Lives Laid Away

by Stephen Mack Jones

  Tomás and I left.

  From the Southfield offices of Barney Olsen, Tomás and I headed even farther north to his Spring Lake home. It wasn’t hard to find; it had been featured a few years earlier in Hour and Detroit Design magazines and looked very much like the fever-dream fantasy child of a feudal shogun and Frank Lloyd Wright.

  It sat on five acres of prime lakeside property with its own private pier and surrounded by a not-so-subtle iron gate. Next to the gated entrance which bore the large scroll initials “BO” rendered in iron was an old-style red enamel British call box.

  “If you gotta call to get in,” Tomás said as we drove up to the gate, “then you ain’t gettin’ in.”

  “I don’t think that’s gonna be a problem,” I said, pointing to the entrance gate. It was already partially open.

  Tomás got out of the car and opened the gate all the way.

  When he got back in the car, he gave me a look and said, “Safeties off?”

  “Safeties off.”

  It’s never a good sign when a house appears to be empty and the main door is open; Tomás went in high and I went in low.

  Nothing. No one.

  Tomás indicated he would take the upper level of the house while I took the first and lower level.

  The house appeared to be completely empty and thoroughly scrubbed down: Empty refrigerator, kitchen cabinets, pantry and closets. No furniture. The two first floor bathrooms stank of bleach. There was a media room with bare wires dangling out of holes and the steel wall brace where a TV had once hung.

  The expansive open-concept dining room and living room still held their breathtaking view of the lake, but aside from that, they too were empty.

  The lower level was the same.

  Big and empty.

  As I was about to mount the steps leading back upstairs, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. A small white square peeking out of a corner of the crème-colored carpeting. I knelt by the white square; a piece of lace stuck under a wall. I tugged at the lace and it came free from the wall. Three inches of it. Stained at one end with what might have been blood.

  It didn’t take long to find the release for the false wall.

  I pushed it open and was nearly overwhelmed by the burning stench of ammonia.

  Barney’s private party room. The room was a large, windowless rectangle. It looked as if a quick renovation of the room had begun and just as quickly abandoned; spackle had patched over some holes in the wall while other holes were left open and gaping. Drag marks of furniture or equipment on the carpeted floor. At the far end of the room was a bar with empty liquor shelves, a few toppled over barstools. Hung from the ceiling over the long bar were three chains, one equipped with a pair of furry white handcuffs. In corners of the ceiling there were more holes where multi-colored wires dangled lifeless.

  A door off to the left near the bar: Five smaller rooms, three with mattresses saturated with bleach. The fifth room was soundproofed. Empty racks where electronics once resided, a small desk and four wall-mounted closed-circuit monitors, their screens smashed.

  I would get the lace to Bobby Falconi at his Wayne County Coroner’s Office for trace analysis, but I had a sickening feeling Izzy had known these rooms.

  “Octavio!”

  I raced to the second floor and found Tomás in what might have been a bedroom facing the lake.

  “What do you smell?” Tomás said.

  “Bleach,” I said. “And paint.”

  Taking out his pocket knife, Tomás crouched by the wall and sank the tip of his knife blade into a soft spot. He brought the tip of the blade up for me to see.

  “Spackle.” I pointed to where Tomás had dug the still drying spackle out. “A bullet hole? What the hell’s going on here?”

  Tomás stood. “I think I know where Barnard J. Olsen, Esquire is.”

  “Where?”

  He pointed out to the expanse of the shimmering lake.

  Twenty-three

  On the way from Olsen’s house to the biker bar, Taffy’s on the Lake, I made two quick calls.

  The first was to my lawyer, David G. Baker.

  “JeeEEEsus, August!” G shouted. “Remember last time? Remember I had to use a goddamn crate of crowbars to free you from the gnarly talons of the FBI? How many times do I have to tell you—I’m a contracts lawyer, August, not a criminal lawyer! You know, your father—”

  “I don’t have time for a virtual spanking from my dad, G,” I said. “I need to know you’ve got my back on this.”

