Written in Blood

by Layton Green

  It took two of them to force the bar higher on Preach’s chest and onto his neck, but once they got it there, he started to panic. He was choking, and the bar was too high for him to engage his major muscle groups. Even if these men left now, he might not be able to get the bar off by himself.

  “I’m a cop,” he managed to whisper. It felt like an elephant was crouched on his throat.

  “Ain’t helping you much right now, is it?” rasped the first one who had reached him. His harsh, rural Southern accent was tires crunching over gravel.

  Preach couldn’t breathe. He was already light-headed. He tried to kick at one of them, but they slapped his legs away.

  The lead assailant spit in Preach’s face, and he caught a glimpse of a jagged cleft-lip scar above his mouth.

  “You’re poking around in the wrong shed with that murder. Don’t stick your nose where it don’t belong.”

  The man’s spittle trickled down Preach’s cheek. He tried to croak out a reply, but he couldn’t get the words out, and bright spots filled his vision in staccato bursts.

  Fear morphed into rage, and he got a final burst of adrenaline. He struggled to lift the weight off his throat, but his assailant held the bar down as his deadened eyes bored into the detective’s, easily overpowering the effort.

  Preach’s fingers quivered and slipped off the bar.

  Just after nine p.m., Kirby knocked and then pushed open the door of his sister’s trailer, late for their weekly dinner. Kayla, his niece, greeted him with a pirouette. “Guess what? We’re having Domino’s tonight!”

  He whistled. “Wowza, high roller. What kind?”

  “Cheese and onion and pepperoni. Just how you like it.”

  He squeezed her shoulder, then crossed the room to hug an unresponsive Jared. His nephew had become a falling leaf in the forest, his buoyant spirit fluttering unheard to the ground. It was breaking his heart.

  His sister winced as she rose off the couch to greet him. He hurried over to help her. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s okay. We snacked.”

  “No better?” he asked, in a low voice.

  “A little,” she said, smiling.

  He wasn’t convinced.

  They chatted until the doorbell rang. Kirby saw the Domino’s car through the window. As he rose to pay, his sister pressed a twenty into his hand. He tried to push it away, but she insisted. “My treat tonight.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. On the phone, she had dropped a mysterious hint that they had something to celebrate.

  Her smile widened, larger than he had seen in months. Years. “I’ll tell you at the table,” she said.

  They sat down to eat, Jalene fussing over the kids’ manners. When everyone was situated, she raised her glass of Coke and said, “I have some great news.” She looked at Jared, her amber eyes bright with pride. “We’ve always known we have a little Einstein in the family, and I’m so proud to tell everybody—” her voice trembled as tears sprang to her eyes—“that my baby boy has just been accepted into the Chapel Hill Academy.”

  Jared looked confused. His mom came up behind him and wrapped him in her arms. “Baby—baby, you’re going to a new school now. A good one.”

  Kirby’s slice of pizza stopped halfway to his mouth. “A good one? That’s the best private school in the Triangle. Jalene . . .”

  He trailed off because he didn’t want to ask the question in front of the kids. The question being, how in the world could his sister afford a two grand a month private school?

  “Not just accepted,” Jalene continued, her sly glance telling him she knew exactly what he was thinking. “A scholarship. He got a full scholarship.”

  Kirby flew to his feet and pounded the table. “Are you kidding me? For real? Hell yeah—I mean, heck, yes!” He lifted his nephew into the air, pressing him up and down as he carried him into the living room. For the first time in months, Jared giggled, and when Kirby brought him down to hug him, his nephew squeezed him back.

  Kayla grabbed Jared and started twirling with him. Jalene came up behind Kirby and put her hands on his hips, and they paraded around the narrow living room in a conga line, whooping and kicking their feet like Russian folk dancers.

  The sound of breaking glass broke the spell. “What was that?” Jalene asked, her hands falling off his hips.

  Kirby heard the front door open, and he reached for his gun before remembering that he never carried inside his sister’s trailer. He jerked a lamp off the table as four men in black ski masks poured through the door.

