Sallow City

by Jim Heskett

  A buzzing came from his pocket and Micah snatched his phone. Unknown number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, kid.”

  “Frank? How are you? Did they give you something for the food poisoning?”

  Frank moaned. “It’s not food poisoning. Appendicitis. Hard to believe an old man like me never had his appendix out, right?”

  “Ahh, that makes more sense, because I’ve never seen food poisoning like you had.”

  “Mystery solved.”

  “Well, at least, they know what it is. Now you can get better.”

  “After these quacks cut me open, sure,” Frank said. “But it also means I’m out of commission for a couple days, so whatever happens with John Doe, you’re on your own.”

  A bolt of excited energy pulsed in Micah’s chest. “Speaking of that, I made progress. I know who he is. I got the name, and I’m on my way to his mom’s house now.”

  Frank hesitated. “Be careful, kid. If this young man died so someone could collect the bounty on your head, maybe you don’t jump right into the middle of it. Maybe it’s best to leave it alone.”

  “But we’ve come so far, Frank. This is the home stretch.”

  “I worry about you getting in too deep. There’s nothing you could do personally that you can’t accomplish by making an anonymous call to the cops.”

  Micah peered over at the Glock in the passenger seat, stolen from the gangster who’d bled out near the motel. Having the gun was supposed to give him confidence, but it didn’t. Micah had mostly been running on curiosity and adrenaline. That wouldn’t last. “Don’t worry about me.”

  Frank paused again, and Micah knew exactly what Frank was thinking. That he would worry no matter what.

  “When I’m done there, I’m going to swing by the motel and get our stuff. I’ll check in somewhere else, somewhere no one knows about. I can do this cleanly.”

  “I know you can,” Frank said. “Just be careful.”

  Micah made some assurances and they ended the call. And even though Micah had done dangerous things before without Frank by his side, this was one time he wished he could have had the old man’s help. Micah was in over his head, no doubt about that. And Frank had a lifetime of experience with this sort of thing.

  And then Micah felt selfish for wanting Frank at his side because his mentor was sick. Frank was entitled to take care of himself, wasn’t he?

  Micah drove into the nearby town of Burton. He was constantly surprised by how lush everything was, as soon as he left the immediate Flint area. Such towering trees and endless fields of green. He’d always pictured Michigan as a northern industrial place, full of machinery and smog and dirty snow. But expectation and truth were often far apart. He should have had enough life lessons in that by now to know better.

  But this suburb still had its share of liquor and gun stores. A mix of sad people standing on street corners and shiny new cars traversing the streets.

  Micah checked the address of the King residence, scrawled on the back of a napkin from Big John Steak and Onion. Navigated to Belsay Road and stopped in front of 3152. Like all the other houses around, this one was set a little back from the road, with no fence and no sidewalk. Sign out front read dog contained by invisible fence. Micah hoped he wasn’t about to run into a Rottweiler or something meaner.

  He parked in the driveway behind a Chevy Malibu. Brand new, still had the temporary dealer license on it. He slipped the gun into his waistband and practiced reaching for it. No reason to think Logan King’s mother would attack him, but he’d had enough surprises on this trip to know better than to assume.

  This city seemed hell bent on killing him.

  With one last deep breath for encouragement, he walked to the front door and rang the doorbell. Music and the sound of running water drifted through an open window near the front door.

  He rang the bell again and the running water ceased. The front door opened, and there stood a woman, drying her hands on a dish towel. Late forties or early fifties.

  Her mouth dropped open. She tried to speak but nothing coherent came out. He had abandoned the fake glasses and removed the contacts beforehand, to remove any doubt.

  A little dog rushed across the room, sniffed at Micah’s feet.

  “You know who I am, don’t you?” he said.

  “You look just like him.”

  “Logan King. That’s who I look like, right? Can I come in and talk to you about it?”

