Michael Lister - Soldier 03 - The Big Hello (12 page)

“Well well,” Butch said. “Would you lookie here?”

“Butch,” I said.

“Jesus, Jimmy, you don’t look so good,” he said. “I mean even worse than usual.”

He was an overweight older man with a dark complexion, stubble, some scar tissue around his eyes, and a nose that had been broken more than once.

“You two are under arrest,” he said.

I shook my head––even though it hurt to do so.

Butch was a bully and a bad cop. He had moved up from Miami or down from Chicago––I had heard both––a couple of months ago and partnered with my old partner on the force, Pete Mitchell. He was slow and mean and had been trying to put the pinch on me since the moment we met.

“Breaking and entering. Disturbing a crime scene.”

“Not gonna let you arrest us tonight,” I said.

“What?” he asked in genuine shock. “Ain’t gonna let me? You ain’t got a choice in the matter, pal.”

“Captain Folsom sent us here,” I said.

“Nice try pal, but Folsom’s in the hospital.”

“Which is where I saw him,” I said. “Call him if you like. Or if you don’t want to disturb him, and I wouldn’t, I was you, then call Iris. I saw her too. She’s in the waiting room.”

He shook his head. “What’re you playin’ at, peeper?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You take chances, dontcha?” he said. “One day you’re gonna push it too far and I’m gonna bury you.”

“Remember the woods, Butch?” Clip said.

Butch had taken me to the woods to torture and interrogate me––maybe even kill me. Clip and I got the jump on him and could have easily given him early retirement, something I was inclined to do when I thought he might have had something to do with what happened to Pete Mitchell and to Lauren. To his surprise we had let him go after he had convinced me he had nothing to do with either disappearance or death.

“You could be rotting in an unmarked grave right now,” Clip continued. “We’re the good guys.”

Butch looked at me. “No nigger’s gonna talk to me like that, understand? Final warning. And just ’cause you ain’t got the rocks to kill a cop, don’t mean you a good guy.”

“Look, Butch, we think De Grasse has Lauren Lewis,” I said. “All we care about is finding her. That’s it. Hassle us all you want after that.”

“Thought the Lewis dame was dead,” he said.

“We’re going now,” I said.

“Where you think you’re goin’?”

“I just told you. To find De Grasse.”

“Entire department’s lookin’ for him, but a one-armed dick and a one-eyed nigger’s gonna find him?”

We started walking away when another uniform ran up from the car.

“Sergeant. Sergeant,” he yelled. “We got another. There’s another.”

“Another what?” Butch asked.

“Another body. Like the others. The surrealist sex killer has struck again.”

My heart stopped beating and my knees buckled. As my legs began to give, Clip grabbed my arm and helped me stay up.

“Where?” I said. “Where is she?”

“Not far from here,” he said. “A little shack at the end of an old dock on the bay.”

***

Clip drove.

We got there before Butch.

One of my old friends from the force let us through.

We ran down the dock, trying to avoid the missing planks, but not being too careful. It was too dark to see well enough anyway.

Like before, all the windows and doors were open. Unlike before, there was movement inside. A few cops moving around nervously.

The cold breeze was damp and dank and smelled of rotting fish and something else––death. Beneath the dock, desultorily, the unseen waters of the bay slapped, tapped, and punched the pilings.

The leaning structure consisted of two rooms.

The living area was just as before––smallish wood room, wind coming through the boards, a cot, a small kitchen table with one chair, an old, scarred wardrobe, a rocking chair, and stacks of papers and books. Framed paintings leaned against the walls, none of it hung, all of it De Grasse’s work, trash and wine bottles littering the floor.

Apart from the body and the blood, the workshop was much the same––dirty and disorganized, littered with trash and bottles, old and well-worn tools, chains and hooks dangling from the ceiling, clinking together in the wind, and protruding from the walls, all holding the dismembered parts of white mannequins.

And now the actual body parts of his latest victim.

The wet copper smell of blood, the foul, slightly sweet-tinged stench of bisected bowel, the acrid ammonia aroma of urine––the olfactory equivalent of death.

