Racing the Devil

by Jaden Terrell

  “We’ve got your fingerprints. We’ve got your name all through her Palm Pilot. We’ve got a message from you on her voice mail telling her she’s one dead bitch if she doesn’t quit screwing around. We’ve got a witness puts your truck at the crime scene, and the receptionist there says a man of your approximate height and weight checked into that room. Guy had a beard, but we all know you wear disguises.”

  “You think I’m dumb enough to leave my hair and semen all over a crime scene? Or forget to wipe my prints? You think I’m dumb enough to leave a threat like that on tape?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so. But it’s a crime of passion, which as we both know, makes men stupid.”

  “You really think I did this?”

  “I don’t know what I think. Why don’t you give us all a break? Come on in and tell us how it happened.”

  “I can’t tell you how it happened. I wasn’t there.”

  I heard a long exhalation on the other end of the line. When he spoke again, his voice had softened. “Mac, I can help you, but you gotta give me something.”

  The nickname was a razor through the heart. I’d trusted Frank with my life, as he had trusted me with his, and now that trust was eroding like a child’s sand castle. But if he could still call me ‘Mac,’ maybe there was hope for it. I squeezed a breath past the knot in my throat and said, “Look, I’ll get back to you later, when I know what’s going on.”

  I hung up before they could trace the call. Hand on the receiver, I laid my throbbing forehead against the wall and thought about Heather.

  I’ll get rid of this on the way to the fridge. But had she? She’d stopped at the trash basket, but had she actually dropped the condom in it? Or had she put it in the refrigerator when she went to get the wine? I remembered how she’d held the glasses, primly, by the stems, and thought that maybe it was something more than primness that had made her hold them that way.

  Here, hold this. She’d gotten my prints on both glasses.

  Semen, hair, and fingerprints. While there were plenty of people who could have gotten prints and hair samples, she was the only one who’d had access to semen in quite a while.

  But why?

  How long had she been planning this perfect little murder?

  I think a murder would be interesting.

  Had she chosen me to be her fall guy because I was convenient? Was I just the one she happened to pick up?

  But if that was the case, how had she gotten my voice on the victim’s voice mail?

  And who was the man with the beard? The elusive, abusive Ronnie? Had there ever even been a Ronnie?

  I thought about the note she’d left. I’m sorry.

  Sorry for what, I had wondered.

  Now I knew.

  I WIPED A LINE of perspiration from my forehead and left the motel on foot. My shirt was plastered to my back before I even made it out of the parking lot.

  I made my next call from the diner across the street and ordered a pot of coffee to occupy me until my ride arrived. His name was Billy, like about a million other good ol’ boys from the South. I have personally known three Billy Rays, a Billy Don, a Billy Jack, a Billy Bob, two Billy Joes, and even, once, a Billy Bill. William Bill Burleson. It said so on his birth certificate.

  My buddy’s name was William Mean, which had, in his army days, been shortened to the more descriptive (and more accurate) Billy Mean. In military fashion, he’d found himself called “Mean, William,” which eventually became Mean Billy, or sometimes even Mean Billy Mean.

  Back then, he was shaped like a sparkplug, all bone and gristle under muscles packed hard as a buffalo’s. Now that bone and muscle was blanketed under fifty pounds of fat. But Billy was no prey animal. He’d been in Special Forces, and he still moved that way, dangerous beneath the flab, like a caged tiger.

  He was three years younger than my father would have been, and back in the late sixties, had served two tours in Vietnam. Dad was Air Force and Billy was Army, but I wondered sometimes if their paths had ever crossed. There was no reason why they would have, but I wondered just the same.

  Billy swears, and I believe him, that he hardly felt afraid at all in ‘Nam. Fear was such a constant presence that he hardly even noticed it. But when he got back home, all that fear crashed down on him like fifty tons of bricks.

  He had night terrors. He was petrified of thunder. One afternoon, a woman spat at him as he was buying groceries. Another called him a rapist and a monster and a baby killer. Before long, he could hardly leave his own house.

