Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  An argument. He’d heard an argument between the lilting-voiced monster and some unseen woman whose skin was heavy with a rich, dusky perfume.

  “Well, hello there,” the monster chimed as Darren’s eyes adjusted to the light of the real world. He stared up at the man looming over him.

  Solomon. His name is Solomon. Hold on to that. She said his name and you need to remember it.

  Solomon was crouching on the heels of his feet, occupying the same position over Darren the little black girl had in his fever dream. The massive bald man was bathed in a soft luminescence, a milky sort of light that Darren’s pain—and chloroform-addled mind registered as nearly angelic, as if a halo were casting its warmth over the monster.

  “We have questions, counselor,” Solomon chirped.

  Darren blinked several times, as much to clear his head as his vision. The world asserted itself, and he was more in the now. It was dark, and he could feel a flutter of night wind against his cheek. He could smell the ripe, sharp stench of mold—a wet thickness in the air. And he could see that it was moonlight that touched Solomon’s shoulders and brow, not some ghastly otherworldly light.

  Jesus, does he have me in a field? Or in the woods? Is this his kill spot? Is this where he gets rid of me? Don’t. Don’t let that in. Darren. Darren, you need to talk. Open your mouth. Just talk and talk and think and don’t get put in the ground.

  He swallowed, wincing against the raw, dry pain in his throat. His nose and mouth tasted like the chemical rag Solomon had shoved against his face whenever Darren had struggled up into consciousness. He was certain it was chloroform, and he wondered just how many doses a human could take of that before they fell into a sleep that did not end.

  Talk.

  “Where...” he managed, his voice clawing its way up and struggling out into the air as a quiet croak.

  “Well, that’s the question,” Solomon said, a cruel smile pulling his lips apart to reveal his small, even teeth. “You live here. You live in this stinking pit of a city, right? So you tell me, just what the hell is that?”

  Solomon stood and pointed one hand behind him, stabbing a finger into the half-light.

  Moonlight flooded down now that the big man wasn’t eclipsing Darren’s view of their environment. A wealth of stars was framed above them, and he realized they were in a room, not out in nature. A skylight? No. As the night wind touched his cheeks and the aching expanse of his damaged forehead, he realized that they were in a room that no longer had a roof above it.

  Solomon’s big hand was still extended, indicating the fifteen-foot height of the tree that was growing up out of a vast mound of decaying books and magazines that filled the floor. That was the source of the mold smell. Hundreds of thousands of pages of text and illustration had been heaped in the abandoned room. The collapsed ceiling had added lengths of wood and drywall to that great mound. Sunlight and rain had worked their magic over the years, so that life had taken root in the moldering hill of lectures and Chapter quizzes. A thin blanket of weeds coated the entire mound, and in its center a single tree had found purchase. Its roots ran like thick veins throughout, pushing the trunk up into the air and feeding the canopy of leaf-thick limbs that hung over the room.

  Under the soft touch of the moon’s light, the tree and the mound of desiccated literature that fed it looked like some sad shrine to Darren, a singular grove where the people of this failed community might come and reflect on what they had lost to neglect and ruin. And like a true shrine, it was evident that the citizens of Detroit had found reason to make pilgrimages—littered among the stagnant pools of rain water and melting pages of chemistry text were liquor bottles, condoms, food wrappers and needles. They lay like offerings around the base of the mound, and as Darren squinted into the depths of the place he could make out a maze of graffiti tags swarming along the warped and discolored walls of the room.

  The faintest of hopes stole into him. People came here. There were people who used this room, still. Maybe they would come tonight, stumbling in to shoot junk under the stars or have fast, unsatisfying sex against the trunk of the Learning Tree. Maybe they would come before Solomon stuffed his body into the textbook mound and left him there to turn into fertilizer.

  “Explain,” Solomon hissed, jabbing his large forefinger at the tree as if it were a thing so alien to him that it was offensive. “Explain that.”

  “The book depository,” Darren whispered weakly. “We’re in the fourth floor of the Detroit Public School Book Depository. Why—”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “—are we here? No, I’m not lying. Why would I?”

  “This is a school?”

  “Was. It was where they stored the books and school supplies for the city.”

  Solomon did a little pirouette, taking in the entirety of the room, and came to a stop peering down at Darren. His cruel smile had disappeared, replaced with a frown of disgust. His big hands ran over his gleaming scalp and the smooth skin of his face, as if he might scrub off some unseen film of contamination the room had transferred to him.

  “How?” he hissed. “How can you people live here? Why aren’t you choking on it? Are you a rat? A roach? Have you...what? Adapted to this skank and sleaze? Doesn’t it get behind your eyes? Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it stick to you?”

  Even in the half-light of the moon, Darren could see the revulsion twisting Solomon’s features, could almost feel it radiating off the huge man. Darren looked at him, scanning slowly from foot to head. He noted the well-pressed slacks and dress shirt, both finely fitted. He noted the clean, evenly clipped nails and gleam of moisturized skin. The very white teeth. The meticulously shaven face and head. And beneath it all, almost drowned out by the reek of mold and stagnant water, the sharp chemical odor of soap. No, not soap. Alcohol. Alcohol-heavy cleanser, like a disinfectant or an antibacterial gel.

