Deeper Than the Grave (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

Grindshop had once been a single-family dwelling—now it was an oddball black sheep among the tidy mom-and-pop stores on the edge of town. Neon graffiti bubbled along the brick walls, and the front window was a patchwork of sun-faded leaflets, stickers, and peeling yellow tape. The railing along the sidewalk bore the dings and scratches of a thousand slides, and cigarette butts littered the ground.

I pulled open the front door, Trey at my heels. And then he stopped, suddenly, like someone had smashed his brake pedal.

I stopped too. “What's wrong?”

“I can't go in there.”

“Why not?”

He turned away from the door and put his back to the bricks. “Olfactory association.”

I took a deep breath and caught it then, the cloying odor of marijuana disguised with patchouli incense. And something else, something pungent and chemical. Trey folded his arms and kept his eyes straight ahead, his index finger tap-tap-tapping against his forearm. I put my hand on his shoulder and he flinched, his breathing erratic.

Uh oh. One of those associations.

“How bad?” I said.

“Very bad.” He licked his lips, tilted his head back. “Major drug bust, the Sinaloa Cartel. They had a dog fighting ring. And a third story balcony.”

“You got dog bit?”

“No.”

“Somebody threw you off a balcony?”

He shook his head, then flexed his fingers, deliberately uncurling the fists he'd made. And then I got it.

“Oh crap.”

“Indeed.” He shook his hands out, took another deep breath. “Go in without me.”

“But I need you to tell me if he's lying or not!”

“I can't. You go ahead. I'll stay here. If he tries to leave, I'll…” He closed his eyes. “No, I won't. I'm just going to watch. From right here.”

“But—”

“Go.”

I went, suppressing a twinge of panic as the door shut behind me. The interior was small and cramped, with stained concrete floors. Shelf after shelf of skateboards lined the walls, along with tee-shirts and bandannas and wheel kits, all of it—every bit of it—covered in skulls. Some scary, some surreal, some flame-eyed, others with eye sockets as empty as the grave. The scent of marijuana permeated the air, layered with…I frowned, took a long sniff. Despite the place's overall grunginess, it smelled like the cleaning aisle at the supermarket, soapy and chemical and fake-lemony.

I heard a noise behind the counter, and an older version of Fishbone—same long black hair, same slouchy clothes, wearing a fedora instead of a bandanna—approached warily. “Yeah?”

“I need to talk to your brother.”

“He's not here.”

“Yes, he is.” I pointed. “He's behind that curtain. I can see his shoes.”

The scuffed Nikes under the beaded curtain jerked from view. The soap smell was stronger near the counter, and I had to concentrate to avoid sneezing.

The brother looked me up and down. “Who are you?”

“Not a cop. Not a detective. Just someone who needs information. So we can do this easy—which means you shove your brother up here and I talk to him for a little minute—or we can do this hard—which means my partner and I call the real cops and they come down and let the dogs have a sniff around. And let me tell you, the dogs ain't gonna be fooled by whatever that smell is. They're gonna find whatever you've got hidden in here. So which is it gonna be?”

The man jerked his head toward the curtain. “Marcus! Get your ass out here and talk to the lady.”

I heard a sigh, and Fishbone AKA Marcus came from behind the curtain. He held his board against his skinny chest, glaring annoyance from behind a hank of black hair. “What do you want?”

I slapped a photo of Lucius on the table. “You know this guy?”

He looked at his brother, who nodded. The brother was keeping far too close an eye under the counter. I knew what I kept under the counter in my shop, and I was betting Fishbone's brother had the same thing, locked and loaded. I chanced a quick look over my shoulder at the front door, relieved to see Trey pacing in front of the threshold.

Fishbone chewed at his thumbnail and shrugged. “Yeah. So what?”

“So he's dead. Been dead a while. And every time I ask who might have wanted him dead, your name comes up.”

“I didn't kill him! I didn't even know he was dead! I thought he left town!” Fishbone shook his head violently, hair flailing with the motion. “He owed me money, why would I kill him?”