  Tears welled at the corners of her eyes. The dog fled into the living room and leaped onto the couch. Gave a single, high-pitched bark.

  The woman licked her lips. “You shouldn’t be here. I don’t know how you found me, but I wish you wouldn’t have. It’s not safe for you to be here.”

  “Then why don’t you let me in before someone sees me?”

  She paused, but only for a moment, and then stepped aside to admit Micah into the house. The dog growled.

  The woman waved him toward a lime green couch opposite a massive television. Heavy carpet underfoot. He sat next to the dog, and the little beast resumed sniffing at the leg of his jeans. “Would you like a drink? I have beer, wine, or I can mix you something.”

  “I don’t drink,” Micah said.

  The woman smiled a sad smile at him and had a seat on the floor, next to the tv. She crossed her legs and rested her hands on her knees, in a meditative kind of pose. “Then you’re not much like my Logan beyond looks. He liked to drink. A lot.”

  Micah almost smiled, because he and Logan were more alike than this woman realized. Before sobriety, not a day went by that Micah didn’t try to escape into a bottle. He sometimes forgot he was only seven months removed from that life.

  “It’s what killed him, you know,” she said.

  Micah leaned forward, which made the dog growl. “What do you mean, it killed him?”

  She pointed at her stomach. “His liver was failing. Hard to believe, I know. Twenty-seven years old and his liver was giving out on him already. And even knowing that, he still wouldn’t give up the drinking.”

  “Alcoholism is an insidious disease.”

  She nodded at this. “I’ve watched it happen to so many in my family, it feels normal. How does something so terrible become normal? When you start going to more funerals than weddings and no one thinks that’s strange?”

  He didn’t have an answer for her, so he kept quiet.

  She swept a chunk of hair out of her eyes. “I’m Yvette.”

  “Micah Reed, but you already knew that.”

  She sighed. “Not really. If you came here looking for answers, Mr. Reed, I’m afraid I don’t have any for you. Logan did what he did for me. It was his final act, and the only unselfish act he’d ever done.”

  Micah leaned closer as the pieces fell into place. Logan had given himself up willingly to have plastic surgery, and then he’d let them kill him. But Micah still didn’t know why. Would Crossroads go to so much trouble over a bounty?

  “What does Crossroads really want? What aren’t you telling me?”

  Yvette’s neck tensed. She was starting to close up. “I never should have said anything. Never should have let you in here. If you want to know the truth, you’re going to have to talk to Harvey down at the casino. But if you intend to do that, you need to hurry. They’re packing up everything and leaving the day after tomorrow.”

  Part III

  RED

  SWEATER

  BARRY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Rourke scooted the seat closer to his workbench and ran a shaky hand over the wooden stock of his AK-47. It was scuffed and worn, the wood streaked with tiny imperfections.

  The only sound in his garage was the ticking of a wall clock. His sister had gone out for the evening, so he’d earned a couple hours to himself. Time to think, or better yet, not think.

  He’d killed a man. Dragged a knife across his throat and ended his life. The man had been trying to kill Rourke and his two friends, but that did
n’t give Rourke the comfort he might have expected with justified self-defense killing. That man had a mother and father, maybe even a wife and kids. Someone would miss him. Someone would mourn him.

  The way the knife cut into the Irish man, slicing flesh open like raw chicken. The way his eyes jumped wide as the blood leaked out of his neck and onto the grass. The way he tried to speak but only blood dribbled out of his moving lips. Tried to stop his life from flooding out of his open neck.

  Maybe it was the fact that Rourke knew he’d have to do more killing before it was all over. More killing before the Crossroads gang was eradicated, and he could recover all the money his father had wasted at those card tables. Make the past right and get rich while doing it.

  Sounded so good, in theory. Killing bad people. Now that he’d started putting it into practice, it didn’t seem so much like checking off items from a list anymore.

