Borrowed Time

by Tracy Clark

  The phone woke me with a start from a fitful sleep, my head popping up from the pillow, my body on full alert. I squinted at the clock on the bedside table, its glowing numerals cutting through the dark: 3:18. Phone calls at that early hour were rarely good news. Somebody was dead. I grabbed for the receiver, answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Cass? It’s Jung.”

  I sat up on the side of the bed, panic replaced by a smoldering urge to reach through the phone and pull Jung back through it by his combat boots. “Oh, no, it had better not be. Not the same Jung I’ve been looking for?”

  “No kidding?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Jail?”

  I switched on the bedside lamp. “What?”

  “I was sort of arrested.”

  “What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

  “Well, like, see . . . I’m not really . . . sure?”

  “Are you allowed to leave the building?” I asked.

  Jung was quiet for a moment. What was he doing, checking? “Yeah, I’m sure that’s a negative.”

  “Then you’re not sort of arrested, you’ve been arrested. What’d you do? Never mind, don’t tell me. Call a lawyer.”

  “I’d rather not. I don’t think he gets me.”

  I flopped back on the bed, my head landing on the pillow.

  “And I do?”

  “Well, yeah. I know you. You know me. You know the cops. I figured you could vouch for me.”

  I stared up at my ceiling, shook my head. “What did you do?”

  “Sort of trespassing.”

  “Stop using the words ‘sort of’! What kind of ninny gets arrested for trespassing?”

  “Trespassing with a crowbar and a glass cutter?”

  I waited. There was more. There was always more with Jung. I also knew that whatever the more was, I wasn’t going to like it. I closed my eyes, breathed in, preparing myself.

  “At the police station,” he added.

  I bolted up. Crowbar. Glass cutter. Police station? “Jung, why on earth would you try to break into a police station?”

  “They wouldn’t let me see Tim’s file. I thought I might be able to find something they missed, and figured if I could sort of sneak in and . . .”

  “Where are you?”

  He paused. “The sign says ‘Area Four Headquarters’? It’s . . .”

  I slammed the receiver down with Jung still talking, then sat there for a time, waffling. Not my problem, I thought. Not my deal. I turned the lamp off, determined to go back to bed, then quickly turned it back on again and began rummaging for my clothes, some on the chair across the room, some on the floor.

  “Damn.”

  I shimmied quickly into a pair of jeans. I didn’t know anyone at Area Four anymore. I found my phone and sent Ben a text asking him if he had a contact. I was snaking into a T-shirt and looking around for my shoes when my phone pinged back. He knew a guy. Detective Sammy Hicks. I sent back a hasty thank-you, and then went back to looking for my shoes. I found one and stomped my right foot into it, not bothering with the laces; the other I had to get on my hands and knees to find. A crowbar? Really?

  My phone rang. I answered. It was Ben.

  “What do you need Hicks for?”

  “He pinched an acquaintance of mine for trying to break into Area Four using a crowbar and a glass cutter.”

  A beat passed. “Are you high?”

  I found my other shoe. “He just called. He wants me to vouch for him.”

  “Seriously, what are you on?”

  “It’s Jung from the diner.”

  “That weirdo kid in the clown clothes?”

  “That’s him.” I grabbed my bag from the dresser, headed for the door. “He won’t last five minutes in lockup.”

  Ben sputtered. “No shit. So what are you going down there to do?”

  “I’m going down there to wring his neck.”

  Chapter 8

  Area 4 Headquarters was at Harrison and Kedzie and I pulled up to it and sat staring at the front door for a few minutes, composing myself, dreading going inside. The building was all red-brick and reinforced glass. The only way to break into the place would have been to liquefy yourself and ooze through a freaking air vent. Jung was a putz.

  The front desk was packed with cops, unusual for four in the morning. A blue wall of uniforms turned to watch me make the long, lonely trip from the front door to the counter. It was obvious from the smirks on their faces that Ben had made a call and everyone knew who I was and why I was there.

  “You Raines?” the stocky detective standing front and center asked, jaded eyes holding me to the spot. I nodded. “Then you’re here for the criminal mastermind.” The cops behind him chuckled. This was the most fun they’d have all tour.

