by J. A. Kerley
“Don’t be so dismally cute, Carson. I told you Peaches was paint. My friend has various chores in Miami, including shopping for furniture. She’ll return early next week. You probably passed her on the way, though she would have been several thousand feet above you.”
“Does not-Peaches have a real name?”
He walked to a mirror and straightened his tie. “I’m beginning to think you don’t believe in her existence.”
“Photos then, a shot of you and your paramour lazing on the beach and making dreamy eyes at one another.”
He turned from his image. “Our relationship doesn’t resemble your body-centric succession of temp workers, Carson. It’s more …” he frowned in search of a word.
“Fictional?” I supplied.
“Cerebral.”
I smiled and made the motion of advancing a pawn. “No sex then, just endless games of chess?”
He started to speak, stopped, changed course. “There was a reason for your visit, correct? Have you brought me something to consider?”
I pulled the materials from my briefcase and handed them over. When I started to add my comments he asked me if I’d been to Key West recently.
“Two weeks ago I drove out to kill a Saturday.”
“Go see if anything’s changed,” he said, nodding toward the door.
37
I stood in the diamond-bright sun and pondered my choices. I might tour the Hemingway house, but I’d done so twice before and exited discouraged. Though the home had been the residence of one of the most influential writers in American history, it seemed the bulk of the visitors were mostly interested in the six-toed cats.
The raucous Duval Street was a few blocks distant and I might grab a beer in one of the bars, but this time of day Duval would be dense with milling clots of tourists released from the cruise ships like camera-strung cattle. I turned to study the imposing home, noting its address on the brass mailbox: three numbers and a street name.
They were all I needed to discover what name Jeremy was using.
I drove to the police station, hoping Lieutenant King Barlow was working. It turned out that King was not only on duty, he was in the station house, all six-nine, one-hundred-eighty pounds of him.
He brought me to his office, a small room beside the squad room, and I stood while he sat and towered over his desk. After a couple minutes of small talk, I got to the point.
“Are the recent real-estate transactions easily accessible, King?”
He held his index finger above his keyboard. “Tap tap. You want me to check something for you?”
I made a deal of looking outside the door, then closing it. “It’s, uh, one of these things that’s still in the early phases, King, if you get my drift. Hush-hush.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Drugs? Or more human trafficking?”
“Can’t say yet. If anything comes of it, you guys will get a piece.”
He grinned. “Hey … we’re still wearing laurels from last year.”
Ten months back I’d handled a human-trafficking case that ended up in Key West. Though King and his people had a small walk-on near the finale, at press conferences Roy McDermott insinuated a supporting role. Many law enforcement entities seized any opportunity to grab headlines, often at the expense of other agencies, but Roy spread the accolades around, thinking it bread on the waters, returned multifold.
Like right now. King pecked at the keys, stood, offered me his chair. “I’ll grab a coffee. Take it away, my man, and happy hunting.”
I entered the address of Jeremy’s home. It would provide the name my brother had used to purchase the property, assuming it wasn’t one of his corporations, dummy and otherwise, like C&A Associates, the one holding the mortgage on my home.
A screen came up with the addresses in sequence. I ran my finger down the list until coming to Jeremy’s house number. He hadn’t used a corporation to buy the house; it was a private transaction.
He had used his new name.
I stared in disbelief. My mouth was probably drooping open.
This was the way it was meant to be …
Debro withdrew from the body beneath him, his breath ragged with exertion and climax, sweat dripping from his brow on to the suck bruises on Billy Prestwick’s neck.
Just me and him. One of them at a time … It was the way.
This way was more intimate. More care could be given to their punishment. He still held their words, looks, dirty smiles in his memory – in his very heart – after all these years. But here he’d been putting them back into their lives unscathed. He’d allowed the kindness of his nature to deprive himself of his true due. This, finally, was the real deal: Justice. It was a pity he’d not realized it when he had the simpering, nasty Brianna or pretty-boy Kemp. Brianna liked to banter with the audience, then turn it into mean barbs. He should have driven sharpened pencils into her ears.
Try to hear what we’re saying now, bitch.
And Kemp? The blond slut sold something to doctors. After finding him – not hard, he remembered his name and it was in the directory – he’d followed Kemp locally for several days, watching him park his shiny silver Camry outside physicians’ offices and medical clinics, pull a big rolling bag from the trunk, and scamper inside for an average of fifty-three minutes. What was a salesman but a talking machine?
It should have meant another tongue gone … just like that.
Debro toweled sweat from his face and chest and went into the anteroom. Locking the door, he studied Billy Prestwick through the window: naked, his small hard buttocks gleaming with lubricant and semen. His eyes were wide open and his mouth opened and closed slowly, a line of spittle running from his chin to the floor. Even in his sloppiness, he was beautiful.
Prestwick’s skin was like fine china, Debro thought, almost glowing. His silver hair was a glorious mop. His slender back was red and chafed from Debro’s half-hour ride, but otherwise unmarked. It would remain so … the Gemini Project officially abandoned. Gary was no longer allowed to share. But Donnie had done his part.
Which meant Debro was alone. Or soon to be.
