by Matthew Iden
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” I said, my voice rough. “Let’s find out what happened first, then deal with it. It might be hard, it might be easy. But inventing things won’t help.”
She nodded and looked down at her lap. I took a deep breath and got ready to plunge into a confession of my own. “Look, Mary Beth. There’s something you should know. J.D. did some bad things, he should’ve done some time, it’s true, but he doesn’t deserve to shoulder all the blame. There were things that happened, things I did—”
She reached across and placed a hand over my mouth. “Don’t. Please. It took me a lot to get this far. Whatever you did, forget about it. For now, at least. We’ll talk it out when you find J.D.’s killer. We’ll make it fit later. Okay?”
I nodded and she took her hand away, only to slide it along my face. She looked at me like that for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed me gently on the mouth. I stared at her for another long moment, then opened the door and slipped out. The Coup de Ville’s lights came on and she drove away.
. . .
I watched the motel from the shelter of the custard stand. A few cars passed in the night, including a truck that tore past at about sixty not long after Mary Beth had pulled away. There seemed to be no one in the office. A light flicked on in number seven, but no one came by to have their itch scratched, and by midnight the light went out, though the blue strobe of TV light played through the cracks of the blinds. The windows of the other huts yawned black and empty. I sank back even farther into the shadows and pulled out my phone. I dialed from my phone’s memory. It picked up in two rings.
“Bloch.”
“Sam, it’s Marty,” I said. “Things have taken a twist.”
“More than they have already?”
“You could say that,” I said, and brought him up to speed. He listened the way Sam always did—quiet, with an intensity that told me he heard everything I said and more.
“So, I was right,” he said. “Meth is the game.”
“It gets better,” I said, and described the Customs boxes.
A long pause. Then, “They’ve got it. A source for the pseudoephedrine.”
“I didn’t want to say it.”
He swore. “What else could it be? Four dozen empty boxes with Customs markings in a meth lab? All the other ingredients are local.”
“And where’s the nearest major Customs port?”
“Norfolk.”
“Will Brower worked at the Norfolk docks after a short spin with the U.S. Army,” I said. “Want to bet it was with the Customs office or close to it?”
“Where he made a buddy who said, ‘Hey, you know, I could smuggle a Jeep through here without anyone batting an eye. How about fifty pounds of suzie, instead?’”
“Problem is, the Browers didn’t dream this up on their own. These guys make rocks look smart.”
“I’ll dig around,” Sam said. “Shouldn’t be too hard to chase down where he used to work and with whom.”
“Any word from the DEA?” I asked.
“No,” he said, frustrated. “Total radio silence. Doesn’t make any sense.”
“Keep plugging away at that,” I said. “And let me know what you find out about Will.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep working on the Browers. Maybe this kid Jay will crack. Blow up another lab, if nothing else pans out.”
“Local dicks going to let you play Lone Ranger for much longer?”
“I pretty much have a mandate from a cop down here to stick my nose into things. Though he’ll deny everything if I get caught.” I relayed Warren’s suspicions about Palmer.
“Do you believe him?”
I sighed. “I want to. Some things fit the way he says they should. On the other hand, I don’t know squat about Palmer and it’s not like I can go and ask him if he’s on the take. I’ll just have to bull my way through this until something or somebody cracks.”
“Sophisticated detective work at play. I love it.”
“You got something better, I’ll listen.”
“If I think of something, I’ll call,” Sam said. “Watch your back.”
I hung up and watched the motel until my legs were aching and my feet were almost numb. I was stalling. What had seemed like a brilliant idea earlier in the day now looked lousy. I sighed and shook myself. I was going to have to sleep sometime. I took a peek left and right, then jogged across the road at a brisk place, neither walking nor running.
The roof’s overhang cast a narrow shadow along the front of the motel and I tucked into it as I worked on the lock of number three. The locks looked to be originals, at least twenty years old, so I took out a bump key that looked like it would fit and got to work. It had been years since I’d tried to bump a lock, but I’d always had a knack for it and I was inside the room by the fourth try. I stood and listened for a minute, waiting to see if anyone had heard my tap, tap, tapping on the chamber door. It was always good to be careful, but I was two units down from a seemingly empty office and four from a junkie with her TV on. The others were almost certainly empty. Nothing and no one materialized after several minutes. I let my breath out and concentrated on the room in front of me.
Must and damp filled my nose, something I hadn’t noticed when I’d looked over the room in the heat of the day. A weak light passed through the windows, just enough to limn the corners of the bed and the nightstands. The room was exactly as I’d seen it before, but the night—and my imagination—suffused it with meaning. J.D.’s blood had probably spread in a kidney-shaped pool just a few feet away, and I imagined I could see it pulsing softly into the rug in time to his last hoarse breaths, soaking down into the fibers, into the pad beneath, into the wood below, down into the earth…
I sucked in a sharp breath, like I’d been shaken awake. I was here to avenge J.D. To see justice done. To dole it out myself, if I could. His ghost would just have to be happy with that.
I took off my shoes, pulled the threadbare coverlet down, and slipped under the covers, hoping for a single night’s sleep in a dead man’s bed.
vii.
