City of Heretics

by Heath Lowrance

  He had no idea how to go about finding Murke. But that was what he had to do.

  On the third day, he made his way into the bathroom and peeled the bandages off his face and had a sickening minute of incomprehension. Dr. Maggie had warned him, but to see it for the first time was sort of a shock.

  From directly above his left brow, a long ugly scar ran over his eye, and ended in a jagged edge at his cheekbone. It was red and raw-looking. His face was the face of someone he’d never seen before.

  He was so shocked by what he saw in the mirror that it took a minute before he realized he was seeing the image with both eyes. So at least he still had my vision. But Christ, it was a hell of a scar.

  Lucky, he said to himself. Lucky that the blade skipped past the eye. Lucky that he wasn’t blinded. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

  He grabbed the astringent out of the cabinet and cleaned the wound. It hurt, bad enough that it made him woozy and he teetered back to the sofa and sat down hard and took a few minutes to will the agony away.

  So, a slight change of plans. Marco Vitower and Chester Paine weren’t the only ones who needed to die.

  Faith went gray when she saw it. She came up to him slowly, squat down in front of him and said, “Crowe.”

  He grinned at her and said, “Don’t worry. I’m about to go bandage it up again.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s just… what the hell are you doing out there that this would happen?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that. What he did hardly seemed to matter. It could happen to anyone. He’d read about a guy once, just an ordinary every-day sort of fella, who worked in the railroad yards, who fell in front of a rolling boxcar and got himself cut right in half and actually lived to tell the tale. Another man got attacked by a grizzly bear and had both his arms ripped off. Another one was walking out of his house one morning on his way to work when a goddamn oak tree fell on him.

  Chance. Blind and random. And maybe Crowe did tempt fate a little, but crazy things happened, it didn’t matter who you were or what you did.

  He didn’t say any of that to Faith. He pushed himself up and headed back into the bathroom to put on a fresh bandage.

  Later on, with the afternoon sun seeping weakly through the bedroom drapes, and Faith only half-drunk, she said, “Why are you here?”

  “I’ll leave anytime you want me to.”

  He felt her head moving against his neck. “No. I don’t want you to leave. I just wanna know why you‘re here. Why are with me?”

  “I don‘t know. I could ask you the same question.”

  She laughed, a little derisively. “You mean, why am I in bed with some guy, old enough to be my pop? And involved in some nasty shit, to boot? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just fucked up, and you’re just the kind of man I deserve.“

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  She propped up on her elbows and looked at him. “I always liked you, even back in the day. And I knew you were wrapped up with some bad stuff. The Old Man and all his people. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care, and I still don’t. I… like I said, I like you an awful lot. Maybe, even… you know.”

  “Christ,” Crowe said. “You’re drunk. Knock it off.”

  He sat up, swung his feet onto the floor. Behind him, she was silent.

  She said, “Fine. See, I know you better than you think I do. I knew this was what you were gonna do. I knew this was how you’d react if I said anything. But I don’t care. I want you to know how I feel about it.”

  Not looking at her, he said, “Okay. Now I know.”

  The last thing he wanted to hear was some raw, uncensored emotion pouring out of the mouth of a drunk. And the thing that doomed them, the thing that she had no way of knowing, was that she was a substitute anyway. When his eyes were closed, it wasn’t Faith’s face he saw.

  Behind him, he heard her breathing go hard and tight, and she said, “You’re a bastard.”

  Someone rapped hard on the front door.

  Whatever else she was going to say was swallowed up. They both sat there for long seconds, not doing anything, until whoever was at the door rapped again, a little harder.

  She pulled a tee-shirt over her head and stomped out of the bedroom to answer the door.

  From the living room, a deep lazy drawl of a voice: “Afternoon, ma’am. I’m Detective Wills, Shelby County Sheriff’s Department. I’d like to speak to Mr. Crowe.”

