by John L. Monk
“How about this sound system?”
I didn’t see how he did it but the place came alive with soul pounding sound of the Ramones.
“Hey,” I said, “how did you know I like the Ramones?”
Pam laughed. “It was part of the questionnaire you filled out.”
“I didn’t fill … ah, never mind.”
That old lady was a work of art. All those times she’d told me to turn the music down I never imagined she knew what I was listening to. For all I knew, she’d come to like it herself. Wouldn’t that be a hoot?
Pam said, “I have to raise your seat before we take off, but after that you may relax. Any questions?”
“Uh, just for Paul,” I said, turning to him. “You don’t do loop-d-loops or fly upside down or any of that, do you?”
Paul laughed good-naturedly—not a fake Bahamian customer service laugh, either. Warmed me right up.
“Maybe after a few drinks,” he said, then closed the airplane door and went forward.
I was pretty sure he was joking.
Chapter 25
I was so tired I forgot to worry about the wings snapping off or a bird flying into one of the engines. I also didn’t partake of the bar, the cool TV, or the snacks. I plugged my phone into an outlet I found, but other than that all I did was sleep.
By the time we landed, someone had thrown a blanket on me. Probably not the pilot, unless he’d been drinking.
“Thanks, Pam,” I said when we stopped. “Sorry for working you to death.”
“Yes, I worked so hard,” she said, laughing.
“Take care, Bo,” Pilot Paul said, shaking my hand. “Good flying with you.”
Paul opened the door, and I gazed out at another small airport.
There were a lot of differences between private and commercial airlines. Other than vibrating seats and high-tech sound systems, when you land your ride can drive out on the tarmac to greet you coming down the stairs. I recognized Mrs. Swanson’s cream-colored Volvo right away, but not the man in the dark suit strutting around to the passenger side to open her door. He was about forty years old, with thinning hair and a neatly-trimmed reddish beard. Mrs. Swanson didn’t need someone to open her door and had never needed a driver before, preferring to use her license so long as there were stop signs to disregard and speed limits to ignore. Yet here she was riding shotgun with this official-looking guy. I wondered if he was that FBI guy, Tucker, and went over to find out.
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Bo,” the man said in a familiar voice I couldn’t place.
“Who are you again?”
“Tom Harrington—your lawyer.”
“Ah, right. So you’re Tom, huh? Pardon me a moment while I thank my lucky stars.”
“Bo, it’s so good to see you,” Mrs. Swanson said, and swept forward to give me a warm embrace.
“You too, Mrs. Swanson.”
“What happened to your eye?” she said, removing my glasses and tilting my head for a better look.
“Kate,” I said.
“Oh dear.”
“You’re not looking so hot yourself,” I said.
She’d covered it with makeup, but hadn’t succeeded in completely hiding her swollen lip.
“That animal hit me,” Mrs. Swanson said, unruffled, as if talking about bad weather. “I want them both back. Please say you’ll help.”
She watched me, waiting for my answer with pleading eyes. It killed me, but I needed to be honest with her.
“Mrs. Swanson, I’m not really—”
Tom glared at me. “You got any idea how much this bullshit is costing her? You know how expensive it is to hire a private jet? On short notice? Now get in the goddamned car!”
“Tom!” she said, shocked to her blue-blooded core. “You will watch your language. I am perfectly comfortable with these expenses, thank you very much.”
I thought Tom might say something back, but he settled for quietly seething. He knew who buttered his bread.
“Did you bring the hundred thousand?” I said.
“Yes, all of it,” she said. “Locked in the trunk.”
Tom pushed past her and said, “You’re not touching that money. Just leave it to the professionals and stay out of the way.”
I laughed in his face. “Professionals? So, what, you’ve seen more kidnapping movies than me? Who was the professional who thought a thief could do a better job than the police and the news and an Amber Alert?”
Tom started to reply, but Mrs. Swanson cut him off.
