Solitary Dancer (24 page)

Grizzly's hand flew at Django's head, catching Django just at the corner of his eye, right where Grizz had aimed, and Django was on the ground, his legs drawn up, waiting maybe for a kick.

“Hey, Grizz,” Django said. “What you wanna do that for?”

“You talk at cops,” Garce said. Sometime while Django'd been talking, Garce had pulled a knife from his jacket and he held it now in one hand, lightly, like he was weighing it, judging how heavy it was. Long blade, cut out at the top, ending in a nasty point.

“I answer the man,” Django said. He watched the knife, he couldn't take his eyes from the knife. “He thinks I trackin' him and Billie, tha's all. . . .”

“Wha's his name?” Grizzly said.

“Man didn't tell me his—”

This time it was Grizzly's boot. Django saw it coming and turned his head so that the boot caught him beside the ear and he lost it for a second, blackness and then flashes of light and then the pain, funny how there was that little bit of time when you wait for the pain to come.

“Donovan,” Django said. He kept his eyes closed. If more was coming, he didn't want to see it.

“Talk to a cop an' know his name?” Garce said, like he's surprised and impressed, like Django just told him he'd won a million dollars in a lottery.

“Talk to the Jolt an' know his name,” Django said. “Grizz know that. Jolt's a customer, Grizz give me the goods to make a sale, I find him . . .”

“You didn't find no Jolt,” Grizz said. “Tell you do somethin' an' it don't get done, hell kinda way izzat to work? Huh?”

“I'm lookin', Grizz.” Django lay where he was, wondering if he was going to be sick.

“Garce say you lay somethin' heavy on this cop.” Grizz knelt down, got his face closer to Django's. “That right, Garce?”

“Tha's right.” Garce was tossing the knife from one hand to the other now, back and forth.

“What'd you tell him?” Grizz said. “What'd you tell this cop, make him so impress with you?”

Do it, Django thought. Let it go, can't hurt you. Can't hurt you now. “I tell him what I see,” Django said. “The night the black cop get his, behin' the Bird, up at the Jolt's place.”

“You see somethin' then?”

Django nodded, biting his bottom lip.

Grizz, still watching Django, held a long arm up at Garce, the massive hand open, fingers splayed. Garcia took a step forward, placed the knife in Grizzly's hand, the white mother-of-pearl handle first.

“Don' move,” Grizzly said. His voice was calm, gentle. “Don' move a thing,” and he brought his hand back and lay the blade of the knife on Django's cheek, the feel of it cold and angry, and he slid the blade until the needle point tickled the inside corner of Django's right eye, below the bridge of his nose. “You feel that?” Grizzly asked.

Django was afraid to move his head so he whispered, “I feel it, Grizz,” and Grizz said, “Good,” and then Grizz asked him to tell him everything Django had told Donovan, especially what Django had seen in the alley behind the Flamingo the night Tim Fox was killed.

Micki came downstairs with sleep and hair in her eyes. “I smelled the coffee,” she said to McGuire. “Thought you might bring me some.”

McGuire was sitting at the kitchen table, the
Globe
spread open in front of him next to a cup of black coffee, but he hadn't been reading. He had been thinking of Heather's murder and Tim Fox's death. “Go back to bed,” McGuire said. “I'll bring a cup up to you.”

“Come with me,” she said.

She led him by the hand upstairs and back to the dishevelled sheets and they lay together, Micki folded into him, her head on his shoulder while he stroked her hair.

“Who are you mixed up with?” McGuire asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Down in Florida. What are you up to?”

“Nothing special.”

“Like the guy in Lauderdale, the dope dealer? You said he was nothing special either.”

“He wasn't.”

“You lived with him two, three years.”

She shifted against him, avoiding his eyes.

“And when he got caught, he pulled you right in with him. Nice guy.”

“I never said he was nice.”

“You never said you loved him either.”

“I didn't.”

“You spent three years of your life with him. Still be with him, maybe, if he hadn't got caught in a D.E.A. raid. What'd he get? Five to ten, something like that?”

