A Devil's Bargain

by Jonathan Watkins

  “That’s right.”

  “This isn’t a military situation. This is just business. Everyone involved is on the same team. Your team. Am I being clear?”

  “Yes,” Krane answered, but even as the connection died, he wondered. What was the point of reminding him of that? Had he been represented as some sort of loose cannon? The idea remained an itch in the back of his mind as he mounted the steps up to the deck and sat back down.

  Be calm is what he was saying.

  Krane didn’t like it.

  Be calm and, by the way, how many are there with you?

  It sounded too much like the sort of question and advice a hostile would impart to an unsuspecting enemy force. Don’t be on guard. Just you and the freak and a tied-up stranger? That’s all? Excellent. Dandy. See you soon, friend.

  The vague sense of unease stayed with him until Reggie appeared on the deck again. He had accommodated Krane’s demand that he cover himself in something more substantial than a dingy pair of piss-stained underwear by pulling on faded green silk pajama slacks and a blue U of M T-shirt.

  Reggie set a fresh bowl of pot roast down in front of him and shoveled a spoonful of it into his mouth while he looked at Krane expectantly.

  “Well?” he said. “Are you forfeiting?”

  Krane glanced at the card he had set face down on the table earlier. He didn’t move to pick it up.

  “Some people are coming in a couple hours, Reggie. We’ll need to secure you in your suite until they’re gone.”

  He watched for any sign of concern or alarm to appear in Reggie’s bizarre, mismatched eyes. Reggie looked utterly untroubled.

  “You’ve been busy the past few days,” he said and wiped broth from his chin with the back of his hand. “Are they going to take away the man you’re playing with in the cottage?”

  “How the hell do you know about that?”

  Reggie grew a big smile and guffawed. Bits of chewed pot roast landed on the table between them.

  “I live here, too, you know. And I can look out windows when you’re running in and out. Did you kill him? Is that why Father is sending people?” Reggie’s voice turned teasing and he said, “Did you make a mess, John? Did you make a really big mess?”

  Krane, not for the first time, felt a shudder of disgust over Reggie. It wasn’t just his clouded, lemon sherbet eye or his meticulously sculpted scallop eyebrows. It was the way he did not connect. Everything was either boring or amusing. Reginald Chalmers the Third had never once shown to Krane any sign of empathy or complex adult emotion. He wasn’t just a forty year-old boy. Boys, even wild ones, had feelings beyond delight and resentment.

  “I didn’t kill anyone, Reggie.”

  Nothing. Just a slurp from the spoon and a weird smile that didn’t belong.

  “Reggie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything, John.”

  “What did you do to make me have to live here and watch over you?”

  Reggie swiped his arm across the table and sent his bowl and spoon cartwheeling through the air. The pot roast splashed across the deck. Something else to clean up, Krane thought.

  “You’re not allowed to ask me that!”

  Reggie was quivering with resentment.

  “Relax. Okay? Jesus, the mess you made. Look at that.”

  “I didn’t do anything.” The monotone again. Back in place without any pause between shouting outrage and unsettling detachment.

  “Alright,” Krane agreed, just to be past it. “Alright. You didn’t do anything. Not before I was hired. Not three nights ago. You’ve never done anything ever. We good?”

  Reggie stared at the puddle of pot roast on the deck and Krane half suspected that the wretched man-child was going to tell him to go fetch him a fresh bowl. Instead, Reggie smiled again and settled back in his chair. He winked confidently at Krane.

  “Next card,” he said. “Let the massacre continue.”

  A very large part of himself wanted to refuse to play. He wanted to press the issue and get answers about Reggie’s sins, both past and present. But the fact was Reggie was right: he wasn’t allowed to ask. That had been part of his employment agreement. Do not question Reginald the Third. Watch him. Keep him contained. Keep him calm. But do not make inquiries above your station, former First Lieutenant John Albert Krane. He knew the penalty of breaching the terms of his agreement. A cell in a military prison was always waiting for him if he ever disappointed the man who had rescued him from court martial.

  So Krane mashed his curiosity down and picked up the trivia card. Reggie clapped his hands twice and fidgeted in his chair.

  “Charles Dodgson’s relationship with the young Ms. Liddell was the inspiration for the work for which he is best known today. What is this work and under what name did he issue it?” Krane read aloud.

  Reggie’s dirty yellow eye lit with instant recognition. His leering smile revealed his soiled uneven teeth and a lusty chuckle took him over.

  “Oh, that’s an easy one,” he crowed.

  Chapter Ten

  Three blocks east of Winkle’s Tavern and one block south, an abandoned house was burning to the ground. Darren stared at it while Theresa brought his Lexus to a stop. The road ahead was cordoned off and a street cop was waving the lines of traffic west, away from the two-story conflagration. Behind him, firefighters stood around in the street and on the lawn, but none of them were making a move to grab a hose.

  “They’re just letting it burn,” she said.

  Darren watched black gouts of smoke belch out of the windows. Part of the roof had collapsed and orange flames wagged up through the hole. Even with the windows up and the sounds of traffic around him, he could hear the violent crack of timbers splitting from the heat.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  Darren looked away from the fire and said, “What? Nothing.”

