Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  “The one you keep in a little holster bolted to the underside,” the man confirmed with a shallow nod of his head. “Honesty is good. Very good. You won’t reach for it.”

  “Of course not,” Gunther sputtered, and it had less authority in it than he intended. “Look, just what the hell do you think you’re doing here? This is private property. I’m calling my lawyer.”

  And he was. He was reaching for the phone.

  “Look out the window first.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m being so nice.”

  Gunther had the receiver in his hand. He leaned back in his chair, working into the bluster he was so keen in employing with the people under him. He was good at bluster.

  “This is nice? Barging in here—”

  “This is nice. Do you want to see not nice?” The agent continued in that same mild, conversational tone. “Look out the window.”

  “Oh, fine. Fine. You want me to look out the window? What’s that change? What’s that change about the fact that this is private property?” He was on his feet and marching over to the window, his mouth running on autopilot, as if he could talk fast enough to outrun the panic that was insisting he was in a life-altering situation. “You think I don’t have a class A lawyer? You think I’m some little shit, you can just push around and—”

  The agent pulled the cord on the blinds, sending them parting away to either end. The Arizona sun hung low against the horizon, fat and red. Gunther squinted out at the parking lot.

  Three black SUVs were parked in the lot. One was blocking the north entrance. Another was blocking the south entrance. The third was pulled up directly in front of his office. A dozen men in black windbreakers that said FBI on their backs were milling about, several of them turning to stare implacably at Gunther in the window.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “The beginning, Gunther.”

  Two more FBI agents appeared in his field of vision. Between them, Francine was being hustled toward the SUV parked in front of the office. She had her purse clutched like an infant against her breast. One of them opened the rear door of the SUV and ushered her in. Francine shot a glance over her shoulder, searching the window, finding him there looking at her. Her eyes were round saucers of fear.

  “Francine...” he heard himself breathe.

  Then she was gone, swallowed up into the interior of the vehicle, the door shut tight behind her.

  When he turned away from the window, the gray FBI agent was standing at the desk, the aforementioned hidden pistol held in his palms. He turned it over, examining it. After a moment, he slipped it in his pants’ pocket.

  “Your wife is already in one of our cars,” he said. “On her way down to the office. Your partner, Mr. Burton, was picked up at his son’s T-ball game. I understand he was less than cooperative. He made a scene. You’re not going to make a scene, are you?”

  Gunther glanced back out the window. The SUV at the north entrance had been pulled forward, allowing the vehicle containing Francine to roll out and away. Gunther stared after her with unblinking eyes, the cocaine in his bloodstream finally kicking in and pushing him into a surreal alertness. Everything seemed to stand out vividly: the sun’s flashing reflection in the sunglasses of the assembled agents, the lingering smell of Francine on him, the thunder of his heart.

  He was high as hell and alone in a room with an FBI agent.

  “What do you want?”

  The agent reached over and pushed the lockbox shut on top of the baggie of cocaine. His fingers drummed across the lid.

  “Just to talk,” he said. “About Red Mesa. And Howard Bright. That’s enough of a start, I think. We can get to accessory to kidnapping after that. And conspiracy. Maybe murder, if your friend in Detroit goes apeshit and does the stupid thing. But we’ll start at the beginning and just take it from there. Put your coat on, Mr. Kriegs.”

  Gunther listened to every word, and watched the agent’s easy, amused expression. The cocaine was red-lining his heart, breaking him out into a heavy sweat. He yanked at his collar, tearing the button loose. He drew a shuddering breath down into his lungs.

  “I need to call my lawyer,” he gasped.

  “Yes you do,” the agent nodded readily. “Now get your fucking coat and stop wasting my time.”

  Chapter Twelve

  They waited until it was very late.

  Theresa parked the van on a side street and the two women stared at the upper floors of the hospital peeking over the parking garage ahead of them.

  “We’re gonna get noticed,” Theresa said again.

  “No we won’t. We’re far enough away.”

  “Izzy, we’re in a big old ‘78 Chevy van painted with unicorns shooting rainbows out their horns. We’re gonna get noticed.”

  Issabella frowned out into the darkness. The street was deserted, though that was no real indication of time in Detroit. Most streets were deserted morning, noon and night. They were parked on a divided, two-lane thoroughfare. The parking garage ahead of them looked unlit and unstaffed.

  She’s right, Issabella conceded silently. If the authorities don’t spot us, somebody worse probably will.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked after a moment, to get her mind off the idea of them getting accosted or carjacked.

  “I dunno,” the big woman admitted with a shrug. She blew smoke out her window and shifted her rump in the seat. “I figure I gotta distract whoever’s watching your old man so you can go have your talk with him, right?”

  “That sounds right.”

  “Pull a fire alarm?”

  “That’ll just get everyone more alert.”

  “Fake a heart attack in front of them?”

  “I don’t know...”

  “I got my shotgun in the back here,” Theresa said, jabbing a thumb over her shoulder. “I could grab it and—”

  “Oh my god, no.”

  Issabella rubbed her temples and scowled. They had already wasted too much time waiting for darkness to set. It’d been hours, and she wasn’t any closer to having a real idea of what to do than when she climbed out the bathroom window of the Gas Light.

