by J. A. Kerley
“You ain’t into what?”
“But you ain’t too shabby for darker meat. Tell you what, I’ll give you ten for a hummer … as long as my lady can watch.”
The eyes turned to slits. “Get the fuck outta here, asshole.”
“Don’t be mean, chica,” I said. “What else you got goin’ on?”
“FUCK OFF!”
“I’ll make it fifteen. Where you from, little mama? Haiti? Honduras? Fifteen bucks is like, what, a year’s pay over there?”
“GET LOST!”
I was betting one of Matthews’ other products had run to his hidey-hole to report a problem. I backed the girl against an abandoned storefront.
“Twenny, chica … all right? But you gotta do my lady, too.”
She tried to slip by to my right, I was in front of her. Darting left did the same. I was a fast drunk. I saw her eyes look past my shoulder and go from scared to relief.
“Yo, muthafucka,” said a voice from behind me; Shizzle, no doubt, out of his hidey-hole and protecting the merchandise. I spun. He was tall and in full-length leather topped with a wide-brimmed white hat, furious that I’d pulled him from the comfort of his brandy cavern.
I was about to cool him out with the shield but my eyes burst into flames. A fist caught me in the throat and sent me to the pavement on hands and knees, rolling away when a kick caught me in the gut and knocked out my breath.
“Muthafucka, you gonna be pissing blood for a week.”
Gasping for wind, I was too concentrated on warding off the next kick to try for the piece in my waistband. Plus I was near blind.
“Excuse me?” I heard a polite feminine voice say. It was followed by a sound reminiscent of a hammer striking meat and a simultaneous scream. Shizzle Diamond’s hatless head slammed the pavement beside mine and kept screaming, rolling on his back and pulling his legs to his chest.
I blinked through tears to see Holly Belafonte silhouetted against a streetlamp, a collapsible nightstick twirling through her fingers like a drum majorette in a holiday parade. She helped me to my feet. Matthews was still on the concrete, teeth clenched in pain. It seemed the hooker had pulled pepper spray from her purse and blasted my eyes. Belafonte had trotted over armed with the nightstick kept in her purse, and whipped it behind one of Shizzle’s legs. It hurt like hell.
I held my shield in Matthew’s face, then dragged him by his shirtfront into the alley where I patted him down, tossed the belt knife to Belafonte, and held the pimp against the building.
“You ain’t vice,” he said.
“FCLE.”
Confusion. “A state guy – why?”
I leaned close enough to let him smell my breath. “A pity the fabric burned but not the skin, T’Shawn. You left two perfect finger prints on her body, bud. It’ll go easier if you start talking.”
His eyes went wide and the pimp persona dissolved into cold-sweat fear. “Body? B-body? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, MAN?”
“You know, bitch.”
“NO I DON’T! TELL ME WHAT YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!”
“You beat Kylie to death and set her on fire.”
“I D-DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT, MAN. SHE’S DEAD? OH JESUS. OH MY FUCKING GOD …”
I didn’t see knowledge or evasion: I saw stark terror. Ten years in the detective game, the last five so experienced from the first five that I knew the scumbucket had no idea what I was talking about.
“Tell me about Kylie,” I said, the hands loosening on his shirt.
“I-I ain’t seen her in four days. I figured she booked.”
“I think I believe you,” I said. “So right now I need the whole ugly truth, T’Shawn. Anything less, I’ll take you downtown and sweat you all night. Your choice.”
He’d probably have done a go-right-ahead bit if I’d been MDPD, but the FCLE had arrived in his squalid little world, which meant things were serious.
“Anything, man,” he said. “But you gotta know, it wasn’t me.”
I asked questions, he provided answers. Matthews had found Sandoval on the streets seven months back, drunk. He’d brought her to one of his two cribs, babied her. He also traded out the booze for H and put her on the street.
“What’d she do before she got to Miami?” I asked at one point.
“She never talked about that, man. Never. Like she’d shut it off. Bad shit at home, maybe. You wouldn’t believe what got done to some of these girls when they lived at home.”
