Jack Keller - 01 - The Devil's Right Hand

by J. D. Rhoades

  “Whoa, Whoa,” Marie said. “Amber’s not here. She’s, ah, sick.”

  Another blast of sound from the phone. Marie’s face reddened. “Listen, you,” she snarled, “this is—” Keller reached out and plucked the phone from her hand. He put it to his ear.

  The voice was so deep and raspy that Keller at first didn’t realize it was a woman. “…tell that little cunt if she doesn’t get her lazy ass back to work, I’ll fuck her face up so bad her own Mama won’t want to kiss her. You got that, bitch?”

  “I got it,” Keller said. “But I doubt she’ll be much good for work for a few days.”

  Silence. Then: “Who the hell are you?”

  “A friend of the family,” Keller replied. “Crys—I mean Amber’s in the hospital. She’s at Fayetteville General if you want to…” there was a click and the line went dead. Keller put the phone down.

  “You told her where to find the girl,” Marie said. She didn’t sound happy.

  “Yeah,” Keller said. “Drop me off at my car. I’ll double back to the hospital and see who shows up.”

  “I don’t think I like you using that girl as bait,” Marie said.

  “It’s possible that DeWayne might hear about it, Marie. The guy who killed your partner. He might show up there. Then he’s all ours.”

  “All yours, you mean.”

  “Hell, you can have the collar,” Keller said. “It might get you back in good with the department.”

  She shook her head. “I feel like I’m making a deal with the devil.”

  “Welcome to my world, Marie.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They had moved him out of intensive care into a private room. Raymond had overheard an argument over that. Detective Barnes clearly didn’t want to commit the city to paying for a private room. He faced off outside Raymond’s ICU cubicle with some guy from the hospital who refused to put another patient in with a “dangerous criminal”. From this, Raymond surmised that they had matched up the slugs from Leonard Puryear with the ones from the gun found with Raymond. In the end, fear of citizen lawsuits had prevailed and Raymond was left pretty much to himself. He suspected that the doctors were keeping him in the hospital longer than they normally would because they knew he was headed straight to jail to await trial once they turned him loose.

  The city may have been forced to spring for a private room, but they weren’t going to give him a TV. Raymond spent much of his time staring out the window at a narrow blue strip of sky between two other buildings. The only breaks in the monotony of his days were when they got him up and made him walk up and down the halls for exercise. Raymond was stashing his pain medication rather than taking it. It hurt his gut like fire to walk up and down the halls, but he bore up.

  He was always escorted on these walks by a uniformed cop who looked bored when he wasn’t flirting with the nurses. The pair of them sometimes drew odd looks from visitors, but the rest of the staff by now hardly gave them a second glance.

  It was on one of these morning constitutionals that he noticed a familiar figure sitting in one of the visitor’s lounges. The lounges were glass-windowed enclosures to which family members and friends of patients were banished whenever it came time for the nurses to perform some uncomfortable and humiliating ritual on the patient. This morning, the lounge was empty except for a big man in a flannel checked shirt sitting in one of the chairs. The man held a magazine up before him, but the ice-blue eyes that could be seen between the top of the magazine and the baseball cap pulled down low on the man’s forehead were fixed on the hall. As Raymond passed by, the magazine lowered to reveal Billy Ray’s face. Raymond gave no sign other than a slight nod. The nod was returned, barely. The cop, who was busy talking about movies with a chubby blonde nurse, never noticed. Raymond turned around and started the slow trek back to his room. The cop followed, looking disgruntled at his interrupted conversation. When Raymond reached the door of his room, he stopped and leaned on the doorjamb as if to catch his breath. He saw Billy Ray pass. His eyes flicked to the number beside the door, then swung back to look straight ahead down the hall. He walked around the corner, out of Raymond’s sight.

  Raymond shuffled slowly back to the bed and got in slowly, grunting with the pain as the motion flexed his ripped and torn muscles. The cop stood by, waiting with the cuffs to secure him back to the bed.

  “I don’t know why you got to use those,” Raymond complained. “I’m so busted up I ain’t going nowhere.”

