“Spunk.” He smiled. “I like that.”
“When is my termination effective?” I asked.
“Immediately,” Theo said. “Sorry. But I have to tell the mayor and DA tomorrow.”
“My severance package. I need access to the databases for a couple of weeks.”
“This could be arranged.” Theo stroked his chin.
Piper said, “You’re still trying to find Tremont, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “And Bobby’s daughter. Hannah June McKee.”
- CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN -
In the makeshift orphanage in West Dallas, Lysol watches Hannah McKee cradle the baby, a bottle of formula in the infant’s mouth. Both she and the child are cooing, looking at each other with contentment.
Hannah is naked except for a pair of black panties, Lysol’s measure to keep her from running away. As time has gone by he’s realized she wouldn’t run even if given the chance. But he doesn’t tell her to put her clothes back on. Nor does she ask to.
Something about a woman with an infant, especially an attractive woman who’s nearly naked, gets a man’s blood going.
Despite wanting Jamal’s help in feeding the babies, Lysol banished him to the backyard after the formula was warmed. Jamal is just a boy, but there’s no sense getting his hormones cranked up any earlier than necessary. Lysol helps with the feeding, surprised at how easy it has all come back to him.
The baby gurgles. The woman pats his back while staring at Lysol, her expression seductive without meaning to be.
Lysol shakes his head, trying to force those particular thoughts of Hannah McKee from his mind. He turns her cell back on, debates who to reach out to. Realizes there’s no one except his lawyer, the phone call of last resort.
“What happens after I’m done feeding the babies?” Hannah says.
“I’m gonna figure a way out of here.” He peers through the window.
The cop is still there but he has company now. A Dallas County sheriff’s deputy has just pulled up. The cop and the deputy talk for a moment and then the cop leaves. This is an odd occurrence and Lysol doesn’t know what to make of it.
The five-oh are obviously still looking for him, but they are apparently stretched a little thin if the county’s getting involved.
“The babies, they’re gonna need to be changed in a little while.” Hannah puts the child down.
“So get to it.” Lysol is all good with feeding the kids. Changing them, that’s another story.
“We’re about out of diapers. There’re more in my car.”
“And where would your car be?”
She walks over to the window, seemingly unashamed of her nudity. It’s late afternoon and the light is growing dim in the living room of the house south of Singleton.
She stands next to Lysol, reaches in front of him, and lifts one slat of the blinds. Her arm brushes against Lysol’s shoulder; he steps back.
“There.” She points to the right. “Down the block.”
Lysol doesn’t want to open another slat and risk the po-po seeing too much movement from the house. So he moves closer to the woman, peers over her shoulder.
A late-model BMW sits in front of the home next door.
He can smell the odor of shampoo and baby powder on Hannah McKee, not an unpleasant combination. That, combined with her body, makes his head swim.
“The car registered to you?” He moves away.
“To a leasing company. My name’s on the lease, though.”
“Is it hot?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Anybody looking for the car? Or you?”
“No.” She turns back from the window and stares into his eyes. “No one is looking for me.”
“Can Jamal and his little crew change the babies?”
She hesitates, then nods.
Another sheriff’s car pulls up behind the first one. The two deputies stand on the sidewalk, conversing. They are relaxed, not anxious. For now at least.
“You can’t leave by the front,” she says.
“I need your car. In the alley.”
“Then I’ll have to put my clothes on and drive it there.”
Lysol doesn’t reply.
“But that would mean you’d have to trust me.” She puts one arm on his shoulder, a finger rubbing his neck. “Do you think you can trust me?”
Lysol struggles not to stare at her body, to control the involuntary reactions from his own.
“Is your leg okay?” Hannah glances down at the flesh wound. “Want me to change the bandage?”
Lysol looks down. She’s standing right in front of him, so his eyes traverse the length of her body, the breasts, the smooth flesh of her belly, the front of her panties, a triangle of black silk.
“My leg’s fine.” He slips away from her, heads down the hall.
She follows him to the bedroom.
Lysol dashes to the window, bumping the bed as he goes, knocking Hannah’s purse to the floor. Her wallet falls out, flops open.
Lysol moves one side of the blinds a fraction, peers outside, looking for an escape.
The children are in the backyard, kicking a basketball. Their weapons are not visible. Beyond the yard lies the alley where he first encountered Jamal.
He realizes he’ll never make it on foot. He has to have a car.
Hannah lies on the bed, head propped up on one arm.
“You ever been with anybody like me?” she says.
Lysol stares at her. A cray-cray white ho, hot-looking, built for speed. Usually this is his favorite combination.
Not now, though.
He glances at her purse and wallet on the floor. He picks up the wallet. Earlier, he’d searched the money compartment and read the info on her driver’s license, which was on the outside in a plastic sleeve.
He had not searched the entire wallet, however.
After dropping off the bed, the wallet had fallen open to the picture section, a throwback to a different era. Who keeps pictures like that anymore when you have a cell phone?
