USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

by Johnny Temple

  Please, please can you drop me somewhere? Keri said, and we were in the school parking lot and her eyes rung wide and fingers gripped the top of the car door.

  Okay, I said, even after barely seeing her for months, a quick hello in the hallways, a flash in the locker room, me on my way in, she on her way out. To Kirk’s? I asked.

  She said no. She said no and shook her head, gaze drifting off to the far end of the parking lot. Further than that. Further than that.

  And then I knew and I told her it was my father’s car and if I got a scratch, he’d never buy me the Fiero come graduation and she promised it would be okay and I said yes. Against everything, I said yes.

  So she was next to me and the sky was orange, then red as the sun dropped behind the Yacht Club, its gleaming white bell tower soaring—when I was a kid I thought it was Disneyland—I was going to take her. I felt somehow I had to.

  Where are we going? I’d say, and she’d chew her gum and look out the window, fingers touching, breath smoking the glass. She was humming a song and I didn’t know it. It wasn’t a song any of us would know, a song we sang along with on WHYT, a song we all shouted out together in cars. It was something else all together. Plaintive and funny and I thought suddenly: Who does she think she is in my father’s car singing songs I don’t know in her white Tretorns and her pleated shirt and hair brushed to silk, whirling gold hoops hanging from her ears? And she thinks she can just go wherever she wants, do things in other places, touch more than the surface of things, and then keep it all inside her and never let anyone see in. Never let any of us.

  You can drop me here, she was saying. We were at the foot of Windmill Pointe.

  You just want me to leave you here? I asked, looking around, seeing not a soul. In Grosse Pointe, especially these its most gleamy stretches, the streets were always empty, like plastic pieces from a railroad set.

  Yes, she said, and waved as she began walking toward the water, toward the glittering lighthouse.

  Wait, Keri, I said, opening my door so she could hear me. Where are you going?

  And she half-turned and maybe she smiled, maybe she even said something, but the wind took it away.

  * * *

  When I saw her in school, I asked her. I said, Where did you go? What were you doing there? She was putting on her lipgloss and shaking her hair out. I watched her eyes in the mirror magnet on the inside of her locker door. I thought maybe I’d see something, see something in there.

  She watched me back, eyes rimmed with pale green liner, and I knew she had to tell someone, didn’t she? What did it count to run off the rails if you didn’t tell a soul? I looked at her with the most simpering face I could manage to make her see she could tell me, she could tell me.

  But she didn’t now, did she? And that was the last time, see? It was the last of that flittering girl.

  * * *

  “Her cousin’s letting her drive her Nova, you should see it,” Joni was telling me. “I saw her in it. Do you think she’s taking it there? Next thing you know, we’ll be driving down Jefferson to go see the Red Wings game and she’ll be rolling with some black guys.” Joni was telling me this as we squeezed together on the long sofa at a party, beers in hand, Joni’s face sweaty and flushed, bangs matted to foreheads, chests heaving lightly.

  I said I didn’t think she went at all anymore. I told Joni she wasn’t going at all. I didn’t want her to know. It was something between us. And, truth told, if she’d asked me, I’d’ve gone with her still. But she didn’t ask me, did she?

  * * *

  It was in the aching frost of February and I was coming out of a party on Beaconsfield and I saw her drive by. I saw the blue Nova and I saw her at the wheel and I saw which way she was headed and maybe my head was a little clogged from the beers, but I couldn’t help it and I was in my dad’s car and I headed toward Alter Road. She was long gone, but I kept driving and I thought maybe I’d see the car again, especially once I hit the ghostly pitch over the bridge at Alter and Korte Street. How many beers was it, I thought I could hear the squeal of her tires. The only sound at all, other than the occasional sludge of water against the creaking docks over the canal, were those tires. I thought it had to be her and I stopped my car, rolled down my windows, couldn’t hear anything so figured she stopped. Did she stop? I edged past the side streets and ended up back at that shell of a trailer court, those aluminum and wood carcasses, like plundered ships washed to shore. And that was when I thought I saw her, darting around the bowed trees, darting along like some kind of wood nymph in a magic forest, and yet it was this.