  Jalene and Kayla screamed, and Kirby stepped in front of them. “Call for help!” he said, then broke the lamp on the table and advanced on the men with the jagged ceramic handle. The man in front pulled a gun and aimed it at Kirby’s head. “Back it up, nigger.”

  The racial epithet was delivered fast and harsh, like the crack of a whip. Kirby felt as if he had been punched in the gut. He lowered the lamp and took a step back, his arms spread wide to protect his family. “I’m a cop,” he said. “Now just—”

  “We know exactly who you are,” the man said. He was tall and built like a bull. A tattoo of the Confederate flag, with skulls in place of stars, wrapped his left forearm. He swung the gun toward Kayla and then Jalene. “This is our town, and you best lay off our people if you know what’s good for yours.”

  Kirby snarled and raised the lamp. “You touch a hair on their heads, and I swear to God I’ll—”

  The intruder shoved the gun into his cheek, leaning in so close Kirby could smell the bacon fat and cigarette smoke stinking up his breath. He cocked the gun. “Give me a reason!” he roared.

  Kirby stood very still, adrenaline and fury pumping through him in shuddering waves. He had never wanted so much to put a gun to someone’s face and pull the trigger.

  But he had no weapon, no leverage, and no choice. These men were crazy enough to attack a cop’s family. He balled his fists at his sides and didn’t take a breath as the man stared him down. At last the thug eased his gun away, but then he reversed the motion, slamming the weapon into the side of Kirby’s head.

  His ear exploded in pain, and the sound of rainfall disappeared, replaced by a metallic ringing. Kirby stumbled to a knee and grabbed his head, blood dripping onto his fingers.

  The intruders backed toward the door. “You remember what I said, now.”

  Just before they left the trailer, one of the men lit a cloth-wrapped torch, and then threw it into the living room. It hissed and burst into flame, emitting a foul odor that stunk like rotten eggs and cat urine.

  Kirby scooped the kids up and rushed them outside. Through the window, he could see his sister smothering the fire with a wet blanket, choking on the foul smoke coating the room.

  The men sped away in a black Dodge Charger. The neighbors had fled inside, and for once the trailer park was quiet. Shaking, Kirby called 911 with a voice so thick with rage he didn’t recognize it as his own.

  16

  Preach was lying on the floor of a one-room, timber-frame house. A raging inferno consumed his body from the inside. Time had blurred into a flat line of pain, broken only by his meditations on death and the nightly rattle of the death cart. The gruesome wagon had paused outside his dwelling, long enough for him to weakly lift his hand. After it passed, Preach coughed up blood and melted back into the floor.

  The smell of decay had seeped into his rags, the walls, the floor. Thirst scratched at his throat like someone buried alive, fingers clawing at the dirt. He tried to scream at God, but the words left his mouth in a trickle of muted sound. Why are you killing us like this? Your creation? Why?

  A stream of water hit him full in the face. He tried to slap it away, but it poured down, clogging his nose and throat, drowning him—

  “Joey! Wake up, son. Wake up!”

  Preach blinked and saw his old coach, Ray Logan, standing over him with a pitcher of water. He was about to toss it again when Preach raised a hand. Instead of a plague-ridden medieval village,
he realized he was lying on his back on a workout bench, the loaded-down barbell on the floor beside him.

  He remembered.

  Water dripped off his hair and chin as a siren whined in the distance. Ray leaned over him, his bald head shining under the cheap fluorescent lights. “A neighbor saw some suspicious men at the door and called me. Thank God you’re okay, son, but what were you thinking? Pressing that much without a spotter?”

  Preach gingerly touched the front of his neck. It felt as if he had been worked over with a baseball bat. “Not too smart, huh?”

  “Didn’t I teach you anything?”

  Preach blew out a long breath. “I guess I never was a fast learner.”

  Chief Higgins met Preach at the hospital. His stomach clenched when she told him about the attack on Kirby’s family.

  “Was it Mac’s boys who attacked you?” she asked grimly.

