Lucky Bones

by Michael Wiley

  Kelson told Marty, ‘You know he almost choked me to death.’

  Marty gazed at Kelson as if he might have more to object to than that and, when he didn’t, said, ‘Which one of us is perfect?’

  Genevieve Bower stared at Marty and Javinsky warily and retreated to the far end of the leatherette sofa. Kelson sat down with her and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I made mistakes,’ she said. ‘Big ones. And now I’m holed up with a couple of psychopaths.’

  ‘You dated Marty. You know he’s a good guy, in his way.’

  ‘For a psychopath. I want this to stop. It’s gone too far. I’m done.’

  ‘What do you mean? What are you done with?’

  ‘Can you arrange a meeting with Harry and Sylvia? I don’t want anything from them. I just want my life back. I don’t have the thumb drive. They can look for it and keep it – I can’t do this anymore.’

  Javinsky had started listening. Now his sandpaper voice said, ‘It’s too late. When I found you, I was supposed to do you.’

  ‘Do me?’ She looked ready for another bottle of strawberry vodka.

  ‘No one’s doing anyone,’ Kelson said.

  ‘I won’t do you,’ Javinsky said to her. ‘But they’ll send others. For you. And me. Harold makes up his mind.’

  Genevieve Bower looked at Kelson. ‘Arrange a meeting. Tell them I want to come in.’

  ‘I’m with Squirt on this one,’ he said. ‘It’s a bad idea.’

  ‘But I get to decide,’ she said.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘You hired me to do a job, and along with any job I protect a client. So I can’t turn you over to the Cranes, even if you think it would work out.’

  ‘But I could fire you,’ she said.

  ‘You could. Another bad idea.’

  Marty told her, ‘You don’t want to fire Sam. He comes off dumb but he knows his fucking shit.’

  ‘Thank you, Marty,’ Kelson said and, to Genevieve Bower, ‘Give me more time.’

  ‘How much? A day? A week?’ She frowned. ‘More?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Give him a day,’ Marty said.

  ‘What happens in a day?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kelson said, ‘what’s a day?’

  ‘Hell if I know,’ Marty said. ‘But what kind of detective are you if you can’t make something happen by then?’

  Genevieve Bower agreed to a day but only after Marty said she could sleep in his bedroom with the door locked, while he and Javinsky slept on the front room floor.

  Back at his office an hour later, Kelson worried about Marty’s promise that he would make something happen. ‘Truth is,’ he told his KelTec, ‘I’m tired – as if truth gives a damn. About me.’ He ran his finger the length of the pistol barrel. ‘As if it should shiver. As if it should burst with pleasure.’

  He set the pistol on his desk, pulled out his phone, and dialed Venus Johnson’s number at the Harrison Street Police Station. Her phone rang three times and went to voicemail. He hung up.

  He checked the KelTec magazine. Then he held the gun between his flattened hands as if he was praying with it. He held it so the barrel faced him. He closed one eye and stared with the other into the tiny tunnel with its enormous darkness. He felt a shiver of fear and pleasure.

  Then his phone rang.

  He jumped. ‘Holy shit.’ He set the pistol on his desk, the barrel pointing at the door.

  His phone rang again. Caller ID said Nancy.

  He breathed hard – in and out – and answered. ‘Hiya.’

  ‘Two questions,’ she said.

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Why did you buy Sue Ellen fancy sneakers, and why did you send them to her at my clinic?’

  ‘Fancy sneakers?’

  ‘Pink high-tops studded with stars. Jimmy Choos. Do you really think she’ll wear them?’

  Kelson’s mind raced, and he yelled, ‘Don’t touch them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They might …’ He didn’t know what.

  ‘I tried them on. They fit. Did you realize Sue Ellen and I have the same size feet? Our little girl is growing up.’

  ‘Dammit – take them off. Wash your feet.’

  Nancy had perfected her exasperated tone years ago. ‘And floss between my toes? You know you’re sounding more than a little crazy again. The shoes were a nice thought. Misguided for an eleven-year-old, but nice.’

  ‘I didn’t send them.’

  ‘The packing slip says you did.’