  “Yeah, right,” the cop said. “You got these doctors fooled, Raymond, but not us.” Raymond sighed with theatrical resignation, then lay back on the bed and lifted his arm. The cop snapped one cuff on Raymond’s right wrist and locked the other to the bed rail. Then he walked out to take up his position in the chair outside Raymond’s door. Raymond turned his head and looked out the window, waiting.

  Keller entered the hospital through the front entrance. He walked to the front desk, where a middle-aged woman in a blue and white striped uniform was talking on the phone. She had dark hair shot with streaks of white, cemented in place with enough hair spray to give it a shellacked appearance. Keller started to speak, but she silenced him with an upraised hand. “Fayetteville General,” she said in a singsong voice. “I’ll connect you..” He waited while she answered and routed several calls. Eventually, there was a lull in the traffic and she looked up at him. “May I help you?” she chirped.

  “I’m trying to locate a Crystal Lee Puryear?” he said.

  The woman turned and began tapping the keys of a computer terminal in front of her. “Are you a family member?” She asked. “It says here she’s to receive no visitors except…”

  “I’m her brother,” he lied. “Leonard.”

  “Room 433,” she said after a moment. “Follow the green line on the floor to the elevators, go up to the fourth floor, and follow the yellow lines to the patient rooms.”

  “Thanks,” he said, but she was already on another call.

  He found the room with only slight trouble. The door stood slightly ajar. He pushed it open gently.

  It was a double room. Crystal Puryear lay in the bed closest to the door, her face nearly as pale as the sheets. She was asleep or unconscious, and there was a thin clear oxygen tube crossing her face under her nose. There was a girl seated in the chair next to the bed, her hand resting lightly on Crystal’s. The girl stood up quickly as Keller entered.

  The girl was tall and painfully thin. Her narrow face was pale and nearly green in the glare of the harsh fluorescent light over the bed. Her light-brown hair was plaited in cornrows that hung in braids to beneath her shoulders. The braids were woven in with colored beads that rattled and clacked when she moved. She was dressed in a ragged midriff top that did what it could to emphasize almost non-existent breasts. A pair of frayed jeans was slung low on her slim, boyish hips.

  “Who are you?” she said. Her voice sounded slurred and Keller wondered if she was drunk. Then he noticed a flash of light reflecting off the metal stud through the girl’s tongue.

  “My name’s Keller,” he said. “I’m the one that brought her in.”

  “I’m Rita,” the girl said. She gave him a professional smile with no actual warmth.

  “She going to be okay?” Keller asked.

  The girl looked back at the pale figure on the bed, chewed her lower lip. “She’s going to live,” she said, “but she ain’t nowhere near okay.”

  “She been shooting up long?”

  The girl sat down and shook her head. “She never did anything like that before. Said she was scared of needles. She just did a little reefer, a little blow, nothing serious. But after her brother and her parents got killed, Jesus, in the same week and all—I guess she just decided what the fuck, y’know?”

  “What about that cousin of hers,” Keller said. “You know, DeWayne. Anybody contact him?”

  Another shake of the head. “Nobody knows where he is. They say he shot a cop. He’s on the run.”

  Kel
ler shrugged, trying to appear casual. “I just thought, he’s the only family she has left. He ought to be here.”

  The girl laughed bitterly. “Right,” she said. “They hardly ever saw each other. Me and Mara, we’re the closest thing she has to family.”

  “Mara?”

  “We work together. I mean, not together, you know, although Mara and I used to do a show together sometimes. But the three of us worked at the same place.”

  “The club?”

  Rita looked puzzled, but quickly nodded. “Yeah. Right. The club.”

  She obviously didn’t know what Keller was talking about. The girl was another hooker, he realized.

  “Still,” he persisted. “Somebody ought to let him know. She ever tell you how to reach him?”

  “No,” she said. She looked up, suddenly suspicious. “How come you’re so interested in DeWayne, anyway?”

  “I know the family,” Keller said. “Maybe she told your boss something.”

