Except that Scott was a bright kid. Too bright to be fooled or patronized.
“I shouldn’t have been that way to him the other night,” Katherine said then, and I didn’t know if she was taking to me or to herself.
I started to answer but didn’t, because I wasn’t sure what to say. I felt her stiffen as a car went by in the street outside and I knew we were both listening for the same thing: tires brushing a curb; a door slamming, footsteps on the walk.
More time passed, and finally she shifted onto her side, away from me. I reached over to touch her, then drew my hand back. There wasn’t anything I could do, and trying to soothe her wouldn’t bring him back.
We were both still staring into the darkness from our separate cocoons hours later when the phone rang beside the bed, sending shards of ice stabbing into my guts.
I grabbed it, hoping it was just a hospital, that he was hurt but would survive: you can’t ask for better when the phone rings at that time of night.
But it wasn’t the hospital, it was Mancuso, his voice sleep-fogged.
“I told you I’d put out the word,” he said. “I asked the shift supervisors to call me if anything turned up—”
“And?” My mouth was dry, and I sensed Katherine’s panic as she strained to listen, not knowing who it was.
“I also called the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department.”
I waited.
“They’re the ones who turned it up.”
“Turned up what, for God’s sake?”
“His car. It was found abandoned on the other side of the river, in Westwego.”
I closed my eyes, heart pounding. “Oh, God,” I breathed.
“Micah?” Katherine was reaching for the phone now, but I kept it in my hand.
“It’s his car,” I said. “They found it in Westwego. What else?” I asked into the receiver, scared of the answer.
“Nothing else,” the detective said. “It was in the Westwego Shopping Center lot. Must’ve sat there a day or two before they realized it had been dumped.”
I relayed the news to Katherine and heard her inhale sharply. I didn’t need to tell her that its being found in the shopping center wasn’t a good sign; whoever had taken it had been trying to delay its being found. On the other hand, it showed the kind of foresight you don’t find with street crime: Scott hadn’t been robbed and killed so somebody could get some money for crack.
“What did you find with it?” I asked.
“I haven’t been out there,” he said. “I’m just getting dressed. If you want, I can swing by and take you both over.”
I thought of red and blue cop lights strobing the night and the crime lab looking for traces of blood, and how it would all affect Katherine. And I knew it didn’t matter; she wasn’t about to stay here.
“We’ll be waiting,” I said.
We crossed on the Huey P. Long Bridge, no one speaking, because our fears spoke loudly enough. Behind us the city was a sea of blinking lights. The West Bank stretched out ahead, and I knew that somewhere in the mass of headlights and neons was a small drama about to be acted out by tired cops, who would do their thing and then go home to bed and forget. But Katherine would never forget, and I sensed the distance between us growing.
There were two sheriff’s cars, the patrol unit, and the sergeant. No flashing lights, because at three in the morning whatever had happened was history and there was no urgency now.
Scott’s white Mustang sat between the two police cars, looking as if he might have just gotten out and gone to search for an all-night burger joint. There was a dent in the right side, but it had been there when he’d gotten the car used, two years ago. He’d always meant to have it fixed, but the money hadn’t been there.
Mancuso introduced us to the deputies. He seemed to hunch down into his windbreaker. No, they had nothing to report. They’d found the car an hour and a half ago. The engine was cold and the doors were locked. There were no obvious signs of violence. Had it been here yesterday? Nobody could remember. Tomorrow the detectives would talk to people in the shopping center to see if anybody had noticed.
Mancuso walked around the car like a tiger stalking a tethered goat. I followed, my eyes on the ground, but other than a couple of cigarette butts there was nothing. And the butts could have been left by anyone.
Mancuso gave Katherine a guilty look and cleared his throat. “I’d like to have the forensics people look it over.”
The sergeant, a thick man with a red face, nodded. “We’ll have to tow it to the yard.”
