Nine Years Gone

by Chris Culver

  He hadn’t mentioned it, but evidently Deadpan recognized Vince. Morgan Rosenthal was the criminal defense attorney who paid his salary.

  “The client was an African American male, approximately six-two and weighing two-hundred and thirty pounds,” said Tony. “He had a scar that ran from his right eye to his jaw and he spoke with a strong accent.”

  He had just described Moses Tarawally, Dominique Girard’s former chief of security, but that didn’t make sense. Moses had no reason to hire someone to take pictures of us. Besides that, he was just a hired gun, a very dangerous hired gun, but an employee nonetheless. That led me right back to where I started.

  Tess, the only other person who knew we were at that gun range, had hurt my wife.

  “Can you tell us anything else about him?” asked Vince.

  Tony shook his head, but Hamhock spoke up.

  “He’s from Sierra Leone, or thereabouts.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Because when he came in here, he wore a white oxford shirt but left the top four buttons undone.” Bruce brought his hand up and pointed to a spot beneath his clavicle, just to the right of his breastbone. “He had RUF branded onto his skin. The way he wore his shirt, I think he wanted people to see it.”

  “Why would he want that?” asked Vince.

  “To scare people. The RUF was one of the groups in Sierra Leone’s civil war. They used kids as cannon fodder, hacked people up with machetes, and gang-raped just about every woman they could.” Hamhock reached behind him and into his cubicle for a cup of coffee and then looked at me. “Any reason why a man like that would be interested in you?”

  I slowly shook my head, hoping the lie didn’t show on my face. “I have no idea. Did the woman you took pictures of ever show up here?”

  Tony shook his head. “No.”

  Vince looked back at me and squinted quizzically before turning to face the investigators again. “Did your client say anything about the pictures? He didn’t say why he wanted them?”

  “No,” said Tony. “He paid us cash and left.”

  “Do you have the negatives from the pictures?” I asked.

  “We shoot digitally,” said Hamhock. “And we deleted the originals after printing them out. That was his request, too.”

  As dangerous as Tess might have been, Moses was in a different league. I had only met him on a couple of occasions, but even those brief encounters and the stories Tess had told me about him convinced me that he was more than a little off, like he was the sort of man who lacked that voice in the back of his head that said hunting human beings is an inappropriate leisure activity. And now he was sending picture to my wife at the behest of a woman who murdered her former roommate.

  “Thank you for talking to us,” I said.

  “Quid pro quo,” said Deadpan, crossing his arms. “Who was the girl? She looked familiar.”

  “She’s a friend of ours,” I said. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “I’ve been doing this for going on thirty years now. No one has ever asked me to mask someone’s face before. Who was she?”

  I looked at Deadpan again. Tony and Hamhock may have talked more, but he was in charge.

  “She’s using the name Holly Olson, but the real Holly Olson died a couple of years ago in Utah.”

  “Hate it when I kiss dead women,” said Deadpan.

  “Me, too.”

  Vince and I started to leave, but Deadpan cleared his throat. “She looked like Tess Girard.”

  I stopped and turned, feeling my skin go cold. As long as Tess was alive and well, I lived in a house of glass surrounded by people whose memories could turn into slings and stones. I couldn’t forget that, even if I didn’t know how to deal with it yet. “She’s not Tess.”

  “Good, because Tess Girard is dead. And, if by some miracle she’s not, I’d appreciate it if she doesn’t show up here.”

  “I don’t see how that could ever happen,” I said.

  Deadpan crossed his arms “If I see her, my first call will be to the police. Fair warning.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Deadpan didn’t blink. “Sure. Good luck out there.”

  Vince and I left the office, but he followed me back to Isaac’s Jeep rather than going straight to his car. Even across the sun-beaten blacktop, the breeze was cold.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on? I saw your face when they described their client. You recognized him.”

  “His name is Moses Tarawally, and he worked for Dominique Girard,” I said. “He was one of his security guards.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Tess once overheard him threaten to necklace someone.”

  Vince furrowed his brow. “And what does that mean?”

  “It means he threatened to put a rubber tire around someone’s neck, fill it with gasoline, and light it on fire.”

  Vince’s eyes opened wide. “And this is the guy sending pictures to your wife?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. She’s at work until five, but once she comes home, I’m going to see if I can get her out of town.” I paused and took a breath, coming to a decision. “This isn’t going to blow over. I’ve got to take care of this.”

  “You should consider leaving town, too.”

  I shook my head without giving the suggestion much thought. “I’m not going to risk Katherine or Ashley’s safety by running from this. I’ll stay. If that means I’ve got to be a target, so be it.”

  “You’re not going to be alone.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Let’s go to Isaac’s and make sure he’s still alive.”

  14

  I parked on the street behind Vince about half a block from North Side Custom Cars, Isaac’s shop. Four years ago, it had been an abandoned car dealership, but with some seed capital provided by me and Vince and a lot of work, Isaac had turned it into a thriving mechanic’s shop. Now, the dealership showroom that had at one time held Plymouths sported stacks of chrome rims and demonstrations of in-dash televisions and entertainment systems.