  Rita’s face became hard. “What boss? Who the hell are—”

  “I talked to your boss on the phone,” Keller said. “She tried to call Crystal while I was driving her to the hospital.”

  Rita stood up. “What are you, a cop? Son of a..”

  Keller shook his head. “No. Not a cop.”

  “Her dealer then? Did you give that shit to her?” The girl advanced on him, her hands clutching at him like claws. Keller noticed her nails, They were at least two inches long. He didn’t feel like going up against them, so he backed up. “No,” he said firmly. “How many dealers you know would drive someone to the hospital when they OD’d?”

  The girl’s hands fell to her sides. “You trying to get Amber to work for you, maybe? Trying to steal her away? Let me tell you buddy, you don’t want to tangle with my boss. You may think she’s a pushover ‘cause she’s a woman. There’s people who’ve made that mistake. But she’s got people that’ll fuck you up, but good.”

  “Yeah, she likes to point that out. But I’m not a pimp, either,” Keller said. “So you can tell your boss that.”

  “What, you think she sent me down here?”

  “It’s a pretty good bet. I doubt you’d stir your ass out of bed otherwise.” The girl swung a clawed hand at his face. He caught her wrist and held it in a painful grip. She gritted her teeth, but didn’t cry out.

  “Tell your boss,” he said evenly, “That I’m not after her or Crystal. I’m after DeWayne.”

  “Hah,” Rita hissed. “I knew it. You are a cop.”

  Keller shook his head. “Nope. I work for DeWayne’s bondsman. I came to talk to Crystal—Amber—because she might know where he’d go if he was on the run.”

  The girl nearly spat into Keller’s face. “Fuck you. She isn’t going to tell you shit.”

  “Even if I knew,” a small voice said.

  They turned to look at the bed. Crystal’s eyes were open. Her face sagged with fatigue and sickness, and Keller saw what she would look like when she got old.

  Rita gave a scream of theatrical joy and threw herself on the bed beside Crystal, who winced with the jouncing. “Baby, sweetie,” Rita crooned, running her fingers through Crystal’s disheveled hair. “We were so worried about you.” She looked at Keller with an expression of spite on her face. “Don’t tell this guy anything, baby. He’s trying to arrest DeWayne.” She turned to him. “She isn’t going to tell, so you can just get the fuck out of here.”

  “She better,” Keller said. He looked at Crystal. “I want to bring DeWayne in, Crystal. And I actually have an interest in seeing him brought in alive. It’s the only way I get paid. But how many cops you think feel the same way, after he gunned one of them down? Somebody’s going to catch him. Nobody can run forever. How do you rate his chances if it’s a cop who finds him first?”

  Crystal closed her eyes. A tear ran down her cheek. She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t want to lose him, too. But I just don’t know anything.”

  “You see what you’ve done?” Rita snapped. “You got her all upset.” she turned back to Crystal. “Don’t you worry, sweetie, Mara went to get you some clothes and makeup. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Keller said. “She and your boss. They’ll have you flat on your back again in no time.”

  Rita turned to him. “Fuck you,” she snarled.

  “Sorry,” Keller said, “but I’m a few bucks light right now.”

  He took a business card out of his wallet. He took a pen off the bedside table and wrote another number on the back. “Call me if you hear from DeWayne,” he said. “Or have him get in touch with me, I don’t care. But you know it’s his only chance.” He handed the card to Crystal.

  “Even if you don’t call me,” he said, “Call the other number I wrote on there. It’s a rehab center. A friend of mine runs it.” He walked to the door and leaned on the jamb. “You need to get out of the life, Crystal. It isn’t just Leonard and your parents’ death that’s pushing you over the edge.”

  “Don’t listen to him, baby,” Rita said, a note of pleading in her voice. “What does he know? He doesn’t care about you, he just wants to catch DeWayne.” Rita stretched out her hand to take the card away, but Crystal closed her hand over it. As Keller turned to go, she spoke up.

  “Thank you,” she said softly. “I’d probly’ve died if you hadn’t brought me in.”

  Keller stopped in the doorway. “It’s likely,” he said. “So I guess you owe me one. Call the number.”

