A Shattered Lens

by Layton Green

  Preach regretted none of those choices. They all added up to the man he was today. If the day came when he thought he was no longer fit to be a detective, then he would move on from that too. Maybe he would retire to the forest one day, surround himself with grandchildren and logs to split and a pile of good books.

  But that day was a long way off, and he had a murderer to catch.

  In the parking lot of the Rabbit Hole Café, he found Wade’s car: a restored, maroon and white ‘57 Chrysler New Yorker. After Ricky’s death, Wade had taken Preach’s abrupt switch the hardest. Unable to express what he was feeling and sure his friend would not understand, Preach had never discussed his decision. It was simply no more parties, no more hell-raising together.

  Even today, he felt as if the air was not fully cleared between them. They had crafted an uneasy peace, one of mutual respect and a shared past, but he knew their childhood bond was severed forever.

  As far as Preach knew, Wade still worked at the Rabbit Hole, an eclectic little café popular with hipsters and college students. He used to supplement his income by running minor drugs on the side. Preach hoped he had stayed straight.

  On his way inside, he spotted Wade on the back patio by himself, smoking a cigarette and staring into the pines. As Preach made his way over, crunching on the wood chips covering the ground, Wade turned and raised the tip of his cigarette in greeting.

  “Afternoon, Joe.” Wade’s voice was a soft growl. “Been a while.” “How you been?”

  “Peachy, man. Just peachy.”

  “You on break?”

  “Yep.”

  Wade’s thinning black hair and handlebar moustache, twisted at the ends, had not changed since the last time Preach had seen him. He was also wearing rimless glasses, Carhartt work pants, and his hipster T-shirt du jour: an image of Sheryl Lee with the caption, “Who Killed Laura Palmer ?”

  “Can you talk for a sec?”

  “Anything for you, buddy,” Wade said, checking his watch. “I can take five more.”

  “Thanks.” Preach sat across from him on the picnic bench. “How connected are you to the scene these days ?”

  “And here I thought you were gonna ask me to join a bowling league.” Wade turned his head to blow smoke away from the detective. “The scene ? What scene you talking about ?”

  “The drug scene.”

  “Ah.” He looked away and said, with a touch of bitterness, “I’m not in the game anymore.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Truly.”

  “Yeah. Well.”

  “I understand you’re out, but word still gets around.”

  Wade took another puff. “Not sure I follow. And not sure I want to. Shoot me straight, why don’t you.”

  Preach spread his hands. “Fair enough. You’ve heard about David Stratton’s murder?”

  “The football kid? Sure. Murder’s still big news in this town. You’re working it ?”

  “I am. I assume you haven’t heard anything relevant?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about David Stratton? Any idea if he was selling? Using?” “No idea. Even if I was back in, I’d never sell to kids.”

  “Ever heard the name Nate Wilkinson?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Preach weighed how much he should disclose versus his need for information. “You’ve heard of Los Viburos ?”

  “Sure.”

  “What else do you know about them?”

  Wade shrugged. “Not much. Like I said, it’s past my time.”

  “Ever heard of a guy named Bentley Montgomery?”

  “Out of Durham?”

  “That’s right.”

  Wade’s eyes narrowed. “Him I’ve heard of. He’s supposed to be real bad news.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “I don’t know anything. Just that a few guys from the old life mention his name now and again. I try not to listen too hard these days.”

  “What do they say?”

  “That he wants to be king and will do anything for the throne.” Wade put his hands up. “I don’t know specifics, so don’t ask.”

  “Does he give orders to Los Viburos ?”

  “No idea. Listen, man—” he checked his watch, “I should get back. I’d help you if I could, but you’re barking up the wrong tree here.”

  “Can you point me to someone who might know something else ?” Wade smirked, and Preach knew he had crossed a line, asking him to rat out his contacts who were still in the business. That said, he didn’t have time to dance around his old friend’s loyalties to his criminal connections. “Wade?”

  “No, Joe. I can’t.” He stood, picked up the pack of Marlboro Lights, and rolled it into the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  Preach rose as well. “Thanks anyway,” he said, a little coldly.

  Wade hesitated, fiddling with the end of his moustache. “There is one thing.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Rumor has it there’s a new player in town, in control of the local product. Has been for six months or so.”

  Preach had heard of no such thing. Then again, someone that new might not have hit the Creekville police radar. Or they might be good at staying hidden. “How firm is this rumor ?”

  Wade looked him in the eye. “Firm.”

  “Who is he ?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re a sexist pig, Joe, because it’s not a he. It’s a she.”

  Preach felt a little wobbly. “A she,” he repeated. “What’s her name ?” “I just told you I don’t know. The guys I mentioned, they don’t know either, or I’d have heard. My guess? She’s a level or two above their pay grade and reports in to Durham. Maybe to this Bentley guy.”

  Preach stood still atop the wood chips, trying to process what he had just heard.

  “Joe ? I gotta get back.”

  “Ask around, okay? If you get a name, or anything, let me know. I swear it won’t come from you.”

