Body Language

by James W. Hall

  Dogs barked wildly on either side of them, a shepherd tearing back and forth along the fence line of the house directly behind. Alex headed that way and helped her father over the chain-link fence and then hurdled it herself. The shepherd squared off before them, snarling, but Alexandra was having none of it, and she shrieked at the animal, a banshee curse that startled the big dog to silence and sent him backing away toward the safety of his doghouse.

  With Lawton floundering at her side, Alex sprinted for the cover of a row of hedges, then scrambled over another fence, cut through two more back yards, and crossed an adjacent street. No cars anymore, no sight of human life, as if that bomb had detonated, the one that kills the people and leaves the structures standing. No one anywhere, a ghostly emptiness along street after street.

  Until five minutes later when she and the old man, both panting, reached a bright, busy thoroughfare. A safe haven of hamburger and fried-chicken joints and used-furniture stores. Traffic humming.

  “I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun,” Lawton said, his face bright with sweat.

  “Stop it, Dad. Goddamn it. This isn’t funny.”

  “It’s not? Okay, okay. But there’s no need to snap at me.”

  Alexandra cut across a lot crowded with used cars and a young man with a fresh haircut marched down the adjacent aisle and intercepted them beside the door of a ten-year-old Ford pickup, black with red trim.

  “In the market for a good truck?” the young man said.

  “You bet we are,” Lawton said. “We’re relocating. Blowing this town, once and for all.”

  “Great,” the guy said, turning his vacuous smile on Alexandra. “We’re a full-service company. Got financing available on the premises. Just sign on the dotted line and drive away.”

  “We’ll be paying cash,” Lawton said. “Won’t we, dear?”

  Alex looked into her father’s helpless eyes.

  “Where’s your phone?”

  “Inside the office. Help yourself.”

  While Lawton took a seat in the pickup and turned the wheel left and right, Alex dialed 911. The operator answered the phone mid-laugh, a joke with a colleague.

  “There’s been a shooting,” she said. “One woman dead.”

  The operator was still chuckling.

  “Listen to me, goddamn it. Pay attention.”

  “Calm down, honey. I’m here.”

  She gave the operator a thorough description of the blue pool truck, the large man and short blond woman who’d killed Gabriella.

  “I didn’t get the license, but I’m almost certain the truck was from Julio’s Pool Company. Probably stolen.”

  The operator asked for her name.

  “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I was there. An eyewitness. Get this out on the radio right away. APB. Do you hear me? Right now, before they have a chance to dump that blue truck.”

  “I need your name and your location, please.”

  Alex hung up. She walked back down the row of cars. Lawton was standing beside the black pickup, kicking its right-front tire.

  “I got us a good deal, sweetheart. Got Rafael to knock off two hundred dollars. Didn’t I, boy?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Your dad’s a hard bargainer.”

  Down the row of cars, someone slammed a door, and Lawton whirled around and clawed at his right hip but found neither holster nor revolver. Alex snaked an arm around his waist, drew him near, and spoke his name, then repeated it over and over until he quieted.

  The young car salesman was grinning nervously, not sure where to look.

  “Are they after us again, those people?” Lawton whispered. “Are we going to be killed, Alex? Are we going to die?”

  She tugged him closer.

  “No, Dad. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  FIFTEEN

  Fifteen minutes after Alexandra and the old man walked out of Stan’s room, the cops walked in.

  Stan was on the phone with Jennifer, five words past hello when the two of them marched into the room and took up positions at the end of his bed, standing there unsmiling till he told her good-bye and put the phone down.

  They were Miami PD, both guys Stan had met at parties over the years. Romano, a puffy old guy with white hair and a boozy face, and Danny Jenkins, a tall man about fifty with the sharp eyes, the tan and limber look of a professional golfer. Romano in a white short-sleeve shirt and dark pants, Jenkins in a black polo shirt and khakis. Bad cop, badder cop.