  His shoulders shot with pain from his arms being pinned underneath him, and his head throbbing from whatever ghastly wound he’d suffered, Darren seized on his newfound information. The monster had become a man, just then, in Darren’s eyes. So he worked up what little saliva he could and swallowed, hoping to ease the raw constriction in his throat.

  A monster, by its nature, is inscrutable. But Darren could talk to any man.

  “You’re right,” he said. “But this isn’t the worst. This is nothing. There are places in this city that would make you vomit. They’d make you run screaming. I’ve seen them.”

  Solomon paused in his scrubbing, his eyes peeking over the tips of his fingers. Those cold, green eyes seized on what Darren had said. They moved over him in the same way Darren’s had moved over Solomon, sizing him up, considering. Solomon’s eyes narrowed and Darren couldn’t tell if he had just pushed the man into a terrible decision. Had he inflamed his revulsion? Had he invited some emotional frenzy, or triggered something in Solomon that would send him into a rage that could only end with Darren dead and left to rot with Detroit’s store of knowledge?

  He saw a shudder run the length of Solomon’s body, and feared the worst. But then the looming figure let his arms fall slack to his sides, and those emerald eyes widened with curiosity.

  “Tell me,” Solomon whispered, a command. “Tell me about them all.”

  So Darren did. His mouth worked the words out, and the constriction in his throat eased as he lied and lied. His mind raced to imagine terrible and fantastic hidden places, dark filthy locales of the city that did not truly exist. The images came quickly in his mind, and just as quickly were born away on his tongue. He invented stories, explanations for why he had found the little corners of festering disuse and ruin. He talked about finding dead things in the basements of client homes. He summoned up a tale of inspecting the city’s sewage treatment facility, and the month following that he spent in a hospital quarantined from human contact. He invented a city park w
here the corpses of homeless people were stacked and burned in a great, greasy pyre of popping flesh. A hot dog street vendor he represented in court for serving rats ground up as chili sauce. A chemical tanker that had overturned on the east side, still there and never removed even after years had passed since it spilled its biohazard soup into the streets and yards of the neighborhood. He found a dozen stories as he lay in the darkness and rambled for his life, each one more gruesome and plague-rimmed than the last.

  Darren told Solomon the nursery rhymes he wanted to hear.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Howard let out a low moan as Theresa poured him into what he guessed was Darren Fletcher’s bed. The big, blunt-spoken woman was remarkably strong. She’d hauled him out of the van once they had descended into the Fort Sheldon’s underground parking garage. Issabella had rushed to help her, and had begun to voice concerns that Howard needed to be taken back to the hospital.

  “We don’t know how bad he’s hurt,” she’d insisted, her mature woman’s voice ringing oddly in his ears. There was a wealth of emotion working on him, now that he was there with her and seeing her, hearing her. His little girl was gone. A beautiful and stern-faced woman had replaced the faerie-girl of his memories, and as Theresa threw one of his arms over her shoulder and hefted him from the van with a grunt, Howard stifled a sob of regret. It was real to him, all of a sudden, how he had missed all of her growth from a giggling sprite into who she was now.

  “We ain’t going to no hospital.”

  “If he’s hurt really badly, we need to get him some—”

  “Izzy?” he made himself moan, blinking around the dark interior of the garage. He was not going back into custody.

  His voice seemed to affect his daughter the way an electric prod affects a cow. She leaped back from him and crossed her arms in front of her, a stunned anxiety grabbing hold of her.

  “Don’t,” she said, reflexively.

  “Izzy, I’m so sorry,” he mumbled. His head was still ringing from getting run down by a van, and his right ankle was swollen from his jumping out a third-floor window of the hospital. He didn’t think it was broken, but putting any weight on it was like stepping on a bed of knives.

  “Izzy—”

  “I said don’t. You don’t call me that.”

  And that had been the end of his reunion with his daughter. Wild-eyed and rigid with fury, she had stalked ahead of them. He managed to stay on his feet with Theresa propping him up, and the three made their way to the elevator that carried them up to Darren Fletcher’s refined loft in the sky.

  Nothing more was spoken. Theresa helped him up the stairs to the second floor of the penthouse, eased him down onto the bed and trundled out. Issabella had stopped at the living room, standing tense and silent while Theresa took him the rest of the way. She hadn’t looked at him since making clear he was not to use her childhood nickname.

  Darren called her that. I know he did. It’s okay for him, I guess. Christ. What did you expect? She hates you. Of course she hates you.

  Howard peeked around the dim expanse of the bedroom. The bed itself was luxurious and overstuffed, and both the big closet doors and the molding running along the walls looked to be genuine oak. But aside from those things, there wasn’t much to indicate that this was the sanctum of a rich man. No high-end wall hangings or expensive decor. Just a laundry hamper in one corner and a nightstand beside the bed. It was a clean, well-kept room that said absolutely nothing about the man who owned it.