She twisted her head to look at him. “Why now?”

“Why what now?”

“Why bring all this up now? Down in Florida, when you came to see me, we never talked about this stuff. We didn't talk much about anything.”

“Maybe it matters now. More than it did then.”

She exhaled slowly and her eyes drifted. “He reminded me of you.”

“Just what I want to hear. My ex-wife shacks up with a drug dealer because he reminds her of me.”

“I meant you're both . . . dangerous in a way. That's what attracted me to you in the first place.”

“Were we that much alike, him and me?”

“No. In other ways you weren't alike at all. He was cocky, arrogant. You . . . you were always a little . . . sad, a little, I don't know kind of blue.”

“You miss him?”

“No.” Not a moment's hesitation in answering.

He wanted to speak, considered the phrases he would use, explored how he might express the anger, the hatred, the way he despised all she had done, but almost as soon as they sprang into his mind, he discarded them and continued to stroke her hair with his hand, wondering how they had arrived at this place and this time, the both of them, together.

Grizzly had cut Django some, little nick under the eye, little slice down his cheek, just laying the edge of the knife in, let him know how sharp it was, how much it could hurt. While Django remained frozen there, his eyes closed, feeling the blood run across his cheek, Garce did what Grizzly told him to do, wrapping a length of wire around Django's wrists, binding them together behind his back.

“Get up,” Grizzly said when Garce finished. He grabbed Django by an elbow and lifted.

Django stood, opened his eyes, looked at Grizzly. “Grizz, I never did nothin' 'gainst you,” Django said. He twisted his body to look at Garce who was watching, eyes half-closed in that funny way of his, never know if he was stoned or sleepy or maybe just nearsighted.

“Never said you did,” Grizzly said. He opened the wooden rear door of Tremont Adult Novelties that led into the storage area, a space smaller than Django's room at the Warrenton. Beyond it was a heavy steel-clad door, barred from the inside. “Move your ass,” Grizzly said.

Django took a small step forward, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness until Grizzly shoved him from behind, sending him sprawling to the concrete floor, and something skittered off among empty cardboard cartons stacked against the wall. He landed on one shoulder, trying to protect his hands, and his head struck the concrete, opening a gash above an eyebrow.

“Didn't piss me off,” Grizzly said. He angled his head at Garce who brought the heavy door closed, shutting out the sunlight. “Pissed other people off's what you did.”

Django heard something shoved through the hasp of the door, locking him inside.

The clinging warmth rising from his groin to his scalp exploded in the release, and he was crying words with meaning but without shape. Then he was lying beside her while she watched him catch his breath and swallow and blink several times before covering his eyes with his hand.

“Never in bed,” Micki said, tracing circles on McGuire's chest with her forefinger. “We never had any problems in bed.”

“In bed with each other, you mean.” McGuire removed his hand and stared across the room at the wall, thinking of nothing.

“You always bring up the good stuff,” she said sarcastically. She smiled and wove her fingers together. “If we only got along, you know, in the rest of our lives as well as we do in bed. . . .”

“We didn't do that badly.” He twisted his head to look at her. “What happened this morning? Everything was fine and then . . .”

“I don't know.” She folded her hands and lay her head on them, like a child preparing for sleep. “I heard you come in, I knew you had the morning paper and I thought, ‘It's like those Sundays when Joe'd go for a walk in the morning and I'd hear him leave and go back to sleep and wake up and smell bacon and coffee and toast and we'd have breakfast together and talk.' But it's not like that . . .”

“Would've been for one day.” A weight settled in McGuire's chest. “That's what I was going to do. . . .”

“That'd be dumb, wouldn't it?”

“What?”

“Trying . . .” She pulled a tissue from a pocket of the robe and dabbed at her nose and eyes with it as she spoke. “Trying to act like nothing's happened, having breakfast, pretending it was ten years ago when it's not.”

“Even last night?”

“No, last night was terrific.” She smiled at him. “Wasn't it?”

McGuire nodded.

“I meant thinking we could ever have a life together again.” She bit her bottom lip and looked away. “I'm sorry. Maybe I'd better go back to Florida.”

