The Killing Game (10 page)

Ten-year-old Tommy Brink rolled past the small grocery, his wheelchair bumping over the uneven pavement and making his knees rock back and forth in his white shorts. He looked at his watch, Donald Duck pointing at the eight and eleven. The sun was just now topping the brick tenements on the other side of the street.

“Hey, Tommy,” he heard over his shoulder. “Get over here, boy.”

Tommy spun to see Mister Teddy, the owner of the grocery, its door and windows barred to keep the crackheads out. Tommy grinned and rolled close.

“Mornin’, Mister Teddy.”

Ted Simmons was a tall and skinny black man in his forties with an outsized smile. He was wearing a white tee and blue uniform pants, a butcher’s apron around his waist. He’d been in his store wrapping sandwiches, his hands in clear plastic mittens.

“What you doin’ out here, boy?” Simmons said. “Ain’t you s’posed to be at school?”

“School’s out,” Tommy grinned. “I won’t see no more school ’til August.”

“You lyin’ to me, boy,” Simmons mock-scowled. “I’m gonna call that truant officer and he’s gonna slap your skinny butt back in your desk.”

“I’m gonna call the truant officer and make him put
you
in your store,” Tommy said, mimicking Simmons’s scowl. “Ain’t you s’posed to be working and not out here botherin’ me?”

Simmons leaned back his head and laughed. Tommy lifted his hand and the two slapped palms. “I been fixin’ san’wiches, Tommy Brink,” Simmons said, “an’ I made too many. What kind you want?”

“You got that Cajun egg salad?”

Simmons dove inside his store and Tommy studied the street, always the same this time of day. Ol’ Man Wombley rooting through the gutter trying to find decent-sized cigarette butts he could finish. Teritha Mapes on her stoop, a bagged forty of Colt in her hand. By noon she’d be passed out. Down the street Wesley Johnson was sweeping outside his little second-hand shop.

All of the furniture in Tommy’s room had come from Mr Johnson’s store. It might not be new, but it was strong and good. His bed, his chest of drawers, a big soft chair to sit in and look out the window. A radio, a television, a ukulele to strum his fingers on and make music, all were from the store.

His aunt, Francine Minear, had gotten the good things for him. They’d made a big deal out of looking at the stuff in Mr Johnson’s store.

“Slip up into this chair over here, Tommy,” his aunt had said. “It looks soft.”

“It cost a hundred-twenty dollars, Auntie.”

“Whose money gonna buy this chair?” his aunt frowned. “Yours or mine?”

Mister Teddy stepped outside and Tommy’s thoughts of his aunt disappeared, leaving only a smile. She visited every weekend, and sometimes during the week. Tommy knew the surprise visits kept his mother closer to home.

“Here’s your san’wich, boy,” Simmons said, handing Tommy a bag. “An’ apple juice to wash it down.”

“Thanks, Mr Teddy,” Tommy said.

The pair slapped a high five again and Tommy wheeled toward home with the bag in his lap. Yep, everything about the same on the street this morning, just like always.

’Cept maybe over there
, Tommy noted, looking down to the corner. That white guy in sunglasses and a big, low-cocked hat parked outside the laundrymat and reading a newspaper like waiting for his clothes to get clean.
I ain’t seen him before.

“The bolt punctured the artery that supplied blood to the liver,” Clair said. “Dead within three minutes, but conscious for one at the most.”

I leaned against the morgue wall. Clair had run home at three in the morning to grab a few winks, returned at seven thirty to meet me. Harry was interviewing friends and colleagues of the victim. Despite almost two decades as a detective, Harry never felt comfortable in the morgue, with its astringent air, shining walls and tables, the long wall holding the cabinets of the dead. I always experienced a quiet thrill as I entered: this was where questions were answered.

“No helmet,” I said. “Not that it would have guarded against an arrow.”

“She was nineteen. At that age they feel invulnerable. I’ve seen bicycle accidents where someone tipped over and hit his head, dead of aneurysm in minutes. Don’t get me started on helmetless riders – bikes or motorcycles.”

Clair got a call and excused herself. The door opened, Gillian Fortner moving my way. She was a new evidence tech, in her mid-twenties, short and spiky ’do, huge green eyes behind frame-heavy glasses. She wore black jeans and black tee under the white lab jacket. The former head of the forensics unit had demanded dark slacks, white shirts or blouses and, for the men, ties. The current head, Wayne Hembree, didn’t care, hiring the best young minds he could find, dress and eccentricities be damned.

