by Matthew Iden
One Right Thing
Matthew Iden
Copyright 2013 Matthew Iden
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are entirely the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
All rights reserved.
Additional titles are available at www.matthew-iden.com.
For Renee, who continues to make the whole thing possible.
For my family.
For my friends.
. . .
By the Author
Crime Fiction
{short story collections}
Three Shorts | Three the Hard Way | Three on a Match | Three of a Kind
one bad twelve
{novels - The Marty Singer series}
A Reason to Live
Blueblood
One Right Thing
Fantasy
{short stories}
Sword of Kings | Assassin | Seven Into the Bleak
Horror
{novella}
Finding Emma
Chapter One
The billboard was colossal and would’ve gotten my attention, if only for a brief second, no matter what had been on it. The verdant hills and bucolic horse farms lining southern Virginia’s Route 29 are cute enough for a postcard, but they go on and on and on in a mind-numbing mosaic of pastoral beauty. Anything that breaks up the monotony will catch the eye, and a sign fifty feet wide and twenty feet high, in the middle of nowhere—a nowhere called Cain’s Crossing, according to the last road sign I’d passed—qualified.
But it was what I saw on the sign that caused me to glance back once, twice, and swear out loud. Unable to look away, my head swiveled, following the billboard as I passed. The semi next to me let me know that I’d drifted into his lane by laying on his air horn and I twitched the wheel to the right to keep from getting flattened, my heart in my throat. We zipped down the road at seventy, though my mind was churning faster than that. A mile passed in a blur before I found a good place for a U-turn. I raced back to the billboard, crossed at one of those turnarounds that says Authorized Vehicles Only, and pulled off the highway at the base of the enormous metal pillar. I hunched forward in the driver’s seat, my chin almost resting on the steering wheel, in order to see the whole sign.
A white man—slim, forty-something, with messy blond hair and a beard going gray—gazed out over the highway. Deep crow’s-feet around dark brown eyes made him appear older than I knew he was and the beard was patchy in places, like he’d trimmed it in the dark. His mouth was open and his eyebrows slightly raised in mild surprise, as though the photo had been snapped just as he’d turned around. Next to the picture was some text. It said:
J.D. HOPE WAS MURDERED ON MAY 6TH. DO YOU KNOW WHY?
Underneath it was a phone number. Nothing else. Without taking my eyes off the sign, I pawed open my glove compartment and fumbled for my notebook and a pen. I jotted down the number, then scribbled “J.D. HOPE” beneath it and underlined the name twice. I stared at it, barely aware of the traffic hurtling past me, buffeting my car, rocking it from side to side.
I peered at the face on the billboard again. Given time, I would’ve recognized him, I think, but he hadn’t worn a beard when I’d known him and the lines around his eyes hadn’t been so deep that they gave him a permanent squint. Aggressively white teeth that I knew had to be dentures or prosthetics peeked out from the open mouth. I thought about the last time I’d seen him and a jumble of emotions welled up from some hidden place I thought I’d tucked away.
I pulled out my phone and stared at it.
Options, choices, decisions. I was a retired homicide cop with time on my hands. No job to return to, no pressing deadlines. Connections, maybe, but no real family obligations tugging me home. The journey to the heartland of south-central Virginia to visit a friend was one of the few pleasure trips I’d taken in the last year, but I was on my way back, not down; I was tired and ready to be home. I could, in good conscience, put the car in DRIVE, point it towards Arlington, and forget I’d ever seen the billboard. I didn’t owe J.D. Hope or the people who cared for him a thing. Theoretically.
I glanced at the sign a third time. J.D. Hope continued to look back at me with the same expression of mild surprise. Perhaps at the fact that he’d been murdered. The car rocked again from a passing truck. I sat there for maybe another five minutes until, in a daze, like my fingers were working on their own, I turned on my phone and punched in the number. I raised the phone to my ear, but looked up at the billboard while it rang, as though I were calling J.D. himself. But it was a woman’s voice that answered.
“Mrs. Hope?” I asked.
“No, this is Mary Beth Able,” she said. “I am—I…was J.D.’s sister. Are you calling about the sign?”
I took a deep breath and said, “Yes, ma’am. My name is Marty Singer. Twenty years ago, I arrested your brother for murder.”
i.
Marine smells curl off the Anacostia in the black morning, fighting the diesel fumes that have been rolling over the Jersey walls on 295 all night and the coal stink rising from the train yard at the end of the block. There’s a church on the corner, a playground on the next street, the gray top of RFK Stadium in the distance. Slick, pebbled streets shine with night rain. A traffic light turns green-amber-red in succession, throwing a long wash of color on the street every twenty-three seconds. It’s joined by blues and reds flashing in place. A single car slows down, pauses, speeds on.
A body slumps on the sidewalk. Five shots, small caliber. Shoulder, abdomen, left buttock, calf. He turned, tried to run. Made it thirty feet, fell down holding on to one leg of a blue mailbox. The last shot was in the back of the head. Four more bullets have embedded themselves in cars and walls around the neighborhood. A forensics guy is placing small yellow tents on the ground to mark the casings, like invitations to a party. I’m bothered by the count. Nine’s not enough. Gangbangers don’t aim, they pull the trigger until the clip runs dry. I hear distant knocking as beat cops rap on doors, ask questions.
