Authors: J. A. Kerley
“Your brother is returning to you, Carson. You can call me by my given name in public. I, in turn, intend to start calling you Alphonse, just to see how it feels to always have to think before addressing one’s beloved brother.”
“The idea is crazy. You’ve truly created the identity?”
“Day by day I add to Jerome Alan Ryder … a peripatetic financier type who moved from Alabama as a teenager and has since resided in various cities abroad. Have you checked your invented past lately?”
“Why?”
“Jerome A. Ryder’s past seems intertwined with yours, as if our fictional selves went separate ways years ago and recently reunited.”
I stared. My brother was beyond belief. “You mean …?”
“A few places in your invented background mentioned
only child
. You’ll now see a brother is casually noted.”
“You’ve combined our false backgrounds?”
“Our real ones are inexorably linked, Brother. It seems so right.”
I shook my head. There were no words for what he was attempting. Chutzpah, balls, brass … all woefully insufficient.
There was but one fatal flaw.
“You’re still a wanted man, Jeremy,” I pointed out. “Every law-enforcement agency in the country has you in their database. Thousands of cops go to work daily with your photo on their bulletin boards and computer screens. There’s nothing you can do to live a normal life. You think you can alter the past? What’s your alteration for that?”
“You’re a man of moving water, Carson,” he said. “You need it nearby to make you flourish, right?”
I had been surrounded by water in Mobile, surrounded by water on Matecumbe Key. Flowing water seemed to soothe my soul and I could no more live in a desert region than on the moon. I stared as my brother opened the huge shower stall and turned a handle. Torrents of water poured from every direction, splashing, mingling, the floor speckling with overspray.
“Yes, I like moving water,” I said, perplexed. “So what?”
He turned off the water, put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the door.
“Then always trust a river, Carson.”
Debro was in his apartment considering the proper punishment for Billy Prestwick. He sat in a chair with a laptop on his thighs, studying Prestwick’s Facebook page. The posts were little more than drivel, self-absorbed twinks jabbering to other self-absorbed twinks.
So gud 2CU last nite at Stallion, Billy. Where did U get cool shades? I NEED a pair like. Kisses.
Why is Life so HURTFULL? Cant Peeple be NICE? Someone send me FLOWERS.
Heading 2 Bink’s Lounge 10 minutes … any U sluts want 2 par-tay?
He opened Prestwick’s photos: Twenty-one separate albums holding a total of 312 photos. They were all basically the same: Billy Prestwick grinning in a bar, smiling on the beach, making gangster fingers on a street corner, sticking his pink tongue out at the camera, standing shirtless beside a mirror. His pretty face smiling beside a dozen different drinks.
Selfies, mostly … pictures of Prestwick that Prestwick had put on Facebook.
Look at me,
they said.
See how pretty I am.
On my ride eastward I was in a fog of Jeremy’s making. Any trip to see my brother ended up giving me a few answers, while generating even more questions. He was actually living in Key West. He had changed his name to reflect mine, and intertwined our fictional histories. For better or worse – as far as anyone caring to dig deep into my history was concerned – I now had a brother.
I doubted Jeremy had come to Key West to hunker down within his house, thus becoming subject to tens of thousands of eyes. All it took was one sensitive pair to see him, log into one of several law-enforcement sites, and call the local cops.
“
Yeah, this is Johnny Baker … a county cop in Spitwhistle, Oklahoma. Me and the missus are here on a vacation and – you’re gonna shit – but I think I just spotted Jeremy Ridgecliff from the FBI listings. I followed him to this big-ass house. Hang on, lemme give you the address …
”
And after Jeremy was hauled away, curious detectives would dig into his fictional past to see how he had pulled it off, finding his lies looped around mine.
If he went down, I followed.
I had spent almost a year with the FCLE, a dream job I hoped would carry me to the end of my career. But into the bright Florida sun had a come a shadow: my brother, using fractured logic to bind his dangerous past to mine. I had thought I was safe. In fact, I was supremely vulnerable.
I was crossing Duck Key when my phone gave the ringtone for case contacts, a four-note theme from an ancient television series called
The Twilight Zone
, which, given my cases, seemed appropriate.
My smartphone let me speak while driving. As could my vehicle, which said, “
Call from Derek Scott
” in the voice of a friendly lady.
