Complicated Shadows

by James D F Hannah

  "No, ma'am. This is Henry. Pete—" Isaac swallowed hard, and his eyes glisten under the floodlights. "Someone killed Pete. Henry, he knew Pete, though. They were friends."

  The old woman let her weapon drop to her side and she walked toward me. She gave me an up-and-down. "You a homosexual like Isaac?"

  I shook my head. "I am not."

  She looked at Davies. "This here your woman?"

  I shook my head again. "She isn't."

  Davies smiled and shrugged and said, "I am a homosexual."

  The old woman looked taken aback for a moment. "Are you now?" She smiled, pulling back thin lips to reveal an oversized set of gleaming white dentures. "You're quite the thing then. Me, when all the boys left for the war, I had me a girlfriend or two. One of 'em looked a bit like you."

  Tennis McCoy said, "Mama, this is not the time for this."

  She shot an angry look back at her son. "You mind your manners, young man. This talk isn't about you." She turned her attention back to Davies. "You got yourself a woman?"

  Davies said, "I do, ma'am."

  The old woman lifted her shoulders. "Oh well. Your loss, honey." She turned to Tennis McCoy. "We should get them inside, get 'em fed. I bet they're hungry as hell."

  "It's the middle of the night, Mama," Tennis McCoy said.

  "Hunger don't give two damns about a clock," she said, heading off to the house. "I'll fry up bacon and potatoes. If any of you are hungry, it'll be ready right soon."

  As she walked away, Tennis McCoy smiled at us with an expression in his eyes that pleaded for understanding.

  "I hope to get old enough, I don't have to give a shit anymore," I said.

  To Isaac, Tennis McCoy said, "The government coming to come fetch you?"

  Davies said, "That's what I'm hoping for. I need to make some calls, and I need to somewhere safe to do it."

  "This is about as safe of a place as you're likely to find," Tennis said. "That said, if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer the government not come here." He looked at Isaac, fatherly love all over his face. "What we do here, it's not legal by the definition of the government, but I'm still proud of Isaac here, having the courage to stand up and do the right thing here." He smiled at Davies and me. "I don't like the way those cartels do things. They hurt too many people. There's too much bloodshed, and that's a bad way to do business."

  We showed Tennis McCoy the contents of the VW's trunk. Burwell bounced back and forth, screaming, the noise a guttural growl far removed from actual human speech.

  To Davies, Tennis McCoy said, "This is your coworker, isn't it?"

  "He was," she said. "We've severed our working relationship."

  "He severed a chunk of his tongue while he was at it," I said.

  "We didn't intend for that," Davies said. "Shit happened in the course of him trying to kill us."

  "Nasty business," Tennis McCoy said. "Person like him, we should just feed him to the hogs."

  The roar that emerged from Burwell was clean and nasty and pushed my hair back. Tennis McCoy shut the trunk lid, and Burwell's cries were muffled but no less noticeable as the tail end of the VW rocked back and forth.

  "He's gonna shit his pants, isn't he?" Davies said.

  "Quite likely," I said.

  She sighed. "I almost had the goddamn car paid off, too."

  39

  Grandma McCoy made a coffee that would have stripped paint off of wood. It made a chunky noise as she poured it from the pot. I stared into its inky blackness and expected something to stare back at me. It was a dark and empty void from which there was no escape.

  Woody would have said it was weak.

  Davies and I sat at the kitchen table while Tennis and Isaac had disappeared to elsewhere in the house. The table was set with ancient chipped plates and silverware at every chair, as if it was normal to have everyone up to eat in the middle of the night. Grandma McCoy fried up food sufficient to feed an infantry, scooping out spoonfuls of something thick and gelatinous from a coffee can and throwing it into a cast-iron skillet and then tossing in thick onion slices and slabs of potatoes.

  The smell sent me back to being four and watching my mother make breakfast on weekends for Billy. It was one of the few solid memories I had of my mother. Most things about her were fuzzy and abstract, like modern art and the appeal of German hard rock.

