Dead Last

by James W. Hall

  “I told Thorn he could crash at my place on the Key. He’ll have to sleep on the floor. Water’s turned off, just one working toilet, but it’s clean. Well, sort of clean.”

  “Is that what you want to do, Thorn? Stay with Agent Sheffield?”

  Frank said, “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m sure he’ll listen.”

  “Here’s the thing,” she said. “My mom and I live about ten minutes from here, a little way up the river. It’s a neighborhood called Spring Garden.”

  “Oh, you’re in Spring Garden?” Frank leaned forward. “Old area, shady streets, historic homes, one of the last gracious corners of town.”

  “It is,” April said. “I have a garage apartment that’s empty, it’s private, has its own entrance. Queen-size bed, full bath. You could come and go, Thorn, be completely independent.”

  “Wow,” Frank said. “You got an extra bunk?”

  “It’s yours, Thorn. A day or two, or as long as you need.”

  Thorn watched the motorized rubber raft come back down the river, the dog still in the bow, his nose in the air, ears flapping. All smells good smells.

  As April Moss described her neighborhood and her house, her voice had warmed to the subject, and her tone, so different from the hard-edged one she’d used earlier at the bar, summoned a swirl of images he’d been trying to resurrect all afternoon.

  Until just now he’d only managed to recall a couple of disjointed moments, but when he heard her natural rhythms of speech, it took him back to that night, and that distant stretch of time snapped into focus.

  He saw again her intoxicated gaiety as they drove away from the Islamorada bar, heading back to his isolated house on the bayside, a talkative, drunken, silly girl singing some Margaritaville ditty. That’s where the interlude had started to feel like a grave mistake, and he was about to swing around and return young April to her girlfriends who were staying at the local Holiday Inn.

  Then came her sudden queasy surge, April leaning her head out the passenger window and letting go. Afterward asking Thorn to please take her somewhere she could lie down. Thorn drove on, got to his place, helped her up the stairs of his stilt house. He could still see her wobbling to his bathroom, hear her retch a second time, and afterward her shyness and discomfort.

  The long night that followed, young April sleeping it off in Thorn’s bed. Her snoring, her fluttering lips, her bursts of incoherent language. Then this anonymous girl waking at dawn, coming outside in one of Thorn’s long T-shirts, onto the upstairs deck where he had spent the night in a lounge chair staring at Blackwater Sound. The coffee, the sunrise, her shaky quiet.

  Then her slow unfolding as they talked in fits and starts, finally landing on the subject of her future plans, what she hoped to do, the life she imagined for herself, college, grad school, a job in the city, her plan to be a crusading newspaper reporter. Afterward, there was a contented silence, and finally he remembered her leaning close to him, an awkward kiss, a kiss of simple gratitude, Thorn believed, a reward for keeping his respectful distance the night before. For not taking advantage. Nothing more than that, a light, dry kiss followed by a shy, winsome smile.

  After that they wandered back inside and circled each other for a while and smiled, and said whatever they said and circled some more, until another kiss happened, a different, more substantial one, and the two of them by mutual consent and with full knowledge melted into the open sheets, and then there was a long gentle morning, her pale skin against the white cotton, the leisurely kisses, her coltish moves, girlish giggles, the wild surprise of orgasm.

  It was all still there, preserved at some substrata of memory, the golden sunlight, the last coolish breeze before summer set in, the blooms of jacaranda outside the window, light twirling and spitting through a wind chime of broken mirror fragments someone had made for him years before.

  Though what happened between them was no more than skin brushing skin, only simple need and mutual pleasure seeking, still that morning together seemed to be a happy few hours for both of them. Ending at the motel door where she was staying with her girlfriends, no promises made, no plans to stay in touch, April reached up for a kiss that both of them knew was their last.

  “Miami hailing Thorn,” Frank said.

  He looked at Sheffield, who said, “Hey, this good lady is offering you a place to stay. Sounds like a damn fine place.”

  “I’d like that,” Thorn said.

  A few minutes later, driving Buddha Hilton’s rental, staying close to April’s Mini Cooper, Thorn leaned over, popped the glove compartment, and drew out the sheriff’s phone and the electronic tablet and her service revolver and the evidence bag with Rusty’s obit. He set them on the passenger seat, where Buddha had sat all day as they toured the city.