“Answer call,” I said, then heard the connection establish.
“Detective Carson Ryder here, Mr Scott. What can I do for you?”
“
Hello, D-Detective. You wuh-wanted to know how things w-went with m-my meeting with Muh-Mr Ocampo?
”
I hadn’t specifically asked that Scott call me with the results of his meeting, but I figured he’d picked up on my concern for Gary when setting up the meeting and was doing me a good turn by reporting back.
“No big deal, Derek, but sure … I’d be interested in how he is. I’m concerned about what the stress might be doing to his health. How’d things go?”
“
I, uh … fine. We t-talked. Sure, he’s got his troubles and all, but, uh, it was n-n-nice of him to want to see me and …
”
His mild stammer verged on full-blown stuttering, which often happened with stress. I cleared my throat. “I’m getting the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me, Mr Scott.”
A sigh
.
“
The meeting with M-Mr Ocampo w-was, um, unsettling. Maybe embarrassing
.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“
Uh … it’s sorta, uh …
”
He was obviously uncomfortable. I checked my watch. I hadn’t planned on going into Miami, but there was time.
I said, “Sometimes these things are best discussed face to face instead of on cold little plastic devices.”
“
I hate them
,” he said, “
phones. Always have. That doesn’t mean I don’t use them all the tuh-t-time, we have to, right? Otherwise we’d be living in 1910 and never talk to anyone who w-wasn’t in front of us
.”
Even though I could talk at my steering wheel and have my voice heard in a phone a thousand miles distant, I felt the same way.
“You want me to come see you?”
“
I live in B-Belle Glade, over an hour away. I’m not there, anyway. I’m in a b-bar, the Cool Melon, just a bit north of downtown, you could come here a lot faster. It’s a regular bar, buh-by the way
.”
“Doesn’t make a difference, Derek. Save me a stool.”
I was there in fifteen minutes, a neighborhood pub near Miramar. Scott was at the end of the bar with a beer mug at his elbow.
“What went on with Gary?” I said as I pulled up a stool. “You said something about embarrassing?”
“Everything w-went like I expected at first. Mr Ocampo apologized several times, telling me he wasn’t like his brother, that he was s-sickened by what was happening. I told him it was fine, there was no way he could be responsible, even if the guy was a twin, Gary was a d-different person.”
“What I pretty much expected.”
“I was there maybe ten minutes, hoping maybe tuh-talking to me made him feel better. But when I got up to leave he still seemed so sad. I felt terrible for him, for all that s-seemed wrong in his life. I leaned over to g-give him a hug, kinda wondering how to do it … all that buh-bigness. And he – he …”
“What happened, Derek?”
“The p-poor man t-tried to kiss me. I wasn’t expecting it and when I p-pulled away he started crying, apologizing for how disgusting he was. I tuh-tried to tell him it was all right, p-p-perfectly natural. But it was a very emotional scene, d-difficult for both of us. I h-hope he’s all right.”
I thanked Scott and started to depart when he called my name. I turned.
“You should know …” he said, “the fuf-first moment I saw Mr Ocampo?”
“Yes?”
“I f-felt a strange shock, like recognition. I know, I’ve seen all the different pictures of the man who tried to abduct me, and I know he’s Mr Ocampo’s brother … but I felt something deeper.”
“Like a visceral resemblance between the two?”
He tapped his chest. “Something in here got scared for a split second.”
Another confirmation that Donnie couldn’t eradicate his resemblance to his brother, and maybe wasn’t even trying. I retreated to the Palace to try and puzzle it out, but fell asleep in the chair.
“
Muchos gracias, amigo
,” Sergeant Leo Bander said, taking the bag of Cuban pastries from baker José Murano. Bander flicked open the tab atop the Styrofoam cup of coffee with his thumb and took a sip. Morning needed strong coffee and baked goods.
“
Jugo?
” Murano asked.
Juice?
“A man can only take so much health, José,” Bander said, eyeing the fresh pastries cooling on a rack behind Murano. “I’ll have an orange juice mañana.”
