“What's this?” he asked again but grabbed the envelope without waiting for an answer.
“Consider this your payment for the night. Of course, you can have your job back tomorrow—no one needs to know. You just have to give me your badge and guest list, is all.”
The man scratched his head as he thought this over. Then he glanced down at the heel of his shoe, which was only half-covering the joint that he’d dropped.
“Fuck it, just don't cause no problems,” he said, and then promptly handed over his name tag and checklist. “I need this job.”
Leroy nodded and watched the man go, counting the cash as he went. When he was alone, he turned his attention to the image on the badge.
He shook his head.
“Looks nothing like me,” he muttered.
But in the back of his mind, he knew that Screech was probably right, that this wouldn’t matter. With all the rampant racism going around, one of the rich white guests would have to have some serious balls to call him out on it.
Leroy rolled his eyes when saw what the man’s name was.
“C.J. Yobooty? You've gotta be shittin’ me.”
With a sigh, he clipped the name tag to his shirt. As he did, the tiny covert earpiece crackled to life.
“Hey C.J., you there?” Screech asked.
Fuck, he knew this guy’s name all along!
With a scowl, Leroy dipped his chin to his collar.
“Yeah, I’m here. Got the damn ID and guest list.”
“Don't talk into your collar, your voice is picked up by the earpiece as well. Just look natural.”
Eyes wide, Leroy looked around but didn’t see anyone.
“What? How did you—”
“Don't worry, I’m still back at the office,” Screech answered as if reading his mind. “I just figured you’d seen too many spy shows. Just speak and act naturally.”
Leroy took a deep breath.
“Okay, fine.”
“Good, now collect yourself and get Yobooty to the front door before the guests start to arrive.”
Chapter 40
Drake wiped the sweat from his brow and took a deep breath. They'd been trudging through the Colombian jungle for nearly six hours now and he was exhausted.
Dane, on the other hand, was relentless, swinging his cutlass in the same wide, shifting arc, in a way that was almost robotic in nature. He truly was a different man than Drake remembered. He’d changed after that summer at the Reynolds’s farm, but he’d become a shell after Ray had killed himself.
The worst thing about this revelation was that Drake could see parts of himself in Dane.
Parts he didn’t care for.
If it weren’t for the fact that his brother would periodically check their coordinates on a handheld GPS device, Drake might have concluded that they were just aimlessly traipsing through the jungle.
It wasn’t as if he was forthcoming with information; Dane’s cryptic ‘we’re going to end this’ was all he’d offered in terms of directions and was unwilling to expound.
In fact, aside from the few minutes of humanity expressed by his brother that morning, silence had been the rule for the day. For Drake, however, silence had never been quiet; his thoughts were a chorus of screams in his brain.
Which, he knew, was why he drank the way he did. But out here in the jungle, having long since finished the handful of warm beers that Dane had procured from the diner, thinking was all he could do.
And he detested every minute of it.
Ghostly—phantasmo—images of Ken, Raul, Wesley, and Clay filled his mind. Occasionally, Jasmine’s smiling face would also appear.
“We’re here,” his brother whispered, pulling Drake out of his head.
He looked around, confusion setting in. There was some sort of hut, right there, not twenty paces from where he stood. A hut, in the center of the jungle.
Drake had to rub his eyes to make sure that this wasn’t an exhaustion-fueled mirage.
“Wh—”
Dane turned to him and brought the cutlass to his pursed lips, hushing him. Swallowing hard, Drake hurried up to his brother’s side and leaned in close.
“Where are we? Who lives here?”
As he spoke, Drake observed the hut, which was about the size of a large shed and made up of a patchwork of tree trunks and thick leaves and vines.
Dane ignored him and looked down at his GPS device and nodded to himself.
“Dane, what the fuck is going on? Where are we?” Drake pressed.
Dane finally turned to him with red-rimmed eyes. He lowered the cutlass from his face, but his grip on the handle tightened.
“Wait here.”
“What?” Drake hissed.
Dane was off, and Drake just missed grabbing the back of his sweat-soaked T-shirt. He moved quickly for a big man, heading not toward the front of the hut, but around the side, sticking close to the thicker vegetation. And then he was gone.
El phantasmo.
Drake ground his teeth in frustration. He was too tired and too sober for this.
Maybe I should just go back, he thought suddenly. Maybe I should just forget about all this and go back to Jasmine, to Clay.
He got as far as to look behind him before realizing how foolish this idea was. There was no back; there was only the jungle. He was surrounded with no way of getting out. Even if he could find his way back to New York, avoided jail time, and patched things up with Jasmine, it wouldn’t be long before the dreams returned.
Dreams of the Skeleton King.
Drake took several deep breaths before jabbing the end of his cutlass into the soft earth. He dropped to one knee and rested his elbow on the handle. As he rested, the entire jungle seemed to go silent and every subsequent blink seemed to last longer than the previous.
Just before sleep took hold, a commotion drew Drake’s chin from his chest.
The door to the hut flew open and a man with greasy black hair was shoved onto the grass. He stumbled and then fell on his stomach. When he lifted his head, Drake saw dual streams of blood running from a nose that was no longer true.
