Tampa Bay Noir

by Colette Bancroft

  “After a while, it kind of puts you into a trance,” said my boyfriend.

  “Then you have to stop,” said his mother. Her expression was fearful. “That’s how the devil gets in.”

  Two years after we broke up, when my ex was seventeen, he married a fifteen-year-old girl from the next street over. Twelve years later, they were divorced with five children. His social media was now a scrolling advertisement for misogyny. Ladies, this is how you take care of your man! Another woman coming at me!

  I often wondered why I was still virtually connected with him. Maybe I recognized his rage as suffering. I suspected the problem was an undiagnosed illness, though that seemed insulting to people with illnesses, and could be letting him off too easily. I knew via rumor that his ex had taken out an injunction for protection against him after he’d tried to strangle her in the shower. Afterward, he got another girl pregnant and beat her into having a miscarriage.

  Now he lived with his mother. I unfriended him and messaged her to ask about Buck. I wondered whether she knew him personally or just followed his ministry.

  I used to call his program for prayer in the late nineties, she responded. She asked me why I wanted to know, and I explained that I was thinking of writing a story about him. I asked her if she’d noticed that he was no longer broadcasting. She hadn’t thought about him in years, she admitted.

  But listen, Andrea, I hope you’re doing an exposé that’s compassionate, trying to find the answers, she said. What could have contributed to this great man’s fall? What were the factors? And you know what? He may tell you. If you say, “Listen, I really want to paint a vivid portrait of what can happen, and the pressures, and what led you to these decisions,” he might tell you.

  * * *

  The mansion was peaches-and-cream, bordering a golf course. In September, Hurricane Hermine had knocked the pool enclosure down, and it had yet to be repaired, so it sat crumpled in a heap on the deck furniture. A cluster of potted plants waited at the edge of the driveway beside bags of potting soil and an ash-gray Toyota Camry. The front door was open. I knocked on the screen. Mi-Seon appeared in a nightgown. She was a petite Korean woman with a kind, open face. She made no move to open the screen while we talked, so we spoke through it. She was convinced at first that someone had put me up to writing the story, and demanded to know who had tipped me off. I assured her that I was writing it as a matter of personal interest. She told me she didn’t want to talk about Buck. “If I talk about Buck, I have to talk about myself,” she told me. “And I don’t want people to call me up and ask me about it.” She told me they’d divorced. He was no longer living there. She’d been living on Buck’s alimony payments, which he’d stopped sending. She didn’t know where he was. “Nothing good can come of this,” she said. “I know it’s public record, but it’s personal.”

  “Buck is a public figure,” I said.

  “He’s been through enough.” She smiled at me. I saw she was crying. I wondered about his new wife, if he had one—I suspected she would be the blonde I’d seen in the Souls of Gold infomercial. In it, she was dropping her old jewelry with French-tipped nails into a padded envelope, and walking it out to the mailbox behind me, at the end of the driveway.

  “Do you think Buck has been persecuted unfairly for his beliefs?” I said.

  “Well, he would say things, and people would get offended, but it’s just his opinion.” Mi-Seon told me again that she didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’re not Christian, you’re against Christians.” She began to shut the door.

  “Wait, Mi-Seon . . .” I’d been attempting to make contact with her for days. She wasn’t listed publicly and wasn’t on social media. She no longer used e-mail. I told her that I had recently been attending church. “First Methodist, in Largo.” This was a lie but it worked.

  She cracked the door. She told me that life with Buck had led her to want to “cocoon.” Pressure in the televangelism industry to maintain a facade had become exhausting. “People say they’re your friends and then they turn around and they’re not your friends,” she said. She was a private person. The screen door didn’t have a knob on it, I now noticed. I asked her if she found it hard to live in the public eye, given how opinionated Buck is.

  “No, it’s not that. I don’t trust secular media. Buck paid a lot of money to the secular media and then they kicked him off. And you journalists pad the story, make it more dramatic, fictitious.”

  I reminded her that she didn’t know what I would be writing.

  “You print lies.”

  “The Tampa Bay Times has fact-checkers.”

  “I don’t like the Tampa Bay Times,” she said.

  “Buck used secular media to reach nonbelievers.”

  “That’s what got him into trouble. He made mistakes.”

  “What mistakes?”

  “With money. And in his personal life,” she said. They had separated a year into his investigation by the IRS. They’d been married twenty-six years. “He wasn’t praying about it.”

  “How did you meet?” I asked, knowing my time was running short.

  Mi-Seon smiled. She opened the door wider and stepped toward the screen. “He saw me at the mall. He approached me and spoke to me in Korean. Then he wrote my name.”

  “How did he know it?”

  “He’d followed me.”

  * * *

  I can’t say I was surprised to see an Aston Martin parked at the Gateway Motel when I got home. The clouds had lifted, revealing a silver sun, and Buck sat in the folding chair outside my room with his hands in his coat pockets. I wondered which hand had the gun in it.

