The Brotherhood of the Wheel

by R. S. Belcher

  Lovina couldn’t help smiling. The little envelope that you got from your ward captain once a month, the one no one ever talked about but everyone took. It was part of the job. You didn’t take it you might be a rat, might find yourself breathless from running down a skell in a pitch-dark alleyway and know no backup was coming anytime soon. Who the hell was going to risk not coming home to their family for a fucking rat? That being said, in Louisiana law enforcement there was bent and then there was crooked. Lovina had worked as hard as she could to stay clean and still do her job. It was a dance, one Roselle had been doing when Lovina was just a child.

  “Truth,” Roselle said. “No conneries, oui? This is one of your cold cases, isn’t it? One of your missing children?”

  Lovina nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Shawn Ruth Thibodeaux, Mary Nell Labarre, and Pierre Markham. Missing since 2011 from Tremé. The oldest, Pierre, was sixteen.”

  “Storyville,” Roselle said as he turned the SUV onto North Ceader Street. There was a cluster of liquor stores, check-cashing fronts, and fast-food restaurants. “Lovina, a sixteen-year-old-boy and two girls going missing in the projects isn’t exactly news. You know that.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I grew up there. I know. These kids don’t fit that profile. No gangs, no drugs, stayed in school. Good families. Someone gobbled those kids up, Leo.”

  “So what brings you across the state five years after the fact?” Roselle asked. “And has me lying to a very good and well-respected friend of mine who is chief of a whole police department?”

  “These kids left a friend’s house a little after nine,” Lovina said. “They had been goofing around on the computer, posting stupid teenage nonsense on Myspace, Instagram … nothing dangerous, nothing sent to anyone we ever traced as dangerous. In the three blocks from their friend’s house to Shawn Ruth’s mother’s house, they vanished off the face of the earth. No trace until a few days ago. A partial latent print found on the inside of Dewey Rears’s front door hit for enough points of comparison to get a notification sent to me.”

  “And how wide a net did you set for your comparison parameters?” Roselle said. He sighed as he pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Wider than normal,” Lovina said. “But close enough to warrant a follow-up—”

  “In your opinion,” Roselle interrupted.

  Lovina nodded. “Yes,” she said. “In my opinion.”

  Roselle watched two teenage boys wander into the brightly lit coffee shop. He scanned them the way street cops do—a preemptive assessment, looking for threat and weakness. Lovina noticed two more kids, younger, both wearing hooded sweatshirts, looking like urban monks. They stood side by side near the pay phone, apparently waiting for someone, looking out in her direction, their faces shrouded in shadow. “Lovina, I know we had an agreement when you took this job,” Roselle said, “and I know that agreement was the only reason you came to CID. But your sister is dead. Your family buried her. You found the people responsible, and you … you saw justice done to them. You have got to come to an understanding that that has nothing to do with this.…”

  “I know that,” Lovina said, her voice rising slightly. “I’ve seen enough shrinks and priests, drank myself blind enough times. I know very, very well that this has nothing to do with that.”

  “You are chasing ghosts, and you’re neglecting living victims to do it,” Roselle said.

  “Those kids are still out there,” Lovina said. “Their families haven’t had a decent night’s sleep for five years, Leo. Don’t they deserve to know?”

  Roselle sighed again. Lovina knew it was as close as he ever got to angry or frustrated. The man was always calm, placid water, no matter what was going on around him, or beneath that water.

  “You’ve been a cop a long time,” he said. “You ought to know by now you cannot save the world. It’s just not that kind of world, Lovina. As your boss, I’m telling you to pack it up. I want you back at work. You have a desk full of active cases. Take the next few days off and get your head screwed on tight. Be back at work Monday. I’ll see what I can do to shake loose any forensic findings the state lab gets on this and get them to you. But no more freelancing. Are we clear?”

  “Rears’s computer?” Lovina asked. “Who at the lab’s working it?”

  “Are we clear?” Roselle repeated.

  “Yes,” she said. “We are clear. Thank you, Leo.” Roselle took a photo out of a plain manila folder and handed it to Lovina. It was the video capture of Shawn Ruth Thibodeaux reaching out toward the camera, her eyes hooded, looking down as she clawed the air. Lovina took the photo. “Thank you,” she said again, smiling.