I stared at him. If he was pretending ignorance, he deserved an Oscar, because it was a very convincing performance.

“I'm also hearing that you were his connection. Is that true?”

He looked at his brother again. Now the brother looked nervous too. Fishbone shook his head again. “I don't know what—”

“Of course you know, but I don't care. I care that somebody caved in Lucius' skull and shoved him in a coffin where he stewed for almost two years.”

“It wasn't me!”

“Glad to hear it. Do you have an idea who it might have been?”

“Lucius hooked up with a new connection, somebody in a chat room online, one of those Tea Party freedom forums. Guy would take just about anything in trade.”

“Even bones?”

Fishbone shook his head. “Don't know anything about bones. Lucius mostly traded credit card numbers. And there was stuff he stole from that redneck group he hung out with and that old guy he worked for.”

“Dexter at the Confederate shop?”

“Yeah, him. Guns and knives, some ammo. It all went to trade.”

“Was Dexter involved with any of this?”

Fishbone laughed. “Him? Nah. He didn't even know he'd been robbed until Lucius skipped town.”

“Did he steal anything from you?”

The brothers looked at each other and said nothing. I sighed.

“So he stole your stash, which you of course didn't report to the police. Anything else?”

“Two autographed trick boards and everything in the cash register. Probably traded them online too. I told him not to be messing around those sites, terrorists and mafia and shit.” He looked suddenly animated. “You wanna know who killed him, that's who did it. Fucking mafia.”

That made three people I'd talked to—Cat and Chelsea and Fishbone—saying the same thing, that Lucius was involved in some shady dealings with an unknown person he traded with online. And while the Goodfellas theory sounded a little far-fetched to me, the fact that I was hearing it again had my ears pricked.

“Did you trade with this connection?”

“Hell no, I'm straight-up face-to-face. Old school all the way.” He scratched his thigh. “Look, I didn't kill Lucius and I don't know who did. Can I go now?”

I thought hard. I may not have figured out who Lucius' shadowy web connection was, but I knew one thing—Dexter hadn't been involved. My uncle had been a lot of things, but computer literate was not one of them. He'd have sooner been caught at the ballet than in a chat room.

I pulled one of my business cards out of my back pocket and scribbled Garrity's new work number on it. “Yeah, I'm done. But here's my number in case you think of anything else. And here's the FBI's number if you get in trouble with the mafia.” I rapped the counter with my knuckles. “Don't play around with this, dude. There's one body on the ground so far. You don't want to be number two.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

When we got back to the shop, Trey insisted I shower and put on clean clothes since I, to use his exact word, “reeked.” Which I did, a peculiar blend of sweat, old pot smoke, and the chemical wallop of the shop's air freshener. So I washed my hair twice with his shampoo, then put on freshly washed jeans and one of his ancient Atlanta PD sweatshirts, items I'd liberated during my most recent plunder. When I got back downstairs, he was lying on his back under the counter, wiring the new monitor into the security system video feed.

I scrubbed my hair with a towel. “Do you need some help?”

“No.” The sound of rummaging intensified. “Did I leave the screwdriver up there?”

“It's behind your head.”

“Oh.”

He retrieved the screwdriver and returned his attention to the installation. The effects of whatever Gabriella had given him were wearing off—I could see the first spit and flare of exasperation coming back—but on the whole, he was remarkably calm, especially considering the afternoon he'd had.

“Trey? I know how olfactory triggering works—neural connectivity, hippocampal activation, all that.”

He stopped messing with the screwdriver and looked at me. “You took my book.”

“Borrowed it. On Eric's recommendation. So I get why you pegged at the skate shop, but why not earlier, in the park? I could smell marijuana there as well, pretty strong, so I know you could smell it too.”

“I could, yes.” He pushed himself to standing and went to the computer. “I don't know why it happened in one place and not the other.”

He double-checked the four-plex video feed, making sure that he had access through his cell phone, through my cell phone, through the laptop. He wouldn't be satisfied until all the deadbolts were deadbolted and the locks locked, until he'd made certain no villains lurked in any nook or cranny.

