The Corruptions

by Vincent Zandri

  He took another small bite of pizza, made a sour face, and tossed what was left into the wall-mounted trash receptacle.

  “You don’t like Sal’s?” I said.

  “It doesn’t like my waist.”

  He was muscular. Cut even. Veiny wiry. He obviously took pride in his appearance. The way he appeared naked. The way he appeared playing bass in his band on stage in some crappy biker bar. Or so I imagined.

  “Tell you what, Mr. Marconi,” he said. “First of all, I don’t know shit. But if I did know some shit, what do I get out of revealing it to you?”

  I had to think quick. I really had nothing to offer him. I wasn’t a real cop, or a lawyer. I wasn’t a real anything other than a PI. A PI who really missed his wife, Fran, even nineteen years after the hit and run that snuffed out her life. This too was real: I was working for the governor. Maybe I could use that relationship to my advantage.

  “What if I were to tell you I could see about getting you a reduced sentence?”

  “Everybody offers that. You watch too much TV. CSI Miami.”

  “More like Miami Vice reruns,” I said. “I’m still living in the 1970s and ’80s.”

  “You’re dating yourself.”

  “Whatever. But I mean it when I say I can go to bat for you. Can’t promise the outcome. I can, however, try. But you gotta give me something first.”

  He sighed.

  “What the fuck,” he said. “I’m in jail, so what difference does it make at this point?” He resumed staring at the white wall. A wall that no doubt bore the face of Reginald Moss and maybe even Derrick Sweet. “Moss wanted to go to Mexico,” he said after a beat.

  “I know that already. But it’s not like he could just head to the airport, hop a Southwest flight direct to Mexico City.”

  He nodded. “The two of them needed a place to hide while things calmed down. A place no one would find them, at least in the first few days. No one other than Joyce, that is, who never showed up.”

  “Let me guess. A hunting cabin. In the deep woods. Something off the grid. Maybe with a basement.”

  “You know your stuff.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  Another sigh. More like an exaggerated exhale.

  “There’s an old railroad bed to the west of the prison and the town. Been out of service for years and years. You follow that for a couple of miles. There’s some kind of marker that indicates a turn-off. Joyce Mathews placed a marker there.”

  “What kind of marker?”

  “I have no clue. But, apparently, Moss and Sweet would know it when they came to it. They were to turn off there, bushwhack into the woods heading north at ninety degrees for another mile. Eventually, they’d come upon the shelter. They’d wait for Joyce there.”

  “Shelter?”

  “Not a cabin necessarily, but something dug out of the forest floor. Constructed by some survivalist freak back in the 1950s. Somebody convinced the Russians were gonna invade, drop the bomb, whatever.”

  “No wonder D’Amico’s been striking out.”

  “That guy’s a major dick.”

  “Couldn’t agree more. But he’s got a job to do.”

  “So,” he says, sitting up, placing his hand on my thigh, “how do I know you’re going to uphold your end of the bargain? Get me a reduced sentence?”

  I took a step back so that his hand fell off.

  “You don’t,” I said. “You’re just gonna have to trust me.”

  “Trust,” he said, “what’s that?”

  “It’s like faith. You can’t see it or feel it or touch it. You just have to believe in it.”

  He smiled sadly, opened his mouth as if to say something, but then decided against it. At that point, I sensed he truly missed Reginald Moss and that he knew he might never have the chance to see him again. Maybe that was why he was so willing to reveal the hideout. Maybe he felt that by opening up to me, instead of the police, Moss might have a real chance at being caught and surviving. Of course, his motivation might lie elsewhere. For instance, the life expectancy for a former screw incarcerated inside a maximum security joint was maybe two weeks. That is, management didn’t decide to lock him up in the box twenty-four seven, which was its own form of slow death.

  I turned for the door, but then turned back.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “You’re standing there, aren’t you?”

  “Why do they call you Mean Gene? I’m not seeing anything mean about you at all.”

  He laughed under his breath. “It’s a nickname Reginald came up with. I guess he didn’t want anyone messing with me. So he called me, Mean Gene. Don’t mess with Mean Gene. Mean Gene will knock your block off, you touch him.” He looked up at me from down on his side on the hard-as-a-rock cot. “You see, Mr. Marconi. Moss wanted me all to himself.”

  I wondered if he was aware that Moss had also been bedding down blonde bombshell, Joyce. But I decided not to press him on the issue. I just didn’t see the point.

  Turning back to the door, I wrapped on it with my knuckles. The bone against metal told Bridgette I wanted out.

  She stood outside the cell, staring into her smartphone.

  “Looks like Maude is pulling through for us. She sent these over ten minutes ago,” she said, holding up her phone so I could clearly see the screen. The photo showed a map, parts of which were still stained by patches of gray paint, but I could also clearly make out lines that had been drawn on it, perhaps indicating the precise location of the shelter Mean Gene had been talking about.

  “Can you enlarge it for me?” She touched the screen, making the picture bigger. But a bigger picture meant a serious lack of focus, so that making out anything proved even harder. We’d have to see the real thing for ourselves.

  “Where’s Blood, sheriff?”

  “Sleeping off the pizza in my office.”