  His red-ringed eyes were drunk and crying. I walked to the check-in window, though it was abandoned, pretending I didn’t see him. I dropped my night’s pay into the rusting mailbox. The skinny girl came around the corner, her face bruised. I asked her how long Buck had been there.

  “All day,” she said. “He rented the room next to yours.”

  “Did he say what he wants?”

  “He asked me if I was a hooker.”

  I took out my recorder and turned it on, then tucked it into my pocket and thanked her. If he shot me, at least there would be a record of who had done it. He followed me with his eyes as I crossed the lot back toward him. He sat forward on the chair, a mordant smile on his face, then he rose and came into my room behind me without saying a word. I closed the door.

  We sat at the particleboard table across from each other. I placed an ashtray between us. He reached into his coat pocket and my heart lit up, expecting to see a gun, but he pulled out a flask and offered it to me.

  “No thanks,” I said, “I’m working.”

  He shrugged. “The IRS will never see a dime due to the fact that I have nothing,” he told me. He pulled at the flask. “The investigation into Live Crusade was started by Lois Lerner, former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit. Heard of her? In 2013, she was investigated for unfair probing of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The IRS knew they would never see a dime. They knew the settlement would never be collected. They just wanted to ruin me. They pick and choose targets based on their own biases.”

  His face became red. I thought he would cry, but he didn’t. He closed his eyes, as if praying. I looked away, embarrassed.

  “Are you asking me to feel bad for you?” I said. “Because I don’t.”

  “No, I’m asking you to leave me with some dignity.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I have a gun.”

  He opened his eyes. My gut turned to liquid. I reached up and pulled back the curtains next to us. The window looked out on the parking lot. I made eye contact with the skinny girl. She nodded.

  “You also have a luxury car,” I said.

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’ve had that car for six years.”

  “And?” I lit a cigarette. I ashed in the tray, blowing my smoke in his face. I didn’t believe he had a gun. I chose not to, or was unabl
e.

  He cocked it beneath the table. I felt it pointed at my uterus. His forehead was wet with sweat. He got off on his power. “The Times isn’t paying you enough to risk your life,” he said.

  He was right about that. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled my nostrils. The crack rang in my ears. The wall’s plaster crumbled into my lap, and I laughed, but the laughter was my overwhelming sadness and fear.

  “You’re living in it now, aren’t you?” I said, meaning the car.

  But he was already gone, leaving the door open.

  JACKKNIFE

  by Danny López

  Gibsonton

  I finished packing my overnight bag and was about to head to the shelter when my phone buzzed.

  “Wes?”

  I hadn’t heard Lisa Moon’s perilous voice in over a year. Now she breathed deep into the speaker. “I need your help.”

  “Really, my help?”

  “Please . . .”

  I tightened my grip on the phone and fought the impulse to throw it against the wall, smash it to pieces like she’d done with our relationship, or whatever you call what we once had. But I was soft—a sucker. She had me wrapped around her finger. She knew it. I knew it.

  “I’m sorry,” she went on real slow. “I . . . I didn’t know who else to call.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I need a ride,” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Jack’s place in Gibsonton.”

  Gibsonton. It wasn’t even a real town, just a few blocks of old houses and single-wide trailers that had seen better days. A depressing Florida suburb once favored by circus folk and carnies.

  I held the phone away from my face, paced around the living room of my run-down Seminole Heights apartment. I could still hear the sound of the door slamming as she walked out of my life, the chain of the lock swinging, clacking against the dead bolt like a clock.

  “Wesley?”

  “There’s a hurricane—”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry . . . but I need help.”

  “What about Jack?”

  “That’s what I need help with.”

  “Jesus, Lisa.”

  “Wes . . .”

  “This isn’t a good time.”

  “Just say no, then. You can do that, you know?”

  No. She knew I couldn’t. So I took down the address. Just before I shut off the TV and walked out the door, the weatherman pointed to the image of the perfect round eye of the storm. Hurricane Lloyd was now a category four with sustained winds of 135 miles an hour. The shiny, well-groomed weatherman warned everyone to evacuate the barrier islands from Longboat Key to Cedar Key and seek shelter immediately from Sarasota to Tarpon Springs.

  Gibsonton was right smack in the center of the cone.

  * * *

  I met Lisa Moon at the Mons Venus during one of my first gigs as a PI after I’d been forced into retirement from the Tampa Police Department. The Internal Affairs investigation into the shooting death of a well-known drug dealer destroyed my law enforcement career. I was canned for doing my job. About half a dozen of us responded to a call of suspicious activity that was soon upgraded to shots fired in Ybor City. Two suspects were dead. Turned out neither one of the victims had a weapon. The investigation found we followed proper protocol, but three of us got terminated because heads had to roll.

  I started doing work for a bail bondsman I knew who did a little side investigation work for select clients. That’s how I ended up following this sleazeball who’d taken out a second mortgage on his nice home in Bayshore Gardens and was using the cash to live it up while his wife stayed home with the kids. Every few days he’d hit the Mons and throw money at the strippers. He got lap dances, and on a number of occasions took one of his favorite girls to the Seminole Hard Rock Casino for a night of gambling and debauchery.