  There was a considerable pause. Then G said, “Depends on who pulls first, how and if that’s verifiable—which, mind you, it almost never is. A badge would help, but of course you don’t have a badge anymore. I’ll ask Janet Layne. Criminal attorney I partnered up with last year. Run a couple scenarios by her.”

  “Weren’t you sleeping with this Janet Layne last year?” I said. “Compact? Great smile? Killer legs?”

  “You’re about to walk into a neo-Nazi biker kill box and you wanna know who I’m sleeping with?” he said. “Listen. Tatina needs to move here. Or you need to move there. Either way, my love life couldn’t possibly be more interesting than you being tried for murder. Or worse, me sitting shiva for you.”

  My next call went pretty much the same way.

  I told Megan O’Donnell about my recent experience with Gerald Brecker and his neo-Nazi biker crew. I told her about our visit to Barney Olsen’s Southfield office and how she might want to get an FBI forensics team to Olsen’s Spring Lake home. And I told her I was on my way for a beer-and-a-couple-shots at a little biker bar called Taffy’s on the Lake.

  “You’re being stupid,” O’Donnell said.

  “You wanna know what’s stupid, O’Donnell?” I said. “Five people sitting in the back of a goddamn donut shop talking about ‘white whales.’ In the meantime, brown girls from my neighborhood are disappearing or showing up dead.”

  “Hey, asshole, don’t you dare play that goddamn brown card with me!”

  “If it’s the only card dealt,” I said, “then it’s gonna get played.”

  I disconnected.

  After a moment, Tomás said, “If I ask a question, you gonna punch me in the mouth?”

  “Not like I don’t owe you a punch in the mouth.”

  “If you’re jacked and ready to unload,” Tomás said, “why you callin’ these tiptoeing hush puppies and givin’ ’em a head’s up?”

  “I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines, watching things go to shit,” I said. “Tired of people who should do something just sitting back, drinking coffee and claiming plausible deniability when things go fubar. If I’m in the shit, then everybody’s in the shit.” I could feel Tomás staring at me. I cut my eyes to him and said, “What?”

  “You’re very tense for a young man,” Tomás said.

  It was late afternoon when Tomás and I rolled up to Taffy’s on the Lake, a rattrap ranch-style building well on the outskirts of Spring Lake’s tonier waterfront residential developments. The parking lot contained a nicely restored sapphire-blue 1959 Ford F-100 with whitewall tires, a beat-up puke-brown 2004 Buick Rendezvous and five black Harley-Davidson bikes gangsta-leaning on their kickstands.

  “How you wanna play this, jefe?” Tomás said after checking the 15-round clip of his Baretta Brigadier Inox.

  “See how we’re dressed?” I said.

  Tomás gave me a curious look before assessing how we were both dressed. “Like real James Bond classy kinda shit.”

  “That’s how we open,” I said. “With class.”

  “And if that don’t work?”

  “Then we put our foot up in it.”

  Tomás parked and we walked into the urinal cake and vomitorium that is Taffy’s (Nowhere Near to Being) on the Lake.

  The lighting was low and even though the ai
r was cool, it was thick and musty and stank of stale cigarettes and pot. There were eight tables and three booths, most still littered with empty beer bottles, shot glasses and the red plastic baskets fries and buffalo wings come in. There was a Wurlitzer Bubbler jukebox with a Confederate flag hung over it and a large poster of a prominent scraggly-haired Detroit rocker wrapped in the American flag and flipping the bird.

  I could feel the soles of my very expensive shoes sticking to whatever biological matter had congealed on the floor.

  Behind the bar was a broad-chested man with a full grey beard and wearing a T-shirt that said “FU.” Over his T-shirt he wore his “cut”—black leather vest with various patches on it. I’m fairly certain none of the patches was earned for helping little old ladies across the street.

  Two other guys—both wearing their cuts—were seated at the bar, smoking and drinking.