  I could admit, if I let myself, there was a beauty in it, if you squinted, tilted your head. If you could squeeze out ideas of the kind of beauty you can rest in your palm, fasten around your neck, never have an unease about, a slip of cashmere, one fine pearl, a beauty everyone would understand and feel safe with. But I wouldn’t really do that, not for more than a second, and Keri, she would. It was like this place she’d found was Broadway, Hollywood, Shangri-La, and she would make it hers.

  I parked my car and got out, the wind running in off the lake and charging at me, but I went anyway. That beer foaming my head, I just kept going. Who was going to stop me? I was going to see, see the thing through. I wasn’t going to tell, but I was going to see it for myself.

  Wading through the golden rod, studded with scrap metal, with shredded firecrackers, flossy crimps of insulation foam, there I was. The trailers all edged in rust like frills peeking from under a dress, but as you got closer, it wasn’t so dainty and there was a feel in the air of awfulness. All of it, it reminded me of places you’re not supposed to be, they’re just not for you, like when we went to that house, when we were in Girl Scouts, to deliver the Christmas presents to the family on Mt. Elliott, and everyone told us, Just watch, they’ll have a big TV and a VCR and they’ll be lying around collecting welfare with tons of kids running around, and that wasn’t what happened at all, and remember how the baby wouldn’t stop shaking and the look in the mother’s eyes like she’d long ago stopped being surprised at anything, and the plastic on the windows and the leaking refrigerator, we weren’t supposed to be there at all, now, were we?

  This, it was like that, but different, because this had that lostness but then too in place of sad there was this hard current of nastiness and dirtiness and badness, sweaty, gun-oil, mattress-spring coil throbbing, stains spreading. My eyes skating over the abandoned trailers and thinking of the things happening behind the bulging screens, the pitted aluminum. The sky so black and the vague sound of music and the feeling of teetering into something and then it getting inside you, feeding off you, making you its own.

  There was a laugh then and it struck me hard right through the swirling muzz in my head, but it was warm, rippling, and it broke up some of the nastiness for me, but not enough.

  Coming from one of the trailers, a faded red one with a rolling top, like a curling tongue. There was something glowing inside and there was music.

  I felt my ankle twist on a bottle curved deep into the earth. I could hear the music, a thud-thud, bass tickling me, promising things, and I walked closer, I just did.

  I walked closer like I could, like I was allowed, even as this was no place for me. That tickling laugh kept rolling itself out, felt like long fingers uncoiling just shy of me, just shy of my body, hot and itchy under my coat, aching for the cold wind ripping off the water and instead this runny canal, a ditch swelling.

  And then there it was.

  Soft, high, sweet, Keri’s own laugh.

  Like when we watched a funny movie or when we watched Joni make cross-eyes or when we danced in our bedrooms, singing, singing until we thought our lungs would burst.

  But then turning, turning like a dial and the laugh got lower, throatier, and I could feel it prickling under my skin, then sinking through me, down my legs, along the twitching pain in my ankle, straight into the ground.

  Reaching under my feet.

  And in
my head, I could see her face and she’s lying on a stripped mattress, hair spread out beneath, a windmill, and she’s laughing and twisting and squirming, her head tilting back, neck arching, and who knew what was happening, what was happening to draw that throaty laugh from her, pump that bursting flush into her cheeks, face, God, Keri, God, all kinds of dark hands on her, she at the center of some awful white-girl gangbang. All those hands touching her white white-girl skin. These are the things I thought, I won’t claim otherwise.

  * * *

  I was standing ten seconds, a minute, who knew, the cold snaking around me but not touching. I could’ve stood forever, twenty feet from that trailer, watching. But then. But then. The sound.

