1 Motor City Shakedown (8 page)

Once they were both seated across from one another, Darren seemed at a sudden loss for words. He had talked freely and absently throughout their car ride to her apartment in Canton, about figuring out the ‘Big Story’ of Vernon Pullins’ legal case, about the need to hit the ground running and get as much pre-trial investigation done as possible before Vernon woke up.

“Once he’s awake again— God, I hope he wakes up --they’ll arraign him on charges. And then it’s off to the ballgame. You and me, Iz—Issabella, we need to hustle and start poking into everything about his life, about what happened at his house, who called the cops, what people heard and saw, who this cop is that died in there…”

He had
rattled on and on. With Vernon in a coma, the prosecution’s case was stalled. It allowed the two of them time to perform a lot of work without being under the ticking clock of court dates. As he had continued to map out all the various things the two of them had to tackle, Issabella grew more and more excited.

This
was why she had gotten into criminal law—the opportunity to pound the ground and chase down witnesses, to flesh out a full story of events and find out what was a lie and what was a useful lie. Criminal law held the promise of high stakes and high drama.

Now, though, Darren was more subdued and he seemed content to look pleasantly at her and sip his gigantic latte. His two speeds appeared to be ‘frenetic’ and ‘inscrutable’.

‘He’s like a top that just spins like crazy, winds down and stops until something gets him spinning again.’

“So,” Issabella said, at last, “y
ou still haven’t answered my question.”

“Hmm? What one?”

“Why did you want me on this case?” she said, and knew that it sounded weak, like she doubted herself. But she prided herself on being pragmatic and self-aware. The truth was she had never tried a felony case. She knew she had the brains, the knowledge and the skills to succeed at any criminal case thrown her way. But
he
didn’t know that. Couldn’t know that.

“O
h, right,” he said. “Not so complicated, really. There were only two lawyers in Wayne County who showed up and barged into Vernon Pullins’ hospital room. I was one. And you, kiddo, were the other.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re taking me on because I just happened to be around? That’s the most reck
less thing I’ve ever heard.”

“You’re right. It was because you’re lovely and I like how you smell like soap.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course not. Look, any answer won’t be good enough for you, because none of my reasons are that I know of your long and storied career as a criminal lawyer. Because, ah, you don’t have one. I think it starts here. With me and this case. So just accept that I saw something in you that told me you were the person to partner up with on this case and leave it at that, alright?”

Issabella relaxed. He was right. She would let it go and be content that he had picked the right lawyer.

“Alright.”

“Great. So here’s how I think we should divide the labor…”

He started laying out the
ir priorities. She listened and took notes and made suggestions of her own. He took them in stride, considered them, and they came to agreements on particulars. It was a professional conversation between two people who seemed to mesh together well when talking strategy. Issabella was thrilled to be engaged in that way and she was proud of the things she pointed out that he had never considered-- seemingly small things that, if ever brought to court, would become big things. He smiled and nodded along and the two of them could have been mistaken for long-time colleagues.

Yet, all the while an ember of nervous warmth refused to cool inside her stomach. He had looked at her with such an honest expression, really looked at her, and told her she was beautiful (no,
lovely
, he had said, which was even nicer than beautiful, really) and that…that hadn’t been a lie for her benefit, she knew.

She wasn’t sure how that made her feel, yet. But the little warm ember inside didn’t go away, so she chose to let it be
and continued talking with him.

*

He came in the dark, scaling the eight-foot fence and avoiding the snare of barbed wire atop it with a nimble grace. Thick shadows pooled all about the storage yard, and he disappeared into them.

In time, he came to a stop in front of one storage unit.
His thick fingers worked the combination lock.

Moonlight poured into the stor
age unit as Malcolm heaved its metal door up on its track. He stood there, silhouetted in the entranceway, and listened. He could hear the insect-hum of an electrical transformer somewhere nearby in the maze of units. Beyond that, fainter, the cough of traffic along Mack Avenue.

It was very late, and he had seen no other living souls since arriving at the unstaffed Save n’ Store.
Still, he listened. Far away, a car’s horn blurted. A dog barked.

Eventually, he was satisfied.
He produced a small, black Maglite and depressed its rubber-sheathed button, bringing it to life. The storage unit was full of neatly stacked cardboard boxes. None of them were labeled. It didn’t matter. Malcolm new exactly what he needed, and where it was.

The flashlight guided him to the back of the unit, throwing leaping shadows across the walls as he moved.
He stopped and put the flashlight in his mouth, holding it between his teeth.

The box he opened was full of
bottles, no one of them identical to another. They were salvage. Everything in the locker was salvage, gathered over the years by Malcolm from the abandoned and forgotten corners of the city.