  He must’ve been about six-three, two-ten, maybe late thirties or early forties. A long narrow face that looked like someone had pressed it between two hot irons, and reddish hair slicked haphazardly back from a wide forehead. He wore an off-the-rack suit and a cheap overcoat with a stain on the lapel. His nose was lined with subtle veins, just a few more bottles away from bursting. His eyes were small and clever.

  He said, “I tried you at your flat. Neighbors say you haven’t been home in a few days now.”

  They were sitting in the living room, Crowe in the straight-backed chair near the TV and Wills in Crowe’s usual spot on the sofa. After letting him in, Faith had glared at Crowe and barricaded herself in the bedroom.

  Wills said, “Well?”

  “Well, what? Did you ask me a question?”

  He chuckled a little. “Lemme tell you, Crowe, I’m awful glad to meet you. I’m just pleased as punch. I heard so much.”

  This was the last thing Crowe was in the mood for, some posturing, easy-talking good old boy cop. But it was just one of those things you had no choice about sometimes; cops do what they do. Crowe said, “I heard some talk about you too.”

  “From Vitower, yeah? Don’t pay no mind to any of that. Really, I’m a nice sort of fella. Vitower and me, we just got off on the wrong foot.”

  “That amazes me. You make such a good first impression.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, so do you. My first impression of you was, well, here’s a fella been through a blender set on puree. What happened to you?”

  “Are you asking me that in some official capacity?”

  He shook his head. “Naw. Just shootin’ the shit, you know.”

  “In that case, nothing happened to me. I accidently bit the inside of my cheek while I was eating.”

  He laughed loudly, even slapped his thigh. “Man, don’t you hate when that happens? For a minute there, I thought you was gonna tell me you cut yourself shaving or something.”

  Crowe nodded, smiling at him. “What brings you around, detective?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment, nodding his head, leaning back in the sofa. “Fair enough. Why don’t you tell me, Mr. Crowe, where you were on the morning of January Third?”

  “The Third,” Crowe said. “What was that, last Wednesday?”

  “Last Tuesday, Mr. Crowe. Late morning.”

  Crowe frowned. “Let me think. I can’t be sure, but more than likely I was at home, watching Oprah.”

  “You don’t have a TV, Mr. Crowe. I’ve been in your apartment.”

  “Oh, Tuesday. That’s my laundry day. I was down at the Laundromat.”

  “All day, huh?”

  “All damn day.”

  He nodded some more, and his smile was starting to look stiffer. He leaned forward, clasping his narrow hands together, and said, “I have witnesses, Mr. Crowe, that say you’ve been making the rounds. Swung by a suspected drug den Sunday morning. Stopped in at The Libre that night. One witness even says you took a little trip to The Libre’s backroom, where our friend Marco Vitower keeps an office.”

  “I don’t know anything about any suspected drug den. As for The Libre, sure, I stopped by there. Wanted to catch up with Faith.” He motioned his head toward the bedroom.

  “I can’t blame you,” he said. “That’s a mighty fine-looking girl. You’re a Detroit boy, ain’t you?”

  “I haven’t been to Detroit in years.”

  “Yeah. Left when you were twenty-one, or thereabouts. Traded one cesspool for another. Whatever made you come to Memphis?”

>   “Seduced by the glamour of crawfish and barbeque, I guess.”

  Wills said, “I been to Detroit. About, oh, five years ago or so. A law-enforcement conference. You know what struck me about it the most?”

  “No, Detective, I don’t.”

  “What struck me is how hypocritical and condescending the folks up there are. You tell someone you’re from Tennessee, they almost always get that stupid grin on their faces, start saying shit like, oh I just love me that Southern accent, and you folks are just so friendly down there and things are just slower and nicer. Like its still 1870 or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then they almost always mention racism. Like we’re still lynching niggers off every goddamn tree. And what kills me is, I met more racists up there than I ever met down here. Oh, they almost never say the ‘n-word’, right. But the way they say ‘black’, or ‘African-American’, you know, in that weird guilty little hushed voice, well… it sounds nastier and meaner than any redneck saying the ‘n-word’ than I ever heard.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do, though, huh? People have their misconceptions, ain’t nothing you can do about it.”

