One Safe Place (22 page)

Psalms had set up an apartment in one of his condos, and Suzy
Q and Tylowe pulled into the basement parking garage near late afternoon. The kids were road weary when they met Psalms. Some people see the rock of a man, and look at him with awe. His physical presence impressed both kids. After the kids met and spoke with him, they went to separate rooms. The great-aunt settled into her room for a long bath and went to bed early. Of course, all the phones and computers had information traps as a precaution. Tomorrow, the kids would have a schedule of activities and a tutor would show up, until something more permanent could be set up. Zelda, the female security trainee, stayed in the condo with them.

Psalms, Suzy Q, and Tylowe convened at Psalms' condo.

“Glad you guys made it back safely. I think the mother is dead. Can't get good intel out of Vegas, but what we do know is strange,” Psalms said.

“I may be able to get some info.” Tylowe picked his cell phone off the table. He had already texted his wife to let her know he was back. He wanted Meeah to know he wanted to see her. It was beyond simply missing her for a couple of days. His encounter with an old lover and old classmates made him grateful that he'd avoided the drama-filled lives that others lived. The old lover gave him a new perspective on what kind of woman he had at home.

Tylowe felt righteous about himself. He passed up temptation, the chance to have sex with an old freak he had done nasty things with at one time. Erika offered him an all-expenses-paid booty-fling if he came to town on the regular. He didn't even think twice about getting in to that strange stuff. That was a red light he stopped at long before it turned yellow. Leading the charge in his soul was that he loved his wife, despite the uncertainty in their relationship.

If their time was up, and their marriage was over, he knew mourning the loss of Meeah in his life and the touch of another woman would simply be torture and remind him of what he'd had. The
last time he had lost someone, he went years hardly being able to engage a woman in conversation. No, if they were over . . .

He smiled. “A connect is a connect,” and then he repeated, “I may be able to get some info.” He scrolled through his past calls and dialed his friend Jon Jon in Vegas.

“Hey, man, I'm back in Seattle. Man, if you can help me out real quick, I'm in a hurry, and I was hoping I could have Erika Corwin's phone number?”

Tylowe looked up at Psalms and Psalms handed him a pen. “Hey, thanks, Jon Jon. It was good seeing you guys. I'll call you in a day or two. Later.”

Psalms poured straight shots of Evan Williams Black Label Bourbon. Tylowe dialed. “Erika, this is Tylowe. Yeah, I know you didn't think you'd hear from me, and I'll keep it straight from the gate. I need your help.”

“Can we talk about that maybe later? I need for you to find out all you can about a woman who was found dead in Vegas. Maybe you can take a Homeland Security angle and help me out for old time's sake. I can reassure you, nothing you tell me will come back on you in any form. I just need to know more.

“I'll gladly fill you in when it's a better time for us to talk. Erika, thanks. Can you have something for me in a couple of hours? Great.” Tylowe talked to Erika for a bit longer, giving her some information that Psalms had on paper and had put in front of him.

He finished talking to Erika, and Tylowe told Psalms and Suzy Q about seeing Erika, Jon Jon and Rufus. Psalms remembered them from college, had a good laugh, and gave praise to Tylowe for not going rolling in the old swamp waters with Erika.

“Hell, man. Married or not married, I wouldn't go there with her now. Oh, hell no!” Tylowe shook his head. “I don't know about either one of you, but some of the sex I had twenty to thirty
years ago, I need a special sanitary memory wipe for. What in the hell was I thinking? I wish I could pull back all the sweat I excreted while having sex with her and others like her from back in the day. I wish I could delete a few moments in time. Now that would be a sweet device someone needs to invent. I know experience is the best teacher, but damn. Not everyone we slept with deserved our time. Sometimes when we run in to someone we have exchanged anything physical with, it feels like scars on parts of our bodies, like when we fell down as kids, and we picked at the scab, and left a characteristic indicator reminding us of the stupid shit we did.”

“Damn, dude, lighten up; it was thirty years ago.”

“Yeah, maybe I should.”