  But I remembered her dancing around the kitchen, Billy's stereo playing from the other room, Janis Joplin or Neil Young, while she chain-smoked her way through the preparations of eggs, sausages, and pancakes. Billy would spend the early hours in the garage, working on some beater he'd brought home like a stray dog, and come in with grease smeared across him, chasing her around the kitchen, trying to kiss her. She laughed and had none of that, tell him clean up before he could eat. We'd sit around the table and eat and laugh, and there was a legitimate happiness that would never found again once she was gone. Breakfasts became another bowl of cold cereal, and Billy in the other room watching the morning news, seeming to count the seconds before I caught the bus and he didn't need to look at me and be reminded of the wife he had lost.

  A radio from the back of the stove pumped out a gospel station on a signal so filled with static it might have been from Mars. It played an old-school hymn about the blood of Christ, sung in what should have been four-part harmony but instead sounded like four folks who were each out for their own interests.

  Grandma McCoy stirred the potatoes around with a spatula, flipped bacon and sausage in another skillet, and joined in on the chorus.

  Davies leaned into me. "What's she cooking those potatoes in?"

  "My guess would be bacon grease," I said.

  Davies looked at me like I'd spoiled a movie for her. "Who does that? Which should you worry about first: the salmonella or the cholesterol?"

  Grandma McCoy smiled at us. I raised my coffee cup in her direction, and she turned her attention back to her cooking.

  I sipped at my coffee. "I'll place a bet the old woman's eaten this way every day of her life, and there's a damn good chance of her outliving either of us," I said.

  "But I don't eat red meat."

  "And I don't eat pork. It's not eating bacon so much as just the grease. But she seems rather sweet on you, so I'm sure if you tell her, she'll make you up something else."

  Davies ran a hand over her hair. "Let's add the octogenarian to my other 99 problems."

  "I'd say if she's only in her 80s, you're lucky." I finished my coffee. There was a clump of grounds at the bottom you could dump into a coffeemaker and run through for a respectable pot. I set the cup aside. "Back at your house, your partner—"

  "Felicia."

  "Felicia. When she came in, she didn't seem thrilled with me being there."

  "You're an observant soul."

  "I suppose me being a guy, that didn't matter much, huh?"

  "That was more the problem than anything. Felicia and I met two years ago. She teaches phys ed at the high school, and she's in the closet so much as no one calls her a dyke to her face, but she's an unmarried 40-year-old woman who teaches gym and drives a Subaru. Our daughter Emmy is adopted. Felicia got her when Emmy was only a few weeks old, when Felicia had given up on dating, and she didn't expect me to show up in her life. We met when I got transferred out to Clarksburg and CJIS, and I was running laps at the track and she was there and one thing led to another and we had that lesbian second date where you rent a U-Haul truck."

  "How are things?"

  "It's not been perfect, but nothing ever is. We've worked through issues—hers and mine—and made it work."

  "Until—"

  She nodded. "There's an 'until.'"

  "There's always an 'until.'"

  "Until last year, when I was in Omaha on a training thing, and there was a guy—"

  "Plot twist."

  "Don't. I may start to like you as a human being, and I would hate for you to ruin it by being who you are. Anyway, I've plowed both sides of the field, so to speak, b
ut 99 times out of a hundred, my preferences are female."

  "But this was that hundredth time, I guess."

  "In a way. Felicia and I had been arguing right before I left. Ignorant crap, like what color to paint the living room. It was the stupidest thing to fight about, because nothing like that matters, But we've been together so long, we're out of the sane shit to argue about, and that left us with the minutiae. So I'm in Omaha, which is bad enough, and I'm out of town and lonely and tired, and I go to the bar and have a drink."

  "Mistake Number One."

  "I lost count of the mistakes that night. Another agent from the training is there, we start talking, I keep drinking, I let my guard down, and he invites me up to his room." She shrugged. "One thing led to another, and—"

  "And your field got plowed."

  She nodded. "But here's where it gets bad. I don't know what happened, because I had my phone in my back pocket and I must have butt-dialed, because I called Felicia as he and I were tearing clothes off one another."

