by Peter Farris
Lucy paused, holding back some emotion. She had one of those expressions. Perpetually on the verge of hysteria.
“I raised him myself,” she said with particular pride. “He was always a bit peculiar, kept to himself, never had friends except for some kids from the rocket club at school. Charlie wants to build rockets and jet planes, work for Lockheed or NASA one day. I sent him to Space Camp over in Huntsville. He loved it. Just loved it. But I never did have the nerve to tell him that some things are just beyond the reach of people like us.”
“He’s an overachiever?” Crews said.
“Oh yes. It’s just the money, and, well, the scholarship he’s on is okay, but that college ain’t like the schools rocket scientists graduate from.”
Crews mentally added to her impression of her victim from Lucy’s explanations. She already felt bad for Charlie. And a little angry. Lucy Colquitt both bored her and made her uneasy. The artificial eye, the quaver in Lucy’s drawl, the damn roosters, that half-empty bottle of schnapps next to the microwave. She had all the signs of a functional alcoholic. The functionally unstable.
Crews could spot a badly damaged human being when she saw one. So what was Lucy’s real story? No family to speak of. No husband. Probably the product of a broken home. A history of abuse? Alcoholic father? Promiscuity? Drugs? An unwanted pregnancy?
“Did Charlie mention anything about work?” Crews asked. “Any rude or unfriendly customers he must’ve dealt with? Strangers he noticed hanging around the bank?”
“He never talked about work much when we had our lunch on Saturdays.”
“What do you and Charlie talk about?”
“Nothing, really,” Lucy said with a shrug.
There was a pause. The detectives exchanged looks.
“Did Charlie have any enemies? Students at the college he didn’t get along with? Or maybe neighbors at his apartment complex? Anyone who knew where he worked?”
Lucy said, “We never really talked … about things such as that.”
“Any family he’s close to? His father, maybe?”
Lucy Colquitt took a drag from her cigarette, then leveled her working eye on Crews. Her artificial eye looked off, as if distracted by something over Crews’ shoulder. Tears caused recently applied mascara to run. Crews frowned, struck by a particularly mean thought. You could have put her in a field to scare off crows. Crews already had a hunch that her last question would be evaded.
Lucy exhaled. Smoke drifted from her mouth like woodsmoke off a hearth. It lingered around her head.
“Long dead,” she said. “Oh, he’s long dead.”
* * *
I thought ye might be dead. But I see you’re breathing. Used to talk to my celly when he was asleep. Know how I still dream about the inside? It’s about all I do dream of. State of Georgia … we had our misunderstandings, sure. Should still be locked up. The things you got to do to survive which ain’t legal no prison I know of. Keep your mouth shut after. That got you solitary most of the time. Unless you snitched. That got you a ticket to the dance.
Funny how they put you away for breakin’ the law and all ye do inside is break the law again, over and over. Them niggers and beaners, the baton-happy prison guards. They will push and if ye ain’t inclined to push back then there’s no helpin’ ye. I was never one to be pushed, and when I was I pushed back harder and meaner. Should still be there. But I’m an anomaly. I learned that word. It means slippery. Means I ain’t been a snitch or just some dumb piece of meat.
I miss the games we played with the warden. Them gangbuster screws thought they was smart. Thought they deciphered our code and could catch all the drugs and contraband. Yeah. Well, Nature finds a way.
We used to throw cereal in the drain, let it ferment for a couple days with some water and then eat it. Enough to get drunk. I wouldn’t wish that taste on anyone. Take fruit from the kitchen, little bag with water. Apples mainly. Bananas. We called it Pruno. Prison wine. It’s just rotten is all. But it did the trick. Anything to make time move quicker. Made a small fortune selling stuff that made time disappear. Heroin, speed, OxyContin, cough syrup. Warden might say drugs are a problem, but it’s isolated. Yeah. Hardly.
Drugs ran the show inside. And we were the show.
But they are a-comin’. Friends of mine are comin’.
This room we’re in, no different than what I’m used to. Playing by my own rules and look what it gets me. Right back in another room. With no windows I care to look out of. Brothers will come lookin’ for me because I jumped on this one. Got greedy. Ye don’t just walk away from jumpin’ a score. It was supposed to be three men.
