The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  I pull a stepladder under the opening and shine the light farther up, the beam capturing only floating particles of dust and insulation. My heart rate has accelerated to the point where I have to move or risk my legs giving out. Bracing my gun hand over my left hand holding the flashlight, I creep as soundlessly as I can up the ladder, doing a twisting, one-eighty sweep with the flashlight once my head clears the ceiling.

  There is nothing in the crawl space, but along the rough planking there is a wide swath rubbed clean of dust where something large has lain. Homicide could have opened it to search there, but the detectives wouldn’t have hoisted themselves completely into the space unless they’d seen something of interest.

  The ladder had not been set under the opening when I walked into the closet. Without it, a person would have to be tall enough and strong enough to pull himself up into the crawl space. Difficult, but not impossible.

  A sense of how and when our home invader operated expands in my head like a night-growing fungus.

  I begin to step down the ladder and a sound behind me makes me startle. There is the touch of a furtive hand along my leg, and I gyrate wildly, stumbling down the ladder. I manage to keep the gun extended along with the blinding flashlight beam and I look down the barrel sights into the face of a figure standing in the office.

  “Don’t you move, motherfucker!” I scream and realize immediately that the blinking, cringing form in front of me is not a man, but a boy: Sergei, the Russian kid.

  “What the fuck, Sergei,” I say, lowering the gun away from his torso. My heart is a berserker inside my chest.

  I drop the flashlight to the floor, holster the SIG, and grab him by the arm. “What are you doing in my apartment?” I yell into his face. I gesture above my head. “Were you the one up in the crawl space?”

  “No…no…” he sputters. He’s trying to pull away from me, but I clamp down harder on his arm and give it a good shake.

  “I saw door open,” he says. “I was just in hallway.”

  His fright has resurrected the Russian in him, and he’s dropping articles of speech like a son of a bitch.

  I let go of him and move back a few steps.

  “Jesus, Sergei, you almost got shot.” I push the hair away from my face, mainly to steady my hands against my skull.

  He starts rubbing his arm, and he must be recovered enough to remember his grammar, and his surliness, because he says, “The door was open. I heard your voice, okay?”

  “Did the other cops leave the door open when they left?”

  “No. I mean, they left about two o’clock. But they closed and locked the door. I was upstairs in my apartment getting some shit for my mom, so I saw them go.”

  Getting the rest of his stash and snooping, more like. He and his family went to stay with friends after the head in the box was found, and his mother hasn’t been back since. “Have you been upstairs in your apartment all afternoon?” I ask him.

  “Yeah, mostly. I came down around four and the door was open again. I thought the cops had come back, you know? So I went out for a little while. I just got back and saw the door was still open.” He sniffs a few times, taking a wounded tough-guy stance. “I heard you inside, yo.”

  “Did you see or hear anyone else in the apartment from the time the cops left until a few minutes ago when you heard me here?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” he says forcefully.

  I pull out my phone and call Maclin, who puts me on hold for a few minutes and then confirms what I already suspected: his team searched the apartment thoroughly and left at two thirty, and they had not checked the crawl space because the hatch looked undisturbed.

  “Mac,” I say. “I think whoever left the hair on the bed was in the apartment the whole time, even when your guys were here.” He’s not saying anything, but I can hear him breathing over the phone. “I think he was waiting in the crawl space until everybody left, then opened the hatch, unlocked the door, and just walked out.”

  He tells me he’ll have some officers over to my place within ten minutes and to stay put. My legs have become too heavy to support the rest of me and I sink down onto the couch.

  This is one bold motherfucker. A guy who sneaks into a cop’s apartment by picking two locks and then hides patiently in an overhead crawl space while Homicide detectives and a Forensics team check every square inch of the premises. Almost every square inch.

  The phone ringing snaps me to attention. It’s Ryan calling to ask where the hell I am. He tells me that he’s received the photos of Evangeline Roy’s two sons. They’re black-and-white case photos, but there is a physical description of the boys. Both have red hair. I tell him what’s going on at the apartment and that I’ll call him back.

