The Reign of the Kingfisher

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The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 9

by T. J. Martinson


  Before she’d left, she’d made her father a tuna fish sandwich. This would keep him occupied for at least an hour, seeing as how he spent most of the time studying the sandwich for imperfections, which he would announce into an empty room. But still, he ate the same tuna fish sandwich every day—had always eaten the same tuna fish sandwich every day. That tuna fish sandwich was a microcosm of the man who fussily ate it. He had immigrated to America as an architect when he was twenty-two years old. This was immediately after he had married her mother back in Haiti. For a short while, he worked for a small Chicago architectural firm in a position that was barely above that of an intern, and he quickly realized that there was little room for him to advance. It had nothing to do with qualifications; it had everything to do with being a black immigrant. To provide for his young family, he’d quit to work for the CTA, where he drove a bus, a job he’d rarely spoke of even when he had still been working. But Tillman imagined that he had enjoyed it, all things considered. It was steady, unchanging—both adjectives he considered to be the highest virtues. She could picture her father sitting on the elevated seat, steering wheel under his unyielding grip, circumnavigating Chicago with an impassive expression, staring out into the street. The sole consistent variable of an always evolving ecosystem. He brought tuna sandwiches in tin foil for his lunch breaks and he continued to eat them straight through retirement. How many presidents had come and gone while her father had eaten a single tuna sandwich for lunch?

  She turned down the street, headed in the direction of Lake Shore Drive. Her GPS assured her—in a robotic woman’s condescending voice—that Tillman would arrive at her location in seven minutes. She settled into her seat, feeling the cool kiss of the pistol in her waistband against her skin.

  Her father would chastise her for having to use a GPS. He would tell her that the streets are not that complicated to navigate if you just pay attention.

  * * *

  The day her mother died, Tillman hurried through the hospital sliding doors. Her police uniform, combined with her frenzied sweep of her surroundings, elicited several curious, worried stares from the waiting room. Her father followed after her in his slow, unhurried pace. They had taken a cab to the hospital. All the way, her father asked her what had happened, where they were going, why they were in a cab. She told him she didn’t know. But she did.

  “There’s been an occurrence,” the doctor said to her when Tillman and her father found him standing in the hall, surrounded by nurses. Tillman told her father to go sit down in the waiting room while she spoke with the doctor.

  Whenever she looked back on that nightmarish day, the detail that bothered her most was the doctor’s use of the word occurrence because, as a name for what had happened, it was horribly inadequate, yet appropriately banal in a way that made her physically ill. For countless nights afterward, whenever the word passed through her soundless mind, it seemed to jeer at her.

  Occurrence. Occurrence. Occurrence.

  Her mother had been shot three times. Once in the back, along the base of her spine, once in the right leg, and once in the chest. She would later bleed out during surgery. But she had not been the only one to die. Two other people were killed, three others wounded. The only common denominator between the victims was that they happened to be standing in line at a pharmacy on State Street, waiting on their prescriptions, when a man entered the lobby. He carried an assault rifle under his leather duster. He pointed it and immediately opened fire.

  She arrived on the scene just moments after paramedics hurried the victims to the hospital. She kept the crowd on the street at bay while a forensics team hauled in their equipment. She hadn’t known at the time that her mother was one of the victims en route to the hospital until she received the call from the doctor close to an hour later.

  “There’s been an occurrence.”

  There was a video of the whole thing captured on the security cameras. They would later play it on the nightly news over and over again until the beginning and end of the video bled into each other. The whole scene quick and quiet and granular and withholding. An occurrence for the world to watch. Her mother’s sloped posture in the bottom left of the screen, grainy and soft. The glass doors sliding open, a shape emerging, noiseless chaos ensuing. Her mother’s body spasmed gracefully, or so Tillman liked to think, and fell gently to the ground while lights flickered and shapes held still. Tillman watched the video on repeat. She memorized every detail, but what haunted her the most was not the visual of her mother collapsing beneath a bullet, but rather the moment when the shooter stopped firing. He stood about for a moment with bodies scattered around him and simply turned around. It was so casual, this motion, as though he were resuming his day without interruption. And he exited the building into some anonymous oblivion where no one would ever find him.