  “I could find a phone, call in a bomb.”

  “Stop.”

  “Just throwing ’em out as they come along.”

  “Stop. Just let me think a minute.”

  Theresa dragged on her cigarette and was quiet. Issabella closed her eyes and tried to think of something, anything, that would be a smart direction to take. Judge Hodgens had sent her on this path with her little speech, and Issabella had seized on to it readily enough. But now, sitting in the dark with Theresa and her really bad ideas, Issabella was beginning to feel absolutely lost. It was one thing to charge forward with the intention of taking action. It was something entirely different to actually be effective in that action.

  “Izzy.”

  “Let me think a second, okay?”

  Sitting there with her eyes screwed shut, she knew that Darren would already have had a plan. He would have concocted a course of action—one that, no doubt, would sound insane to anyone else—and would be pursuing it single-mindedly. He wouldn’t have been sitting in a van in the middle of nowhere wondering what to do.

  Ugh. Don’t do that. Stop wallowing.

  “So what’s your old man look like, anyway?”

  “Theresa, look—”

  “Tall, handsome guy? Like maybe could be in one of those cholesterol medicine commercials?”

  “How could you know—”

  “That him? With the butt?”

  Issabella opened her eyes and saw Theresa pointing out the windshield.

  Howard Bright was struggling to crawl over the half wall surrounding the parking garage. He was wearing only a hospital gow
n and had one leg planted on the ground, the other still caught on the lip of the half-wall.

  “No. Way.”

  “It’s him, ain’t it? Not a bad caboose for an old guy.”

  Howard hopped, pulled his leg clear of the wall, spun around with one heel planted in the grass and toppled into a heap. Issabella watched him struggle to his feet, saw him begin to shamble awkwardly toward the road. He was limping profoundly, his right leg seeming incapable of keeping up with where he was telling his body to go.

  “Whudda we do here, Izzy?”

  Howard paused at the edge of the roadway and peered into the gloom toward the lingering van. His eyes were wide and desperate, his mouth set in a grimace that was a mixture of pain and determination. He looked past them, then down the opposite direction. He began to hobble out into the road.

  “Izzy.”

  “Right.”

  “Right? Right, what?”

  “Let’s...”

  From beyond the parking garage, down where the hospital complex began, a police siren leaped to life.

  “That’d be for your old man,” Theresa prodded.

  “What...what is he doing?”

  “Okie-dokie. You go ahead and be shell-shocked. I got this. Buckle up, Izzy,” Theresa snapped. She turned the key and the old van’s engine rumbled in response. Without pulling the knob for the headlights, Theresa guided the shuddering beast onto the road and cranked her window down.

  Howard had reached the grassy median and was facing away from the van as it bore down on him from the darkness. He had the coiled, panicky posture of a hunted rabbit, looking in every direction for some sign of safety. His head spun around as the wheezing van emerged from the night.

  “Hey!” Theresa shouted out the window. “Mr. Bright, right?”

  Issabella saw her father’s face clearly as he stared in terror at the unicorn-mobile descending down on him. It was the man from her memories. Only where that man had been eroding over time and growing less distinct, he was real and exact now—older, certainly, but suddenly real and right there. Her breath hitched in her throat.

  Her father heard his name shouted out the window of the van, and he scrambled across the median, propelled forward on his good leg. The van continued on past him.

  “Crap. Think I spooked him. Here we go.”

  Theresa cranked the wheel to the right and the van veered in response. She cranked it back to the left, the wheels squealed, and they were bounding over the median divider. The unicorn-mobile lurched and jounced wildly over the curb. Issabella was heaved up out of her seat, struck her head against the roof, and came back to earth in a stunned jumble. They cleared the median and Theresa gave another tremendous yank on the wheel, bringing them back to bear on Howard Bright’s retreating buttocks.

  “Told you to buckle up,” Theresa said, glancing at Issabella.

  The big woman goosed the accelerator and the van lurched into a higher gear. She pulled the headlight knob and Howard’s backside was suddenly starkly illuminated. He continued to shamble away, casting a saucer-eyed look of terror over his shoulder at the advancing behemoth.

  “Izzy, when this is all over, you just remember one thing,” Theresa announced and yanked her door open. “I’d do just about anything to get Darren out of a jam.”

  The van came up alongside Howard. Theresa threw her door open wide and it collided against Issabella’s father with an audible metallic ring. Issabella saw him pitch forward and roll, limply coming to a stop a few feet from the now-idling van.

  Theresa was out in a flash, moving far more quickly than her girth would seem to allow. She yanked the van’s sliding door open and peered in at the stunned lawyer.

  “Okay, no more of that crap,” Theresa insisted. “Yep, it’s your dad. Yep, I knocked him out with my door. And yep, we’re gonna help him get away from the cops. So get your skinny little butt moving. I can’t carry him by myself.”

  As if intent on driving the bar owner’s point home, the wail of a police car’s siren was echoed by another, seemingly closer now. Issabella found herself standing on the pavement with Theresa, grabbing hold of her father’s ankles while Theresa scooped him up under his shoulders.

