Suitcase City (34 page)

* * *

Blood Naylor was heading north on 275, toward the open country out around Lutz. Plenty of pastures and pinewoods, sinkholes and abandoned farmhouses up that way where he could leave the newspaperwoman. Places where nobody would ever find her. He wasn’t sure why he had picked up that table leg and smacked her mouth with it. It happened so fast. The way she pulled those pictures out, stuck them under his nose. A smart-ass white lady asking him if he’d read her stories about whores. Like she wondered if he
could
read.

It wasn’t until he had her in the trunk of her car that he’d placed her name. She was the woman who had written about Teach thumping Tyrone in that men’s room. She had done a good job on Teach. Blood remembered laughing his ass off reading it. Well, he had killed her without planning it, but it was a good thing she was dead. She was going to write Blood Naylor like she’d written Teach. Call the cops back into his life.

The Ford’s air conditioner cooling his face, Blood felt himself relaxing a little. He had been thinking about just running. It was all over. He had killed the woman. The cops had come and they would be back. Now he was thinking maybe he could get away with this. Maybe the woman hadn’t told anyone where she was going today. The two cops, Aimes and his little white dog, had just been fishing, stirring up the mud to see what crawled out of it.

When the idea came to him, and he saw its brilliance, he pulled the Taurus over. He pounded his gloved hands on the steering wheel in jubilation.

* * *

It took Teach by surprise when Blood Naylor jerked the Taurus off 275 and stopped, idling there on the shoulder. What was the guy doing? Teach was going too fast to stop behind Naylor, so he drove on past and pulled over just before the Lutz exit ramp. In his rearview mirror, he could see the man sitting there, a half-mile back. Then the Taurus pulled out into traffic, cut across two lanes, and bounced across the grassy median. Teach gunned the old Alfa down the exit ramp, turned left under the overpass, and headed back south. The Taurus was nowhere in sight.

Teach cursed and beat his fists on the steering wheel. Traffic was thick, and it was dangerous weaving through the gaps, searching ahead for the Taurus. Finally, he glimpsed the Ford’s rear end swerving between a Winnebago and a city bus. The Taurus took the Westshore exit, and Teach was stuck six cars back from the intersection, waiting for the light to change.

Teach told himself to calm down. Some traffic signal up ahead would stop Blood. He would catch up. He looked over at the pistol on the seat next to him. It wouldn’t do for him to be caught speeding in Bama’s car with a stolen handgun, an old Navy Colt .38. Teach had found it under some charts in a locker on the boat Bama looked after. He had to be careful. His felony conviction was old, but the cybershadow of his past was somewhere in a computer. He had always lived with the fear that some cop, stopping him for a traffic violation, might call in his name and get a report on his record. He had paid a lawyer a lot of money to have the record expunged, but he had always believed more in Santa Claus than in the promises of the State of Florida.

The speed limit was thirty-five on Westshore and Teach was going fifty. He’d glimpsed a white Taurus crossing Kennedy. It resembled Turkel’s car, but there were a thousand like it in Tampa and a hundred just as dirty. He reached over and put his hand on the revolver. What the hell was Naylor doing in Turkel’s car? Were the two of them together now in some scheme? Up ahead, the Taurus crossed San Rafael, still heading south.

When Teach crossed the intersection at Westshore and Sunset Boulevard, he was only a few blocks from home. He’d lost the Taurus, but a cold dread had crept into the pit of his stomach. It seemed that Bama’s Alfa turned of its own will onto Sunset. It would be stupid to drive to his own house, the cops could be there watching for him, but Teach had to do it. He could not shake the ugly thought that Blood Naylor was in this part of town for a reason. And the reason was Teach.

He coasted past the house. The Taurus was parked two houses down from his, in front of the Winstons’. Teach felt the sickness of fear sap his strength as he turned into Mrs. Carlson’s driveway, backed out, and stopped at his own curb. He looked up and down the street. There was no sign of Naylor. Maybe he had left the car on this street as some weird message or threat. Left it for the cops to find, and walked away. But a black man like Naylor would stand out in this neighborhood. Just seeing him, someone might call the police. Teach slipped the Navy Colt into his waistband and walked to the Taurus.