  "This wasn't one of those points where the call went to voicemail, was it?"

  "Jesus but I almost wish. Felicia picked up her phone, and all she heard was—"

  "The plowing of your field."

  "Which, if I'm honest here, and I feel I can be since we've been in a shootout together, was an intense plowing."

  "Loud, too, I bet."

  "Very. This is a complete guy porn fantasy, isn't it?"

  "I'm sure his letter to Penthouse Forum started, 'I didn't think these things really happened, but I was in Omaha—'"

  "Things so rarely happen in Omaha. Felicia heard the whole goddamn thing. Which, when things calmed down a little, she said didn't sound like much compared to her and me, which I think was mostly to needle at me."

  "Therein lies the eternal divide between men and women. You can marathon, and we're running a 5K."

  "Some of you all can't break the tape on a 100-yard dash."

  "I'm defending an entire gender here; cut me a small amount of slack."

  "'Slack' is usually the problem with men."

  "Okay, I'm getting the point."

  "Right, but we're wanting to get the point."

  "Christ, but I'm just feeding you setups, aren't I?"

  Davies laughed, but it didn't last long, and her voice turned pinched and pained. "It's been tough ever since. I didn't realize what happened until she called me the next morning, and she was in tears. Most people would have kicked my ass to the curb. Not Felicia; she's different. She loves me, and she said it hadn't been easy to get to where she trusted me again, because someone had screwed her over so many times before. Plus, there is Emmy, who loves me too, and I love her."

  "But seeing a man in the house, one she wasn't expecting, that was something of a trigger," I said.

  "She doesn't trust men. Or rather, she doesn't trust me around men. Which is funny, because I don't think I could cheat with another woman. There's not another woman who compares to Felicia. And neither do most men."

  "Now she's suspicious and you carry guilt around."

  "Both. Nonstop."

  "What you have to accept is that you fucked up," I said. "We all fuck up. She's giving you a second chance. Be sure to take it."

  "I didn't think about that when we fought tonight. I stormed out of the house—as much as you can without waking up a sleeping four-year-old, that is."

  "And you called me."

  "I did."

  "Which saved Isaac's life."

  "Seems that way."

  "Then be grateful for that. We make it to the morning, you can work out everything with Felicia."

  I refilled my coffee cup at the stove. Grandma McCoy added fresh strips of bacon to the skillet. She had fried enough to make two layers in a plate large enough to use as second base. She brought a pan of biscuits out of the oven. They were perfect: golden brown, plenty of butter melted into the crust, big as a cat's head. She set them on the stove atop an unused burner.

  As I looked at the food, my stomach did an involuntary growl.

  "Be just a few minutes," Grandma McCoy said. "You keep yourself a seat at the table."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  Tennis McCoy and Isaac walked into the room. Davies came to her feet.

  "Mr. McCoy, I need to make those calls so we can take Isaac somewhere safe," she said.

  Isaac wouldn't look at us. He kept his head down, like he was caught in the midst of prayer.

  Tennis McCoy took his hat off. He was bald, and his tanned scalp, marked by age spots, shined in the overhead kitchen light.

  "I can't let that happen, Agent Davies," he said. "Isaac's not leaving with you folks."

  40

  "Excuse me?" Davies said.

  Tennis looked at Isaac. Tennis' expression was soft and caring, and he wrapped an arm around his son.

  "I know the people coming after Isaac," he said. "They are among the nastiest people I've met, and I've dealt with many unsavory sorts. They'll get out of him what they want, and then they'll kill him. And you know as well as I do, they won't just put a bullet in his head. They'll make him suffer."

  Davies knotted her hands together. "Mr. McCoy, Isaac is crucial to a federal operation."

  "And Isaac is crucial to my heart." He pulled Isaac closer to him. "This is my son. And based on what you all have told me about tonight, I question the government's ability to keep him safe."

  "You think you can?"

  "It's a matter of Isaac not showing back up. You already have this computer thing, this Cashbyte, correct? I'm not sure there's more need for Isaac. Let me hide him away from these people." To Isaac, he said, "Sit down, son."

