Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Michael Wiley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Note on the Daniel Turner Thrillers

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Two

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Part Three

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Recent Titles by Michael Wiley

  The Joe Kozmarski Series

  LAST STRIPTEASE

  THE BAD KITTY LOUNGE

  A BAD NIGHT’S SLEEP

  The Detective Daniel Turner Mysteries

  BLUE AVENUE *

  SECOND SKIN *

  * available from Severn House

  SECOND SKIN

  Michael Wiley

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2016

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Michael Wiley.

  The right of Michael Wiley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Wiley, Michael, 1961- author.

  Second skin. – (The Detective Daniel Turner mysteries)

  1. Police–Florida–Jacksonville–Fiction. 2. Murder–

  Investigation–Fiction. 3. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8534-0 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-638-1 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-698-4 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to the many people who helped make this book happen, especially:

  To Dr Mike Lehman, former Navy Lieutenant Commander, for experiences and pathologies, familiar and strange. To Homicide Detectives K.L. Haines and John Hinton, for shades of darkness. To Staley Pattishall, for the grim work in another fight long ago. To Howard Edde, Nancy Kane Ohanian, and Robert Zieger, for pulp and paper, and to Wilbur Cross, Faith Mitchell, and Joseph Opala, for insights into the Gullah. To Julia Burns and Sam Kimball, for readings and talks. To Philip Spitzer and Lukas Ortiz, for the good fight. To Julie, Isaac, Maya, and Elias, for loving and laughing. To George, Sally, Deb, and Peter, for loving and forbearing. To that noirest of poets, Emily Dickinson, for ‘“Hope” is the thing,’ ‘My Life had stood,’ ‘Apparently with no Surprise,’ ‘After great pain,’ ‘I cannot live with You,’ ‘I heard a Fly buzz,’ ‘Not with a Club,’ and ‘I’m “wife.”’ And to Walt Whitman, for ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ and ‘The Wound-Dresser,’ and Lord Byron, for ‘Fare Thee Well.’

  NOTE ON THE DANIEL TURNER THRILLERS

  In each of the Daniel Turner Thrillers, Homicide Detective Daniel Turner plays an important secondary role. He is the common element in others’ lives and deaths, getting caught in the spirals of crime that he investigates. These are North Florida city and swamp thrillers – set far from the well-traveled crime fiction of Miami Beach, Disney World, and the Everglades – and the people who star in them are city and swamp characters.

  In writing about them, I dig into the psychologies and motives of heroes and antiheroes, persecutors and victims, criminals and seekers of justice (legal or vigilante), the beautiful and the ugly. Daniel Turner is a character in their stories. He is their brother, their childhood friend, their enemy, and their protector, and they love him or hate him – or sometimes think barely at all about him – as we do the people in our lives who hurt us and save us.

  Emerging from others’ shadows, Turner is the man who, at the end, wears a badge showing his right to use deadly force and to order the world. When the dust settles, if it settles, he embodies the law – shaky, just or unjust, sometimes arbitrary but generally necessary.

  When we were children, our nurse, to keep us quiet, often poured molasses in our hands and then gave us a wad of feathers.

  Lillian Smith

  ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.

  Emily Dickinson

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Lillian

  No one ever calls desire a deadly sin but they should – more than lust or greed or appetite or envy. William Blake says it’s better to murder an infant than nurse unacted desires. Satisfy desire or kill it, or it will kill you. I’ve always known that. That’s what first threw me into Johnny’s arms. And that’s what I taught Sheneel Greene. But then her chair was empty – empty as an empty cradle, an empty bed, an empty heart.

  Her chair stood in the front row, third from the right. She sat between a tall Cuban boy named Angelo and an Asian kid whose name I could never remember though I saw him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon for more than a month; couldn’t remember because when my eyes scanned the room, they stopped on Sheneel Greene and stayed too long, until she smiled or looked away.

  She had pale skin, like a salt block, so translucent the blue of her veins seemed to rise through it. Her white hair dropped past her shoulders. She had slate-gray eyes like the eyes of some fair-skinned blacks. Mostly she wore jeans and a red T-shirt with the word Ngafa on the front. Midway through a class on Emily Dickinson, I asked what Ngafa meant.

  ‘Bad spirit,’ she said.

  ‘In what language?’

  She smiled and looked away.

