by Lowe, Tom
“Do you really believe that, Sean? Or are you trying to come to grips with the sad fact that a pretty young woman can be a lethal killer?”
As I started to answer Dave’s question, my cell rang, the call coming from the same number Courtney had used to call me. I answered and a falsetto voice of a man said, “Mr. O’Brien, my name is Isaac Solminski. It was my phone that you called.”
“Who are you?”
“Courtney’s friend.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you calling from the carnival?”
“Yes, and she’s gone. Police are here.”
“Do you know what happened? Why’d she run?”
“Feared for her life. Courtney was about to be raped. She told me that she took the money owed to her after Tony Bandini tried to force himself on her. They wrestled for the gun. It went off and he was killed.”
“Did you tell that to the police?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure they’re buying the story. I’m just a carny, in their eyes not very credible. Since there was no eye-witness, it looks to me like they believe she stole money from Bandini and killed him.”
“Did they tell you that?”
“No, but I overheard the cops talking right outside my trailer.”
“Speak with Detective Dan Grant. He’s African-American, probably the lead detective. Tell him what Courtney told you.”
“I did. He’s a better listener than the others, but I can tell he’s just as skeptical. Mr. O’Brien, Courtney said if you called to give you a message.”
“What message?”
“She wants to know if you have a birthmark on your left shoulder.”
I said nothing. I knew I was wearing a shirt each time I spoke with Courtney, the night I found her, and then on Jupiter. My heart beat faster.
“Are you there, Mr. O’Brien?”
“Yes.”
“She said she believes you might have a small birthmark on your left shoulder that resembles a four-leaf clover, or an Irish shamrock. Do you, Mr. O’Brien?”
For a long moment I didn’t want to answer, the question too invasive. My personal space in some way now violated. I knew the girl hadn’t seen my shoulder. How did she know? Who’d she know that knew me that well? Think.
“Mr. O’Brien, are you there?”
“Yes.”
“I assume Courtney was right, you have a small birthmark resembling the shamrock?”
“Yes.”
“She said one other thing … if you do have this mark on your left shoulder, you are related to her. She didn’t say how. Could you be her father?”
16
After I disconnected from the man with the falsetto voice, I turned to Dave. He said, “You look like someone just said that you have three months to live.”
I said nothing, my thoughts racing.
“Who was on the line, Sean? What happened?”
“A man who goes by the name of Isaac Solminski. He works at the carnival. It was his phone that Courtney used when she called me.”
“What’d he say?”
“He told me that Courtney said I might have a small birthmark in the shape of an Irish shamrock on my left shoulder. Dave, there is no way that she could have seen it. I didn’t mention it, and very few people even know it’s there.”
“I’ve known you for five years, see you working on your boat many times in nothing but your swim trunks, and without my glasses I’d never see it.”
“It’s not much larger than a postage stamp. But the birthmark looks like a clover or a shamrock. Sherri used to call it God’s perfect little tattoo on my shoulder. How in the hell did Courtney know it was there? Solminski said she told him it meant that she was related to me.”
“Did she say how, as in a niece or a long lost daughter?” Dave grinned.
“For Christ sakes. You sound like the guy on the phone. I have no living family. Sherri was an only child. My parents died when I was in my last year of high school. I had no siblings. I lived with my uncle until age eighteen when I left for college and then joined the military. My uncle had no children when he and my aunt died. So I’m it—the last of the bunch. It’s just Max and me.” I reached in the topside cooler and lifted out a Corona, popped the top, and took a long pull from the bottle. “Now I know what Courtney meant in her voice message when she said there was ‘something else.’”
Dave nodded. “It’s a hell of a something else. What if she’d been stalking you from the beginning?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if all of this is some kind of an elaborate ploy to get you involved in her bizarre world, a place where the Mad Hatter holds the keys to her Wonderland?”
“But why? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s not supposed to make sense in the playground of a psychopath.”