  She stared at Keller, not speaking, as he walked out.

  Keller left the hospital and drove back to Marie’s house. When he got there, she was in the front yard. A blonde-haired boy about three years old was riding the Big Wheel down the driveway as Keller was pulling up, so he parked on the street. Marie came out of the garage as Keller was coming up the drive. She was dressed in a pair of white shorts and a man’s denim shirt tied beneath her breasts. Her hair was bound up in a pale blue and white scarf and there was a smudge of grime on her cheek. Keller stopped and watched her come towards him. “Trying to get the garage organized,” she explained. “There’s so much crap in there, I can’t even get the door closed.”

  “Looks like a big job.” Keller said.

  She looked away. “Yeah. Well. Just trying to stay busy. Keeps my mind off things. You know.”

  “I know,” Keller said. He felt strange and awkward. He wanted to kiss her, but was stayed by the solemn regard of the boy with the Big Wheel, who had stopped to regard him gravely. Keller and the boy stared at each other for a long moment, then the boy unhorsed himself from the Big Wheel, ran to Marie, and attached himself to her leg, where he watched Keller warily.

  “Ben,” Marie said, a laugh bubbling just under the surface of her voice, “this is Mister Keller. Can you say hello?”

  The boy’s answer was to bury his face in Marie’s thigh. She gave him a reassuring pat on the head. “How’d it go?” she said.

  Keller shrugged. It seemed somehow grotesque to discuss what he had seen in the hospital room in the middle of this domestic scene. “She doesn’t know anything.”

  She wiped the sweat from her brow. Keller wanted to gently wipe the smudge from her face, could imagine himself doing it, but the boy was staring at him again. “I got a Big Wheel,” the boy announced suddenly.

  “I can see that,” Keller said. “It looks like fun.”

  The boy pondered for a moment. “You want to ride?”

  “Thanks,” Keller said. “But it’s been a while. I might fall off and hurt myself.”

  “Okay,” the boy said. He detached himself from his mother’s leg and went back to the Big Wheel. He saddled up again and began industriously pedaling his way up the driveway, his tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth with concentration. Keller and Marie watched him, standing a few feet apart.

  “You going to keep an eye on her in the hospital?” Marie asked finally.

  Keller shook his head. “She won’t
be there long. She’s got no insurance, most likely, so they’ll show her the front door as soon as they can without risking a lawsuit. If she gets lucky, somebody will refer her to rehab. If not—well, I gave her the number of a friend of mine.”

  Marie turned in surprise to look at him. “You did?”

  “Yeah,” Keller said. “A guy—a doctor I knew in the Army runs a rehab center. Does good work. If he knows I sent her, he might not be so sticky about insurance questions. Why, are you surprised?”

  She shook her head, a slight smile on her face. “You’re a hard guy to figure out, Keller,” she said. “One minute, I feel like you’re staking the girl out like a goat set as tiger bait. The next, you’re sending her to rehab.” She slid her arm around his waist and kissed him on the cheek.

  He shrugged. “Maybe she goes, maybe she doesn’t. It’s not like it cost me anything. Besides, I finally decided that with as many people as he has chasing him, DeWayne Puryear would be an idiot to try to contact her at that hospital, anyway.”

  “C’mon, Crystal,” DeWayne muttered, “answer the damn phone.” He hunched over a little more, trying to make his face inconspicuous. The pay phone was stuck on a metal pole in the corner of a convenience store parking lot, and DeWayne felt as exposed as a bug on a sidewalk. He had considered calling from Debbie’s apartment, but he suddenly got paranoid about the possibility of phone taps and traces. That was the problem with that rock cocaine, he thought. It felt good going down, almost better than sex, but afterwards, when the blast wore off, you felt all jittery and sick and your mind kept running into all these dark places. All the colors looked too bright and sharp and the sound of the phone ringing was boring into his ear like a needle. He was about ready to slam the receiver down when he heard somebody pick up on the other end. A female voice said “Hello?”

  “Crystal?” DeWayne began. “It’s DeWayne.”