  A hinge struck and I could hear and there it was, I could see they weren’t in the trailer but on the other side of it and there I was, back to the mangled sheet metal, sidling around, and that’s when I saw the bonfire that made the glow and I hid behind the tinsely branches of a half-fallen tree and I watched and I saw everything, or figured I did.

  There were two black guys and a white guy and there was a tall black girl with a dark jacket on and I could see it had gold print struck in it and then I saw it was a letter jacket, Keri’s letter jacket from volleyball, and the girl was climbing on the picnic table and that was where Keri was and she was dancing. She was dancing to the music from the radio they’d brought and one of the black guys, Keri was saying something to him as she danced, and he was laughing and watching her and I could tell he was the one she was with, you could see it in his eyes and hers, it was vibrating between them.

  She was there in the Homecoming Court, resplendent in her floral dress, smiling brightly, waving at everyone and standing ramrod straight, face perfect and still.

  And the black girl joined Keri and the girl had a can of beer and so did Keri and the guys, they were shouting and they were lightly rocking the table, and the white guy was tipping a bottle of something into his mouth and singing about how some girl was his twilight zone, his Al Capone, and I could smell the pot and a lot was going on like at any party and it seemed like maybe more, but I was watching Keri and Keri’s face, it was lit from the fire and it was a crazy orange flaring up her cheeks and she was wearing her long cashmere muffler from Jacobson’s, coiled around her neck, flapping tight in the wind, and she was dancing and the fire lit her hair and I could see her face and it was like I’d never seen it before and never would again because things made sense even if they didn’t because there was something there that I felt twenty years too young to understand, no, not too young, because I couldn’t understand it because she was fathoms deep and I would be driving along Kercheval in fifteen minutes, driving to my family’s three-bedroom colonial and tucking myself in and hoping the boy would call and thinking about the next party and here was Keri and she was fathoms deep and I was . . .

  * * *

  I couldn’t have known, watching her there, watching her dancing and looking like that, feeling that way, that she would be gone by finals, by junior prom even. I never said a word about what I saw and I never told her to watch out either, even though, the way I was, I could only see it as she was going for broke and it could turn out any number of ways but most of them bad. But even if I had tried to warn her, to hold her back, it wouldn’t have mattered because I would’ve told her to watch out for the wrong things, the wrong places. I couldn’t have known, watching her there, that two weeks later she’d be driving a drunken Kirk Deegan home late after a postgame party, driving him in his Audi and coming into the Deegan garage too close to the wall and shearing off the sideview mirror. I couldn’t have known Kirk Deegan would get so mad and push her so hard against the garage wall and her head hitting that pipe and then turning and hitting the edge of the shovel hanging and what must have been a sickening crack and her falling and her dying and her dying there on the floor of his garage. Her dying on the floor of his garage and him there, too dumbstruck to call the police, an ambulance, his parents, anyone, for a half hour while she was there, hair spread on the cement floor like a windmill and then gone forever. I couldn’t have known that. But one way or another I did.

  PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION

  BY LEE CHILD

  Chandler, Arizona

  (Originally published in Phoenix Noir)

  He said he wouldn’t talk to me. I asked him why. He said because he was a cop and I was a journalist. I said he sounded like a guy with something to hide. He said no, he had nothing to hide.

  “So talk to me,” I said, and I knew he would.

  He scuffed around for a minute more, hands on the top of the bar, drumming his fingers, moving a little on his stool. I knew him fairly well. He was edging out of the summer of his career and entering the autumn. His best years were behind him. He was in the valley, facing a long ten years before his pension. He liked winning, but losing didn’t worry him too much. He was a realistic man. But he liked to be sure. What he hated was not really knowing whether he had won or lost.

  “From the top,” I said.

  He shrugged and took a sip of his beer and sighed and blew fumes toward the mirror facing us. Then he started with the 911 call. The house, out beyond Chandler, south and east of the city. A long low ranch, prosperous, walled in, the unlit pool, the darkness. The parents, arriving home from a party. The silence. The busted window, the empty bed. The trail of blood through the hallway. The daughter’s body, all ripped up. Fourteen years old, damaged in a way he still wasn’t prepared to discuss.

