Read Faces of the Gone: A Mystery Online
Authors: Brad Parks
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Mystery, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Murder, #Organized Crime, #Crime Fiction
en minutes later, I was in the midst of explaining to Rashan the process of how a story got into the newspaper when a brand- new red Audi A4 rolled slowly past us and turned into the driveway. A short, round, middle- aged Hispanic man got out and Rashan practically jumped over the dashboard.
“Come on, Rashan,” I said. “If you want to see how a reporter gets a story, this is a good place to start.”
Or at least it was a good start if he wanted to get a feeling for ambush-style journalism, which is what this situation demanded. I closed in fast, with Rashan right behind me. Alvarez was barely out of his car when we were already on top of him.
“Hi, Hector, Carter Ross from the
Eagle-Examiner,
” I said. “And I’m sure you remember Rashan here.”
Alvarez rocked back on his heels. He pretty clearly did remember Rashan and was too stunned to open his mouth.
“Rashan tells me you recruited him on behalf of a local drug syndicate,” I continued. “You want to tell me who you’re working for?”
Rashan and I had Hector more or less pinned against the open door of his Audi, which still had a faint new-car smell to it. Alvarez had a broad, fleshy face that was registering complete surprise.
“I, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, trying to recover from his shock but not doing very well.
“Well, then, let me remind you: Rashan was one of your patients in a drug and alcohol rehab program at East Jersey State Prison. When you realized he was nearing the end of his sentence and going back home to Newark, you offered to hook him up with a source for heroin.”
“I don’t know who he is. He’s got me confused with someone else,” Alvarez said halfheartedly. Rashan just scoffed.
“Sure, sure he does,” I said. “Let me lay this out for you right now, Hector. You’ve been doing something very bad, something I’m sure the commissioner of the corrections department would be eager to hear about. Now, if you can help me out and tell me who you work for, maybe I can forget your name, you can forget your little sideline business, and everyone can move happily on with their lives. Or if you don’t tell me who you’re working for, I’ll plaster your name in a nice big headline, and you’ll not only lose your job, you’ll end up serving time with some of the very same people you’re counseling now.”
I was pretty sure I had the man soundly beaten and just moments away from full confession. But apparently Hector Alvarez was a little more stubborn than I gave him credit for. That, and the shock was wearing off.
“He’s lying to you,” Hector said. “I’m a certified drug and alcohol counselor. I got a degree. Who are you going to believe, me or some punk?”
I glanced at Rashan, then back at Hector.
“The punk,” I said.
“Then you go ahead and print your story and I’ll sue your ass off,” Alvarez said. “My cousin is a journalist. I know how this stuff works. You can’t just print something because someone says it’s true. This punk is lying.”
Rashan shouted a few excited obscenities and faked a charge at Alvarez, who cringed. I grabbed Rashan by his backpack, and he allowed himself to be restrained—basically because he wasn’t planning on jumping Alvarez anyway.
“Calm down, Rashan,” I said. “We’re just having a conversation here. Because now Hector is going to explain how he can afford this very nice new automobile on a drug counselor’s salary.”
Alvarez gazed longingly at the Audi for a second then turned back to me like I was talking about stealing his firstborn.
“That’s none of your business,” he said.
“You make thirty-eight grand a year, Hector,” I said. “I looked it up. I can also look up how much money you owe on your house. I’m guessing between your house payment and car payment, something won’t add up. Unless, of course, there’s some, you know, outside stream of income. But I’m sure you can explain that all to the IRS after I run my story.”
“Screw you,” Hector said.
I lost control of my inner wiseass and pulled out my notepad.
“Is that your official comment, Mr. Alvarez? ‘Screw you’?”
“Suck my dick,” he said.
“Interesting,” I said, pretending I was writing that down, too. “Not only is he the Crooked Drug Counselor of the Year, Mr. Alvarez is also a homosexual.”
Alvarez slammed the door to the Audi and stormed past us toward his house. “If you got anything more to say to me, you can talk to my lawyer,” he said.
“I’m not going away, Hector,” I called out as Alvarez fumbled with his keys. “But you can end this little problem in one sentence. Just give me a name and you get to keep your job.”
He stuck the key in the lock, turned it, then looked at me.
“You just don’t get it, do you?” he said, shortly before disappearing through his front door. “You think I’m worried about my
job
?”