  ‘They’re a threat,’ he said.

  ‘Sneakers are a threat? Who sends sneakers as a threat?’

  ‘The Winsins,’ he said, ‘probably the Winsins. It’s a double threat – sending you the shoes for Sue Ellen.’

  ‘Do you mind if I keep them?’

  Kelson explained the situation as well as he could. When he finished, she still sounded calm. She almost always did. Her fearlessness had drawn him to her when they first met – he found it sexy. Now he found it maddening, and told her so.

  ‘I won’t throw out perfectly good shoes,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not the shoes,’ Kelson said. ‘It’s what they mean – what the Winsins mean them to mean.’

  ‘Shoes can’t mean anything,’ she said. ‘If the Winsins show up at the house, I’ll kick them in the head with them.’

  When they hung up, Kelson stared at the pistol on his desk as if it threatened him as much as Jimmy Choo sneakers. So he strapped it back under the desktop and said, ‘Better, I guess.’

  Then, for the first time in days, a piercing headache started in the bone above his left eye and needled backward. He swore at it, as if he could chase it out of his head. His left eye started to twitch. He took his vial of Percocet from the middle drawer, unscrewed the cap, and swallowed a little blue tablet. ‘Take that, Dr P,’ he said.

  He closed his eyes, caressed his forehead, breathed in deep, and breathed out. He imagined clouds scudding across the sky over the skyscrapers in the city. ‘Nice clouds,’ he said. Then, as the medicine did its thing, his phone rang again. He returned the vial to the drawer and checked who was calling. This time caller ID said Zoe Simmons – JollyOllie’s high school friend who lived next door to his gay cousin Rick.

  Kelson answered, ‘Hiya,’ again.

  ‘Right. Do you still want the thumb drive?’

  Kelson felt the same kind of jolt as when he’d stared into the KelTec pistol barrel. ‘You’ve got it?’

  ‘Rick’s boyfriend had it. I took it from him.’

  ‘You at home?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t let anyone else in. Don’t even answer the phone. I’ll be right there.’

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘Oh no,’ Kelson said. He sat with Zoe Simmons in her living room and watched a video from the red thumb drive on her laptop.

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone do that before,’ Zoe Simmons said, ‘and I watch a lot of porn.’

  ‘That’s Harold’s daughter, Sylvia – the son of a bitch.’

  ‘At least she’s old enough.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Then he shouted at the screen, ‘No, don’t do that. Oh, man.’

  Zoe Simmons blushed. ‘I’m open-minded, but—’

  ‘Where does someone even get one of those?’

  ‘Home Depot?’

  ‘Go to the next video, OK?’ he said.

  She opened a new one.

  She’d found the thumb drive after Jeremy Oliver’s cousin got in a fight with his boyfriend. She said Rick came home from a lacrosse game early and found his boyfriend with another boyfriend – and this and that and so on – and Rick threw all of his boyfriend’s belongings out on to the sidewalk. As the boyfriend loaded the stuff into the trunk of an Uber, Zoe Simmons came from her apartment to see what the deal was, and she plucked an envelope – addressed to Rick Oliver – from the pile. Along with screwing other men on the side, the boyfriend soothed his insecurities by neglecting to tell Rick when friends a
nd relatives called, and by stealing Rick’s mail if it looked important.

  The second video showed two men, one of them Harold Crane.

  ‘Ah, shit,’ Kelson said, twenty seconds in.

  ‘The old guy has interesting tastes, I’ll give that to him. What happened to his nipples?’

  ‘Do we really want to know?’

  ‘Who’s the other guy?’

  ‘His name’s Chip Voudreaux,’ Kelson said. ‘One of the executives at G&G.’

  ‘The old guy keeps it all in the family, doesn’t he?’ Zoe Simmons said. ‘At least all in the business.’

  ‘Everyone but the receptionist.’

  ‘There’s still one more video.’

  ‘Let’s see it,’ Kelson said.

  She played the third.

  It was the one Kelson dreaded, with Genevieve Bower. Harold Crane enjoyed inflicting pain, and here that pain bloomed into real evil as he experimented on a twelve-year-old girl.

