by Ellen Hart
“Shanice,” he called, thinking Shanice Williams, his head chef, might have come in the back door while he was upstairs. “You here? Diamond?” Diamond Brown was his general manager. When he received no response, he walked down the line, checking the knobs on the gas ranges and listening. He wasn’t sure why, but he had a weird feeling that he was being watched. He opened the door to the cooler and stepped halfway inside. “Anybody in here?” He flipped open a plastic container of lychee nuts and snatched a couple, popping them into his mouth. Maybe he should cut back on the blow.
Returning to the show floor, he switched on the track lights over the main bar. It was going on ten, which meant he’d better get busy if he intended to rouse his employees and get them moving. Lunch was an obvious no go. Some of the girls probably assumed that they were looking at a day off because of the snow. No such luck. He didn’t care if they had to rent dogsleds or buy cross-country skis, the club, a clean one, would be humming by happy hour.
Grabbing his clipboard from under the counter, Vince found himself a can of Red Bull and sat down on one of the bar stools to make the calls. He figured he’d contact Diamond and a few of the alpha strippers. They could form a phone tree.
Four cigarettes and seven arguments later, he was done. Being a hard-ass came easily to him, although it wasn’t his preferred management style. He liked to wind people up, give them a pep talk, then let them go do their jobs. If they proved unable to work without constant supervision, he fired them, clean and simple.
As Vince glanced one more time at his notes on the clipboard, his cell phone rang. Checking the number, he groaned. “Hey,” he said, firing up another cigarette.
“I need money,” came Royal Rudmann’s soft, almost sweet voice. “Five thousand should do.”
“Five thousand dollars? Are you kidding me?” Rudmann was a friend of sorts—a dangerous old friend. “Where are you?”
“A motel. How soon can you get me the cash?”
“I’m strapped,” said Vince. “Which you already know.”
“Yeah, yeah, but you got assets and I don’t.”
Tapping ash onto a plate, Vince said, “Look, if I give you the money, I want you to leave the state.” And never come back.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Are you working?”
“Met a guy in a bar. He owns a janitorial service. I’m helping clean a couple offices, a couple of day care centers.”
Rudmann was a festering problem. Three months ago, he’d been granted a provisional release from St. Peter, Minnesota’s first psychiatric prison facility, where he’d been held on a locked ward for two years. He was allowed to leave after a special review board recommended his release, and true to form, he’d violated the conditions of that release almost immediately, failing to attend his mandated AA meetings or report in to his case manager. He needed to stay under the radar or he ran the risk of being sent back.
Vince had read an article in the local paper a few weeks ago about the number of violent, mentally ill offenders who had been let out of St. Peter, only to violate the terms of their release. Some of them, like Rudmann, were still at large, and nobody seemed to be looking for them. An official police spokesman was quoted as saying the problem had been fixed, although the author of the article seemed skeptical, saying it continued to be a glaring breakdown in state and local law enforcement. Obviously, it wasn’t information Vince had passed on to Rudmann. He figured if his old buddy got scared enough, he’d take off.
“I could come by the club tonight and pick it up,” offered Rudmann.
“No,” said Vince, taking a deep drag and then blowing the smoke over his shoulder. “You know what happened the last time you were here.”
“Man, I don’t hold that against you. I got drunk. Sloppy. Still, that guy had it coming.”
“You don’t start a fight in my club and think you’re going to waltz right back in.”
“Yeah, yeah. So how you gonna get me the money?”
Why the hell was Rudmann’s insolvency his problem? He knew the answer, and yet it rankled. Every time Rudmann needed something it came with an unspoken threat: Do what I tell you or live with the consequences. The fact that Rudmann was as guilty as Vince didn’t seem to penetrate. Maybe he figured he would likely be spending a good part of the rest of his life in prison anyway, so why not take Vince down with him, if Vince didn’t cooperate. “Give me the address of the motel. I’ll see what I can do. Might not be the full five thousand.” He wrote it down, then repeated it to make sure he had it right.
“Call when you have it. Be sweet, man. Peace.”
“Peace,” repeated Vince, smashing the end of his cigarette against a dirty plate, wishing it was Rudmann’s face.