“But we don’t know that’s what she is, do we?”
Dave grunted and sipped his drink. “My friend, Sean O’Brien, the timeless optimist, the man who sees good where evil hides in the shadows.”
“Evil couldn’t exist without the presence of good. I like to believe that good is a little more predominant and a lot more appreciated because of evil.”
Dave laughed and lifted Max onto his lap. “Maxine and the other critters don’t operate in either camp, it’s just us free-willed, vertical-walking mortals. So now that Courtney Burke has laid a bomb under your mental hood, what are you going to do?”
“I want to know how she knew about the birthmark.”
“Maybe some things in life should remain a mystery. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, it might become Pandora’s Wonderland.”
“Dave, at this point, I can’t think of anyone alive who knows that I have a tiny birthmark on my shoulder. Someone would have to get close to me without my shirt on, and then be looking for it. Otherwise it’s not that obvious. Who knows it’s there? Who could have told Courtney and why? Since Sherri’s death, I’ve only been with a few women. Two of them are dead, too.”
“Maybe a look at your birthmark is like looking into the face of Medusa, fatal, or dangerously rocky at best. Perhaps you’ll recall that Medusa was a mere mortal, too. I’ll remind you to keep your shirt on.” Dave smiled and sipped his drink.
“Something’s very strange here. I want to pay a visit to the guy who was just on the phone, the man with the falsetto voice.”
“Why?”
“He may know where Courtney can be found.”
Dave shook his head. “Let Detective Grant, the FBI, and whoever the hell else might be following this young woman, let them track her down.”
“You and Grant both mentioned Bandini’s brother, Carlos. What if he finds her before the police do? If he’s the real bad ass in the bunch, what would he do to her? If she vanishes, I may never know how she was aware of my birthmark.”
“Then let it go. Plan A is hoping the cops find her first.”
“What’s Plan B?”
Dave sipped his drink, watched the rotation of the light from the lighthouse sweep high above the tops of the sailboat masts and challenge the dark over the Atlantic Ocean. He lowered his eyes to meet to mine. “Plan B, unfortunately, Sean, is when somebody’s Plan A didn’t work out for them and you get involved.”
“Too bad I can’t design Plan B, only answer it. Maybe I’ll have a better answer when they arrest Courtney.”
17
A taxi pulled up to the curb in front of the Greyhound Bus station in Daytona Beach and slowed to a stop. The dark-skinned driver wore a Cardinals’ baseball cap and a diamond stud in one ear, the earring winking from the passing headlights on Ridgewood Avenue. He cut his black eyes up to the rearview mirror and looked at Courtney Burke in the back seat. “This is the place. Do you know what time you catch your bus?”
She didn’t answer, her eyes following a police car that entered the parking lot from a road behind the building. “Drive on, please.”
“What?”<
br />
“Now! Just go.”
The taxi driver nodded, put the car in gear, and pulled back into the night traffic. “So where’d you want to go?”
“Where’s the closest truck stop?”
“Less than three miles.”
“Take me there.”
The driver sighed, accelerated and changed lanes. He glanced back in the mirror at the girl. “You in some kind of trouble?”
“No.”
“When you saw that cop car, you got an instant case of the hee-bee-jee-bees. Know what I’m sayin’? Hey, I’ve been there. Why are the cops lookin’ for you?”
“I didn’t say they’re looking for me. I just don’t feel like hanging around a creepy bus station half the night.”
“So you’re gonna hang around a creepier truck stop? C’mon, that don’t take a hellava lot of smarts.”
“Please, just take me there, okay? I don’t feel like talking either.”
The driver was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “Look up ahead. Lots of blue lights. Either a wreck or the cops are runnin’ a sobriety check stop.”
“Turn around!”
“I can’t do a U-turn here.”
“Let me out!”
“What? In the middle of damn the road?”
Courtney opened the passenger door a few inches. “Slow down!”