  “You looked gone, Fletcher. You never seen a Detroit house fire?”

  “Sure. No. I was just thinking about something.”

  He’d been thinking about a three-bedroom, single story house in Ann Arbor that had also burned to the ground, five years before. That fire had been arson.

  James Klodd, the child killer he’d saved from his just desserts by getting a search warrant thrown out of court, had committed one final act of violence before slinking off to the shadows. He’d burned his own house down.

  Nobody had ever offered a proper explanation for it. The cops on the case called Klodd a psycho who was trying to cover up any evidence in the house by setting fire to it all. A psychiatrist Darren had paid to analyze the cold case would comment that she firmly believed that Klodd’s destruction of his house was a deeply unconscious attempt to destroy his own feelings of guilt and torment over the crime he’d committed. “A sort of Baptismal fire, if you get my meaning,” she’d told him and he’d cut her a check right then just to be done with her.

  Darren knew, though. He had known from the moment he first heard that the killer’s house was now a mound of ash: James Klodd torching his own home was him giving the middle finger to Darren. Everything the monster had done since the day Darren had set him free had been designed to twist the knife and say, “You. You did this. This is the direct result of your handiwork.”

  First was a phone call to Darren’s office from Klodd’s home number, with nothing but an ominous silence on the line when Darren answered—a long silence designed to allow Darren the time to come to the realization that it was the closest anyone would ever get to James Klodd’s confession.

  Two hours later a fellow attorney called and told him to turn on the news: James Klodd’s house was burning down.

  A month after that, the first green envelope had arrived in his mail. No note. Jus
t a child’s tooth inside. Seventeen more envelopes had followed over the years.

  But not anymore, he thought. It had almost been a year since the last one had arrived.

  Sitting there, his eyes illuminated with the weaving flames of another house consumed, Darren was certain of exactly one thing. James Klodd was right. The child killer was malignant and wretched, but he was also correct: only Darren was to blame for his freedom.

  Theresa followed the street cop’s hand signals when it was their turn in line and detoured west onto another block of equally derelict houses.

  “Why the hell would Gil Sharps say James Klodd’s name?”

  “Darren, you can keep asking me that but I ain’t gonna magically have an answer for you.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense. None.”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re sure you can’t remember him saying anything else?”

  “Hey, did I mention I’m on the hook for murder, Fletcher? Cause, you know, that’s what I’m dealing with over here.”

  Darren saw the smoke tumbling up into the summer sky and struggled to push away the gloom that had descended over him since hearing that James Klodd’s name had been spoken by Gil Sharps.

  It was an impossible task. He couldn’t focus on the here and now. He closed his eyes and he saw Shoshanna Green in his mind’s eye—a little black girl with dirty feet and an enthusiastic smile. Dead now for five years. Dead, but never far from him.

  When his phone chimed in his pocket, it was a relief. He grabbed for it like a man reaching for a lifeline, for something to cling to and keep the currents from pulling him down.

  He held it to his ear and said, “Darren Fletcher.”

  “Darren, its Chelsea Hodgens. You missed our meeting.”

  Theresa took a right turn and lit a cigarette.

  “It was three days ago,” the Judge continued. “I know you know that.”

  “Look, Your Honor—”

  “No. None of that. We had a deal.”

  “Well, I can’t make it. Lots of busy lawyering stuff right now. Maybe you can hold the candlelight vigil without me.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I haven’t slept.”

  “We can talk when you get here.”

  “Chelsea, I literally have no time.”

  Judge Hodgens’ tone hardened with easy, practiced authority and she said, “Darren, you’re coming in for a sit down. That’s an order. If I haven’t seen you in the next thirty minutes, I’ll have Dan come and fetch you. You know his opinion of you. He’d enjoy tracking you down and dragging you into my chambers. You wouldn’t.”

  She hung up and Darren slipped the phone back in his pocket.

  Theresa blew smoke out her open window and said, “Is that about my case?”

  “No. She wants to sit around and commiserate about Shoshanna Green.”

  Beside him, Theresa was silent as they traversed a block of overgrown lots.

  “You two still do that?” she said finally.

  “Yeah. She insists. We talk about my cases, my habits and a dead girl. She seems to think it’s the only way to find closure. Whatever that is.”

  “You better go see her.”

  “It’s all just...I don’t know. It’s like self-flagellation. What’s the point? If James Klodd is done mailing her teeth to me, maybe we should just learn to let the whole thing fade away.”

  But even as he said it, he knew how hollow it sounded. Whether or not Gil Sharps’s speaking the monster’s name would lead to some new opportunity to seek out and find the monster, there was still little chance that Shoshanna Green’s ghost would let him forget her.

  “Sounds good to me,” Theresa said. “You gotta move on, Fletcher. That Judge does, too. You can’t drag those chains around with you forever, you know.”

  Darren felt a wry chuckle rise out of him and he shook his head.

  “What? What’s funny?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I have to go. If I don’t she’ll just send her bailiff to come and drag me to her chambers. She was clear about that.”