  “I think that was the message,” Preach said, his voice raw from the injury. “They were smart enough to keep it anonymous.”

  “This isn’t like him. He’s never come after a cop before.”

  Preach’s face darkened. “He has now.”

  “I guess we’ve got to assume he’s got a murder rap stuck in his craw.”

  “If so, that was a dumb move.”

  The chief looked away for a moment, which surprised him, but then he understood. Mac Dobbins thought he could get away with murder in Creekville—and she was worried that maybe he could.

  “I’m calling the mayor in the morning,” Chief Higgins said. “You need help on this.”

  “Do what you need to.”

  It was well after midnight by the time Preach was released from the hospital. After driving home, he set the painkillers aside and picked up a beer instead.

  An attack like that would never have happened in Atlanta. Criminals didn’t taunt cops in the big city. The more he thought about the night’s events, the more he came to the conclusion that his shakedown of Wade had triggered the attack. Either the String Shack had cameras, or Wade had come clean.

  But that entirely didn’t ring true to Preach. Wade was just a pawn.

  So what didn’t Mac want them to find? If he was so concerned with someone poking around his business, why not make Farley disappear, throw the body in a quarry? Why draw attention to the murder with the bizarre reference to a nineteenth-century novel?

  His hand paused on the refrigerator door with sudden knowledge.

  What had they learned from Wade? They had learned about Damian.

  About the blackmail.

  Had Damian grown tired of making payouts, and hired Mac to take care of the problem?

  Preach changed his mind about the beer and poured a tumbler of bourbon instead. The solitude of the forest enveloped him as he threw on his jacket and stepped onto the back porch. A barn owl eyed him from its perch above the woodpile.

  He made a fire in the potbelly stove squatting in the center of the porch, then sat on a stump of wood and thought about the violence that men do and the darkness bubbling in his own soul. A darkness that coexisted with the thing inside him that had gone catatonic at the sight of Ricky’s suffering. That had suffered a system failure inside that tree house in Atlanta.

  He had once asked Aunt Janice why she decided to become a psychologist. Her answer had stuck with him. Have you ever tried to look inside yourself, Joey? Really figure it out? It’s like trying to solve a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces are solid black. It’s frightening and disconcerting, as if you’re looking at someone or something else. Only when we disengage do we feel whole again. Real.

  And I want to know what that means.

  A young woman with spunky eyes and scattered dark hair drifted into his thoughts, and he traced her lips and cheekbones in his mind, remembered the soft wisps of hair that feathered her neck. He thought about how little he knew of Ari, how little she knew of him—and how little it mattered.

  The owl hooted, and the pines whispered, asking about the two crosses, wondering why he hadn’t told Ari the rest of his thoughts on Crime and Punishment.

  For regardless of what the commentaries said, Preach knew what Dostoevsky was really writing about. He could see it flashing like a neon billboard throughout the novel, behind the clever rhetoric and symbolism. At the quiet center of it all was a human being—Raskolnikov—who was in pain. Deeply afflicted. A lost, lonely little boy who had wandered far from his village home and wanted so much for the universe to make sense, for something to matter, that he planned and committed a murder for the sole purpose of trying to shake that sleeping colossus awake. Offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb in order to discover whether his crime would be punished, not by the authorities or Sonia or even himself, but by a higher power.

  Since Raskolnikov realized he had a soul and understood the import of what he had done, he knew he had found his answer. And that would have been fine—a great victory, in fact—except it wasn’t enough, not for someone like him. It would never be enough. He cared and he didn’t know why and he knew he never would.

  And that was the knowledge that destroyed him.

  Preach poked the fire and chuckled away his thoughts. Moral of the story: leave murder to the sociopaths.

  He leaned his elbows on his knees as the bourbon warmed his belly, easing his aches and pains. Theme or no theme, he knew he had to stay on his toes in the morning, when he paid Damian Black a visit in his fancy country manor and asked him if he had murdered his best friend with a hatchet.