“Darnell Anthony Moore,” Stan Lowry says. White hair, lined face. He looks at the body like it’s his first. Sad, sick, a little angry. He takes out a tube of lip balm and applies it carefully to the logical place. “How old you think he is?”
“Twenty-six?” I ask.
“Twenty-five.”
“Second one tonight.”
“No,” Stan says and puts the cap on the balm, tucks it into a breast pocket. “The other one was five hours ago. Makes it yesterday.”
“Better for our average,” I say. “Spread it out.”
Stan grunts. I probably said it just like that last week. Humor so thin, you can see through it.
“Anything special about this one?” I ask.
“Neighbor says he was sleeping with the local crack warlord’s girl. Or, one of them, at least. Guy’s mother says he was with her all night. No way he could’ve killed this boy.”
“So…no,” I say. “Nothing special.”
Stan sighs. “I am tired of this shit. Nothing we do makes a dent. This kid is like every other sorry fuck that got capped this year. And last year, and will be next year. Doesn’t matter.”
“We’re not here to stop them all,” I say, sick of the argument before it starts. It comes up every other time with Stan. “Just this one.”
He opens his mouth to reply, to give me one of his stock retorts, when we hear a wail start down the street. The pitch is so high that, for a heartbeat, I think it’s an alarm. Then the half-formed words come through the screams.
“Oh, shit,” Stan says.
“Oh, no.”
And we take off at a jog to find the tenth bullet.
Chapter Two
Armed with directions to the Hope house, I turned the nose of the car off the highway and in the general direction of a white church steeple poking up over the trees, though I wasn’t ready to head straight there. I’d already been driving for hours and the car was running on empty. Not to mention I needed a little mental adjustment time to think about what I was doing. As I headed down the exit ramp, I saw a faceless strip of asphalt with a no-name gas station squatting a hundred yards away. It would do. I eased off the road, pulled up to the number three pump, and got out.
I stood there for a second, transitioning from my car’s air-conditioned interior to the outside world, a transition that nearly sucked the air from my lungs. It was late summer in rural Virginia and, as morning marched on towards noon, the heat lay like a thick blanket over everything, slowing the day until it was reduced to the sound of grass dying and my car’s engine ticking as it cooled. Only the occasional hum of truck or car tires on I-29 broke the monotony, a brief reminder that the world was moving on, rushing north and south, leaving Cain’s Crossing behind.
I popped the cover, unscrewed the cap, and chose my grade of fuel. Like everyone else in the world, I had nothing to do while I pumped the gas, so I looked around. There wasn’t much to see. A big, chunky blond-haired kid leaned against the driver’s door of a battered Ford Bronco, maroon where it wasn’t covered with mangy spots of patching compound. The kid’s head was cocked downward at a ninety-degree angle while he tinkered with a cell phone. Cutoff jean shorts and a powder-blue t-shirt with the sleeves rolled to the shoulder displayed thick arms and legs, hairless and pink. The truck sat squarely in front of the entrance to the combo station office and convenience store. Shadows moved and twisted behind the thick glass.
When there was no familiar clicking as I pulled the trigger on the gas nozzle, I double-checked the front of the pump. A handwritten notice on a yellow Post-it note said I had to pay inside if I wanted gas. I put the nozzle back and headed for the office. As I passed him to go inside, the kid on the phone didn’t so much as glance up. Or blink, maybe.
I shivered a little at a second transition, this time into sixty-five-degree air-conditioning. Behind the counter was an old man with a sunburnt face creased in unlikely places, down the muscles of his jaw rather than from his cheekbones. He wore a long-sleeved flannel plaid shirt and those moss-green work pants old men prefer, held in place by a thin black belt. One sleeve was empty and the fabric was pinned neatly to the breast of the shirt with a shiny steel safety pin. He swayed in place with small movements, like he was on the deck of a sail boat.
He was watching the only other person in the place, a rail-thin twenty-something in jeans and a dirty Black Sabbath t-shirt standing in front of a drink machine. He had a tiresome number of tattoos running up his forearms and peeking out from under the t-shirt. A lank brown curtain of hair hung past his face as he concentrated on filling an enormous plastic cup, moving it under each of the three nozzles in turn. One-two-three, one-two-three. As I watched, he raised the cup and drained a third of it before putting it back and filling it again. The machine’s mascot, a sad basset hound with a tasseled ski cap, looked down mournfully as the kid tried to empty the machine single-handedly.
“You got to pay for that,” the old man called. “We can’t afford to fill your belly all day.”
“Fuck you, Henry,” the kid said without turning around. The corners of his mouth were electric blue from the dye in one of the drinks. He punched the button on the Radical Raspberry and a stream of something oozed from the tap into the cup.
The old man’s eyes turned to me. “Help you?”
“Number three, please,” I said.