In the end Matthews knew almost nothing of Sandoval; little more to him than an ATM, and as long as she kept pumping out money, he was fine with it. I shot a glance at Belafonte. Her eyes were expressionless but her nose looked like a sewage field was nearby.
“Beat it,” I said, releasing the pimp. Matthews ducked low past me and went to pick up his hat but Belafonte was standing on it. He gave her a wide berth and retreated down the street as we climbed back into the car to press onward into the unrevealed world of Kylie Sandoval. I took a deep breath and rested my head on the steering wheel. My cheek was sore from the punch and my side ached from the kick.
“Quite the interesting play,” Belafonte said, giving me my first-ever sample of what amusement sounded like in her voice. “Your take on Richard III, perhaps?”
“My kingdom for a nightstick,” I sighed.
10
I dropped Belafonte off at her car and headed to Viv’s. The place was deserted and my heart sank. I gave her a call.
“I’m running a half-hour late … be home in twenty minutes. I’ll make a food grab on the way in. Miguelito’s?”
“Olé.”
Viv arrived minutes later with burritos, chips, salsa and guacamole from a favored tacquería. She grinned as she scampered by to warm the chow and I used the time to admire Vivian’s slender form bending to put the food in the oven. She wore a simple blue skirt over improbably long legs and a gray blouse. The kicks were dark athletic shoes which looked out of place, but were the requisite wear for long hours of hard hospital floors.
We feasted on burritos – chicken for Viv, goat for me – washed down with Negra Modelo. Our conversation veered briefly into the sadness of Roberta Menendez’s loss, then, happier, into a recap of my weekend with Harry and his new prospects.
“Harry’s driving someone around?” Viv said. “He’s already bored with retirement?”
“Harry felt he could stash some playtime cash. And yes, Harry needs to be doing something or he gets mopey.”
“Mopey?”
“That time he got his head bashed in and spent weeks in the hospital? He hated TV so he tried crossword puzzles. Doing them bored him after two days, so he started making them. I remember one had the word ‘heimidemisemiquaver’ crossing the word ‘subdermatoglyphic’.”
“What the hell do those mean?”
“The first has something to do with music, the second concerns fingerprint patterns, and is the longest word where every letter is used just once, the reason Harry wanted to use it. It took him a month to build that damn puzzle but when he was done it made the New York Times Sunday version look like it was written by a ten-year-old.”
Viv gave me a look. “You miss him, don’t you?”
I made a smile happen. “We had some good times. But the world moves on.”
Another look, then a change of subject. “Harry thinks he’ll like being a chauffeur?” Vivian asked, curling the long legs on to the sofa.
“Driver,” I corrected. “We’ll just have to wait to find out.”
“I guess we will,” she said, standing and angling toward the stairs. “But until then, I know something that can’t wait much longer.” She winked.
I was off the couch like a shot.
Viv left for MD-Gen before six a.m. and I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of a fleeting kiss. Breakfast was leftover frijoles refritos and chips and I was ready to attack the Sandoval case when my phone rang: JEREMY.
“There’s a huge commotion down
the street, Carson,” my brother said before I could speak. “What is it?”
I suppressed a moan: My brother always wanted something.
“A commotion?”
“An ambulance, a quartet of cop cars. A news van. There’s a goddamn circus out there. What the hell is going on, Carson?”
“Why should I know that?”
“You’re a big-league detective, right? Find out.”
“Jeremy, I’m—”
“It’s a distraction. I can’t concentrate on my work.”
I figured Jeremy had been up at daybreak studying the morning’s financial indicators from Asia, preparing for the day’s buys and sells. I’d seen what a trading floor looked like and assumed part of Jeremy’s success in the market came from years in an institution for the criminally insane.
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Drive out and shoot them?”
“How much do you pay in rent, Carson?” He hung up.
Through a Byzantine set of manipulations, my brother was my landlord and I paid a hundred bucks a month to live in a home that should have cost three grand. I stared at the phone, sighed, and made a call to King Barlow, an investigator with the Key West PD.