I sat on the counter next to him. “Does it happen a lot? Olfactory triggers?”

“Somewhat. But usually not so…violent.”

I slid an inch closer to him, catching the mingled scent of starched cotton and soap and his evergreen aftershave. Yes, I knew about olfactory triggers. I exhaled softly, ran my foot along his calf…

He didn't look up from the computer. “Tai—”

“I know, I know.” I snatched my foot back. “You have a strategy.”

“I do.”

“Well, you'd best speed it up. I am officially love-starved, boyfriend, and it sucks.”

He raised his head and regarded me with fresh curiosity. “Love-starved? Really?”

I froze. There it was. The L-word. And there was Trey—patient, polite, but not backing down one bit.

I felt a blush rising. “I meant to say sex-starved.”

“Oh.”

“Because I'm not…I mean, it's not like…you know.”

The words hung in mid-air, but the universe was swinging like a metronome, back and forth. Tick tock. He crossed his arms, then deliberately uncrossed them. Shifted his weight to neutral stance and then back to natural, as if he couldn't figure out what he wanted to do next.

“Yes,” he said. “I know. I think I do anyway. Do I?”

I could feel the blood draining from my head, raging in my chest. He was waiting, I was waiting, each of us waiting for the other to do…what? And I knew that one move from either of us would tip the balance, and we'd both tumble, head over heels, into something vast and maybe endless, like the expanding edge of the universe.

And then my damn phone rang. It buzzed and vibrated and shrilled, insistent and impossible to ignore.

Trey didn't even blink. “That's yours.”

“I know.”

He glanced at the readout. “It's Richard.”

I cursed under my breath.
Now
he decided to call me back.

The phone rang again.

I sighed. “Can we put a bookmark here? At this exact moment? And come back to it later, when the freaking phone isn't ringing off the freaking hook?”

Trey nodded. “Of course.”

But he was wrong. It was gone. Whatever he'd been about to do, whatever I'd been about to say, it had crumbled. The moment dissolving. There was no use snatching at it. It was like ashes blowing on the wind.

I cursed again and picked up my phone. “Hey, Richard, thanks for returning my call.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

Trey wore the suit and jacket despite my warnings that we would be in-field, and that with reenactors, that meant literally. This particular field lay in a private stretch of woods next to the park, one of the oddly shaped properties with boundaries like a snake trail, sometimes bordering the battlefield, sometimes bumping up against subdivisions or commercial parking lots. Despite the patchwork landscape, once we got past the parking area, the aura of civilization crumbled. The moonlight covered the ground like a wet spiderweb, and the cold seeped into my pores with a bone-chilling potency.

We tromped in silence, following the trail markers. This far off the beaten path, I could almost believe we really had gone back in time, to the place these mountains had been before the railroads and highways had cut it up into lines of travel and trade.

Trey shoved his hands in the pockets of the black trench and turned the collar up. I tried to imagine him on assignment here—lying on the wet ground for hours, one eye pressed to the scope of a sniper rifle—but the image would not take hold. I could only conjure up the Trey walking beside me, skeeved out and uncomfortable and grumpy as hell. But still there, nonetheless.

“Did you bring some more of those little pills?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Maybe you should—”

“I already have.”

“Oh. So this is as mellow as you're going to get tonight?”

He huddled deeper into his coat. “Yes.”

Great
, I thought. I'd have to talk to Gabriella about preparing a nuclear-strength concoction, maybe something with an IV.

“Hang tight,” I said, “we're almost there, just over the next—damn it!”

My ankle wrenched sideways, and I started to topple. Trey caught me around the shoulders and held me upright.

“Are you okay?”

“Stepped in a hole. I'm good.”

I put my weight on my foot gingerly. The tendon complained a little, but held. And in that moment, my back against his chest, his arm around my shoulders, I felt the unsettling but definite shift in his stance—left foot one step behind, spine straightened, shoulders back.

“Trey?”

“Did you hear something?”

“Something like what?”

He didn't answer. He didn't have to.