  Hicks was an old-timer, a sturdy black man with years of filthy street ground into every pore on his face. The look he gave me told me he’d seen it all a million times over and knew how it all worked. Jung’s crowbar assault probably wasn’t even enough to raise his heart rate, but formalities still had to be satisfied.

  I winced. “How bad is it?”

  “On a scale of one to ten? Minus three. For all the elbow grease, he barely scratched the paint.”

  “Has he been processed and charged?”

  “To do all that, the uniforms upstairs would have to stop laughing and talking shit, and that hasn’t happened as of yet.”

  I sighed. “Then he’s free to go?”

  Hicks scowled, and then shook his head ever so slightly. “Cop a squat. I’ll have somebody bring him down.” Hicks strolled over to the phone and called upstairs. “We’ll be keeping the crowbar and glass cutter,” he said when he hung up. “He can come back for the bike he rode to get here.”

  C’mon, a getaway bike, really? I cleared my throat. “Sounds fair.”

  Hicks looked at me hard. “You know next time nobody’ll be laughing. And you can tell Mickerson this makes us even.”

  I smiled politely at Hicks, then at the other cops. “I’ll relay the message.”

  Hicks walked away without another word; the cops wandered away, too, getting back to real business. Ben had called ahead, cashing in a favor, and he hadn’t done it for Jung, he’d done it for me. Cop favors were precious commodities. A cop never knew when he or she would need an assist from another cop, personal or professional. You didn’t squander favors on foolishness. Jung had reeled me into using up one of Ben’s, and I was seething by the time he was walked down to me ninety minutes later, dressed in a black T-shirt, black cargo pants, and neon lime running shoes with bright yellow laces. A favor had been done, but that didn’t mean the cops had to make it all sunshine and lollipops. There had to be at least a little suffering. I was so angry I didn’t trust myself to speak to him, and so we walked in silence out to my car.

  “Let me explain,” he said as he slid onto the passenger seat.

  “Not one word,” I hissed, my jaw tightly clenched. “Not a single syllable.”

  And that’s all either of us said the entire way to Jung’s place. Pushing the speed limit, I got there in record time. When Jung got out, I barely looked at him as he lingered at the door, as though he wanted to say something but didn’t know where to start.

  “I know you’re mad, but listen,” he said. “You’re right. I kept some major things back when I talked to you at first. I knew how it looked, and I didn’t want you jumping to the wrong conclusion, and you would have, because the police did, and sorry to say it, you think like they do.”

  I slid him a sideways look, but kept my mouth shut.

  “But I don’t care what Stephen said. Tim wasn’t some basket case that you had to keep eyes on. I wanted a look at the cops’ report, is that so bad? I don’t have your connections. Sneaking in was the only way I was going to get it. That’s all.”

  I listened as his voice cracked with emotion, and some of my mad melted away. My hand still gripped the steering wheel, though. I wasn’t completely sure
I wouldn’t still throttle him.

  “We were planning Tim’s memorial, with him. We had musicians, poets, dancers, the whole nine, lined up for one awesome send-off. Why would he go through the trouble of all that, if he planned on killing himself? And why put together a final trip to St. Maarten? He was shoving off next week. I know because I was going with him, along with a couple of other buds. My stuff’s packed and ready to go. That’s why he was giving stuff away. He was clearing things out, lightening his load. Maybe I should have told you, but I really didn’t think I had to. I thought you’d believe me and trust that I knew him better than the cops did, but you didn’t. You don’t.”

  Jung looked like a lost puppy left out in the rain. Obviously, he hadn’t thought the break-in through. He had no clue what he was doing. There was nobody on the street but the two of us. I turned and stared at him as he stood there on the curb. This is it, I thought. This is the moment. Either I’d drive away and leave him and Tim Ayers behind, or I wouldn’t. Everything about the case seemed locked up tight. Marta was a good detective, solid. Not much got by her, but a planned memorial, a trip to the Caribbean, and what about the lack of fingerprints? That still bothered me. I wondered why it didn’t bother Marta. Every inch of Ayers’s boat would have been checked. How’d he get over the side without touching anything? I idled for a time, my eyes peering through the windshield, aware that Jung was watching me sit there, waiting for me to decide.