  Isaac lowered himself into a chair at the table. Tennis poured himself a cup of coffee.

  Davies crouched down in front of Isaac. "Talk to me. What is it you want to do here?"

  Isaac sniffled a few times, worked to push back what would grow into tears with little work.

  "Think of Pete," I said.

  Davies and Tennis both looked at me. They seemed surprised I'd said anything. I was shocked myself.

  "Pete came here looking for you, and he died because of that," I said.

  Isaac turned at his father, this baleful expression on his face like a dog unsure if he’d be petted or struck.

  "They'll kill you too, Isaac," Tennis said.

  "No, they won't," I said. "The cartel didn't kill Pete, and neither did the Japanese. Your family did, and now they're ready to sell you to the highest bidder."

  The silence that fell over the room could have injured a person. I shifted my body to put my back against a wall and to keep a view on the doorways into the kitchen.

  Grandma McCoy clinched a fork in her arthritic hand. She was ready for action—slow, joint-popping action, but she'd shove that fork between my ribs without a second thought.

  "Momma," Tennis McCoy said. His eyes stayed on me. "Turn off the bacon and go on. We've got everything. Tell everyone to stay put. We have matters to discuss here. Just us."

  She did as asked with reluctance, and shuffled her way out of the kitchen with small, methodical steps that reminded me of a Carol Burnett sketch.

  The expression on Tennis' face never changed. The ones on Davies and Isaac sure as hell did. They looked as if they had found Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box.

  To Davies, I said, "Remember what Burwell told us. He said all he needed to do was deliver Isaac to his bosses. Not that he needed to kill Isaac. Why was that?"

  A little light of realization shined in Davies' eyes. "Cashbyte."

  "Cashbyte is the perfect mechanism to launder drug money, which is why the Feds want it, and why the dealers want it, too. Whoever controls that code can control a giant leap in criminal activity."

  "But that means keeping Isaac alive," Davies said. "They need Isaac to maintain the code, to keep it clean."

  "Which was why they murdered Price and Kaur. Insurance against the other two creators altering or changing anything the code."

>   "So at the safe house tonight—"

  "They weren't there to kill Isaac; they were there to take him from the Feds. Burwell was in the pocket to the cartel, so leaves the old man here to work for the Japanese, I bet." I looked to Tennis. "Still doesn't explain Pete's murder."

  Tennis ate a piece of bacon. This may as well have been any of the thousands of other breakfasts he had consumed over a long life. "You gonna accuse me of killing Mr. Calhoun?"

  "I don't think you did it yourself. There's no shortage of folks around here willing to cut up a queer if Grandpa says to do so."

  Isaac retched and gagged and let out a sound that wasn't crying so much as an emotional dry heave. He pounded a fist against the kitchen table, and the contents jumped and rattled.

  Davies and I watched as Isaac sobbed and choked and slammed his fist onto the table top over and over. Tennis ate another piece of bacon.

  "You're an old man who doesn't want to spend his last years fighting a losing battle with a drug cartel," I said. "My bet is they're making a push into your business, aren't they? The guy Kaur and Price mentioned—"

  "Wakahisa," Davies said.

  "Wakahisa has deep pockets. Plus I bet he offered you reach into an international market, too. When did he show up?"

  Tennis drank more coffee, keeping his eyes toward the floor.

  "So which are you planning on doing, Tennis? Are you hiding Isaac from the Mexicans, or are you selling him to the Japanese? It's a bit of both, isn't it?"

  Tennis' eyes scanned the room. Isaac rocked back and forth in his chair, not saying anything. Davies' view ping-ponged between Tennis and me. I kept my sight on the kitchen door and a quick escape.

  "I would never harm my son or anyone close to him," he said.

  "Unless it interfered with your business," I said. "Your family's reputation precedes you for dealing with competition."

  "Boogeyman stories, that's all. People love to pass on these impossible little stories. Besides, you saw me give Mr. Calhoun the money. Why would I kill him and steal the money back?"

  The coot had me. Maybe he hadn't—

  "How d'you know about the money?" I said.