by Nick Petrie
The images were striking, and brought the war sharply back to him. The first pictures were obviously taken during active combat, armed men with rifles up and fear in their eyes. Some of the men wore U.S. uniforms, others wore dress shirts or knockoff T-shirts over dirty pants and sneakers. A few more in turbans and shalwar kameez.
“You were with the insurgents, too?”
“I was with everyone,” she said. “I wanted to capture the war. To show its cost to all sides.”
The next photos were of the wounded. Again, some were Americans with blood on their BDUs, some were civilians in primitive hospitals. As he flipped through, he realized that the later pictures included the dead. Fighters from all sides, but also women and children.
“How long were you there?”
“Ten years, on and off. Twelve embeds, each anywhere from a week to a month. Seven of those in combat.”
He shook his head. “You’re crazy.”
“You were there, too,” she pointed out.
“I signed up,” he admitted. “I wanted to do some good. Now I just try not to remind myself of it every day.”
“Well, that’s my job,” she said. “To bear witness for everyone else. To remind people of what happens when we go to war. It’s not pleasant.”
“No,” he said. “It’s not. Nothing else quite like it.”
“Yeah, that’s fucked up, right?” She shook her head. “You’d think after the first time I got shot at, or my hotel got shelled, or I saw the aftermath of a drone attack or market bombing, I’d never sign up again. When actually, that’s the reason I kept going back.”
Peter knew exactly what she meant.
The sun never shone so brightly as when somebody was trying to kill you.
The next group of photos showed more ruined buildings, more wounded men and women, more lifeless bodies sprawled in the dirt. But the buildings were small Cape Cods or bungalows. The men and women were mostly black, wearing Levi’s or sundresses or sports jerseys or plain white T-shirts. Wanda hadn’t taken these in Iraq or Afghanistan.
“That’s my new project,” she said. “Memphis. A different kind of war zone, but the job is the same. Document the waste and dignify the dead.”
“You ever think about shooting landscapes?” he asked. “Maybe flowers? Or butterflies?”
“You sound like my last girlfriend,” she said sourly. “Wanted me to do celebrity weddings. I do have some portraits, but those won’t be in this show. I have to get this done first.”
“When I got here, you said something about talking with the police today?”
“Right.” She bent to a laptop on the corner of the worktable, and plucked a small USB drive from its socket. “I already downloaded all my images from yesterday and isolated all the faces and license plates.”
“Really, did you get any sleep last night?”
Wanda waved a hand dismissively. “Who needs sleep?”
He looked at her, at the dark suitcases she was carrying under her eyes, at the forward lean like she was walking into a high wind. “Maybe you?”
She drained her coffee mug. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Then pulled a small black notebook from her front pocket and riffled the pages until she found a business card, which she handed to him. DETECTIVE JAMES GANTRY, MEMPHIS POLICE, DETECTIVE 2ND GRADE.
“He said he’d call, he wanted to stop by this morning.” Wanda glanced at her phone, then back to the prints laid out on the worktable. “The thing is, I really need to finish getting ready for this show.”
“You need to meet with the police, Wanda. This is a big deal.”
“It’s an inconvenience. I don’t have the time.” Her face distorted with the words, and her narrow shoulders rose as if the pain was physical. She clenched her phone tightly in her long fingers. She was practically vibrating in place. “What I need to do is work.”
Peter glanced from the smashed front of the house to the clean, ordered worktable with its neat grid of photographs, then to the back of the house with its clutter and mess, the tangled blanket on the couch, the dishes piled in the sink.
Suddenly claustrophobic, Peter felt the white static rising up like a signal flare.
There was definitely something else going on with Wanda Wyatt, he thought.
Something worse than a dump truck in her living room.
“Okay.” He pointed at the cell phone clutched in her fist. “They’ll call you on this, right?” He reached out slowly, gently, and tugged on the phone. “Let me help, okay? I’ll take care of it.”