  “Let’s wake him up and get back over to Maude’s. That map, taken with what Mean Gene just confessed, might give us something that no other law professional on earth has right now.”

  “What’s that, Keeper?”

  “The precise location of those two escaped cons.”

  When I tapped Blood on the shoulder, he slowly sat up.

  “Just resting my eyes is all, Keep.”

  I told him we were going back to Maude’s, now. Then, we enter the woods.

  “I hope she made more cookies,” he said.

  “We’ll take some for the hike.”

  Bridgette grabbed her Jeep keys.

  “Vamoose, muchachos,” she said.

  “Hasta la vista…baby,” I said in my best imitation Arnold.

  Blood laughed. Not with me. But at me.

  Nothing looked out of place when Bridgette pulled up to Maude’s bungalow. We slipped out of the Jeep, made our way up the front steps and onto the porch. When I looked over my shoulder at the easel set up at the far end of the room, I noticed something was missing.

  The shotgun.

  “Something’s not right,” I said to Bridgette.

  She looked up at me wide-eyed, then opened the door, stepped inside.

  “Maude!” she barked.

  Blood pulled out his gun. I did the same. So did Bridgette.

  “I’ll get the back,” Blood said, about-facing, heading back down the porch steps.

  “Maude, honey, you here?” Bridgette shouted once more.

  “I’ll take upstairs,” I said, entering. “You be careful, sheriff.”

  I bounded up the wood stairs two at a time. Coming to the landing, I scanned the small hallway with the barrel on the .45, like it was a tank turret. I went right, checked the small bathroom, threw open the shower curtain. The tub was empty. I crossed the hall, checked out the first bedroom. It, too, was empty.

  That was when I heard something I didn’t want to hear coming from downstairs. A gut wrenching scream.

  “Good Christ, Maude!” Bridgette yelled. “What the hell did those bastards do to you?”

/>   Heading back down the stairs, I entered into the kitchen at precisely the same time Blood did. As soon as my boot soles met the old yellow linoleum, I saw the feet that belonged to a body laid out in the back pantry section of the kitchen. The double-barreled shotgun was also lying on the floor beside her. That the leather sandaled feet belonged to Maude, I had no doubt. This gentle woman gave us cookies just a short two hours ago. A sweet gesture that made her violent homicide seem all the more wrong. I almost didn’t want to look. But how could I not look?

  Bridgette turned away, wiped a tear from her eye, stepped into the adjoining dining room. Together, Blood and I stood over the body. Not only had her neck been sliced from ear to ear, whoever slaughtered her thought it prudent to jam the cone-shaped paint brush handle through her left eye. Taking a knee, I picked up the shotgun, cracked open the breach. The shells were still live. She never got a shot off.

  “That thing in her eye,” Blood said after a long, sad beat. “It take some strength to do that shit.”

  “And a black heart,” I said. Then, standing, “The map. Anyone seen the map?”

  A drafting table occupied the far corner of the dining room. A draftsman’s lamp clamped to the table was still lit up, indicating that Maude had been using it when whoever killed her intruded. I went to the table, saw that it had been ransacked. Paper towels soaked in gray paint and paint remover littered the table surface and the paint-stained wood floor.

  “This is where she worked on the board,” I said. “Whoever killed her took it.”

  “I’ll check upstairs just to make sure,” Bridgette said.

  She ran up the stairs while Blood and I made a futile check of the downstairs and even the basement. Back in the kitchen, Bridgette shook her head.

  “No board,” she said. “Whoever did this didn’t want us to get at that map.”

  My mind spun like a wheel of fortune until it stopped on a clear vision of Rodney standing outside the prison cell.

  “Rodney was the only one who knew we took the board,” I said.

  Bridgette went for her chest-mounted radio, like she was about to call the murder in.

  “Wait,” I said. “Not yet. We bust Rodney now it’s just our word against his. Plus, I’m beginning to think there’s something more to this than just two cons who wanted to jump the walls of this prison.”

  The wailing…the crying…the high-pitched voices rising up from within…

  “Me too,” Blood said. “There something going on inside that prison. Something bad. I can feel it.”

  “Listen, Bridgette,” I said, “you take in Rodney now, they’ll whitewash whatever it is they have going on somewhere in the depths of that place.”

  “Maude was my godmother, Keeper,” she said, her eyes wet, her face pale with sadness.

  “I know how you feel,” I said. “But our best bet is to cut to the chase, go after Moss and Sweet now that we have at least some idea of where they are. While D’Amico is still in the dark and the FBI are operating outside their jurisdiction.”

  “In other words, sheriff,” Blood said, “what Keeper’s trying to say is, let’s go get them two fucks while we still have at least some control of a situation that is clearly going south fast.”

  Her eyes wide. “You think Clark and Rodney and the two cons are in on this together, don’t you?”

  In my head, I once more heard the faint but high-pitched, almost screaming voices coming from the depths of the prison.

  “Joyce and Mean Gene were in on it. Who knows the extent of what’s happening inside the iron house?”

  “But what will you do now that there’s no map?” Bridgette said.