  He wanted it to be easy. To take pleasure in ruining these casino assholes. But what he’d found instead was that this made him question everything in his life up to this point. What would Rourke’s obituary read after he died trying to rob this casino?

  The garage door rattled, and Rourke snatched the dirty towel on his workbench to cover up the rifle. He crossed the garage and peered out the window to see Carter standing there, his arms crossed. Impatient.

  “Open up,” Carter said through the door.

  Rourke thumbed the button to raise the garage door, and Carter slipped his hands into his pocket, now seeming relaxed.

  “Sup, dude?” Carter said, grinning.

  Rourke raised his palms. “Not much.”

  Carter entered the garage, smacking Rourke on the shoulder as he passed him. He took a seat on the hood of Rourke’s car. “Two more days. You getting excited? I don’t even know if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

  “Excited isn’t the word I’d use,” Rourke said as he jabbed the button again to lower the garage door.

  “What’s with the dour face? We have two days to plan and get this shit ready. Only two more days until we make a name for ourselves. Show these racist jerkwads what happens when they think they can run Flint.”

  Rourke wanted to match Carter’s enthusiasm. Rourke was the one who should have had the motivation. The personal vendetta. There seemed to be no trouble getting Carter excited, and Ethan was always hungry for a fight. Maybe the three of them didn’t have a unified goal with this robbery, but the three goals put together should have given Rourke the boost he needed.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong with you?” Carter said.

  Rourke considered a few different ways to talk about it. Couldn’t find phrasing he liked, so he spit it out. “That guy we killed. I keep seeing his face.”

  Carter took a few breaths and scooted up the hood of the car so his feet dangled off the edge. “That was messed up. But it had to happen.”

  “You seem so calm about it.”

  Carter ran a finger along the car’s hood. “Sure, I look that way. It’s easy to compare your insides to other people’s outsides and come up short. But when you get right down to it, it was him or us, and I don’t feel bad about what we did. Who knows how many people that guy had killed before.”

  “Good point. I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

  “Why do you think you keep seeing his face?”

  Rourke turned his head away as he realized he didn’t want to discuss it anymore. Hashing it out like a therapy session wasn’t going to undo what they’d done.

  So, he moved on to logical problems. “I think we should get more info. We need to learn something concrete about what we’re going to find in there on Saturday night. Where the money is, how much we can expect to clear, and when it’ll be the least-guarded.”

  Carter pushed his glasses up his nose. “Okay, that sounds like the start of a plan. What did you have in mind?”

  “Maybe we snatch one of them.”

  “I like where your head’s at. How do we do that?”

  Rourke opened the mini-fridge and removed two cans of beer. Tossed one to Carter. “We don’t know their exact schedule, but we know they use that back door to take out the garbage a few times a day, at least. I say tomorrow, we wait right outside that back door and get one of them. Pop him in the trunk and take him somewhere.”

  “You don’t sound convinced that this is a good idea.”

  Rourke hadn’t realized his voice had wavered. “Am I crazy to be freaked out by all this? We’re going in there armed with assault weapons. We could die.”

  “Dude, this was your idea. I’m totally on board with it, but if you’re feeling any trepidation, maybe we should call it off.”

  Rourke debated this idea. Would he feel like a total failure if they decided to abandon the casino raid? They’d already come so far, had made so much progress and invested so much time. After blowing all of his money on the AKs, he had nothing left.

  “Or,” Carter said as he sipped his beer, “you could just stop being a pussy about it.”

  Rourke chuckled. “It’s that black and white, eh?”

  “Of course not. Yes, it’s dangerous. We might get shot at. But think of what we stand to gain. We’ll be swimming in so much money, we could buy the damn Dort Mall, if we wanted. We could shut that bitch down and have our own private soirées there. Think about it: our own personal shopping mall.”

  “I got my first ever handjob behind that mall, when I was fourteen. Tiffany Catanzaro.”

  “Exactly,” Carter said. “Dort should be on the goddamn historic register.”