  “Don’t thank me too much,” Roselle said. “I’m writing up those days off as a disciplinary suspension without pay. It goes in your jacket. That makes me square with the chief for lying to him.”

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re a very good man, Leo?” Lovina said, putting the photo away in her bag.

  “I’m not,” Roselle said, blandly. “Just a sight better than what else is out there.”

  Roselle dropped Lovina off at her car. “See you Monday,” he said. He waited until she unlocked the car and started it before he nodded and drove into the night. Lovina slipped her phone out of her jacket and punched a number from the phone’s memory. Russell Lime answered on the third ring.

  “Hey Love-e-ly Lo-vina,” the senior technical director at the Louisiana State Police Crime Laboratory said. “To what do I owe the pleasure, chère?”

  “Russ, you could charm the scales off a snake,” Lovina said with a smile. “I wish it was pleasure, but it’s business. You have a sec?”

  “Course, chère, what you need?”

  “I’m helping the local PD with that missing persons up in Tallulah,” Lovina said. “I need this Rears guy’s LUDs from his phone and a complete copy of everything from his computer and drives.”

  “He does have some weird stuff on his drives,” Lime said. “All encrypted. He’s got some kind of map program linked with GPS to hyperlinks of disappearances all over the country and going back twenty-odd years. Got it hooked up to some kind of cell-phone tracking program, and social-media archives, too. Very weird. It looks like he’s been going to the sites of the disappearances and GPS logging them, tracking the coordinates.”

  “Really?” Lovina said. She suddenly flashed to something back at Rears’s apartment. “I need all of that, everything.”

  Lovina heard the tack-tack of a computer keyboard as Lime spoke. “Sure enough,” he said. “May take a day or two to get together all the—”

  “I’m sorry to rush you, Russ,” Lovina said, interrupting Lime as she started her car. She saw movement off to her right. Two kids shuffled along the sidewalk on the other side of the street, walking side by side. They both stopped in unison and turned toward her car when her headlights popped on. Both had on skater hoodies like the kids at the coffee shop. For a second, Lovina thought they might be the same kids. She pulled away from the curb and headed toward Dewey Rears’s apartment. “But I need it tomorrow. I’ll meet you at the lab in the morning. Case just got hot, and I don’t want it getting cold on us. I’ll buy the coffee and doughnuts.”

  The computer keyboard kept tapping over the phone. “Okay,” Lime said, sounding slightly distracted. The tapping paused. “Uh, your name isn’t listed as the investigator anywhere on here, chère.”

  “I know,” Lovina said. “Like I said, everything is moving fast. I just spoke with Roselle a few minutes ago.” She let the implication hang. She turned into the now mostly full parking lot in front of the row apartments. Her tires crunched under the loose gravel as she parked in an empty spot, killed her lights, and turned off the engine. “That’s why I’m calling, Russ; I’m kind of already behind the eight ball on this one.”

  “No worries, chère,” Lime said, the keyboard clacking away again. “I’ll hold you to those doughnuts. See you about ten?”

  “Sounds good. Thanks. Good
night,” Lovina said, and hung up. She put the phone in her pocket, grabbed her flashlight and her lock picks, and headed up the dark walk as quietly as she could. Half the apartments didn’t have porch lights on, so she walked between bridges of light and wells of darkness until she came to Rears’s apartment door once again.

  She heard the sound of TVs through open windows, babies crying, and, under it all, the hum of cicadas. As she worked the lock in the darkness, by feel alone, Lovina remembered that her pops told her when she was little that the cicadas stopped their song before midnight, because that time was the height of the nocturnal predators’ hunting hours, and they stilled to avoid the hunters devouring them. She thought she heard a shuffling sound in the darkness.

  The lock popped open, again, and Lovina entered, keeping the lights off. She shut the door and snapped on her flashlight. The circle of light from the beam caught the overturned chair and the beer-stained carpet, the empty can. The apartment air was stale and warm in the darkness, almost claustrophobic.