“Right.” Mancuso turned toward us, his expression apologetic. He jacked his head for me to follow him and went to the edge of the lighted area.
“We really ought to look in the trunk,” he said.
I’d been waiting for it, but it still made my stomach do a flip-flop. I nodded and went back to Katherine.
“Let’s walk over this way,” I told her, but her hand came out and grabbed my arm like a talon.
“Why? What are they going to do?”
I exhaled and made myself say it: “They want to check the trunk.”
She nodded, and warning lights went on in my mind, because her calmness was the kind that you see in people before the full import of a tragedy has sunk in.
“Then let them open it,” she said, her voice unusually high. “I can stand it.”
Helpless, I nodded to Mancuso, who went back to the deputies. One of them opened the trunk of one of the patrol units and removed a tire tool. Then he went over to the trunk of the Mustang.
A few seconds, I thought, and everything will be changed; this world of Katherine and her softness and the nights in her arms, and the comfort of having a place to come home to—it will all be gone, or if not gone, then changed so terribly that neither of us will recognize it again. And then I thought of Scott and felt guilty for thinking of myself.
The deputy thrust in the tire tool and pried. The trunk lid emitted a crack and sprang upward. I forced my eyes to stay open, and I tried to sense what the police were feeling by looking at their faces. But there was no apparent change.
“You want to come over here?” one of them asked us.
I took Katherine’s hand and we walked over, numb.
“Do you know if anything’s missing?” he asked.
I looked down. I saw a tire, some plastic containers of Quaker State oil, and a blanket. Letting out a long, shaky breath, I looked over at Katherine, to see if she was steady. I needn’t have worried.
“It looks all right,” she said, her voice back in a normal register. “But, then, I don’t know what he keeps in there.”
The cops nodded at the logic of it and shut the trunk. One of them went to call a wrecker.
“I’ll take them home.” Mancuso said.
I held the car door open for Katherine and climbed in after her. As we took a left turn onto Fourth, she fell against me and stayed that way for the rest of the ride.
He hadn’t been in the trunk, so maybe our luck would hold, I told myself, and then remembered guys who’d thought that way in Nam and gone home in body bags.
Mancuso let us out in front of her house.
“Get some sleep,” he advised. “I’ll call you as soon as I hear anything.” I knew what he meant, of course: if we find bloodstains or pieces of human tissue inside the car.
I thanked him and helped her up the walk. Once in, she went to the kitchen and fixed coffee. It was four o’clock, and there was a mist hugging the streets and houses. Another hour or so and it would start to turn grey as another day started. I didn’t want to think about what that day might bring.
I took the cup Katherine brought me and tried to think.
There was only one thing I could think of now: Cal. It was Cal who’d started it all.
I turned to face her. “I have to go somewhere,” I said.
“What?”
“Trust me,” I said, but my words sounded hollow, even to me.
“Micah, do you know where h
e is?”
“No. But I can’t sit here if there’s somebody out there who might be able to help.”
Before she could protest I was out the door, and heading down the path to the rental car, the anger growing in me with each passing second. Part of it was irrational, I knew, a drowning man’s fury at seeing his whole world for the last time before plunging back into the depths. And part of it was resentment at having my concern for a friend turned against me by some force I could only sense.
Action was the only antidote.
I slid through the mist, anonymous, cold, like a shark at the bottom of an ocean, now and again passing another swimmer, whose yellow eyes blinked at me and then were gone. I found the freeway entrance and crept to the top, through the fog, vaguely aware that these were the worst possible conditions in which to be on the interstate. But it didn’t matter. I wrestled the rental car off the ramp, swaying just a little as I reached the top, my hand slipping on the unfamiliar wheel. I headed northeast, toward the lake, the speedometer creeping up to fifty, braking as the lights of eighteen-wheelers appeared suddenly in the soup, then overtaking them. Somehow the challenge of it all was satisfying, as if the fog was a foe that I could pit myself against and defeat. It was a dangerous way to think.