Two photos are visible. One is a black kid, maybe twelve or thirteen. The kid has eyes that aren’t slow but aren’t right either. The other picture is a much younger Hannah McKee, maybe a decade before, standing by a Mexican man in a Dallas police uniform.
“This is Tremont Washington.” Lysol points to the first photo. “I recognize him from the neighborhood.”
Hannah doesn’t reply.
“People are looking for Tremont,” Lysol says. “You know where he is?”
She shakes her head. “We had a fight, me and—it’s not important. He always runs away when we fight.”
“We who?”
“He always comes back, too.” She paused. “Except this time he didn’t.”
“The cop.” Lysol points to the second picture. “You had a fight with him?”
Hannah grabs an end of the comforter and covers herself.
“Is the cop your boyfriend?”
She pulls the comforter to her chin.
“If you tell me where Tremont is,” Lysol says, “then I can get someone to pick me up and I’ll go away. You won’t have to see me again.”
Jonathan Cantrell. He’s still connected to the feds. He can call off the local heat if Lysol can give him info about Tremont Washington.
Hannah shakes her head. “I don’t know where he is. He just took off running and we never saw him again.”
Tears fill her eyes.
Lysol throws the wallet against the far wall, angry and frustrated.
Cantrell will be of no help then. Lysol is alone. The weight of that simple fact hangs on his shoulders like a lead blanket.
Time for the escape plan. He’s been putting it off for too long.
Lysol sits on the bed and, using Hannah’s cell
, dials the number of his attorney, an ethically challenged gash-hound named Stodghill.
Stodghill, a criminal-defense specialist, answers his cell after a long time. Lysol can hear 1980s hair-band music blaring in the background. He figures the man is in a strip club since it’s after lunch and all.
Without going into any incriminating details, he explains quickly what’s happened.
Stodghill understands immediately, says he’ll ready Lysol’s escape plan, which is really quite simple.
A chartered Learjet will be standing by at Love Field. In the passenger compartment will be a bag of cash, a passport, and a key to a safety deposit box in Houston. Three million euros are in the safety deposit box, enough to start a new life somewhere else.
They discuss the details for a few moments. Then Stodghill says, “You really leaving Dallas?”
Lysol stares at the wall of the bedroom for a long time.
Stodghill says, “You still there?”
“Stand by,” Lysol says. “Just keep it all on hold.”
He hangs up before the attorney can respond.
He looks at Hannah. “Do you want to come with me?”
“Where?”
“Away.”
Neither of them speak.
A helicopter flies overhead. Low and fast.
On the dresser is a small flat-screen TV. Lysol turns it on.
The local anchors with their puffy hair and plaid sport coats are talking fast, like they get paid by the word and they better get as many out as possible.
A gunfight on Singleton Boulevard several hours before. A picture of Lysol appears on the screen.
There is another story, too, though.
A suspected serial killer, responsible for what the police are now calling the Vigilante Murders, has been taken to a local hospital after suffering a heart attack.
Another picture flashes on the screen, this one of an older man, a retired cop named Robert McKee.
Hannah weeps softly as Lysol calls his attorney back.
TEN DAYS LATER
- CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT -
THE LOAN SHARK
The thing about borrowing money is, you have to pay it back.
An important lesson, one that Donny Ray Holecek always tries to impart to his clientele.
You take money from Donny Ray, you gotta make payments.
With interest. Lots of interest.
Simple concept, right?
This fine morning Donny Ray is in his South Dallas office, a picnic table in a park a few blocks from the crumbling Cotton Bowl.
The park backs up to a cemetery, which makes for some interesting visuals when instructing a reluctant client on how important it is to keep current with his payments.
Across the street from the park lie block after block of small wood-framed homes built in the 1920s, most of which suffer from what could be termed “extreme deferred maintenance.”
Peeling paint, weed-filled lawns, broken windows. The only modern features most have are satellite dishes and the occasional late-model luxury car in front of the home of the local drug dealer.
In other words, nobody in the neighborhood is going to give a shit about what goes on in this particular park.
Ergo, why Donny Ray has chosen it as his office.
At the moment, he’s in a meeting with a client who is late on his interest charges.
The client, who Donny Ray affectionately calls “Fuck Stain,” is lying on his back on the picnic table, held down by Donny Ray’s assistant, a seven-foot-tall African American gentleman named Mr. Phyllis.
Fuck Stain—a stockbroker with a drug problem—has been ignoring Donny Ray’s calls, something that is almost worse than not making your interest payments.
Communication, Donny Ray likes to say. That’s the important part of any successful business venture. And Donny Ray Holecek—a pudgy high school dropout from Kosse, Texas—is very successful in his field. In fact, Donny Ray is so successful that he’s considered the biggest purveyor of street money in all of Dallas County.
Donny Ray takes pride in this fact, an accomplishment for which he credits two things: good communication (see above), and passion for the job.
Another lesser element of his success comes from choosing just the right tool for the task at hand. In this instance, a ball-peen hammer.