“I got a weird call, King. From a friend, sorta, that lives out there. He says there’s a commotion down the block. He’s kind of a crank, and thought I could assure him it’s not an alien invasion or whatever.” I gave King the block number and he blew out a breath.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Carson. Gonna be on the news any minute, I expect.”
“What is it, King?”
“Amos Schrum has come home to die.”
A picture immediately came to mind: a man of towering height with his face looking hewn from flint, all angles and hollows. His eyes were squinty small and peered from the cave of his brow, and his curling, snow-white hair flowed back from his high forehead like a foaming wave. Schrum’s stentorian voice had once been compared to “a trumpet calling the righteous to battle”.
The Reverend Amos Schrum had been a fixture on the religious scene since I was a kid, my mother dragging me to one of his tent revivals thirty-something years back. Schrum would have been in his late forties at the time, and though I recalled not a word of his message, my child’s eyes were riveted to the figure on the distant stage: diamond-bright in cones of light that seemed aimed from the heavens. People were Amen-ing and Hallelujah-ing. Some wept openly. A black woman beside me began babbling nonsense. A white man fell to his hands and knees and started barking like a dog. Throngs rushed the stage to be saved.
If there were more than a few people who conflated Amos Schrum with God Almighty, I could almost understand.
“Schrum’s from Key West?” I asked.
“Lived here until he went to bible school. He felt close to the place – family home and all – and kept the house. He’s had a caretaker living there, though Schrum hasn’t visited in years.”
“What’s wrong with the guy?”
“Supposedly the old ticker might blow at any second. His people told us Schrum was arriving today around daybreak, and when the news got out we’d need crowd control.”
“Schrum’s that big a deal?”
“The guy’s network broadcasts into over seven million homes a week. He carries a big stick in conservative and evangelistic religious circles.”
“So I should tell my br— … friend that his neighborhood’s gonna be chaotic for a while?”
“There’ll be church buses hauling in the faithful to pay respects, prayer vigils, TV vans, that kind of thing. At least until the bucket gets kicked.”
“Thanks, King. I’ll pass it on.”
I channel-surfed news outlets, stopping on a woman backgrounded by a photograph of Schrum and I upped the volume.
“… seventy-six-year-old evangelist and creator of the Crown of Glory television empire, is reportedly gravely ill and has moved from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, to the house in Key West where the influential pastor spent his early years … wife of thirty years died five years ago from ovarian cancer … no details on his illness are available, though a history of heart problems … pacemaker implanted in March …”
I called Jeremy and told him to get used to crowd scenes.
“It’s already started,” he moaned. “Four more news vans and two dozen halfwits weeping in the street. One lunatic is dressed in sackcloth and dragging a wooden cross. Maybe I’ll saunter over in a devil mask and tap the window. Give Schrum a heart attack so I can get some peace.”
“Stay away, Jeremy. Crowds are potentially dangerous.”
“You said my visage no longer graced the halls of police departments. I’m a free man.”
A year after being identified as dead and removed from Wanted listings, I was less fearful of my brother being identified with old photos than of his need to meddle and manipulate. Despite his claimed need for peace, a crowd of emotionally distraught mourners would fascinate my brother.
“Stay inside and let it blow over,” I said. “Promise me you’ll ignore the commotion.”
“Can you believe this,” he said – and I knew he’d been looking out his window – “a guy with a bullhorn has started ranting about homosexuals. Interesting.”
“Stay inside,” I told him. “Promise me.”
“Yes, yes, of course …” he said, hanging up the phone, suddenly distracted.
11
Frisco Dredd sat naked save for a T-shirt and briefs in the tiny room on the southern edge of Little Havana, watching the traffic crawl down Highway 90 through a dirt-hazed window. The bathroom was a filthy toilet and a dripping sink, the shower a two-by-two recess in the wall, the plastic curtain half hanging on the broken-tile floor.