“Enough, you two. None of this is going to help Anna or Jimmy. Now, Bo, I was told you recently talked to this Fruit specimen. Do you have any idea where he has taken them?”
I glanced at Tom, his face tight with anger, then at Mrs. Swanson, earnest and hopeful despite every reason in the world not to be. In her own way, she was there for them, like she’d been there for me. Maybe it was pride, but I wanted to be there for her.
“Uh, Mrs. Swanson,” I said. “Before we get into that, the uh, pilot of the plane, Paul—he wanted to talk to you about something. There he is now.”
I pointed back to the jet at Paul, standing at the top of the stairs with Pam. He saw us looking and waved.
“I wonder what he wants,” she said. “You and Tom stay here and make up. I’ll be right back.”
She left us there and made her way to the jet.
Tom gave me a puzzled, suspicious look.
“What was that about?” he said.
Another good thing about private airlines, depending on your point of view: you could sneak loaded handguns aboard in your carry-on.
“Give me the keys,” I said and pointed Marco’s gun at him, which I’d slipped from my backpack. I admit, it was fun watching Tom’s eyes widen in panic at the sight of it.
Normally I don’t steal from little old ladies and leave them stranded with grumpy-pants lawyers, but if they wanted my help I couldn’t do it their way.
“Jesus, what the hell?” he said. “Where did you get that thing?”
“From your momma, now hand over the keys,” I said, extending my hand.
“Bo, I’ll agree you’re an asshole, but you’re not a murderer. Just put the gun away.”
“You’re right, foster boy, I’m not going to kill you,” I said. Then, trying for a menacing tone, I added, “But I’ll shoot you in the hand you jerk off with, you don’t give me those goddamned keys.”
Tom hesitated, torn between rage and fear. He didn’t know me. People shot each other every day. Maybe I’d actually shoot him. I angled the gun more toward his right hand.
“Fine,” he said. “Why not? Then even she has to see what you really are. This was just a ploy to get the money. Was Anna in on it the whole time?” He shook his head, a look of disgust on his fuzzy lawyer face. “Kate was wrong about you—you’re bad all the way through.”
I wanted to correct him, tell him he was wrong about Anna, but then realized I didn’t care what he thought. Mrs. Swanson wouldn’t listen to his idiocy. And then I thought, Wow, Kate said something nice about me?
I’d have to ask her if she liked Scrabble—so we could put U and I together.
“Go on,” Tom said, scowling, handing me the keys. “See how far you get when we call the police.”
“Oh, now you’re gonna call the police?” I said. “Here’s a tip: do that, then call a cab.”
I got in my new stolen Volvo and left.
What Tom said about calling the police had me thinking about the kidnapping again. It still didn’t make sense, bringing in a thief to do a SWAT team’s job. And what Kate said about Fruit having shadowy protection sounded like bad Hollywood stuff. It seemed more likely Mrs. Swanson didn’t trust the police, or maybe the state itself. And as I thought it, I knew it was true—other than me, she hadn’t called anyone at all.
Back when I lived with her, most of the kids that came and went dreaded social services, and with good reason: they were the ones who took us back to our parents. Not
me, of course—too old to adopt, and nobody to get sent back to. The really small children didn’t know how good they had it at the mansion, so they were always happy to go home. But for the older ones, the threat was always there.
The way foster care works, in theory, is the foster parent works with the state as a sort of teammate with the social workers and other foster parents until the real parents are ready to take them back. At Mrs. Swanson’s, it was something that happened several times a year. Social services would show up and take one of the kids and return them to their drugged-up, abusive families. All because the mom—never the dad—somehow remembered to stay sober and show up on time for her court date. When that happened, it was hard on everyone. Especially Mrs. Swanson.
I shook my head as I remembered something else.