  “Sure. Hey, it’s been real. We should do this more often.”

  Preach didn’t respond. He didn’t even notice when Wade stepped aside, leaving the detective alone on the patio as a breeze stirred, causing a patch of colored leaves to swirl like faerie dust in the parking lot. All Preach could think about was that a woman might be running the drug show in Creekville. A woman who might be the missing connection between Nate and Los Viburos and Carroll Street Homes, a woman who could have made the footprint under the leaf pile in the woods the night David was killed, a woman who Sharon Tisdale might have seen with David in his house that night.

  A woman who might have killed David for a very different reason than Preach had suspected so far. A reputable citizen with a secret identity, a drug queen David might have threatened to reveal to the world.

  Whether Claire was the guilty party or not, the logic behind her primary defense had just crumbled.

  Now she had a motive.

  28

  A few hours after Blue had heard the last of the footsteps crunching on gravel near her hiding place, cramped and numb from the cold, she had wriggled out of that god-awful hole inside the concrete platform and spent the rest of the night concealed inside the muddy thicket. She had kept her camera dry and had fifty dollars in her pocket, but she knew she dared not return to her hotel.

  When the sun rose on Greensboro, she finally descended the embankment and emerged into the city, miserable and starving and exhausted to the bone. She had to get out of town and decided to risk a bus. No one would pick her up on the side of the road looking like she did.

  During her overnight ordeal, she had had plenty of time to think through her options. No way could she go home yet, and she was almost out of money. Hungry. Desperate.

  The way she saw it, she had three choices. The first two were hide out on the streets or find a homeless shelter to hole up in. She quickly discarded living on the streets. It was just too dangerous, and she would probably starve or freeze to death. No, that was the absolute last resort. A homel
ess shelter was a much better idea, except for the other creeps who would be living there, and a higher risk that Los Viburos would find her. Shelters were full of drug people, any of who would give up her location for a single hit.

  Her third option was very different and, in some ways, frightened her even more than the other two.

  After her father had left, once her mother had realized he wasn’t coming back and hurled his belongings into a dumpster, Blue had pawed through the trash and found a photo album from her father’s childhood. She even found a letter from a cousin addressed to her father at his old house.

  She still knew the address. Her father had grown up in Old Fort, North Carolina, a speck on the map in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from Asheville. Her father’s childhood home was a mythical town to which she had never been, her last place of refuge.

  Blue had enough money to get there. She could take a bus to her father’s hometown and beg one of her relatives to take her in.

  Yet what if they rejected her?

  That was something Blue wasn’t sure she would survive.

  After scurrying to the Greensboro central bus station, she checked the timetables and learned her father’s hometown was so small there wasn’t even a bus stop. The closest town was Black Mountain, a touristy spot about ten miles from Old Fort on the way to Asheville. The lack of bus service made her decision easier. She could go to Black Mountain to get away from Greensboro, then decide whether or not to visit her father’s family.

  She bought a one-way ticket to Black Mountain and a cup of coffee, then hunkered down in the most secluded corner of the station she could find. During the wait, she didn’t spot any gang members. With any luck, they would bank on her returning to her hotel or running back to Creekville.

  Though the wait had her biting her nails to the flesh, by the time she boarded her bus, just after noon, she was sure no one suspicious was watching her.

  A few hours later, when Blue arrived in Black Mountain, she stood on the sidewalk and took a few minutes to inhale the fresh mountain air, eying the sweep of shaggy peaks that cradled the town. It was beautiful, an entirely different world from the Piedmont. As if the rise in elevation had also raised her station in life, or at least lifted her spirits. Yes, that was it. The change was internal. The mountains inspired her, transformed her into a more soulful being. She already felt closer to her father.

  After spending a couple of bucks at Goodwill on a clean pair of jeans and a Montreat sweatshirt, she bought two hot dogs for a dollar at a gas station. There wasn’t much to the town that she could see, a few blocks of quaint shops and restaurants, but there was lots of activity. Tourists and hikers and parents walking their kids to school. It was a bucolic place, a place out of time, and she loved it at first sight.

  After freshening up as best she could in a public restroom, she sat cross-legged in a public park full of gnarled old trees and debated what to do. She supposed she could walk the ten miles to Old Fort. How long would that take her? Half a day? It didn’t sound very enticing. She could also try to thumb a ride, or maybe she had enough money left for a taxi. No—she wasn’t spending the last of her funds on that. She would need those dollars. And hitchhiking was dangerous. She had pushed her luck once already.

  Blue sat in the park for a very long time, knowing she was stalling, enjoying the crisp mountain air and the ancient wisdom of the trees. At the end of the day, she trudged toward a homeless shelter she had noticed on the ride in, nervous about spending the night in such a despondent place, but terrified even more by the thought of knocking on the door of the house where her father used to live.

  29

  “Christo, pass the salt please.”

  “Yes, Mama. For the beans?”

  His mother reached over to pat his hand. “They just need a little help. Thank you for cooking.”