  Immediately following, Jackie calls to say that we’ll need to pick up dinner. Anne doesn’t feel well enough to cook tonight. Apparently, the invasion of the lesbians has left her incapacitated. I don’t tell Jackie about the visitor in the crawl space; I’m putting that one off indefinitely. I talk to her in monosyllables, telling her that I’m in the middle of something and have to call her later.

  I have my head in my hands and see a pair of sneakered feet in my field of vision. I’ve all but forgotten Sergei’s presence, but he’s standing close to the couch, holding out a glass of water. His hand is shaking, sloshing the liquid over the edge.

  “Thank you,” I say, taking the glass from him and drinking.

  “My mom cries all the time now,” he says.

  His clothes are rumpled and none too clean-looking, and I can imagine that her waking hours are distracted by the recurring nightmares she’s having.

  “She’s scared,” I tell him. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m scared too, Sergei.”

  “I saw something…” he starts to say, looking down at his feet. His tough-guy act has vanished. “The delivery guy that left the box had a tattoo.”

  I set the glass of water on the coffee table, reminding myself to keep my voice even. “A tattoo?” I ask him.

  “When I was on the stairs that day, the day he left the box, I couldn’t see his face too good. But he reached up to pull his hat down.” He mimes with his fingers pulling the bill to a cap down lower over his brow. “There was a tattoo of wings on the back of his hand.”

  “What kind of wings?”

  “Like an angel’s wings.”

  “Could you draw it if I gave you some paper and a pen?” I ask him.

  He nods. “The ink was blue. Bright blue,” he tells me. “With something red in the middle. Like a sword, I think.”

  My hands are unsteady as I rifle through drawers looking for some paper and blue and red ballpoint pens. He sits cross-legged on the couch in front of the coffee table and quickly sketches a pair of up-swooping wings with a transecting sword in red. The image is surprisingly detailed, drawn with confident strokes. The kid is a good little artist.

  Studying the drawing, I’m initially disappointed, though. When Sergei mentioned the wings, my first thought was that the tattoo was gang-affiliated, like a Hells Angels branding. But the Angels’ trademark is a winged death’s-head in profile, and what Sergei has drawn looks nothing like that. But when he adds two letters, one on either side of the wings, that might be a capital A and a capital B, the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. The biggest distributor of meth in East Texas is the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, or ABT.

  Maclin’s team will be at the apartment any minute, so I fold the paper and put it in my pocket.

  I tap Sergei on the top of his greasy, uncombed head. “Hey, can we just keep this between you and me for a bit?” I ask. “You don’t need to be explaining to more cops why you’re hanging around a crime scene. Just write down your phone number in case I need to get in touch with you.”

  “Sure,” he says. He looks me full in the face, his eyes wide. “He saw me. The delivery guy.”

  I sit down on the couch next to him. �
��I thought you just said you didn’t see his face fully. Why didn’t you tell us earlier about this?”

  He shrugs miserably and looks away, and for one awful moment I feel like giving the kid a hug.

  “Did he threaten you?” I ask.

  “No,” he says, rubbing a finger alongside one nostril. “He smiled at me. Friendly, you know? Like a nice guy. I felt bad ’cause I took the box. I figured no way someone like that would know about what’s inside. Right?”

  Sergei looks at me nervously, tentatively, waiting for me to validate that perception, because a cheerful, smiling executioner can be more terrifying than a brooding, threatening one.

  The ABT, more than any other group, more than law enforcement, more than local, homegrown security organizations, have kept the cartels at bay in East Texas. But not by being nice guys.

  Their methods are as ruthless as their Mexican counterparts’, their retaliation swift and brutal. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that their delivery guy wouldn’t know what was in the box.

  I think of Kostucha, the Grim Reaper. As Uncle Benny might have reminded me, Death himself, according to Polish legends, grins amiably and wears a white robe.