  All eyes were on Tomás and me.

  “We’re closed,” the bartender growled.

  “Actually, that’s a good thing,” I said. “See, we’d like to have a nice, uninterrupted conversation with the manager of this fine establishment.”

  “He said we’re fuckin’ closed,” the customer to the right said. “Or don’t you and your buddy speakee dee English?”

  The three men laughed.

  I slowly reached into my back pants pocket and, with two fingers, extracted my wallet. From my wallet I pulled three hundred dollars. “Tell you what,” I said. “Three hundred for three minutes of the manager’s time. How’s that—”

  “Your money’s no good here, Buckwheat!” the barkeep said, slamming his meaty fist on the bar. “Now get your asses outta here!”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Hatcher,” a heavy baritone voice said from the shadows. “Money’s always welcomed everywhere—including here. Especially here.”

  A mountain of a man emerged from the shadows. He was zipping up the fly of his jeans.

  “You boys five-oh?”

  “Oh, heavens, no,” I said. “My name is Mr. Snow and this is my associate, J. Paul Yeti. We’re just a couple of interested parties making inquiries.”

  “Interested in what?” the big man said.

  “For starters, the relationship between the BMCs and a lawyer named Barney Olsen,” I said. “And if we get around to it, why a couple club members tried to give me a beatdown last night in Mexicantown.”

  The big man stared hard at us for a moment. There was a slight whistle from his nose as he breathed.

  The bartender slowly reached beneath the bar.

  The guy on the left at the bar had slipped his hand beneath his vest.

  “Tell you what,” the big man finally said. “Why don’t you leave the money on the table along with your email address and we’ll get back to you.”

  He turned and started to walk away.

  “Gee, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I said. “See, I need answers in a timely manner since a girl—two girls, in fact—have been murdered and I think your club and Barney Olsen have something to do with their murders.”

  The big man stopped. He turned back to us.

  “I thought you said you wasn’t no cops?” the big man said, crossing his massive arms across the wide geography of his chest. “If you ain’t cops just who the fuck are you?”

  I took a couple steps closer to him, smiled and said, “I’m the vengeance of the righteous, motherfucker—and if you don’t give me answers in the next sixty seconds, I will rip your asshole out through your left eye socket.”

  The whistling from the big man’s nose suddenly got louder and faster.

  After a moment, he looked at the bartender and said, “Take ’em.”

  The bartender suddenly pulled a sawed-off shotgun from beneath the bar at the same time the patron on the left pulled a .38 revolver.

  Tomás, having five minutes earlier decided which of the three men at the bar he would put rounds in first, fired twice at the bartender. The bullets ripped into the bartender’s right shoulder and trigger hand. His shotgun fired and a portion of the ceiling exploded.

  I fired my Glock at the patron with the .38 revolver, catching him in the knee and hip.

  He tumbled off the barstool in agony.

  The big man fired a long-barrel revolver at Tomás but missed.

  From a crouched firing position I made a seven-foot leap at the big man and brought the grip of my gun once into his nose and once into his mouth in quick succession. His nose and teeth crunched, blood slopping out of both.

  He wasn’t done.

  “Motherfucker,” he slurred before catching me in a rib-crushing bear hug and running me into a wall. Hitting the wall squeezed out the last bit of air from my lungs.

  Tomás would have helped had he not been busy with the second man at the bar, who was now in possession of a machine pistol set on full auto; bullets ripped up the wall and door of the bar. Tomás dove to the side of the jukebox, waiting for his shot.

  I was about three seconds from passing out.

  Still holding my Glock, I squeezed three—four—rounds down toward the floor.

  The big man dropped me and stumbled away. I gulped in as much air as I could.

  My bullets found a path down his left thigh and into his knee.

  I fired at the guy with the machine pistol.

  No choice but put him down.

  One in the right temple.

  Done.

  The big man had crawled to a wall and sat himself against it.