  Dying didn’t mean despondent, but that’s exactly how Tim’s brother described him to Marta. Something was off, but Marta had a point. Who’d go to the trouble of killing a dying man? She’d been adamant that the logic in the statement validated her theory of either accidental drowning or suicide, which she did not press, out of respect for Tim’s family and pressure from her bosses. Could Tim’s death have been murder?

  I turned to Jung. “Who’d want to kill a dying man?” It was the question Marta had posed to me. I didn’t have an answer then, or now.

  His eager eyes widened, appearing as though I’d startled him by speaking. “Somebody who didn’t know he was dying. That lets out everybody who knew him, though, right? This could have been, like, a kidnapping gone bad. Somebody out for money, but Tim gets away somehow? Only he didn’t.”

  I thought for a moment. A kidnapping? I hadn’t thought of that angle. It was a possibility, though. The Ayerses had tons of money. It wouldn’t be a stretch to believe somebody out there might have wanted a piece of it. I let out a deep sigh, a mournful exhale. I’d wanted easy work I could do without thinking too much about it. This wasn’t it, not by a long shot. I’d have to go up against the police department again, up against Marta specifically, and no way was she going to make that easy. I had a very bad habit of tilting at windmills, poking the bear. Why? What the hell is wrong with me? Why couldn’t I let a loose thread be, why’d I always have to be the one to worry it? Jung Byson, sandwich guy. Nobody wipes their prints before downing a lethal dose of pills, hurling themselves off a bridge, or drinking themselves blind and jumping into a cold, dark lake. So, in Tim’s case, if he didn’t do it, who did? Who didn’t want to leave any trace of themselves behind?

  “My office. Monday morning. Ten,” I said resignedly. “We’re going to have a long talk.”

  Jung nodded, then closed the door and stepped back, watching as I sped away.

  Chapter 9

  Jung stepped into my office on Monday as though he hadn’t woken me up at 3 a.m. the previous Saturday and forced me down to Area 4 to get laughed at by battle-worn cops. I’d spent all day Sunday getting my mind right for this meeting. I was still a little put out, but at least now I was ready to hear his side of things. I shut down my computer and gestured toward the client chair facing my desk, watching as he folded his skinny body into the seat.

  He stared at me sheepishly. “So, about what happened?”

  “First, explain the shoes.”

  Jung glanced down at his feet. He was wearing flip-flops.

  “Not those,” I said. “At Area 4. You dressed all in black, you brought along a crowbar. Your shoes were neon green with yellow laces.”

  He blinked. Lost.

  “Conspicuous,” I said. “Rookie move.”

  “I didn’t think of that.” It’d been a while since I’d seen a face as blank as Jung’s was now. Even Bucky T.’s hadn’t come this close. “The shoes are new. I needed to break them in.”

  I shook my head. It was sad, really. Jung Byson, clueless, out in the world, a babe in the woods. “Tell me what you think you know.”

  Jung’s eyes met mine. “You’re still mad.”

  “I’ve passed mad. Don’t make me go back for it. Go.”

  “Okay. I know Tim didn’t just drown. I know whoever did this to him he had to, at least, know them a little. He didn’t let just anyone on his boat. The Safe Passage, he said, was a no-asshole zone. When you blew me off, I went by there, tried talking to his neighbors. I thought maybe they saw something without realizing they saw it, you know? That happens all the time.” Jung paused, maybe to make sure I was listening. I was. Intently.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “Like I said, most of them are real old, at least sixty. None of them had good things to say. They didn’t like Tim keeping up all the party noise. He left behind some hard feelings. They didn’t like me asking questions, either. One guy even threatened to call the police. But it got me thinking, if Tim got plastered, like they say, what happened to all the bottles? At the marina, the one cop who’d actually talked to me like a person said they didn’t find anything like that. So how’d he get shit-faced? That’s something, right?”