  I said, “There were details that you withheld.”

  He asked, “How do you know?”

  “You guys always do that. To evaluate the confessions.”

  He nodded.

  I asked, “How many confessions did you get?”

  “A hundred and eight.”

  “All phony?”

  “Of course.”

  “What information did you withhold?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.”

  “Why not? You not sure you got the right guy?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  So he did. The scene was clearly fresh. The parents had gotten back maybe moments after the perpetrator had exited. Police response had been fast. The blood on the hallway carpet was still liquid. Dark red, not black, against the kid’s pale skin. The kid’s pale skin was a problem from the start. They all knew it. They were in a position to act fast and heavy, so they were going to, and they knew it would be claimed later that the speed was all about the kid being white, not black or brown. It wasn’t. It was a question of luck and timing. They got a fresh scene, and they got a couple of breaks. I nodded, like I accepted his view. Which I did. I was a journalist, and I liked mischief as much as the next guy, but sometimes things were straightforward.

  “Go on,” I said.

  There were photographs of the kid all over the house. She was an only child. She was luminous and beautiful. She was stupefying, the way fourteen-year-old white Arizona girls often are.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The first break had been the weather. There had been torrential rain two days previously, and then the heat had come back with a vengeance. The rain had skimmed the street with sand and mud and the heat had baked it to a film of dust, and the dust showed no tire tracks other than those from the parents’ vehicle and the cop cars and the ambulance. Therefore the perpetrator had arrived on foot. And left on foot. There were clear marks in the dust. Sneakers, maybe size ten, fairly generic soles. The prints were photographed and e-mailed and everyone was confident that in the fullness of time some database somewhere would match a brand and a style. But what was more important was that they had a suspect recently departed from a live scene on foot, in a landscape where no one walked. So APBs and be-on-the-lookouts were broadcast for a two-mile radius. It was midnight and more than a hundred degrees and pedestrians were going to be rare. It was simply too hot for walking. Certainly too hot for running. Any kind of sustained physical activity wo
uld be close to a suicide attempt. Greater Phoenix was that kind of place, especially in the summer.

  Ten minutes passed and no fugitives were found.

  Then they got their second break. The parents were reasonably lucid. In between all the bawling and screaming they noticed their daughter’s cell phone was missing. It had been her pride and joy. An iPhone, with an AT&T contract that gave her unlimited minutes, which she exploited to the max. Back then iPhones were new and cool. The cops figured the perp had stolen it. They figured the kind of guy who had no car in Arizona would have been entranced by a small shiny object like an iPhone. Or else if he was some kind of big-time deviant, maybe he collected souvenirs. Maybe the cache of photographs of the kid’s friends was exciting. Or the text messages stored in the memory.

  “Go on,” I said.

  The third break was all about middle-class parents and fourteen-year-old daughters. The parents had signed up for a service whereby they could track the GPS chip in the iPhone on their home computer. Not cheap, but they were the kind of people who wanted to know their kid was telling the truth when she said she was sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house or riding with a buddy to the library. The cops got the password and logged on right there and then and saw the phone moving slowly north, toward Tempe. Too fast for walking. Too fast for running. Too slow to be in a car.

  “Bike?” one of them said.

  “Too hot,” another answered. “Plus no tire tracks in the driveway.”

  The guy telling the story next to me on his stool had been the one who had understood.

  “Bus,” he said. “The perp is on the bus.”

  Greater Phoenix had a lot of buses. They were for workers paid too little to own cars. They shuttled folks around, especially early in the morning and late at night. The giant city would have ground to a halt without them. Meals would have gone unserved, pools uncleaned, beds unmade, trash not collected. Immediately all the cops as one imagined a rough profile. A dark-skinned man, probably small, probably crazy, rocking on a seat as a bus headed north. Fiddling with the iPhone, checking the music library, looking at the pictures. Maybe with the knife still in his pocket, although surely that was too much to ask.