She opened her hand without taking her eyes from the vivid images of beautiful carnage laid out on the table. “Take it,” she said. “Whatever.”
Outside, the warm, clean smell of last night’s rain on dirt and grass and pavement poured through him like some kind of medicine.
9
Before he did anything else, Peter arranged for the delivery of a heavy-duty thirty-yard Dumpster in Wanda’s front yard, and scheduled a lumber drop for later that afternoon. He was going to need to reinforce the frame of her house if they were going to get that dump truck out of there. Right now, it was the only thing holding up the building.
Next, he used Wanda’s phone to call the Memphis detective, but got sent to voice mail. The message was barely audible, as if it was recorded on speakerphone while driving on the freeway with the window down.
Peter gave his name, then said, “Wanda Wyatt asked me to call you for a progress report. She’s working today and won’t answer her phone, so best to call me directly.”
He left his cell number, then went to unlock the cargo box on the back of his truck. He hadn’t been able to manage more than a single sip of Wanda’s paint-smelling coffee, so he parked himself on her porch, unpacked his little one-burner backpacking stove, and fired up the old-fashioned espresso pot June had given him for his birthday.
While he waited for the little pot to do its magic trick, he put a spoonful of brown sugar and a splash of cream into his fancy double-walled featherweight titanium cup—another gift from June, Peter’s camp kitchen getting pretty upscale these days—then diced up onions, red pepper, and cured sausage and threw it all into his little Teflon saucepan with a slab of butter. When the espresso was done, he poured it into his mug, gave it a stir, then set the saucepan on the flame to cook.
He’d already used his last eggs on the drive east, but still had some leftover cooked rice, so he dumped that into the pan to soak up the butter and oil from the sausage. He was almost out of groceries. While he was crumbling the last of the cotija cheese on top to glue it all together, Wanda’s phone rang.
Peter turned off the stove and picked up the phone.
“Wanda Wyatt’s office.”
“This is Detective Gantry of the Memphis Police.” With a crisp cell connection, Gantry sounded like the older, Vegas-era Elvis, the same resonant, Mid-Southern voice, each word sliding into the next. Peter pictured a black velvet pompadour. “Is Ms. Wyatt there?”
“She’s not available. This is her assistant, Peter.” True enough for the moment. “I left you a message earlier. She asked me to talk with you.”
“Please tell Ms. Wyatt I can’t make it this morning. Something’s come up.”
Peter could hear a cascade of sirens in the background. “Sounds like you’re busy. But this thing has gone from simple harassment to major property damage, and I’m concerned about what might happen next. Please tell me you’ve made some progress.”
“Well, we’ve eliminated a few things,” Gantry said. “Things” sounded like thangs. “The dump truck came from a black-owned excavation company. It’s not a huge outfit, we’ve talked to all but two of their people. One is in intensive care after getting the crap kicked out of him outside a bar in Orange Mound, the other is in North Carolina picking up his daughter from Wake Forest. The office was broken into and the keys were
taken from a locked cabinet. I’m confident the truck was stolen out of their yard and nobody there was involved.”
“What about the computer stuff, the email threats and the video?”
“No luck there, either. The guy used a free email account to send the burning-cross video. There were no identifiers on the image or the camera used. The electronic trail ends at an Internet café outside of Oxford, Mississippi. The store manager says they don’t have cameras and they don’t require ID from people who pay cash. There’s no way this guy would use his own credit card to pay for computer time, but the store manager won’t even release those names without a court order. We don’t have jurisdiction there, and it’s not a priority for the locals. So, another roadblock. Maybe that’s intentional, too.”
“Okay, he’s not sophisticated enough to hide behind an Eastern European firewall, but he’s not stupid, either,” said Peter. “Does it bother you that figuring out how to send an anonymous email and stealing a dump truck are fairly different skill sets?”
“It does, actually.” The detective paused, recalibrating. “Tell me who you are again?”
