So she’d learned something new: she might have competition. The thought pleased her—an opponent added spice to the game. Let them bring it! Deb liked her chances. She was smart, she was well-read, she was pretty.
And she could cook.
She glanced at her watch: almost eight thirty p.m. She was ravenous—she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, just after six a.m. And there she was, sitting on Jenner’s porch with two thick roast beef sandwiches on homemade bread, a bottle of pinot noir tucked away in her book bag. Showing up with dinner and wine was completely transparent, but Jenner would hardly be astonished to discover she was interested.
Besides, Deb was happy on the porch. The air had cooled with the seeping dark, and the mosquitoes weren’t too bad.
She stood, walked casually to the door. She turned on her cell phone, and peered at the envelope in its glow. The fat, looping J and the billowy letters weren’t just feminine, they were downright girly. Deb smirked.
She shielded her eyes from the glare as high beams flooded the porch. It was an SUV; Jenner drove a rental Accent. The SUV pulled up in front of Jenner’s cabin, and a young couple with matching sunburns and FIU windbreakers climbed out. They said good evening, and went into the cabin next door.
It was closing in on nine p.m.—what if Jenner had been called out?
Her stomach rumbled. With a short sigh, Deb finally gave in. She tore open the wax paper and chomped into a sandwich, wolfing down the rare roast beef, the Swiss cheese, the horseradish mayonnaise.
She had eaten half her sandwich when headlights tipped over the low ridge from the street, and Jenner’s car settled slowly toward the cabin. She hastily jammed the other half back into the wrapping and stuck it back into her bag. She watched Jenner park and climb out. He stretched stiffly, then reached inside for a bag of clothes. He headed toward her; Deb swallowed frantically.
The dog shuffled to the porch step, and Deb followed. From the shadows, she could see Jenner’s face clearly in the pathway light—his surprise at the dog, then his grin as he saw her silhouette moving forward.
But when Deb stepped into the light, his expression turned guarded—the smile stayed, but he was disappointed. He’d thought she was someone else, and, when he saw it was just her, he was disappointed.
He said, “Hey.” He looked exhausted.
“Hey, Jenner.” Deb fought to hide her own dismay. “You look beat.”
“Damn! I knew I should’ve used more concealer under my eyes—they’re one of my problem areas.” He smiled grimly. “It was a rough day.”
“Yeah, well, I know.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “I guess you heard about American Crime?”
“Heard about it? Oh, yeah.” He paused. “Tommy Anders just fired me.”
“Oh my gosh—I’m really sorry to hear that.” He looked thoroughly beaten. “Is there anything you can do?”
“Nope. I was basically a temp here, and the guy who hired me is dead. On Monday, pathologists from Miami are taking over until the county finds a replacement. I’ve got a week to finish up my paperwork and get the hell out of Dodge.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well.” Jenner produced an envelope from his pocket and waved it. “On the bright side: I finally got paid.”
“Well, good.” Deb held up her book bag. “Look, I figured you could do with some company tonight, so I brought you a bite to eat. Just sandwiches, but…”
“Deb, you’re amazing! Thank you.” His smile was warm and genuine.
With a puzzled look, he gestured at the dog. “How come you brought him back?”
“Nothing to do with me—he was sitting there, snoring, when I got here. There’s a note.” She nodded toward the door; she couldn’t stop herself. “It’s from a girl, I think.”
Jenner stepped to the door, plucked the envelope, and read in the porch light; his expression didn’t change.
He folded it into his pocket, and turned back to her. “It’s a bit of a dump in there. Want to eat on the porch?”
“That’d be nice.”
He disappeared into the cabin, and she unwrapped the sandwiches on the small table and pulled out the bottle. She called out, “Got a corkscrew, Jenner?”
“There’s wine? You’re an angel!” He appeared at the doorway with a box of mosquito coils. “I’ve got a knife with a corkscrew.”
She sat. “Hey, you want to have a shower or something, go right ahead.”
“Really?” He hesitated, smiling. “If you can hang on, a shower would be fantastic.”