  I leaned forward in my chair, folded my hands on the desk. “Maybe he threw them over the side when he finished them and they sank to the bottom of the lake. Maybe he got shit-faced someplace else and weaved his way home.”

  Jung shot me an incredulous look. “In a thunderstorm? Shit-faced? On all the meds he was taking to keep himself going?”

  “If he were in an altered state . . .” I left the sentence unfinished. Jung knew where I was going with it.

  “Okay, I know. Or maybe the killer took them so no one would know he was there, because maybe they had his prints on them somewhere?”

  “Saturday you mentioned a possible kidnapping. Did Tim worry about that? Take precautions? Had he encountered any such attempts before?”

  Jung shook his head. “It was just an idea. I don’t think Tim ever worried about that or bothered too much with security. He kept things low-key. But I guess it could have happened.”

  “Was he OCD, or not?”

  Jung snorted derisively, then dug into his pockets and came up with a stack of photographs, fanning them out on my desk. “That’s Stephen’s lie and I can prove it. These are photos of our first dorm room, undergrad, and a few of a recent party at Tim’s. Does that look like the room or the boat of a guy with OCD?”

  I leaned over to get a closer look. The dorm room looked like a bomb exploded in the center of it: beds unmade, clothes discarded everywhere, stacks of dirty dishes. The party pictures looked almost as bad.

  “And that’s before the party even got going.” Jung sat back and watched for my reaction. “People with OCD go bananas if a paper clip’s out of place. They scrub their hands a hundred times a day, repeat the same action over and over in exactly the same sequence. Tim didn’t have any of that, and I’ve known him for practically forever. I don’t think he even knew how to make his own bed. Lucky for him, the boat was easy to keep straight, when he thought to do it. Stephen sold the police a line and they bought it.”

  I pushed the photos back toward him. “Why would his brother do that?”

  “Resentment. Stephen wanted everything to himself, the money, his father’s love and attention, all of it. Tim couldn’t keep up—he never fit in. Eventually he gave up trying.”

  “What do you mean ‘fit in’?”

  Jung shrugged. “Wealthy family, influential circles, there are . . . exp
ectations. Stephen toed the party line, followed in his father’s footsteps, never made waves. Tim tried, but couldn’t hack it in the end. He was an artist. He was gay. They didn’t approve of either. Add to that, Tim didn’t give a shit about his family’s legacy. When his father died, he had a choice, go with the flow or get the hell out. He got the hell out. That’s when his mother froze him out. Stephen too. Then he got cut off from the money, and he had to go it alone. His father left him the boat outright, though, so Tim decided to live on it.”

  “How’d he get by?”

  “He worked odd jobs, a year here, a year there. He sometimes would sell a painting or two. Mostly, I think, he lived off his insurance. He called it a vertical settlement? Sounded strange to me, but he seemed stoked about it. He said it gave him his insurance money upfront, enough to get by on, instead of it coming in after he died when he couldn’t use it? It’s legal. He was doing okay out there on the lake.” He shook his head, grit his teeth. “Man, Stephen’s a real tool. I wish I could punch his face right now.”

  So much for Swami Rain and Jung’s yogi business, I thought, smiling. I scribbled viatical settlement on a notepad so I could check it out later. “What did Tim have that somebody might want?”

  Jung leaned forward, his head in his hands, out of his element, in way over his head. “The only important thing he had was time, and what kind of creep would take that from him?” He looked up, searched my face. “So? What do you think? I convinced you, right? Please, you have to help me here.”

  “There are some inconsistencies. Maybe they mean something, maybe they don’t.”

  Jung slid onto the edge of his seat. “So you’re definitely in, right? Like in ‘in’?”

  I thought it over. “I’ll take a look. No promises. If I come up with nothing, I’m out, but, more important, you’re out. Got it?”

  Jung grinned, pumped his fists, and then reached into his pack and pulled out a checkbook with the symbol for yin and yang on the cover. Leave it to Jung to flake up a check. “You wouldn’t take my cash before, so I brought a check this time. It’s more professional, anyway. I know I’m right about this. I can feel it. How much?”