The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

  “Nice,” I said.

  “I got a friend who makes them. I can let you have some cheap.”

  “I wouldn’t take them any other way. In fact, I wouldn’t take them at all.”

  Jackie was offended. For a guy who might have passed for Tim Sylvia’s out-of-condition older brother, he was pretty sensitive.

  “How many are there in the house?” I said, but his attention had already wandered onto another subject.

  “Hey, we’re dressed the same,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We’re dressed the same. Look: you got the hat, the same jacket, the jeans. Except you got gloves and I got this T-shirt, we could be twins.”

  Jackie Garner was a good guy, but I thought that he might be a little crazy. Someone once told me that a shell accidentally went off close to him when he was serving with the U.S. Army in Berlin just before the Wall came down. He was unconscious for a week, and for six months after he awoke he couldn’t remember anything that happened later than 1983. Even though he was mostly recovered, there were still gaps in his memory, and he occasionally confused the guys at Bull Moose Music by asking for “new” CDs that were actually fifteen years old. The army pensioned him off, and since then he had become a body for hire. He knew about guns and surveillance, and he was strong. I’d seen him put down three guys in a bar fight, but that shell had definitely rattled something loose inside Jackie Garner’s head. Sometimes he was almost childlike.

  Like now.

  “Jackie, this isn’t a dance. It doesn’t matter that we’re dressed the same.”

  He shrugged and looked away. I could tell he was hurt again.

  “I just thought it was funny, that’s all,” he said, all feigned indifference.

  “Yeah, next time I’ll call you first, ask you to help me pick out my wardrobe. Come on, Jackie, it’s freezing. Let’s get this over with.”

  “It’s your call,” he said, and it was.

  I didn’t usually take on bail skips. The smarter ones tended to head out of state, making for Canada or points south. Like most PIs, I had contacts at the banks and the phone companies, but I still didn’t much care for the idea of tracking some lowlife over half the country in return for five percent of his bond, waiting for him to give himself away by accessing an automated teller or using his credit card to check into a motel.

  This one was different. His name was David Torrans, and he had tried to steal my car to make his getaway from an attempted robbery at a gas station on Congress. My Mustang was parked in the lot beside the station, and Torrans had wrecked the ignition in a doomed effort to get it started after someone boxed in his own Chevy. The cops caught him two blocks away as he made his getaway on foot. Torrans had a string of minor convictions, but with the help of a quick-mouthed lawyer and a drowsy judge he made bail, although the judge, to his small credit, did set bail at $40,000 to ensure Torrans made it to trial, and ordered him to report daily to police headquarters in Portland. A bondsman named Lester Peets provided the coverage for the bond, and then Torrans skipped out on him. The reason for the skip was that a woman who had taken a knock on the head from Torrans during the attempted robbery subsequently lapsed into a coma in some kind of delayed reaction to the blow she had received, and now Torrans was facing some heavy felony charges, and maybe even life in jail if the woman died. Peets was about to go in the hole for the forty if Torrans didn’t show, as well as sullying his good name and seriously irritating local law enforcement.

  I took on the Torrans skip because I was aware of something about him that nobody else seemed to know: he was seeing a woman named Olivia Morales, who worked as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in town and had a jealous ex-husband with a fuse so short he made volcanoes look stable. I had spotted her with Torrans after she finished her shift, two or three days before the robbery went down. Torrans was a “face” in the way that such men sometimes were in small cities like Portland. He had a reputation for violence, but until the robbery bust he had never actually been charged with a serious crime, more through good fortune than any great intelligence on his part. He was the kind of guy to whom other lowlifes deferred on the grounds that he had “smarts,” but I had never subscribed to the theory of comparative intelligence where petty criminals were concerned, so the fact that Torrans’s peers considered him a sharp operator didn’t impress me much. Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they’re criminals. If they weren’t criminals they’d be doing something else to screw up people’s lives, like running elections in Florida. The fact that Torrans had tried to hold up a gas station armed with only a pool ball in a sock indicated that he wasn’t about to step up to the majors just yet. I’d heard rumors that he’d developed a taste for smack and OxyContin in recent months, and nothing will scramble a man’s intelligence faster than the old “hillbilly heroin.”

  I figured that Torrans would get in touch with his girlfriend when he found himself in trouble. Men on the run tend to turn to the women who love them, whether mothers, wives, or girlfriends. If they have money, they’ll then try to put some ground between themselves and those who are looking for them. Unfortunately, the kind of people who went to Lester Peets for their bond tended to be pretty desperate, and Torrans had probably used all of his available funds just rustling up his share of the money. For the moment, Torrans would be forced to stick close to home, keeping a low profile until another option presented itself. Olivia Morales seemed like the best bet.