“Hey! Wait a second, okay? There’s a side street up ahead about fifty yards. I can turn to the right and by-pass all that shit up there.”
“Okay.”
The driver cut through two lanes of traffic, horns blasting, drivers swearing. He made a sharp right turn and zoomed down a darker road, the staccato pockets of light from the streetlamps popping like overhead fireworks bursting. “Damn, girl. You know how to get the adrenaline pumping.”
“Thank you for doing that.”
“No problem. Long as I don’t see flashing blue lights in the next thirty seconds, we’re good to go. Why the hell are the cops lookin’ for you?”
“I don’t want to go into it.”
“All right. Probably best I don’t know. Don’t want to be called an accessory to some friggin’ crime, especially one I didn’t do.”
A few minutes passed in silence, and then the driver pulled into a large, well-lighted parking lot half filled with semi-trucks, neglected palm trees, and steel trash barrels overflowing with garbage. Beyond the rows of fuel pumps was a single-story brick building with a blue neon sign that read: Open 24 Hours. Many of the big rigs were parked with running lights on, diesels idling, drivers climbing in and out of the cabs.
Courtney watched a middle-aged woman open the passenger side door of a parked truck. She took a moment to adjust her short skirt as she stood on the top rung in spike heels, and then stepped down to the parking lot.
The taxi driver stopped near the building and turned back toward Courtney. “You sure you wanna get out here?”
“I’m sure.”
“That’ll be twelve even.”
Courtney handed him a ten and five. “Keep the change.”
“Be careful. Most of these drivers are hard working stiffs like me. Good guys. But some are real degenerates. They can use their mobility to do a lot of rough shit and never get it pinned on them ‘cause they’re here one hour and gone the next.” He looked around the three-acre lot. “Big place. I’m glad they have surveillance cameras out here. But it just makes some of them more careful.”
Courtney got out of the taxi. She paused and leaned in the front side window. “Thank you.”
“No problem. You take care of yourself. Shit, I don’t want to read that they found your body in a dumpster or some other God-awful place.”
Courtney smiled and then turned, stepping into the jumble of lights and sounds, the cranking of diesel engines as a country song blared from outdoor speakers. She walked around two truckers sipping black coffee from paper cups, steam rising in the cool night air. Their eyes met her as she walked through the odor of fuel, fry grease, bacon, and cinnamon buns, leading to the truck stop entrance drenched in the blue glow of a neon sign that read: PRIVATE SHOWERS.
18
Two hours after Dave had walked back to Gibraltar, I still sat in Jupiter’s fly bridge as the midnight hour approached. A warm breeze blew across the marina from the east, carrying the scent of the sea and night-blooming jasmine. Max slept curled up in a ball on the bench seat, an occasional dream-induced whimper escaping from her throat. I could hear a woman’s laugher coming from the Tiki Bar at the far end of the dock, the sound of Harleys cranking and pulling out of the parking lot. I was exhausted, tired but yet too wired to go down to the master berth for the delusion of real sleep. I had been sitting in the same spot for two hours thinking about the message the man with the falsetto voice had left with me. “She said one other thing … if you do have this mark on your left shoulder, you are related to her. She didn’t say how. Could you be her father?”
Courtney Burke said she was nineteen maybe close to twenty. Doing the math and trying to fit it in with the time-line of my life, I thought about the women I’d known—the women I’d taken to bed. I pictured Courtney’s face, the slight cleft in her chin, the texture of her hair, the slant of her cheekbones, and even the way she carried herself—straight, shoulders back, her strong sense of presence. Who might have resembled Courtney twenty years ago? I tried to superimpose images of former girlfriends over Courtney’s face. I struggled to match a gene pool that tonight had an opaque surface hiding the passage of time and people in my life. Most of the images were faded, blurred in a scrapbook that I rarely opened for all the reasons that they were part of the past.