They’ve given me a special room away from the Visitation Hall. It has two entrances: one for cons, one for cops and DAs. It’s the best way to keep cons who want to talk alive. Petersburg is a federal prison, and the code regarding informants is just as strong, if not stronger, than it is in state penitentiaries. The guards can sneak a con in here, have a ten-minute conversation, and put him back in General before anyone knows he’s gone.
A constable leads J.D. into the room wearing his DayGlo jumpsuit and white socks, hands cuffed behind his back. Since I know why I’m here and he doesn’t, I get a brief second to look at J.D. before he recognizes me. The change in him is astonishing. In three years, he’s even thinner and more ascetic than I remember. Like a table knife honed down to a straight razor. The shaved head and tattoos are part of it, of course, but there’s a coiled violence in him that the punk in the car didn’t have.
When he sees me, the look is assessing, trying to place me. Then he breaks into a smile. He’s missing his four upper front teeth. The constable takes the cuffs off him and walks him over to the chair.
“So, you’re my surprise visitor,” he says.
“That’s me. Getting along on the inside?” I ask.
“Can’t complain. I mean, if I have to be here, it could be worse. ’Course, I don’t have to be here, do I?”
I shuffle some papers. “I thought you might be interested to hear your old boss Maurice is up on about ten counts of murder and too many drug charges to keep track of.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“You drove to Richmond to tell me that?”
“We could use your help. We got what we need to get the ball rolling on Maurice, but a word from somebody who knows him could put him away for good.”
J.D. smiled again, showing off red gums and the gap where his teeth should’ve been. “You want to know how I
got my teeth knocked out, Detective?”
“Not really.”
“About a year ago, I stood up for this old man that was about to get fucked to death in the shower here. Cost me my teeth and about sixty stitches but it felt good, you know, doing the right thing. I ain’t never had that feeling before, ’cause I never really did the right thing before.”
“This would be doing the right thing,” I offer.
“No, it would be doing what you want,” he says, and the smile disappears. “There’s a difference. The right thing is doing something without payback. Doing it when it ain’t easy. Doing it when it’ll hurt.”
“You gonna lecture me on integrity, J.D.?”
“Somebody has to,” he says. “I’d say you and your friend Lowry could use a lesson or two.”
“What do you mean?”
He gives me an incredulous look. “What do I mean? What do I mean? I mean you planted that gun on me and you fucking well know it. When I wouldn’t rat on Maurice, you put me away.”
I get a wriggling feeling in my gut. “Bullshit.”
“Fuck you. One of the homies I used to run with ended up in Petersburg and told me Maurice himself gave the Hi-Point to a white cop to set me up. It’s the truth and you know it.”
I shuffle the papers yet again, then stop, angry with myself. “Wasn’t me.”
“Didn’t have to be,” J.D. says. “You were there when he did. And if you saw it done, you could’ve stopped it. Either way, you missed the boat, Detective. You had your shot to do one right thing and you blew it.”
Memories tumble together. I see Stan’s face, his attitude, his little speech in the courtroom. Things make too much sense. I fumble for a way to pull this back together. “If things went down the way you say they did, then Maurice is as much to blame as we are. This is your chance to get even.”
The chair scrapes the floor as J.D. pushes back from the table. He walks over to the door and raps twice. “Maybe so, Detective. But I ain’t going to take it. I meet up with Maurice here in lockup, he’ll get his. But I’ll be damned if I let you use me to do it.”
The guard unlocks the door. He sees J.D. there and looks at me for confirmation. I nod. The guard makes a motion for J.D. to turn around so he can cuff him for the walk back.
Hands behind his back, J.D. pins me with his stare. “You might want to think hard on this, Detective. I got another seventeen years to chew it over. Might be too late for me, might not. But there’s going to be another time when you’ll wonder if you got it in you to do the right thing. You gonna be up for it?”
The guard turns him around by the elbow and they walk out, their feet echoing down the long corridor.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I slept fitfully. I dreamt of the explosion and hospital smells and chemotherapy and Will Brower’s grinning face. I heard the soft, wet sound of a bat hitting a skull. The last tapering breaths. The crash of a cell door being slammed shut. Felt Mary Beth’s lips on mine. Tasted smoke and gunpowder and blood.
I was floating in the middle spaces, not sleeping, not awake, when my phone—stuffed in my shirt pocket with the sound off—buzzed, jerking me awake.
I answered it by the glum light of the predawn, bleary-eyed and sleep-stupid. “Singer.”
It was Warren. “Time to wake up, bud.”
“What’s going on?”
“State police found Mary Beth Able’s car by the side of the road last night. Empty, with the doors wide open.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Warren came around the curve fast, bringing his Camry to a skidding stop a few feet away from me where I stood in the shadow of the custard stand. I opened the passenger door, slid inside, and he took off again.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Trooper called it in around four-thirty this morning. Plates and registration confirmed.”
“What shape was the car in?”
“No body, no blood, no struggle. Purse on the front seat.”
I swore.
“Yep. Someone convinced her to pull over, got her out of the car, and shoved her in their trunk.”