This was nothing like before. Before he had made art of bloodless bodies, arranging their cleaned and pristine parts into surreal displays. This was rushed. This was ugly. This wasn’t creative or artistic. This was a big bloody mess. Why? I knew why he was rushed, but why do it at all while on the run, while being pursued relentlessly? What’s he up to?

Clip rushed in before me.

“Hey. Hey. What’re you doing?” a cop yelled.

“Just need to see her face. Her face. Where is it?”

“Who the hell are you?” one cop said, while another said, “Over there,” and nodded toward a hook in the corner that held her head.

We both turned and looked.

Unable to stop myself, my momentum had carried me into the room right behind Clip. I was close enough to see the horror with my own eyes.

“Jimmy?” one of the other cops said.

The disembodied head was tear-streaked and blood-covered, its skin pale and waxy, but I could tell instantly it wasn’t Lauren.

“Get them the fuck outta here,” Butch barked as he rushed in behind us.

A couple of cops started toward us, but we held up our hands and walked out on our own without protest.

***

Walking back down the long dock, attempting to avoid the missing planks, I was weak-kneed and punch-drunk, completely and utterly spent, but relieved and strangely relaxed, as if my body no longer had the strength or capacity for even the slightest tension.

“Why take the time to do that?” Clip said.

I turned and looked back at the leaning shack––now crime scene––and the cops swarming around it.

Clip added, “Just can’t help himself? Can’t stop? Even when he tryin’ to get away.”

I shook my head. “He’s driven all right and he enjoyed that and good,” I said. “But look.”

He turned and looked back down the dock with me, as more cops passed by us on their way to the shack.

“Hell,” I said, “practically every cop on duty is down there.”

“Diversion,” Clip said.

I nodded.

“But the roadblocks still up,” he said. “This ain’t gonna change that.”

I started to say something and then it hit me. “Look,” I said, directing his attention to the right, to the marina a mile or so away and all the boats moored there.

“Not usin’ a road,” Clip said. “Son of a bitch.”

We jumped in the car and raced around toward the marina, hopeful and suddenly energized.

“We don’t find him at this one,” Clip said, “he might be at another––public or private.”

I nodded. “He uses this one,” I said, “he escapes sooner and spends far less time on the road––possibly being spotted or hittin’ a roadblock.”

He nodded.

We were quiet a moment.

I was driving. There was no traffic on the road and with all the cops at the crime scene, I drove just as fast as I wanted, as I could.

“You gonna tell me what that was about?” Clip asked.

“What what was about?”

“The ‘would I still find Lauren and take care of her and not square anything that might happen to you’ what,” he said.

“Just what it was,” I said. “Just making sure.”

“Could be wrong,” he said, “but I’s pretty sure this the first thing you lied to me about.”

“I’ll explain after we find her,” I said.

“And if you gets killed ’fore we do?”

“Then you’ll know what I meant.”

“What I figured,” he said, nodding to himself.

We reached the marina, parked, and began looking around.

We checked each slip, each boat, working our way quickly but carefully down the first row.

At the end, partially hidden by a bait and tackle shack on one side and a covered slip on the other, was a parked patrol car.

“We involve him?” Clip asked.

“Don’t see as we have any choice,” I said.

He nodded and we walked over to the car, making sure not to look like crazed surrealist sex killers as we did.

When we got close and the cop didn’t flash his lights or open the door to get out, I figured he was walking around, patrolling the place on foot.

When we got closer I found out what he was really doing.

The beat cop, a big bald man named Kieser, was slumped in the seat, head forward, throat slit, shirt blood-soaked, lap a crimson puddle.

“He’s here,” I said. “Let’s split up and find him.”

Clip nodded.

“Two rows left,” I said. “You take the next one. I’ll get the one after that.”

Guns drawn, we split up and began going slip by slip, boat by boat, down the two remaining rows.

It took a little while, but I completed the search of my row, continually checking the bay for boats in case he had already shoved off as I did.

There was no sign of him. Maybe he’d left long before we got here. Maybe this was another decoy. Maybe Kieser getting his throat cut had nothing to do with De Grasse. Maybe I’d never find Lauren. Maybe I’d be dead soon anyway.

I looked around but found no sign of Clip, so decided to walk back over to his row and help him finish the search.