  April led him through an edge of Overtown, with its ratty public housing, busted-out streetlights, old wood houses missing windows and doors, vacant lots surrounded by razor wire, soup kitchens, halfway houses, and the occasional corner groceries and barber shops fortified by prison bars and rolldown shutters, then she cut south along the river where the neighborhood improved by a few degrees, rolling past the once-genteel homes of Miami pioneer families, some freshly renovated, most untouched for a generation.

  April pulled through the front gates of her place and rolled up to her modest but tidy two-story coral house and parked and Thorn parked beside her.

  In the passenger seat Buddha’s phone was blinking with a message. A missed call, a waiting voice mail. Thorn fiddled with the device, trying to imitate the sliding motions he’d seen Buddha use earlier.

  Finally the screen changed and revealed a small icon lit up in the corner. While April stood beside her car looking off at the dark sky, Thorn touched a fingertip to the icon, then pressed the phone to his ear.

  A good old boy introduced himself as Officer Ben Hardison of the metro Atlanta police department. “But everybody calls me Big Ben, like the clock,” he said. “You can too.”

  He’d pulled that file Sheriff Hilton wanted, which he’d sent her as an e-mail attachment, though there wasn’t much to it. Just a pedestrian stop and a brief questioning. No ID taken, no name, nothing. Didn’t even merit entering it in the record, but he did it, just out of habit.

  However, there was something the sheriff might find some use for.

  “’Cause I wanted to help you out with your situation, I went and had a look at the dashboard video of the night in question. Hadn’t been deleted off the server. Subject’s standing there in the headlights in that crazy suit.

  “I ordered the hood removed. Video’s grainy, but you might find somebody in your tech department could clean it up for you. From what I can tell, it’s a foxy young woman. Dark hair cut short. I’ve emailed you a link to the video. Anything else you need, you get back to me, little lady, you hear?”

  ACT THREE

  HUGE

  SIXTEEN

  “THIS IS HUGE,” DEE DEE said. “Huger than huge.”

  It was Saturday morning, dawn. Sawyer and Dee Dee were in her tenth-floor condo on Brickell, lying naked on top of the open sheets. A small blue slice of Biscayne Bay was visible in the distance, but mostly her view consisted of three other tall white condo towers boxed in close.

  As usual they had the weekend free. Gus wanted everybody to stay close, make themselves available for pressers. TV, radio, newsprint, do every interview offered. Be shocked, sympathetic to the victim, but mention Miami Ops at every opportunity. Thursday at ten. Thursday at ten on the Expo Channel.

  Talking point: “The entire Miami Ops family is horrified and outraged at these gruesome murders that bear such a striking similarity to the events depicted on our show.”

  After the news broke, it turned into a crazy all-nighter. Most of the crew and cast converged on Gus’s penthouse condo on the fifteenth floor of the same building where Dee Dee and Sawyer were shacked up.

  With the cable news channels babbling in the background, Gus and Flynn and several membe
rs of the film crew talked, drank whiskey, and shook their heads and tried to figure out how this would impact their future.

  For several hours in a row all the cable networks led with the story, a killer stalking the Miami streets. One of the wardrobe girls went online and checked the websites for all the national papers. Most had front-page headlines featuring the killer with a striking resemblance to a character from a TV show. The murderer was apparently following the blueprints he’d found in obituaries written for The Miami Herald.

  Everybody’s cell phones kept going off. A dozen calls from the west coast; Exposure Channel people; the geniuses at Clintron, the production company that put together the deal with Expo. Gus’s agent—who also repped Dee Dee and Flynn—and Sawyer’s agent, a young woman working out of New York, both called. Each pretending they were checking in to be sure their good friends on the Miami Ops team were safe. Yeah, right.

  All the film execs and development people and lawyers and agents so concerned and courteous and worried, but all clearly faking, calling for other reasons entirely. Sharks on their best behavior, circling around the other topic, eager but unwilling to broach the obvious.