“Any evidence it wasn’t the Browers?”
“Like, did they find a business card at the scene?”
“No, like someone ID’d one of the Browers’ monster trucks leaving the area.”
“Nope. Didn’t get that lucky.”
“You got a plan?”
He shook his head. He drove fast, cutting curves where it made sense, pounding the gas on the straightaway. “The best I can come up with is to hunker down near the Browers’ place and watch it ’til we see something worth moving on. I tossed a pair of binoculars, food, some extra ammo in the trunk.”
“You got any friends in the department that could help out?”
“Only six of us are full-timers including me and Palmer. The other four would either run straight to him with the news or hem and haw about procedure. And I wouldn’t trust the part-timers to not accidentally shoot us in the ass.”
I leaned my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes. “What’s their place like?”
“Old farmhouse. Still in pretty good shape. Their mama died just a few years ago, so they haven’t had time to run it into the ground. Two or three outbuildings, falling down.”
“If it’s farmland, is there any cover?”
He nodded. “The land hasn’t been worked for fifty years or more. Woods have grown over most of it. They keep the yard clear around the house out to about twenty or thirty yards.”
“Fencing? Dogs? Cameras?”
“No fence. No dog could stand ’em. And I’ll eat my own gun if the house is wired with anything slicker than a doorbell.”
I frowned. “Are they that dumb?”
“No, they usually got one of them flunkies guarding the place, twenty-four seven. Give him a shotgun and tell him to walk around the yard, peek out the windows once in a while. Folks around here know to give them a wide berth if they don’t want to get shot or have one of the brothers beat up their grandma.”
“For someone who wasn’t going to touch this, you seem to know an awful lot about the layout.”
He quirked a smile. “A man’s got his hobbies.”
We talked a little more about how we wanted to approach the house, what we thought we could expect, and how far we were willing to go. With no warrant in hand, no backup, and my status as a civilian, things were going to be dicey on a legal front, to the say the least. But we’d have to throw caution out the window if we saw any sign of Mary Beth being held inside.
“I’m going to fly past their place so you can get a view from the road,” Warren said. “Then we’re going to circle up the east side along an old road that used to be part of the property. We’ll have to bushwhack to get to a good spot, maybe a half mile in from where we’ll park. Think you can handle it?”
“I can handle it.”
“Alright, then. Coming up on it in about a quarter mile.”
We drove past the Browers’ place just under the speed limit, hoping to get a quick reconnaissance in without being too obvious. Even with Warren’s description, I’m not sure what I expected. A ramshackle farmhouse with goats chewing the hedges? A hillbilly rancher with living room furniture on the porch and a ’76 Firebird on blocks in the yard? A walled compound with razor wire and a Confederate flag waving in the breeze?
What I got was a glimpse of a tidy, three-story brick home, with a wide front porch and expansive front lawn. While it wouldn’t have placed in any House Beautiful contests, it didn’t fit the profile of a family of meth dealers, either.
Two miles later, Warren slowed and turned onto a half-dirt track named Browers Mill Road that split a cornfield in half. An idle portion of my brain decided that the name might explain the beautiful family home. A prosperous ancestor builds the first mill in an agricultural county, makes a modest fortune and, after forty years of saving, builds a beautiful home on acres of land by the edge of an idyllic wood…just in time for autom
ated mills and corporate farms to make the family business obsolete. The Brower name fades over the decades until all that’s left is the brick home and a vague sense of self-importance. Ending with the present generation of drug dealers.
Warren slowed the car even more as we tested the Camry’s suspension on the deep ruts and potholes in the road. The low speed helped keep the dust cloud down, as well. Ten minutes later, he eased off the track and bounced into a cornfield. A two-year-old could’ve followed the trail from the road, but at least the stalks broke up the car’s profile from a distance.
We got out of the car and went back to the trunk. Warren opened it and took out a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, a box of shells, and his binoculars. He was wearing a green-and-white Hawaiian shirt with palmetto trees on the front—as good as camouflage—and a hunter’s vest over top.
“You still got that SIG?” he asked me. I nodded and he pulled out a box of 9 mm shells from a tackle box. “Load up.”
I slipped a handful of shells out of the box and into separate pockets to keep down the jingle they made. The extra bullets were comforting, but that was the extent of their usefulness unless we got caught in a siege. My SIG had an extended eight-round magazine, but I’d have to eject and load the clip manually if I ran out. Unlikely in a firefight. Nine rounds would probably have to do.
Warren tossed some bottles of water and some granola bars into a threadbare camo backpack, closed the trunk, and looked at me.
“You ready to do this?”
“Got to,” I said. “When they don’t get any info out of Mary Beth, she’ll be nothing but a liability. We’ve got a couple of hours at best.”
He nodded and we set off through the cornfield.
. . .
We set up four hundred yards east of the house, looking down at the back and side of it from a small rise in the woods. Warren and I had played commando, crawling on our bellies for the last fifty feet of the rise before it crested and sloped down to become the back forty of the Brower property. I wiped sweat out of my eyes and tried to ignore the sticks and rocks jabbing into my stomach. Warren dug around for his binoculars and scanned the place before handing them to me.