  17

  The morning sky was a violet haze as Preach strode through the door of the police station, his neck purple with bruises and stiff as a piece of frozen cloth. He could tell by the drawn faces of the other officers that they had heard what happened.

  Kirby was waiting on him, a bandage covering the left side of his head. “You okay?” Preach asked.

  “Not even close. Who’s first?”

  “Damian.” Preach lowered his voice. “We’ll deal with Mac tonight.”

  “What time you think a writer gets out of bed?”

  “I don’t care.”

  It was only eight a.m., but Preach and Kirby were already too late. As they parked outside Damian Black’s residence, to a soundtrack of chirping birds and two furiously barking Akitas, the door to the Southern Gothic manor opened, and the author stepped onto the porch in a monogrammed white bathrobe, accompanied by Elliott Fenton.

  Kirby cursed under his breath, and Preach thought about how convenient it was that Elliott represented everyone associated with Mac Dobbins.

  He also noticed how Damian had a shot glass of amber liquid pinched between two fingers, how both men looked sleep-deprived and agitated, and how Elliott’s lavender necktie was loose and off-center under his pinstriped gray suit coat.

  “Can I help you, officers?” Damian asked evenly.

  “I was in the area,” Preach said, looking straight at the author, “and thought you might want to grab a cup of coffee.”

  “Breakfast is over,” Elliott said. “Sorry you missed it.” He had a handful of coffee beans, and popped one in his mouth.

  “The invitation was for Damian,” Preach said, still eying the author. “And it might not be there tomorrow.”

  He didn’t have enough to bring the writer in, but he was getting closer, and he wanted Damian to know it.

  Elliott stepped forward, as if in physical defense of his client. The attorney had an angular face with calculating hazel eyes, and a mouth that tilted to one side when he spoke. “Did you come to arrest my client?” he asked.

  Kirby started to speak, but Preach laid a hand on his arm. “We’re just here to ask Mr. Black about some large cash payments he might have made to Farley Robertson,” he said, causing Damian’s eyes to whisk away from his.

  Elliott popped another coffee bean in his mouth. “Detective, you seem to be making a habit of harassing my clients without due cause. I’d advise you to rethink your strategy.”

  “Rethink my st
rategy? The only thing you’re doing for your clients is increasing my interest in them.”

  Damian’s eyes disappeared into his tumbler. A dismissive smile appeared on Elliott’s face. “Good-day, gentlemen. Don’t let me find you near my client again without my knowledge.”

  The attorney ushered the writer inside. The dogs continued barking as Preach and Kirby returned to their car.

  Chief Higgins beckoned Preach and Kirby into her office. On her desk, photos of her three Yorkies shared space with a quartet of bowling trophies. She had never remarried and had not discussed her social life with Preach.

  “I just got a call from the mayor’s office, asking why we were harassing one of her largest donors.”

  “I guess Creekville’s just a cliché after all,” Preach said.

  “Yeah,” Kirby muttered, fiddling with one of the trophies. “Like the one about how the rich get away with murder.”

  “Not on my watch, they don’t,” she said. “So you’d best get to finding something solid.”

  “We’ll hit the laptop and the phone today,” Preach said. “Hard.”

  “The mayor also denied my request for more officers. Or at least put it off until the next budget meeting. Hang in there until the fifteenth, and I might be able to get you some help.”

  Preach pursed his lips as the chief reached into a bag of honey and lemon lozenges and popped one into her mouth. “Trust me, if we find a smoking gun, the mayor will cut the line with Damian faster than a fisherman who’s hooked a turd.” She turned to Preach. “We responded to a call this morning at the Cedar Street Apartments. Wade Fee was beat half to death with a monkey wrench. Couple of broken ribs, bashed up his face something good. He was unconscious when we found him, no prints on the weapon.” She looked at Preach. “Your card was sticking out of his pocket.”

  Preach’s face flushed, and he stared down at the carpet. “Who called it in?”

  “Anonymous tip.”

  Though his head stayed lowered, his eyes moved upward to meet Chief Higgins’s.