He picked through them, passing over orange plastic prescription bottles, brown glass chemistry regents, and dozens of other found
, bottled treasures. In the bottom of the box, he found the bottle he sought.

He pulled it out and held it up to the light.
It was very old, and the words typed across its white paper label were so faded as to be illegible. Rolling it over in his fingers, he saw the one thing upon its face that was still recognizable: a red skull and crossbones.

With his free hand, Malcolm reached into his Carhartt jacket and produced a hypodermic syringe.
Carefully, he uncapped the bottle and drew its liquid contents into the syringe.

The bottle went back in the box and the syringe into his coat.
He clicked the flashlight once more, killing the light.

SIX

Darren was a slouching mass in Issabella’s passenger seat when her GPS announced they had arrived at Vernon Pullins’ crematorium in Westland. She pulled into the crematorium’s parking lot and looked at him beside her. His hair was a wild thicket, he had the passenger seat fully reclined, and his eyes were hidden beneath a pair of sunglasses despite the pale, early morning half-light.

Issabella parked in the gravel lot close to the squat cinder-block building. The crematorium had no business signs of any sort. The only windows were thin panes running along the top of the one-story building. There was a huge garage door on one side, and an improbably tall smoke-stack running up out of the center of the roof.

‘State regs, I bet,’
she thought, craning her head to one side and peering up through the windshield until she could see the top of the smoke-stack,
‘Can’t have the remains of Aunt Ethel wafting through the neighborhood.’

A yellow truck—the boxy sort that package delivery companies use –was sitting in the shadow of the building near the garage door. Issabella squinted and could make out the bio-hazard symbol emblazoned in a corner of the truck’s body.

With a disquieting chill, she realized that it must be Vernon’s dead body delivery truck.

Darren roused himself beside her and offered a weak grin.

“New rule,” he said hoarsely. “I do the scheduling. Nobody, and I mean
nobody
, has any damn business being alive at this time of the morning.”

She opened the door and snatched her briefcase up from the backseat. Inside it was the big ring of keys Vernon’s brother, Eugene, had provided to Darren.

“I didn’t tell you to spend the night getting drunk, which seems apparent is what you did,” she said.

“
That’s not what I did.”

“You have a drinking problem, don’t you?”

Darren groaned and got out of the car. The two of them stood looking at the squat, solid bunker that was their client’s chief place of business.

“I enjoy a good drink, yes,” he said after a minute. “
Maybe a bit too often. But not last night. Last night, I had trouble getting to sleep. It happens. You’re not going to suddenly grow a mommy personality on me, are you?”

“God, I hope not.”

“Stellar.”

“But, you know, early bird catches the worm and all that. So, no, I’ll be in charge of scheduling throughout, thank you very much.”

“You were that girl in school weren’t you?”

A wrinkle appeared between her eyebrows and she drew in a long breath.

“What kind of girl?”

“The one who actually believes all those sayings. Like ‘the early bird catches the worm’ and ‘waste not want not’ and
‘success is ten percent inspiration. “

“Let’s get to work,” she said and walked off toward the front of the building.

Darren trailed after her, a mess of wrinkles wearing a playful smile.

*

Once the two of them had performed enough of a cursory walkthrough to establish what each room was--a large room that contained the crematorium ovens and the garage door, a janitorial closet, an office, and a bathroom --the two of them stood in the middle of the big oven-room.

“Remind me why you thought we needed to come here,” she said.

“I want to know as much about him as I can. You should, too.”

“We should be attacking the search warrant.”

“We will. Let’s be nosy first.”

“I think we’re wasting time.”

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, and stopped in the center of the room. “Let’s make it a game.”

“A game.”

“Yep. Our objective is to observe as much as we can. Fifteen minutes to a room. Neither of us can inspect the same room at the same time. After an hour is up, we get together and compare notes. Whoever has the most useful information to our man’s case is the winner.”

Isabella frowned and said “That’s totally subjective. ‘Useful’ can be interpreted or argued any which way.”

Darren nodded, shrugged and said “I’ll trust you to admit if I hit the mother lode, and you do the same. Right? Great. Let’s hit it. I’ll start with the bathroom, since I have to pee.”

“This is crazy.”

“It’s
fun
.”

“It doesn’t help our client.”

“You don’t know that yet. Let’s be snoopy and see what turns up.”

“We should be drafting a motion to quash the warrant.
Not playing pretend in a dead-body burning company.”

“You’re scared I’ll win.”

“No. I’m not.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I’m not scared. Without the warrant, the firearms go away. Without the warrant, we get a good argument of self-defense.”

