Dead South (A Bryson Wilde Thriller / Read in Any Order) (8 page)

22

Day Six

August 8, 1952

Thursday Afternoon

The bar was dark, the whiskey was strong and Jori-Rey was every damn bit as intoxicating as Sudden Dance. Wilde found his thoughts turning nasty. Images popped into his head, rude images of driving the woman back to his place and taking her deep and hard and all-consuming and not stopping until he’d turned her into a sweaty, lust-soaked animal with nothing left of her existence except the fire in her veins and the thrashing of her body.

“Wilde, you there?”

The image snapped off with all the subtleness of an 8mm tape splitting in two and slapping over and over as the reel spun.

He tapped ashes into the tray.

“I need you to do me a favor,” he said. “There’s a detective in town by the name of Johnnie Fingers. He’s convinced himself that I killed Sudden Dance. He’s going to take me down as hard as he can.”

“If you didn’t kill her you don’t have anything to worry about.”

Wilde cocked his head.

“That’s not the way it works,” he said. “Fingers will make stuff up if he has to. It’s all in the name of justice because he knows in his heart I’m the killer. What I need you to do is go down to Fingers’ office with me and pretend you’re Sudden Dance. We’ll show him you’re still alive. That will put an end to it.”

Jori-Rey leaned back.

“No.”

“No?”

“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’d like to but I can’t.”

“I don’t get it—”

“Play it out,” she said. “We trick Fingers into thinking that Sudden Dance never really got killed. What happens next is that word to that effect will get out on the street and then it will eventually make its way to Rojo. Now, when Sudden Dance doesn’t return to him—which she won’t because she’s dead and I can’t pretend to be her—he’ll have only once conclusion to reach, namely that she left him. As soon as that fire enters his brain he’ll kill Maria. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He did.

He did indeed.

“In fact, even being here with you in public is dangerous,” she said. “I’m sorry Wilde. You seem like a nice guy but I can’t put Maria’s life on the line, I just can’t.”

“No, that’s okay, I get it. I’d do the same thing. Don’t feel bad about it.”

She leaned in and put her hand on his.

“You’re a private investigator,” she said. “Maybe you can figure out where Maria is. If we can get her to a safe place, then we’ll be in a position to go to Fingers like you want.”

Wilde tapped two new smokes out of a pack, lit them from the hot end of his and handed one to Jori-Rey, who dangled it between her lips.

“Do you have any idea where she is?”

“Maria? No. In fact, I’ve spent every penny I could get my hands on hiring people to find her. No one’s even gotten close. The last guy I hired, a PI named Cisco Bandaras out of Las Angeles, had a theory that the only way to find her was to get close to the one person who knew where she was, namely Rojo himself—or someone he may have told, which would be someone close to him. He went down to Paso del Norte to snoop around. He knew the town and had some connections there. He knew the language and the haunts and the ways. He could blend in better than the most invisible ghost.”

She paused.

“And?”

“And he never came back.”

Wilde pictured a knife slicing through a throat.

He could hear the gurgling of blood and the monotone thump of the man’s body dropping to the floor.

“Look,” he said. “Sudden Dance died because of that money. It belongs more to you than me. It’s a little over five Gs. I’m going to give it to you. Just be careful it doesn’t get you killed.”

Jori-Rey shook her head.

“I don’t want it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s cursed,” she said. “If you want to give me something that I really want, give me Maria. Find her so I can take her someplace safe and raise her. I’m the only blood she has left.”

Wilde took a long drag on the smoke and felt his world shift.

Everything was suddenly different.

He’d help the woman.

He’d help her all the way to the ends of the earth if need be.

23

Day Six

August 8, 1952

Thursday Night

Thursday night after dark an evil storm rolled out of the Rockies and attacked Denver with everything it had. Wilde punched through it from behind the wheel of an oversized ’49 Studebaker, heading south out of the city with the headlights barely able to cut through the weather to define the road.

Alabama rode shotgun.

Between the two of them on the bench was Jori-Rey. Bringing her might be a mistake but it was too late to worry about it now. Her thigh pressed against Wilde’s.

Jori-Rey had a theory about the boxer, namely that Rojo had gotten the word on the street that Wilde killed Sudden Dance. He hired the boxer first and foremost to kill Wilde and secondly to recover the money that Sudden Dance had picked up from whoever it was she picked it up from.

Wilde agreed.

It fit perfectly.

“The boxer won’t be the last,” Jori-Rey said. “He’ll just be the first. If I were you I’d turn myself into a ghost and disappear. Denver will never work for you at this point, not unless you want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder. Go somewhere else, get a new name—I picture you as a Slade, maybe Nick Slade or something like that. Start fresh.”

Wilde made a face.

“That’s not my style.”

“Yeah, well, make it your style. Lose the macho stuff because if you don’t it will kill you.”

“Then I die,” Wilde said. “Can you light me a smoke?”

Thirty minutes later they reached the well. Alabama took the wheel and drove off into the storm. The taillights disappeared almost immediately. Wilde and Jori-Rey cut into the brush armed with a flashlight that could have had stronger batteries. Over Wilde’s left shoulder draped a 100-foot coil of rope.