  “Never thought I’d be a shopping mall owner. I kinda like that.”

  Carter finished his beer, crossed the room, and put a hand on Rourke’s shoulder. “You’ll be a motherfucking entrepreneur. You can put up a plaque outside the mall commemorating Tiffany Catanzaro stroking your cock for the first time. People will put flowers underneath it. And all we have to do is snatch one of these bastards, find out what we need to know, and then we get rich.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  When he could see that questioning Yvette was a waste of time, Micah gave up. She kept answering every question with “talk to Harvey,” and wouldn’t offer him anything else. He didn’t know if he was done with her, but he didn’t see any point in interrogating her further that night. Didn’t want to harass a woman who’d lost her son only a week before.

  Maybe she needed time to reflect. Let his involvement sink in. Come to terms with the fact that she could still do some good here, if she made that choice.

  He drove back to Flint. Stopped by the old motel and parked on the far side of the street. Watched. Checked every angle to make sure no one noticed him or had eyes on the motel room.

  When he was satisfied, he gathered his and Frank’s belongings from the room and left. Didn’t bother to check out, because the motel office might have wanted to know why they’d abandoned their room in the middle of a gunfight and therefore weren’t around to talk to the cops.

  Yellow police tape marked a room on the second floor. The vigilante’s room, the one who had shot one of the attackers in the leg, then tumbled to his death in the motel parking lot. Whatever that guy had been seeking, hopefully, he’d found it in a glorious action hero death.

  Micah finally had Boba Fett’s severed plastic head back in his pocket, which made him feel a little closer to normal. He left and drove around for a half hour to find a new motel, making sure that he wasn’t being followed. He committed lots of extra left turns and drove down neighborhood streets to try to spot any tail. He just had to hope this Crossroads gang wasn’t sophisticated enough to have satellite tracking.

  Olivia would have it, that was for sure. If she were working for the government as a contractor, she’d probably have access to all kinds of high-tech equipment. She could have Micah picked up at any time by the cops, for any reason.

  But she’d told Frank they weren’t interested in him. Maybe Micah believed that, and maybe not. It didn’t matter. I
f she wanted to speak with him and explain herself, he might listen. Or he might tell her to go to hell.

  Either way, he couldn’t waste any energy worrying about her right now.

  He found a motel not far from Interstate 475 and checked in. Seedy place, a room that smelled of decaying soup, but it was nestled in a more secluded location than the motel they’d been discovered at before. There was a door that led into the adjoining room. Might prove useful.

  He set Boba Fett on the nightstand. Felt safe here, for now. The room had double beds, and as he stared at the perfectly tucked bedspread, he thought of Frank. Hoped he was getting the care he needed at the hospital.

  Micah walked out of the motel room to check the entrances and exits. He needed a better escape plan if someone else came to call, unlike they’d had at the first motel. That poor planning had almost gotten the both of them killed.

  He leaned over the railing, breathing in the tepid night air. Quiet in this part of town.

  A sleek black car pulled into the lot, and Micah’s jaw dropped open when he saw the passenger. Olivia. The driver, he didn’t recognize, but Micah made eye contact with her and held it until the car parked across the lot, a couple hundred feet away.

  He hadn’t seen her since the Denver airport. Since getting her phone number a few minutes after they’d had a near-death experience together. He carried that number on a slip of paper in his pocket, and now wondered if it was fake. He hadn’t called it yet.

  She sat in the car, holding his eye contact. Didn’t make any move to leave her seat. He felt an urge to bound down the stairs, rush across the lot, accuse her of all manner of things. But why? What would that accomplish?

  She wasn’t the person she’d said she was. He had to accept that and move on, whatever that meant. Yet another nugget of proof that Micah’s new post-WitSec life was meant to be solitary.

  He shook his head, disgusted. Didn’t want to talk to her. As he turned to leave, he caught a flash of disappointment on her face. Didn’t care.