• • •
he door slammed. I stuffed my notebook in my pocket and turned to walk back to the car. Rashan didn’t follow. “What!?” he said. “That’s it? You’re not going to go break
the door down?”
“I’m a newspaper reporter, not a bounty hunter,” I said. “But he’s lying!”
“I know. No law against lying to a newspaper reporter. It
happens all the time.”
“So you just let him go?”
“I may call him later—but only when he’s cooled down,” I
said. “I took a chance that ambushing him like this would catch him off guard and he’d just start blabbing. It didn’t work.” “But you’re going to go write the story now, right?”
“Before I write it, I have to prove it,” I said. “Rashan, I know you’re telling the truth. And I could tell that guy was full of crap. But unfortunately, Hector is right: no one is going to believe a drug-dealing ex-con over someone who works for the Department of Corrections. I need to verify your story two or three different ways before my editors will even think about printing it.”
Rashan stuck out his lower lip in a convincing pout, making it clear his first brush with journalism had left him rather unsatisfied.
“This isn’t a Western, Rashan,” I continued. “The guys in the white hats don’t always win. At least not right away. Sometimes you got to keep at it for a long time before you get the payoff.”
With that particu lar bit of advice, I was talking about more than just journalism. But it was hard to tell if Rashan was listening anymore. I had disappointed him and now he was tuning me out.
“Get in the car,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
“Nah,” he said. “I ain’t going back there.”
I didn’t know if he meant now or ever.
“Okay. Well, here’s my card,” I said, handing it to him. “Give me a call sometime, okay?”
“Uh-huh,” Rashan said, then, without looking at me, turned and walked off into the night, his soda can tabs jingling as he went. I watched him go until all I could see was the night reflector strip on his backpack bobbing up and down. Then I went back to the Malibu, feeling the weight of the day settle on me.
It was getting to be six, which felt a lot like quitting time. And on a normal Friday, after a rough week at the office, I might just head home, curl up with Deadline, and watch
Braveheart
for approximately the fiftieth time. Except now my copy of
Braveheart
was just one more piece of ruin in what used to be my house. And, sadly, so was Deadline.
Then there was the other standby Friday-night activity for the suddenly overstressed: going out to some local bar, getting mindblowingly drunk, and hitting on anything under the age of forty that wasn’t utterly repulsed by me. Except there was the small problem of what I would do if I actually succeeded in luring some lovely young lady into my clutches.
Hey, honey, what do you say we go back to my place. I’ve got this great little debris pile not far from here
. . .
No, I was pretty much cruising for another night on Tina’s couch—or maybe, if I could stop being such a loser, Tina’s bed.
I just had one last errand to accomplish before I started traveling that way. Call it a mission of guilt: I wanted to see if I could find anyone who had seen Red or Queen Mary since their building got blown up. It wasn’t going to do them a lot of good if they were, in fact, underneath the rubble of Building Five. But I felt like I at least owed it to them to check.
So I made the turn off South Orange Avenue, not far from the Wyoming Fried Chicken where my buddy North Face was likely on patrol, and soon found myself back in the odd netherworld that was the remains of the Booker T. Washington Public Housing Project.
It was its usual empty, forlorn self—though instead of six large, empty brick buildings, there were now five. The search- and-rescue mission had been called off. So it was just me and the ghosts again.
I started looking around for signs of life, peering in the corners and behind the shadows just like I had been doing a few days earlier. The wind was managing to find a way to blow up my pants, which felt even less pleasant than it sounds. I pulled my jacket closer to my body and kept hoping for that whiff of smoke or glimpse of light that would indicate I was not alone.
But I was. Obviously I was. And yet I kept standing there as, what, self- punishment? As if I could somehow atone for Red and Queen Mary dying a horrible death by standing out in the cold and looking for them? What the hell was I doing here?
I was losing it. I must be, right? Why else would I be shivering in the courtyard of an abandoned Newark housing project waiting for two dead people to show up? I felt this hysteria creeping all over me, like my rational mind was separating from me, slipping off into the ether where it would never again be found. I cupped my hands to my mouth and started yelling as loud as I could.
“Rrrreeeedddd,” I hollered. “Rrrreeeeddd!”
I kept bellowing, each time pausing to listen for a response but only hearing the sound of my own voice echoing off cold, hard brick walls.
The Director picked up the call on the second ring, looking at his cell phone like it offended him. It was unusual for one of his people to call at this hour—or any hour for that matter. They were instructed to contact Monty on routine matters. And the Director had set up his or ga niza tion so most matters had become routine.