The way it was meant to happen.
I walked the area around the cop house for twenty minutes, trying to make sense of my finding. To purchase the house, Jeremy would have had to create the kind of identity echoed in a multitude of government offices, meaning that cross-checking would create confirmation and not questions.
It was a monumental undertaking, much riskier now than two decades back, when I’d crossed from one life into another, though Jeremy’s money might make it less reliant on paperwork trickery and more on well-placed bribes.
Still … why that name?
When ninety minutes had elapsed I returned to Jeremy’s house, surprised to find a large orange van out front, the lettering saying Island Electronics. In front of the van were two green pickup trucks with covered beds, the logo stating Fioptics Ltd. Across the street was a panel van from Harrow & Son, General Contractors. A short man in a blue uniform closed the back door of the orange van and strode toward the house with a coil of wire over his shoulder and a toolbox in his hand.
I heard hammering from inside, took the front steps three at a time and entered without knocking. The sound of sawing was added to the hammering and I saw two men cutting a section of wall from Jeremy’s kitchen. He was standing behind them, talking to a third man.
I pointed upstairs. “Can we go up to your office and talk?”
“We can go to my office.”
Climbing the steps I saw a woman in the rear room assembling an electronic console. The home held the sudden industry of a beehive. We entered my brother’s office and I saw the man who had carried the wire from the van. He was drilling a hole in the floor near the wall as a young woman wearing protective glasses looked on. Both wore Island Electronics uniforms.
“We need to talk,” I whispered to my brother.
“By all means, Carson, talk.”
“Not here, dammit.
The bedroom.”
He shrugged and we backed into the hall and stepped into the empty bedroom. Or almost empty, another of the electronics crew pulling away floorboard with a pry-bar.
“I’m updating the security system,” Jeremy said. “And adding high-speed fiber optics. Putting new arteries in an old body, so to speak. Plus upgrading the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. I want it all completed soon … my girlfriend has furniture deliveries scheduled.”
“Where can we go to speak?” I said, feeling my jaw clenching.
“About the cases?” He sighed. “With all this clamor I haven’t been able to get to it today, Carson. I’ll call in a day or two.”
I willed my hands from his neck. All of this work had been scheduled and from the git-go my brother had no intention of reviewing the cases today. I could have e-mailed the materials. But that wouldn’t have let him jerk me around in person.
“Screw the cases, Jeremy,” I hissed. “I need to talk about something else.”
“I’ve really got to stay here, Carson. I want to make sure everything’s done to a T.”
The bathroom was across the hall and when the workers looked away I yanked him across the hall and into the bathroom, closing the door behind us.
“You can’t use the facilities on your own, Carson?” he grinned. “Is it ageing? Your prostate?”
“I know you know I know your name,” I said. “You know I know that, right?”
My brother held the grin, not needing to unravel all the knows. “You’re so predictable, Carson. How are things at police headquart—”
“Tell me your name,” I interrupted. “I want to hear you say it aloud. Just so I know I’m not dreaming.”
He paused, eyes sparkling, savoring the moment.
“Jeremy Ryder.”
“Why that name?” I said. “WHY?”
“Shhhh,” he said, lowering the lid on the toilet. “Have a seat, Carson.”
My legs were wobbly with everything that had unfolded in the past two hours: his magnificent house, his artwork, his original given name combined with my concocted surname. I sat. Jeremy leaned against the wall beside the long vanity and crossed his arms, a picture of elegance.
“Your brother is returning to you, Carson. You can call me by my given name in public. I, in turn, intend to start calling you Alphonse, just to see how it feels to always have to think before addressing one’s beloved brother.”
“The idea is crazy. You’ve truly created the identity?”
“Day by day I add to Jerome Alan Ryder … a peripatetic financier type who moved from Alabama as a teenager and has since resided in various cities abroad. Have you checked your invented past lately?”
“Why?”
“Jerome A. Ryder’s past seems intertwined with yours, as if our fictional selves went separate ways years ago and recently reunited.”
I stared. My brother was beyond belief. “You mean …?”
“A few places in your invented background mentioned only child. You’ll now see a brother is casually noted.”
“You’ve combined our false backgrounds?”
“Our real ones are inexorably linked, Brother. It seems so right.”
I shook my head. There were no words for what he was attempting. Chutzpah, balls, brass … all woefully insufficient.
There was but one fatal flaw.
“You’re still a wanted man, Jeremy,” I pointed out. “Every law-enforcement agency in the country has you in their database. Thousands of cops go to work daily with your photo on their bulletin boards and computer screens. There’s nothing you can do to live a normal life. You think you can alter the past? What’s your alteration for that?”
“You’re a man of moving water, Carson,” he said. “You need it nearby to make you flourish, right?”
I had been surrounded by water in Mobile, surrounded by water on Matecumbe Key. Flowing water seemed to soothe my soul and I could no more live in a desert region than on the moon. I stared as my brother opened the huge shower stall and turned a handle. Torrents of water poured from every direction, splashing, mingling, the floor speckling with overspray.
“Yes, I like moving water,” I said, perplexed. “So what?”
He turned off the water, put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the door.