  Howard remembered Darren leaning over him in the interview room at the jail, trying to cradle him into a position where he wouldn’t choke on his own vomit. He’d heard Darren’s stern threat to the deputy that Howard Bright would be rushed to the hospital or there would be legal hell to pay.

  And he’d heard the FBI men loitering outside his hotel room talking about how the lawyer had been abducted.

  Fix this, he thought.

  But the ankle was still useless, he knew. The only reason he’d gotten as far from the hospital as he had was the adrenaline rush of fear he’d felt over the prospect of getting caught and hauled back into custody. That surge of panic had propelled him along just far enough to get clobbered by what he could only describe to himself as a crazy fat woman’s Mystery Machine.

  He wasn’t going anywhere. Even if he hadn’t been enfeebled, the two women downstairs weren’t letting him rush out into the night with the promise that he was going to put things right and extricate them all from this nightmare. Issabella’s ice-cold reaction to hearing him say her name was all the proof he needed to know that he had not been rescued by his daughter and her chain-smoking accomplice.

  He had been kidnapped.

  From downstairs he heard what sounded like a drawer full of utensils banging shut. Women’s voices, raised in argument.

  You don’t know them. Not either of them, really. That big one could march up here with a butcher knife to get answers out of you. And you don’t know if Izzy would stop her. You don’t know who she is now. Your little girl grew up. She grew up and the man she lets call her Izzy got abducted because of you. So maybe it won’t be the big woman who comes up here to get answers.

  Laying there in his torn and dirty hospital gown, Howard Bright let a bitter, absurd chuckle escape his throat.

  * * *

  Theresa finally found the corkscrew among the host of shiny steel gadgets that filled the drawers in Darren’s kitchen. She used it to pry open one of the expensive bottles Darren kept in a large wooden wine rack that hung suspended from the ceiling above the counter.

  Issabella wanted to say something useful, to snap out of the dumbstruck fog she’d occupied since first seeing her father fleeing the hospital, but nothing would come. She found her eyes continually drawn away, over to the stairs that lead up, up to the bed where Theresa had deposited him.

  “Him for Darren,” Theresa said and pushed a glass of wine across the counter to her.

  “I don’t want that.”

  “Maybe a drink’ll help you snap out of it. You look like you’re sleepwalking, Izzy.”

  Issabella took the glass but didn’t drink. Theresa shrugged and recorked the bottle.

  “You know, I’ve never seen you have a drink,” Issabella said. “Of alcohol, I mean.”

  “Nope. Dad was a class A drunk. Opened the bar after he retired from GM and just drank all day long ’til one of his buddies would peel him off the floor and prop him up in a booth. I stick to pop.”

  Issabella nodded along vaguely while her brain caught up enough for her to say, “Wait. Him for Darren? You mean—”

  “Give your old man over to get Darren back. Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

  Theresa said it casually, like she was stating something self-evident. But underneath that casualness, the woman’s small brown eyes were hard, even challenging.

  “You think I won’t agree,” Issabella said. “Right? You think I won’t—”

  “Then what’re we talking about it for, Izzy?”

  “Stop interrupting me.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love Darren, Theresa. I’ll do anything to get him safe. You don’t have some monopoly on loyalty or friendship.”

  Theresa pointed a finger at the stairs and said, “So you going up there, Izzy? You going to force your old man to tell us how to get a hold of the people he ripped off so we can trade his worthless ass?”

  Issabella stood up and walked a straight line out into the living room, spun around and walked straight back with her hands on her hips. She heard herself yelling without realizing she’d even opened her mouth.

  “This isn’t some...some movie! What do you think? You think you can just act tough and do impulsive nonsense and in the end it’ll all come out right? We don’t know anything about the men who are after my father! We don’t know if
they’d even want to make that deal!”

  “Of course they would, you dope! This whole thing is about him!”

  Issabella sat back down and forced herself to calm down, to get her voice under control before she continued. Theresa dropped the corkscrew in a drawer, slammed the drawer shut and rehung the wine bottle in the overhead rack.

  “I need a cigarette,” she groused.

  “It isn’t about my dad. You’re wrong.”

  Theresa snorted and produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her pants’ pocket.

  “Darren ain’t here to tell me no,” she mumbled and lit up.

  Issabella went out to the terrace and sat down in one of the wrought iron chairs. A few moments went by before Theresa appeared, sat down next to her and tapped her cigarette in the glass ashtray Darren had, days before, attempted to use as a Conch of Order.

  “It is about your dad,” Theresa insisted.

  “No. It’s about money. Giving my dad to them doesn’t get them what they want. The only thing he owns is a hospital gown, Theresa. If they don’t get their money, there’s no deal. Don’t you see that?”

  Theresa didn’t answer, but Issabella could see the woman knew it was the truth. The people who had sent Darren’s kidnapper to Detroit had sent him to retrieve the six hundred thousand dollars Howard had absconded with. That was what they wanted. Money. Not Darren.

  Then why don’t they call?

  She knew why, down in the core of her where she was doing her best to keep all of her panic and dread locked away. No ransom had been demanded because something had gone very wrong with the man they’d deployed to Detroit. The one who’d called, only once, to say he’d “wait for the girl.’”