  I squinted in the afternoon sunlight and walked toward the building, a few steps behind Vince. The doors over the garage bays were closed, but I heard the whir of a pneumatic wrench and voices inside. One of the mechanics in the garage hammered something and then swore loudly as metal clattered to the floor.

  “Think that was Isaac?” asked Vince.

  “Unless you know another mechanic who swears in Hebrew.”

  We didn’t hear anyone swear again, but then we didn’t hear anyone work again either until we passed the bullet-resistant glass of the front door. A young man in a light blue mechanic’s shirt stepped through a doorway from the garage, rubbing grease off his hands and onto his pants.

  “Help you?” asked the mechanic.

  “We need to talk to Isaac,” I said.

  The mechanic’s eyes traveled up and down me. “You friends?”

  “Yeah. Tell him Steve and Vincent are here.”

  The mechanic nodded and then hurried through the doorway from which he had entered. He wasn’t gone for more than a minute before Isaac stepped through. Like his employee, Isaac wore a light blue mechanic’s shirt, but no grease stained his hands or clothes. Bloody gauze, however, covered the tip of one of his index fingers. He saw us, nodded, and then pointed at the door to the garage with his thumb.

  “Let’s go to my office.”

  Isaac’s office was a glass-enclosed cubicle next to his shop. It had room for a steel desk, a couple of bookshelves laden with technical manuals, and a waist-high ficus plant in the corner. Isaac sat behind the desk, and I cleared papers from the chairs in front and sat down. The thin walls and door barely muffled the noise of the mechanic shop behind us, but at least they let us talk.

  “Didn’t know you two ever came down to this neighborhood. I don’t suppose you guys came to pimp your cars out.”

  “No,” I said, raising my voice so Isaac and Vince could hear me over the
ruckus outside. “We brought your Jeep. My neighbors started complaining. They said having it outside lowered their property values.”

  Isaac chuckled. “Serves those bastards right.”

  “You’re welcome, by the way,” I said. “It’s not often I come by gang territory.”

  He waved me off. “They only bother you if you bother them. You guys want to get a beer? There’s a bar up the street. In case you’re worried about your safety, the bartender’s a Marine who keeps a shotgun beneath the counter. Nobody messes with him.”

  “Some other time,” I said. “I talked to the valet at the Ritz-Carlton this afternoon. He told me something interesting.”

  Isaac leaned back and put his feet up on his desk. “And pray tell what was that?”

  “That he and the manager kicked you out after you got into a fight with Tess in the lobby.”

  Isaac looked from me to Vince and back. He put his hands behind his head, relaxing. “And is this where you and Vince give me a stern talking-to?”

  “Yes, it is. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Isaac took his feet off his desk and leaned forward. “Since you didn’t have the balls to do it, I told her to leave town before we all go to prison. She didn’t appreciate the request.”

  “She checked out of the hotel,” I said.

  “Good.”

  I shook my head and pounded on his desk with my index finger. “No good, because that means we don’t know where she is. Do you remember Moses Tarawally?”

  “The guy who worked for Dominique Girard?” asked Isaac.

  “Yes, the very dangerous man who worked for Dominique Girard. He hired a private detective to take pictures of Tess and me and send them to my wife.”

  “And that’s exactly what I was talking about,” said Isaac, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes. “That’s why she needs to go.”

  “Since you saw Tess,” said Vince, leaning forward, his voice flat like a television detective’s, “has anybody tried to contact you?”

  “Other than you two?”

  Vince nodded.

  Isaac shrugged and thought for a moment. “Other than regular customers, no.”

  “And you’re sure no one’s followed you?” I asked.

  Isaac shrugged again. “I didn’t know to be looking, but I don’t think so.” He squinted at me. “What’d you do with the pictures she sent Katherine?”

  “Nothing yet, but I’ll destroy them when I get home.”

  Isaac nodded and blinked, but then licked his lips. When he spoke, he spoke as much with his hands as he did with his mouth. “Listen, I hate to be the guy to ask this, but somebody has to. What does this guy have to gain by breaking up your marriage?”

  “Nothing,” I said, looking through the window at the busy garage around us. The young mechanic who had met us in the lobby rolled a tire past my field of vision. “I think Tess told him to do it.”

  “Did the pictures come with demands?” asked Vince.

  I shook my head.

  “Did you talk to Tess about them yet?” asked Isaac.

  I shook my head, trying to force my thoughts into some semblance of order. “I tried, but I couldn’t get in touch with her.”

  “Then do that,” said Isaac. “We need to take care of this thing before we all go down.”

  “Of course, I’ve got to find her first,” I said, glancing at the clock. “But right now, I’ve got to get home.”

  “Why?” asked Isaac.

  “I need to pick up Ashley,” I said, glancing at Vince. “I’m late. Can you give me a ride back to Webster?”

  15

  Rush hour always sucks, but nothing ever seems to go right when you’re running late. That seemed especially true in Missouri, where our department of transportation is so badly underfunded that it can barely afford to operate salt trucks and snow plows in the winter, let alone expand and improve the state’s aging roadways. By the time the office actually conducts the environmental impact studies, secures funding, and starts expanding our roads, the project’s end result—still years away from completion—is already outdated. Ashley’s school had after-school programs for kids whose parents worked, so at least she wouldn’t be alone. I doubted that comforted her, though.