“Is this the man?” Dane demanded as he stepped forward aggressively. The sun glinted off his cutlass as he held it high in the air. “Drake, is this the man who gave you up? The man from the boat?”
Drake shook his head.
Man from the boat? What is he talking about?
“Please,” the man lying on his stomach whimpered. Drake’s eyes suddenly went wide. Despite the blood and snot and tears coating his face, he recognized the man.
“Diego,” Drake almost whispered. His brother nodded and stepped forward.
And then, to Drake’s horror, he swung his cutlass down in a looping arc.
“No!” Drake shouted, holding his hand out in front of him.
It was too late; the glinting steel met first flash, then bone before Drake could do anything about it.
Chapter 41
Beckett’s eyes moved from the photograph of the wheelchair to Mr. Armatridge’s bruises, then back again.
Needing a better look, he slid his hands under the man’s body and attempted to turn him over. He was heavier than he looked, and Beckett considered asking Dr. Nordmeyer for help. But, seeing the sour expression on her face as she hovered behind him, Beckett decided to save his breath. With a grunt, he managed to flip Mr. Armatridge onto his side, giving him a clear view of the bruises.
Then he looked back at the wheelchair.
The back of the seat had a curious design: there were two oval pads right in the area that Mr. Armatridge had his bruises. There was also a space down the middle of both. Beckett considered that if the man had fallen backward in his chair hard enough, the bruising might have come from these molded pads instead from a set of hands.
Satisfied that staring at the man’s pale back would provide no further insight, Beckett laid him flat again and turned his attention to the wounds that had killed him: the deep gashes in his scalp. His first instinct
was that, based on their rounded shape, they were consistent with striking the stairs.
Beckett looked at the crime scene photos next. The thing that didn’t jive was the sheer volume of blood in the stairwell. Based on the spray pattern and the collection on the bottom steps, he could see why he’d told Dr. Nordmeyer that it appeared that Mr. Armatridge had been pushed and essentially fallen up the stairs.
With a heavy sigh, he picked up a photograph in each hand: one of the wheelchair and one of the stairwell.
Although nothing screamed to him that his initial assessment was categorically wrong, there was something off about the images. While this oddity, whatever it was, might have been ignored by another Medical Examiner—ahem, Dr. Nordmeyer—Beckett just simply couldn’t turn a blind eye.
Beckett sucked his teeth. According to the police report, Mrs. Armatridge had wheeled herself inside and found her husband lying on the floor in the stairwell. But given the fact that he too was wheelchair-bound, it made sense that he would bring his chair to the bottom step before hoisting himself up. But the crime scene photograph of the chair was not in the stairwell, but near the kitchen. It made sense; to get to Mr. Armatridge, his wife would have had to move the chair.
In order to put things back the way they’d been, Beckett reached for a set of scissors.
“Uh, you can’t, uh, you can’t cut those. They’re from the crime scene.”
“Print another,” Beckett grumbled as he started snipping away. It didn’t end up being the greatest cut job—he was a pathologist, not a surgeon, not to mention he was missing a finger care of the douchebags from the Church of Liberation—but it was good enough. Next, he overlaid the cut-out wheelchair on the stairwell photo. The perspective was slightly off—the wheelchair photo was taken from a higher angle—but it was large enough to cover the clean area of the floor where it must have once sat.
Beckett stared at the collage for a second, before he finally realized what was off about the scene.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered.
“What? What do you see?” Dr. Nordmeyer asked, suddenly interested.
Beckett turned his nose to the sky.
“Oh, nothing. Nothing to see here. Move along.”
He set the collage on the gurney and was reaching for the ME report when Dr. Nordmeyer leaned over his shoulder.
Beckett quickly slid the wheelchair cut-out beneath the stairwell photo. Then he started to whistle as he flipped through the pages of notes.
No evidence of debris from a weapon found in any of the lacerations.
“Oh, really.”
Beckett reached for a speculum and proceeded to spread one of the deeper wounds on the man’s scalp. With it spread wide, he used forceps to peek around. He went as far as to tap the man’s exposed bone but didn’t find any debris.
“Hmm.”
He set about tackling another one of the cuts next, this time focusing on the largest and deepest. Just when he thought he saw something, a tiny fleck of gray, the speculum, which was slightly too small for this wound, slipped and popped out.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he muttered as he rammed it back in again, harder and deeper this time.
Thankfully, he spotted what looked like a small gray fiber, only three or four millimeters long. The speculum started to slip again, but he managed to grab the fiber and pull it before the wound snapped closed.
“No evidence of debris from a weapon found in any of the lacerations, huh?” he mocked as he held the tiny fiber up to the light. “Then what the hell is this?”
Chapter 42
Hanna smoothed the front of her dress and tried to walk as stately as possible up the long front staircase leading to the entrance of the Loomis Estate. At some point, a man—a gentleman—attempted to take her arm with a gloved hand, but she shook him off, fighting back a scornful remark.
