Otis knocked on the door. A voice that sounded like it originated from the far end of a train tunnel said, “Bring him in here.”
The pope would have said the office decor was too much. The first thing you saw through the door was a floor-to-ceiling painting of Jesus on the cross. This was Jesus at that Mel Gibson level of suffering, with blood dripping from the crown of thorns pushed into his flesh, and a scornful group gathered around mocking him. On the opposite wall was a painting the same size as the other, this one of Christ ascending to heaven, and crowds watching with suitable awe.
Things got less subtle from there, with various images drawn from the Bible adorning the walls. Most were vivid and bloody and made Jesus look like the lead singer for a ’70s prog-rock band doubling on the cover of Fangoria.
Mitchell Gillespie sat at his desk like a monarch on a throne, dressed in a dark suit and a white shirt and his gray hair plastered in place with determination. He wore a trimmed mustache and a bolo tie like a Texas cattleman. He looked like the televangelist who told you to lay your hands on the TV so you could receive your blessings, but be sure to keep the checks coming in.
My newest buddies shoved me into a chair in front of the desk then took a stance on either side. A clock somewhere in the house knocked down the seconds. Each tick sounded like Father Time getting a beatdown in a cage match. Gillespie stared. Sometimes the old man twitched his mustache just enough so you could tell he was still alive.
I tapped my foot against the chair leg. Rapped my fingers on the arm. Hummed some Chicago—the old stuff with the horn section, and not that Peter Cetera shit everyone danced to at the prom. Somewhere into the tempo drop in “25 Or 6 To 4,” Gillespie said, “Mr. Malone.”
Then, nothing. Except for Milo and Otis breathing, and time taking a beating.
I said, “Is that it?”
Gillespie kept the same empty expression. “Excuse me?”
“You said my name. I’m not sure if it’s a question, a statement of fact, or what. Or why Milo and Otis here brought me here, what the fuck you want—”
Otis busted me one in the ear. A fist, solid and hard, into the side of my head. My teeth ground together, and my vision went dark, and the world blotted into silence on that side of my head. I grabbed the chair arms to keep from falling to the floor, squinting away the blackness until things were only blurry, and then waiting for the cracks of sound to poke through. After an eternity, there was a droning ring, and the ambient noises around me crept back.
Gillespie said, “You’ll watch your language and your tone in my presence. You understand me, son?”
I nodded. I was sure something important had been knocked loose. I sucked in deep breaths.
“My name is J. Mitchell Gillespie,” he said. “You are acquainted with a business partner of mine. Robert Charles. I am correct in this.”
“Yeah.” I was having trouble sitting up. The entire world tilted like a poorly hung picture, askew and sliding to one side.
“I wasn’t asking for your confirmation of information I know to be a fact, Mr. Malone. You are poking around in the death of Meadow Charles.”
“Is this where you say things we both know, and I nod?”
Gillespie rested his forearms across the top of his desk. “If you want to walk out of my home instead of being wheeled out, you’ll keep your smart-alecky and uppity tone to yourself. Do you understand me?”
I nodded. I know me well enough, if I opened my mouth, the wrong thing would have come out, and Milo and Otis would have made my spine resemble the design for a roller coaster.
Gillespie sat back in his chair. “Good to know you’re not as stupid as you look. While you likely have little to no appreciation for the ideas of family or the cost of true loss, the death of Meadow was trying on the Charles family. I have known them many years, and losing Meadow was a painfully difficult time they wish to leave in the past. Robert gave you a large sum of money to leave his daughter’s murder alone, and yet you’ve persisted in disturbing waters which have lain still for many years, and which have no reason to be stirred.”
“That may be true, but the other issue is a man’s in prison for a crime he might not have committed, Mr. Gillespie.”
Gillespie waved a hand in the air as if dismissing thoughts or persistent flies. “That simple-minded fool is serving his penance on earth. If he has repented of his sins, then let him receive his reward in heaven. And don’t try to fool me, son. This is not out of a sense of Christian charity; someone offered you more money to continue.”