“Speak,” the Director said.
“It’s Hector. Hector Alvarez.”
The Director could practically hear Alvarez gulping through the
phone. The Director did not like Alvarez, a former drug addict turned counselor. The Director had little respect for addicts. He viewed them as weak, lacking self-control.
But dealer recruitment was not something the Director wanted to do himself. He came up with the idea for recruiting in prisons early on. It just made sense. Most of the inmates were there for dealing drugs in the first place, so they already knew the business. Plus, recruiting in jail meant you weren’t taking the unnecessarily dangerous step of swiping active dealers from other syndicates or gangs.
It hadn’t taken long working through the Director’s various Department of Corrections contacts to find Alvarez. He and the Director had a few beat-around-the-bush conversations, but the Director knew the first time they spoke he had found the right man. Alvarez had the taste for the finer things in life but not the paycheck. He had that sense of grandiosity, common among addicts, that convinced him he was due more than what life was giving him.
The arrangement with Alvarez, as it was with the recruiters in the other prisons, was simple: he received a cash bounty for every dealer he channeled to the Director. Yet while the Director valued Alvarez’s service, he had little patience for the man himself—especially when he was being hysterical like this.
“Get a hold of yourself,” the Director commanded.
“I’m sorry. I just got a visit from a reporter, a guy from the
Eagle-Examiner,”
Alvarez said through shallow breaths. “I think he’s on to us.”
“Explain.”
“Well, he had one of the dealers with him. Rashan Reeves. I got him for you a couple months ago. Remember him?”
“I do,” the Director said. The Director knew who all his dealers were, even if they didn’t know him.
“Yeah, so the reporter is like, ‘Rashan here tells me you’re recruiting drug dealers from jail. I’m going to write a story about you if you don’t tell me who you work for.’ ”
“And you told him . . . what?”
“Nothing,” Alvarez said, his voice cracking slightly. “I told him to screw off, and that was it.”
“So by ‘on to us,’ you really mean ‘on to you,’ ” the Director said coolly.
Alvarez did not reply.
“Well, you’re calling me,” the Director said. “Is there something you want me to do about this?”
“I just . . . I thought you should know.”
“Fine. What’s this reporter’s name?” the Director asked, even though he already knew the answer.
“I don’t know. He said his name so fast.”
“Carter Ross.”
“Yeah, that’s it!” Alvarez said. “I swear, I didn’t tell him anything.”
“And where is Mr. Ross now?”
“I don’t know. He just left.”
The Director frowned. The Director thought he had rid the world of Carter Ross with one push of a wireless detonator. It had surprised the Director to see Ross alive and breathing on the
News at Noon.
Clearly, he needed to be dealt with. Immediately.
As for Alvarez . . .
“So, tell me, Hector, how old is that little girl of yours?” the Director asked.
“She just turned nine,” Alvarez replied, his voice faltering.
“How nice,” the Director said. “Tell her happy birthday.”
I must have yelled Red’s name twenty or thirty times, with each repetition a little louder, a little more desperate than the last. I yelled until my throat went raw and I lost the breath to yell anymore.
But he wasn’t there. Or perhaps he was, but only as a corpse buried under several tons of debris. I started walking toward Building Five to, I don’t know, say a prayer or something. Then somewhere off in the distance, I heard a faint voice.
“Who there?” it said.
“Red?” I shouted one final time.
“What you want?” the voice said, and this time I could trace it a little better. It was coming from Building Three. And it sounded like Red.
I ran toward Building Three, pushing my numb legs to move as fast as they could. As I got closer, I saw Red’s patchy- bald head sticking out of a second- story window. I never thought I would be so happy to see an old homeless man in Newark.
“Hey, Red!” I said, feeling some warmth returning to my body. “Remember me? Carter Ross from the
Eagle-Examiner
.”
“Yessir. I got Queen Mary right here,” he said, then lowered his voice for a moment. “I’m trying to get me a little some, you know what I mean?”
I was so happy to see him alive, it didn’t bother me that the image of two aging addicts in the throes of passion—was now drifting through my mind.
“Why aren’t you dead right now?” I asked.
“Oh, you mean with the building and all that? Shoooot,” he said. Red was directly above me, one story up. I was still on ground level, which made me feel like the world’s weirdest Romeo looking up at the world’s ugliest Juliet.