Reckon how many of us ye see here, Coma?
Sometimes I wish I never got out. Maybe that’s why I took ye alive? I’m still trying to figure that one out.
I know how to play the games, though. I know the angles. You’re just one of many. Do ye feel like an angle? I do. I guess eventually we all do. Something playin’ us. Workin’ us over. We’re all marks, I suppose. I’d like to know who’s in charge. Because this life is just one big score. All of it.
Been a long time since I had a cooler full of cold ones. I might just puke tonight. Then we might have somethin’ in common after all. Ain’t that right, Charlie Colquitt?
* * *
Hicklin took short pulls from his beer, eyeing Charlie with a mixture of curiosity and resentment. Charlie’s head had drooped forward again. Damned if the boy didn’t look dead, Hicklin observed. Has a face that might’ve been trapped under ice and drowned.
He felt the alcohol buzz from his fingertips to his sternum. And right between his throbbing temples. He’d been lighting one cigarette after another, thinking on what his next move should be, but answers seemed in short supply.
Hicklin rose and walked to the radio in the corner where a long orange extension cord disappeared out a cracked window. Newspaper kept most of the light out. Could have been any time of day. He didn’t care what time it was. Just like he was used to.
He turned up the volume and returned to his chair, feeling thoroughly drunk when he sat down. A traffic report from Chattanooga crackled in and out. He heard Hummingbird talking to herself. She was in the bedroom, rummaging around, looking for something. She was always looking for something, real or imaginary. That woman is no earthly use to anybody, he told himself. She was slowly killing herself anyway.
A goddamn shame, too.
An impulse struck him. Walk in thar and stick her. You’d be doing her a favor.
Hicklin reached inside his boot for a three-and-a-half-inch folding knife. He locked it and ran the tip of his thumb along the black edge of the drop-point blade. He knew anatomy. It was one of his prison hobbies, sizing a man up, looking for the weak spots. Another hobby was to know when to act on these impulses, when to put them aside.
But the impulse grew stronger. Hicklin pressed the edge of the blade against his forearm until it sliced the flesh. Blood appeared, thin as a paper cut. Yet cutting himself quelled the awful notion his mind was entertaining. He folded the blade and put it on the coffee table. Looked around instead for where he’d put his beer.
The night dragged on. Hicklin found himself humming along to a tune from the radio. Charlie slept, his head down, lifting gently as he snored. Otherwise, he was like a statue in a courthouse square. Something you’d just walk past and never notice. Hicklin looked around the living room, stopping to watch moths as they fluttered behind a lamp in the corner. The light had a weak saffron-colored pulse, like it was keeping time, counting down the minutes.
This party won’t last.
He stared at Charlie for long stretches. Thought about waking him, maybe with a slap. He could free the boy, drop him facedown across the coffee table, pull down his pants.
Hicklin entertained the idea of raping him, but his attention drifted. He stumbled to the couch, suddenly very drunk. He moved the shotgun, laying it across the floor next to him, thinking if anybody—the law, some disgruntled co-conspir
ators—came through that door, well, he’d be in deep shit. But they didn’t know about this place, Hicklin reminded himself. They didn’t know.
Outside the cottage there were chirps and cries, the world rallying around another morning.
We are caged men, ready to watch each other die.
The thief is in your spotlights.
Come and get me you righteous pigs!
FIVE
Nathan Flock turned up the volume on the radio. He was driving his Chevy Silverado, heading west on I-285, skirting traffic as it backed up near the exits. The lighter popped. His passenger cracked the window and lit a cigarette.
“It’s a brand-new truck, Preach,” Flock objected.
“You smoke, don’t you?”
“Yeah, so?”
Leonard Lipscomb pulled a soft pack from the breast pocket of his work shirt. Shook out a cigarette. Nathan glanced at the filtered tip, then took it.
He tried to keep up with a brunette in a convertible. She wore a visor and was talking on a cell phone, a wake of hair flapping in the breeze. Nathan could see her painted nails. She wore a blue tank top and white tennis skirt. She looked rich and well put together, but he’d already convinced himself she was dirty in bed. Probably liked to be choked or cut or both.
