Down the Darkest Street

by Alex Segura

  Pete didn’t respond. He watched as the coffee he spilled spread around in front of the store, soaking the stack of newspapers. He’d have to pay for those, he thought. He didn’t care.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” Pete said.

  “Oh, I see,” Kathy said. “I guess this is ‘Pete mad’ mode. Well, look, I had no choice. My editors needed a story on these murders. They knew where I’d been and who I’d spoken to. So it was either write the best column I could, and hope it prods the damn police to do some actual, oh, I dunno, fucking police work, or face the wrath of my editors. And, in case you’d forgotten, the terms of my reinstatement at the paper are not ironclad, dear. I came back because I had a killer story—no pun intended—in the Silent Death fiasco. But once I wrote that, it was back to being on thin ice. My reputation as a troublemaker didn’t just disappear. And once the book money ran out—I didn’t have the forethought to just save it all and get a retail job, like some people—I needed the job as much as I’d needed it the year before. So, I’m sorry if this breached our trust or whatever. Everything we did, mind you, and every conversation we conducted was under the auspices of me being a reporter. Me being an employee of The Miami Times. You knew I was going to make a story out of anything we found, so don’t play innocent and pouty with me. I’m just not going to stand for it. Had you taken point and conducted the interviews yourself, done your due diligence—”

  Pete hung up his phone. He walked through the open store door. He scrolled through his phone contacts and selected a name. He let it ring. He got Emily’s voice mail. It was early. She’d probably gone back to sleep.

  He turned around and grabbed the one dry copy of the paper and returned to Kathy’s column on the front of the local section, with a promo on the paper’s front page. He read it again, sitting down at his usual spot behind the main counter. He didn’t want to deal with the mess of coffee and newsprint just yet.

  On second read, Pete realized the column was good—effective. She had done a fair amount of reporting Pete hadn’t been privy to, including a few cops on the force speaking to her off the record. She painted a picture of an inept department that was in over its head and was now facing FBI interference on a major case. She added context. It would piss off a lot of people.

  Pete still felt uncomfortable about his name appearing in print, even more uncomfortable because he had no idea it was coming. She’d been desperate and had tried to cobble something together with what little info she had. She should have called him. He heard a slight rapping on the store’s glass door. He looked up and saw Aguilera on the other side, waving.

  Pete got up, unlocked the door, and opened it, not stepping aside to let Aguilera in.

  “We’re closed,” Pete said. He knew Aguilera wasn’t here to buy a used copy of Tender Is the Night.

  “Nice work in the paper this morning,” Aguilera said, still with the sardonic smile. “Really appreciate you finally showing us your notes like that.”

  Pete backed up, letting Aguilera step into the store. The door closed behind him.

  “No words, eh?” Aguilera said. “Can’t say I blame you. That Bentley lady sure did a number on you. Some friend, printing all your leads on the front page of your old newspaper.”

  “What do you want, Aguilera?” Pete said. “Something tells me the self-righteous prick act isn’t a new thing you’re trying out today.”

  “Let me enjoy this moment,” Aguilera said, raising a hand. “See, I’m not Miami-Dade PD. I could drag you in if I wanted to. I’m not scared of you. You don’t have national immunity. Your little rogue mission, and Bentley’s dumbass move, helps no one. Now the killer knows exactly what you know. He knows we know about the mirrors and have connected the killings. So, thanks to you, we’re back to square one. In your heroic effort to top yourself, and, I guess, your weird, compulsive need to make your dad’s old colleagues look stupid, you’ve just set us back—probably irreparably.”

  “I’ve just given you a convenient excuse,” Pete snapped. “You sanctimonious asshole.”

  He didn’t see Aguilera’s swing coming, but when it connected, it knocked Pete back into the middle shelves; his body crashed against the side of the massive aisles. He slid down, more dazed than hurt.