The rooms rented by the week, mainly to the desperate, downtrodden and addicted. But the hotel-apartment was anonymous, the other dwellers transient and acknowledging Dredd with a fast nod and averted eyes, if at all.
I live amidst the wicked until my tasks are finished … Dredd thought. He closed his eyes and recalled a passage from Malachi: “And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet …”
The room came furnished with a beaten couch, a lopsided chair and a wooden table. The bed was in an alcove and Dredd had stripped off the threadbare cover and stained sheets and put them in the garbage, buying a sleeping bag to put atop the mattress and a fresh white sheet to cover his body. He’d also purchased a small refrigerator and a cheap set of weights to keep his body strong.
His body needed to stay fit: It carried precious cargo.
Dredd started to stand, but his knees quivered and he sat heavily. When with the Jezebel last night, the power had flowed through him brighter and purer than the sun and while he worked the holy symphony sang in his head. But after he’d finished, his energy had drained away, leaving him weak as a kitten.
Dredd looked at his briefs and saw the purple stain of dried blood. He’d been so wearied he’d fallen asleep before removing his wire. He winced as he eased the underwear down and over his animal. Dredd fought his way to standing and limped across the room to the kitchen drawer he used as a tool box. He pulled it open: hammer, vise-grips, duct tape and – tucked in back – the spool of .32 gauge copper wire and the snips. He grabbed the snips and returned to the bed, sitting on the edge with his legs spread wide, picking gingerly at the base of his animal, grimacing as he pulled up a knotted loop of thread-thin brass wire, snipping the strand. Teeth clenched against the pain – nothin’ compared to your pain and tribulation, Lord, forgive my weakness – he slowly unwrapped the biting wire from his animal, fresh blood seeping from cuts inflicted when the women were close and his animal awakened and hungered for them. But the constricting wire stopped that, the fierce pain reminding him of his holy mission.
Gasping, Dredd dropped the crusted wire to the floor. He fell back to the mattress and began to sing in a high and whispery voice.
“When the Bridegroom cometh will your robes be
white?
Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?
Will your soul be ready for the mansions bright,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
Dredd stripped off his shirt to let the Lord see that Frisco Dredd had again fought his animal and won.
“Lay aside the garments that are stained with sin,
And be washed in the blood of the Lamb;
There’s a fountain flowing for the soul unclean,
O be washed in the blood of the Lamb …”
After several verses, Dredd gathered his strength, pushed from the bed and went to the bathroom, dropping to his knees beside the sink. The pipes went into a jagged hole in the wall. Dredd snaked his arm through the hole until his fingers withdrew a leather rectangle with a silver cross of duct tape.
Dredd returned to the bed. From the leather holder he withdrew a black notebook. His missions, his holy crusades, were listed within, along with valuable information: times, dates, locations, employers, routes traveled, maps, photos … Time to prepare for the next mission. Dredd thumbed open a page, a list of names. Who would be chosen? Who was next?
Dredd held the notebook inches above his bleeding animal, showing it to the gaping wound.
The choice was His to make.
12
Jeremy Ryder’s Key West home sat toward the rear of a long, palm-studded lot abloom with bougainvillea and myrtle, the front yard picket-fenced with ficus on both corners. Pastel yellow with white accenting and a deep porch, the house stood two stories tall plus an attic story beneath a high-pitched roof, a rounded tower twelve feet in diameter comprising the southern corner of the home and ending with a third-story projection with cupola. The majestic dwelling had been built in the early 1920s, when ceilings were a proper height, twelve feet. The original owner, Mr Tobias Throckington, had made his fortune during Prohibition, running liquor from Cuba to speakeasies as distant as Galveston.
It was the top story of the tower where Ryder currently stood, his office, a burled-oak desk curved to fit the wall below one of the wide windows. On the desk were the six small displays of his Bloomberg terminal, his link to the financial world. On the other end of the desk was his personal computer, a large-screen iMac. The Bloomberg monitors danced with charts and graphs and streaming numbers, the personal computer was dark.