A grin from Murano. “
Pero tu esposa …
”
“My old lady’s got me eating salads five times a week, José. Or fucking stir-fries.” Bander patted the two inches of belly leaning over his belt buckle. “She’s got the idea that when I retire next month, we’re gonna go hiking in the fucking Alps or something. Never marry a woman ten years younger, José. They’ll wear you out.”
“Sometimes that can be a good thing, Leo,” Murano winked.
“Sometimes, amigo,” Bander sighed, handing over his money. “And sometimes it’s just tofu and goddamn carrots.”
Bander left the small panadería reluctantly, its atmosphere thick with the smell of fresh bread and iced cakes and dense black coffee. Though dawn was an hour past, its echo tinged the sky with pink. Gulls flicked between palms on the avenue and squabbled over crumbs on the sidewalk.
Good morning, Miami,
Bander thought, fresh caffeine and the promise of pastry kicking his brain into a higher gear.
You’re looking beautiful today, babe.
A dozen pounds of gear squeaking on his utility belt – pistol, pepper spray, folding baton, radio, cuffs, ammunition – Bander climbed into his cruiser and pulled into the parking lot of one of the ubiquitous shopping centers a block down the street. He rolled into the shade beside a furniture store, put the cruiser in park, and buzzed the seat back to give him more room. He downed one of the sweet pastries in two bites and chased it with a swallow of coffee.
One month
, he thought as he removed another pastry from the bag and took a bite.
One freaking month more.
He figured he’d die in the saddle, but his wife of five years now, Marilita, had other ideas, like hiking the fucking Alps.
And maybe she was right. He’d have done his full thirty when he pulled the plug, every day of it on the streets of Miami. “Fuck a desk job,” he’d once told a partner. “The street is where the action is, the glorious fucking weirdness, the insane sideshow.”
Leo Bander thought he’d seen all the sideshow had to offer in his thirty years. He had once stopped a guy doing a hundred-twenty on Interstate 95, the guy saying he’d just washed his car and was drying it off. He’d busted a whorehouse to find a famous television preacher drunk, stoned, and buried under a naked and writhing clot of male and female bodies, the righteous reverend later explaining it was simply research, that he had to know sin in order to preach against it.
Bender had arrested a seventy-year-old woman for shotgunning a rooster in the middle of Flagler Street in Little Havana, the woman explaining that the rooster held the spirit of her late husband, and had recently had amorous relations with a neighbor’s hen.
He’d once watched a guy in a silver lamé bodystocking – and wearing a beach blanket as a cape – take a nine-story dive from the balcony of a Miami Beach hotel on to the hood of a stretch limo, the limo filled with a half-dozen Atlantic City gamblers. He’d walked up to the pale and shaking group and nodded at the broken body cradled in the vehicle’s roof, cape dangling over a smoked rear window.
“So what’re the odds on that one, boys?” he’d said, as seriously as he could muster.
He’d seen bodies mangled in car crashes, people jumping from buildings to escape fire, babies roasted in hot cars while parents sat in a cool bar two dozen feet away. A man killed with a roofer’s nail gun …
Thirty fucking years,
Leo Bander thought, staring at the sky through the windshield.
I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing left.
He checked his watch: time to get back on patrol. He radioed his return to service and pulled to the rear of the buildings, no attempts at forced entry, just the usual gang signs on the brick.
Bander passed a stand of trash receptacles, a corpulent rat darting from one bin to another. Motion ahead caught Bander’s eye and he blinked to see the pale back of a naked man with exceptionally bright hair. The man was staggering from a loading bay at the rear of a store. He looked wasted, stoned or drunk or both.
Bander sighed and rolled the cruiser a half-dozen feet behind the guy’s skinny white ass, the guy oblivious to the sound of approaching tires. Bander gave the siren a hit:
Whoooooop.
He leaned out the window. “OK, buddy, let’s put a stop on it right there.”
The man twitched. Moaned. Turned around.
Leo Bander’s heart stopped in his chest. He was wrong. He had seen everything in thirty years …
Except that.
I awoke in the chair at two a.m. and moved to bed, too tired to remove my clothes. I arose at seven, showered and performed three days’ worth of shaving, then dined alfresco on sausage, eggs and grits as workers filed into the surrounding buildings and buses whined from stop to stop. Rain had passed through before dawn and the air felt renewed, at least until a bus sizzled past.