The ground was saturated.

The storm was fierce.

They were barely off the road when something strange happened.

Headlights came out of nowhere, going the same direction as Alabama, a couple of minutes or so behind. They turned into taillights as they swept past and then vanished.

They were going fast.

It could just be a rough coincidence.

Wilde’s gut, however, told him otherwise.

“That’s not good,” he said.

“So what do we do?”

He searched for options, found none and said, “I put my gun in the glove box. Alabama saw me do it.”

The well appeared exactly where it should.

Wilde shined the flashlight down to be sure the boxer’s body was still there.

It was.

He tied off the rope to the trunk of a scraggly pinion pine and climbed down.

The body stank.

He got the man’s wallet out his pocket and stuck it in his own. He tied the rope around the man’s chest and climbed back out. Then he pulled the body up and got it over the edge of the well onto the ground.

He shined the light into the man’s face and let Jori-Rey take a good look.

“Do you know him?”

“No.”

Wilde wiped water out of his eyes and contemplated the best way to get the body back to the road. He didn’t want to touch it more than he had to and considered dragging it with the rope. On closer thought, that would leave a trail, not to mention that the body would probably snag every ten feet. He picked the man up in his arms like a baby, but the weight was too much. He dropped it down, got his strength and then flung the body over his shoulder with one solid motion.

That was better.

That was doable.

“Lead the way.”

It took an effort, an insane effort, but they eventually got to the road where Wilde dropped the body just out of sight.

The storm pummeled down.

The world was black.

Wilde stared down the road in the direction Alabama would come from.

No headlights appeared.

A minute passed, then another and another.

Nothing changed.

Everything remained black.

The world remained empty.

Jori-Rey wrapped her arms around Wilde and said, “She’ll be here any minute. Don’t worry.”

24

Day Six

August 8, 1952

Thursday Night

Time passed and Alabama still didn’t show up. The storm was under Wilde’s skin. The possibility of being abandoned out in the middle of nowhere with a dead body wasn’t helping matters.

Forty-five minutes had passed.

Alabama was supposed to swing back in thirty. She’d have trouble finding the exact drop-off point so she was supposed to flash the lights when she got in the area. That way Wilde would know it was her and he’d flag her down with the flashlight.

Suddenly something happened.

Headlights came up the road at a high speed. They were flashing. A second car followed, dangerously close. Bursts of orange came from outside the passenger window.

“They’re firing at her!”

Wilde saw that.

He said nothing.

He needed action and needed it now.

He had no gun.

He had no knife.

The second car rammed Alabama’s bumper. Her headlights jerked with the motion and she fought to keep control.

Wilde swept the light to the ground and didn’t let up until he found a rock. It was the size of a baseball, heavy in his grasp. As Alabama approached Wilde pointed the flashlight at her at the last second.

Then he hurled the rock at the second car with every ounce of strength his arm could muster.

The windshield exploded.

The vehicle jerked to the right, tried to counter and pitched into a death roll, eventually grinding to a stop on the roof.

“Stay here!”

Wilde ran towards the vehicle with one thought and one thought only, namely to pound the men into oblivion if they were conscious, before they could regain their senses and get their deadly little weapons back in hand.

The driver was dead, grotesquely dead.

His face was a bloody pulp.

His neck was broken, leaving his head to hang with a bizarre twist. Wilde wrestled the man’s wallet out of his pocket and shoved it in his own, not for the money if there was any, but to know who he was.

The other man wasn’t in the vehicle.

He must have been ejected.

Wilde swung the light to the ground and swept it back and forth, searching, knowing he was a sitting duck because of the light but counting on the violence of the roll to rip the gun out of the shooter’s hand.

The man didn’t appear.

Wilde searched more, quicker, with more intensity.

Still the man didn’t appear.

Alabama returned, shaken to the core but beautifully alive, and getting a tight full-body squeeze from Wilde to prove it. The back window was shattered and there were bullet holes in the dash but she was unharmed.

“There were two men in the car, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then one got away.”

“Forget him. Let’s just get out of here.”

Wilde contemplated leaving the boxer there for the police to find, as some unknown piece of a mysterious puzzle. Then he thought better of it; the body was too decayed to be part of the accident. So they put it in the Studebaker’s trunk, drove into the mountains and dropped it over a high jagged cliff. The bears and coyotes and hawks would find it long before a human did. Twenty-four hours from now it would be unrecognizable. The important thing was that it wasn’t at the well any longer, the well that Fingers had Wilde connected to.

Ironically, the new accident was at the well.

The murder attempt wasn’t against Alabama, that’s what Wilde told her once and then twice and then two more times. “They were trying to get me. They thought I was in the car. They didn’t know you dropped me off. So don’t worry, no one’s out to get you.”

“Okay.”

“Plus tonight’s safe in any event. If the missing guy is actually still alive it probably isn’t by much, not to mention he’s stuck out in a storm in the middle of nowhere.”

Out of an abundance of caution, though, he didn’t want her to be where anyone could find her tonight, so he got her a room at the Kenmark and tipped the receptionist a soggy five to make sure that if anyone came in looking for her they didn’t find her, not in a hundred years.

