Two for Flinching (23 page)

“Your niece back?”

“Tomorrow. Blondie won’t leave Sarah’s
side.”

“The dog?”

“Yeah. Why? Are you in my driveway?”

“Hmm. Sounds enticing, but I’ve got this work
thing.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“And the last time turned out so good.”

“I didn’t hear you complaining.”

“Not until I put my clothes back on. I heard
the fuzz came by today.”

“The fuzz?”

“Are they on to us?”

“It’s all good.”

“Right. Wiretaps. I got you.”

“Huh?”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“Maybe a little.”

“So…tell me a secret, Beason.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“We’re good?”

“You’re way better than good.”

“That’s no secret.”

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I sat in the pew, not listening to the
sermon—which is what happened when I went to church as a child.
Sarah had gone with the other kids for whatever it was they did
during the message. I knew snacks and crafts would be involved. You
can’t have a group of kids for any amount of time and not have
snack—or glue sticks. I just hoped they went glitter free.

I felt out of place, even more than I had the
last time I sat in this pew with my brother and his family. I was
an imposter and everyone could see right through me, pretending
they couldn’t, that I was no worse than they were. I knew the
truth. They may have lied to their spouse or coveted their
neighbor’s wife, smoked and told dirty jokes, spread malicious lies
about their coworkers. I had blood on my hands. I had taken human
lives. Three of them.

I had believed I had dealt with that Friday
night, drinking myself into oblivion and moving on. I was wrong. It
was the first time I had taken a life without the cover of a
uniform. Not a soldier inflicting casualties on the enemy, a man
killing another for his own reason. They were valid reasons and I
would do it again, but…still. Man is made in God’s image and I had
destroyed three of His images.
What would have happened to
Quentell Harris, LaMichael Axel and Montarious Moss if I had not
killed them?
They probably would have come to the same violent
end sooner or later, or gone to prison, causing heartache and
carnage along the way.
Probably.
Now, though, they would
have no opportunity to turn around their lives, to become assets to
society, to be husbands and fathers and raise families. If the
preacher was correct, they were burning in hell at this very moment
with no shot at redemption. And I had put them there.

In our last days together, my wife had been
facing sexual blackmail and I didn’t have a clue. I wish I had
never come across that journal. I couldn’t understand why she would
even keep something that incriminating. Unless part of her
self-destructive nature wanted me to find it.
Why not take it
with her?
Did she really want to hurt me that badly? I couldn’t
say for certain. Stella had always done exactly what she wanted,
and any pain inflicted was only a byproduct, not her goal. I
reasoned she kept the journal because she had to tell somebody what
she was doing, how much other men wanted her, how attractive she
was to the other sex. Aside from her mother, I couldn’t think of
anyone she could trust with that and so had put it on paper for
herself to enjoy.

I was a half-step behind as everyone stood
for that altar call. Something deep inside pushed against my soul,
urging me forward, to fall prostrate and plead the blood of Jesus
to forgive me for what I had done. I didn’t move.

“You okay?”

I looked into Gus’s earnest eyes. A good
husband, father, and brother. All I could never be. “I’m fine.”
Add lying in church to the list.

He nodded, letting it go. “You coming for
lunch?”

I shook my head. “I’ve got something I need
to do.”

***

The gate was open, as it had been for
decades, the rusted chain cut and hanging in two pieces. As it had
been for decades. The track was soft from the rain, the deeper ruts
filled with gravel and the Jeep easily made its way up the hill in
two wheel drive. The early afternoon sun was bright, the blue sky
so brilliant it could have been alive. I parked in our spot and
killed the engine.

I was going to lose the house. I was three
months behind on the mortgage and there was no way I was coming up
with the money. I had hung on as long as I could and had at least a
few more months as the foreclosure process dragged out. The legal
system is set up for lawyers and judges and all their apparatuses
and they made their money by taking their time. Billable hours. If
it wasn’t for Sarah, I wouldn’t have lost a minute’s sleep. I
wanted her to have stability and that meant giving her a home. I
realized now that was a mistake. A building did not provide
stability. Walls and brick and a backyard. My daughter’s stability
came from me (God help her) and Erin and Gus and my dad. We would
be there long after another family moved into the house. I had
spent years living in barracks and tents, sleeping on the ground in
a foreign land, an apartment wouldn’t be so bad. Sarah would
adjust. That was something I’d heard a lot since Stella left:
children are much stronger than we give them credit for.

Camp Investigations was a failure. No shame
in it. Plenty of better run companies were closing their doors in
this economy. Maybe in a different time it could have been
successful, but that didn’t matter. This was the time I was in. I
had become a private eye because it was the only thing I could
think of and needed flexibility to rear an infant. Set my own
hours. It had served its purpose. I could get a job in a factory
and pay the rent. We wouldn’t starve to death. Of course, ten
percent of the population was already looking for that job.

Dad’s idea was intriguing, but I knew it
wouldn’t work. There was no way I could get financing for a karate
school—not in this time. I didn’t really see a future in it. Not
many parents wanted their children learning how to take out their
teachers with a math book and that was what martial arts boiled
down to—using whatever you have as a weapon.

I got out of the Jeep and closed the door
without locking it. The wind was gone. Sarah was spending the day
with her grandparents, Orrin and Felicia. Mom and dad had the
boardwalk. Melvin and Cynthia had King Ralph. Stella and I had
this.

I walked to the edge, looking down at the
crater. The gravel pit had been abandoned for as long as I could
remember. A road circled the giant hole, circling lower and lower
so the dump trucks could haul out the rock. At some point, they had
hit an underground spring, the hole quickly filling with cold,
clear water. The digging operation died and a swimming hole was
born.