  20

  The drive to the Gas Monkey Bar ’n’ Grill takes about twenty minutes from the center of town. It’s a Friday night, and the parking lot is full, but it’s late enough that the band has finished playing. There are twenty or more motorcycles out front, along with a few vintage cars that shine lustrously under the towering neon sign of a deranged chimp, teeth bared, tongue lolling. I find an open spot near the back of the property and wait for Seth to show up. The lot is dark and quiet, giving me a chance to gather my thoughts. I dry-swallow a couple of headache capsules to ease the tension band around my temples and lean back against the seat, closing my eyes.

  A few minutes after I told Sergei to leave my apartment, Maclin’s crew showed up and began searching the closet for fibers, prints, or any other residue that someone hiding in the crawl space might have left. I revealed to Maclin the events preceding my discovery of the opened hatch without telling him about Sergei and his drawing. I’d eventually share it with him, but I wanted some lead time to try to ID the delivery guy by running matches of the winged tattoo. Maclin would be pissed when he found out, but he would have done the same thing. I would simply tell him that I wanted to verify the information before we sent his team on a wild-goose chase.

  While I was watching Forensics work, my phone rang. It was Seth telling me that he had tracked down a CI who had some things to say about the Roy family. I told him about Sergei’s drawing and we decided to meet at eleven that night at the Gas Monkey, a restaurant and bar in West Dallas.

  Jackie and I agreed to get takeout at a restaurant in Anne’s neighborhood for the merry band of three—me, Jackie, and her mother—before I went out again to talk with Seth. The restaurant was packed and we had stood in line close together so we could talk without being overheard. She looked exhausted. It had been a full day at the hospital, and, unthinkingly, she’d slipped her hand into mine, leaning into my shoulder. If I’d not been so tired and on edge myself, so focused on not letting slip the latest drama in our own home, I would have noticed the hostile glares from the employees, as well as some of the customers.

  When we’d made our way to the front of the line, I started giving my selection, but the zombie taking the order, an overweight young woman with the underbite of a pit bull, interrupted me. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I can’t serve you.”

  “What? Are you closed?” I had asked, surprised. The sign on the door, with the logo of a chicken waving a Texas flag, clearly stated that the restaurant was open until nine o’clock, an hour away.

  She was immediately joined at the counter by an older man. His name tag read BILLY, and he stared at our intertwined hands like he was watching mating cobras.

  With the full picture coming into focus, I dropped Jackie’s hand and placed both of mine on top of the counter.

  “How about this young lady just takes our order so we can go?” I asked. My voice was low, but my face was over the centerline of the counter.

  I felt Jackie tugging on the back of my coat, but I ignored the warning.

  “How about you go to another establishment?” Billy said, crossing his arms. His face flushed with anger. “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. For any reason.”

  I ignored Benny’s ghost telling me to walk away from a battle I couldn’t win, especially if it involved coleslaw and fried chicken.

  In my mind, my immediate response to Billy had been How about I kick your self-righteous, pimply ass across the Trinity River?

  But what I actually spat out was “Just so you know, sir, I’m a cop.”

  His back stiffened and he said, “Then you should know better.”

  “What?” I had felt in that moment that all the wiring in my brain would short-circuit and that I would either start laughing maniacally or grab Billy by his poly-ply work shirt. Of all the insults, threats, and admonishments I had ever received, that one seemed the most absurd.

  I could feel Jackie moving closer to the counter, coming to stand next to me.

  “Excuse me,” she said, getting Billy’s attention.

  He turned to her, clearly expecting more abuse from an angry dyke, his eyes narrowing as though preparing to face into a battering wind.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, her voice mild, the lanyard holding her doctor’s credentials clattering against the counter, “but that mole, over your eye?”

  “Huh?” he responded, surprised at the turn of conversation, reaching reflexively to touch his right eye.

  “No,” Jackie corrected. “Your left eye. Have you had that checked out? I’m a doctor at Children’s Hospital. Can I just…take a closer look?”