When I was fourteen, there’d been a kid in the house named Anthony, about ten years old. He wasn’t freaky like some of the kids or cruel or suicidal or violent or fascinated with cat burglars or anything like that. Of all of us, he was the most normal. So it was particularly hard when, three times in a row, he was taken away and given back to his mother the heroin junkie and sometimes prostitute. She’d clean up, put on a dress and a little makeup, and back he’d go. Then she’d start using again. Every time he came back, he said he couldn’t believe how fast the police found out she was using again. The last time it happened, she’d taken off an hour after getting him home. Five hours later, a social worker arrived to pick him up because she was already in jail. I was there when Anthony came back playing it off like it didn’t matter, knowing us kids were listening from our various places. The social worker told Mrs. Swanson it had been yet another anonymous tip, and said she thought someone was looking out for Anthony. Almost like he had a “guardian angel,” in her words.
Then I realized something else … but there was nothing I could do about it now, so I pushed it off.
My jet had landed way out in Manassas, so I followed the signs to I-66, heading east, then took I-495 toward Springfield. It was after eleven thirty and Monday morning traffic had started to die down. As I turned the corner to Debbie’s apartment complex I saw they’d fixed the broken gate, so I pulled to the side and used my high-tech burglar skills to wait for someone with an access card to go through. Then I followed along behind them.
After parking, I climbed the three flights to her apartment and knocked. She didn’t answer, so I knocked again, louder. I did it again for good measure. Then I got out my ring of bump keys and fit them, one-by-one, until I had one that felt right. One, two, three raps from the handle of my butter knife and pop went the doorknob. She hadn’t locked the deadbolt so I strolled right in.
The place was messier than last time. More bottles and plates, more mail, and clothes lying out on the floor. Still freezing from too much air conditioning. There were messages on her home phone, causing it to beep every few seconds.
I went over to the table and poked through the mail, never opened: advertisements for credit cards, loan consolidation, grand openings, and utility bills. Her bedroom was more promising—Debbie was in bed with the covers pulled up under her chin, quite dead. Her eyes were half open and her face was too skinny or puffy in all the wrong places. I hadn’t smelled the death in the air because of the overlay of perfume and hair spray, but it was much stronger here. With the place so cold, who knew how long she’d been like this—except Kate had said Anna was in the back seat when Mrs. Swanson looked out the window. That was two days ago.
I’d told Anna to leave Ted’s apartment when I learned the Feds were onto me. Told her to go to the mansion, only she never made it there. That was a week ago. Now, because of me, Fruit had Anna and her son. Possibly my son.
Cautiously, I pulled back the covers and almost stopped when I saw she was naked, but I needed to know if she’d been stabbed or shot. Her skin was bloodless and taut, but otherwise unmarked. I covered her back up and struggled against spasm after nauseated spasm. I controlled myself long enough to flee to the bathroom. My last meal had been more than twelve hours ago, so nothing came out, but I flushed anyway and wiped everything down. No need to make it easy for someone to link me to the murder scene.
That’s right, murder. I might not have thought so if I hadn’t seen a familiar purple baggie resting next to the sink. It had a few smaller baggies in it, each filled with powder. I’d seen a purple baggie like that the night I snatched Anna from Manny. I’d watched her dump the contents down the drain.
The way I saw it, Fruit had shown up looking for Anna. After taking her, he’d left the bag behind as compensation for upsetting Debbie. Something to ease her troubled mind. I’m sure she was no saint. With her friend gone, feeling helpless and guilty, she took what was given, and it had killed her.
From the living room, the steady beep of the phone continued like nothing had happened. I left the bathroom, picked up the phone, and hit the Messages button. Kate’s voice came out of the tiny speaker sounding concerned and friendly and different than I was used to.
“Debbie, this is Kate. From the other day, remember? I’m sorry I missed you, but can you give me a call back as soon as you get this message?”
She left her number and repeated how important it was to call her back.
The next message was also from Kate, only more insistent, and a little more like the Kate I’d come to know and love.
“Debbie? Kate. We need to talk, and there’s not much time. Have you seen Anna? If you care about her, you’ll call me back at this number.”
She repeated the number twice and then hung up.