  It dawned on me then. “You showed me a cell phone pic of the map just a few minutes ago. Maybe if Maude’s phone is still lying around, we’ll find even more pictures of the map on it.”

  “Question is,” Bridgette said, “where’s her phone?”

  “The most obvious place,” I said.

  “Read you loud and clear, boss man,” Blood said.

  He went back into the kitchen, turned into the pantry. Bending at the knees, he started going through the pockets of Maude’s baggy jeans. He came back out with a smartphone. Even from out in the dining room, I could see that it was an Android packed inside a red and white protective case. When Blood turned the phone over, we could make out the big words printed on the case back.

  Art Slut.

  “Whoever did this to her didn’t think of looking for her phone,” Blood said. “They must have been in a panic, or amateurs, or both.”

  We all gathered a few steps away inside the kitchen and Blood handed the phone to Bridgette.

  “You know the code that unlock the screen?” he said.

  Bridgette bit down on her bottom lip. “I can try. Her birthday would be a good start.”

  She punched in the digits.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “We have, at most, nine more tries before the phone locks us out for good. Ideas?”

  My eyes focused on the protective cover.

  “How about art slut?”

  “Worth a shot,” Bridgette said.

  She typed it in. The phone unlocked.

  All three of us anxiously stared at the screen while she used the pad of her index finger to access the gallery and the most recent pictures. The first, and what I could only assume was the last photo snapped before her murder, showed a blurry if not distorted image of what appeared to be two men. Their torso’s actually. One dressed in black, the other in blue. They seem to be approaching her from the direction of the living room.

  “Recognize these people?” I said.

  Bridgette shook her head.

  “It’s impossible,” she said. “The picture is so distorted and no faces.”

  I held out my hand.

  “May I?” I said.

  I enlarged the picture, stared down at it for a few beats. There were definitely two people…men…in the foreground, and even the possibility of someone in the background. A third person. I thought about making my observation known to all, but my gut told me to shut up about it. Right now, the important thing was the map’s and the cons’ location.

  I shuffled to the next picture. The map. It wasn’t the picture that Maude had sent to Bridgette while we were in the Sheriff’s office. It was a better picture. One she’d probably taken after the one she’d sent. I enlarged it. A series of lines led through the forest west of the prison, not far from the rail bed that Gene had spoken about. There was an X drawn in red sharpie that, in my mind at least, indicated precisely the spot in which we would find Reginald Moss and Derrick Sweet. If they were still hold up. And knowing that the state police were out en force, and now with a posse of hunters and their dogs, it made sense that they would be.

  “You see that, people?” I said. “You see that red X?”

  “X marks the spot,” Blood said.

  I pocketed the phone. “Bridgette, I assume you need to call in the proper authorities to take care of Maude’s body? Maybe even the state police? Plattsburgh CSI?”

  “I’m already on it. I’m staring down the barrel of a homicide that’s directly related to the prison break.”

  “Blood and I are heading for the woods. I’ll radio you for backup when our mission is accomplished.”

  She nodded. “You’ll need a ride back to your Toyota.”

  “It’s four blocks,” I said. “We’ll take it double time.”

  She showed us to the door. I opened it for Blood. He stepped out and started making his way down towards the road. I went to step out. But Bridgette grabbed my jacket sleeve. She leaned into me, kissed me on the cheek. Lovingly.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Those men are killers.”

  “So am I,” I said. Then I leaned in, kissed her on the mouth.

  On the quick walk back to the motel, a black van pulled up.

  The black van. The FBI.

  We stopped. The window on the passenger side came down.

  “W
here you off to in such a rush?” said Agent Muscolino from behind the wheel.

  “I gotta pee,” I said.

  “Me too,” Blood said. “Too much coffee this morning.”

  “Anything to report on behalf of the ongoing quest for our missing cons?”

  I stared into Muscolino’s sunglass-covered eyes, and then into his partner’s eyes. They were like emotionless robots.

  “Not a thing,” I said. “But rest assured, when we do, you fine federales will be the first to know.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Muscolino said. “In the meantime, we’ve called in reinforcements. By tonight, this investigation will officially be in the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “I’ve got chills,” I said.

  “Me too,” said Blood. “You got any extra FBI T-shirts in the van? Size extra-large? Maybe a couple Agent Muscolino and Agent Doyle bobble-head dolls?”

  Muscolino pressed his thins lips together, sneered at us, thumbed the window up, and pulled away.

  “They takin’ over,” Blood said. “They do that, you get fired, lose out on your pay.”

  “They take over, this thing is gonna end in a blood bath. I’ve seen it happen before when the Feds take charge.”

  “Could end in a blood bath anyway. Maude’s lying dead on her own pantry floor. We should have let Muscolino know about it.”

  “He’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Maybe he already know.”

  “One thing’s for sure,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We need to find those two cop killing assholes. Find them now. Before anyone else dies.”

  Back at the motel, Blood and I prepped for battle. Both of us changed out of our street clothes and into black fatigues and matching T-shirts, our equipment stuffed windbreakers over that. We carried our sidearms in shoulder holsters, and we carried additional magazines in holders strapped to our belts. While we painted our faces with black camo, we finished the last few beers and watched a live news report on the wall-mounted high-def television.