  The closest anybody came to outright rejoicing was Murray Danson. On a conference call with Gus, Sawyer, Flynn, and Dee Dee, Danson said with his usual bland indifference, “This could help with ratings.”

  Gus laughed at him.

  “Help?” he said. “This fucking nails it. Now get off my back, asshole. As of now, you’re putting us back on payroll. Tonight either start churning out checks or we start shopping for another outlet. And I want to see a second season contract on my agent’s desk Monday morning, you got that, Danson?”

  “Did you hear me, Sawyer?” Dee Dee was saying.

  “Yeah, this is huge. I heard you.”

  Dee Dee was spread-eagled on the sheets, a luscious white X against the black silk sheets, her wrists and ankles bound with pink rubber exercise bands whose other ends were attached to clips on the sideboards of the bed. It was a position she’d invented and named the Flytrap. An erotic cardio workout, missionary position on Benzedrine. Burn a few thousand calories while swapping some serious bodily fluids.

  Freaky and mechanical, the way it worked: With Sawyer lying atop her, his cock inside, Dee Dee brought her extremities together, foot straining toward foot and hand toward hand until she was squeezing Sawyer’s body tightly. Then as she exhaled, she relaxed and let the pink bands draw her limbs apart until she was spread again, and lay wide open, a moment or two, allowing hips to thrust against hips, groin to grind groin.

  After an interval to catch her breath, she repeated the process, slowly closing her arms and legs around him, encircling him, clenching tight, tighter than tight, a crushing embrace, almost asphyxiating, then slowly letting go, one rep after another, picking up the pace, faster and faster, the two of them becoming a carnal exercise machine, Dee Dee pumping her hard body full of blood and contracting sphincters until both of them were gasping, and damned if Sawyer could believe it, but even though it was all so freaking weird and motorized, his climaxes went beyond anything he’d known.

  Throughout it all Dee Dee cycled from vulnerable to dominant and back again. Creepy and exhilarating, she worked on Sawyer like a carnivorous flower, opening and closing around him, until she’d extracted a spurt of nectar.

  All this was performed, as everything that took place on her bed was performed, with the curtains open and their activities in plain view of hundreds of adjacent condos.

  Sawyer was a private guy, but since their first night together, Dee Dee had been coaxing him step by step out of his shell, into exhibitionist territory.

  “They’re watching,” she said, that first morning as they lay exhausted.

  “Who?”

  “I’d say about three dozen.” She nodded at her picture window. Sawyer looked out at the nearby towers and saw the winks of light that he came to discover were the telltale signals of the binocular and telescope voyeurs.

  Sawyer resisted, but Dee Dee wore him down, first with the shades open in the dark, then at dusk and dawn; now, after months of open-curtain sessions, they left them drawn back all the time and Sawyer had embraced the role, feeling a strange kinship with those horny snoops who lived vicariously through his hours with Dee Dee Dollimore. Even coming to accept her view of sex as performance art, something they did as much to satisfy their fan base as each other. Nothing was too harebrained or extreme as long as it kept the audience enthralled.

  Sawyer understood very well this was not the basis for a long-term relationship, but it was a wild turn-on while it lasted.

  “What’s huger than huge?” she asked.

  She shrugged out of her elastic cuffs and rolled over to face him.

  “Monstrous,” Sawyer said.

  Jacking herself up on an elbow, she squinted down at him. The sheets were damp. They’d kicked the quilt—the one Garvey had made for him before he headed off to Harvard full of ambition—to the floor. Around them Dee Dee’s collection of rubber toys was scattered across the dresser and the carpet. Pinks and blacks and flesh colors, mostly jumbos. One of them, a long skinny probe with a bulging tip, was still buzzing on a bedside bookshelf.

  “Are you being sarcastic again?”

  “This is gruesome, Dee Dee,” he said. “Over-the-top gruesome. Why do I have to explain that to you?”

  “You’re not happy? This isn’t your wildest dream come true? The big come-from-behind finish. Don’t you get it? This is the New York fucking Times, Good Morning America, CNN, the tabloid shows. We’ll be making the rounds. The Nielsens will skyrocket.”

  “Guy on CNN called Miami Ops ‘an obscure third-rate crime drama.’”