“Are you asking, or are you telling me?”
“Mr. Malone, rest assured there will not be a time where I’ll turn to the likes of you and ask a question and expect you to know the answer.” He stretched his arms out and tapped his fingers on his desk. “You will leave the murder of Meadow Charles alone. You’ll not have anything to do with the Charles family. You’ll return the money you have been given with the request that they donate it to the Christian charity of their choice. And if you’ve the sense the good Lord gave geese, you’ll consider finding a new place to live. It’s a big world out there, and surely a man like yourself can make something of himself in it better than what you’ve done to date.”
“I am to presuppose that you’re not interested in answering questions about Meadow’s murder.”
“I’ve nothing to say to the likes of you, Mr. Malone. Meadow’s in heaven, her killer is in prison, and her family still hurts from the loss. All you’re doing is exacerbating their pain.”
I gave my neck a solid twist around. I still wasn’t in great shape from the brawl with Tommy in the motel room, and Otis’s love tap hadn’t helped. I wondered if I needed to see a chiropractor.
“Then what about the fact you’re banging Brooklyn Charles like she’s a screen door in a tornado?” I said.
Remember what I said about me opening my mouth and letting the wrong thing roll out? That right there was what I meant.
Gillespie’s face went flush, and his eyes darted to Otis, and the next thing I knew, I felt a burning sensation on my right shoulder. It took about a millisecond for the electrical impulses to hit the outer reaches of my various extremities, and every limb bolted straight, and my body vibrated like demons were being pushed out of me. The world around me trembled, and I made gurgling noises, and I realized that Otis had hit me with a Taser.
Mother. Fucker.
I rolled out of the chair and hit the floor and shook like I’d been filled with the holy spirit. Ripples of pain racked through me, and my bladder gave up the ghost as the front of my pants exploded with a flood of urine.
Gillespie’s voice continued to drone on, but it all sounded like the midnight broadcast of an AM station out of Mexico, full of fuzz and static, the hollow form of sounds you recognize as words but little else. He talked, and I let him, because I didn’t have anywhere to go, and I sure as hell couldn’t have gotten there anyway.
Fire pulsed through my brain. My muscles were like globs of spit hanging from tree branches. I hated everyone in the world in that moment, and I hoped Otis somehow contracted one of those diseases people get from not wearing shoes in a communal shower, and it ate chunks of his brain until his was nothing but a twitching mess of nerve responses, and he had to pay someone to come along and wipe the drool off his chin every fifteen minutes or so. It seemed a reasonable desire.
When the world snapped back into clarity and the human voice made sense again, Gillespie was still droning on, now talking about what true responsibility was, quoting verses from the Bible, and I opted to lie on the floor. I could have gotten up, but it was a fine and comfortable floor, and part of me hoped my piss would seep into the carpet and he’d have to live with the smell. You take the small victories sometimes.
“Are we understood there, son?” Gillespie said.
I drooled more on the carpet.
Otis nudged at my shoulder with a shoe the size of a Ford Fairlane. “Hey, asshole..”
“Watc
h your language,” Gillespie said.
“Sorry, sir. Hey, meathead. You alive down there?” This time he kicked me. I felt it. I was grateful for the sensation for a split-second, and then the pain hit me and I tried to scream, but the best I could muster was a pathetic moan. I pulled my arm up like a dog dragging his nuts across a floor and clutched my shoulder.
“I’m grand,” I said. I willed my muscles to respond and pushed myself up and off the floor. There was a saliva stain in the carpet and a larger urine stain three feet from it. They looked like those new countries that formed in Eastern Europe after the Berlin Wall went down. Again, these are the small victories you savor.
Milo decided I wasn’t crawling fast enough, and he took a hold of my shirt collar and pulled me to my feet. I dangled there like Pinocchio, my toes scraping against the carpet. Milo said, “Jesus, Mr. Gillespie. He pissed himself.”