  Stan tried not to swallow or let the sweat start on his face. Conjuring up a memory of stoicism—those Friday nights back in high school, before the game started, guys slapping him on the back, trying to pump him up, trying to get him mean and excited. But getting pumped up wasn’t how Stan got to be MVP in the regionals. He did it by staying cool. By putting his mind down around his navel, feeling the calm glow, the warmth radiating through his body. And that’s what he did with the cops standing looking at him. He turned off all the lights inside, relaxed his fists, and nodded hello to the two men.

  “Sorry to bother you, Stan,” Romano said. “You in any pain?”

  “I’m dealing with it.”

  “Just wanted to ask you a couple of questions, that’s all. Cover one or two items about the accident. Ten minutes, tops.”

  “Fine,” Stan said. “I got all the time in the world.”

  And the questions came. Slow softballs thrown underhanded. They needed a description of the speeding Mustang. Wanted to know if he’d recognized any of the looters. How fast was he going when he exited the interstate? Was Benito buckled up?

  Romano jotting down his answers, the other guy, Jenkins, delivering the questions. After half a dozen questions, all fluff, Stan felt his gut relax. It was clear Alexandra hadn’t spoken to them. Stan’s threats holding her in check so far.

  Romano with his eyes on his pad, scribbling away, an occasional glance up at Stan, but nothing suspicious in his eyes. Jenkins was bored, going through the exercise. Until the last question, which caught Stan off guard, coming in the same deadpan voice.

  “You attempt to rescue your partner? Pull his head out of the water, anything like that?”

  Stan swallowed, tried to keep his eyes clear of worry.

  “I was passed out,” Stan said. “I woke up, the paramedics were there, and Benito was gone already. It’s terrible. Him and me were very close. How’s his wife taking it?”

  Jenkins looked over at Romano.

  “How would you say, Dan? How’s the guy’s wife taking it?”

  “First thing she wanted to know,” Romano said, “could the Brinks people give her an advance on his life-insurance check.”

  “Yeah,” Jenkins said. “Wanted the money so she could buy the top-of-the-line casket Preferably something metal she could have welded shut so the guy couldn’t ever bother her again.”

  “So, all in all, I’d say she’s taking it pretty well.” Romano flipped his notebook closed. “Hey, thanks for your time, Stan. Tell your pretty wife hello for us, would you?”

  “You bet,” Stan said.

  And a minute after they’d left, Stan was back on the phone. “Get the hell over here, Jennifer. Bring my sweat clothes and a pair of crutches.” Before she had a chance to say a word, he slammed the phone down.

  Knowing Alexandra like he did, he figured he had maybe another hour or two before she got her shit together, stashed her father somewhere, and came back full throttle to bring Stan Rafferty down. He was pretty sure if he stayed put, next time the cops walked through the door, they’d have their holsters unsnapped.

  He was taking Friday afternoon off from work to scout for women. Not in a hurry, no pressure, but a quiet prickle heating his loins. An urge to browse, to mingle, to dangle his bait in the clear waters and see what nibbled.

  It was early afternoon and he was at the mall, Dade-land out in Kendall, with all the yummy mummies and their strollers and their cell phones and manicures and Ann Taylor outfits. He sat near a pl
ay area in the main thoroughfare and watched them talking on their tiny phones and to one another while they supervised their kids with an occasional Spanish bark. Ninety-nine percent Cuban in this mall, all of them wearing loud perfume and louder jewelry. A few with nannies in white uniforms, Guatemalans or Mexicans who considered themselves lucky to wipe the asses of bratty Cuban-Americans.

  He was smiling. He was watching a couple of four-year-olds chase each other around the carpeted play pit. He tried laughing at their antics. It was a good laugh, hearty with rich contralto sincerity. It caught the attention of one of the Cuban yummy mummies sitting nearby in a red blouse and stiff white shorts. He turned his eyes her way and she smiled coolly at him. He nodded back.

  “Are they yours?” he called over.

  “Mine, yes.”

  “Brother and sister?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Very cute.”

  “Thank you.”