  There was no money. His wife moved out and took their two-year-old daughter with her, and while Billy said he couldn’t blame her, it only made the black depression worse.

  One day, a buddy from his old platoon called up and said he had a plan to make them rich. It involved guns and a liquor store.

  It was desperate and stupid, and Mean Billy knew it. But he was desperate himself. And besides, it served the commie-hippie-liberal assholes he’d gone to war for right.

  The best thing to be said was that nobody died.

  After six hard years at DeBerry Correctional Facility in Nashville, he got out with a Bachelor’s in Social Science, a handful of grant applications, and a vision. Within the year, he’d wrangled a warehouse down on Seventh Avenue and turned it into a shelter for homeless men, mostly ex-vets and ex-cons. He arranged jobs for them and provided transportation in a faded Chevy van on which one of his clients had painted a not-too-shabby replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. He called it the Dream-mobile.

  His clients called it the Mean Machine.

  Twenty minutes after I called him, he pulled up in it and honked the horn.

  I paid my tab and went outside to catch my ride.

  “Think you might announce us to the whole damn neighborhood?” I brushed a petrified French fry off the passenger seat and slid inside. After a few fruitless tugs at the seat belt, I gave up and consoled myself with the hope that he’d drive less like a bottle rocket than usual.

  “Aw. Nobody’s watchin’.” He peeled out of the parking lot, dispelling my misguided optimism. “Now, tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

  “I wish I knew. Frank says they’ve got a boatload of evidence against me in this killing they had out at the Cedar Valley Motel night before last.” I told him about the hair, the prints, the tape, and the semen.

  “Jesus, buddy. That’s almost enough to make me think you did it.”

  “Don’t even joke around about that.” My tone was sharper than I’d intended.

  “Well, who have you been giving semen samples to?” He tugged at his grizzled beard and laughed at his own joke, his ruddy face reddening to the shade of a country ham.

  I shot him an annoyed look. “I know who planted the semen. I don’t know how they got the tape. I never met this woman, and I sure as hell never threatened to kill her.”

  “Which, if you was gonna do, you wouldn’t have announced on tape.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Nashville’s full of actors, buddy. Maybe they just found someone who sounds like you.”

  “Maybe.” It seemed unlikely, but if there was some other explanation, I had no idea what it might be.

  We drove to Billy’s place and I followed him up a narrow stairwell to the efficiency apartment he’d built above the shelter. He jiggled the key in the lock until it caught, then kicked the door open and made a sweeping gesture toward the living room—sagging brown leather couch, frayed tartan La-Z-boy, scuffed coffee table, and a twenty-nine inch TV way too heavy on the green. His battered maple desk was jammed into one corner, piled high with bulging manila folders. The room smelled stale, like sour socks beneath a veneer of Pine-Sol.

  “Welcome aboard, good buddy. Mi casa es su casa.”

  “Gracias,” I said, which was about the extent of my Spanish.

  “I’ve got a couple of appointments downstairs. Grab yourself a beer and make yourself at home. Stay as long as you need to.”

  He p
icked through the precariously balanced folders, eased out two fat files, and nudged the stacks back into place.

  “It won’t be long,” I said. “Don’t want them looking at you as an accessory after the fact.”

  “I’m already an accessory.”

  “They can’t prove you knew I was wanted when you picked me up. In a day or so, there won’t be any question.”

  His big shoulders hunched. “We’ll cross that river when we come to it. I owe you, boy, and I always pay my debts.”

  The debt he was referring to was one of my first cases: finding his daughter, Cambria, and arranging a reconciliation. The first part was a cakewalk; people who aren’t hiding from anything are easy to find. The reconciliation was tougher. Cam hadn’t seen her dad since she was two, and the chip on her shoulder was about the size of a redwood.

  In the end, she agreed to meet her father, and after a cool year, things had finally begun to warm up between them.

  “Hell, Billy, you already paid for that, remember? Two hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.”

  “Naw, man. You gave me back my little girl. That’ll never be paid back.”