  Jackie Garner had good local knowledge, and I brought him in to stay close to Olivia Morales while I was taking care of other business. He watched her buying her food for the week, and noticed her including a carton of Luckys in her buy, even though she didn’t appear to smoke. He followed her home to her rented house in Deering, and saw two men arrive a little later in a red Dodge van. When he described them to me over the phone, I recognized one as Torrans’s half brother Garry, which was how, less than forty-eight hours after David Torrans had first gone off the radar, we found ourselves hunched behind a garden wall, about to make a decision on how to deal with him.

  “We could call the cops,” said Jackie, more for form’s sake than anything else.

  I thought of Lester Peets. He was the kind of guy who got beaten up by his imaginary friends as a child for cheating at games. If he could wheedle his way out of paying me my share of the bond, he would, which meant that I’d end up paying Jackie out of my own pocket. Calling the cops would give Lester just the excuse that he needed. Anyway, I wanted Torrans. Frankly, I didn’t like him, and he’d screwed around with my car, but I was also forced to admit that I was anticipating the surge of adrenaline that taking him down would bring. I had been leading a quiet life these past few weeks. It was time for a little excitement.

  “No, we need to do this ourselves,” I said.

  “You figure they have guns?”

  “I don’t know. Torrans has never used one in the past. He’s small-time. His brother has no jacket, so he’s an unknown quantity. As for the other guy, he could be Machine Gun Kelly and we wouldn’t find out until we hit the door.”

  Jackie considered our situation for a time.

  “Wait here,” he said, then scuttled away. I heard the trunk of his car opening somewhere in the gloom. When he returned, he was clutching four cylinders, each about a foot in length and with the curved hook of a coat hanger attached to one end.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  He held up the two cylinders in his right hand — “Smoke grenades” — then the two in his left — “and tear gas. Ten parts glycerine to two parts sodium bisulfate. The smokes have ammonia added. They stink bad. All homemade.”

  I looked at the coat hanger, the mismatched tape, the scuffed pipes. “Wow, and they seem so well put together. Who’d have thought?”

  Jackie’s brow furrowed, and he considered the cylinders. He lifted his right hand. “Or maybe these are gas, and these are smoke. The trunk’s a mess, so they’ve been rolling around some.”

>   I looked at him. “Your mom must be so proud of you.”

  “Hey, she’s never wanted for anything.”

  “Least of all munitions.”

  “So which should we use?”

  Calling on Jackie Garner was looking less and less like a good idea, but the prospect of not having to hang around in the dark waiting for Torrans to show his face, or trying to gain access to the house and facing down three men and one woman, possibly armed, was certainly attractive.

  “Smoke,” I said at last. “I think gassing them may be illegal.”

  “I think smoking them is illegal too,” Jackie pointed out.

  “Okay, but it’s probably less illegal than gas. Just give me one of those things.”

  He handed a cylinder over.

  “You sure this is smoke?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they weigh different. I was just kidding you. Pull the pin, then toss it as fast as you can. Oh, and don’t jiggle it around too much. It’s kind of volatile.”

  Far away from Portland, as her mother made her way through the streets of an unfamiliar city, Alice emerged from a deep sleep. She felt feverish and nauseous, and her limbs and joints ached. She had begged, again and again, for a little stuff just to keep her steady, but instead they had injected her with something that gave her terrible, frightening hallucinations in which inhuman creatures crowded around her, trying to carry her off into the darkness. They didn’t last long, but their effect was draining, and after the third or fourth dose she found that the hallucinations continued even after the drug should have worn off, so that the line between nightmare and reality became blurred. In the end, she pleaded with them to stop, and in return she told them all that she knew. After that, they changed the drug, and she slept dreamlessly. Since then, the hours had passed in a blur of needles and drugs and periodic sleep. Her hands had been tied to the frame of the bed, and her eyes had remained covered ever since she was brought to this place, wherever it was. She knew that there was more than one person responsible for keeping her here, for different voices had questioned her over the period of her captivity.

  A door opened, and footsteps approached the bed.

  “How are you feeling?” asked a male voice. It was one that she had heard before. It sounded almost tender. From his accent, she guessed that he was Mexican.

  Alice tried to speak, but her throat was so terribly dry. A cup was placed to her lips, and the visitor trickled water into her mouth, supporting the back of her head with his hand so that she did not spill any upon herself. His hand felt very cool against her scalp.

  “I’m sick,” she said. The drugs had taken away some of the hunger, but her own addictions still gnawed at her.

  “Yes, but soon you will not be so sick.”

  “Why are you doing this to me? Did he pay you to do this?”

  Alice sensed puzzlement, maybe even alarm.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “My cousin. Did he pay you to take me away, to clean me up?”

  A breath was released. “No.”

  “But why am I here? What do you want me to do?”

  She remembered again being asked questions, but she had trouble recalling their substance, or the answers that she gave in reply. She feared, though, that she had said something bad, something that would get a friend into trouble, but she couldn’t recall her friend’s name, or even her face. She was so confused, so tired, so thirsty, so hungry.

