“What I need you to do,” he said, “is just shut the fuck up and sit there and keep your eyes open. Till I tell you to do something else, that’s all I need you to do.”
He hauled the beast down Jefferson towards Washington Bottoms, over a spectacular collection of potholes and into what appeared to be either a long-abandoned warehouse district or the set for some postwar science fiction epic. We pulled up alongside the only visible life-forms hereabouts, all of them hovering about a Spur station advertising “Best Barbecue.” A four-floor apartment house across the street had fallen into itself and a young woman sat on the curb outside staring at her shoes, strings of saliva snailing slowly down a black T-shirt reading ATEFUL DE D. A huge rotting wooden tooth hung outside the onetime dentist’s office to the right. The empty lot to the left had grown a fine crop of treadbare auto tires, bags of garbage, bits and pieces of shopping carts, bicycles and plastic coolers, jagged chunks of brick and cinder block.
Nabors had the special on a kaiser roll, Fritos and a 20-ounce coffee. I copied the coffee, passed on the rest. Hell, I could live for a week off what he spilled down his shirtfront. But that day his shirt was destined to stay clean a while longer, because, once we’d settled back in the squad and he started unwrapping, we got a call. Disturbance of the peace, Magnolia Arms, apartment 24.
He drove us twelve blocks to a place that looked pretty much like the one we’d left.
“Gotta be your first DP, right?”
I nodded.
“Shit.” He looked down at his wrapped barbeque. Grease crept out slowly onto the dash. “You sit here. Anything looks out of whack, you hear anything, you call in Officer Needs Assistance. Don’t think about it, don’t try to figure it out, just hit the fuckin’ button. You got that?”
“Gee, I’m not sure, Cap’n. You know how I is.”
Nabors rolled his eyes. “What the fuck’d I do? Just what the fuck’d I do?”
Opening the door, he pulled himself out and struggled up plank-and-pipe stairs. I watched him make his way along the second tier. Intent, focused. I reached over and got his fucking sandwich and threw it out the window. He knocked at 24. Stood there a moment talking, then went in. The door closed.
The door closed, and nothing else happened. There were lights on inside. Nothing else happened for a long time. I got out of the squad, went around to the back. Following some revisionist ordinance, a cheap, ill-fitting fire escape had been tacked on. I pulled at the rung, saw landings go swaying above, bolts about to let go. Started up, thinking about all those movies with suspension bridges.
I’d made it to the window of 24 and was reaching to try it when a gunshot brought me around. I kicked the window in and went after it.
Through the bathroom door I saw Nabors on the floor. No idea how badly he might have been hurt. Gun dangling, a young Hispanic stood over him. He looked up at me, nose running, eyes blank as two halves of a pecan shell. Like guys too long in country that had just shut down, because that was the only way they could make it.
I shot him.
It all happened in maybe twenty seconds, and for years afterward, in memory, I’d count it out, one thousand, two thousand… At the time, it seemed to go on forever, especially that last moment, with him sitting there slumped against the wall and me standing with my S amp;W . 38 still extended. Right hand only, not the officially taught and approved grip, never sighting but firing by instinct, how I’d learned to shoot back home and the only way that ever worked for me.
I’d hit him an inch or so off the center of his chest. For a moment as I bent above him, there was a whistling sound and frothy blood bubbling up out of the amazingly small wound, before everything stopped. He had three crucifixes looped around his neck, a tattoo of barbed wire beneath.
Nabors lay there lamenting the loss of his barbeque. Man like him, that’s the note he should go out on. But he wasn’t going out, not this time. I picked up the phone and called in Officer Down and location. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t cleared the rest of the apartment.
Not much rest to clear, as it happened. A reeking bathroom, a hallway with indoor-outdoor carpeting frayed like buckskin at the edges. Boxes sat everywhere, most of them unpacked, others torn open and dug through, contents spilling half out. The girl was in the back bedroom, in a closet, arms lashed to the crossbar, feet looped about with clothesline threaded into stacked cinder blocks. Her breasts hung sadly, blood trickled down her thighs, and her eyes were bright. She was fourteen.
Chapter Three
“I’m in over my head,” Sheriff Bates said. “You came up around here, right?”
“Close enough.”
“Then you know how it is.”
We were in his Jeep, heading back towards town. Dirt roads pitted as a teenager’s face. Now we turned out of the trees onto worn blacktop. The radio mounted beneath his dash crackled.
“Weekends, we break up bar fights, haul in drunk drivers. Maybe kids pay someone to buy them a case of beer and party till they get to be a nuisance, or some guy down on his luck climbs in a window and comes back out with a pillowcase full of flatware, prescription drugs, a laptop or TV. Not like there’s much anywhere he can go with it. Once in a blue moon a husband slaps his wife down once too often, gets a butcher knife planted in his shoulder or a frypan laid up alongside his head.”
The radio crackled again. Didn’t sound to me any different from previous crackles, but Bates picked up the mike. “I’m on my way in.”
“Ten-four.” Guy at the other end loved those vowels, rolled them around in his mouth like marbles.
Bates hung the mike back on its stirrup.
“Don Lee. You’ll be meeting him here shortly. Eager to get home to his six-pack and his new wife, most likely in that order. What time’s it got to be, anyway?”
“Little after eight.”
“My month to cover nights. Natural order of things, Don Lee’d be gone hours ago. Lisa’d have had his meat and potatoes on the table, he’d be on the couch and his second beer while she washed up. But long as I’m out of pocket, he’s stuck there.”
Bates hauled the jeep hard right and we skidded out onto what passes for a highway around here, picking up speed. Almost immediately, though, he geared down, braked.
“You need help there, Ida?”
A saddle-oxford Buick, cream over blue, vintage circa ’48, sat steaming in the right lane. An elderly woman all in white, vintage a couple of decades prior, stood alongside. She wore a hat that made you want to hide Easter eggs in it.
“Course not. Just have to let it cool down, same as always.”
“I figured. You say hi to Karl for me, now.”
“I’ll say it. What he hears…”
A mile or so further along, the sheriff said, “Back in Memphis you had the highest clearance rate on homicides of anyone on the force.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
“I’m not in a habit of drafting help. Tend to be cautious about it.”
“Then you know it wasn’t me, it was us. What part wasn’t plain luck owes mostly to my partner. I’d be jumping hoops of intuition, flying high. Meanwhile he was back down there on the ground thinking things methodically through.”
“That would be Randy-right?”
I nodded.
“Like I said, I’m in over my head. Expertise, luck, intuition-we’ll take whatever you’ve got.”
We came in from the north, onto deserted streets. Pop. 1280, a sign said. Passed Jay’s Diner with its scatter of cars and trucks outside, drugstore and hardware store gone dark, A amp;P, Dollar Store, Baptist church, Gulf station. Pulled in behind city hall. One-story prefab painted gray. Probably took them all of a week to put it up, and it’d be there forever, long as the glue held. The paint job was recent and hurried, with a light frosting of gray on bushes alongside. A single black-and-white sat nosed in close outside. Inside, a rangy man in polyester doing its best to look like khaki sat nosed close to the desk. On it were a radio, a ten-year-old Apple computer and a stack of magazines, one of which he was paging through. He looked up as we came in. Wet brown eyes that reminded me of spaniels, ruddy face narrow and shallow like a shovel, thin hair. Something electric about him, though. Sparks and small connections jumping around in there unremarked.