She smiled back. “Wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t mean it.”
Smelling the food, the dog waddled up and pressed his paws on her leg. She shooed him away, unwrapped Jenner’s sandwich, then her own half-eaten one.
Deb looked at her half-sandwich and grinned.
Fuck him! She was glad she’d eaten it.
CHAPTER 64
Daylight. Jenner had left the curtains open, and the cabin was bright in the early morning light. He checked his phone on the side table; no messages.
He dragged himself out of bed, opened the door for the dog. He stood on the porch in his T-shirt and boxers, watching the thing snuffle and root around under the cabin. As he stood there, dressed in his underwear, watching his mutt crapping on a bush, it occurred to him that, just as he was about to leave for good, he’d never been more at home at the Palmetto Court.
What was he going to do with the damn dog?
He let it inside, and lay back down on the bed.
He was surprised he wasn’t hungover. Maybe it was the fatigue, but he was definitely feeling the alcohol by the time he said good-night.
He really liked Deb—she was bright, incredibly kind, funny. And she understood him well—dealing with four brothers had left her with keen insight into the mysteries of How Men Work.
And she was different—at least, different from New York women. Her interest in him was relaxed, patient, artless. There’d been no game-playing, no look of recrimination when he’d rejected her with a good-night peck on the cheek, as if she were his baby sister. There’d been no need to say anything, she just understood.
He wondered if she’d read Maggie’s note.
He opened it again.
Jenner: Take him back, we got plenty!
Use him to pick up chicks, or something.
Maggie Craine
He looked at his watch. Seven thirty a.m. Too early to call.
“Maggie Craine.” Formal, distant—maybe the “pick up chicks” suggestion wasn’t a joke. Maybe he should get a clue.
There was a lolloping sound from the floor, and he leaned over to see the dog licking clean his sandwich plate. He lay back.
Marty’s memorial was at eleven a.m.
Jenner got up and sat at the kitchen table, reading over his eulogy notes. He knew what he wanted to say: that they’d all been better for knowing Marty and Bobbie, that Marty had made him a better pathologist, and in doing so, a better man.
He needed a black jacket for the service. He showered and dressed, and headed to the New Promenade mall. He deposited his check at the bank next to Nordstrom, then spent a few minutes sorting out his money at the ATM. After paying off American Express and the minimum on his main Visa card, he realized, the check money wouldn’t go much further. The credit card company wanted the full balance, nearly three thousand dollars, before they’d reactivate his frozen MasterCard; it would have to stay frozen. When all his money had been allocated between his various accounts and debts, he had barely enough to take out four hundred dollars in cash.
His cell phone rang. The tox lab director, confirming that Adam Weiss had been poisoned with Malathion, an organophosphate insecticide—the safety officer would be happy.
Jenner folded the money into his wallet and went into Nordstrom. It had just opened, and the store was still quiet, the air slightly stuffy and humid, with the faintest note of mold. The sales people were chatting dully, polishing counters and setting up. By the escalator nex
t to the menswear department, there was a baby grand piano, its gleaming black lid open; a man in a dark suit and a bow tie was tapping keys one by one, listening to each note critically.
The jackets were handsome, and good quality, with New York prices. The $460 charge was too much for Jenner’s Visa card; it took two more tries before the purchase went through, the clerk splitting the price between a $290 charge and $170 in cash.
Jenner refused the suit bag, had the salesman cut off the tags, and slipped the jacket on in the store. He smoothed his shirt and straightened his tie in a mirror, noticing that, somewhere along the way, his face had become tan.
He splurged on a coffee at Starbucks, and read his notes. They were good, his words heartfelt and true.
Jenner was ready to say his good-bye to Marty.
CHAPTER 65
Brodie stood at the top of the gentle slope, looking out over the outbuildings and pastures. Down toward the road, two of his Mexican field rats were herding a cluster of sows, leading them back to the slop troughs.