  She swung the beam in the direction of the kitchen and the office nook. She moved toward the desk, still cluttered with papers. She searched through the scraps, pushing aside the shadow-smudged photo she had seen earlier, until she found the note with the cryptic reference to Four Houses and the map coordinates. She thought for a moment about disturbing the scene and how angry Roselle would be at what she was doing. Even his calm must have limits. She did the equation in her mind, instantly, debating taking a photo of the scrap of paper with her cell-phone camera versus just taking the scrap of paper. Every second she was here increased her chances of getting caught again. She tucked the note in her pocket.

  There was a knock at the door. Lovina froze. If it were cops, they would be kicking the door in, as they did earlier. No, this was someone else. For a second, she thought maybe Roselle had tailed her. She’d rather get busted again. Maybe the guest who had been in the overturned chair had come back? The digital clock on the microwave said it was 9:36, too late for a casual visit for most folks. Lovina walked to the door, unlocked it, and opened it.

  Two children were standing on the stoop, both boys. It took Lovina a second to realize that they were the two boys who had been loitering outside the Dunkin’ Donuts. Both looked to be twelve or thirteen years old. Skinny, very pale, and both had on oversized pullover sweatshirts with hoods. Both boys had their hoods up, obscuring most of their faces in cloth and shadow. One had a black hoodie with the Misfits’ skull logo on its chest; the other kid’s was gray, with the Ron Jon Surf Shop logo over the breast. They both wore baggy jeans and Converse sneakers.

  “Let us in,” Misfit Hoodie said. “Please.”

  Lovina was speechless. The old lady had said kids had been coming around to see Rears, and these two may have been just neighborhood kids looking to score a nickel bag, but Lovina was having trouble thinking. The moment she saw the two boys, she had been filled with a horrible dread, a fear worse than anything she could imagine. It stunned her with its fierce, sudden intensity.

  “Let us in,” Gray Hoodie said. “Please, we need to come in.”

  The fear in her was worse than the most terrifying moments in the war—the first time she was fired on and had to return fire—worse than her years on the streets as a cop, sprinting breathless through dark alleys waiting for a shadow to pop out in front of her with a gun or a knife, worse than the fear of searching the ruins of New Orleans for Delphine after the storm. Worse than finding her, finally. Lovina felt drunk on fear, numb from it. Her instincts screamed like a scalded cat to pull her gun and fire or run. But her legs, her arms, were stone.

  “What do you want?” she managed to say. Even her voice was trembling. What the hell was wrong with her?

  “We want to come inside,” Misfits Hoodie said again. “Let us in.” The voice was monotone, like someone too drugged to feel anything or too insane to register emotion. Lovina had heard the tone many times before, in the back of squad cars, in emergency rooms and psychiatric wards.

  “Let us in,” the boys said in fluid, perfect unison. This time there was a little emotion, a little anger behind the words, but only a little. Lovina felt herself starting to move to one side to allow the boys to enter; she felt that this was some horrible nightmare she needed to wake up from. Her heart was a fluttering, terrified bird struggling to escape its bone cage. She tasted fear, bitter, sharp, and metallic, like tinfoil, in her mouth. If they came in, if they shut the door and she was alone in this dark place with them … no … no … Gun, get the gun.… Her fingers refused to work. She suddenly realized the cicadas had grown silent, long before midnight.

  “No,” Lovina heard herself say as if at from a great distance. Terror was like cotton stuffed throughout her mind and body, muffling everything, diffusing it. She moved back to block the doorway, and she felt the haze in her mind clear just a little, the fear lessen. “No,” she said again. “Who are you?”

  The boys looked up, and she saw their full faces for the first time. One was light-skinned black, the other white. They both had pimples, and their mouths were tight slits of contained rage. But it was their eyes—their eyes—that set off the alarm in Lovina’s ancient, primal, reptile brain. Their eyes were completely black, filled with the deepest, darkest ink, devoid of any light, any detail, any soul.

  “Let … us … in,” the boys said in unison, the acid of anger dripping in their voices now.