In the front seat, he saw nothing but dust, coffee stains, scraps of paper with notes scrawled on them, and credit card receipts. Nothing in the backseat but old newspapers. He stepped back and looked at the car, at his house. A strange quiet came from the house, and the weak sickness in Teach’s limbs grew. He felt exposed standing here, like some night creature forced out into the daylight. He opened the car door and pulled the trunk release lever.

Seeing the face through the wrapping of dusty, blood-smeared plastic made Teach sink to his knees. Holding onto the bumper, he closed his eyes, steadied his head, and peered into the trunk, unable to identify the face that stared up at him through layers of dust and blood. He thought of Dean, of safety, of a good life lived in quiet and reason and law, and he peeled aside the smeared plastic.

“Oh God. Oh my Christ,” whispered Teach. “You poor, poor woman.” All she had done to him, all he had hated her for, left him now as he looked at the mess of her face. Someone had dealt her two huge strokes with a heavy weapon. Strangely, the phrase
blunt trauma
came to him, and with it a curious calm. He reached into his waistband and drew the Navy Colt. He released and spun the cylinder, rested the hammer on the chamber he had left empty. There they were, five messages for Mr. Naylor.

FORTY-FIVE

The man held her hard, and Dean stood in front of him trying to give her body a calm compliance. To tell him with her limbs what she had already told him in words. She would do anything he asked of her if he would not hurt her father.

Her father was here somewhere. He was close. She had heard nothing, and she knew from the way the man held her mouth, from the way his mouth breathed against her neck, that he had heard nothing. But she knew Teach was here. She could feel his secrets in the air, hear his mind whisper that he was coming. She wished she could send to him what she knew, that he was walking into death in his own house. She closed her eyes and, breathing as calmly as she could, wished her message to her father:
Look out, Daddy. Beware, my dear Daddy.

* * *

Blood held the girl’s mouth, pressed the gun barrel to her throat, and whispered to her, “You be quiet, you understand me? You don’t say nothing when he comes in here. I only want to talk to him. You make noise, anything could happen, you understand me? Anything.” The girl moved her head in his hands, trying to nod.

Out there on the road, the plan had hardened in Blood’s mind. He had decided not to take the body to a sinkhole, not to run. How the hell could a man who owned as much as Blood did just pull up and run? It would be like calling in a confession. So he had turned around and driven to Teach’s house. The plan, the beautiful plan, was to leave the car in Teach’s neighborhood, not exactly at his curb, but near it, then get one of the whores to call the cops, talk in a snotty white-lady voice, tell them there was something suspicious in her neighborhood, a car that didn’t belong there. She thought something might be wrong. Then the cops come, and they look in the trunk, and there’s the poor dead newspaper bitch, and they want to know who killed her. Who in this nice white neighborhood has a motive? James Teach, the man whose life she pissed on in print.

But then Blood had seen the girl come home. Her girlfriends dropping her off. They had driven past and she had looked at him. She had looked right into his face, that white-girl surprise in her eyes.
Nigger, what are you doing in my neighborhood?
So Blood had to change his plan. He had to park the car and go into the house and take the girl. Because now, now that she had seen him, it had to be different. It had to be a murder-suicide thing. Teach losing his mind over all the trouble that had come down on him, killing the newspaperwoman, driving her car to his house, and shooting his pretty little daughter, then himself. Blood knew he could do it. He could hold the gun to the girl’s head, and make Teach kneel. Get him to take the barrel of the unregistered Smith in his mouth.

Blood felt the girl move in his arms. She had been good, but now she was beginning to panic. He whispered to her in his sweetest voice, “Be still now, baby. He’ll be home soon. I told you I ain’t gone hurt him. I’m just gone talk to him a little. Then you two can go back to your nice little life.”

The girl stopped struggling, went calm in his hands. Blood Naylor had a way with the ladies.

A few minutes later, he heard Teach downstairs, the guy calling out, “Dean? Dean, are you here?” It didn’t sound right, not like Father Knows Best coming home, calling his little daughter. The man sounded scared. He must have seen the car, maybe even looked in the trunk. Blood held the girl’s face hard. Teach calling out again, “Dean? Deanie, are you here?”

Blood whispered to the girl, “I’m gone take my hand off your mouth. You tell him to come upstairs. You mess up, and I kill you where you stand. You understand me?”