“Yeah, you weren’t in Building Five this morning?”
“Oh, I was there,” Red said.
“Then how did you not get blown up?”
“Aw, hell, youngster, I got more lives than a kitty cat,” Red boasted. “Can’t nothing blow me up.”
“You mean you were inside?”
“Well, I was jus’ layin’ in there with Queen Mary”—more bad visuals—“when I heard this racket coming from the fire escape,” he began, and I imagined this was not his first time telling the story today. “An’ I was thinking, ‘Who’s comin’ visitin’ at this time of the mornin’?’ Our friends ain’t exactly early risers, you know?”
I nodded. Red sounded a little less drunk than the first time I spoke with him, which was to say he might have only been two sheets to the wind instead of the usual three.
“So I stole a peek around the corner, an’ I saw this guy with a bunch of dy-no- mite. An’ I thought he was from the city, come to blow the buildin’ up. They’s always talking about how they gonna blow it up. An’ I jus’ thought maybe today was the day, an’ they jus’ hadn’t told none of us street people, you know?”
“Right,” I said.
“So I watch him go ’bout his bidness, pickin’ out a wall and tapin’ his dy-no- mite and fussin’ with all his doodads. And then he musta gone and taped it to some other walls or something, I don’t know. But as soon as he was gone, I went an’ got Mary. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we best be gettin’ usselves outta here. It about to blow.’ An’ you know what she said?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘Awww, there you go again,’ ” Red said, and then started howling with hee-haws, punctuating it with some woohoos, then finishing with some hoo-wees. I laughed to be polite, having no idea what he found so funny. Then again, I’m not sure it was fair to expect total clarity from a guy whose last sober day had probably been while I was in the first grade.
“So I said, ‘No, no, Mary, we got to go. I mean, we got to go
now,
’ ” Red said. “An’ she didn’t say nothin’. An’ I said, ‘Mary, we got to
go.
’ An’ I done picked her up and carried her out, jus’ like I was Superman.”
I was having a tough time believing Red could carry a well- mannered lapdog—much less an inert old woman—down a fire escape. And apparently so did Queen Mary.
“There you go again!” she hollered from somewhere inside the building. And Red, finding this every bit as inexplicably hysterical as last time, started with a fresh round of har-hars, tee-hees, and ho-hos. I let him finish and he continued.
“Now, we wasn’t out of the buildin’ mo’ than three minutes and,
WHAMBO,
the whole damn place done gone sky high, and then it fell down, jus’ like it was a deck of cards fallin’ in on isself. It was a terrible noise like you ain’ never heard. And you know what?”
“What?”
“It wasn’t no man from the city after all. Folks here is sayin’ it was jus’ a man up to no good, jus’ wantin’ to blow up our buildin’ because he don’ wan’ it here no more. Can you believe that?”
“Actually, I can,” I said. “He blew up my house, too.”
Red couldn’t have looked more surprised if a bottle of Majorska vodka up and started talking to him.
“You don’ say!” he said. “Mary, you hear that? Remember that white boy who got us the food? That big feller with the dy- no- mite, he done blowed up the white boy’s house, too!”
“I heard him the first time,” Mary said tersely from inside the building.
“Well, don’ get all sore. I was jus’ sayin’,” Red said, then turned and gave me the universal male shrug that loosely translated to,
Women, what can you do?
“Red, tell me something. The guy with the bunch of dynamite, how big was he?”
“Little bit taller than you an’ about twice as wide. He had hisself a neck like a bull.”
Red held his hands a fair distance apart to signify a substantial width. That sounded like Van Man to me.
“Did you get a good look at him?” I asked.
“Sho’ as I’m lookin’ at you right now, youngster.”
This was getting too good to be true. Not only was Red alive, he was possibly the only living witness who could ID a serial murdering arsonist. And, yes, there was the small problem of what, exactly, Red had managed to see through his Mad Dog 20/20 goggles. But it was still a hell of a lot better than nothing.
“What did he look like?”
“Well, like I said, he was a big feller an . . .”
“Do you think you could describe him to a sketch artist?” I said, cutting to the chase.
With that, Red leaned back from the window for a moment, straightening himself.
“Well, now,” he said. “That all depend, don’t it?”
I caught his drift immediately.
“Another trip to the store on me,” I said.
Red flashed a smile that displayed his teeth—both of them— and said, “Make it three.”