“I wonder if he has more guns stashed all over this place,” Darren mused.
“That would be good to know. Wouldn’t it? But, yeah, let’s go draft a motion for a court date that isn’t even set yet. Maybe we can type our way to setting him free.”

She crossed her arms in front of her
and stuck her chin in the air. Darren arched his eyebrows expectantly, seeming to recognize he’d pushed enough buttons.

“Shall we play a game
, Issabella?”

Isabella narrowed her ey
es.

“
Fine. Game on,” she said.

*

The morning haze slowly lifted off the waking city. Malcolm Mohommad leaned his shoulder against the window frame and let his eyes get lost in the muted glow of the low-hanging sun.

“Illusions are the enemy of a thinking man,” he said.

The sun grew in his eyes. It swelled and eclipsed the rest of the world. He didn’t blink.

“I want to peel away every illusion. In my work. In my art. Anywhere I can. I know I’m failing. If I was going to truly peel back the whole tapestry of illusions in this life, I’d have to be willing to kill myself. Suicide eradicates the ability to perceive. Perception is the broken system that creates the illusions to begin with. Real honesty is self-death. I know this to be a fundamental truth.”

He shut his eyes. The sun’s negative filled his inner vision, pulsing with a seemingly physical pressure so close to his brain. He stared at the negative twin with the same intensity as he had its brother.

“I suppose my weakness is that I have a great capacity for being offended. Mother used to say I was sensitive. I guess she just saw it from a distance… whatever it is that keeps me from going along with all the little dishonesties and cheapening things in this world. That was the only word she had to try and name it. She was a whore and a drug addict and didn’t have any sort of insight that would have helped me know myself. I cried when I should have shouted. I ran when I should have stood defiant. This was her ‘sensitive’. Maybe she thought I was a homosexual. It doesn’t matter now. She’s long dead and I haven’t shed my dissatisfaction with this world. I wonder if she would still call me sensitive, though, if she knew me as a man. I don’t think she would. I think she would find another word now that I don’t cry.”

The negative-sun in his mind’s eye had dimmed, the pressure relenting. But he kept his eyes closed and continued talking with his face pointed out the window.

“But that’s not what I wanted to say. I wanted to talk to you about truth. About ugliness, I think. I wanted to…”

His voice trailed away and he was just a silent mass in the window for a long moment. Then he opened his eyes, let his hands fall slack to his sides and turned around.

He stared at Vernon Pullins in the hospital bed across the room. The machinery running out of Vernon chirped with the regularity of a metronome.

“…I wanted to tell you how much I admire your killing an agent of their systems.”

Malcolm crossed over to the side of the hospital bed and let his large hand rest on the railing.

“I hope it wasn’t a mistake. Or a rash act. I hope you were deliberate and that you knew you were delivering a blow against their illusory system of order.”

Malcolm glanced out the doorway at the empty chair sitting on the other side of the hallway. It had been there for the police-guard posted after Vernon’s arrest. But the Detroit Police Department was not an organization that ran budget surpluses, even in good times. Malcolm guessed that Vernon’s coma
tose condition was enough of a guarantee to the police that he wasn’t going to be skipping out on any court dates.

He suspected that was not the truth.
He suspected the door had been left unguarded in order to allow him unmolested access.

“I
hope it wasn’t insanity or desperation. Derangement has no artistic merit. I hope it was because you saw the illusions, the ideas of protection and security that surround their system and laws. The
illusions
. Did you see them? Did you recognize the lies at the heart of human designs? Did you despise them the way I do?”

M
alcolm stared at the enormous bulk of Vernon. He hadn’t spoken this much to anyone in as long as he could recall.

“Anyw
ay…I thought I should tell you that. You aren’t one of the offending things, Vernon Pullins. You delivered a gruesome act. I wish I could have seen it in their eyes when you removed one of them from the world.”

Malcolm reached into his Carhartt jacket and withdrew the hypodermic needle he had brought with him. Reaching up, he carefully pushed the tip of the needle into the top of the IV bag connected to Vernon. He depressed the plunger and dribbled twenty milliliters of strychnine down the inside of the bag, where it mingled and mixed with the saline solution being fed into Vernon’s body.

Once the needle was back inside his jacket, Malcolm spared Vernon not so much as a final glance. He turned and walked away, out of the room, past the nurses and attendants, past the suffering and the near-dead, past the blood-soaked newborns, down and out and away into the obscurity of the devastated city where he had been born and forged into what he now was.

Fifteen
minutes later, the machines in Vernon’s room began to sound the alarm.