A rush of air whizzed past me, and I dropped to the floor like a pile of sadness with a thud next to me a beat later. Milo clutched his chest. Gillespie had chucked a brass paperweight shaped like an open Bible into the center of Milo’s chest. Milo looked at Gillespie like a whipped puppy. A smile, thin and cruel, crept up on Gillespie’s face.
Gillespie returned to his chair and motioned to the door. “Get him out of here.”
Milo reached for me. I pulled away. “Back off, Gigantor. I got this.” I used the chair to get to my feet. I was wobblier than a newborn colt walking on Jell-O.
Gillespie watched me with narrowed eyes. “So you have something resembling willpower after all, son.”
“You can lay off that ‘son’ stuff,” I said. “I don’t remember you at the family reunions, and my sell-by date is well past the point where I need to tolerate anything like that.”
I stiffened my back and pushed my shoulders up and put all my energy into not tumbling forward. I gave small nods to Milo and Otis. “Gentlemen, if you please.”
They exchanged looks, with Milo grabbing the back of my shirt and Otis taking a hold of me by the belt, and carried me out of the office longways. My pants crawled far enough into my ass, I’d need pliers to change clothes later.
“Or we can go this route, I suppose,” I said.
We drove with the windows down, and by the time we got back to my Aztek, my pants had dried and my motor responses had returned. Milo and Otis still weren’t conversationalists. I suspected they would have said no if I invited them over for coffee.
They dumped me off in the parking lot, and I got into my car and sat there for a few minutes in a moldering mix of shame, anger, and the reek of piss, before driving home. I loaded the groceries inside and put everything away. Except the popsicles. They had melted.
29
By the next day, I was back to normal, or at least whatever “normal” is for me; all of that seems to operate on a sliding scale. I felt okay enough to get out of bed earlier than God intended us to ever get up and dragged myself to the early meeting at the Riverside. Afterward, I told Woody about what happened.
“Gillespie makes himself known when he wishes,” Woody said as he drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
“He’s got a charming countenance about himself. He’d have enjoyed the Spanish Inquisition, I think.”
We got breakfast and then drove over to the empty parking lot across from Parker County Savings and Loan where we could keep an eye on the front entrance. We had gotten to-go cups of coffee because goddamn, it was early. Woody had already worked his way through most of his. The caffeine seemed to have no effect on him. He stared out the window with a serene calmness on his face. I, on the other hand, needed to piss like a toddler was bouncing on my bladder.
“Gillespie seemed rather eager to get you away from investigating Meadow’s murder,” Woody said.
“He seemed rather eager to put my head on the end of a pointy stick.”
“It leans toward a desire to keep secrets buried, which means we can argue what Black told you about Meadow’s ‘uncle’ might be true.”
“It makes me wonder if what Black said about Deacon could be true also.”
“Let’s deal with the concrete facts we’ve got. We know Gillespie’s fucking Brooklyn and he’s doing business with Robert, so he’s keeping several beds warm in the Charles house.” Woody shook his head. “He’s using the Charles family as his own private playpen. No wonder they’re all fucked up.”
“I don’t know that I’d categorize Dagny as ‘fucked up.’”
“She’s fucked up in ways you can’t see yet. I’ll bet money there’s something wrong with her wiring. She could surprise me and be the outlier here by not having a boatload of issues, but I won’t hold my breath on it.”
A black Lexus SUV came down the street and swung into the bank parking lot, sliding into a spot well away from the other cars. Milo and Otis came out of the SUV. They still wore mirrored sunglasses, though today they’d thrown on sports coats that stretched out across their shoulders until the seams showed. Milo went to the rear of the SUV, scanning the area. The sports coats fit shitty, so every arm movement exposed the shoulder holsters underneath.
Gillespie stepped out of the back of the SUV. He didn’t acknowledge the men as they walked him toward a rear building entrance and he vanished inside.