“I’m a friend, trying to help. You know Wanda’s house was bought at auction, right? And that she just moved in? Did you talk to the former owner?”
“Golly, thanks for the tip,” Gantry said dryly. “Tip” sounded like teeyup. “Today’s my first day on the job.”
“I thought you sounded new,” said Peter. Then, “Sorry. I’m worried about Wanda.”
“I get you. I’m worried, too. But you really think the guy who lost his house is pissed enough to wreck it trying to kill the new owner?”
“Shit, I don’t know. It’s the only actual idea I had.”
The sound of pages turning. “The previous owner’s name is Vinson Charles, he goes by Vinny. A year ago, he was in a car accident. According to the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, he was going something like ninety miles an hour on I-55, lost control, and hit a concrete bridge abutment. According to Vinny, the Devil ran him off the road, trying to kill him.” More pages turning. “Vinny was fairly stoned, I gather. Either way, he’s lucky to be alive. The investigating officer found enough drugs stashed inside that car—heroin, methamphetamine, and ten kinds of pills—to get the State of Tennessee high for a month. After the hospital, he went to Henning for eight to thirty, and he’s still there. So it’s probably not him.”
“Could he have arranged this from prison?”
“A year later?” Peter could practically hear Gantry roll his eyes. “Son, you watch too much of that teevee. Vinny Charles is nobody, just a mule moving weight like a hundred others. He had no fancy lawyer, just a Shelby County public defender who pled him guilty. Anyway, along with the sentence came a hefty fine, and to pay it, the State of Tennessee took his house and sold it. He’d inherited the place from his uncle, so he owned it free and clear. The woman who oversaw the sale told me that house was no prize.”
“So you’ve eliminated a few things,” Peter said. “You find anything leading you forward?”
“A whole lotta nothin’ goin’ on,” said Gantry, sounding more like Elvis than ever. “Now I got a question. By any chance, are you licensed to carry a firearm?”
“Not in this state,” Peter said. “I haven’t owned a gun for years.” Although, somehow, he kept finding one in his hand, again and again. He was thinking of finding one now. “Why do you ask?”
“Usually in these neighborhoods, violence starts as some kind of personal beef. One guy throws a punch, the other guy pulls a knife, or does a drive-by later. A lot of wannabe gangster stuff. Mostly young men killing each other over territory, or pride, or ambition, or fear. Most of these kids think they got no other options, and most of them don’t.”
He cleared his throat. “But this thing with Ms. Wyatt, it’s different. And like you said, it’s escalating. So you need to watch your back, and find Ms. Wyatt someplace else to stay. Because whoever has it in for her, and whatever they want? They’re not going away until they get it.”
10
Peter went looking for Wanda. He found her on the couch, sprawled out like a corpse, limbs loose, the blanket kicked off onto the floor. He figured her sleeping was a positive development, although the open bottle of Tito’s vodka on the coffee table was not. They’d talk about getting her out of that house when she woke up. He left her phone in the kitchen with the ringer off.
The white static was starting to crackle and spark, even though he was back outside. Like a kind of radar, the static had its uses. It reminded him to keep one eye on his surroundings.
He started his truck and sat behind the wheel with the door open and the motor running while he punched in a phone number from memory.
“Jarhead.” The answering voice was like motor oil, slippery and dark and latent with combustion. “June told me you were on the loose again. How’s that leg holding up?”
“Good as new,” Peter said. “How’s married life? Dinah and the boys?”
“Nothin’ but trouble. Damn kids.” That wide, tilted smile coming through with every word. “Where’re you at and what you need?”
“I’m in Memphis, and I need a gun.”
“Never been to Memphis,” Lewis said. “Love that Memphis sound, though.”
“What, you don’t know a guy?”
Lewis always knew a guy. Usually more than one.