The soldier materialized from the fog as if he were stepping from the shrouded mists of time. He was grizzled, gray, in the worn butternut of an infantryman. And he held a bayonetted musket pointed right at us.

“Halt!” he yelled. “Who goes there?”

Trey's hand slid between the buttons of his coat, heading for the holster. I grabbed his wrist. “No! No! No! He's in character.”

Trey remained on red alert. “He's pointing a rifle at us.”

“It's not loaded.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he's in character. Which means we have to be too.”

“No, we do not. I—”

“Trey, I deal with these people all the time, let me handle this.” I cleared my throat and stepped forward, putting on my best aristocratic drawl. “Sir, we are lost in these woods, victims of a Yankee rampage. I am ashamed that those heinous villains left me only these men's clothes to wear, and my husband here only his evening dress.”

Trey shot me a look.
What are you doing?
he mouthed.

Trust me,
I mouthed back.

I addressed the soldier. “If you could take us to your captain, we would be most grateful.”

He gave us a studied look, then lowered the musket. I felt Trey's muscles relax. He was still on alert, and I hoped to whatever deity was listening that there were no other surprises waiting for us in the deep woods. I'd hate to see one of the rebels get Krav Maga all over him. Or worse.

The soldier spat tobacco juice into the shrubbery. “This way. Hands up. And don't be trying no funny business.”

***

Trey did not like having a bayonet at his back. Not one bit. So I broke character for thirty seconds to explain to our “captor” that he was dealing with a bad-tempered, well-armed ex-cop, and that he should probably dial down the menace a teensy hair. He took a good look at Trey's jacket, noted the well-concealed but telltale lines of a shoulder holster. And then he immediately dropped the weapon. He also kept quiet until we got to the clearing.

“Thank you,” I said to Trey.

“For what?”

“For being a good sport about this.”

“I'm not.”

“Well, thank you for not beating that guy with his own musket. Hopefully this won't take long, and then we can be on our way back to the city. I want to ask Richard some questions, that's all, especially about Lucius.”

“That might prove to be a sensitive subject, especially considering that Richard was there the night Lucius most likely died, which makes him a suspect.”

“Yeah but…I mean, Richard would never kill anybody.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure enough to come tromping out in the woods to talk to him.”

Trey didn't argue. He looked miserable, shivering despite multiple layers of wool and cotton. I stepped carefully in the crunchy wet leaves. An owl hooted above us, and Trey flinched.

“Fine. But be quick about it, please.”

I smelled the campsite before I saw it. The odors of cooking fires and meat stews and tobacco smoke wafted over, and my whole body panged with hunger and longing. I reached into my pocket for a sucker, but found only a crumpled wrapper. I gritted my teeth and rubbed the nicotine patch.

“I'll be quick. Don't worry.”

The sentry led us to the officer's tent, a rectangular unit set up away from the foot soldiers' A-frames, which in war times would have housed men stacked head to foot like cord wood. But the boys tonight had made a small concession to comfort—each tent housed only two men. Still, I didn't envy them the cold soppy ground and steely night air.

The sentinel stood at the tent flap. “Sir! I apprehended two strangers in the woods, sir!”

Richard stuck his head out, and I did a double take. He looked like a daguerreotype come to life. The neatly trimmed beard now bristled over an officer's frock coat, and he carried a pipe instead of the ever-present cigarettes. I suppressed the shiver that we really had stumbled into a rebel regiment, that our lives really were on the line.

And then Richard smiled. “Hey, you two. You're late.”

The sentinel looked confused. “Sir?”

Richard composed his expression. “I'd received advance word that two civilians would be arriving, on the run from Sherman and his damned flank attacks. At ease, soldier. These are good people from a good family, and on my honor and in the name of our just cause, it is my duty to protect them.”

The sentinel executed a sharp salute. “Yes, sir!”

“As you were, private. Tell the others that we don't want to be disturbed.” Richard held open the tent flap. “Welcome to the headquarters of the 41st Infantry, Company B. Make yourselves at home.”