  “Any hype is good hype.”

  “You can’t be happy about this, Dee Dee.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s heartless. People have died. This is brutal shit.”

  “You’re such a prig. The studio cuts off funds, we’re dead in the water, might as well be cancelled. Now this happens. Sure, it’s sad people died. Sure, sure, okay, I get it. And believe me, my heart goes out to them, and I’m sending their loved ones my thoughts and prayers. Hey, I’m not some cold bitch. But Sawyer, this is going to push us into the big-time.”

  She prodded him in the ribs. Prodded him a second time.

  Sawyer closed his eyes and ground his head into the pillow.

  “God, you’re incredible. Lightning strikes, this amazing thing happens, and you’re glum. We’re all going to be crazy famous. This is what I’ve been working for, what you’ve been working for. We’re on the big stage. The paparazzi are staking out your mom’s house. I got plans for all that money that’s going to start pouring in. Oh, I got big plans.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Our fifteen minutes have started.”

  “Fifteen minutes?”

  Sawyer rolled onto his side. Dee Dee stared at him blankly. Was she putting him on? Could she not know the Warhol line? Lately he’d been finding out more and more she didn’t know. Blank stretches in her education. Stuff that hadn’t bothered him a month ago, stuff he’d ignored, so lost in the fever of lust.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said. “The eyeballs will be there this Thursday, sure, that’s probably going to happen. The Expo Channel is going to light up like Christmas. We’ll hit Danson’s number, the studio will piss itself, yeah, yeah. But what about the weeks after that? After the ratings spike, then what? Is it going to take more murders to keep us going?”

  “Look, once people start watching the show, see how good it is, they’ll spread the word.”

  “Is it? Is it any good, Dee Dee?”

  “What a party pooper. You’re absolutely zero fun.”

  “This whole thing,” he said. “It’s sickening.”

  “If you weren’t such a stud, I might have to dump you.”

  “I can’t believe this. A woman got beaten to death with a baseball bat, everybody’s popping champagne.”

  “I’m sorr
y for the poor girl, and for whoever else this maniac murdered. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Bad things happen. Bad people do bad things. There’s a lot of terrible shit in the world. Okay? I get it. I truly do get it.”

  She trailed her fingers down his ribs, coasting past his navel. Sawyer was unresponsive, and as she reached his pubes he recoiled.

  Dee Dee jerked her hand away.

  “Hey, mister. Let me ask you something.”

  Sawyer cocked his head her way and took her in.

  “You ever fail at anything? Anything at all? Your whole life?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Well, I’ve failed plenty,” she said. “And I’ve butted up against some of the ugliest shit there is in this world, stuff I’ve never told you about and never will. And this show, this thing that’s happening now, this is as close as I’ve ever come to making it. So okay, people died, well, that’s too bad for them. But there’s a lot of ways a person can die, okay, without actually dying.”

  She swiveled around and from the bedside table she nabbed the remains of the joint they’d shared last night. With a huffy sigh, she scratched the Bic into flame, lit the roach, and sucked in a lungful. She didn’t offer a hit to Sawyer. Just drew the bright glowing weed down to her fingertips.

  When she’d released everything from her lungs, she stabbed it out on the wooden tabletop. She rolled out of bed, crossed the room naked. In the nearby buildings Sawyer saw a dozen flashes, the voyeurs doing a quick refocus.

  Sawyer lay back and looked at the light streaming in, at the clouds reshaping along the horizon. He knew the cop drill, and what was coming next.

  While he listened to Dee Dee humming to herself in the dressing room, Sawyer considered his alibi. One that would be impossible to prove, and just as impossible to disprove.

  Last night he left the sound stage at nine-thirty, a fact easily verified by several crew members. He called Dee Dee’s cell to set up a dinner date, but all his calls went to voice mail. Odd, but not without precedent.

  So he returned to her condo, where he’d been living for the last few months. Didn’t ride upstairs, simply got his running shoes out of the trunk of his Honda, slipped into his shorts in the front seat, and went for a late-night jog in the muggy summer night. No security cams in the outside lot. Didn’t swing by the front and wave to Maury, the bellman, just ran off into the darkness.