“What’s up, Gilly?”

“Scraps from the scene.” She tossed plastic evidence bags onto a white marble counter. “Got a couple bottle caps, a rotting hair band, probably been there a year. Pieces busted off the bike. Crumpled cigarette pack that’s weeks old. A few coins. The usual detritus.”

I sorted through the findings, the coins at the bottom of the pile. Two nickels, a dime, a quarter. One shiny penny.

“You printed the coins, of course.”

“Smudged partials on all the coins except the penny. It was as fresh as from the mint.”

“No help from the coins,” I said. “No help from anything.”

Gilly returned to her department, one building down the block. Clair entered, her face serious. Behind her was a slumping man in his sixties, his mahogany face bespeaking a lifetime in the sun. He was big-boned and wearing a gray work shirt and Levi’s tucked into battered Wellingtons. Though strong and fit, sorrow had shrunken him and his clothes could have been hung over strands of vapor.

“Carson, this is Mr Silas Ballard. He’s come to…” She caught herself, the words
identify the body
harsh and final. “To tell us what he can,” she amended.

Clair led the man to the coolers. I saw his knees tremble and stepped to his back. When Clair opened the door Ballard went down, slowed by my hands under his arms. He began weeping and I helped him to a chair.

The standard meme is,
I’m sorry for your loss
. But years of repetition on cop shows and the like have turned it into parody, same as asking someone
How are you?
then turning away because an answer isn’t expected.

“You’re from Shuqualak, Mississippi, sir?” I said, taking another road. “Is that what I heard?”

For a moment the man did nothing. Then he seemed to hear my words and nodded at the floor.

“I’ve been through that area,” I continued, trying to picture the region, to make it my link with the broken man beside me. “I hear it’s some of the richest land to be found in the whole Delta. That seeds will sprout just being waved over the dirt.”

Ballard cleared his throat. “My great grandaddy bought a eighty-acre parcel there in 1887. He planted fifty acres and Ballards been working that land ever since, adding a few acres here and there.”

“How many acres is your place today, sir?”

“Over a thousand.” Even through his grief there was pride in his words.

“Do other family members work the place?” I asked.

Ballard lifted his eyes from his hands. “It’s been said the Ballards could grow anything ’cept more Ballards. I got one brother gone twelve years. A couple cousins up north, no interest in farming. All I had was Kayla. But we had each other.”

“Kayla was going into farming?” I asked.

“She loved…” His voice broke and he swallowed hard. “She loved making things grow, was here getting her agriculture degree. I know all the old ways, Kayla was studyin’ all the new. We figured together we could, we…” His voice broke.

“Did Kayla have a boyfriend, Mr Ballard?” I asked. “A special someone?”

“Tyler Charles, as fine a young man as you’ll find. They was gonna get married when they got out.”

“Where’s Mr Charles today?” I asked. The boyfriend always got the first look. Often it was where we stopped.

“He’s been three months in England. A place called Middlesborough College in North Yorkshire, wherever that is. Tyler got a prize … got to go there free…”

“A grant?”

Ballard nodded. “Ty’s studying botany. He and Kayla was gonna get married in the Fall. I been building them a house on the land. Four bedrooms to handle the kids they wanted.” He looked up. “Finally we was gonna have a bumper crop of Ballards.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s all over,” he whispered to the air.

“Pardon me, sir?”

Ballard swiped tears from his eyes with thick and callused fingertips. He pushed to his feet and shuffled to the window, staring into a wall of gray rain.

“I’d gotten to looking out over the land and seeing the future: fresh crops pushing up year after year. Grandkids playing, a big party at harvest time. Now all I’m ever gonna see is dirt.”

There was little left to say. Clair and I walked Mr Ballard to the door and watched the rain wrap his form. He seemed oblivious to the downpour, shuffling into the forever wreckage of his dreams.

“You all right, Clair?” I asked.

“The worst part of my job,” she said. “Watching lives change for the worse.” She nodded out the door and into the rain, Silas Ballard’s form a dark smudge disappearing into gray. “Everything in that poor man’s life is gone, Carson,” she said quietly. “It’s like the killer got him, too.”