The third message was something altogether different: “Yo, Debbie? This is Elvin. You there? Yo, you there? Hello? Hey, Debbie!”
Before he hung up, I heard him say, faintly, “She ain’t there…”
After playing the messages, the phone stopped beeping, leaving just one other sound in the blighted apartment: the quiet hum of the overworked air conditioner. For Debbie, I popped the thermostat down as low as it would go.
No, Elvin, she ain’t there.
And I had a problem with that.
Chapter 26
Before I left, I hit the up arrow on Debbie’s phone. That last call had come from a Washington, DC number at 11:07 a.m., yesterday. Other than my dad, I’d never seen a dead body up close before, but it seemed likely Debbie had died more than twenty-four hours ago.
A search for Elvin’s number on my smartphone gave me what I wanted in the very first link: a bar in DC. Out of sixteen reviews, the Starlight Lounge averaged one-and-a-half stars, which would have been funny any other day.
Thirty minutes later, I was driving in the city. Another ten and I got lost in a bad part of town where tattered stickers, posters, and flyers for clubs and rock bands hung everywhere like urban mange. I saw a homeless guy lean up against a dumpster and relieve himself. After he finished, he walked casually over to a steel-cage door and went inside, and that’s when I found out I wasn’t lost. Over the door, a neon sign read, “Starlight Lounge.”
I left the Volvo parked under a sign promising dire consequences for doing so between the hours of nine and six, then crossed the street and walked in.
It wasn’t so bad inside—kind of nice, actually. The bar was a bit scratched and dented, but not badly. The tables had clean tablecloths, and nobody was peeing on anything. A black woman, too old to be dancing with her clothes off, was dancing with her clothes off on a little round stage. An old white man sat watching her, smoking a cigarette. I thought DC had a smoking ban in place, but he didn’t care, and she didn’t care, and nobody cared what I thought in any event.
I didn’t see a bartender or a waitress, so I walked farther in, looking for an office or wherever that woman kept her clothes. A door in the back seemed promising, so I went there and opened it. It was an office, of sorts, with a desk and a bulletin board with sheets of paper tacked to it. About ten feet in I saw a stack of boxes. Beyond that, the room took a sharp bend right.
The man I thought of
as homeless was sitting at the desk eating from a carton of Chinese food. He eyed me when I came in, but didn’t move or act surprised.
“You can’t come in here,” he said, talking with his mouth full.
“Who’s there?” someone else said from behind a door I’d missed to my right.
“Bo,” I said helpfully.
“Marty, who the fuck is that?”
“Some white ma’fucker,” the homeless man said, taking another bite.
“Well tell him he need to get the fuck out of here before I finish.”
“What are you doing in there?” I said.
“Taking a shit, you got a problem?”
“Is that … are you Elvin?”
I heard a flush and then a man came out, quite large—as tall as me, only fatter. Being heavy like that puts on muscle. If he got his hands on me he could do some damage, but he’d have to finish me quick before he ran out of steam.
“Who wants to know?” he said.
“Man, shut that door, can’t you see I’m eating?” Marty said, making a face.
“Fuck you,” the big man said. But he did shut the door.
“Are you Elvin?”
The big man eyed me carefully, taking his time. “What’s it worth to you?”
I opened my wallet and took out a handful of bills. Then I counted it in front of them: four hundred dollars.
“Marty, get the fuck out of here,” the big man said.
“Shit, I ain’t leaving now,” Marty said, grinning and rubbing his hands in a caricature of greed.
“If you’re Elvin,” I said, “I’d prefer we speak alone.”
“Marty, I said out.”
Marty leaned back and put his feet on the desk, not going anywhere. The big man kicked the back of the seat, sending him sprawling.
“Elvin, man, shit!” Marty yelled, scrambling to his feet and examining his arm like maybe it was broken, putting on a real show of it.
“Go on,” Elvin said, and kicked him again, smiling a little as Marty limped slowly, painfully, pathetically from the room.