A Visible Darkness

by Jonathon King

  Today the Brown Man had been equally silent when Eddie came for his heroin. The dealer had seen him two blocks away, pushing his shopping cart along the edge of the street, one defective wheel clattering and spinning wildly each time it lost purchase with the concrete. The Brown Man swept the area with a knowing eye for any hiccup in the routine and then, satisfied, elbowed his new runner.

  “Bundle,” he said, and the boy looked expectantly down the street and then wrinkled his face at the lack of traffic.

  “Go on, nigger,” snapped the dealer, cuffing the boy with the back of his hand and scowling after him until he’d disappeared around the fence. As Eddie rattled closer, the dealer reached into his pocket and took out a gold dollar coin and started flipping and rolling it in his hand. He had worked the street for two years, dealt with the meanest motherfuckers in the biz. Been tightened up by the cops a dozen times and just swallowed the blood in his mouth and stayed cool. But the trash man always made him nervous. Those got-damn eyes lookin’ up at you like dark holes that you couldn’t escape.

  The boy came back just as Eddie slowed to a stop, his cart inches from the Brown Man’s hip. The runner started to offer up a warning to the old junk man but the dealer hushed him. The Brown Man took the thirteen dime bags of heroin from the boy and dropped them casually into the cart. In exchange Eddie passed him a crisp, folded hundred-dollar bill. Neither man spoke a word. Eddie shuffled on and the boy’s eyes rode his rounded back until he was out of earshot.

  “They’s a man you don’t fuck with,” the Brown Man said when the runner turned. “His moneys always good, and you don’t never try to cheat his ass. You always give him the good rate, hear?”

  The boy nodded. He was new, only on the street a week, but he had never seen such deference from the Brown Man, even when the packed-up low riders or the sedans with white men pulled up. Maybe it was the junk man’s eyes, the boy thought. He’d never seen eyes so hollow.

  Five blocks later Eddie heard the girl behind him. He’d seen her peeking out of the alley when he went by. He knew she would follow. Now she was hanging back, scared but unable to stop herself. Eddie went left, around the chain link fence at the back property of the old newspaper printing plant and pushed his cart a few blocks through the alley. He turned onto a rutted trail leading into an overgrown weed lot. There was an abandoned cinder-block shack squatted down near the back of the lot. It had once been some kind of electrical substation, but once it had gone unused for a month, it was stripped of anything that could be used, exchanged or sold. Eddie hoped no crackheads were using it. He could hear the girl moving in the grass behind him. He pushed the cart against the outside wall of the blockhouse and ducked through the doorway.

  Inside the single room a torn, filthy mattress lay on the floor. Piles of wadded trash—greasy food wrappers and empty cellophane bags—were kicked into the corners. Something scurried away when Eddie sat down on one corner of the mattress and took out his tools.

  Inside his coat was a spoon from his mother’s kitchen, a small bottle of water and a syringe that he had stolen from her diabetic supplies. Eddie knew the value of a clean needle. Sometimes he could barter the ones he had hoarded in exchange for dope when times were tough. But times had not been tough. Eddie had money now. He carefully poured the water into his spoon and then mixed in the powder from one of the thirteen bags. He wondered what was taking the girl so long.

  When the heroin was ready, he took out a small piece of cotton from his shirt pocket and rolled it between his thumb and finger into a small ball. He dropped the cotton into the spoon and set it on the floor while he took the orange cap off the syringe and then she was there.

  “Hey baby, you got some sugar for me, too?”

  The girl was leaning into the doorway, the toe of one shoe pointed carefully inside. She had finger-brushed her hair back and used some kind of cloth to wipe her face clean. When Eddie looked up she straightened her back, pushing her small breasts out against the worn fabric of a dingy cotton blouse. Eddie could see the tremble in her fingers.