For two days Harry and I dug up anyone who might deliver insight into the last days of Kayla Ballard. She did not drink. Was terrified of drugs. She drove home every other weekend. The rare social forays were to church, campus movies and sporting events. Her number-one topic of discussion was farming.

No one had anything approaching a grudge toward Kayla Ballard. There was no hint of anything sexual. The purse I’d missed at the crime scene was in her dorm room, not generally carried, and I pretty much nixed robbery as a motive.

I contacted the chief of police in Ballard’s hometown.
It’s a small community
,
he said,
everyone knows everyone’s business.
Kayla Ballard was without enemy, without any kind of dark side.
Whatever went wrong
, was the unspoken conclusion,
it was based down there in your damn city.

The next day I was parked a bit north of downtown, engine running to keep the AC flowing in the ninety-degree heat. Harry and I had split our duties, me dealing with the Ballard case, Harry pushing on the more quotidian killings that crowded our desks. The radio crackled with the dispatcher’s voice.

“
We’ve got a kid in the backyard at 423 Mason, Detective. Paramedics report a knife in his side. Lieutenant Mason says to boogie.
”

I knew the area: poor, tough, crime-ridden. I fired up the screamer and light show and pulled behind the forensic van alerted to the same call, arriving at an end-of-street house with a listing porch and torn-sheet curtains. It sat at the end of a line of similar houses owned by slumlords who charged the government outrageous sums to enclose the downtrodden. Behind the ragged boxes of despair stood rooflines of warehouses and factories.

I jogged past the house, jumping a rusting fence. I found a uniformed cop named Mailey who I’d never formally met, one of the first on the scene. When I asked, “What we got?” he nodded to the rear of the dirt backyard. I looked ahead, felt a punch in my gut.

A small form lay on the ground, a kid, black, aged ten or thereabouts. Two paramedics were above the body, one doing chest compressions as the other held an oxygen mask over the boy’s face. They got him stabilized and onto a gurney, the handle of a hunting knife protruding from below his right ribs. In the liver.

“How’s he doing, Wade?” I asked Wade Delacroix, pulling the front of the gurney.

“Wish us luck, Carson,” was all he said, racing to the bus. I was left with the two first responders, the youngster named Mailey and his hulking partner, Horse Austin. Austin was in his fifties, old school, a too-large percentage of his collars visiting the emergency room for stitches, Austin claiming resisting arrest as the reason. Austin also loved citing people. If a kid got hit by a car and his mother ran into the street to help, Austin would cite the mother for jaywalking. Harry and I didn’t much care for Austin, nor him for us.

“What was happening when you got here, Horse?” I asked.

Austin stifled a yawn, showing huge yellow teeth that could have crowded Secretariat’s jaw. He scratched one of the big canines with a fingernail, flicked something away, and turned to me like an afterthought. “A neighbor came sneaking round the back looking for the mother and saw the kid. Lucky for the vic, since he was all alone here.”

“Where’s Mama?”

“At any one of a dozen bars. Or holed up in a crack house. You know the type, Ryder, all the motherly instincts of a clam. Squirt ’em out, collect the welfare.”

I ignored his jibes, figuring Austin would be retired in two or three years, sitting in his living room watch-ing football and polishing his cirrhosis. I’d seen him sneaking nips from a bagged bottle he kept in his cruiser kit.

“Why was the kid in the wheelchair?” I asked.

Austin put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, broke wind. “Hell if I know.”

“You didn’t think to ask, like maybe it could have been important to the medics?”

“The neighbor wasn’t making much sense, Ryder, jabbering like a magpie. She wouldn’t know nothing.”

I looked to Mailey. “You didn’t ask why the vic was in the chair either, Mailey?”

He shot a glance at Austin, like a kid hoping Daddy would save him. “Don’t look at Horse,” I growled to Mailey. “Look at me. Why was he in the chair?”

“Didn’t think to ask.”

“Next time get your head out of your ass. You see a vic has a medical condition, you ask what it is. You got me?”

Austin was in my face. “Get the fuck away from my partner, Ryder. Save your righteous bullshit for someone who cares.”

“Detective Ryder?” called a voice from behind me.

I saw Jim O’Reilly walking up, beside him a rope-skinny middle-aged black woman in a pink housedress. O’Reilly was twenty-eight, one half of what the department called the O Team. “Here’s the woman who found the boy,” O’Reilly said. He headed to the rear of the lot.