  “This is a crime,” she heard herself whispering. “We’re actually committing a felony now.”

  They got him in the van, splayed out in the back amid a vast clutter of cigarette wrappers, fast food bags, newspapers and glossy-paged gossip magazines. Howard let out a low moan as Theresa slammed the sliding door shut.

  Soon they were rumbling away, headed toward the expressway. Issabella cast a sideways glance at the woman beside her. Theresa’s normally implacable face was fixed in an exultant grin, her eyes bright and alive. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out her nose like a cartoon bull.

  “See?” Theresa crowed without looking away from the road ahead. “All it took was a little gumption.”

  Issabella buckled her seat belt and let the unicorn-mobile carry them away from the sirens, down into the blighted and abandoned outer stretches of the city.

  * * *

  In the long darkness, the little black girl came and held vigil over Darren.

  She knelt down beside him and ran her hand over his brow, her touch cold and comforting against the heat that was raging through him. Her hair was a wild, untamed thicket and when she smiled down at the shuddering, feverish lawyer, her mouth was missing most of its teeth. Those that remained were large and very white, like a handful of rare stones. Her shirt was a vivid green, and when Darren met her eyes he saw that they were green, too—vast emerald pools that drew him in and, somehow, quelled the terrible fever that raced rampant inside him.

  “I want to go outside,” the little girl chimed. “I want to go out and play. Just for a little while.”

  “Don’t do that, Shoshanna,” he croaked. His throat was impossibly dry, constricted and raw. “Just stay. Stay inside.”

  “Pleeease.”

  “If you go outside, he’ll get you. You have to stay here with me.”

  Didn’t she know that? Didn’t she know that outside meant the monster? She’d go away, and she’d never be seen again. And he would get her teeth, delivered to him in little green envelopes every few months. The monster would take her away and amuse himself by mailing reminders to Darren, again and again. And he’d open the envelopes, each time. He’d let the single tooth inside plink-plunk down onto the tabletop, and he’d stare at it like it was the whole wide world for endless hours. And he’d order a drink or two, or three, and la-la-la the merry-go-round goes round and around and around—

  “You have your own monster, now,” she whispered, crouched down at his side, her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking back and forth. Her toes were dirty in the good way a kid’s feet should be dirty—with grass stains and dark earth from the yard outside her home.

  She was right. He did have his very own, personal monster. It was somewhere out beyond the darkness, stalking about on heavy feet and singsonging all the terrible things it planned to do. When it got tired of talking, the monster would hurt Darren some more. It would shine a terrible light down into this darkness, just long enough to hurt him again. And when it was bored of that, Darren would be cast back here, with nothing but the fever and the shuddering certainty that he was dying.

  “Stay with me,” he groaned, and reached out for her. He felt her small fingers encircle his own, felt how cold they were in his palm.

  “We can both go outside,” she said. “We can play out in the yard. Mom won’t care. She’s making dinner and she doesn’t want me mucking it all up. That’s what she said.”

  “Your mom loves you. Your dad, too.”

  “They don’t mind if I go outside.”

  “Don’t. Don’t. Please, just stay here. Stay with me, okay? We can just be here and not out there and we
don’t even have to ever think about out there ever again. I’m so sorry.”

  A sob wrenched out of him, and he squeezed her hand tight.

  “I’m so sorry I helped him get away,” he gasped, and the torrent of regret rushed up. He was crying, curling up on his side and just weeping like he hadn’t done in all his life. “I’m so sorry for what I did. I just want you to know that. I just want you to know.”

  He let the awful regret spill out of him, a miserable wave of sobbing that went on longer than he thought it could. When it was past, and he could talk again, he squeezed her hand in his and stared into those emerald eyes that were the only light in the world.

  “I wish I could save you,” he said. “With all my heart.”

  “You can’t,” she whispered. “Not if you can’t save yourself.”

  “How—”

  But she was gone, her little body and bright green shirt fading into the darkness, becoming translucent, then transparent and finally just gone. Only the emerald eyes remained, hanging bright and real in the air. They hung there, and as Darren watched it seemed that the little black girl was coming back, after all. She was becoming real again, her outline growing and thickening in the darkness around the floating emeralds.

  “Hello, sunshine!”

  It wasn’t the little girl.

  Reality poured in painfully, buoying him up out of the dark corner where he’d been hiding, rushing and carrying him toward those flashing green eyes which had taken on a cruel and malicious bent. Light bit him, stinging. Air poured into his lungs, and the sounds of the world reappeared.

  “Wakey wakey, Mr. Fletcher. Esquire of jack shit. Counselor Sleepy. Barrister of the befuddled. You hear me? You back with us, buddy boy?”

  It wasn’t the light that was stinging, he realized. He was laying on a hard surface, with his shoulders and triceps bunched into tight, aching cramps from having his wrists bound under him for...how long? He didn’t know. His hands were nothing more than an assumption, though, since he could not feel them anymore. His head throbbed and he remembered being smashed face first into the edge of his car’s roof. He remembered coming in and out of the darkness before now, snatches of conversations and...and what? Something important. Something he had told himself to remember before plunging back into the chemically induced darkness. Darren groped around for the memory.