She nodded. Blood could hear Teach down there creeping through the house. Going room to room. The phone rang. Christ, Blood didn’t want the guy answering it down there. He crossed the bedroom, pulling the girl by the arm, and whispered to her, “Stop it ringing. Don’t answer it, just turn it off.”

She picked up the phone, hit some buttons. The phone stopped ringing. The girl’s hands were trembling. She’d almost knocked the phone off its little table onto the floor.

Blood whispered into her ear, “Get him up here. Tell him he’s got a phone call.”

* * *

Aimes grabbed Delbert by the arm. “Come on.”

“What the . . . ?” Delbert shrugged out of his grasp, a fighting cock with his ruffle up. Aimes had made him spill a forkful of grilled Cajun sausage.

They were sitting in a booth at the Green Iguana. Aimes had gone to the men’s room, then stopped at the phone booth in the hallway to call Teach’s house. See if the daughter was there, if she knew anything.

They ran out of the restaurant, leaving their food behind. In the car, Aimes caught his breath, thanked his treadmill, and told Delbert the story.

The answering machine at Teach’s house had malfunctioned, or someone there had done it on purpose. Instead of James Teach’s cheery salesman’s voice with the usual message, Aimes had heard a song that he remembered from his youth. Little Anthony and the Imperials. “Tears on My Pillow.” A very pretty tune, a very sad story.

Aimes pushed the Crown Vic through the traffic on Westshore. Delbert held onto the hand strap. “What does that mean? That song. I don’t get it.”

“It means Bloodworth Naylor. You remember that little record player we saw in the warehouse? That song was on the turntable.” Aimes thinking,
It means blood on somebody’s pillow.

* * *

Teach heard Dean call down, “Father, you have a phone call.” It was never
Father,
always
Daddy.
But nothing else seemed off. Her voice sounded normal, and if it were not for the car out there at the curb, a dead woman in the trunk, Teach might have walked up the stairs to ask his daughter why she had called him
Father
.

He stood at the foot of the stairs with the pistol in his hand, its grip slippery with the sweat of fear. Naylor was up there in his bedroom with Dean. Some mad revenging symmetry working in the man’s brain, doing to Teach what Teach had done to him. He would not let himself think of what Blood might have done to Dean already. It had only been minutes since Blood left the Taurus at the curb, but a man with his hate could do a lot of harm in minutes.

Teach put his foot on the first riser and remembered how the moon had come out that night, leaving the sea and the boats that ran on her open to the sky. How he had pushed the shrimper, the
Santa Maria
, hard to the shore, and how glad he had been with the fisherman, Carlos, standing beside him when the moon had hidden behind the clouds. Teach saw the flames that had consumed Frank Deeks. Heard the great breath of combustion and smelled the burning boat and flesh and boiling seawater. Then he saw the pistol rising in his hand toward the side of Carlos’s head. He had known it for a while now. You never escaped. Some men could never find their way back to the maps. The charts of a good life. You were always what that time had made you do. Well, Teach had put a gun to the head of the best of three bad men and pulled the trigger. He had painted the man’s brains onto the wheelhouse window, and then things had gone from bad to worse.

Teach checked the load in the pistol again and called up the stairs, “Blood! Blood Naylor! You don’t know what you got yourself into! You fucked with the wrong man!”

* * *

Dean had never heard that voice before. She didn’t know what was coming through that door, but she knew her daddy wasn’t coming unwarned. She was glad of that. For that, she had called him
Father
. She would die now, she thought, and in dying she would miss him. But she would do what she could before the man who held her hurt her daddy.

* * *

Running up the drive, Aimes pointed to the side of the house, said to Delbert, “Get the back door.”

A car pulled up and some high school kids poured out onto the street thirty yards from the Ford Taurus. One of them was Tawnya Battles. The trunk of the Taurus was still open. Aimes had found it open and wished now he’d closed it. He hoped the kids didn’t look inside. They didn’t need that. Tawnya Battles saw Aimes and Delbert with guns in their hands, and started walking toward Teach’s house. Then she started running. “Deanie!” she called out. “Is Deanie all right?”

Delbert tackled her in the middle of the front yard.