By the time I reached Oak Island I thought the fog had lightened a shade, but it might have been my imagination. I don’t like the fog: it reminds me of recon missions, squatting beside a trail with my M-16 across my knees, waiting. Hoping that the next movement in the mists would be a shift of wind or an animal, something you could deal with, and not death. The fog had always been the foe.
I found the street and went slowly, having trouble distinguishing the houses. Then I saw the blue pickup and knew I was in the right place. I parked and got out and made my way up the walk to the door, hammering on it for three minutes until he pulled it open and stood staring at me from bloodshot eyes.
“God damn it, Melville, I want to talk to your father and I want to talk to him now. I’ve got a gun and I’m in a bad mood, and I hope the hell for your sake you won’t give me any shit.”
Eighteen
His mouth fell open. He started to say something, but I shoved past him, slamming the door behind me and stalked into the living room. There was a fireplace with a gun rack mounted on the wall above it and a coffee table with a house brand of Bourbon standing next to a glass. A bell rang in my mind, but I didn’t have time to examine what it was trying to tell me.
“Man,” he began, but I had my finger in his face.
“I want you to take me to your father,” I repeated. “I know he isn’t here because the cops will have looked here first, and they don’t build secret chambers in houses like this one. But he can’t be far. And I want to see him. Now.”
He pointed at the wall clock. “You know what time it is?”
“It won’t get easier later,” I said, “and I’m not going to go away.”
A woman came around the corner into the living room, blond, holding her robe together with one hand. “Melville, what the hell? The kids are gonna wake up.”
“It ain’t nothing, darling,” he said.
“It’s plenty,” I said. “Now let’s go.”
He started to double his fist, but my hand went to the gun in my belt. His fist relaxed.
The woman gasped. “Melville, is this about your old man?” she asked, hugging the wall. “I told you this wouldn’t be nothing but trouble. For Christ’s sake, take the man to him. It ain’t worth getting shot over.”
“Nobody’s getting shot, Lou Anne. This is between friends.”
“Friends?” She gave a hoarse laugh and turned on her heel. “Then I’d hate to see enemies,” she said over her shoulder. A door slammed down the hall behind her.
Melville flushed red. “You see now? She’s pissed off.”
“That makes two of us.” I could tell he knew I wouldn’t shoot him, and too much time had passed for me to maintain the advantage of momentum. I had to use another ploy. I looked up at the gun rack and found it.
“Melville, I swear to God I’ll blow a hole right through that Browning of yours, right in the middle of the hand-carved stock.”
His eyes went big in horror. “No.”
I cocked the gun and aimed it at the rifle.
“Shit, man, no!” He jumped in front of me. “Okay, I’ll take you.” He shuffled over to a closet and took out a windbreaker. “He’s gonna eat out my ass for this, though.”
All at once he was a little boy again, contemplating his father’s wrath, and I knew I wouldn’t have any more trouble with him. I pulled open the door and pointed out the car, and he went ahead of me like a sheepdog.
We took Discovery Boulevard south, heading for Chef Menteur Highway. The low scrub poked through the fog like skeletal arms.
“I got him at a construction site where I used to work,” Melville said. “They were gonna make a subdivision, but the contractor went bankrupt and the whole thing shut down.”
I managed a nod. There were plenty of places like that in today’s Louisiana, where the good times had stopped rolling in ’eighty-six when the oil glut hit and the economy fell apart.
“Here.” He pointed, and I had to brake hard to see the road on my left.
We found ourselves in something that resembled an old movie set, with ghostly houses whose walls remained propped up by timbers, and cleared lots where nothing grew but gray mist.
“It’s down here at the end,” he said. “Flash your lights a couple of times so he’ll know who it is.”
I did as he said and then glided into a driveway next to a two story town house that had been abandoned halfway along.
“There’s no watchman?” I asked.
Melville snorted. “There’s an old man who checks once or twice a night, but he’s too drunk to know where he is half the time.”