“Then always trust a river, Carson.”
38
Debro was in his apartment considering the proper punishment for Billy Prestwick. He sat in a chair with a laptop on his thighs, studying Prestwick’s Facebook page. The posts were little more than drivel, self-absorbed twinks jabbering to other self-absorbed twinks.
So gud 2CU last nite at Stallion, Billy. Where did U get cool shades? I NEED a pair like. Kisses.
Why is Life so HURTFULL? Cant Peeple be NICE? Someone send me FLOWERS.
Heading 2 Bink’s Lounge 10 minutes … any U sluts want 2 par-tay?
He opened Prestwick’s photos: Twenty-one separate albums holding a total of 312 photos. They were all basically the same: Billy Prestwick grinning in a bar, smiling on the beach, making gangster fingers on a street corner, sticking his pink tongue out at the camera, standing shirtless beside a mirror. His pretty face smiling beside a dozen different drinks.
Selfies, mostly … pictures of Prestwick that Prestwick had put on Facebook.
Look at me, they said. See how pretty I am.
On my ride eastward I was in a fog of Jeremy’s making. Any trip to see my brother ended up giving me a few answers, while generating even more questions. He was actually living in Key West. He had changed his name to reflect mine, and intertwined our fictional histories. For better or worse – as far as anyone caring to dig deep into my history was concerned – I now had a brother.
I doubted Jeremy had come to Key West to hunker down within his house, thus becoming subject to tens of thousands of eyes. All it took was one sensitive pair to see him, log into one of several law-enforcement sites, and call the local cops.
“Yeah, this is Johnny Baker … a county cop in Spitwhistle, Oklahoma. Me and the missus are here on a vacation and – you’re gonna shit – but I think I just spotted Jeremy Ridgecliff from the FBI listings. I followed him to this big-ass house. Hang on, lemme give you the address …”
And after Jeremy was hauled away, curious detectives would dig into his fictional past to see how he had pulled it off, finding his lies looped around mine.
If he went down, I followed.
I had spent almost a year with the FCLE, a dream job I hoped would carry me to the end of my career. But into the bright Florida sun had a come a shadow: my brother, using fractured logic to bind his dangerous past to mine. I had thought I was safe. In fact, I was supremely vulnerable.
I was crossing Duck Key when my phone gave the ringtone for case contacts, a four-note theme from an ancient television series called The Twilight Zone, which, given my cases, seemed appropriate.
My smartphone let me speak while driving. As could my vehicle, which said, “Call from Derek Scott” in the voice of a friendly lady.
“Answer call,” I said, then heard the connection establish.
“Detective Carson Ryder here, Mr Scott. What can I do for you?”
“Hello, D-Detective. You wuh-wanted to know how things w-went with m-my meeting with Muh-Mr Ocampo?”
I hadn’t specifically asked that Scott call me with the results of his meeting, but I figured he’d picked up on my concern for Gary when setting up the meeting and was doing me a good turn by reporting back.
“No big deal, Derek, but sure … I’d be interested in how he is. I’m concerned about what the stress might be doing to his health. How’d things go?”
“I, uh … fine. We t-talked. Sure, he’s got his troubles and all, but, uh, it was n-n-nice of him to want to see me and …”
His mild stammer verged on full-blown stuttering, which often happened with stress. I cleared my throat. “I’m getting the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me, Mr Scott.”
>
A sigh. “The meeting with M-Mr Ocampo w-was, um, unsettling. Maybe embarrassing.”
“Can you talk about it?”
“Uh … it’s sorta, uh …”
He was obviously uncomfortable. I checked my watch. I hadn’t planned on going into Miami, but there was time.
I said, “Sometimes these things are best discussed face to face instead of on cold little plastic devices.”
“I hate them,” he said, “phones. Always have. That doesn’t mean I don’t use them all the tuh-t-time, we have to, right? Otherwise we’d be living in 1910 and never talk to anyone who w-wasn’t in front of us.”
Even though I could talk at my steering wheel and have my voice heard in a phone a thousand miles distant, I felt the same way.
“You want me to come see you?”
“I live in B-Belle Glade, over an hour away. I’m not there, anyway. I’m in a b-bar, the Cool Melon, just a bit north of downtown, you could come here a lot faster. It’s a regular bar, buh-by the way.”
“Doesn’t make a difference, Derek. Save me a stool.”
I was there in fifteen minutes, a neighborhood pub near Miramar. Scott was at the end of the bar with a beer mug at his elbow.
“What went on with Gary?” I said as I pulled up a stool. “You said something about embarrassing?”
“Everything w-went like I expected at first. Mr Ocampo apologized several times, telling me he wasn’t like his brother, that he was s-sickened by what was happening. I told him it was fine, there was no way he could be responsible, even if the guy was a twin, Gary was a d-different person.”
“What I pretty much expected.”
“I was there maybe ten minutes, hoping maybe tuh-talking to me made him feel better. But when I got up to leave he still seemed so sad. I felt terrible for him, for all that s-seemed wrong in his life. I leaned over to g-give him a hug, kinda wondering how to do it … all that buh-bigness. And he – he …”