  Theresa wheeled the Lexus through an abrupt U-turn and groused, “Fine, but I’m driving.”

  “We can still drop you at the bar first. I’m sober.”

  “You had two drinks fifteen minutes ago,” she said.

  “Soberish,” he admitted.

  * * *

  Downtown, Darren left Theresa idling at the curb on St. Antoine Street after explaining, “Hodgens is the judge on your case the next time we go to court. She’d never let you be in the same room as her without the prosecutor there. It’s called an ex-parte meeting and it’s against the rules.”

  She didn’t seem to care one bit, reclining her seat and closing her eyes, so Darren jogged across the street and up the wide set of steps leading to the courthouse. Three floors up, he came to stop in the hallway outside Judge Hodgens’s chambers and watched Dan Finch talking in an animated fashion with two uniformed sheriff’s deputies. The deputies nodded along with what the lanky old bailiff was saying. When he was finished they each marched stiffly and swiftly off in different directions while Finch focused his implacable cop’s stare on Darren.

  “That’s a damn shame,” he said. “I thought for sure I was going to have to come and put the hand on you.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Darren said and nodded toward one of the retreating deputies. “What’s up?”

  Dan Finch looked skeptical and ran a hand over his white, perfectly groomed mustache. With his sun-leathered skin and narrow blue eyes, Darren thought he looked the picture of an Old West lawman.

  “You ain’t heard? Her Honor got a bomb threat.”

  Any curiosity Darren felt over the matter dwindled away. Death threats were a near weekly occurrence in the Wayne County court system. Most often they were traced back to a recently sentenced felon, or a felon’s disgruntled relative. Every now and then, someone due to appear that day would phone one in with the vain hope that it would shut down the court and push his appearance to some future date. It never worked. Security tightened but the process would not be slowed, much less stalled.

  Darren let out a yawn he could not repress, smiled, and said, “Were you here the day that lawyer from Southgate called one in because he wasn’t prepared for his closing argument on a home invasion trial? What was his name? I want to say Frank. Fred? I can’t remember. I think he wound up getting more time than his client did, didn’t he?”

  Finch didn’t smile along with Darren. He looked the lawyer up and down and said, “You not knowing about the bomb threat tells me maybe they didn’t pat you down when you come in.”

  “They waved me through. So what?”

  “So everyone gets the same treatment, boozer. Protocol is protocol.”

  Darren knew what Dan Finch thought of him. He knew that the by-the-book old cop who was in charge not just of Judge Hodgens’s courtroom, but also of her personal safety, viewed Darren Fletcher as a singularly irritating presence who was altogether too friendly with the Judge.

  He saw it now in the look of cold satisfaction spreading over Deputy Finch’s face.

  “Dan, this is bullshit. She called me. I didn’t even want to come in.”

  A cold grin crawled into place beneath Dan’s gunslinger mustache.

  “Sure, you’re Her Honor’s pet cause. She bends every rule she has for you. You’ve been a weight around her neck from the jump. But that don’t mean squat to me. To me, you’re just a drunk with a license to screw up people’s lives. Arms out to the side, Fletcher.”

  Darren rolled his eyes and was opening his mouth to protest when Finch seized him by the shoulder and spun him to the wall.

  “Hey!”

  Finch moved fast, thrusting Darren’s
arms up and patting him down roughly. It was over almost as soon as it had started. When the deputy stepped back, Darren lowered his arms and choked back his outrage.

  “Good thing I forgot the bomb in my car.”

  “Cute.”

  Finch opened the door to the Judge’s office and ushered Darren through. Darren nodded at the Judge’s judicial coordinator, Judy. From behind her desk, her expression was just as chilly as Dan Finch’s. Not for the first time, Darren was keenly aware that the people who worked closest with Chelsea Hodgens didn’t share her attachment to him.

  “Go on in,” Judy told him. “The Judge is waiting.”

  * * *

  As soon as they were standing on the floor of the rented hangar at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Luther realized that Carmen and Dick had agreed on certain professional realities.

  Dick, with his acne scars and his bruised chin, was the first to lay it out as they stood between the parked Cessna and the black SUV that had been waiting for them inside the hangar.

  “Look, no disrespect, but you got to give us a bit of leash from here on out, boss. We’re in the field now and me and Carmen here need to be able to call the shots.”

  Beside Dick, her head only reaching the level of his chest, Carmen nodded in agreement.

  “We need a briefing before we go any further, sir.”

  Luther looked from one to the other and was mildly surprised that he felt no need to lash out at their insistence he do anything. He was not a man who gladly suffered presumptions from his subordinates, but there was nothing routine or ordinary about the tasks he needed to see completed in Detroit.

  Still, they were subordinates. They only needed to know what he chose to tell them. With that in mind, Luther decided to give them just enough.

  “Three days ago, Joe Link miscalculated,” he said.

  “Doesn’t sound like Joe,” Dick said.

  “Who’s giving the briefing, Dick?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I sent Joe to Detroit on company business. While he was here, he pulled on a thread that he shouldn’t have. He spooked our most important client. He made our client think that he was a threat to them. A serious threat.”