We got out, and I followed him up the walkway. I had a feeling I didn’t like, a sensation of being exposed. Even with the fog we were both good targets, if somebody had a mind to kill us.
But I fought back my misgivings. Nobody was expecting us here, so what was there to be afraid of? Unless Calvin got spooked and started shooting. He still had that .22, and though it wasn’t much of a gun, it would do until a better one came along.
“Pop.” Melville stood in the side doorway, where the door should have been. I strained to look past him into the dark interior. “Pop, it’s me, Melville. You there?”
There was no answer, and my hand went down instinctively to touch the comfort of the .38.
“Damn it, he’s got to be here,” Melville said. “I brought him dinner at eight o’clock.” He stepped into the house and I followed, smelling sawdust and paint. “Hey, Pop.”
There was another smell here, faint but still perceptible: the odor of perspiration and old food. The smell of human habitation.
“That old bastard,” Melville swore. “I told him not to wander off.”
I took the penlight out of my shirt pocket and played it off the walls, going from room to room in turn. There was nothing downstairs but some old wrappers from fast food and a 1988 Penthouse with the cover torn away, traces, I surmised, of the last transient that had stayed there. I shot the light up the stairway and tested the first step. It seemed solid and I started up. It was a hell of a place to be, I thought: on a stairway I was dead meat for anybody at the top or bottom.
“Where you going?” Melville called.
“To see what’s up here,” I said.
“He ain’t up there,” Melville pronounced, and kicked the floor.
I came to the top and walked down the hallway, whose bare ribs, without the wallboards, made me think of the bars of a jail cell. Melville was right: there was nothing up there.
I started down. Just as I reached the bottom step I heard the movement in the doorway. I dropped my light, my hand going for my revolver, and then I heard Melville utter an oath.
“Shit,” he swore. “Don’t do that!”
/> A figure flickered in the doorway and then vanished inside.
“How the hell I know who you was?” Calvin Autry shot back. “Weren’t no car I recognized out there, so I went out the back way. Who you got with you, anyhow?”
“Me,” I said, stepping toward him. “Micah Dunn.”
“Micah?” He came toward me, and a flashlight threw glare in my face. “What the hell are you doing here?”
All the anger that had been building since I’d left Katherine’s came roaring back.
“I’ll tell you what the hell I’m doing here,” I said. “You hired me to help you and I did my best. You paid me back by running away, making yourself look guilty, whether you are or not. And leaving me out on a limb.”
“You wasn’t out on no limb,” Cal said. “It wasn’t your hide.”
“You’re wrong about that,” I said. “I’ve been shot at, brought in by the cops, and shown on television trying to pass a bribe. And now somebody I care about is missing and may be dead. So don’t you fucking tell me I don’t have any stake.”
Calvin backed up a step. “I don’t know about none of that,” he said.
“No? Well, why the hell don’t you tell me just what you do know? I’m tired of games, and I want some straight answers.”
I could sense him shrink back in the darkness. “I told you the truth,” he said. “Did you check out them people I told you?”
“I checked ’em, everybody but NOPSI, and your’re right, they’re some pretty shady types, but they didn’t do this.”
“Why didn’t you check NOPSI?”
“Because,” I exploded, “the goddamn New Orleans Public Service doesn’t have to shoot and kidnap people to get paid, they just cut you off, that’s why!”
“But I wrote my congressman about ’em.”
“See?” Melville said under his breath. “See what I mean?”
“See what?” Calvin demanded. “You shut up, Melville. I’m your old man, and I’m still big enough to knock shit outta you.”
“Both of you shut up,” I said. “Calvin, I want to know what you were so sensitive about when you were a kid that you wouldn’t take showers with the others in high school. I want to know what you got into a fight with another boy about; what made you so mad you damn near killed him and had to leave town?”
Deep Kill (The Micah Dunn Mysteries) Page 16