I might have growled when I saw Gillespie. I say might because Woody gave me a long stare and a thin smile like he’d swallowed a canary whole.
“You don’t like him, do you?” Woody said.
“My favorite jeans got marinated in my own piss because of him. No one likes anyone after that kind of crap.”
“I don’t blame you one iota on that one. Come on and let’s go inside and see if we can make Gillespie a little miserable.”
Gillespie’s offices sat on the building’s seventh floor. The elevator only went up to the sixth floor. Woody and I figured this out when we got on the elevator and realized we couldn’t go all the way up, so we then stepped back out into the lobby.
“What about the stairs?” I said. My voice cracked at the thought—the looming dread of climbing stairs. It’s hard to be a tough guy when you’re felled by a broken elevator or the threat of a seven-floor walk-up.
“Guess they’re in the back and you get buzzed in,” Woody said. “Think you’ve got that in you?”
I toughened up my voice. “You’re aware I can take the stairs.”
“I know you can. You know you can. But you don’t believe you can.”
“That’s the same thing parents tell their kids learning to ride a bike.”
“You’ve got this, Scooter. I believe in you.”
“Asshole.”
Woody strolled across the lobby. He gestured toward the fire alarm the way a model on a game show shows off the grand prize car, with big hand gestures and a smile.
“We pull it, the building clears, then what?” I said.
“We sneak up the back staircase to Gillespie’s office. It’ll take a few minutes for the fire department to show up. They’ll check floor to floor, and that should give us time to rifle through Gillespie’s office, see if there’s anything interesting.”
I cracked my knuckles. “Let’s do this shit.”
He stretched his neck out and looked into the bank lobby. Studied it for a moment, gave a nod, and said, “Okay.”
He pulled the alarm lever.
The fire alarm sounded like a war cry, and it came with something that sounded like honking geese in between the other noise, and a strobe light to boot. It was a guaranteed attention-getter, like a stripper at a Baptist convention.
People poured out of the bank lobby like syrup, reluctant to interrupt whatever they were doing to maybe escape being burned alive. They came out down the stairwell from the upper floors a few seconds later, muttering that this had better not be another false alarm.
Oh well.
Woody walked into the lobby and went over to the area where they kept deposit slips and other paperwork. Clipboards were anchored on skinny chains. Woody grabbed a
clipboard and yanked it loose, popping the chain, and repeated the process with another. He slipped a few sheets of blank forms into each clipboard and came back out into the lobby, handing me one and telling me to follow him.
A crowd had formed by the time we made it to the area behind the building The back door opened, and Woody grabbed it to allow someone to walk out before we slipped inside. There was a steel door that led to the stairs and the elevator. Both had numerical keypads for access.
The stairwell door opened, and we headed up. A grandmotherly type with a perfect cloud of white hair and thick black glasses stopped us halfway up the first flight as she came down and said, “Are you morons deaf? Can’t you hear the fire alarm?”
Woody held up the clipboard. “Safety inspectors.”
She gave us the once-over. Woody, in his standard-issue black T-shirt and blue jeans and Doc Martens. Me, in an untucked blue button-down and jeans and Chuck Taylors. She had a definite moment of questioning.
The moment passed, and she said, “What-the-fuck-ever,” and headed outside.
Woody waved his clipboard. “Social skeleton key. Makes you look like you know what you’re doing.”
The dregs of the dawdlers had bailed by the time we hit the third flight of stairs. I said, “What makes you so sure we’ll find something in Gillespie’s office?”
“The man has life secrets, which means he’s also got work secrets. Besides, you don’t drag that shit home with you if you don’t have to.”
“And why are you so sure he’s got secrets?”
“Because he’s got bodyguards. Any reason someone around here would have bodyguards if they didn’t have secrets?”
The man had a point.
I hurt badly by the fifth floor. My knee throbbed. I could feel the blood pulling through my leg, and it ached, which wasn’t how blood flow should feel.
She Talks to Angels Page 13