  “Shit!” Lovina said, and slammed the door hard in the kids’ faces. She locked it, dropping her flashlight in the process. The half-moon of the beam’s light rolled on the floor, then stilled. There was pounding on the front door now, louder, insistent. Lovina raced through the house. There was a back porch, a back door with a small mud room. She stumbled through the darkness, fumbling with her car keys. She threw open the door and sprinted for her car in the parking lot. Her feet slipped in the loose gravel that crunched under her feet. The thrill of panic, of your mind knowing what your senses can’t tell you—knowing eyes are on you, behind you in the darkness, coming closer. She unlocked the car door and jumped in, slamming and locking it. She jammed the keys into the ignition, almost dropping them. She couldn’t catch a breath; her heart was a fist, punching to be free of her chest. The car revved to life. She snapped on the headlights.

  The two black-eyed children stood before her car, silent, their eyes empty mirrors of oil.

  “No!” Lovina shouted and jammed the car into reverse. Gravel flew everywhere as the car fishtailed. The children stood bathed in the red light of her taillights for a moment, standing side by side, and then were lost to the darkness as she sped out of the parking lot and onto Beech Street. She didn’t slow down, didn’t catch her breath again, until she was on the highway and headed back to New Orleans, to home.

  FOUR

  “10-47”

  The sky was on fire, golds, oranges, and reds burning at the razor edge of heaven and earth. The dark green Honda CR-V glided down U.S. 36 into the setting sun, into the furnace of light. The Honda passed farm fields stretching to the horizon in either direction. Occasionally, the endless looping monotony of farmland would be punctuated with weathered grain silos reaching to the bruised sky, or with a field of jade grass or a stand of trees. The Kansas tags on the SUV said KEROUAC, and the mellow, joyous music drifting out the open windows was Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” The music for this leg of the journey was chosen by the driver, a lean, late twentysomething with a close-cropped fringe of a beard already turning gray and hair of the same color poking out from under his driver’s cap. He wore a checked collared shirt, an unbuttoned tweed vest, and a stifling air of smug superiority.

  “Look at that sunset,” the driver said to his companions. “That, that is why I write poetry.”

  “You write poetry in a never-ending quest to sleep with every woman with a pulse, Gerry,” said a dour slender girl in her early twenties, with long, straight, ink-black, dyed hair and thick black eye makeup. She wore a black m
inidress, torn fishnets, and Doc Marten boots and was sitting in the coveted shotgun passenger seat. “This music makes me want to cut someone besides myself.”

  The three passengers in the backseat laughed. One was a handsome, muscular young man with fashionably cut black hair. The boy was in his early twenties and was dressed in a blue-and-yellow Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt and jeans. He had his arm around the girl sitting in the middle of the backseat. She was a little younger than the boy but carried herself with a practiced maturity. She had long, silky blond hair with straight bangs across her forehead. Her eyes were a brilliant blue and held a wicked intelligence and sheen of cruelty to them behind thick-framed nerd-style glasses. She was attractive, with an athletic body, and wore a blue-and-white University of Kansas T-shirt and cutoff Daisy Duke–style jean shorts.

  “If you kill Gerry, Lexi,” the blonde said, “who’s gonna buy us beer and weed?”

  The girl sitting next to the blonde by the passenger-side rear door nodded in agreement. She was brunette, her long hair pulled away from her face and into a ponytail. She wore a dark-blue-and-black striped top and old, torn Levi’s, as well as a pair of old Converse high-tops. She was slender and had less of a figure than the blonde, but her features were much more delicate and beautiful.

  “Ava’s got a point, Gerry,” the brunette said. “Not to mention your death would probably cause the Rohypnol market to crash.” Everyone laughed again except Gerry.

  “Fuck you, Alana,” Gerry said, and flipped the brunette off. “And fuck you, too, Ava! Last time I invite any of you assholes to a field party.”

  Alana fished her headphones out of her pocket and connected them to her phone. She was already wishing she had stayed home and binged on Sherlock on Netflix, as she’d planned. The only reason she was here was that Ava was her friend as well as her roommate. Lexi was her roommate, too, but, to be honest, she hated the whiny, self-absorbed little bitch. She saw how Lexi and Cole looked at each other and she hated it for Ava. She had talked to Ava about it several times, and Ava had laughed, saying that she didn’t intend to stay with Cole past college, anyway, if that long. What was the fucking point then, to be with someone you didn’t even like or really want? He was a means to an end, and that was Ava’s first and governing principle. He kept her warm, he was pretty, and he fucked good. What else could there possibly be, right?