She settled on, “It’s twenty nineteen, dear.” She thought the thick, southern accent was a good touch.
The man, who had one of those gray mustaches with the twirly ends looked at her as if she’d just taken a dump on the hood of his Bentley.
Hanna smiled and continued up the steps.
Halfway to the top, her eyes fell on the two men that were checking the guest list as people approached; on the left was a burly black man who was bald and had close set eyes, while the other was Leroy Walker.
No, that’s not right, she scorned herself. That’s not Leroy, that’s C.J. Yobooty.
Even her thoughts had a southern accent now as she fell completely into the role.
Meryl Streep would be so proud.
Hanna deliberately made her way to the right side of the staircase so that she could have her name checked off the list by Leroy. But just as she was about to grab the railing, a man and a woman—the former looked like the Great Gatsby while the latter a porn star—giggled and forced their way in front of her.
For a second, she envisioned her foot sliding out and clipping the back of the Jenna Jameson’s Jimmy Choos, sending her flying to the ground.
Instead, she brought a hand to her lips and muttered, “Oh, dear,” and let them pass.
“Alright, not so thick, Hanna,” Screech muttered in her ear.
Hanna couldn’t help but smile.
The duo went to Leroy and he dutifully checked off their names.
“Ma’am, over here please,” the other security guard said, gesturing for Hanna to come on his side.
Hanna stopper smiling. She watched as Leroy’s brow furrowed and he searched for the couple’s names.
Hurry up, C.J.
“Ma’am?”
Shit.
Hanna couldn’t stall any longer. She moved to the other side of the staircase and pulled the envelope with the invitation from her clutch.
“Name?” the man said, not even bothering to look at the invitation.
“Greta Armatridge,” she said, slowly shifting her shoulders and pouting with her lips.
I should get an Oscar for this shit.
The man scanned his list then said, “Thank you, go on inside.”
Hanna just stood there, invitation in hand. She couldn’t believe it.
You mean after all this shit, I could’ve just said I was anybody on that list? Instead, I get to be an eighty-year-old grandma?
“Ma’am, would you please continue up the steps? You’re holding up the line.”
Hanna made a mental note to slap Screech and then hurried up the steps, making sure to glide in front of the bimbo and her sugar daddy.
The house, quite frankly, was like nothing she’d ever seen outside of the movies.
The entrance was grand, but that was only the beginning; there was a chandelier in the front hall that must have weighed a metric ton and require the services of a small powerplant to fuel all of the lights.
Hanna tried to act normal, tried to pretend like she’d seen this before—Oh, gee all this for little ol’ me? For my debutante ball?—but everything was just so… grand, that it gave her pause.
“Strip club rules, remember?” Screech said in her ear.
Hanna frowned and started deeper into the house, admiring the wooden floors that were polished enough to act as mirrors and the gilded frames on paintings made by dead French people, the names of whom she did not know.
Fitting in here would prove difficult, but her one skill, the thing that she’d been gifted with ever since her mother had abandoned her at the side of the road when she was eleven, was to get other people to believe in her, to do what she wanted. It was a skill necessary for survival.
Even before her master’s degree, Hanna had had significant insight into the human condition. The reality was, the vast majority of people were intractable in their beliefs and opinions. So long as you did nothing to directly contradict them, they were apt to go along with many a narrative. This was most evident while conversing; most people weren’t listening, they were simply rehearsing their responses in their head as the other party spoke. Sure, they were having
a conversation, but not with you.
They were conversing with themselves.
And so long as you just filled in the blanks, ticked all the right boxes, they wouldn’t question anything. These were just plastic people with plastic faces and plastic lives.
Hanna often wondered what it must be like for these people when they realized that the only real thing about them is the number of zeroes in their bank account.
It saddened her that most people lost before they even knew the rules or how to play the game.
She’d taken only a few more steps into the hallway when a man approached her from the side. But unlike the man who’d attempted to help her up the stairs, this clearly wasn’t hired help; the person approaching her was young and handsome, mid-thirties, maybe, dressed in a sharp white shirt, black bowtie, and black suit jacket. He had the beginnings of a beard, not in the manicured way, but a genuine five o’clock shadow.
“Hi there,” he said, with a grin. Hanna noted that the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.
She knew at that moment that this man wasn’t like the others, that like her, he didn’t quite fit in.
Hanna just hoped that he didn’t see the same in her.
“You come alone?”
“I did,” she replied with a nod, falling just short of batting her eyelashes.
“Good,” he replied, “so did I.”
An uncomfortable silence ensued, and Hanna chewed her lip while fighting the urge to say something.
You’re the debutante here, sweetheart, the voice of a fictional Southern grandmother reminded her. Let the boys come to you. It’s your flower they want, so let them sniff it before they pluck it.
She inadvertently shuddered.
“Yeah, that’s the way I feel, too,” the man said before extending his hand. “Mackenzie Wilcox.”
Hanna knew at once that it was a fake name. She smiled.
“Greta, Greta Armatridge.”
They shook hands.
“Well, Greta, would you like something to drink? Because I sure as hell would.”
Drug Lord- Part II Page 12