  And every time she watched the man exit those sliding doors, she prayed the next frame that she had seen a thousand times would reassemble into something that made sense—the man falling to his knees in remorse, the man shooting himself in the head, the man grabbed by a long-dead vigilante and thrown into traffic—but instead he simply walked away just as he had done a thousand times before. Justice deferred in the sunlight of an otherwise unextraordinary afternoon.

  Her mother was in surgery all day. A few other cops dropped by to offer condolences and then lingered about uncertainly, all of them unsure of what else to say, how soon they could leave. Jeremiah brought her coffee and brought her father a bag of Hershey’s Kisses. Jeremiah sat next to her, held her unfeeling hand. He didn’t say a word, and she was thankful for this. Her father began peeling the Hershey’s Kisses, shaping the foil into the likenesses of birds. He gave one to Tillman and one to Jeremiah. Jeremiah thanked him, pretending to make the bird fly, which made her father smile.

  But for the most part, her father seemed lost in the hours in the waiting room, only occasionally leaning over to ask her when they were leaving this place. And Tillman could only manage to pat his hand and tell him they would leave soon. She wanted to tell him what had happened, why they were here. But his mind and memory were both deteriorating, and she had no control over what stuck and what slipped away. Maybe it was better this way.

  By midnight, the doctor emerged from surgery. She rushed up to meet him. But before he even spoke a word, she knew as well as she had to that she was not going to leave the hospital with her mother.

  When Tillman and her father entered the room, her mother’s body was still hooked up to machines. Her dark skin appeared not lighter, but somehow thinner, as if one stray finger could peel her flesh from her face and reveal the skeleton beneath. But even worse, her hair was wild, unkempt. Her mother had always prided herself in her perfect presentation. Tillman tried to fix her mother’s hair, coaxing it to lie flat against the pillow. She tried to remember the last conversation she’d had with her mother. It was a phone call the day before. Her mother often called once a day with some sort of complaint, often philosophical in nature, and thus completely outside of either of their control.

  “Young kids on the upstairs, they have the music on loud. They think that they own the whole world, so they play their music so loud I cannot even think.”

  An occurrence.

  Tillman sat next to her father in the hospital room and held his hand. He looked at his wife, stone-faced. His lips were trembling, as they sometimes did when he was straining for a lost thought. He simply stared. She wasn’t sure if this was just her father being her father or if this was her new father, the one who spoke in monosyllables and listened to Al Green all day on a record player. And for a brief moment she envied him for the disease that removed him from the dull and dark hospital room and inserted him somewhere else. Somewhere far away, untouched and unanchored and drifting out to sea while squinting at a foggy shore.

  * * *

  Tillman parked the SUV down the block from the apartment building her GPS had led her to. She swiped her debit card through the electronic meter
and added an hour. Longer than necessary, she hoped.

  The man she was looking for was named Jeffrey Jenkins, but, according to Marcus Waters via Jeremiah, he went by the name of Penny.

  “Penny like the coin,” Jeremiah had said over the phone after he’d given her the addresses.

  “Thanks for the clarification,” she’d said.

  From what Marcus had told Jeremiah, Penny had been a drug runner for some kingpin back in the ’80s. The Kingfisher had busted up the guy, somehow saving Penny in the process. The details were unclear to Tillman, but then again, the details didn’t matter for what she was doing. Either Penny was safe or he wasn’t safe at all. It was a fairly binary situation she was entering.

  Penny’s apartment building was on the liminal orbit of the Back of the Yards. The building was rust-red, squatting into the earth. The inside of the building smelled like piss and bleach and vomit and Pine-Sol. Forest green walls, forest green carpet. Tillman passed up a flight of stairs and found apartment twelve—Penny’s apartment—in the middle of the hall.