  “I seen you stop off at the Brown Man’s so I was wonderin’ maybe you want some company,” she said, trying to hold her voice steady. Eddie went back to his spoon and slipped the needle into the soaked cotton and drew the liquid up into the syringe. The girl stepped over and sat next to him, folding her long, washed-out skirt under her. From somewhere she came up with a thick rubber band and without asking wrapped it around her bare upper arm. Eddie looked into her face but she was staring at the needle, a small pink tip of her tongue showing at the corner of her mouth.

  “You get what you want. I gets what I want,” Eddie said.

  Question or order? The girl couldn’t distinguish the statement. But she knew how to handle his kind. She’d been on the street. She’d get the sweet shot and slip the junk man without giving anything up.

  “Sure, baby. I know what you want, big man,” she said without looking up from the needle. The veins in her arm had popped like thin worms under her bruised skin. She nodded and the tip of her tongue moved to the other corner.

  Eddie watched the girl accept the dose of heroin into a thin vein. He watched her eyes roll up and the smile play at her face. He liked to watch them. It made him anxious for his own hit, but he liked to see them smile first. She hummed through the high for a few minutes and then her eyes drifted open.

  “Go ’head, baby,” she slurred. “Get your own self some of this.”

  Eddie knew the girl would wait until he was half conscious with a dose and then either rip him off or split. He shook his head.

  “Now I gets what I want.”

  The girl’s eyes opened wider and she pulled herself up.

  “Okay, baby. You gonna get yours. But I gotta pee first. Know what I mean?” She was now on her feet. Yeah, Eddie thought, I know what you mean.

  She took a step and he had her by the wrist before she could turn. She kicked at him but Eddie caught her ankle and like a rag doll tossed her back on the mattress. Eddie had been cheated too many times by women. When she started to scream Eddie had her instantly by the throat. No yellin’. Ain’t no yellin’ in this house, his mamma always said. His grip on her throat tightened until she was quiet and he went about his business, getting what was his.

  When he was through, Eddie let loose and sat back against the cool block wall. The girl stayed quiet while he mixed his own package from the bundle and got himself high. She was still quiet when he got up to leave. She was still lying there when he ducked out the doorway and started pushing his cart back to the streets.

  8

  When I left Ms. Greenwood I drove east, over the tracks and toward the ocean. After ten years as a cop I’d heard enough stories, confessions, excuses and bullshit to come to a conclusion. Truth is an ephemeral thing. Perception holds a powerful sway. Ms. Greenwood was convinced that someone connected to her mother’s viatical policy had a hand in her death. That was her truth. Billy, whose judgment I trusted, also believed it. McCane was never going to get his nose in this neighborhood to make any kind of assessment. I could walk away and not subject myself to the hassle. But that was the thing about truth and the possibility of it. I had a hard time leaving it alone.

  I crossed A1A and turned down a short residential street to a small oceanfront park and pulled into a shaded spot. I stepped over the bulkhead and walked down to the beach. At the edge of the sand you could smell brine drying on the rocks left behind by an outgoing tide. I dug the cell phone out and dialed Sherry Richards’ direct line.

  “Strategic Investigations Division, Richards.”

  “I am surprised and honored not to have your machine answer,” I said.

  “Freeman. Hey, what happened? The swamp dry up?”

  Her voice had a lilt to it. That was positive. It had been a few weeks. Maybe she wasn’t pissed.

  “I had a craving for civilization,” I said.

  “You’re calling me civilized, Max. How sweet.”

  Still, there w
as that sarcasm.

  “Hey, I’m on dry land. How about lunch?”

  “Today? I don’t know, Max. Wind’s a little stiff. Might be too busy for you.”

  I was left again without response. Seriously pissed? Or joking? Three, maybe four weeks ago we’d been out on Billy’s thirty-four- foot sloop, sailing to nowhere with Billy and his girlfriend, another lawyer who had an office in his building.