Wilde wrote down his phone number and said, “If anyone asks about her, give him the big stone face and then call me at home.”

“You bet.”

Then he headed home through the storm with Jori-Rey still in the car.

He checked the house, found no unwanted scumbags lurking in the corners, and brought Jori-Rey in. They were no longer dripping but were clammy clingy damp. Wilde got a hot shower going for her, laid a dry T-shirt, fresh boxers and pair of pants out on the bed, and closed the door.

With a beer in hand, he plopped down on the couch and went through the driver’s wallet.

Inside was money, over a G in twenties.

It brought a smile to his face.

Being a target was starting to have its advantages.

Also inside was a condom and more interestingly a folded page torn out of the yellow pages. It was the listing for investigators, meaning Wilde’s number and office address.

Outside the storm raged.

The windows rattled.

Lightning flashed and thunder rolled over Denver with the force of a thousand maniac drums.

The shower shut off.

Two minutes later Jori-Rey walked into the room wearing the T-shirt but not the pants. Her legs were strong and shapely, capable of rivaling Norma Jean’s six out of seven days. Her hair was wet and incredibly erotic. Her eyes had a depth that Wilde had never seen before.

She turned off the lights.

Then she came to the couch, straddled Wilde’s lap and brought her lips to his.

25

Day Seven

August 9, 1952

Friday Morning

Friday morning a well-dressed man walked into Wilde’s office. He was strong, intense and polished; the kind of ego-infested guy who could hold his own in an alley fight during the day and chat-up the high-society dollfaces at night. An expensive suitcase dangled from his left hand. He sized Wilde up and said, “My name’s Jack Strike. I’m a lawyer with a law firm here in Denver by the name of Banders & Rock. I’d like to retain your services for a project if you’re available.”

Banders & Rock.

Banders & Rock.

At first Wilde couldn’t place why the name was familiar. Then he remembered. Banders & Rock was the law firm where Alley London worked, the woman Wilde found in the well.

Wilde tapped two cigarettes from a pack and offered one to Strike, who declined. Wilde lit his and said, “I’m a little surprised you’re here.”

“Why?”

“I thought all your work went to Nicholas Dent.”

“It does, normally, but this is something that needs to be done right away and he’s tied up.” He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and set it on the desk. “That’s $1,500, half-payment upfront. You get another $1,500 when the job’s done.”

Wilde focused on the envelope but didn’t pick it up.

“That’s a lot of money,” he said.

“We buy confidentiality in addition to services,” Strike said. “I assume your services come with confidentiality—”

Wilde nodded.

“A hundred percent worth. So what’s the job?”

The man set the briefcase on the desk and said, “The job is to deliver this to a lawyer in El Paso.”

“El Paso, as in Texas?”

“Right.”

“Just deliver it? Nothing else?”

“No, nothing else. You drive down, you hand it over, you drive back and get your other $1,500. If everything goes without a wrinkle, you’ll see more work from us down the road.”

Wilde focused on the briefcase.

Then he raised his eyes and stared into Strike’s.

“So what’s inside?”

Strike frowned and shook his head.

“You don’t need to know that,” he said. “It’s for your own good, to help you keep the confidentiality part of your commitment. The briefcase is locked. Here’s the important part; it’s to stay that way at all times. You’re not to open it and you won’t have the key. If you pry it open or force it open in any way, it will show and we’ll know that you did it. See the hinges and hardware and leather? They’re all pristine, without a scratch or a mark. Your job is to make sure they stay that way, meaning that they’re not tampered with. I’ll repeat it again just to be absolutely sure we’re on the same page. You are not to open the briefcase or attempt to open it under any circumstances. You’re to deliver it and that’s all. Is that something you can do?”

Wilde blew smoke.

“How do I know there’s not something illegal in there?”

“You know it because I’m telling you that right here and now,” Strike said.

Wilde wrinkled his face.

“That’s a lot of money to be a delivery boy.”

“It’s fair pay.”

“It seems a little more than fair to me.”

Strike shifted his body.

“There’s a little twist I haven’t mentioned yet. There may be people who will try to take it from you. Be sure they don’t.”

“Who?”

“Unknown.”

“But someone?”

“Possibly. To be honest, that’s why you’re getting the case instead of Dent. Between you and me, Dent’s a good sneak but he’s not much of a man.”

Wilde focused on the briefcase.

“Who do I deliver it to?”

“A man named Lester Trench.”

Lester Trench.

Wilde knew the name.

The man’s business card was stuffed in the envelope of money Wilde found in the boxer’s hotel room.

His heart raced.

Something was going on, something dangerous.

He needed time to figure it out.

It was too complicated to piece together in the next two minutes.

“If you want the job, I need you to leave right away,” Strike said.

“You mean today?”

“No, I mean right now, as soon as I leave.”

Wilde chewed on it.

He couldn’t let the case get away.

It had secrets to tell him.

He blew smoke and said, “I’ll need an hour to wrap a few things up.”

Strike looked at his watch.

“Okay. Be sure you take your gun.”