  So I read to the who
le class from Dickinson, but mostly to her:

  My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun –

  In Corners – till a Day

  The owner passed – identified –

  And carried Me away.

  I said, ‘Dickinson was tiny, like a wren, but she called herself a loaded gun. You can hear her desire. A loaded gun aches for a finger to shoot it.’

  Angelo grinned. In our town, almost everyone owned a gun – for hunting, sport, protection, aggression, all four – and mixing a rifle with sex could make a poetry lover even of a kid whose grammar consisted mostly of grunts.

  Sheneel Greene’s eyes lit up too. The words seemed to thrill her as a lover’s hands on her body might. After class, she said, ‘I love Emily Dickinson,’ intoning love the way only a nineteen-year-old can, with a mix of crumbling innocence and half-secured experience.

  I taught to her, and she seemed to hook into the books we read with a tender-fleshed intensity. Every good teacher knows that there’s an erotic to teaching, not so different from the kind that drives a girl down between her teacher’s knees in his office after class or carries a boy to his teacher’s bed where she touches his hairless chest. It’s a dance in which teacher and student anticipate each other’s moves and they move with a grace that feels almost physical, though it need not be.

  I danced with Sheneel Greene. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon for a month.

  Then she was gone, her chair empty. One class meeting, two, a week, ten days. I felt the class slipping from me.

  None of Sheneel’s classmates knew her phone number. I asked them with the false airiness of a woman who suspects a friend is avoiding her, or a new lover whose calls have gone unanswered. ‘She lives in Fernandina,’ said the Asian boy whose name I couldn’t remember.

  ‘Samuel Huang. Sam,’ he said, annoyed, when I gave him an uncertain look.

  The department secretary pulled the phone number and address on her computer. Samuel Huang was right: Sheneel lived in Fernandina, a beachfront town on a barrier island thirty miles to the north, where people moved when they tired of the city, though fumes from the paper mills overpowered the ocean air both day and night, and the noise of shipping trucks sounded over the bell-like music of halyards and metal hardware on the shrimp trawlers.

  I closed my office door and dialed. Sheneel’s number rang four times and voicemail picked up. Her voice still surprised me. It was deep and rough for a pale, little girl, though it lilted Southern as only the voices of multigenerational Southerners’ voices did. ‘Leave a message,’ she said.

  I did, with false airiness. She had missed five classes, I said. We’d finished Dickinson and started Whitman. Read ‘Song of Myself.’ Feel free to call me. ‘Please,’ I added, though it was a non sequitur except in the economy of desire.

  Her chair remained empty all the following week.

  Students often dropped out of classes. They got jobs, got pregnant, got high or drunk, got into fights with their families or friends, and going to school no longer mattered. I should have forgotten Sheneel Greene, focused on the kids who remained.

  Then Eileen Rothenstein called from Student Counseling and asked, ‘Has Sheneel Greene come to class this week?’

  ‘She’s been gone for three.’

  ‘Has she emailed or called?’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Her friends haven’t seen her, and her brother has reported her missing. I can’t say much, but we’re worried. Let me know if you hear from her.’

  ‘Why would she contact me?’

  She hesitated. ‘She talks about you during our sessions. I think she feels close to you.’

  What sessions? Why did she talk about me? I wouldn’t go there. ‘Have you talked to her parents?’ I asked.

  ‘Sheneel and her parents had a falling out. She has her brother and her friends. And people like you.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if she calls.’

  ‘She’s a good kid,’ Eileen Rothenstein said, ‘but she’s also a danger to herself.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You understand, I’m crossing professional lines in saying this much.’

  ‘What kind of danger?’

  ‘You’ll let me know right away if you hear from her?’

  When we hung up, I sat for a long time. A picture of Emily Dickinson stared at me from the cover of a book on my desk. Her face was as pearl-white as Sheneel Greene’s. But her eyes were dark and spread too far apart, her hair also dark and parted crookedly, her black dress topped by a black ribbon at her throat. Only the gentle inward curve of her neck indicated that she might have sweated with desire.

  The afternoon sun shined through the window into the office. During the summer, heat radiated from the glass, but now in late February, though the weather outside was turning warm, the glass seemed a solid barrier. What did Dickinson say? The blonde assassin passes on, The sun proceeds unmoved. Dickinson had violence in her heart. She was as tiny as a wren – and she wrote wren-like poems, poems of few words and bird-like immediacy – but wrens eat meat and they tear other living creatures mid-flight from the sky.