It didn’t take long to find him.

He was in a boat in the third slip up from the bottom.

He was standing there staring at me.

It took me a minute to make out Flaxon De Grasse behind him, gun to his head, using him for a shield.

“Riley,” he said when he saw me. “Should’ve known.”

Clip looked at me and frowned. “Sorry,” he said. “He got the jump on me ’fore I knowed what was happenin’. Fuckin’ up a lot tonight.”

I shook my head and waved off his apology.

De Grasse was immaculately dressed dandy. His bleach-blond hair was short and looked electrified. His skin was pasty, but only showed on his face and hands. Every other inch of him was covered in a blood-splattered black European suit, white shirt, and tie. He stood at just under five feet, which meant that Clip, not a large man himself, completely covered him until he moved.

I continued edging closer until I was at the edge of the dock, nearly able to reach out and touch the boat.

“Where’s Lauren?” I asked.

The fine features of his small, pale face fractured into an enormous smile and expression of pure delight as he let out a little gleeful squeal.

“Oh,” he said. “This is too good. You think I have her.”

The boat rocked back and forth gently, rhythmically, Clip and De Grasse mirroring its movements, which reflected those of the bay.

“I don’t have her,” Flaxon was saying. “Oh, I wanted her. I really did. The art I could’ve made out of her already artful perfection … But no. Alas, what will happen to her is far, far worse than anything I could do to you or her. With what I do the suffering is over so quickly. The art lasts, but the suffering doesn’t. Oh, she is so going to suffer––and so are you now. I can’t believe no one told you. Guess Harry was going to but you killed him before he could.”

Looking at this little man made me wonder again how such a small and odd-looking boy-man could have done the things he had done, could be such a brutal butcherer of beauty and innocence.

“Are you ready?” he asked. “Don’t you want me to tell you? Isn’t the suspense killing you? You better sit down.”

“Tell me where she is and we’ll let you live,” I said.

He laughed in genuine amusement.

“I’ll tell you where she is before I kill you and the nigger,” he said. “She’s in hell. A lasting torment and torture concocted for her by a truly wicked man.

“She’s been nursed back to health––well, as healthy as she can get––then treated like the whore she is. Drugged, but not so much that she doesn’t know what’s going on, bound, gagged, she is tied to a bed in a whore house, being used and abused and defiled and re-diseased by every fat, ugly fucker who pays to put his limp prick in one of her whore holes. Think about it. Right now your precious Lauren is being fucked by a stranger. Some hairy, sweaty––”

He stopped mid-sentence as a flap of his bleach-blond hair and scalp blew off and brain and blood started running down his face and neck and he collapsed onto the deck of the boat, dead where he lay.

Clip grabbed his own ear and jumped forward.

I turned toward the sound of the shot to see Coleman Burke standing down the dock a short distance, his gun already holstered again.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled.

“Only thing I ever do,” he said. “What I was paid to.”

“Burke the reason you sayin’ all that shit earlier?” Clip asked.

We were back in the car driving down Beck Avenue.

I didn’t respond.

“De Grasse not the only one he hired to take out, is he?”

I still didn’t say anything.

“Speak up,” he said. “I’m still havin’ a hard time hearing. Head’s all fucked up from almost getting blowed off and gettin’ some crazy fucker’s blood and brain splattered on it.”

Beck was empty.

We were driving down it looking for a payphone. I was going to call to check in with Collins because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Why didn’t he take us out too?” Clip asked. “Been easy to do. Three shots instead of one. You, me, and that blond bastard?”

“He gave me a day head start,” I said.

“To run?”

I nodded.

He was quiet a moment thinking about it.

We passed by the ornate, opulent, and lushly landscaped Oak Cove and I thought of Gladys all alone in her hospital bed––the way her husband of over thirty years was in a different room in a different building across town, and it made me sad. Life is loss, I thought. We lose everything eventually, everything in the end.

I should stop and see her, should check on her and hug her and let her know she’s not alone, but I couldn’t. I just didn’t have the time right now. I couldn’t do anything but search for Lauren.