The chain link fence proved to be no
impediment to teenagers. Generations of kids had proved their
bravery diving from the road into the deep, calm, water. About
every ten years or so, some poor bastard would drown and the outcry
would come to shut it down. New fences. New signs. New chain. It
never kept them out for long. At night, when the swimming was over,
kids would come and drink and build bonfires and do what kids
do.

This was our spot. Stella’s and mine. The
first time we made love, in the back of my father’s Crown Vic. We
would come back many times over the years, no longer young, looking
for that old spark. A remembrance of easier times. My wife was gone
and she wasn’t coming back. Even if she did, I wouldn’t have her. I
wish I could say my daughter needed her, but she had made it this
far and we would continue to get by. With or without her.

The water was calm as always and so clear you
could almost see the bottom. Light winked at me from the
depths.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“It could have been anything.”

“It could have been,” I said. “But it wasn’t.
It was the reflection from a windshield.”

The detective shook his head, stomping his
feet. We stood at the lip of the crater, watching the Indianola
Sherriff’s dive team work. I knew most of those guys and knew they
didn’t mind. They loved diving and loved the opportunity to search
for something. The time and a half didn’t hurt. Randall Rodgers,
however, was not in agreement.

“You already fucked up my weekend. I
shouldn’t be surprised you couldn’t let me have my Sunday.”

“What did I do?”

“I spent all night Friday and most of
Saturday looking for Trey, Q, and M and M.”

“I don’t understand what the big hurry was,”
I said. “Three boys out of touch for a while.”

He shot me a look. A nasty look. “M and M had
a son, a six year old little boy. I bet you didn’t know that.”

“No.”

“Every Friday, for six years, he picked up
his child and spent the evening with him. They would go to the park
or to the movies or McDonald’s or just hang out and play video
games. For six years, he never missed it.”

A coldness spread deep inside me.

“Until last Friday. Then we found his car
abandoned in the Bottoms—keys in the ignition. And Jajuan’s dead
dog. It’s obvious something bad is going down.”

I remained silent.

“You wouldn’t know anything about that,
though.” His face was hard, arms crossed. “Right?”

It was something they taught us in the Army,
dehumanizing the enemy. They weren’t sons and fathers, brothers and
uncles. They were “combatants” intent on killing us. It allowed us
to sight them down the barrel of a rifle and shoot them in the
back—before they could shoot us. Or our friends. It fell apart,
though, when we went into “rebuilding” Iraq and Afghanistan,
walking into villages and meeting the widows and orphans. Mothers
and fathers with no sons. They were people a lot more like us than
we wanted to admit. Their own dreams and people they loved and
loved them. I shouldn’t have been shocked to learn gangbangers were
no different.

A diver broke the surface of the water, his
face obscured by the mask. Randall called down to him.

“You find a car?”

“No.”

“Shit,” he said to me, then yelled, “wrap it
up and—“

“We found two.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to get Sarah. She’s at
Felicia’s.”

“Felicia’s? What the—“

“I don’t have time right now. Just go get
her. Take her to my house or yours or Gus’s. Erin should be back
soon. Send me a text and let me know where she is. I won’t be able
to answer my phone for a while.”

“What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m not a hundred percent sure
what it is, but it’s serious. Just get Sarah.”

“I’m on it.
Where
are you?”

“Sherriff’s office.”

***

I was in the interview room. There must have
been a government blueprint for interview rooms. Metal desk, two
chairs on one side, one on the other for the subject. The subject’s
chair had the front legs sawed off a couple of inches so he would
invariably lean forward. One way glass on the wall.
Psychological games.
I knew all about the games. The Army
had trained me on interrogation techniques, both as questioner and
detainee. They had even gone so far as to put me under water
boarding. Though I was sure some in this building would object, I
doubted I would be undergoing that again. The sun had long ago
set.

Larry Coleman came into the room, happy to
see me in that chair, unhappy it was a Sunday. I guessed he had
been at home watching the playoffs. He chewed on a stick of gum,
but I still caught a whiff of beer as he and Randall took the seats
across from me.

“Who’s car did you find?”

Larry, ever the diplomat: “We’ll ask the
questions here, if you don’t mind?”

Randall: “What were you doing at the
quarry?”

“I went there to think.”

Randy: “To the rock pit?”

“Yes.”

Randy: “You do that much?”

“No.”
Always answer a yes/no question with
a yes or a no.

Larry: “Why there?”

I had gone through the likely questions for
the hour they left me to stew. I didn’t have a reason to lie. They
might not like my answers, but I had was beyond caring what these
people thought. “It was Stella and mine’s spot.”

Larry: “Your spot?”

“Yes.”

Randall: “You care to explain?”

“It was the place we shared—our place.”

Larry: “Why?”

“It was the first place we made love.”

Randall leaned back in his chair, crossing
his fingers over his stomach.

Larry: “How about you and Amber? Was that
your spot, too?”

“No.”

Randy: “You mind telling us about the last
time you were with Amber?”

“No.”

A long pause. If it was supposed to make me
uncomfortable, it wasn’t working.

Larry: “Well, go ahead.”

“As soon as you tell me what you found in the
lake.”

Randall: “We’ll get to that.”

“If you want an answer, you better get to it
in a hurry.”

They exchanged a look.

Randall: “It was Amber’s car.”

I had figured as much. It was why I was here.
“She in it?”

Randall: “Yes. In the trunk.”

I shook my head. That little voice had been
telling me for some time that she was dead. Still, when you heard
the words, it hurt. “What about the other car?”

Randall: “We’re not sure, yet. Amber’s car
was on part of the underwater road. The other is in deeper, it’s
taking some time to get it out.”

I nodded.

Larry: “You’re not surprised we found your
lover in the trunk of her car.”