  I had met Richards several months ago. She’d been on a special task force investigating a string of child abductions and killings. One of the dead kids had ended up on my river. Despite myself, I got pulled into the investigation. She’d kept a professional and wary distance until the case had broken. Then she’d found too many reasons for coming to the hospital to check on me while I convalesced from a gunshot wound.

  I tried to see her whenever I came in off the river. Drinks at a beachside tiki bar. Dinner at Joe’s Seafood Grill on the Intracoastal. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her legs during a Saturday afternoon on the beach. She’d noticed. She was after all, a trained cop.

  On the sailing trip she’d surprised me with her dexterity and seamanship. She’d been showing me up from the time we’d pushed off from the dock, but it had only registered a small manly tick with me and probably hadn’t even crossed her mind. You don’t do much sail trimming on the streets of Philly. Then Billy had decided to unfurl his spinnaker in a downwind run and I’d jumped to show I wasn’t useless. The damn sail was huge and far too unwieldy and strange in my hands. When I’d tangled the lines and tripped on a stanchion, the women had smartly taken control. Richards had whipped the lines out of my hands before I went overboard. Then she and Billy’s friend expertly set the whisker poles and stood framed in the billowing color and smiled and hooted at the boat’s speed. Billy winked at me as I settled back in the cockpit and watched with a tainted respect.

  I’d been through a short marriage with a cop in Philadelphia. She, like Richards, had been strong and tough-minded, smart and intuitive. Those were things I liked, things I understood. But both were also emotional, able to absorb a victims pain, to show an instant empathy. The dual abilities were unsettling.

  My ex-wife had also lived on an adrenaline push, one I didn’t want to compete for. I still didn’t think I knew Richards well enough to know if that was another shared quality. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Oh come on, Max. Don’t tell me you got intimidated by two women who could handle a spinnaker in an eight-knot breeze better that you two boys?” she said, breaking my too-long silence.

  “Can’t intimidate a man who knows his limitations,” I said. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been in sooner. So introduce me to a new recipe for mangrove snapper.”

  My apology must have been accepted.

  “How about Banyans at two?” she finally said. “Bring your cash, Freeman, it’s on you.”

  I started back south on A1A, rolled down the windows along a stretch of beachfront where oceanside condos had somehow been banned. From the road the view of the surf and the watery horizon were unobstructed. On the sidewalk I watched a young woman in a bikini walking south, her hips switching like a metronome. Two buzzcut boys walking a pit bull said something to her and she nonchalantly flipped them the finger. I slowed for a middle-aged man crossing from the hotel side, sliding on roller blades, shirtless and tanned with a multicolored parrot perched on one shoulder. I passed a throbbing, low-ride Honda Accord that broadsided me with a bass line from a backseat full of speakers. Eight hours ago I was watching a wild bird hunting gar fish on a thousand-year-old river. Welcome to Florida.

  I got off the ocean drive and went back west half a mile, over the Intracoastal bridge, and found a parking spot across the street from Banyan’s. Inside the restaurant was an open courtyard dominated by the huge trunk of a live banyan tree that measured some eight feet across and spread its monstrous canopy up and over the surrounding roofs. Its leaves were so dense that even at midday it left a cool and dusky patio below.

  When my eyes adjusted to the shade, I saw Richards sitting at a table near one corner, a cop’s territory where you could catalog everybody who walked in. She was dressed in a cream-colored suit, white silk blouse underneath. She sat at an angle to the table so she could cross her legs. Even sitting you could see her height in the long bones from knee to ankle and elbow to wrist. Her blonde hair was pulled back. Her eyes, I already knew, would look green today. I am not a smiling man, but approaching the table I could feel it coming into my face.

  “Hi. Nice table.”

  “The advantage of two o’clock lunches,” she said without missing a beat. I took her hand and bent to kiss her lightly in greeting and stole a deep draught of her perfume.

  “Freeman, you are god-awful thin,” she said when I stepped back.

  “Thank you,” I said, pulling out a chair to the side of hers so I too might have a view.