He couldn’t keep up with her, though. Bitch must be doing ninety.
“Why don’t you turn this nigger shit off,” Lipscomb said, yanking Flock from his fantasies. It wasn’t a suggestion, either. In the joint Lipscomb had been known as Preacher. He had a way with words, his musings and philosophizing as legendary in facilities like Hays State Prison as was his ruthlessness.
“What’s wrong? You don’t like rap?” Flock said.
“I said turn it off.”
“Ain’t you ever listened to it, though?” he argued. “Not like we haven’t done plenty of business with the spooks inside…”
Lipscomb pulled a Randall knife from a scabbard and pressed the tip against Flock’s jeans just above the femoral artery. Flock flinched and swerved across the next lane, eliciting a chorus of horns before regaining control of the pickup. A tractor-trailer blasted its air horn. Flock turned the radio down, then flicked off the trucker. Lipscomb put the knife back in the scabbard. Not a hint of humor on his face.
“Jesus Christ, Preacher!”
“You don’t know nothing about the inside.”
A long silence followed. Lipscomb produced a folded sheet of paper. Studied directions written down for him.
“It’s the next exit coming up,” he said.
Flock threw his cigarette out the window. He glanced at the radio.
“Well? What you want to hear then?”
“How about some Jimmie Rodgers.”
“Huh?”
“My thoughts exactly.”
Flock abruptly drove his pickup between an 18-wheeler and a limousine before exiting. They came to a stop at the top of the off-ramp. Traffic blocking the intersection. Afternoon rush hour around Atlanta was notorious. Flock could burn half a tank of gas getting anywhere. Lipscomb just stared straight ahead. Nathan didn’t remember him disposing of his cigarette. Crazy asshole probably ate it.
Nathan made a left and crept toward a bus stop packed with Mexicans and blacks. They were stopped momentarily near the crowd. Lipscomb rolled down the window and spit. Looked around. Everyone with a lick of sense averted their eyes.
Flock drove past a gas station and liquor store and taqueria. Hung a right on a street with the whimsical name Wispy Willow Court. Women walked with their children along the sidewalks, pushing strollers, everyone carrying grocery bags.
Flock turned left into an apartment complex, the parking lot full of vans and used compacts. Work trucks with ladder racks. Imports with tacky paint jobs. Little decorative flags hung from the rearview mirror of almost every vehicle, announcing their owners’ origins. Mexico. Nicaragua. El Salvador. Guatemala. A community of illegals, Lipscomb mused. Left alone by the cops until somebody got mean drunk or a wife got battered or a drug deal went sour. Then the cops show up and try to recall their high school Spanish.
“Who we meeting again?” Flock said.
“Hicklin.”
“I heard about him. Y’all did time together, right?”
“Ten years,” Lipscomb said.
“What’s he like?”
“Ask him yourself if he don’t shoot you first.”
They got out and walked. Lipscomb led the way up a staircase. The walls of the complex were peeling and cracked.
“So you trust this beaner?” Flock said.
“Yeah, we do.”
It was Friday afternoon and a group of day laborers piled out of a mini-van. Cases of Budweiser, Pepsi and fast food in tow. They’d been on a roof all day, Lipscomb figured. In some tony neighborhood, skin sun bronzed, hands hardened from years of hammering and hauling and sanding and gutting and mowing. Denim jeans flecked with concrete dust and paint, their shirts tar stained and stinking. Some wore their hair in ponytails. Others wore hats from sports teams for which they had little concern. None of the workers acknowledged Flock or Lipscomb.
But Lipscomb admired the work ethic of folks like them—at least they worked, unlike those welfare zombies—even if these wetbacks were what he’d deemed the racial equivalent of a fruit fly.
Rich smells wafted from open windows as dinner was being prepared in a dozen units. A dirt lot doubling as a courtyard served as the recreation center for the neighborhood. Teenagers kicked a soccer ball around while younger kids amused themselves along the sidelines. Some of the children tended to infants in strollers.