  Christo Emilio Rivero, known on the street as Cobra, reached across the kitchen table to pass the salt to his mother. His father had died on the family’s harrowing flight from Honduras when Christo was ten years old. Like the buried remnants of a terrible nightmare, he retained only flashes of the journey: leaving his childhood village in tears; an exhausting march through a mosquito-infested jungle with armed men prodding them along; eating insects and roots and hoping not to get sick from the water; the screams of women and young girls at night; his father never leaving Christo or his mother alone during the day and tying them all together with a belt while sleeping; Christo understanding nothing except the village had no work and they were going to a paradise called Los Estados Unidos; the hiss of rattlesnakes and bitterly cold nights in the Mexican desert; feeling as if he would die of suffocation when stuffed with thirty people in the back of a stifling hot truck for eighteen hours during the border crossing.

  Most of all, he remembered the shootout with the group of armed Latino men in a small town in Texas, soon after he and his family had crawled out of the truck. Later, he had learned that a local gang had not liked the fact that the handlers for Christo’s village had tried to cut out the middlemen. Back then, he knew only that one of the bullets had caught his beloved father in the throat, and he had bled to death on a cracked piece of asphalt in their brand-new country. Forced into another truck, Christo had no idea what had happened to his father’s body.

  He could never get the beans right. Though he worked odd hours and sometimes gave his mother a break by cooking lunch, the main reason he tried to make it home as often as possible was the curly- headed boy sitting to his right.

  His name was Hugo, after the grandfather he had never known.

  Every now and then, Cobra liked to read books for laymen on theoretical physics. Books like The Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time. He didn’t understand all the concepts, and certainly not the math, but he was fascinated by the universe and all its inconceivably bizarre wonders. One thing he did know was that the scientists were all searching for something called the theory of everything: a way to marry macro and micro behavior models, Einstein’s theory of relativity with the bizarre world of quantum physics.

  It was easy, he thought. The theory of everything is sitting right beside me. Why did anyone need to search anywhere else ?

  Cobra and his mother had struggled mightily in Texas, managing to eke out an existence picking fruit in the daylight hours and cleaning toilets at night. Yet it still wasn’t enough. In addition to paying for room and board in the cement block they shared with two other families—how was this better than the fresh air and fertile soil of his childhood village, Christo wanted to know ?—they had to pay back the men who had smuggled them across the border, who charged an exorbitant interest rate.

  They would never pay them back, he had finally realized. These men hadn’t brought them across the border out of the kindness of their hearts, or even for the initial fifteen hundred dollars they had charged.

  They had brought them over to work as slaves.

  Maybe it would have been different if his father had lived, and maybe not. But once Christo turned twelve and realized this was their fate, this half-life of menial labor and filthy living conditions, he took the only avenue of escape he saw for him and his mother.

  He joined a gang.

  It turned out he was more suited to crime than tossing watermelons into the back of a dusty pickup. A natural athlete, smart and desperate, Christo rose steadily through the ranks, graduating from petty crime to slinging rock to armed robbery. After surviving an ambush by a rival gang and slaying two of their members with a folding knife, he was promoted to the coveted position of asesino. Christo had never wanted to hurt anyone, but he found that once he started, he developed a taste for it. Not only that, but he knew too much about the activities of the gang to ever leave, and he owed them ten grand for a loan to move himself and his mother to an apartment complex near Chapel Hill. The gang wanted to expand in the Triangle region, and Cobra wanted his son to grow up in a safer place. It was a good fit for everyone.

 
“Papa, stay and play this afternoon.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Please please please?”

  Christo waffled. “Maybe for a bit. Just for a few minutes, though. Papa’s very busy.”

  “Can we play trucks ?”

  Sure.

  “Hey Papa, watch this!”

  Hugo giggled and folded the two middle fingers of his right hand into his palm. As he held his hand proudly in the air, sticking out his thumb and pinky and index finger, Cobra turned white and yanked his son’s hand across the table. He unfolded the fingers and covered Hugo’s hand with his own. “Where did you learn that?” he said, though he already knew. His was not the only gang family living in the cheap apartment complex.

  Though Cobra was a feared enforcer, he was paid very little. It was another form of slavery, he knew, but at least one that came with respect and a far better standard of living. Though Cobra would do almost anything the gang asked, one thing was not for sale: his son’s future.

  Cobra had traded his soul for security for his family, but if anyone tried to recruit his son, they would find out exactly how Cobra had earned his nickname.

  And so would everyone they held dear.

  “Someone showed me,” Hugo said, his soft brown eyes lowering, aware something was wrong.

  “Never do that, okay?” Cobra said. “It isn’t a nice thing.”

  “Okay, Papa. I’m sorry.”

  Cobra pulled his son into a hug and pressed his lips to the top of his head. “It’s okay, niño. Papa loves you very much.”

  “Can we play trucks now ?”

  Sure.

  The buzz of a text vibrated Cobra’s pocket. He pulled his phone out and checked the message. It was Javier. Someone in Greensboro had spotted the girl, Blue, but she had slipped away again. The gang leader wanted Cobra to step in. Ensure the job was done right.