  “What, the fish on the river haven’t been cooperative?”

  “You mean they don’t like to be caught and eaten? Or I’m a piss- poor fisherman?”

  “Exactly,” she said. “But you’re in luck. The special is red snapper, and it’s very good here.”

  I opened a menu as if to make a decision on my own. Took a breath, looked up into her face.

  “You’re looking fit, detective. Climbing the gears right off that Stair Master?”

  One of our connections was a passion for exercise, a shared habit of sweating through a pain we both understood.

  Her husband had been a street cop who had died in the line of duty. He had confronted a kid in a holdup and never expected a thirteen-year-old to aim a gun in his face. According to his partner, that night he’d just stared at the barrel and seemed to tilt his head in confusion when the kid pulled the trigger. It was still not long enough in the past.

  “No more Stair Master,” she answered. “Got a new thing. Aerobics boxing. Great stuff.”

  “Figures,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow, then let the comment slide.

  “So, what’s up on the river, Freeman? Anything we should know about?”

  Her question reminded me how hard it was for her not to always be a cop. There had been some loose ends in the abduction case. A witness, an eighty-year-old legend of the deep Glades, had disappeared and was never found for questioning. The detectives knew he had picked me out as a conduit for special information and wondered if I would ever put them in touch “just for conversation to fill in some holes,” they said. What they didn’t know was that the old man had saved my life. My repayment was his anonymity.

  “Everything is quiet on the river,” I said. “But we’ve got to get you out there again, work on that paddle technique.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, but there was a grin on her face.

  “No,” I said. “This time it’s your side of the woods where I think I need some help.”

  The waiter came and took orders, and as we sipped iced tea, I told Richards about Billy’s theory about the insurance scam and murder. I gave her what sketchy information I could about the women’s locations and similarities, and about the insurance investigator who, for lack of a better word, was working with me.

  She listened, nodding and only interjecting with the proper street names and neighborhood tides. When the fish came, sizzling off the grill and surrounded by dirty rice, we both went quiet.

  She finally broke the silence. “Even that many naturals, in that section of the city, wouldn’t necessarily raise any flags. And even if Billy alerted us to it, I doubt it would push anyone off the dime to take a closer look.”

  I looked up from my plate.

  “It’s a high crime zone, Freeman. You know the drill. Keep the lid on. Try to make insider friends, keep the politics in check and don’t sweat the small stuff. They’ve got bigger problems over there.”

  It was my turn to raise eyebrows, first at the small stuff comment and then as an unspoken question about the bigger problems. She took a few forkfuls of rice,
pulled a loose strand of hair back behind her ears and began again.

  She told me about a string of rapes in the same area over the past several years that had also passed across someone’s desk. Some were reported, some were just street talk. The women involved were street girls, prostitutes and addicts feeding their habits and not too particular about what they traded for an eight-ball of crack or a dose of heroin.

  “They only got reported when the guy got too rough and the women were found hurt. I answered one while I was still on patrol. Girl had marks around her throat like a thick rope had been wrapped around it. She said it was the guy’s hands.”

  That case, like the others, had never been solved. The witnesses were too high to give good descriptions. The crime scenes were either forgotten or so contaminated that they were useless for processing.

  She saw me looking at her eyes, watching the way they kept jumping away from mine.

  “Goddammit, Freeman. I worked it as much as I could. I was only patrol. I handed it up to the detective bureau.”

  “I didn’t say a word,” I said, holding up my palms in defense. She went quiet.

  The waiter came back. I ordered coffee and stared up into the canopy of the banyan, following the branches down into the thick mass of tangled roots that formed the trunk.

  “So what has changed?” I asked.

  “They started turning up dead.”

  “The rape victims?”

  “The users, the hookers, then just women in the neighborhood.”

  “But not older women?”

  “No.”

  The coffee came and she knew enough about my habit to wait until I’d taken two long swallows.