  She was ten feet away, perched on the second step. Her legs were shiny, just shaved and moisturized. She had long brown hair that she was wearing loose. Coming to the mall not to shop but to put herself on display. To luxuriate in that fluorescent aura of overripe perfumes and gaudy goods. Teaching her children about America, its bounty, its vacuity.

  The children had noticed him now, noticed that he was watching them and that he was talking to their mother, which made them increase the heat of their activity. The boy chasing the girl while she toddled along squealing with that blend of horror and delight that seemed obscenely sexual.

  He stood up, stretched, then angled a few feet in her direction.

  “I always wanted kids,” he said.

  She looked at him for a moment.

  “They are wonderful,” she said. “They fill your life with riches.”

  “Your husband must be very proud. You do have a husband?”

  Her eyes drifted away to the storefronts.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m being forward. Excuse me, please.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. She turned her glance back to him and forced a smile.

  “No, no, you’re right to be on guard. A beautiful woman can’t be too careful today. Paranoia is the number-one survival skill in this town. With things the way they are, you have to assume everyone is a killer, that any man who strikes up a conversation in a public place might just turn out to be the Bloody Rapist looking for his next victim. Trying to seduce you, get you alone, have his way with you, his violent, degenerate fun.”

  She looked at him for a long moment. He bore it for a while, although he could feel her eyes crawling around inside his head like she was profiling him, a psychologist analyzing the structure of his personality, probing the soft folds of his cerebellum, searching for some telltale coil of cells, some twist in the DNA that would confirm his depraved condition.

  So he shut his eyes. Blocked her out. Kept them shut moment after moment while he listened to her gathering her children, while she shushed them and hurried them away. Standing stiffly on the stairs to the play pit, he kept them shut as the other yummy mummies nearby followed her lead, lowering their loud Cuban voices, moving off. He kept his eyes shut for five minutes, maybe ten, inhaling the machine-made air, the artificial mall scents, until a security guard tapped him on the shoulder and said, “You having some kind of problem, mister?”

  He opened his eyes, looked squarely at the guard.

  “No. Are you?”

  He was a black man in his thirties who looked like an ex-tackle for some half-assed football team. A radio on his belt, a nightstick on the other side.

  “I was meditating,” he said. “That’s a crime now?”

  “Well, maybe you should just go meditate back at your own place,” the guard said. “You’re spooking the kids. And their mothers.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, Officer. Certainly don’t want to spook anybody. No, no, we positively can’t have that, can we? Bad for business. Suppresses the shopping instinct, doesn’t it? A spooked customer is a hurried customer.”

  “All right, sir. Why don’t you just move along, take your bullshit somewhere else where they might appreciate it?”

  “Yes, Mr. Rent-a-Cop, whatever you say, sir. Happy to oblige. I have no problem with authority figures. Oh, no, not me. Always eager to comply with the universal laws of good manners and social rectitude.”

  Twenty minutes after the assault, Emma still felt the vibrations of the Heckler & Koch, eight hundred rounds a minute, her arm muscles quivering. She’d probably be sore tomorrow, her triceps anyway. That’s what usually hurt when you hadn’t fired your weapon in a while and took an hour’s practice at the range.

  Twenty minutes since they’d gone into that house and found the skinny Hispanic woman dead in the living room. They’d scoured the place, run out the back. All the dogs barking, but the money and the old man and the woman had vanished. Twenty minutes later and Norman still hadn’t said a word. Just sat there in the passenger seat of the pool truck, the knees of his sky blue pants wedged against the glove compartment, staring straight ahead.

  Emma just drove around aimlessly for a while until she found herself drifting south toward the neighborhood where most of her pools were. She got to a back street, pulled off under a banyan tree across from a pink Spanish-style mansion, and put the truck in neutral.

  “They can run three miles an hour,” she said. “It’s not Olympic class, but hey, for an insect, that isn’t bad. They can hold their breath for forty minutes, squeeze through a crack the size of a dime, and it takes forty-eight hours for soft food to move through a cockroach’s gut.”