  I sat away from the action at the Mons and observed. I took notes, some photos, maybe a little video for evidence. And every time it was Lisa Moon in her skimpy waitress outfit who came to take my drink order.

  “Just soda water.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “you have soda water, don’t you?”

  She shrugged and wrote the order down on her pad. “You on the wagon?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You a cop?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  She gave me that little sideways smile. “I dunno. The Dockers, the shoes. You got the look.”

  “The look, huh?”

  “You come in here a couple times a week and sit in the back, drink soda water, and never get a dance. What gives?”

  “Nothing gives,” I said. “You getting me my water or do I have to go to the bar and get it myself?”

  * * *

  I took my overnight bag. Hurricane Lloyd was less than a couple hours away. We were already getting occasional feeder bands. If rescuing Lisa Moon took too long, I’d have to find a shelter down in Gibsonton.

  Traffic was hell. Every gas station had lines of cars that snaked out onto the street. I-75 was bumper-to-bumper heading north, but the southbound lane was deserted. I was the only crazy headed into the storm.

  * * *

  On my last visit to the Mons, my subject didn’t leave until closing. When I walked out, Lisa was standing outside smoking a cigarette. She tossed the butt in the air and it flew across my path like a falling star, stopped me in my tracks.

  “So where to next?” she said.

  I had to smile ’cause she was too cool, wearing a pair of black leggings, combat boots, and a gray tank top. She looked totally different than the waitress I’d come to know at the Mons.

  “Sleep,” I said.

  “What about the dude you’re shadowing?”

  “What about him?”

  “You gonna follow him or what?”

  “Nope. But when that son of a bitch wakes up in the morning, he’s going to be looking at divorce papers.”

  “So, mission accomplished?”

  I nodded.

  “Right on. We should celebrate.”

  I looked behind me at the Mons. “Bar’s closed.”

  She nodded to the side. “How about breakfast? My treat.”

  We walked to the Denny’s down the block and took a booth at the very back. She had French toast and coffee. I had the All-American Slam. She talked. I listened. I don’t know if it was the lack of sleep or that the last few months of surveillance work had destroyed whatever little social life I had, but that morning, as dawn turned the windowpanes a sad gray, I was captured by her bright-blue eyes.

  Lisa told me she grew up in a small town outside Augusta. She dropped out of high school and escaped to Miami, where she found a job booking cruises for some online discount outfit.

  “It wasn’t as glamorous as I thought it was gonna be,” she said as she drowned her toast in syrup. “I wanted to travel, so I stuck with it for a couple years. The dude I was living with at the time managed a club on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach. One day he tells me he’s been offered a job running the London Victory in Tampa, so he splits. I followed only to find out his move had nothing to do with work. He was chasing some Cuban bitch with huge knockers.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I kicked his ass,” she said all casual, “and moved to St. Pete and got a job at one of those trendy restaurants on Beach Drive. Three years and five jobs later, I ended up at the Mons Venus. I should’ve gone there from the start. Place is a gold mine.” She stopped talking and eyed my plate. “You gonna eat that last piece of bacon?”

  As predicted, we went back to my place.

  * * *

  The address Lisa had given me led me to the Fairfax—a trailer park across Riverview Drive from the VFW. The place was like a junkyard of eight or nine single wides in various stages of disrepair. My first thought was that I was in the wrong place. I couldn’t see Lisa living in this filth. I couldn’t see anyone living her
e. But still, I parked between a rusted orange trailer with a Confederate flag on the window and a dirty single wide whose roof was half covered with a blue-vinyl tarp and old tires.

  I barely knocked when the door flew open. It took me a moment to realize it was Lisa—my Lisa. She had her long dark hair up in a messy bun, wore cutoff jean shorts and a pink T-shirt. But it was her eyes that struck me. They were big and jittery. She was scared.

  “Wes!” She grabbed my hand and pulled me inside, saw the scar on my thumb. I pulled my hand away quickly. She looked to the side and back at me like she was waiting for something—or someone. Still, it felt good to be close to her again, taking in the sweet flowery smell of her perfume. I could’ve stood there for hours, but there was a hurricane coming.

  “We should get going,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The storm.”

  “Wes . . .”

  “What happened to you?” It escaped me like a prayer. This was her life, where she lived—the nasty yellow shag carpet and the warping dark-wood paneling, the stink like burned Spam and cigarette smoke.

  The Lisa Moon I’d known was tough. She dressed like Joan Jett and lived in a nice studio apartment in Palma Ceia and drove a bloodred Miata. She had it together like no one I knew. She was always in control. That had been our problem. We were two headstrong lovers with trust issues. Protecting our own feelings came first.

  Now here she was, living like trailer trash—and in Gibsonton, no less.

  “I don’t know where Jack is,” she said, and took a short step back. “I need to know he’s safe.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.” But I really didn’t give a damn about her knife-throwing clown.

  “No. I need to know. We need to find him. He’s been gone three days. He won’t answer his phone. And now this damn hurricane. He would never just go and leave me here like this.”