  A sound came from Kelson’s throat – a sound that seemed like it should stop time – but it couldn’t undo all Harold Crane did to Genevieve Bower. Kelson tried to tell Zoe Simmons to turn off the video, but another sound like the first came from his throat, and when he looked at her, she was crying.

  He gasped, and the words finally came. ‘Turn it off.’

  She wouldn’t. She insisted on watching the video through, as if witnessing it would offer Genevieve Bower a salve or at least acknowledge an injury that would never heal.

  The video lasted two minutes fifty-eight seconds, and it seemed like forever. When it finally ended, Kelson said, ‘You don’t put that back together.’

  ‘Damn,’ Zoe Simmons said, and she wiped tears from her face with trembling fingers.

  Kelson stared at his hands and wondered what they might do to Harold Crane. Might they grip the man’s neck and deprive his brain of the oxygen he needed to stay conscious and alive? Might they grip pistols – the KelTec on the right, the Springfield on the left – and fire a dozen bullets into Crane’s body? Might they grip Crane’s ankles and drag him – down stairs, across pavement – and dump him at the Harrison Street Police Station?

  He realized he’d asked these questions out loud only when Zoe Simmons asked if he wanted to see the other files on the thumb drive.

  ‘Huh?’ he said.

  ‘Documents,’ she said. ‘Do you want to see them?’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he said. ‘I guess.’

  She opened the first of five – a spreadsheet with numbers but no words explaining what the numbers meant. The other four documents included detailed information about the past four distribution cycles at G&G, leading up to but excluding the one that ended with the library blast. The information revealed much of what the Cranes supposedly tried to make disappear with their vanishing accountants. Names of banks in the Bahamas, Hong Kong, and the Caymans. A multi-step route through Panama. Names of investors, including the Winsins. One investor’s transactions were each for under a million dollars. Four were for over five million. The rest were in between.

  Zoe Simmons opened the first document again and scrolled to the bottom – her tears dry, her face pale again under her black hair – and said, ‘Numbers and numbers,’ as if nothing disgusted her more than numbers.

  Kelson said, ‘This is the dirt – the real pain. The Cranes will kill to hide Harold’s sex life, but this money pays for him to exist. Without it, he would shrivel. The investors must know he’s the devil. They pay him to play the part, and I’ll bet having a devil of their own allows them to throw a couple extra nickels in the offering plate on Sunday. But the devil only gets away with being the devil if he stays underground.’

  Zoe Simmons closed the document, ejected the thumb drive, and gave it to him. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Good question,’ he said, as he drove south into the Loop. ‘With only one answer.’ He parked at a meter by Marty’s basement hideout. A city bus, gray with grime, blew past. He went through the building lobby, down through the stairwell, and into the basement corridor lined with insulated pipes.

  When he knocked on Marty’s door, no one answered.

  He knocked again and waved at the ceiling-mounted security camera.

  The door opened, and Marty looked up at him. ‘What?’

  Kelson stepped into the room and peered around. Stanley Javinsky sat on the leatherette sofa eating a microwave pizza pocket from a paper plate. On the table, Marty’s computer showed line after line of code. Kelson went to the bedroom door and looked in. Empty.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Genevieve? She busted out an hour ago,’ Marty said. ‘She kept talking about making peace with Uncle Harry. I’ve got a high tolerance for crazy, but that chick is fucking loony. Can you believe I dated her? Can you believe she broke it off with me because I was too much work?’

  ‘She went to G&G?’

  ‘Nah. She said she was heading to Uncle Harry’s house – to see the old man himself.’

  Javinsky raised a finger, swallowed a bite, and looked as if swallowing hurt. He croaked his words. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Kelson fished the thumb drive from his pocket. ‘This.’

  Javinsky’s hard eyes lit up.

  ‘Don’t even …’ Kelson said to him. ‘I need to ask her some questions.’

  ‘You’ll go after her?’ Marty asked.

  ‘Got to.’

  Javinsky rasped. ‘You want a hand?’

  Kelson stared at him. ‘I’m sure that’s a generous offer. But no. Really, no.’

  Javinsky gave him a funny little smile. ‘Harry’ll tear you apart.’