“Mr. Phyllis,” Donny Ray says. “Refresh my memory. How behind is Fuck Stain?”
The stockbroker groans and cradles his left hand, the one with the two broken fingers, knuckles smashed by the ball-peen hammer.
“Four payments now plus the vig,” Mr. Phyllis says. “Twenty-five hundred.”
Donny Ray clicks his tongue. He points at the stockbroker with the business end of the hammer.
“You got two and a half on you, Fuck Stain?”
“N-no.” The man shakes uncontrollably. “But I can get it for you. I promise.”
“That’s what you told me last week. Isn’t that right, Mr. Phyllis?”
Mr. Phyllis nods.
Fuck Stain looks back and forth between his two captors, hyperventilating.
“And then you quit answering your phone.” Donny Ray shakes his head.
“See, I got a new cell,” Fuck Stain says. “I was gonna call you with the number.”
“But you didn’t,” Donny Ray says. “Which means, before we even talk about the money, I gotta break another finger.”
“Nooo!” Fuck Stain struggles to get away from Mr. Phyllis’s meaty arms.
“Hold him still, will ya?” Donny Ray grips the hammer.
“I’m trying, boss, but he’s a wiggly sonuvabitch.” Mr. Phyllis reaches for the client’s injured hand but stops. He stares at the street, which is partially obscured by a row of cedar trees.
Donny Ray follows his assistant’s gaze.
A battered navy-blue Crown Victoria has stopped. The driver’s door opens and a man in a black tracksuit gets out.
- CHAPTER FORTY-NINE -
I have a thing for cemeteries.
The solitude and stillness. The desolate sense of peace, brooding yet calm, surrounded by long-forgotten actors from the world’s stage, the bare nuggets of their life story encapsulated on the weathered tombstones.
The magnificent melancholy of it all.
Midmorning. The humidity wasn’t too bad yet, though precious little wind stirred among the oaks and pecans in the graveyard by Fair Park, a few blocks away from the Cotton Bowl.
Old weather-gnarled trees formed a canopy over my family’s plot, a small rectangle surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and set apart from the rest of the dead.
I sat on the tombstone of my father, Frank Cantrell. His final resting place was a few yards away from my grandfather’s.
My cell phone, a disposable model, chirped with a text message from Piper. R u there??
I replied in the affirmative, gave an exact location. Then I waited.
The gate to the graveyard was visible in the distance, bracketed by a pair of oleander bushes.
The cemetery was in an area that had been lower-middle class a hundred years ago. Now it could best be termed as a neighborhood for the working poor, except there wasn’t much work to compensate the poor. There were, however, a lot of crack houses, people on food stamps, and single mothers interspersed with shotgun shacks, tin-roofed blues clubs, and exotically named Baptist churches.
It was a perfect location for a meeting away from prying eyes.
A few minutes later a white Ford stopped at the gate.
The driver’s door opened, and Piper exited, scanned her surroundings.
She peered over the tops of the tombstones, saw me, then opened the rear door of her car.
A man in handcuffs stumbled out. He was lanky to the point of emaciated, wearing a white jumpsuit with “Dallas County Inmate�
�� emblazoned on the back.
She grasped him by the elbow and together they threaded their way through the tombstones to where I sat on my father’s grave.
Piper stopped a few feet away and mopped sweat from her brow with a forearm.
“Spending a little quality time with the family?” she asked.
I shrugged.
The man stumbled against a tree root but didn’t fall. He stared at the ground, not speaking.
His name was Stephen Duane Chalupnik, alias “Stoma Steve” due to the breathing hole in his throat from the tracheotomy.
He was well over six feet tall and weighed about as much as a grade-schooler. The reasons he looked like a concentration-camp escapee were myriad: HIV positive, screwed-up metabolism, bad jail food—take your pick.
“Any problems getting him out?”
Piper shook her head.
Steve Chalupnik was East Texas hillbilly, what in less polite circles would be referred to as white trash, that of the trailer variety. He had an arrest record as long as the Rio Grande. His criminal history read like the Molesters’ greatest hits album and included such gems as “Sexual Contact with a Child,” “Indecency with a Child,” and the always-popular “Continued Sexual Abuse of a Child.”
He fit the profile of the person Lysol Alvarez had told me about. And sure enough, he’d been arrested in front of the Iris Apartments on the day that Tremont Washington had gone missing.
Stoma Steve glanced around the graveyard for a moment. Then he returned to staring at the ground, not making eye contact with either of us.
“Tremont Washington,” I said. “That name mean anything to you?”
Stoma Steve didn’t reply.
“Let’s don’t make this messy.” I smiled. “Tell me what you know about Tremont and then you can get back to lockup in time for your bologna sandwich.”
“Are you a cop?” Stoma’s voice was croaky from the trach hole.
Piper chuckled.
“No.” I shook my head. “But I’m a guy who can get your child-raping ass brought to a deserted cemetery just because.”
“You hadn’t oughta taken me here. I want to talk to my lawyer.”
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