He was a career criminal who had done Peter a big favor, a few years back. Then he’d refused to accept his full negotiated share of the windfall that had come from it, probably because he’d ended up reunited with his childhood sweetheart and her two boys. Despite Peter’s attempts to convince him to the contrary, Lewis still seemed to feel pretty strongly that he’d gotten the better end of the bargain. It didn’t seem to make any difference that he’d saved Peter’s ass several times since.
“Don’t know nobody in Memphis,” said Lewis. “I’m told it’s like Detroit, only smaller. Which means you pick the right corner and stand there long enough, somebody either gonna point a gun at you or try to sell you one. Either way works if you got the right attitude. Or I could bring something down outta inventory, if you want some company.”
“You’re a married man and a father,” said Peter. “You’re supposed to be retired, remember? Stay home with Dinah and those boys.”
“Some guys go to Vegas, others to spring training,” said Lewis. “No reason I couldn’t come to Memphis. Listen to some music, eat a little barbecue.”
“Maybe,” said Peter. “But not yet. I don’t want you scaring the locals.”
Lewis’s laugh was long and deep. “’Cause you such a damn pussycat.”
11
Memphis had a few legendary bad neighborhoods, but Frayser was near the top of the list and it was close to Wanda’s house. He drove a few blocks east, then turned north on Watkins.
He passed vacant lots, auto repair shops, a trailer park. After Levee Road came a service lot for city buses, then a giant junkyard called U-Pull-It Auto Parts, with a broad dirty swath of water barely visible through the trees on the right. On a long bridge, he crossed a sluggish brown river bounded by trees on both sides. Then under the freeway, past a row of humming high-tension power lines, and into Frayser.
Here, Watkins lacked Midtown’s signs of emerging prosperity. He saw a string of run-down gas stations, a pawn shop, a tire shop. Empty buildings and vacant lots everywhere.
Peter needed gas before he could do any more recon. He pulled into a Texaco on the corner of Watkins and Delano, three pumps and a red-brick convenience store guarded by iron grates and steel poles set in concrete. For a commercial street, the area seemed weirdly empty. As if everyone had just left town.
Memphis reminded Peter of some parts of Milwaukee. It had plenty of decent-looking homes, with fresh paint and well-tended gardens, but also more than its share of vacant lots and boarded-up houses. Land was ob
viously cheap here. Some buildings had clearly been abandoned for years, sagging into themselves while nameless weeds around them grew up into tangled shrubs and misshapen trees.
He ran his card through the slot, then unscrewed his gas cap and set it on top of the pump. As he lifted the pump handle, a boxy red car came down the road. Something from the eighties, Peter thought, with a terminal rattle, trailing smoke that smelled like a refinery fire.
How that car was still running was anybody’s guess. Peter imagined some shade-tree repairman with two screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a spool of baling wire, and a box of used hose clamps. From the smoke and the gasping engine, it was clear that baling wire could only do so much.
When the car slowed for the corner, the driver peered out the side window at Peter. He was improbably young and skinny, with a haunted look on his face that reminded Peter of the kids he’d seen in war zones. Kids who’d seen too many people die, who’d lost family or friends. Kids who might never be quite right again.
Peter happened to agree with Wanda, that the worst parts of Memphis—or Detroit or Chicago or Milwaukee, for that matter—were just a different kind of war zone. He had friends from the service who’d grown up in those places. Not much opportunity, and people fighting each other over the scraps. The deck stacked against you from the start. Even if you were better than good, even if you were smarter and more talented and worked harder than everyone else, the violence was random and ruthless and could take anyone at any time. Getting out of those neighborhoods was more difficult than anything Peter had ever done, and took more luck than he’d ever had.
The pump ticked off the gallons. Peter thought about Wanda’s house and the steps he’d take to shore it up. When he heard the scuff of a shoe behind him, he swung around.
The same skinny kid from the red car stood now between Peter’s front bumper and the reinforced steel post protecting the corner of the pump island. The red car was nowhere in sight.
