A Devil's Bargain

by Jonathan Watkins

  “Why?”

  “We’re done here. And there’s no reason to steal from the hotel. Those cards can’t be cheap.”

  He handed over the card and Issabella tossed it onto a corner of the nearest bed.

  In the elevator again, she said, “Gil Sharps sure knew how to fold his clothes neatly. He was a boxer-brief man.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a clue.”

  “You’re a boxers man.”

  “I wear boxers. How is that important?”

  “Boxer-briefs look nice, don’t you think? More flattering. I think so. But whatever. That’s your call.”

  He looked down at her but couldn’t see if she was smiling underneath the brim of her inside-out baseball cap.

  * * *

  Issabella pulled the Lexus to the curb outside their office building. Darren watched her get out of the car before he slid over into the driver’s seat. She collected her purse and briefcase from the back seat, then leaned down at his window.

  “I’m going to work on a bond motion. When the courts open, I’ll see if I can get in for Theresa’s arraignment. If I can convince the arraigning judge to agree to personal recognizance or a cash bond—”

  “I’ll put up any amount if they agree to a cash bond,” he said.

  “I know that. I’m sure Theresa does, too. Don’t worry, Darren. I’m going to get her out.”

  As tired as Issabella looked, she’d rarely ever looked as lovely to him as in that moment. He realized that somewhere in their few years together as a couple and as law partners, Issabella Bright had become a better lawyer than him. He had ten years more practice experience on her but the woman vowing to free his oldest friend had persistence, work ethic and a keen intelligence.

  “You remember when we first met?” he said.

  “Of course. You were rumpled and a little drunk.”

  “I was charming.”

  “Yes. That, too.”

  “And you talked about how you had a vision of the lawyer you’d be one day, and how it seemed like it was all impossible and you’d never get there.”

  Issabella rolled her eyes.

  “Maybe I was being a bit dramatic,” she said.

  “You’re that lawyer now, Izzy. You got there.”

  “We can’t have sex right now, Darren, so don’t say that sort of thing to me.”

  “I love making you flustered.”

  “Go find out what evil things your brother and his firm are up to. It’s bound to be vital if we have to start thinking about a trial.”

  They agreed and Darren was pulling away from the curb when he heard her call his name. He pushed the brake down and she ran up to the window.

  “I just thought of something,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I finally have an innocent client. I’ve never had one of those.”

  “Well, try and make the feeling last, kid.”

  Chapter Three

  It was nearing five in the morning when Darren parked his Lexus in his reserved spot inside the underground parking garage beneath the Fort Shelton Tower. He wheeled Gil Sharps’s improbably heavy metal suitcase into the elevator, which whisked him smoothly up to the very top floor. It delivered him to a round, marble-floored vestibule with a single door directly opposite the elevator. Darren keyed his way through the door and stepped into the foyer of his apartment.

  Sam hustled around him, circling and sniffing and thudding his tail against the wall, then the door, the other wall, and around again.

  The Labrador let out a series of high plaintive sounds.

  “I know,” Darren said. “I know, buddy. I know. Stop.”

  He maneuvered Gil Sharps’s suitcase into the living room and left it there in the center of the floor. Sam sniffed the suitcase.

  In the kitchen, Darren brewed a pot of coffee. Sam paced and huffed air out his nose like a cartoon bull.

  “Sam, I know. Just give me a minute. Can you do that?”

  Darren drank the first cup out on the ivy-draped terrace. The lights along the length of the Ambassador Bridge were still bright and visible in the thinning murk of pre-dawn. He yawned like an animal and rubbed at his face. He thought about Gil Sharps and tried to imagine where the dead man might have kept the key to the suitcase.

  A second cup of coffee was consumed in periodic gulps between the acts of splashing cold water over his face in the upstairs bath and changing into a fresh set of clothes.

  By the time he padded back down to the living room, Darren had been awake for twenty-three hours. He felt like a man divided into two incompatible halves. He was teeming with the jittery, uncomfortably alert effect of all the caffeine he’d ingested since dining in the MotorCity Casino’s buffet room. But at the same time, that alertness felt wholly insubstantial. Thin. No real match for the other half of him that was plodding with exhaustion, which yearned to overcome the chemical dosing and shut down.

  Darren stared at the suitcase with heavy-lidded eyes. He considered going back out, buying a hammer and battering the suitcase’s locks until they buckled. It seemed like a last resort. He couldn’t know what was inside the suitcase. Maybe something important to him and to Theresa. And maybe that unknowable thing was fragile. The option of the hammer would wait. He needed another, better option.

  He retrieved Gil Sharps’s set of keys from his pocket and began to sort through them again in a superstitious hope that he had simply missed something. He stopped and stared at what was in his hand.

  “You idiot,” he whispered.

  Sam uncoiled from where he had positioned himself in a curled heap at the front door. He cocked his cinderblock-sized head.

  “Not you,” Darren said. “Me. I’m the idiot.”

  He poured the remainder of the coffee pot into a black insulated travel mug, took the suitcase by its handle, and fetched Sam’s retractable leash from the closet.

