by John Inman
Not once during those two weeks did I see him drive an automobile. And it was this, more than anything else, that made me come to a decision. It might very well be true that John Allan Davis made a mistake and killed my clients’ son. It might even be true that he hid the evidence of that fatal accident from the police by dumping the car and concealing for all time any evidence of his involvement in the young boy’s death.
But still, if his actions made him change the way he lived his life, if he no longer touched the steering wheel of a car after he’d been drinking, perhaps a lesson had been learned. It was a pity he wasn’t made to accept the blame for his actions, but in the long run, if it served to make him a better person, why should I think he deserved further punishment?
The second Friday of surveillance found me once again parked across the street from his crappyass apartment building. It was another hot day. The seat of my pants and the back of my shirt were glued to the car seat with sweat. My legs were asleep, and the bottle of Sparkletts I brought with me that morning was long gone. I was not happy.
My mind was a million miles away when a fist came out of nowhere and rapped on the side of the car. I all but jumped out of my skin. A troll-like face with big ears and white razor stubble bent down and gazed through the window. A toothless grin appeared. My visitor seemed inordinately amused by the way I was rubbing my head after banging it on the car roof.
By way of apology, the old gentleman held out an ice-cold can of Coke, dripping with condensation. At the sight of it, I grinned back and reached through the window to snatch it out of his hand.
“You’ll die of a heatstroke in there,” the old man said. He motioned to the Coke can I was rolling across my forehead. “Drink up.”
So I did. He stood at the side of the car while I popped the tab on the can, tilted my head back, and poured more than half of the Coke straight down my throat. I had never tasted anything so good.
The old man laughed. “Better, huh?”
“Better,” I said. “Thank you.”
He rested his elbows on the sill of the window and peered around at the interior of the car, unabashedly snooping. Finally, his gaze slid back to me. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward the apartment building up the street. “You’re watching him, aren’t you?”
I followed the line of his thumb to Davis’s building. This was another day when John Allan Davis had been a no-show. I assumed he was inside, either avoiding the heat or sleeping off his last twelve-pack of Falstaff.
“Why would you think that?” I asked, at rather a loss for words. I had always assumed I was being discreet.
The old guy chuckled. “Ain’t that hard to figure out. He’s not home today, though. You missed him.”
I sat up straighter, unpeeling my sweat-stuck ass from the seat like ripping Velcro. “Why?” I asked. “Where is he?”
He gave me a wily grin, and before he could answer, I sat up even straighter. “You’re him! You’re the witness!”
The old man looked saddened by that. “I’m the witness nobody believed.” A new set of wrinkles etched their way across his face, and I wondered if he was about to cry. Or cuss. Or spit in fury. But he did none of those things. He merely stared back into my eyes, reasonably unperturbed and stubborn as hell. “You’re here to make it right, ain’t you?”
I tried for evasive. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“What are you, then? A private detective?”
I was getting used to that question. “Not exactly,” I replied.
He chuckled at that, giving me a dubious wiggle with a raggedy white eyebrow. “If that’s the way you want to play it, young man, I guess that’s the way we’ll play it.”
Uncertain how to proceed, I ventured, “So how have you been? You know. With the thing.” I gave my head a little tap with a fingertip to indicate I was referring to his mental processes, or lack thereof.
The old man pulled a big paisley hanky from his back pocket and blew his nose. It sounded like a factory claxon blaring out quitting time. He offered me an amused glance while he reamed out the residue of snot from his hairy nostrils.
“I’ve got a ways to go before I forget where my ass is attached, if that’s what you mean.”
I laughed. “I guess you do at that.” Looking down at the crap on the seat beside me, I started chucking it all on the back floorboard. When I was satisfied he’d fit, I said. “Join me.”
He walked around the car, and I pushed the passenger door open so he could climb in. He did so with a minimum of old-man grunts. When he was situated, he looked over at me and stuck out his hand.
“Cotton,” he said. “Jim Cotton.”
We shook. I didn’t offer my name in return, and he seemed to understand. As we exchanged glances, I sensed a stitch of camaraderie cementing us together, as if we both suddenly realized our immediate plans for the future were pretty much on the same page. And those plans were fairly simple. Keep a wary eye on John Allan Davis.
Jim Cotton had no teeth. Nary a one. I pointed to his empty smile. “Where’s your dentures?”
“Don’t like ’em,” he said. “They hurt.”
I nodded as if I understood. As silence descended between us, our eyes turned in tandem toward the beat-up apartment building up ahead.
“So where is he?” I asked.
He pointed to an old, rundown two-car garage I could barely see around the corner of the property. The garage looked as old as the apartment building. Built back in the forties, maybe. It sat crooked on the ground, as if at some point in the last eight decades it had slipped off its foundation like an old drunk teetering out of his shoes. In the past two weeks, I had never seen anyone enter or leave that garage, with or without a car. I had supposed it was used to store junk. “He’s in there,” he said. “He brought a car home last night and parked it inside. I expect he’s working on it.”
“He’s not supposed to drive,” I said.