  “Fuck you, Fernandez,” Aguilera said. “And fuck your friend. You stick your nose into this again—you even cough in my direction—and you’ll never live a day in peace. I don’t care about the FBI. Or Harras. I’ll do whatever I can to make you miserable. I’m not some local punk. You may have cost some poor girl her life by traipsing around like some bodega Columbo. You make me sick, you know that? You’re just another know-it-all who hasn’t done shit. You’re not even half the man your father was.”

  Aguilera turned and left, not waiting for a response from Pete. He tried to get up, but stayed down. He’d been laid up on his back too often lately.

  Pete saw Aguilera kick over the stack of newspapers still waiting outside the store, sending copies of the paper fluttering in the Miami wind again.

  ***

  Pete dialed the number as he walked to his car. He had to talk to someone, and the people he would have called first were either dead, not responding, or had just been hung up on. Pete waited as the ringer went off twice. A gruff voice picked up the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Jack? Hey, it’s Pete.”

  “Pete? Oh, hey,” Jack said, sounding surprised. “How’s it going, son? Everything all right?”

  Pete balanced the phone on his shoulder as he backed his car out of the parking lot in front of the Book Bin. He pulled the car onto Bird Road, heading east. Home.

  “I’m…I’m not doing so hot,” Pete said. “I fucked up. I fucked up and I’d really just like to go to a bar, order a shot, and just destroy this day, man. It sounds so stupid and cliché.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “In my car,” Pete said.

  “You heading home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” Jack said, his voice calm. “Listen to me: What you’re experiencing is normal. Your body’s getting used to dealing with life sober. Problems, conflict, change—the usual. The kind of stuff that’d make you recoil and head to a bar before can’t have the same effect on you now. You have to fight that feeling off. Otherwise, you’re back to where you started. You don’t get a free pass if you go back. You return as bad a drunk as you left.”

  “Yeah,” Pete said, trying to weave through traffic and focus on the phone at the same time. “I just feel like stuff is unraveling and I should have better control, or a better idea of what to do.”

  “You’re just feeling life,” Jack said. “Life isn’t about closure or calm. You don’t reach a point where everything’s OK. It’s peaks and valleys, and eventually you learn to manage the lows the same way you manage the highs, so you’re not knocked out by either. That’s the tricky part. Riding the waves.”

  “You’re right,” Pete said. He was almost there. “I’m just going to go home and get some sleep and see what I can do about this when I wake up. It’ll be fine.”

  He turned his car onto his street. He could see his house.

  “You bet it will,” Jack said. “Call me if you need anything else. And Pete?”

  He pulled into the carport.

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t talk to newspaper reporters if you can help it,” Jack said. “They’ll only hassle you. I heard the FBI is involved now, too? Yeesh.”

  “Yeah, they brought in two agents, Harras and Aguilera,” Pete said, rubbing his chin. “Harras seems like a smart guy. So does Aguilera, if a bit of a hothead. He’s got a temper.”

  “Aguilera’s dad was a cop, too,” Jack said. “Good man. Died too young. He worked around the same time as your father, Broche, and me.”

  “He died? When?”

  “Not sure,” Jack said. “He was Miami PD, too. Doubt his son was more than a few years old. Shame. Lots of stories from those days. Prob
ably too many. When you’re free, we can sit down over a few cups of coffee and you can humor a retired cop.”

  “Yeah?” Pete said, his brain wired, too agitated to really listen to Jack’s rambling beyond registering that he was talking. “Anyway, thanks for picking up the phone. Sorry to bother you. I just needed to talk to someone, I guess.”

  “Stop apologizing,” Jack said. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Answer me one question before you go.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Have you got a sponsor yet?”

  “No,” Pete said. A sponsor was someone who helped you work the twelve steps of the program. Pete had avoided anything that would require regular contact or anything resembling homework. He hoped that by just going to these meetings from time to time, he’d be able to keep his life in some kind of order. He wasn’t sure it was working.

  “I just haven’t found the right person,” Pete said.

  “That’s a weak excuse,” Jack said. “But we all work this program at our own speed. Look, if you need to talk, I’m here. If you want someone to help you with this in a more formal way, I’m here too. Helping you helps me, OK?”