Gladys alone in her bed made me wonder what kind of bed Lauren was in and if anyone was in it with her. Was De Grasse telling the truth? Was she being viciously and repeatedly violated right now?

“You act like he already took you out,” Clip said.

“Huh?”

“Him punchin’ your ticket inevitable?”

“He could’ve done it tonight,” I said. “I’d’ve never known he was there. Never known what happened. Just be dead. Flame burning one second. Snuffed out the next. I’m no match for him.”

“And you think I not either,” he said. “That why you say don’t try to square anything, just find Lauren and take care of her.”

“Burke’s the best,” I said.

“Best what?”

“Shooter.”

“So I challenge him to a chess match.”

“Hear he’s pretty good at that too.”

He laughed. “How you get a day out of him?”

I told him.

“He know you a stand-up guy,” he said. “You willing not to be for love confused the little fucker.”

“Guess it did.”

“You willing to … to not be you, to be somethin’ you disrespect––hell, that you detest––for Lauren.”

I nodded. “’Cept … guess that means it is me.”

He seemed to need a moment to think about that one. I gave it to him.

“What that thing ’bout honor you say?”

Instinctively, nearly involuntarily, I let out a harsh, humorless laugh.

“The Lovelace line,” I said. “‘Yet this inconstancy is such as you too shall adore. I could not love thee, dear, so much loved I not honor more.’”

“What about that?”

I thought about it.

“Thought you believed that,” he said.

“I did too.”

“You don’t?”

I thought about it some more. “Guess I don’t.”

I was confronted with being a hypocrite, with being full of shit, with abandoning my code, and I tried to figure out why. Were there things I wouldn’t do for Lauren, for love? There were. This just wasn’t one of them.

“What do you believe in?”

“Lauren,” I said. “Love. That love matters more than honor, that love is honorable, a higher honor.”

“Actin’ dishonorable for love is honorable?” he asked.

I thought about it.

“How?” he said.

“Huh?”

“How dishonorable you willing to be? How far you willing to fall?”

I shrugged. “Not sure. Sort of making this up as I go along.”

He laughed. “You’ll run,” he said. “Will you back-shoot Burke?”

Before I could respond, before I could even think about what he was asking me, I had a sudden and jarring jolt. A flash of an image. I thought of love and honor. I thought of what we do for love. I thought of Lauren and what I was willing to do to find her. I thought of the gangster in his pajamas in his comfortable hotel room, Henry alone and lonely in his simple, serviceable hospital bed, Gladys alone and confused in her nice nursing home one. I thought of the dead and how they haunted us, the living, if we are living at all, of Dana Shelby and Vanessa Patrick. I thought of what each of us is capable of, of what we will do out of necessity and self-preservation and how they can’t compare to what we will do for love. I thought of all this and I knew. I knew where Lauren was. I knew who had her. I knew who was behind it.

As quickly as I could I found a phone box and called Collins.

“I need Sam’s phone number,” I said.

“You mean Detective Smith?”

“Yes,” I said. “He went home, right?”

“I have some bad news for you,” Collins said, “or haven’t you got time for it?”

“The number. Please. It’s an emergency.”

He covered the receiver with his hand and yelled to someone for the number.

“We found out who bribed the inmates to fight,” he said. “You’ll never guess who it was.”

“Dana Shelby,” I said.

“How the hell did you know that?” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“What’s going on? Why do you want Sa––Detective Smith’s home number?”

“Things are starting to come together in my mind,” I said. “Got a quick question for Smith. If I’m right or I’m not I’ll call you back.”

“Why did Detective Shelby do it?”

“For love,” I said.

“Huh?”

“For a man’s great love for a woman. Why else?”

“I don’t understand.”

“The number. Please. I’ll call you back. I promise.”

He gave me the number. “Call me right back,” he said. “I mean it. Right back.”

We hung up. I dropped some more change and dialed Sam.

It took a few minutes but he finally answered. It took a few more minutes but he finally woke up enough to understand who I was and what I wanted.

“Huh?” he said. “Riley, what the hell? I just got to sleep.”

“You said Vanessa Patrick was a prostitute, right?”

“Right.”

“For who?” I said. “Who does she belong to?”

“The black market guy,” he said. “Lee Perkins.”