“No, he isn’t. Or drink either, for that matter. Court rules.”
“How could he buy a car without a license?”
“Probably under the table,” Jim Cotton said. “The car’s most likely stolen. Your boy bought it from the guy who stole it. Not much paperwork required for a sale like that.”
“No, I guess not.”
“Or hell, maybe he stole it himself.”
I couldn’t fault the logic. “Which would make him an even bigger shitbag than he is already.”
A couple more minutes of companionable silence ensued. Then, “Have you seen him drive? I mean, since he had his license revoked?”
The old man eyed me with a little less joviality. “You mean, have I seen him behind the wheel of a car since he killed that boy?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s what I mean.”
“A few times,” he answered. “And it always happens like this. He brings home an old clunker, stashes it in that garage, and then one night he gets himself stuffed full of beer and goes carousing. After that I never see the same car again. Then one day he shows up with a new one. Maybe after he’s had his fun with ’em, he just resells ’em. Don’t know.”
“So he drives drunk?”
Cotton gave a snort. “Course he does. Hell, he’s always drunk.”
I stared at the garage, wondering how I could have missed it for so long. “So he hasn’t changed at all, then,” I mumbled, more to myself than to him.
Cotton seemed to know I was thinking things through, because he didn’t interrupt my deliberations by speaking out loud. He merely sat there nodding as we both studied that dilapidated garage.
“Who owns this apartment building?” I asked.
“He does.”
That surprised me. “How’d he get it?”
Cotton pulled a piece of horehound candy from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth. He sucked on it noisily while he talked. “He inherited the building from his mother. She died a few years ago. Nice woman. I sort of knew her. Her son is a piece
of moose shit.”
I counted the units in the building. Six. Five, not counting his own. That’s a good chunk of change to have coming in every month. “So that’s why he doesn’t work,” I said. “He doesn’t have to.”
“Yep.”
“Tell me, Jim. How is it you know so much about his movements? I mean, where do you live?”
He pointed through the windshield at a small brick house three doors down on the same street. The fence in front was buried in oleander bushes, but the house itself looked well maintained. The windows were clean, the lawn tidy. A hummingbird feeder flashed bright red from the corner of the porch roof.
“Me and my wife live there,” Jim said.
I turned back to study Jim Cotton more closely. “I thought you were supposed to have Alzheimer’s.”
He sucked on his candy and stared down at his hands. “Some days I get a little confused. But like I said, most of the time I still know which end is up. Only the people investigating that boys’ death didn’t think so. My doctor ratted me out. The prick. On the other hand, it might have been my wife who put him up to it. She didn’t want me testifying against Davis. She’s afraid of him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.” His eyes traveled back to the apartment building. “I hated he got away with what he did. That boy deserved better than that. He deserved a little payback. Davis left him on the street like a piece of roadkill—you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know.”
“How is his family?”
“Not good.”
He still stared at his hands. His eyes, I suddenly noticed, had misted up. “It’s a damned shame,” he muttered softly. “I saw him drive home that day, you know. There was blood smeared all over the front of his car. Next thing anybody knew, that car had just up and disappeared.” He glanced at me, his mouth still working around the candy. “My wife thinks I should stay out of it. Stop watching him. She’s afraid he’ll see me and come gunnin’.”
“I suppose he might,” I said. “You should be careful.”
I reached out and patted his hand. He didn’t seem surprised by the touch. He did seem surprised by the sympathy he saw on my face when he looked at me. Somehow it seemed to give him hope.
“You’re going to make it right, ain’t you?” he said. “That’s why you’re here. To make it right?”
I turned back to stare at the garage. “Now that I know he’s drinking and driving again, maybe I am at that.”
“Good,” Jim Cotton said. “Don’t worry about me,” he added. “I never saw you before in my life. Besides, I’m senile. Remember? No one would believe anything I said about you anyway.”
I offered him one more smile. He smiled back, then dipped into his shirt pocket again and hauled out a piece of horehound candy for me.
After that, we sat there quietly for a while, watching the building and sucking noisily on our treats.
I had forgotten how tasty horehound candy was. And how depressing it was to know I’d soon be killing someone again.
“You’ve done this before, I guess,” Jim said.
“Nah, I’m a newbie.”
He chuckled briefly, but then his face grew serious. “John Allan Davis is a dangerous man. You should be careful. If he gets wind of what you’re up to, he’ll come after you.”
“I assume the same applies to you.”
He nodded. “Sure it does. But I’ve got less to lose. My Alzheimer’s will be in full bloom somewhere down the road. Maybe months, maybe a year or two. But sooner or later I won’t know my dick from a tea kettle. You, son, have your whole life in front of you. I’d hate to see you lose it over this child killer.”
“I’m always careful,” I said.
His eyes crinkled up at that. “Yes, I suspect you are.” After a beat of silence, he added, “I’ll try to watch him for you when you’re not around. But I’m not allowed to drive any more than he is, so I can’t follow him when he drives off.”
“I wouldn’t want you to. But having you keep an eye on him while I’m gone would be a big help. You can tell me who he sees.”