“Eh, are you ex-whores finished going down memory lane? 'Cause if you are done, we have people's lives in our hands, and some lives out of our hands, and in the ground. I certainly don't want to have a pity party for ye-old peckers, my dear mates, eh.”

• • •

Suzy Q sat, tired and bothered. She wasn't the kid-friendly type after a few hours. “Hey, I had to ride and drive back from Vegas to Seattle playing nursemaid. I like you guys, but can we keep it moving?”

“Sure, boss,” Psalms responded sarcastically. He was the last word in the room as to what was going to happen in their plan, but sometimes called her the boss. “Not that it matters much now after we have the children here, but do you think those are Elliot's children?”

Tylowe nodded and then said, “I'm pretty sure the girl, Celia, is Elliot's. She looks so much like Mia and even walks like her.”

“The tone in her voice sounds like a younger Mia,” Suzy Q said.

“The boy, Cleophus, he is smallish and don't look like Elliot, and
when I ask the great-aunt, she says she not sure. The only thing she knows is that her niece birthed them, and we have to treat them as one for all.”

Tylowe's phone vibrated. He looked at the screen, answered, and walked out onto the balcony.

• • •

Psalms and Suzy Q went over all that they knew and made notes. They also had other affairs needing attention. A concert security project and the situation with Darcelle and her ex-husband needed a solution, and there was a new matter of importance to Psalms: Where was Evita?

“Q, I need you to take the lead on this for me. I'll just get angry and lose my objectivity. I know you don't care for her, and I don't understand why, but it is what it is. Track her down and I'll take it from there. You're better at that than I am. You're the boss lady when it comes to tracking people down.”

“I'll get it done. I want Zelda to help, so free her up from babysitting by tomorrow. She's sharp and analyzes well. She's ready for something deeper. Then, I want something else. I want you to stop letting Evita put you in such bum moods. You have the beautiful Gabrielle, and you have yourself, mate, eh?

“I'm trying to stay in my lane and mind my own business, but you know us Brits. We drive on the wrong side of the road in some of our colonies.”

“You ain't British, you're Canadian, and the Brits about lost all their colonies, which is why we have weird-ass civil wars in Africa, but I digress.”

“Yes, mate, you do digress, but hear me out. I know you consider Evita to be some kind of soul mate. I have to ask, how did you
come to this conclusion? Evita has had drama following her since the day of her birth. A serial killer would love to borrow her résumé of troubles.” Suzy Q stared at Psalms knowing much more about the woman that Psalms would protect to the death.

Suzy Q knew things from the underground world that she crawled in and out of when she wanted her type of loving. Suzy Q knew that Evita was deceiving. The thing that Psalms praised Suzy Q for was her extraordinary ability to track a person down. In the past, she had tracked down Evita without Psalms' knowledge, and it had led to finding out about Evita being a hermaphrodite.

The reason Suzy Q disliked Evita is she had been deceiving the man who loved her. She had been hoodwinking him for decades. She thought Evita had gained a strange trust in him that made Psalms weak and blind. To her, Evita used his trust much like in the story of Samson and Delilah, with Evita playing the part of Delilah, subduing Psalms' strength and his vision as if fires had burned his eyes out.

“PB, someone else's path cannot be for you unless they are for you. I think one of the ways you can know this is when times are not so sweet and hot, and how are you are loved and cared about. PB, you have had way too many ugly moments in life because of her. Those cannot be the reason she is your soul mate.”

Suzy Q wasn't the touchy-feely type, but she took her middle finger and forced his balled-up fist to open, then pushed her finger into the center of his hand and tapped it softly.

“So, you're telling me I can only know how someone feels about me when life is ugly? Give me a minute to think about that. I have to pee.” He left the room, but Suzy knew she had touched a nerve in the hardest man she knew. Suzy Q had watched men all her life take their act-macho-man attitude to the extreme when it came
to her. As a lesbian, she noticed men would try to be tougher for strange reasons, as if they would convert her to being sexually attracted to a man. She laughed almost too loud when she recalled several incidents in her life. She broke the nose of a male detective while she was a Royal Canadian Mounted Policewoman. The male detective stepped one time too many times over the line in the overzealous macho-man act.