  She leaned in, frowning with concern, giving the prominent mole over Billy’s left eyebrow her best professional assessment. One exhalation of air through the nostrils signaled an unfortunate diagnosis.

  “That doesn’t look good,” she had said. “Dark, with irregular borders. Really, sir, I’d get that checked out right away. If it’s cancer, it will need to be removed, and soon.”

  For another thirty seconds, Jackie held Billy and the entire restaurant, including Pit Bull Girl, rapt with her graphic descriptions of various treatments for late-stage malignant skin cancer.

  When she finished, she slipped a pale and anxious Billy her business card, tugged on my sleeve, and left. I followed her out like a court jester trailing her queen.

  Jackie stood outside the restaurant, one hand clapped over her mouth, eyes wide and disbelieving. Then she whispered, “Oh my God. What I did was so unethical.”

  “And mean,” I said, laughing and impulsively hugging her. “I’m finally rubbing off on you.”

  Afterward, we had a rushed dinner of Chinese takeout at Anne’s house, where, over duck sauce and wantons, I spent the better part of an hour convincing Jackie that she was not going straight to hell just because she put a little fear of God into Billy the Bigot.

  The roar of a large engine rouses me, and I see Seth maneuvering his oversize truck into a parking space a few rows behind me. He climbs stiffly out of the driver’s seat, a hand pressed against his middle, where he’s still bandaged, and I wait for him under the lights in front of the entrance.

  “You’re looking better,” I tell him.

  He does look remarkably well, clean-shaven and without the puffy dark circles under his eyes from the pain meds.

  “Excellent nursing staff,” he says with an exaggerated leering grin.

  “Oh, it’s a staff now, is it?” I give him a friendly finger jab just above the wound. “It’s good to see you vertical again, Seth.”

  He gestures for me to follow him away from the bright lights and onto the restaurant’s deck. We stand at a railing overlooking a small artificial lake, built to give the customers eating outside more of a sense of “country” dining. T
he only people on the deck tonight are a few overweight urban cowboys drinking beer.

  “My CI’s name is Wayne Rutherford,” Seth tells me.

  “Of course it is,” I say. “They’re all named either Wayne or Delbert.”

  “He may not be the brightest bulb, but he’s been a good CI. A fountain of information for the past few years when it comes to meth gangs. Been in and out of prison for possession. He’s been a prospect with several of the OMGs but always screwed up too bad to make the cut.”

  OMG means Outlaw Motorcycle Gang. There are more than three hundred OMGs in the United States, some of them with only a few members, others with thousands. The Hells Angels, Bandidos, Mongols, Sons of Silence—they all traffic in drugs, extortion, and even murder for hire. The common perception among average citizens is that the bikers are Neanderthal thugs, screwing, drinking, and fighting their way through the trailer parks, bars, and back roads of hick-town America. But they have become transnational, even international, with sophisticated drug-smuggling operations across borders in Canada and Mexico and across every state line.

  The OMGs call themselves the 1 percenters, meaning that 99 percent of U.S. bike clubs are composed of law-abiding citizens; the remaining 1 percent are pathologically proud, efficiently organized, and savage.

  I follow Seth into the restaurant, where fewer than a dozen people are eating in booths or at tables littered with longneck beer bottles, plates of fried food, and scattered groupings of hot sauce that could take the finish right off the vintage cars parked out front. On the weekends the wait time would be close to an hour.

  To the left of the entrance is the bar. Seth signals to the bartender, who directs us to a small private room off the main dining area. Inside, the only diner seated at a table is a rangy, gaunt-faced man in a blue-jean jacket eating from a plate stacked high with ribs, a jelly jar filled with soda next to the plate. His dark hair, parted in the middle, is long and falls like two curtains over his eyes. He bends his mouth toward the plate with each bite rather than raising his arms, and the bottoms of both sleeves are stained with barbecue sauce from the meat. The middle and ring fingers on his right hand are missing, giving him a permanent advantage at rock concerts when he flashes the horns.