“That’s easy,” Jim said. “He never sees anybody. Just sits in there in that rundown apartment complex and drinks himself silly. Sometimes when he gets good and juiced up, I can hear him yelling through the walls.”
“Do his neighbors complain?”
“If they did, they’d get evicted. He’s the landlord, remember?”
I studied the upstairs apartment, the farthest one to the right. I thought I saw a curtain twitch, but I wasn’t sure. Was he watching us? Had I parked too close?
“Is there a back door to that apartment?” I asked Jim.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s the only one with a porch back there.”
“So he could get into his apartment from the garage without us seeing.”
“Sure he can. Why?”
“I think I just saw him at the window.”
“Then we’d both better mosey on along, don’t you think? Don’t want him to get suspicious. Day’s almost over anyway. Like I said, I’ll watch him for you when I can. Right now I’d better get home to dinner. My wife’ll beat the tar out of me if I’m late.”
“Really? She sounds like a hardass.”
“Well, I might have exaggerated a hair.”
We both laughed.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “And don’t forget to be careful.”
He shot me a thumbs-up and creaked and groaned his way off the car seat. The last time I saw him, he was toddling down the street, scratching his ass. I smiled watching him go.
Then I turned back toward the apartment building and spotted John Allan Davis, peering out through a slit in the curtains, his angry eyeballs aimed directly at me.
Chapter Eleven
“YOU’RE A million miles away,” Kenny breathed in my ear.
He was right. I pushed John Allan Davis out of my mind and tried to concentrate on matters closer at hand. Like Kenny. It helped when I turned and brushed my lips across his mouth. “No, I’m not,” I fibbed. “I’m right here with you.”
He inserted a devilish grin into the kiss. “I’m not so sure. I’d better do what I can to focus your attention.”
I opened my eyes to study him lying naked beside me. He was hard already, as was I. His dick rested against my hip, and my own pecker stood up like a tent pole under the sheets. How much attention can one man focus?
The planes of Kenny’s face were softly etched in moonlight. His smile was so wide now, so full of mischief, his dimples were little black-shadowed holes in his cheeks. With the bedclothes pushed aside, he knee-walked up the bed and straddled my waist. Looking down with a smile, desire burning brightly in those moonlight-shrouded eyes, he reached between us to caress my erection with gentle fingers. His touch was so erotic, my hips strained upward, my ass leaving the bed entirely. Within a breathless span of time that could have been either a second or a week and a half, he positioned me properly against his hole and guided me in. With a combination of softness and strength, willpower and want, plus a little help from my factory-lubricated condom, he forced himself to open like a flower and relax down over me. I gasped at the sudden sensation of enveloping heat. I managed to smile at him, amazed by the assured way he melded the two of us into one. He steered me deep, laying claim to my length as if it belonged to him, which indeed it did. I stared upward into his face, never looking away for a moment as I drove upward, losing myself inside him. If he felt pain, and he must have, at least during those first few moments of penetration, he never betrayed himself by showing it.
When my pubic hair brushed his opening, he went one step further and settled himself even more firmly down onto me, driving me deeper yet. I bit back an ecstatic cry and watched his sweet face hovering above me. His eyes were closed now as he absorbed every sensation of my piercing cock inside him. I waited until he opened his eyes again before I began to move. His lips
parted and a shudder ran through him, a shudder I could feel both on the surface of his skin and deep inside his core, where my cock had found a home.
He placed his hands gently to either side of my face, and as I stroked myself in his depths, he outlined with his fingertips every ridge and hollow, every eyelash, every softness of skin and hardness of bone that made my face what it was. He read me like braille, and as he did so, that magical smile of contentment never once left his mouth.
Now it was he who began to move. Taking turns, lifting and lowering himself along the length of me, his sheath surrounded me, hot and grasping, as soft and delicate as sun-warmed satin. Delicious. Driving harder now, both of us moving more quickly in our need, I plumbed his very soul with my cock. I watched, concerned, when a tear slid down his cheek, but when I reached up to touch it, he brushed my hand away. His smile never faltered. A purr rumbled deep in his throat.
“Don’t stop,” he murmured. “Don’t stop.”
I smiled when one of his hands left my face and circled his own erection. His knees clamped tighter around me as he began to stroke himself. The sheath that circled me tightened and relaxed as I slid my length inside him, burrowing deep, then drawing back, over and over again. His eyes squeezed shut once more as he moved his hand more quickly over his cock. The softness of his balls brushed against my tender skin. I ached to take his hardness into my mouth and coax his juices from him, but I knew he didn’t want me to stop what I was doing. He clearly enjoyed having me inside him as much as I enjoyed being there.
Without warning, he tensed above me and cried out. A moment later, as he perched motionless above me, his juices exploded from his bobbing cock and splashed across my chest, my chin. A string of hot liquid seared my cheek. I ducked my head and licked a splotch from my lower lip, relishing the taste I already knew so well. His hand moved more slowly now along the length of his dick as he squeezed away the last drops of come, which puddled in my navel, as hot as candle wax.