  “Yeah, OK. Sounds good. Take care,” Pete said. He hung up and turned off the engine. He sat in the driver’s seat for a few seconds. He needed to take a day or two to figure out what to do next. But first, he needed some rest. Pete got out of the car.

  He walked to the front of the house. He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door. The house was dark. Was Emily still asleep? He looked around. Everything seemed to be fine. He made an immediate left and headed to his—their—room. He pushed the door open slowly, trying not to wake Emily. Except she wasn’t there.

  He turned around and walked back down the hall to the guest room, where Emily had been storing her things and where she slept for the first few days of her stay, before they’d decided to give it another try. He opened the door.

  The room was tidy—the bed was made, the dresser was cleaned off, and the two nightstands on opposite sides of the bed had been wiped clean. Costello lay in the middle of the bed, curled up and sleeping, purring to himself. Something was off, Pete thought. Why had she tidied up this room, which had been no more than a storage space for her? He walked to the closet and opened the sliding doors. That’s when he knew. The closet, which had once been packed with Emily’s overgrown wardrobe, was empty. He looked up at the shelf above the hangers and saw only space. Her luggage, which consisted of four or five large suitcases, was gone, presumably with her clothes in it.

  He took a step backwards and then tumbled onto the bed, scaring Costello away. He felt something under him, a piece of paper. His heart beat faster. He knew what it was. Had he missed it, or just tried to deny it was there somehow?

  Emily’s handwriting had always been good, but this was extra legible. She didn’t want to leave anything up for debate. That’s just what would motivate her, legibility. He stood up, the single sheet in his hand, and walked to the living room. The page was still in his hand, unread, the sweat from his palm seeping onto it.

  He sat down at the head of the small dining room table.

  Pete,

  I don’t know what else to say besides ‘I’m sorry.’ You don’t deserve this. You’ve been wonderful to me. I’m just not in the right place for this. I have a husband.

  I’m so hard on you, Pete. I keep telling myself I’m trying to be strong and supportive, but most of the time I just feel mean and cutting with you, and that’s a problem I can’t fix living in your house and sleeping in your bed. I also can’t make myself accept that you will continue to put your life on the line like this, especially with what happened before. But I can also see it’s not going away.

  You’ve made so much progress in the last year. Since Mike died, since you stopped drinking.

  But we don’t have a future. What would we do? Get married? Have a kid? What we had together once is gone, and what we tried to have together now, while exciting and warm, was stillborn.

  I do love you, in a way I probably won’t ever love anyone else. And I know you care about me. But this is for the best. Please don’t try to contact me.

  Be strong,

  Emily

  He grabbed the piece of paper and crumpled it up, feeling the edges of the sheet slide against his skin. He didn’t cry. That would come later, he thought. He felt cold, a strange numbness—that he’d often sought to obliterate.

  He tossed the paper onto the floor. He walked down the main hall and into his room. He closed the door behind him and slid into bed. The bright morning sun crept into the room through the blinds. Pete buried his face in his pillow and closed his eyes, letting the darkness he created take him away.

  “All the dreams you had.

  It’s been years and you’re still mad.

  You say you miss me in your memory.

  You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  —Kathleen Edwards, “What Are You Waiting For?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  He saw the light flicker on. He saw Fernandez walk across the living room and head toward the back of the house, to his bedroom. His lady friend wasn’t around—she’d left a few days before. She’d been almost frantic in her packing.

  Julian had chosen to pay attention to the fly swirling around his head. Fernandez was not stupid. He knew Julian had him in his sights. Luckily, Fernandez had other distractions. He still checked the liquor cabinet from time to time.

  He saw Fernandez step out of the house. He waited for Fernandez to get in his car and back out of the driveway. The sputtering Toyota turned onto the street and sped off. He slipped on a pair of leather gloves. He whistled softly as he stepped out of the car and walked toward the front door.