  “You’re dead,” he half grunted, half laughed. “You are so fucking dead. You’re gonna see all of us soon. Real soon, motherfucker.”

  “Shut up,” Tomás said before bringing the butt of his gun across the big man’s jaw.

  We stood in the doorway of the big guy’s office.

  “Jesus.”

  On a black metal desk was a kilo of cocaine. Apparently, we had interrupted sorting the coke into small baggies. On a chair in a corner were two large bags of pills. And there were the four stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

  I spotted a small black safe and decided it was coming with us.

  My phone rang.

  “I got a Spring Lake police unit on its way to some biker shit-hole out there,” O’Donnell said. “Is that you?”

  “That’d be me,” I said.

  “Goddammit!”

  Just as Tomás and I were about to bug out, the beat-up sofa in the office moved. We pulled our weapons on it. Cautiously, I jostled the sofa away from the wall; a young woman—sixteen or seventeen—naked, huddled and scared out of her mind. On her upper right arm was a recent brand of a swastika. Her fully dilated pupils told me she was higher than the International Space Station.

  She stared like a wounded animal up at me waiting for the killing shot or mercy. She was trying to say something. I knelt slowly, assuring her everything was alright.

  “Get her something to cover up,” I said to Tomás.

  She tried to speak again.

  I got closer.

  This time I heard her: “Nigger.”

  I took the big man’s riding jacket from Tomás, draped the jacket around her shoulders and stood.

  “We gotta go, jefe,” Tomás said.

  Leaving Taffy’s would have been so much easier had the tires of my rental Caddy not been slashed. It also looked as if someone had tried to crowbar the trunk open.

  “Shit,” Tomás said. “Now what’re we gonna do?”

  Tomás had always wanted a classic Ford truck in sapphire blue with whitewall tires.

  And frankly, I think I look pretty good in the saddle of a Harley Softail Fat Boy . . .

  Twenty-four

  “You know how many useless UHF antennas and first-gen satellite TV dishes are sitting on top of houses and apartment buildings and office buildings in Detroit?”

 
; I was sitting on my sofa staring at the small black safe from Taffy’s on the Lake on my coffee table.

  I’ve done a lot of things in my life.

  Cracking a safe is not one of them.

  Lucy sat on the granite work surface of my kitchen island eating from a bag of tortilla chips. An open jar of my salsa was next to her.

  “Sit on a chair,” I said still staring at the safe. “Don’t sit on my island. I prepare food there.”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly how many UHF antennas and TV dishes there are on buildings in Detroit,” she continued unabated. “But I’m guessing a shitload. Just sitting there being nests for pigeons and hawks and falcons.”

  I sighed and flopped back on the sofa. “Is there a point, Lucy? Or is this just you free associating?”

  “Oh, there’s a point, big guy,” she said, hopping down from the kitchen counter. She took a seat next to me. “Okay, so I couldn’t figure out who spoofed your phone besides me. I mean, I can usually trace a piggyback in my sleep. I wouldn’t be much of a digital-diva if I couldn’t do that, right? But this one? Pure freakin’ genius!” She paused. Then she said, “You want me to open that for you? I mean ’cause it ain’t gonna open itself.”

  “You can crack this?” I said.

  “Oh, my God!” she laughed. “A five-year-old could crack that! Move.”

  I slid down the sofa a bit and Lucy took my position.

  “It’s an old Nationwide Class B combination safe,” she said, staring at the metal box on my coffee table. “Thicker metal makes hearing the tumblers a little harder.”

  “You’ve really had a misspent youth, haven’t you?” I said.

  Lucy slid off the sofa and, on her knees in front of the safe, gently placed an ear against the door of the safe.

  No sooner had she done this, Jimmy knocked on the door. As usual, he entered without waiting for an invitation. Seeing me on the sofa and Lucy with her ear against the metal door of an office safe, Jimmy said, “Uh—bad time?”

  “Hi, Jimmy!” Lucy said without taking her ear from the safe door.