  He said he’d be gone until about four-thirty, then took his massive self downstairs. When he was gone, I helped myself to two aspirins and a Dr. Pepper, plugged my phone in on Billy’s charger, left a brief message on Frank Campanella’s answering machine, and settled in to figure out my options.

  I knew I’d have to turn myself in sooner or later, but first I wanted to find out more about the woman I was supposed to have killed. Amanda Jean Hartwell. Amy. If I knew who she was, maybe I could determine who might have wanted her dead.

  And why her murder had been pinned on me.

  I still didn’t know why I’d been chosen. Had I just been at the wrong place at the wrong time, or did someone hold a grudge against me? There were plenty of candidates: guys whose insurance scams were derailed when I snapped photos of them lifting weights and dancing with their girlfriends, parents who’d lost custody of their children when embarrassing photographs surfaced, husbands who’d been caught with their pants down and lost half their assets in messy divorces.

  Not to mention all the scumbags I’d helped put away while I was still on the force.

  I grabbed a piece of paper and started jotting down names of people who might hate me enough to do this and be smart enough to pull it off.

  By the time Billy got back, I had covered most of the sheet. Some of the names weren’t really names at all, but descriptions. “Scraggly reddish brown hair, scar on left cheek, arrested for burglary.” “Big guy, lightning bolt tattoo, arrested on suspicion of rape.” Some were nicknames: Ice Pick, Hammerhead, Crossbones, Blade.

  I didn’t think any of the names would lead anywhere, but it was a place to start.

  Billy ordered us a sausage pizza with double cheese, which we washed down with a couple of Heinekens while we watched the evening news.

  Sure enough, my name was on it.

  My gut lurched when they showed the victim’s picture. Dropping my pizza back into the box, I leaned forward for a closer look.

  In the photo, Amy Hartwell stood in front of a Tudor-style stone house, her arms clasped around two young girls. Katrina and Tara, said the anchorwoman, ages twelve and seven. Amy’s hair and Tara’s were the same soft shade of golden-brown, like buttered toast. Katrina’s was as smooth and pale as corn silk.

  They were all smiling.

  The camera segued to an interview with the cleaning woman who had discovered the body. She was a buxom redhead in her fifties with a round, freckled face. Her hands, in her lap, twisted a frayed Kleenex into a corkscrew, and her eyes were swollen, rimmed with red.

  “It was early, you know, and she didn’t have . . . Ms. Hartwell didn’t have . . . the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the doorknob. So I used my key and went in . . . And I went in, and it was . . .” She stifled a sob. “There was a naked woman on the bed. Her legs were spread, like . . . like he . . . somebody . . . wanted her to be found that way.” She held the tissue to her nose and honked into it as the camera cut away to the reporter.

  This time, they didn’t say I was wanted for questioning.

  This time, they said I was a suspect.

  I leaned over and flipped the channel to the Nashville station, where local celebrity Ashleigh Arneau was delivering the same news in a breathy, husky voice that made murder seem like seduction. She batted her eyes at the audience, wide blue eyes she insisted on calling “wisteria.”

  On the screen behind her was a photograph of me with my eyes bulging and my mouth twisted in what was almost certainly a curse. I looked like a man with murder on his mind. In truth, I’d just dropped a hammer on my thumb.

  A real Kodak moment.

  I could imagine how Ashleigh must have salivated when she realized she had photos of a bona fide fugitive in her own personal archives.

  “Aw, shit,” Billy said. “Not that bitch.”

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  “A bad idea. I can tell. You don’t even have to tell me what it is.”

  “She can help me.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, when Hell freezes over. Didn’t she help you enough already?”

  “Billy . . .” I sighed. He was right. It was stupid. Of all the people in the world I shouldn’t trust, Ashleigh was at the top of the list. But she was also one of the few people in a position to help me out of the mess Heather had gotten me into.

  Besides . . .

  I punched the off button on the remote and said, “She owes me one.”