  She knocked on the door, leaning in close to listen for footsteps or any other sign of life, but all she heard were the sounds of fighting coming from apartment thirteen. A man and a woman exchanging hostilities with the bored inflections of two people who did this sort of thing every day. A daily ritual of stabbing words into each other’s skin like daggers.

  Tillman raised her hand to knock again, but she heard the dead bolt turn. The door cracked open as far as the chain anchored to the wall would allow. A face appeared in the narrow void—a Latino man, lips held in a skeptical slant. He was young, maybe twenty or so. A tattoo of an eagle peeked out of his T-shirt, wings out, as though taking flight from his neck. His disheveled, bed-head hair shined in the light of a half-opened window behind him.

  “What?” he asked.

  She began to recite the reflexive identification of a police officer, but she stopped herself right away. An ex–drug runner, or maybe even a current drug runner, doesn’t exactly seek out the company of police officers, and those with whom they surround themselves abide by a similar logic. Even if the person knocking is not technically a police officer. “I’m looking for Jeffrey Jenkins.”

  “You got the wrong place.”

  “Penny. I’m looking for Penny.”

  “Wrong place,” he said and shut the door.

  The dead bolt turned back into place.

  Tillman knocked again. “Penny is in danger,” she spoke into the door. “I need to talk to him.”

  A pause, followed by the slide of the dead bolt. Again, the door opened as far as the chain would allow.

  “What kind of danger?” the guy asked. He spoke with a veneer of disinterest, but beneath it Tillman saw, or at least heard, a scant trace of something else.

  “Is Penny home?”

  He continued to study Tillman. His lips pursed, eyes darting back into the room. “You a cop?”

  “I just need to speak with Penny.”

  “I asked if you were a cop,” the guy said.

  “I’m not a cop. I’m just looking for Penny.”

  The guy smiled, then nodded, his entire demeanor softening. “I didn’t think you were, but you know what it is.”

  “Where is Penny?”

  “What sort of trouble he get himself into this time?”

  “I didn’t say trouble. I said danger.”

  “Fine. What sort of danger?”

  Tillman looked around the hall. No one, save for the voices of the arguing couple, who seemed to be acquiescing into apologies now. But still she felt vulnerable. “Can I come in?”

  “If he owes you money, I’m not paying. You can take that up with him.”

  “He doesn’t owe me money. I just need to speak with him.”

  “Well, he’s not here.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me where I can find him. It’s important.”

  The guy shut the door. Tillman thought it was for good this time. But then she heard the chain sliding off the door. The door reopened to the guy walking into the apartment, waving over his shoulder for Tillman to enter. “Close the door behind you,” he called out. “And lock it, please. Lunatics in this building. They smell an open door.”

  The apartment reeked with the heavy dusk of cheap weed. A homemade gravity bong on the kitchen counter next to a half-pot of coffee. Tabloid magazines stacked like slanting obelisks. The TV was on in the living room, Jerry Springer offering his final thoughts on a woman who’d married her ex-husband’s ex-step-brother’s ex-fiancé. The guy plopped down on the couch and turned the volume down a notch or two. Tillman stood in the living room next to the TV. She didn’t want to sit. Sitting invited a conversation, conversations took time, and time right now was a precious commodity. He caught her eyeing the bong on the counter.

  “You want a hit or something? I’ll key you up.”

  “No, thanks. Where’s Penny?”

  “I told you, he’s not here,” he replied.

  The door into the bedroom was open. An unmade bed, sheets twisted and dripping to the floor.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Ibrahim. Are you Penny’s girlfriend or something?”

  “No,” Tillman said. She wasn’t sure what she was in relation to Penny, or any of this, for that matter. “I know some people who are worried about him. I said I’d check up on him. It’s a favor to a friend.”

  “A friend of Penny’s?”

  “Sure.”