He scowled: for some reason, Brodie found their white-and-blue La Grulla Blanca baseball caps particularly irritating today. He loathed the way the fucking wetbacks swanned around in them, like commodores at a fucking yacht club. Of course, compared to typical farmhands, his men were wealthy.
Most growers paid pickers about fifty cents for a thirty-two-pound basket of tomatoes. Your typical Mexie would get up at four a.m. to get a prime position at the bus hub for the foremen’s six a.m. day-laborer run. He’d work the fields all day, home at five or six p.m., now richer by sixty bucks.
Brodie turned and walked back over the slope, back to the bunkhouses. Inspection time.
The fifteen or so workers at La Grulla Blanca got five hundred dollars in cash at the end of each week, with Brodie holding another five hundred. In addition, twice a month, Brodie sent a thousand-dollar wire transfer to their home country.
This wage system had paid off big-time; gratitude from their abuelas and mamacitas created a work ethic on the farm that neither money nor the threat of violence ever could. Of course, there was always the threat of violence to back it up; the men understood that Brodie knew where their families lived, and they’d witnessed his cruelty firsthand.
Tony was leaning by the door to Bunkhouse A, the cookhouse; he nodded at Brodie. A breeze picked up, the smell of pig filth abruptly sharpening; Tony’s white guayabera billowed, and Brodie glimpsed the dark handle of his .45. Just under the lip of the house, hidden by tall grass, there were two Tec-9 machine pistols.
Brodie cracked open the door and peered in. It was cold in the long room, four industrial air-conditioners chilling it down into the low sixties. But it was never the cold that struck him so much as the smell, the cloyingly sweet smell of the acetone they used to extract the pseudoephedrine from the cold medicine, the sour citrus smell of the product.
They were now nearing the middle of the forty-eight-hour methamphetamine cook cycle. At the far end of the room, three men in hooded white Tyvek jumpsuits and painters’ masks gathered around a globe-shaped glass flask the size of a beach ball, wrapped in a steel heating mantle. As Brodie watched, they slowly trickled red phosphorus onto the pseudoephedrine they’d extracted that morning. There were three other triple-necked twenty-two-liter flasks, each half-filled with a bubbling slurry the color of caking blood; corrugated orange hoses crooked off the flask tops, pumping waste gas into tall plastic canisters packed with cat litter to absorb the reek. The cat litter was really overkill—they kept pigs on La Grulla Blanca because the stench masked the smell of methamphetamine cooking.
Brodie didn’t speak—the phosphorus was lethally poisonous, and could ignite from friction, and the hydroiodic acid in the flasks could burn a man’s eyeballs out. The greatest danger was fucking up the mixture and making phosphine gas, which would kill them all within seconds. This was why all his cooks came from Michoacán state, from Apatzingán or Tepalcatepec, where all the best meth cooks came from—Lord knows Brodie didn’t want a roomful of dead Mexies on his hands.
He watched them tip the last of the phosphorus into the funnel, then carefully ease the canister down to the ground. They stepped back, relieved; one capped the open necks while another checked the heating-coil settings.
Brodie closed the door and looked out over the land. The farmhands had reached the feed pens now and were smoking in the shade as they watched the sows crowd the trough. The average profit on a pig raised and slaughtered was less than $20; a two-day cook cycle netted thirty pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of roughly $800,000—it was always about the money.
Brodie thought of his daughter back in Mendocino, begging him to give Tarver a job but just to please keep him out of the meth business—his idiot son-in-law already had one strike against him in California. But Tarver wanted money, and factory or warehouse work wouldn’t cut it. Besides, Brodie could use a man with Tarver’s special gifts: the psycho was happy to do things most men wouldn’t. Case in point: their little instructional video had been Tarver’s idea.
Tarver had videotaped the men first as Tony worked on them, and after their interrogation, he taped their execution.
Brodie had shown the first video at the monthly barbecue. The men had been pretty drunk and raucous when Tarver rolled out the TV; by the time the screening ended, the men stood in stunned silence.