Tylowe was still on the deck talking on his phone, and Psalms walked back in the room and headed to the stereo and hit “play.” Lalah Hathaway started singing “When Your Life Was Low.”

He sat down next to Suzy Q on the couch, and turned toward her and nodded, signaling her to resume the conversation.

Suzy Q continued. “How does a person treat you when the money is short, or work depletes your energy, or you lose someone like family or a friend? You have to get to a low point in life to see how that person supports you. You have, for the most part, never been in a low spot, except when your grandfather died. And Evita was nowhere to be found. She wasn't there for you at a time that, maybe, was the first time she should have been there for you.

“Psalms, your grandfather killed a man to protect her, and then years later you did the same thing. That is twelve feet worth of dirt thrown over dead men for her sake, and every time she pulls another one of her disappearing acts. It's like shovels full of more insulting dirt thrown in your face.

“If Evita is your soul mate…her behavior and ill-responsive nature is soul-wrenching to me, eh.

“What's love got to do with it? Love can come about without someone being your soul mate. Is it possible for someone to develop in to a soul mate, without being born to be? I say yes, but this is not the case here, and you know it, but deny it…Samson.”

Tylowe walked back in from the deck, and saw a look on Psalms'
face as if someone had taken his ball from him on the playground. He had never seen that before.

“Hey, guys, I had to talk to my wife a bit. I have not clued her in on any of this, and I'm feeling that I need to when I get home.”

“Yes, you should tell your soul mate what's going on in your life,” Suzy Q said, and then poured a double shot of bourbon for her, and one for Psalms. She lifted her glass up, and slowly Psalms lifted his, and they clinked glasses.

“Touché,” he said.

Tylowe sat down. He didn't pour a shot and he refused one. “Erika called back. The dead woman was unmercifully tortured. It's her. Her name was Queen…Queen Ivanov, and her maiden name is Frêche. She's the daughter of the former President of Martinique. Fingerprints identified her. They have been withholding the information as a precaution because of the connections to a dead Russian mob boss and her being the daughter of a head of state. It appears that whomever tortured her—and we know who that is—the Russians never found out where she was staying. The FBI and Homeland Security found the house down the block and one street over from where the kids and the great-aunt were staying. The house was tidy and well kept, and there are pictures of two kids, a boy and girl, found there. An oddity though—apparently Queen had a heroin addiction. Needle marks and toxicity tests confirmed it. A clean house and druggie don't jibe in my book.”

“Not in mine either,” Psalms interjected. “They shot her up when they found her and must have held her a long time trying to get information out of her.”

Both men had knowledge of addiction. Psalms had witnessed a lot through the kids who had come through the foundation that Evita and he administered. Tylowe and his wife had run a drug rehab center in Vancouver, B.C. for the past twelve years.

“Authorities found a fake passport, and a work visa. The name on both was…Elnah Runway.” Tylowe said the name slowly, as if he were spelling it.

Suzy Q knew the name from her first encounter with Tylowe, and helping him through a tough situation. Elliot's last name, Piste, means “runway” in French. It's the same last name Meeah, Tylowe's wife, used as her last name because she didn't want to be associated with Elliot while they were separated. Tylowe explained this to Psalms.

“It's
Color Purple,
Shug Avery time. God is trying to tell us something. The more we know, the more we don't know,” Psalms said.

He got up, went to his elaborate stereo, and turned a knob. Nothing happened for two seconds, but then a wall behind the stereo lifted and rolled up like a garage door. He went into the room, and came out with two small guns and holsters. He turned the knob, and the wall came down again.

Psalms walked over and placed the guns on the table. “You keep your permit on you at all times and keep a gun low on your ankle, and one in your back waist,” he said to Tylowe.

A voice floated from the back of the three-thousand-square-foot condo. “Psalms?”

“What's up, Faelynn?”

“Gabrielle wants you to call as soon as you can.”

“Tell her in about twenty minutes.”

“Okay.”

Psalms, Suzy Q, and Tylowe discussed the conflicts and knowledge of what they did know. The problems presented—what they did know, what they didn't know, and how to find out—dominated the conversation. Twenty minutes later, Tylowe headed home to his wife.