  Emma looked over at him. Norman Franks’s face had muscled up into a scowl.

  “I talk too much,” said Emma. “I know I do. I get wound up and I just go on and on. I get excited and that’s the way I ventilate. Some people find it annoying, I realize that, but there’s a lot of people who find it stimulating. But the thing is, I’m just being me. A talkaholic.

  “I guess I’m a little wired about killing that lady. Not that she was the first person I’ve killed. No, the first one was a girl. Tawana Bartley. You remember three or four years ago, that body they found in the Dumpster over on Sixth Avenue, all razor-slashed? It was on the news for a couple of days. Well, that was me who did it. Tawana and I had a financial dispute and I settled it. And killing her didn’t bother me any more than killing that woman today bothered me. So you can quit your analyzing.”

  “You’re a killer, are you?”

  “Damn right I am. A killer of color.”

  She unbuttoned the flap on her shirt and reeled Amy out of her pocket. The roach seemed dazed or sleepy. Emma dangled it over the black dashboard and lowered it till it was standing on the hundred perforations where the radio speakers were. Amy waved her feelers around a little to see where she was, but she didn’t try to make a run for the air vents like she usually did. Probably still a little stunned from the concussions of the Heckler & Koch.

  “Largest roach in the world lives down in South America. It’s six inches long and has a wingspan of one foot. It hisses when it’s angry. The mother ship of all roaches. You get out the bug spray, turn it on that roach, and it’ll spin around and fly in your face, grab you by the collar, pick you up, carry you off to its goddamn roach nest. Yes, sir. I want to be there the day that roach sneaks into the USA. Oh, boy. Turn on the light in your kitchen in the middle of the night and there’s five or six of those, one-foot wingspan, buzzing around the cookie crumbs, oh, yes, that’ll be an exciting day. Beginning of the fucking revolution.”

  Norman dusted a thread off the lapel of his canary yellow sports coat. He reached up to his throat and felt the stubble. His eyes squinted out into that expensive sunshine blazing on that expensive street.

  “So what’s next, Norm? What’s the plan? Got any ideas, big fella?”

  “The hospital,” he said. “Jackson Memorial.”

  “What?”

  “Guy broke his leg.”


  “What guy? What’re you talking about, Norman?”

  “Guy driving the armored truck.”

  She peered at Norman Franks for a minute. The big man stared patiently out the windshield.

  “Oh,” Emma said. “The hospital. Yeah, of course. The hospital.”

  SIXTEEN

  Stan and Jennifer were in the third-floor corridor of Jackson Memorial. Stan gimping along on the pair of aluminum crutches Jennifer had smuggled into his room. His left leg in a cast that went almost to his knee. Ten pounds of plaster. He was wearing his blue Adidas track suit, razored up the seam of his left leg so the cast would fit.

  While Stan hobbled on the crutches, Jennifer rested her hand on his shoulder like that would’ve helped catch him if he lost his balance. As they approached the nurses’ station, some kind of argument was going on between two black women, everyone else listening in. Stan kept his eyes on the floor, moving steadily but not too quick. Passing by without a word from any of them.

  Then they were in the elevator, grinding down to the basement, where she’d parked the car. Jennifer stood beside him.

  She said, “Whew. That was tense.”

  Stan waited till they were between the first and second floors and then reached out and smacked the red stop button.

  Jennifer looked up at the numbers and waited. She had on a low-cut red dress that showed freckles on her shoulders. For the last three months, every chance he’d had, Stan had been trying to lick those freckles off. She wore dark leather sling-back sandals and earrings made from feathers and beads, more of the Navaho crap she was so fond of.

  From all the supercharged sex they’d had, Stan had stored up a lot of good will for Jennifer McDougal. Which was how he was managing at the moment to keep from punching her in the teeth.

  “So, tell me, Jen. You left maybe a couple of million dollars sitting in your closet. That was your idea of hiding it?”

  She kept her eyes on the lighted numbers.