A couple of young thugs on the second tier had been watching Lipscomb and Flock since they parked. The thugs hung over the railing and smoked, the sort of cocksure posturing corner kids assumed when they were trying to impress their superiors. One of them sent a text message on his cell phone. The other, brown and stout, turned to face the two white men as they approached. He wore khaki Dickies and a wifebeater, Chuck Taylors. A protégé of some Southern California sect, getting a B.A. in gangbanging, apparently.
“Yo!”
“Yo, yourself,” Lipscomb said. He and Flock stopped five feet away.
“You got business here, Abuelo? Better hope you do.”
Flock flexed some attitude, locking eyes with the mouthy gangbanger. The kid looked not a day over sixteen. Lipscomb stood his ground, clearly not impressed. For sure the boy was strapped. Maybe even fired his little popgun once.
“Lose the attitude, Hay-soos,” Flock said, then complaining to Lipscomb, “This place is a day-care center.”
“I don’t want you to talk,” Lipscomb said over his shoulder. He turned to address the sentry, saying more with his six-foot-four frame, the hard fat and muscle, than any words could. Body language that suggested he was the type of man to lift a burning car with his bare hands, only to drop it on the trapped victim for laughs.
He noticed the kid glancing at the tattoos that unwound down each forearm. Lipscomb held up his palms like he was trying to coax a kitten from a tree.
“Now listen here, Jorge or Javier or…”
“My name’s Paulo, motherfucker.”
“So it’s Paulo. Tell Cueva we’re here. I’m expected.”
“And who the fuck are you?” Paulo chirped.
Lipscomb glanced over the railing to the parking lot below, as if judging if the fall would kill a man. Then he smiled.
“Somebody that doesn’t give a shit if you live or die in the next ten seconds.”
Paulo elbowed his buddy. Another text message was sent out on the cell phone. Then Paulo looked up nervously at Lipscomb. The smile hadn’t left the ex-con’s face, like a used-car salesman with a secret.
“Make that five seconds, Paulo. My watch is fast.”
Someone cut the music inside a nearby apartment. A door opened. The two Hispanic kids walked away. Flock could smell rice and chorizo. He was hungry. Wondered if dinner was part of their deal.
* *
*
Nathan Flock followed Lipscomb inside the apartment and shut the door behind him. The main room included living space and a side kitchenette. Sitting on a couch was a stocky Salvadoran wearing khaki work pants with a white T-shirt. The slippers on his feet were the kind the state issues, known as Nikes by the boys in county lockup. There was a black polymer handgun resting on his knee. A boom box thumped softly on the floor. Flock hesitated near the door, tickled by the fear they were about to be ambushed.
Cueva and a woman sat at a table in the kitchenette. Fifty or so money orders were neatly arranged in front of the woman, a bookish pair of reading glasses on the end of her nose. A menthol cigarette smoldered in an ashtray.
“Thought you’d have guards posted,” Lipscomb said. “What about the pigs?”
Cueva smiled. He rose, raised his arms and turned around. There was a pistol snug in the small of his back. An A4 .223-caliber rifle was within his reach, propped in a corner.
“I only use this place a couple hours at a time, Preacher. Policia know better than to come around without an appointment.”
The man on the couch chuckled. The woman did not look up from the money orders. Somewhere a fire truck siren blared.
Lipscomb noted the black rifle cases stacked six high next to the couch. One was open. Custom interior. Military green ammo boxes. A rucksack with spare magazines pushing against the canvas.
Cueva offered Lipscomb a chair at the table. Flock stood behind them, finding himself ignored now by all in the apartment. He studied Cueva. The Mexican gave up a couple inches to Lipscomb but was no less wide. Cueva’s face was pocked around the neck and ears with scars like the chewed-up face of a pit bull. Indeed, the Mexican’s eyes had the ferocity of a fighting dog. The potential for reckless abandon. That fearless extra gear inside him that fascinated criminal profilers and penologists.
His body was adorned with prison-gang tattoos. Flock recognized the call signs.
There were hands clasped in prayer, Aztec warriors, naked mamacitas with long black manes and pear-shaped breasts. Roses and skulls and the word Esperanza from collarbone to collarbone. An ominous blue-green handprint the centerpiece.