  “I guess so.”

  He said, “But you, Crowe. You’re no racist, are you? You got yourself a fine little black filly just in the next room. And you work for Marco Vitower. Probably the most powerful black man in this goddamn city. Maybe even more powerful than our esteemed mayor Dr. Willie.”

  “What does any of this have to do with Tuesday, the Third?”

  His good old boy mask dropped a bit, and he sighed. “Tell you what, Crowe. Between you and me? Let’s not play make-believe, yeah? You may have left Detroit a long time ago, but you still got that northern condescending thing going on. You’re gonna sit there and act like you don’t know what happened on the Third, and like you don’t have a goddamn clue about why I’m here? You’re gonna act like I’m some stupid hillbilly cop? It’s beneath you. It’s beneath both of us.”

  Crowe was watching him carefully, his mannerisms and speech patterns, and decided he was all colored glass, just transparent enough to show the unbalanced thing beneath it, shifting and creaking. Wills was one bad day—or one stiff drink—away from crossing that thin blue line you always hear about.

  He’d seen cops like that before. No one is crazier than a crazy cop.

  So he said, “Fair enough.”

  “I didn’t expect you to talk to me, Crowe, not really. But I want you to know. I want you to know I’m here, and you are currently the man I’m looking at. You read me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Good,” he said, and pushed a large gnarled hand through his red hair. “That’s very, very good. Because loud and clear is what I wanna be right now. I want you to know that I have every intention of taking you out of the game at the earliest possible convenience. And just in case you don’t know anything about me, I should tell you. I don’t let little details hold me up. You know, things like due process or reasonable cause.”

  “I’ve heard that about you.”

  “Good. So you know. If I can’t nail you by the book, Crowe, I will nail you by the balls. You understand?”

  Crowe nodded.

  Wills stood up with a wheeze, and Crowe could smell the whiskey on his breath from across the room. “I’m glad we had this talk, Crowe. Just so everything’s clear.”

  “Crystal.”

  “Be seeing you. Sooner than you think.”

  He grinned the goofy good old boy grin again and headed for the door. He closed it very gently and politely behind him.

  Faith didn’t come out of the bedroom after Wills left. Crowe didn’t want her to anyway. He sat around the living room for a while and finally got up, put on his coat and headed out to clear his head.

  He walked the few blocks up Madison to Overton Square, where the shops of Midtown lined up in defense of the encroaching ugliness of the city. Just a few short years ago, it used to be fairly Bohemian, with a bookshop, a health food store, a vegetarian restaurant. There would be harmless panhandlers and young hippies in the street, not looking or smelling much different from each other, wearing tie-dies and strumming guitars, just like it was the Summer of Love all over again.

  All that stuff was long gone. Midtown was almost as bad as every place else in Memphis these days. A lot of the shops had closed up. For rent signs were everywhere. It was late afternoon, but there wasn’t much traffic on Madison and a cold wind skirted along in the wake of each passing car.

  He stopped and huddled in the doorway of what used to be a head shop, marveling at the pain in his left shoulder and at his shoulder blades. He’d been stabbed once before, in the side. He was thirty-two when that happened, and he didn’t remember the pain of it lingering as long as these new wounds. The cold only made it worse, reaching deep down inside his muscles and clawing them.

  He felt old. He felt like a stranger.

  Eddie Wills was going to be trouble, that much was clear. More trouble than Vitower or Chester or anyone. It didn’t make Crowe’s life any sweeter, knowing that the cop would be dogging him. But he’d had cops giving him grief before; it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. And no cop was going to stop him from doing what he had to do.

  He was standing there in the cold thinking about Wills and thinking about how damn old he felt when the pimped-out silver Grand Prix pulled up to the curb in front of him. The power window on the passenger side came down, and a handsome black face with a bandage over the nose said, “Crowe. Get in.”