  He stood up, lazily made his way to the water bong. “Now I know you’re lying to me. Penny doesn’t have friends. He’s only got people he owes money to. That’s probably who sent you looking for him. Paulina’s always telling Penny they are going to come looking for him one of these days. They are going to send people like you to remind him. But Penny doesn’t listen to her. Penny doesn’t listen to anybody but Penny.”

  “Who’s Paulina?”

  “Penny’s daughter,” Ibrahim said before taking a long hit from the bong. He straightened up, releasing the smoke in a thin tendril. “But she’s my girl. My fiancée.” He pronounced the word with pride.

  “So you and your fiancée live here with Penny?”

  “No, no, no,” coughing up the last of his hit. He pounded his chest and cleared his throat. “You got that backwards. We don’t live with Penny. Penny lives with us. We’re the ones who give him a place to stay. I got a full-time job working interstate construction. I make good money doing hard work. Bust my fucking body for a paycheck. But Penny? The man can’t keep a job more than a few days. Paulina begs me to let him stay with us. I tell her, sure, a few days can’t hurt. He’s been living here for years now. You ever met Penny yourself?”

  “No.”

  “That’s good. He’s like herpes. You can’t get rid of him. You just have to hope he doesn’t flare up.” He smiled, pleased with the accuracy of his metaphor.

  “Has Penny been here today?”

  “No. But that’s nothing new. He comes and goes. Probably spent the night facedown on a curb. But look, if he owes you or your boss some money, all I’m asking is you don’t come around here looking for it. Penny’s hardly ever here anyway. Shake him down somewhere else, OK? Don’t kill the guy, but feel free to rough him up. Just don’t do it here. This is my place.”

  “I’m not collecting.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He smiled. “You’re worried he’s in danger.”

  “Where’s Paulina?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I promise you I’m not looking to hurt her. Or Penny. I really need you to tell me the truth.”

  Ibrahim shook his head, scratched his stubble-lined cheek. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know where she is. I’m betting Paulina met him last night for a drink at Lucky’s. She always comes home right after work, but she didn’t last night. But, see, Penny’s always begging her to come have a drink with him. Probably felt it was time to give the devil his due, get him off her back for a while.”
>
  “You haven’t heard from her at all today?”

  “No. I been texting her all morning, but she hasn’t said anything. Her phone probably died at the bar. She never charges it. Drives me fucking crazy.”

  Tillman nodded warily. “Do you think you could tell me where Lucky’s is?”

  “How about you tell me what’s really going on?” he asked, apparently after sensing something wrong, some latent fear coming to life. “I don’t like all these questions if I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You keep talking about danger this and danger that. Just tell me what the hell is going on.”

  Tillman briefly debated what to share, what to withhold. But she ultimately decided she would share what little she knew, in hopes that he knew something she didn’t know.

  “Did you see the video that was released this morning?” Tillman asked. “The one about the Kingfisher?”

  “On Twitter, sure. Why?”

  “Did you recognize the hostage killed in the video?”

  He seemed to think about this deeply, retracing the pixelated images. He was becoming more panicked, fidgeting with his fingers, as though playing some invisible instrument in his lap. His red, glazed eyes danced in their sockets. “No. I don’t think so. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Are you aware that Penny used to run drugs? Maybe he still does?”

  “He doesn’t do that anymore. Or at least I don’t think he does. Why does it matter?”

  “The man killed in the video used to work with Penny. Years and years ago. They both were apparently saved by the Kingfisher.”

  “The fuck are you talking about?” he asked, not waiting for an answer. He smiled disbelievingly. “Penny never said anything about that. And trust me, Penny would have said something if he’d run into the Kingfisher. He’d never shut up about it. I can guarantee it.”

  “I don’t care about the Kingfisher,” Tillman said. “I care about finding Penny. Just because Penny’s”—she searched for the word—“associate was a hostage doesn’t mean that Penny is, too, but I just want to make sure he’s safe. When did you last see them?”

 

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