After the tape Bentas spoke to them in Spanish, explaining that the mistake of one man destroys the lives of all, and that the weakness of one can overcome the strength of many. He told them that the hanged men had been stealing meth, using it and dealing in Bel Arbre; these men had risked everything, risked sending them all to prison.
Then Brodie announced the pig they’d slaughtered that morning was ready, and the Corona and tequila flowed again, and everyone gathered around the pit to eat.
Later, Brodie gave each man a five-hundred-dollar bonus. And there was more: he clapped his hands and pointed to the main farmhouse. Headlights turned on, and a minivan trundled slowly to the barbecue area, the van full of whores from Bel Arbre, big fat mamacitas probably ecstatic not to still be fucking donkeys back in TJ. And while usually Brodie brought in two or three women, that night there were six.
When the owner came to a barbecue, Brodie had to supply young girls. At first he’d been surprised how easy it was to find a fourteen-year-old—for the right money, everything is possible. He didn’t like it, though, not from a moral point of view but because it was an unnecessary exposure: people talk about a fourteen-year-old whore in ways they don’t when the girl is seventeen.
So Brodie took precautions. He sent out a different man to meet the procurer each time, used a rental car, blindfolded the girls immediately, and didn’t take the blindfolds off until they were inside the main farmhouse. Afterward, the weeping girl (and they were always crying by the time the boss finished with them) was soothed with money and tequila, then blindfolded again and taken on a circuitous route back to the town. The challenge of procuring girls for the boss had become harder as his tastes had evolved; it was now difficult to find girls young enough and thin enough to make him happy.
Brodie spat and adjusted his cap. Fuck it—with a steady supply of ingredients, the farm was averaging two forty-eight-hour cook cycles a week, pushing the weekly gross near two million dollars. Brodie could stomach a little risk.
Because it was always about the money.
CHAPTER 66
At ten thirty a.m., Jenner was dictating his report on the rib injuries when he looked up to see David and Marie Carter and Richard Flanagan in his doorway; he’d never seen Flanagan in a tie before.
“Time to go?” Jenner put down the microphone and turned to slip his new jacket off the hanger on which he’d carefully hung it.
They filed into his office somberly, and Flanagan shut the door.
They’d designated David Carter to do the talking; Carter clearly found it difficult.
“Dr. Jenner…”
Jenn
er nodded. “What’s going on, David?”
“When I was driving here to pick Marie up, I passed by the chapel. It’s a…a zoo out there—reporters, news vans, at least twenty TV cameras. And Amanda Tucker is outside right now…” He shook his head.
Jenner said, “Go on.”
Marie Carter broke in. “Dr. Jenner, Eye on Port Fontaine showed the report about you from the Amanda Tucker show this morning, and then they had Diane Sales from the sheriff’s department saying you’re leaving next week. They said you had problems in New York, and there are problems with your work here.”
David Carter raised a hand dismissively. “We want you to understand all of us know that’s completely wrong—we’ve worked with you, and we’ve seen your dedication, and the great work you’ve done here.” He hesitated. “But this has got really political now. If you go to the Roburns’ memorial, it’ll be all about you—they’ll ask Sheree about you, they’ll talk to the sheriff about you. And when you show up, they’ll ask you all sorts of questions. Let’s face it: they’re going after you—you know that, don’t you? They’re making you the fall guy for everything that’s gone wrong.”
He paused, then said, “And if you go, Marty and Bobbie will get lost in the shuffle.”
Jenner put his new jacket down on the desk. “I see.”
Flanagan said, “Doc, we hate to ask you. We know you were closer to him than any of us. And we know you’re getting a bum rap here. But you show up, it’ll be like Clown Day at the circus.”
Jenner looked down at his notes. Then he nodded, and said, “You’re right. Of course I don’t want to get in the way.”
He didn’t look up as they left.
Jenner picked up his speech, folded it in half, in quarters, then across into eighths. Then he lobbed it into the bin.
CHAPTER 67
Leila, the head of Craine’s household staff, was waiting for Maggie at the steps.
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