I closed my eyes and attempted to run a movie trailer of my life from two decades ago through the film gate of my mind. Some of the women I’d known were there in full color, captured in slow-motion angles—the way they’d turned their heads, the way they’d smiled, their physical features still vivid. Other faces were harder to see through the lens of the past, the landscape of their appearances now more distant on the horizon, and the closer I tried to focus, the more stonewashed the faces became. It was like trying to replay a dream I’d made a mental note to remember, but couldn’t.
One picture stopped. It became a freeze-frame when I remembered her eyes.
Like the image of an old National Geographic cover.
Like Courtney’s eyes.
Her name was Andrea Hart. A woman destined for better things than what I could bring to the table after college graduation. She wanted no part of a possible “military life,” hop-scotch jumping from base-to-base if I wanted to climb the ladder while, at the same time, searching for purpose in what I would do. In retrospect, after we went our separate ways, I probably have Andrea to thank for my determination to get through Delta Force training and the Special Activities Division. The experience forever changed me—the good, bad, and ugly, scars and all.
Where was Andrea Hart tonight, twenty something years later? Could she be Courtney Burke’s mother? Could I be her father? No way. I touched the cleft in my chin and pictured her face. I stood from the captain’s chair, my back muscles in knots, a slight headache forming over my left eye, my scalp tight. “Come on, Max. Let’s go down. I need to use the computer to track a ghost from my past. If not, the image of Courtney and what she might represent, will haunt me for the rest of my life.”
***
She knew he was looking at her. Even from behind her, Courtney could feel his eyes on her like a breath. She was stirring cream and sugar into her black coffee when the man approached. She sat at the café counter inside the truck stop and sipped from a cup of coffee in front of her. She’d felt the man staring at her twice, both times when he’d walked past her, once heading from the restrooms, the second time when he pretended to be looking at magazines in the rack.
The man moved and sat on one of the stools beside her where he waited for the waitress to return from the kitchen. He glanced at Courtney, his face ruddy and chapped, lips cracked, eyes dancing l
ike flames across her face. He said, “This place has the best coffee of all the truck stops in Florida.”
Courtney nodded. “It’s pretty good.”
“Ought to be real good. I hear the nightshift manager, gal’s name is Flo, puts on a fresh pot ever’ half hour.”
“Really?”
“Hell yeah. But this time of night they’ll go through a few pots ever’ hour anyhow.”
Courtney sipped her coffee.
“What brings a girl like you in here? Can’t imagine you drivin’ a rig.”
“I’m not. I hitched this far. The trucker was going toward Miami. I didn’t want to go down there.”
The man ran his tongue over his front teeth and swallowed. “Where do you want to go?”
“Which way are you headed?”
“It for damn sure ain’t Miami. You almost need a passport to drive through the city. Try askin’ for directions if you don’t speak Spanish.” He grinned, a small crack in his bottom lip strawberry red.
Courtney finished her coffee and turned toward the man. “Where’d you say you were going?”
“Anywhere you want to go, sugar.” He grinned, his breath smelling of beer and beef jerky. “C’mon girl, jet’s jump in the truck. My rig’s fueled up and good to go all night long, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” Courtney followed the man out the door, keeping her back to the three security cameras she’d spotted earlier. She unzipped her purse as she walked, her fingers touching the Beretta, her thoughts touching the face of her grandmother so far away.
***
They were in the cab of the big-rig less than a minute when he made his move. The trucker reach behind his seat and pulled out two cans of Budweiser from a small cooler. “How ‘bout a cold one?”
“No thanks. Never got used to how beer tastes.”
“I wonder how you’d taste.” He popped the top on the can and took a long pull, his Adam’s apple moving like a piston.
Courtney rested her hand on the Beretta in her open purse between her right leg and the cab door.
The man used the back of his left hand to wipe his mouth, his lips wet with beer foam and saliva. He grinned. “Best way to learn to like the taste of beer is to slip me some tongue. That way you can get the flavor little doses at a time. You got some damn pretty eyes, girl.”