  Outside, in the alley between the Fort Shelton high-rise and the office complex next door, Darren waited with his hand loosely holding the leash while Sam shivered through his business.

  “You don’t have to stare at me while you do that, you know.”

  Darren used a plastic baggie to finish the chore, deposited it in a corner trash bin, and walked down into the parking garage with the suitcase trailing behind him and the yellow Labrador loping ahead. He buckled the now content Sam into his safety harness in the back seat of the Lexus and heaved the suitcase onto the lip of the trunk, and then inside.

  Behind the wheel and easing out into the gray of the waking day, Darren shuddered as another yawn clamored fiercely up out of him. In the rearview mirror, Sam stopped making wet streaks across the window with his nose and looked around in confusion at the abrupt sound.

  Darren reached back with one hand and patted Sam’s muzzle.

  “Miles to go before I sleep, buddy. Miles to go.”

  Half an hour later, Darren was three blocks east of Winkle’s Tavern when he finally found Gil Sharps’s red Acura RLX. When he slowly drove alongside it and pressed the remote on Gil’s set of keys, as he had done to every car in the neighborhood so far, he was rewarded with an answering flash of parking lights and a chirp from the car’s horn.

  “Sam, I am one smart son of a gun,” Darren said as he wheeled to the curb behind the Acura.

  He left Sam there with the back windows cracked and stepped out onto the pitted asphalt. Like most of the neighborhood surrounding his friend’s bar, this street was a series of weed-thick lots, only occasionally separated from one another by the crooked lines of old, half-collapsed fences. Demolished houses were heaps of brick and concrete centered in the lots. Not for the first time, Darren looked at the long row of those heaps dwindling to the horizon and thought they looked like the burial mounds of a time lost and forg
otten civilization. An archaeological prize to be sifted through for signs of what had happened, where the people had gone and why they had vanished.

  Darren pushed the button to unlock the Acura and sat down in the driver’s seat. The black interior of the car was utterly clean, with no signs of debris in the foot wells, no coffee stains in the console cup holders, and no clothing lint in the folds of the seats.

  A rental, Darren decided. Regularly cleaned and maintained. He popped the glovebox, looking for the rental agreement, but only found the car’s operating manual. Darren frowned, his confidence over having found the Acura now tinged with doubt.

  There’s nothing in this car. He was careful enough not to park his car on the same block as the building he was going to break into. He’s one of Luther’s minions, he isn’t going to just leave clues to his identity lying around...

  He flipped the visors down, hoping a key would fall out of one of them. A key did not fall out of one of them.

  Okay. Then why did he have all of his ID on him? Was that careful? Maybe because he’s a human, Darren. People aren’t consistent.

  He turned himself sideways and began searching in the folds of the seats. He got out and moved the seats all the way forward, then back. He got down on his knees and peered under the seats. He scoured the back seat. He opened the trunk, the interior of which was just as immaculate as the passenger compartment. He yanked the carpeted panel up and searched through the sunken space where the spare tire was bolted in place.

  Only after he had done all of those things again, this time in an aggravated rush, did Darren finally close the doors, shut the trunk, push the button to re-lock the Acura, and sit back down in the driver’s seat of his Lexus.

  Sam breathed on the back of Darren’s neck and slapped his tail against the door.

  “Okay. Maybe not quite as smart as I was leading you to believe,” Darren said as he put the Lexus in drive. He pulled slowly away down the street and made the decision that he would abandon his quest for the missing suitcase key.

  What he needed was a hammer.

  Chapter Four

  There was nothing to like about Reggie’s suite of rooms in the second-level basement.

  John Krane stood at the door that lead to Reggie’s main living area, at the other end of the hallway from the entrance to the tennis court, and recoiled at the stink. It was an altogether unique stench, a swampy co-mingling of human smells and of food left to decay into mold, of armpits and congealing milk.

  Krane touched the button beneath the speaker plate beside the door and breathed through his mouth. It didn’t help as much as he’d hoped.

  “Leave me alone.” Reggie’s monotone, distorted through the digital static of the speaker plate. Krane pushed the button again, holding it this time.

  “You know what?” he said. “I’m not going to come in. You’re coming out. Meet me in the kitchen, Reggie. Five minutes.”

  “Go away.”

  “Five minutes. After that, I’m coming in through this door and dragging you out by your balls.”

  “I know you can’t do that. Go away.”

  Despite the wretched stink and despite all the varied frustrations of the last few days, Krane smiled and felt a cruel satisfaction as he held the button again and slowly, clearly spoke the nine-digit passcode out loud.

  It was the same passcode that, if tapped into the keypad directly beneath the speaker plate, would allow him access to the only set of rooms that, per his employment, had always been denied him. Reggie had been allowed exactly that much autonomy by his father and his father’s men.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Things have changed,” Krane said. “Your father is concerned, Reggie. Five minutes or I come through this door.”

  He waited a moment, then turned to jog back up the stairs.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Reginald said.