  He showed Crowe his gun.

  Garay got in the backseat with him, sure to keep his gun low. The two others occupied the front. The driver was a big, thick bastard whose hands made the steering wheel look like a toy. The guy in the passenger seat was smaller, with delicate, almost feminine features. Neither of them spoke.

  “Found out your name,” Garay said. “Didn’t even have to ask my sissy.”

  He seemed proud of that, so Crowe said, “Congratulations.”

  The car smelled, not unpleasantly, of weed. The driver took a hard left, headed toward downtown. “Yo,” Garay said to him. “Go easy on my car, motherfucker.”

  The smaller guy said, “Stop fuckin’ around, Garay. You gotta talk to the man, talk to the man.”

  Garay looked ready to mouth off to the guy, but then thought better of it. Obviously, he was low man on the totem pole here but didn’t want to look too weak in front of Crowe. He leaned back in the seat, gun in his lap, eyed him, his face saying, who’s the bad-ass now, huh?

  He nodded at the bandages on Crowe’s face, said, “What the fuck happened to you?”

  Crowe didn’t answer him. Garay waited a beat, realized he wasn’t going to get an answer, decided to let it go. He said, “Well, whatever it was, I’m glad. Makes my little bandage look like nothin’, don’t it?”

  Crowe let him enjoy that for a moment, and said, “You got a reason for plucking me off the street?”

  The little guy in front said, “Maybe we gonna kill you. What you think about that?”

  “I don’t like that plan.”

  The two in front laughed, but Garay just looked at me warily.

  The little guy said, “You don’t like that plan. Nice. Naw, we ain’t gonna kill you, not unless you get all crazy and shit. Garay, tell your man why we grabbed him.”

  Crowe looked at Garay, waiting for an answer, and Garay said, “We got a proposition for you. We got a little business arrangement, see what you think about it.”

  “Is this something just between the four of us? Or are you guys running errands for someone else?”

  The driver’s huge hands tightened on the steering wheel, and he glanced at Crowe sharply in the rear-view. “What?” he said, his voice rumbling in the confined space. “What, you think we just some motherfuckin’ errand boys?”

  “I don’t know what you are, Fats. You tell me.”

  Garay looked nervous. He fingered his gun, said, “Chill, bro. Let’s just chill, yea
h? This don’t have to get ugly, right?”

  The driver relaxed, taking a deep, resigned breath. His fingers were still tight on the wheel, though. Crowe shrugged and said, “I’m listening.”

  “You one of Vitower’s boys, ain’t you?” Garay said. When Crowe didn’t answer, he went on: “Marco Vitower, the big fucker. Thinks he’s the fuckin’ King of Memphis, yeah?”

  “What about him?”

  “He don’t know shit, that’s what about him. He don’t know, the game’s changin’ all around him and he’s frontin’, actin’ like it’s still the old days. But it ain’t the old days.”

  The little guy said, “He thinks he’s the New Breed. That’s what makes me fuckin’ laugh. He thinks he’s the New Face of Crime in Memphis. But he’s DVD, knowmsayin? He’s DVD and Bad Luck Incorporated’s fuckin’ Blu-Ray.”

  The big bastard laughed, said, “Yeah, yeah! Fuckin’ Blu-Ray, motherfucker!”

  Garay laughed along with them, and said to me, “He’s still playin’ the game by the white man’s rules, right? He don’t know.”

  Crowe said, “So what does any of this have to do with me?”

  Garay smiled slyly, nodding. “You been away for a while. Been in the joint. They be sayin’ you’re something like a free agent, got no loyalty to Vitower.”

  Crowe frowned. “Who’s been saying that?”

  “It don’t matter who’s been saying what. What matters is that you got no reason to be loyal to Vitower.”

  “You’re suggesting I throw in with you boys.”

  Again, they all laughed.

  Garay said, “Fuck, man, what we gonna do with some old cracker? No, what we got in mind is something more… free-lance, right?”