  The cool hand passed across her brow, brushing the damp hair from her skin, and she almost wept in gratitude for this brief moment of solicitude. Then the hand touched her cheek, and she felt fingers exploring the ridges of her eye sockets, testing her jaw, pressing into her bones. Alice was reminded of the actions of a surgeon, examining the patient before the cutting began, and she was afraid.

  “You have nothing more to do,” he said. “It’s nearly over now.”

  As the taxi neared its destination, the woman understood the reasons for the driver’s unhappiness. They had progressed uptown, the area growing less and less hospitable, until at last even the streetlights grew dark, their bulbs shot out and glass scattered on the sidewalk beneath. Some of the buildings looked like they might have been beautiful once, and it pained her to see them reduced to such squalor, almost as much as it hurt her to see young people reduced to living in such conditions, prowling the streets and preying on their own.

  The taxi pulled up in front of a narrow doorway marked with the name of a hotel, and she paid the driver $22. If he was expecting a tip, he was now a disappointed man. She didn’t have money to be giving people tips just for doing what they were supposed to do, but she did thank him. He didn’t help her to get her bag from the trunk. He just popped it and let her do it herself, all the time looking uneasily at the young men who watched him from the street corners.

  The hotel’s sign promised TV, AC, and baths. A black clerk in a D12 T-shirt sat behind a Plexiglas screen inside, reading a college textbook. He handed her a registration card, took her cash for three nights, then gave her a key attached to half a brick by a length of thick chain.

  “Got to leave the key with me when you go out,” he told her.

  The woman looked at the brick.

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll try to remember.”

  “You’re on the fourth floor. Elevator’s on the left.”

  The elevator smelled of fried food and human waste. The odor in her room was only marginally better. There were scorch marks on the thin carpet, big circular black burns that could not have come from cigarettes. A single iron bed stood against one wall, with a space between it and the other wall just large enough for a person to squeeze through. A radiator sulked coldly beneath a grimy window, a single battered chair beside it. There was a sink on the wall, and a tiny mirror above it. A TV was bolted to the upper right-hand corner of the room. She opened what appeared to be a closet and discovered instead a small toilet and a hole in the center of the floor to allow water from a shower head to drain away. In total, the bathroom was about nine feet square. As far as she could see, the only way to shower was to sit on the toilet, or to straddle it.

  She set out her clothes on the bed, and placed her toothbrush and toiletries by the sink. She checked her watch. It was a little early. All that she knew about where she was going she had learned from a single cable TV show, but she guessed that things didn’t start to get busy there until after dark.

  She turned on the TV, lay on her bed, and watched game shows and comedies until the night drew in. Then she pulled on her overcoat, put some money in her pocket, and descended to the streets.

  Two men came to Alice and injected her again. Within minutes her mind began to cloud. Her limbs felt heavy, and her head lolled to the right. Her blindfold was removed, and she knew that it was coming to an end. Once her vision had recovered, she could see that one of the men was small and wiry, with a gray pointed beard and thinning gray hair. His skin was tanned, and she guessed that this was the Mexican who had spoken to her in the past. The other was an enormously fat man with a belly that wobbled pendulously between his thighs, obscuring his groin. His green eyes were lost in folds of flesh, and there was dirt lodged in the pores of his skin. His neck was purple and swollen, and when he touched her, her skin prickled and burned.

  They lifted her from her bed and placed her in a wheelchair, then wheeled her down a decaying hallway until she was brought at last to a white-tiled room with a drain in the floor. They transferred her to a wooden chair with leather straps to secure her hands and feet, and there they left her, facing her reflection in the long mirror on the wall. She barely recognized herself. A gray pallor hung behind her dark skin, as though her own features had been thinly overlaid on those of a white person. Her eyes were bloodshot, and there was dried blood at the corners of her mouth and upon her chin. She was wearing a white surgical gown, beneath which she was naked.

  The room was startlingly clean and bright, and the fluorescent lights above were merciless in their expositio
n of her features, worn down by years of drugs and the demands of men. For a second, she believed that she was looking at her mother in the glass, and the resemblance made her eyes water.

  “I’m sorry, Momma,” she said. “I didn’t mean no harm by it.”

  Her hearing became acute, a consequence of the drugs pumping through her system. Before her, her features began to swim, mutating, transforming. There were voices whispering around her. She tried to turn her head to follow them, but was unable to do so. Her paranoia grew.

  Then the lights died, and she was in total darkness.

  The woman hailed a cab, and told the driver where she wished to be taken. She had briefly considered taking public transport, but had made the decision that she would use it only during daylight hours. By night she would travel by taxi, despite the expense. After all, if something were to happen to her on the subway or while waiting for a bus before she spoke to him, then who would look for her daughter?

  The cabdriver was a young man, and white. Most of the others were not white, from what she had seen earlier that evening. Few were even black. The races that drove the cabs here could be found only in big cities and foreign lands.

  “Ma’am,” the young man said, “are you sure that’s where you want to go?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Take me to the Point.”