  ASHLEIGH ARNEAU AND I met in high school. She was Ashley Arnold then. Head cheerleader, vice president of the student body (“president of student body vices,” was the joke), drama queen, and star reporter for the Golden Bear Claw student newspaper. We didn’t date back then, although we did a few shows together. In The Crucible, she played Abigail to my John Proctor, which might have been an omen of things to come.

  But she was seeing a guy from MTSU, and I was dating a cute little junior who played clarinet in the band. The junior, Belinda Honeyman, was playing Goody Proctor, so there was little opportunity for conquest, even if either of us had been so inclined. By the time I ran into Ashleigh again, she was working as a reporter for a local TV station. She’d nose around the precinct house looking for a story, and I would spout whatever we’d been told to tell the press—usually “no comment.”

  I swear on my mother’s heart, I never slept with Ashleigh. Not while I was married, anyway. Maria has her doubts, but this is the God’s honest truth. Until six months after my divorce—by which time Maria was already seeing D.W.—my relationship with Ashleigh Arneau was strictly professional. But after my wife—my ex-wife—got serious about the man who would in time become my replacement, I took the plunge and asked Ashleigh to a live performance of Johnny Guitar at a local dinner theatre.

  We lasted for four months. Four months of drama, four months of her pleading with me for info on ongoing cases, four months of stimulating conversations and fantastic sex. And in the end, when I was called into the Commissioner’s office and relieved of duty for divulging sensitive information, it turned out to be four months of nothing.

  I called Ashleigh from a pay phone and told her I’d been fired. She made all the right noises, sympathetic and concerned, and I got home just in time to catch her removing the recording device she had placed in the receiver of my phone.

  There was an awkward silence. Then she asked, “Are you going to have me arrested?” Only the slightest tremor in her voice told me she was genuinely frightened of the prospect.

  I thought about it. Thought about what would happen to that exquisite body and that gorgeous face in prison. And I decided that, whatever she had done to me, I couldn’t put her through it.

  I looked squarely into those wisteria-colored eyes and said, “Get out.”

  She laid a cool hand on my forearm. “I’m sorry, Jared. I didn’t mean to get you fired. Only, you have no i
dea how fierce the competition is out there. If I don’t get these stories . . .”

  “Get out,” I repeated, and I guess she finally figured I meant it, because she left.

  I mailed her the rest of her belongings. There wasn’t much. Some lingerie, a few toiletries, and a couple of changes of clothes.

  I didn’t pee in her shampoo, but I thought about it.

  I hadn’t seen her since, except on TV, and even then I always tried to change the channel before she came on.

  Now, though, I hoped a sense of obligation and the lure of an exclusive would be enough to secure a little loyalty.

  Billy hovered over my shoulder as I dialed the number on my cell phone. When she answered, I drew in a breath. Her voice was still enough to drive a sane man mad.

  “Ashleigh, it’s Jared. Jared McKean.”

  “Jared!” She sounded surprised and a little eager. “How long has it been?”

  Not long enough, I thought, but did not say. “A little over a year. I saw you on the news tonight.”

  “Really?” A note of pleasure warmed her voice. “What did you think?”

  “Beautiful, as always. I wanted to talk to you about your lead story.”

  She gave a squeal of nervous laughter. “Yes, I imagine you do. But, Jared . . .”

  “Ashleigh, you know me. I didn’t kill this woman.”

  “Oh, I know. I’m sure this is all a big misunderstanding.” After a little pause, she added, “I understand they’ve got your DNA.”

  “They don’t have my DNA,” I said, though if my suspicions about Heather were true, they very well might. “They have my blood type. But I know that isn’t public information yet. You got taps on someone else’s line?”

  Long pause. “I have a contact on the force.”

  I took in a long, slow breath. “Look, Ash, enough fencing. I need your help.”

  Wary now. “Why should I help you?”

  Why, indeed. “Let’s start with, you used me, you lost me my job, and then you did a story on how I’d been dumped from the force—which was your fault to begin with. Now you’ve plastered my picture all over the news. Nice touch, by the way, choosing the one that makes me look like a homicidal maniac.”