“How much?”
“Let’s start with forty, see where that takes us,” I said and put two twenties on the counter.
He nodded, swept up the bills, and flipped a switch on a control panel off to one side. I went outside and began filling my car. The husky kid was done texting or checking the weather or whatever it was people did on their phones these days and stood with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, watching me. I filled the tank like I do every time, so I’m not sure what there was to see. But if that’s what passed for entertainment in Cain’s Crossing, I wasn’t going to deny him.
I finished gassing the car, then used the windshield squeegee to scrape a million bugs off the windshield and front bumper of my car. I caved after a minute. It was going to take more than rainwater and a ten-year-old sponge on a stick to get them off. I chucked the squeegee into its bucket and headed back to the office for my change and a drink.
As I passed him, the husky kid suddenly said, “Hey, you a cop?”
I stopped and looked at him. “Why, you need one?”
He blinked, surprised. “Nah. Just asking.”
“Okay,” I said and went into the office.
The old man was still swaying in place, watching the punk drain the slushie machine. His gaze switched over to me as I walked up to the counter.
“Thirty-six eighty-three,” he said.
“Okay.”
He rang up the sale and counted my change by putting the bills and the coins on the counter one at a time. It was a dangerous gamble between staying upright and getting the money from the register.
“This a family-run station?” I asked as I scooped the change off the counter.
“Yep,” he said. “Son bought it. Got killed driving over to Nashville about a year ago. He was hoping to give us an income ever since I lost my arm driving tractor. Don’t think he had this in mind.”
“How’s business?”
His eyes flicked over to the kid at the slushie machine. “We get by.”
I stared at him for a second, feeling something sharp and angry click into place, then walked over to the kid. He ignored me, going for his third or fifth or twelfth refill. He was focused, I’ll give him that. All his powers of concentration had been brought to bear on whether he should go for the Tantalizing Tangerine, Whacky Watermelon, or—the old standby—Radical Raspberry. I could’ve been a potato chip stand for all the notice he paid me.
I tapped him on the shoulder. His head swung around, his hair following the motion. His face was blank and the eyes void, as though he’d been put together this morning in a robot factory. They’d just forgotten to add brains and a personality to this particular model.
I gestured to his cup. “You gotta pay for that.”
“Huh?”
“The stuff in this machine isn’t yours. It’s not a bottomless cup of coffee. You have to pay for what you’ve drunk.”
“I don’t have to pay for shit,” he said, showing some animation. A change in air pressure told me the front door had swung open.
I jerked my thumb towards the counter. “This guy is trying to make ends meet working at a gas station a half mile from the ass end of nowhere. Every ounce of that crap you drink without paying for is hurting his bottom line, which is hurting him.”
“Fuck is it to you?”
“I am the Shadow. The fear of retribution in men’s minds. I am justice.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Just pay the man at the counter, please. You don’t have enough mind to generate the fear of retribution.”
“Fuck you.” He was facing me square, so I saw it when his gaze flicked over my shoulder.
“I appreciate the offer, but no thanks. Just pay the man, please.”
His lip curled and then he threw the drink at me.
It was as predictable, really, as his buddy—who was such a mouth-breather that I heard him from ten feet away—grabbing me in a bear hug from behind. I’m not psychic, but most guys who grab you in a bear hug lean back. So, after dodging the slushie and letting the big kid pin my arms, I reared back, going with it, and planted my size-twelve foot square in the skinny kid’s sternum between Ozzy on mic and Tony Iommi on guitar.
His eyes popped wide and his head—followed by that hair—snapped forward, then back in a graceful, almost artistic, whiplash. The momentum of my kick sent him staggering back into a giant display of pretzels and beef jerky. Both hit the floor with a crash.
The fat kid swung me back and forth with those ham-sized arms, but I was a half foot taller. I held on to his arms like we were dancing, moving with the ineffectual thrashing. Except with each swing to the left, I stomped down with my heel, aiming for his instep. I missed once, then twice. But on the third try I came down on the top of his foot with the sharp edge of my heel. I felt something give and he hollered in my ear like he’d been shot. The hug disappeared and I shoved him back to get some distance.
“You pussy,” he yelled, reaching for his foot. His face was red and twisted in agony.
Bending over and holding your boot with both hands isn’t a recommended hand-to-hand-combat stance. But it worked out just fine for me.
I didn’t want to hit him with my hand. The movies and TV shows never show broken knuckles and swollen fingers. And I didn’t have a brick, which is what I wanted to hit him with. But I had alternatives. I shuffled forward, twisted from the waist, and whipped the point of my elbow into the squinched-up flesh just above his cheek. The skin split over the bone and the kid kissed the floor.
The crinkling of chip bags and rattle of wire mesh told me that the skinny kid hadn’t been done in by my kick to the chest. I turned in time to see him pull a butterfly knife—the weapon of choice for punks and bravos the world over—from his back pocket. This particular punk, however, wasn’t quite as intimidating as he might’ve been, since he was clutching his chest with his off hand, telling me his breastbone must feel like it had been cracked in half.