  By the time Vince dropped me off at the house and I made it to the school, classes had been out for over an hour. Normally, Ashley would have come running out toward me, but as late as I was, she had evidently gotten tired of waiting by the door. I wandered the school’s hallways until I caught the sound of footsteps and the rhythmic thump of a ball striking the ground in the school’s gymnasium. Twenty or so kids remained, and most of them seemed to be enjoying themselves. The older boys and a few girls shot baskets on a hoop on the far side of the gym, while other kids sat on the bleachers to talk or do their homework. Ashley sat alone, her backpack flung over her shoulders as she stared at the floor.

  I jogged across the room and then made eye contact with the teacher watching over the kids. Her hair had changed from blonde to gray, and her skin had wrinkled, but I recognized her immediately as my sixth-grade reading teacher. She looked at me and smiled.

  “Someone’s been waiting to see you.”

  “Thank you for keeping her, Mrs. Butler,” I said. Ashley stood up and shuffled towards me, so I knelt and looked her in the eyes. “Hi, sweetheart. I’m sorry I’m late.”

  She looked at the ground. “I didn’t know if you were going to come.”

  “I will always come. You don’t need to worry about that. I got held up doing some work, but I’ll be more careful next time.”

  Ashley kept her head down as we walked to the car and didn’t say a word the entire drive home. In typical negligent parent form, I asked if she wanted to stop by Serendipity, a local ice cream parlor, but she declined and said she wanted to go home and walk the dog. There are worse things in the world she could have wanted to do, so I assented readily. It was only after we returned from our walk and started her homework that my wife called to tell me she would come home late, something I had expected given our conversation at her office. I read Ashley a story and put her to bed at a little after eight. With her safely ensconced in dreamland, I burned the pictures Moses sent in the fireplace and watched the news until nine when my wife came home. She looked tired and as worn down as I’ve ever seen her.

  “Hey,” I said, leaning against a kitchen cabinet and watching as she hung her purse up on a peg beside the back door.

  “Hey, yourself,” said Katherine, staying near the door.

  “You want me to warm something up for you?” I asked. “I picked up dinner, but Ashley didn’t eat much of her shepherd’s pie.”

  “I had something at work,” said Katherine. “I’d like to talk, if that’s all right. I’ve been thinking about what you told me, about the pictures, about Tess Girard. You’ve never lied to me before, at least not about something like this. I want to believe you, but I need to know what you held back.”

  “This might take a while,” I said. “You want to go sit down?”

  “Yes.”

  So we sat down on opposite ends of the sectional sofa in our living room, and, for the next hour, I told her the truth—at least most of it—about Tess, about Dominique, about what my friends and I did, how we helped her escape, how we framed Dominique for murder. Katherine never once interrupted, but she did start crying halfway through. I took a chance at that point and migrated to sit beside her. She put her head on my shoulder and listened. When I finished speaking, Katherine wept, and I sat in silence until I felt it begin to seep into my bones.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Katherine. “You killed a guy.”

  “We had a good reason.”

  “Do you really think that was your call to make?”

  It was one of those questions I wished she hadn’t asked, mostly because I didn’t have an answer, at least not a good one.

  “I don’t know any more.”

 
Eventually, Katherine drew a deep breath and began to wipe tears from the corners of her eyes. “What do we do now?”

  “You get somewhere safe,” I said. “I found out who sent you the pictures. His name is Moses Tarawally. He was Dominique’s chief of security, and he’s a very dangerous man.”

  Katherine closed her eyes. “What does he want from us?”

  “Revenge for hurting her, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe they think we’ve got money.”

  Katherine chuckled. “If they’re after money, we should just show them a printout from our checking account. Might take care of the problem right there.”

  “I wish it were that easy,” I said, tilting my head to the side. “You’re a doctor, and I’m a published author. No matter what we say, some people are going to think that means we’re rich.”

  “Idiots think we’re rich,” said Katherine, closing her eyes. “What do they get by making me think you’re having an affair?”

  “Tess is showing me that she knows how to hurt me. If we don’t give her money, she’ll hurt us in the future.”

  Katherine tilted her head to look at me. “Have you tried to contact her about it?”

  “She didn’t answer her phone.”

  “This is unbelievable,” said Katherine, rubbing her eyes. “I couldn’t even imagine something like this.”

  I pulled her tight against my chest and kissed the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her perfume, her shampoo, every bit of her.

  “I’m not going to let anyone hurt you or Ashley.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, but how do you plan on doing that?”

  “Long-term, I don’t know,” I said. “Short-term, I’d like you and Ashley to stay in a hotel, just to get away from the house.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m staying here. If Moses and Tess are watching, they’ll think their ploy worked. Maybe that’ll buy us some time.”

  Despite my suggestion of going to a hotel, we stayed on the couch for another half hour, not saying a word. Eventually, though, Katherine got up, packed a bag, and took my niece to the Springhill Suites in Brentwood, just a couple of miles away. With the house empty and lonely, I went to bed, wishing I had gone with them.