  FORTY-SIX

  Outside of Marty’s building, Kelson called Rodman. Because Javinsky was right. Kelson had already hit the Cranes too hard and too often to expect anything but an ugly welcome. Also, if Harold Crane asked where the thumb drive was, he would tell him. And if Harold asked where Marty had holed up, Kelson would give up the street address and directions to the basement door. Kelson needed Rodman to stick a fist in his mouth or do something – anything – to keep him from talking too much.

  ‘Meet me at my office?’ he said when Rodman answered his phone.

  ‘What’s up?’ Rodman said.

  ‘I’ll tell you on the way,’ Kelson said.

  ‘The way where?’

  ‘Bring a weapon,’ Kelson said. ‘Or two.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Or three.’ He went to his car, opened the trunk, dug under the mat covering the spare tire, and tucked the thumb drive by a bolt that kept the tire from sliding around.

  Next, he called G&G and asked the receptionist for Harold Crane’s address. ‘An acquaintance of mine is with him there,’ he said.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to give out that information,’ the receptionist said.

  ‘What if you call and tell him Sam Kelson knows about his nipples?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Tell him I’ve seen more of him than I wanted to – more than anyone should be forced to see, though he seems willing enough to bare it all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and we don’t disturb Mr Crane at home except in emergencies.’

  ‘What does an emergency sound like to you?’ Kelson said. ‘Do you need sirens? If I can’t talk to Harold, I can send some his way.’

  ‘Hold on.’ She sounded exasperated.

  When she came back several minutes later, she said she’d talked with her boss. She gave Kelson an address and said Harold Crane would expect him.

  Twenty minutes later, Kelson and Rodman stood in Kelson’s office. Kelson strapped on an over-the-shoulder rig and holstered his Springfield. He tucked the KelTec into his belt, then put on a blue windbreaker that mostly hid the guns.

  Rodman wore a big Beretta 92 in a hip holster. He cupped his little snub-nose Colt revolver in his hand like a baby bird. ‘Harold and his own daughter?’ he said. ‘I didn’t see that coming.’ He dropped the little gun into
his jacket pocket.

  ‘And Chip Voudreaux,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Swings left, swings right.’

  ‘And Genevieve Bower.’

  ‘Who now forgives all?’

  ‘More likely Harold scared her into giving up.’

  ‘Busy old pecker. When does he have time to earn those millions?’

  They drove north through early-afternoon traffic. The sky was the deep blue of coming summer, but when Rodman cracked open the passenger-side window, a cool wind whipped through the car.

  The gate in front of Harold Crane’s house was open. It was tall and wrought iron, with a stamped-metal image of a wading bird – probably a crane – in the middle. The driveway that extended from it was the smooth gray-black of a bicycle inner tube, and it curved around a large oak tree with the bright, tender green leaves of late May. As Kelson and Rodman pulled past the tree, Rodman said, ‘Why don’t you stay in the car?’

  ‘And miss the excitement?’

  A giant brick house with gas lamps on either side of a big wooden front door and a gabled porch roof supported by two-story columns rose at the far end of a circle where the driveway looped back on itself. White drapes were drawn across tall first-floor windows. The second-floor windows had no drapes but, reflecting the afternoon sun, were opaque and offered no clues about the life behind them.

  ‘Sometimes you bring too much excitement,’ Rodman said. ‘Maybe I go in and find out the deal. If I need you, I yell.’

  ‘You yell? You never use more than a church voice.’

  Rodman patted his pocket. ‘Or maybe I shoot someone. If you hear a gunshot, you can come in.’

  ‘Or maybe I go in with you and we don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Until you give up the thumb drive and draw a map to Marty’s apartment.’

  ‘I’m ready for any questions,’ Kelson said.

  ‘Did that ever work for you before?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘A little.’

  So Kelson parked at the bottom of the broad front steps, and they climbed to the broad front porch, where Rodman rang a little doorbell.

  A short man in khakis opened – Greg Cushman, the G&G security officer Kelson had already rescued Genevieve Bower from once after he and his partner, Stevie Phillips, kidnapped her and Doreen from Kelson’s apartment.