  Krane didn’t answer. He rushed up past the two basement levels until he was in the clean air of the ground floor. He took long, deep breaths and kept moving. When he was at the sliding door that lead out onto the deck, Reggie’s monotone issued out of the estate’s speakers, reverberating through every room.

  “I didn’t do anything. You shouldn’t be allowed to have that code. I didn’t do anything, John. I don’t see why I’m the one being punished.”

  Krane stepped out onto the deck and into the soft light of morning. The estate’s backyard was a rolling carpet of Kentucky bluegrass that went on for two hundred feet, undisturbed, before terminating at the base of the property’s stone wall. Past that, the canopies of an old and tangled woods.

  A speaker was built into the exterior wall of the mansion, just above the ten-person Jacuzzi in a corner of the deck.

  “John, I want you to call my father.”

  Krane bounded down the steps and onto the lawn. He turned left. Out there in the western expanse of yard stood a one-room, cobblestone cottage with a roof of black slate. John spied the wisp of smoke drifting out of the little cottage’s chimney and was mildly surprised the fire he’d built in the hearth the night before was still struggling on.

  “I want to talk to Father. He...he needs to hear my side of things.”

  Krane reached into the pocket of his jeans and brought out the key to the cottage’s front door. Early in the course of his employment, he’d taken a real liking to the old homestead. It had been built in 1703 by one of the men who’d accompanied French explorer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac during the founding of what would one day be Detroit. Like that anonymous Frenchman who had built the cottage, Krane enjoyed being alone inside it. It had been preserved perfectly, even after the Chalmers family’s fortune and clout had allowed them to ensconce what should have been a historical site away from public view. There was no electricity in the cottage. There were no speakers in the cottage.

  “John? I didn’t do anything, John.”

  Inside, the fire he’d built the evening before was now reduced to a gray mound of smoldering ash and bits of charred pine.

  “I’ll be up in ten minutes, John. We’ll sort this out.”

  Krane shut the door behind him and turned to look at the man who was bound in one corner of the room. He was asleep.

  Or faking, Krane reminded himself.

  The man he’d taken custody of three days ago was stripped naked, his wrists and ankles bound with fishing line. He was a big, hairy beast of a man, with pale skin and hands that looked like they belonged on a stonemason. As brutish as he looked, his captive had proven even cruder in his reactions to Krane’s attempts to solicit information from him.

  All along the hairy length of his body, the man bore the bruises and lacerations Krane had inflicted upon him—each of them earned by the man’s unyielding refusal to do anything but laugh and taunt Krane’s attempts at interrogation.

  The man’s left eye was a swollen, purple wound. He’d earned it when he’d told Krane, “Shit, son, Alice Munser hit me harder than that when I pinched her butt in third grade.” His nose was a mashed lump of blood, the result of asking Krane, “You getting a boner from this? I hope so. One of us should get something out of all the huffing and puffing you’re doing, buddy.”

  Krane hated him. Not for the insults. He hated him because he knew for certain this man would break before he would ever bend. Some men were like that. He’d seen it in the desert. When the majority of prisoners fell all over themselves to talk and cooperate at the first hint of physical pain, a minority of others would put on a brave face and keep their lips zipped. Of those, most still talked after enough pressure was applied. Still, even then, there would be one among them who wasn’t just full of bravado and stubbornness. Mere stubbornness couldn’t account for that kind of unyielding resolve. Krane didn’t pretend to understand it.

  He only knew that the man on the floor was one o
f that sort, the rarified soul that would die before it gave up anything useful to him.

  It was maddening. Now, this morning, he needed answers. More than ever, he needed someone to explain to him what Reginald Chalmers the Third had been doing three nights ago instead of going to see a movie. More than that, he needed to know why it had brought such attention.

  Because attention paid to Reggie could easily become attention paid to him.

  Krane knelt down and examined the fishing line that bound the man’s wrists and ankles. There were cuts where the monofilament had dug into the flesh, but they were three days old. He’d stopped struggling once it was clear that the monofilament would only grow tighter if he continued.

  Satisfied that the man was still immobilized, Krane relocked the door, slipped the old brass key in his pocket, and walked back up to the deck, through the slider door, and down the hall to the kitchen.

  The house was silent again. Reggie had apparently run out of useless things to say and accepted the fact that he was going to have to come up out of his stinking lair long enough for a talk.

  Krane selected a single-serving pod of coffee from a drawer full of them and fed it into its brewing machine. He wasn’t particularly fond of coffee, but he hadn’t slept in too long. He wanted to be alert for his talk with Reggie.

  Behind him, he heard the door open. The squeak of Reggie’s cheap, plastic-soled sneakers on the floor tiles. Krane took a sip of coffee and stared out the kitchen window at the woods beyond the wall. Those woods went on for half a mile in all directions and were very old. He had ventured out into them only once and was quickly turned back by the thick choke of vines and brush that made passage too difficult to be worth the effort.

  “I already called your daddy’s men,” he said. “Two hours ago. We’ve got a real situation here because of you, Reggie.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “You didn’t go see a movie the other night, Reggie. That was a lie. I know where you went. And guess what? Someone else knows, too, because they followed you home.”