McGuire rose from the bed and began putting on his clothes. “Make it soon,” he muttered. “Soon as you can.”

“Why the hell not, Eddie?”

Phil Donovan stood shaking in the captain's office, watching Fat Eddie trying to stay cool, popping another thick tablet into his mouth.

“You know why,” Vance said. “It's classified. You tell me what you're looking for and I'll locate it for you.”

“I told you, I got an eyewitness description—”

“From a convicted felon, a street person, probably addicted to the same chemicals he peddles on the streets. You think I'm going to break the commissioner's instructions on something that weak? Now if you want to bring your witness in here where we can question him correctly and in some depth. . . .”

“The guy's not gonna risk his ass comin' down here, not unless we arrest him. And then there's nothing in it for him if he talks, we got nothing on him.”

“Yes, we have.” Vance smiled. “We could lay trafficking charges very easily, you know that.”

“And he still won't talk unless we get him protection.” Donovan walked to Vance's window and back. “Can you promise him that?”

“I can't promise anything,” Vance said. “But if you want to find this witness and bring him in here, we could assess things.”

“Do you know who he saw?” Donovan asked. “Do you know who he described?”

“I think so,” Vance said. Something was doing somersaults in his intestines. “But I don't believe it.”

Donovan stared back at Vance, then turned and left, leaving the captain alone in his office reaching for his antacid tablets.

Should he tell Zelinka, Vance wondered. Zelinka, sitting up there in his cubbyhole near Government Center, spinning off requests for files that even Vance himself would normally not have access to except with the commissioner's directive. Files from everywhere, few of them connected with anything except some convoluted bookkeeping among a few downtown businessmen, none of it decipherable to Vance, none of it directly linked to the murders of Heather Lorenzo and Tim Fox.

No, he decided. There was nothing to tell, all Donovan had was a wild tale from some half-crazed street person. He would rather find a way to rein in Donovan, let him know if he was going to explode like he just had, he'd better back it up with results. That's what McGuire and Schantz had done.

McGuire and Schantz.

There were times when he almost missed them.

Grizz my buddy, Django repeated to himself. He tell me once, he say, “You okay, some day I let you have a little taste of the Gypsy, show you what a real woman can do, she love a man 'nough.”

Never say that to nobody else, Django assured himself.

He was cold, the concrete beneath his body like the floor of a freezer chest, and the wire cut into the skin of his wrists. The blood on his cheek had hardened to a crust and in spite of his fear and panic he was weary. When Grizzly came and let him go, he'd head back to the Warrenton, crawl into bed, have a good sleep, refresh himself.

Django couldn't judge time, never owned a watch, but less than an hour had passed before he heard footsteps on the bare dry earth of the square surrounding the rusting barrel. No voices. Just footsteps and a fumbling at the hasp. Django sat up painfully on his haunches, facing the door.

When the door swung open, the gray light that flooded in on Django was like life itself, and he smiled back at the silhouettes of Grizzly and Garce looking down at him. Behind them stood the Gypsy in the massive oversized gray parka, muttering to herself, one hand rising to stroke a fresh raw welt on the side of her neck then falling, rising and falling, over and over, like a mechanical device marking the time or signaling danger.

“Hey, Grizz,” Django said. “Everything cool, right?”

Grizzly looked back at Django, his face cold and unyielding like the pitted concrete floor, and when Django looked at Garce, the Cuban turned his head away and Django began to panic.

“Goddamn it, Grizz!” Django tried to rise to one knee but with his hands behind his back he had no balance, no momentum, and he fell sideways, feeling more vulnerable than ever. “I good to you, Grizz,” Django said. “I good to you, I your man, Grizz!” He rose to his knees again, a man shouldn't die on his knees but he didn't want to die lying there on the floor, giving up, either.

Garce had taken a step back from the door and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking around, staying cool.

“Tol' you,” Grizz said. “You good to me but other people, they better to me, you know that. Need them more'n I need you. An' they don' need you at all. Don' even want you around.”