  ***

  Even under the shade of a giant umbrella, the Miami heat and humidity were still wearing on Pete. He shook his glass to make the ice move around and took a few small cubes in his mouth, crunching on them to pass the time. He hadn’t ordered any food yet, despite being starved and despite being at Versailles, one of the tastiest and best-known Cuban restaurants in Miami. He looked out onto the street. It was the middle of the week in the middle of the day. Not a lot of activity, aside from a cluster of Cuban viejos sipping coffee under an awning at the restaurant’s pickup window. The fast, pitter-patter beat of the Spanish exclamations and stories being shared a few feet away comforted Pete.

  “Are you waiting for a date?”

  Pete turned around and saw Kathy’s lanky figure standing between him and the boiling sun. She cast a long shadow.

  “Kind of feels like it, no?” he said.

  “I guess,” she said as she dropped her purse down on the large table and sat to Pete’s right. “I’m assuming this means you’re not mad at me anymore?”

  “I’m still annoyed at you,” he said. “But I need your help.”

  “Well, that’s encouraging, I guess,” she said. “Why are we here? I mean, I’m excited to hork down some carne asada and all, but a fancy lunch isn’t your usual way of expressing annoyance. Also, are we waiting for people to join us?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Wonderful. It’s going to be like that,” she said, looking around the outside seating area, hoping for a waiter. Her eyes found two other people, though. “Who are those two dudes heading over here? They appear to know you.”

  “I know them,” Pete said, putting his glass down and waving at Harras and Aguilera.

  “I don’t like this,” she said. “You didn’t tell me I’d have to interact with strangers.”

  “Just let me take the lead,” he said, his voice lower as the FBI agents approached the table.

  “That’s fucking reassuring,” she whispered back.

  Harras reached the table first and nodded, sitting down across from Pete, Aguilera taking the seat to his left as he scanned Kathy and shot daggers at Pete.

  “Glad you could make it, gentlemen,” Pete said. “You guys know Kathy Bentley. Kathy, this is Harras and
Aguilera. Two of the FBI’s finest.”

  Kathy nodded. She looked confused. Her eyes widened at the mention of FBI.

  “Get to the point,” Aguilera said. “This better not be a waste of time.”

  Harras shot Aguilera a dirty look.

  Pete laid his hands palms-down on the table and looked at the agents sitting across from him. “I want us involved.”

  “Involved in what?” Harras said, his tone sharp.

  “In the case,” Pete said, his voice clear, his eyes locked on Harras. “We knew more than you did. We know more now. Nina Henriquez is still missing—she might be alive. If you don’t let me help, I’ll go back to the press and we’ll blow the lid off this entire thing, and show how incompetent you guys are.”

  “Are you fucking crazy, man?” This time Aguilera responded, half rising from his seat. “We’ll throw you in jail in a second for interfering with a police investigation. Do you think we won’t do that?”

  “Shut the fuck up, Aguilera,” Harras said, his voice low but forceful. Aguilera twitched in protest but stayed quiet.

  Harras looked at Pete and Kathy, like an annoyed parent forced to discipline an unruly child.

  “Forgive my partner,” Harras said. “His tone is off. But he’s in the right ballpark. You mess with this investigation, and it’s going to be easy to lock you away.”

  “I’m sure,” Pete said. “But by then the damage is done. The guy who brought down the Silent Death is calling the Miami PD and the FBI incompetent? People will buy it. Whether it’s true or not, or whatever the details are. That can be resolved later.”

  Harras looked at his hands and took a deep breath.

  “What’s your angle?”

  “You can’t be seriously engaging this asshole,” Aguilera said, turning to Harras, a look of shock in his face.

  Harras shot Aguilera another glance before turning back to Pete and Kathy. “Fernandez—answer the question. What’s your angle with this?”

  “I want to help,” Pete said. “I can help you. You must see that by now. I’ve been dancing along the fringe of this thing—these kinds of things—for a while now. I want to be an active part. I think I can help nail this guy before any other girls go missing. Or die.”