  Sheneel was a danger to herself. What did that mean?

  I should have let Student Counseling deal with this. I should have returned to my class and taught the students who showed up.

  But I carried my thoughts about Sheneel Greene home to Johnny. I talked with him about her with forced airiness. I told him all I knew. I said that he should look for her. I did it for myself, though I pretended it would be good for him, since he too had torn at himself ever since he’d been back, and maybe searching for a self-destructive girl would turn out well for both her and him.

  TWO

  Johnny

  Felicity came through the glass door of my office, dragging a wicked trail of truck exhaust and the bitter smell of roadside weeds that always hung over Philips Highway.

  ‘Cigarette?’ she said.

  She was a tall, black woman, heavy-boned. Her skin, tight over her cheekbones, glistened with sweat. She generally wandered the mile stretch of highway between Emerson and University with a brass-topped cane, though I once saw her with a wooden walking staff topped by a head whittled and painted to look like a grizzly bear.

  ‘Cigarette?’ she said again.

  ‘I’ve told you I don’t smoke,’ I said.

  ‘The hell you don’t.’ She turned to leave.

  The stories said she’d worked this stretch for forty years and more, from before the government built the Interstate, when traffic backed up a quarter-mile at the stoplights and a girl could walk the line ignoring all but the men in Cadillacs. Now, in the two months since I’d set up my agency in the rental, I’d never seen a car stop or slow for her. A guy named Farouk Bashandi, who’d opened a restaurant called Sahara Sandwiches Shop a hundred yards south from me, said he’d once seen her get into a beat-up Chevrolet van, but that was it. Few men fantasized about a sixty-year-old hooker with a gimp leg unless sex had come to smell to them like death and dying.

  I asked, ‘How’s business?’

  ‘I’m too old for the butcher,’ she said. ‘You can lead me around on a chain but I can’t carry a load, so what good am I?’ She smiled, and she still had all of her teeth. ‘Business is middling.’

  ‘You can sit here awhile,’ I said. ‘Breathe the air conditioning. Stay out of the dust.’

  She stared at me, and her eyes glinted with something – gratitude, shame, craziness?

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s time for me to go back where I came from.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ I asked.

  She smiled again but with a nasty edge. ‘I crawl outta de swamp.’

  She was making fun of me, but I said, ‘Like the rest of us.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth.’ The mockery was gone. Or was it? ‘How’s business with you?’

  ‘Middling,’ I said.

  ‘Far as I see, sugar, I’m the only one that’s walked through your door since you unlocked it and h
ung up your sign.’

  ‘Takes a while to build up clients.’

  ‘Sure it does,’ she said, and looked at me slyly. ‘Isn’t your job to find things? That’s what skip tracing is?’

  I nodded. ‘More or less.’

  ‘Then find me a cigarette.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You give me a cigarette, you can take me any way you want.’

  ‘I don’t want you, and I don’t smoke.’

  ‘The hell you don’t. Look at yourself in the mirror. Your head’s on fire.’

  ‘You’re more than a little crazy,’ I said.

  She laughed at that. ‘Bye-bye, sugar, till next time,’ and went out through the glass door.

  Afternoon sunlight bent through the gap between the door and the frame, and I stared at it until the door swung closed. Light like that could blind a man, but I’d learned that if you closed your eyes for even a second – if you let your mind wander to the skin of the woman you loved, or you whistled a song you’d heard that morning in your bunk – a bomb might explode under your feet, or a quarter-inch piece of metal, shot from a shadowy window a block away, might rip into your jaw. I’d seen the damage. I’d tagged it and zipped it into bags. I’d smelled the meat and ammonia of dead men in gray-metal rooms, two decks down, as the ship around me lowered side to side so slowly I felt the movement only in the deep part of my belly. But it moved and in its movement revealed that the whole earth at its center is liquid and undependable. They called the job soft duty and gave it a name that painted over the bloody rooms in which I performed it: Corpsman, HM3, in the Deceased Personnel Mortuary Affairs Division. Preparing plastic bags for the 346th Airlift Wing, who would refuel in Germany and then fly straight to a giant warehouse in Dover, Delaware. Joint operations duty. Soft duty – a hundred miles offshore from the bombs that exploded under men’s feet and the pieces of metal that ripped into their jaws.