* * *
After Jane finished digging her truck out, she ran across the street to help her neighbor Evelyn Bratrude, whose car had become stuck as she tried to back it out of her driveway. With Evelyn behind the wheel, Jane and another neighbor pushed from the front. After a lot of huffing and puffing—and slipping and skidding—the car rolled backward onto the street.
This was one of the things Jane liked most about winter snowstorms. It brought out the best in neighbors. She stayed around long enough to make sure that the car didn’t get stuck again as Evelyn made her way to the end of the block. When she turned the corner, Jane waved and returned to her house.
As she was digging through her garage a few minutes later, looking for the snow rake, she heard a horn honk. Stepping back outside into the hard white glare, she saw that Nolan’s silver Ford Five Hundred had stopped at the end of the drive.
“Hey,” she said, trudging around to the driver’s side window. She’d been planning to go in and call him when she was done putting the rake together. “You braved the snow. How are the roads?”
“Miserable. The morning news said the snowplows were out all night. Most of the main streets are generally passable. The side streets are a mess.”
Jane rested a gloved hand against the roof. “Did you call your sister in St. Louis?”
He looked straight ahead, adjusted his sunglasses. “That was a hard one.”
“You okay?”
“Taylor and his crew found the murder weapon. Tossing it in a Dumpster less than a block away from the nightclub wasn’t exactly the act of a homicidal Einstein.”
“Did they find any prints?”
“Two perfect specimens. They’re running them now to see if they get any hits.”
“Fingers crossed,” said Jane.
“This investigation is moving fast,” said Nolan, flipping open a container of orange Tic Tacs. “When I worked homicide and we got breaks like this early in the game, more often than not we solved the case. I could be wrong, but I think we’ll have answers soon.”
“You want to come in? I could put on a pot of coffee. Make us some lunch.”
“Nah. I hurt my back. Slipped on some ice. Think I’ll go home and lie down on the heating pad.”
“You need anything, you call.”
“Will I see you tomorrow at the office?”
The office he referred to was a local bar—the Rat, his current favorite. He particularly liked their “unhappy hour,” when the beers were cheap and the TVs were all tuned to sports channels. Nolan liked to mix the concept of relaxation with low overhead.
“Maybe I can stop by later in the day. You take care, okay? If you want some company—”
“I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just going to take some time to wrap my head around the fact that I’m never going to see my nephew again.” He took a breath, closed his eyes for a second, then put the engine in gear.
Jane tapped the roof and stood back, wishing there was more she could do to help him through this rough time. In the coming weeks, she’d find a way. For now, all she could do was stand in the street, shading her eyes from the sun, and watch his car rumble away.
4
He had to be alert for the descent. Pull it together, he ordered himself, refusing to lo
ok at his first officer. The Boeing 767 was traveling at nearly five hundred miles per hour. This was no time for reflection, not the place to parse out what had happened.
Emmett Washington had been awake for eighteen hours, nine of them since reporting to the airport. Long waits, even for pilots, had become far more frequent in the last five years. As always, before the plane could land in the Twin Cities, he had to play runway roulette with the air traffic controllers. He’d done it so many times before that the normalcy felt soothing. Still, every flight he piloted from here on out would come with a threat. A fine or a license action would be the result of any deviation from the prescribed altitude, course, speed, and heading. Since he’d already blown that, he needed to get it right, even though sweat was dripping off his forehead into his eyes and his body was shaking so hard he wasn’t sure his hands were steady enough to use the controls.
With the low ceiling and the darkness, there wasn’t all that much to claim his attention except for the runway lights. Down to 160 mph. Line it up. Lower the gear.
“Thank God,” whispered Ted Kulakov, the first officer, when the wheels finally bumped against solid concrete.
Emmett felt the welcome g-force press against his body.
The flight had been lucky to hit a window in the departure traffic. The taxi to the gate took just a few minutes. As passengers began to head up the jet bridge, Emmett finally worked up the nerve to look at his FO.
“How you going to handle it?” asked Ted.
Emmett removed his glasses, ran a hand over his eyes, and then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus. I feel like I’ve been through a war.” He looked straight ahead as the ground crew began to swarm the plane. “At least no passengers were hurt. This time.”
“We were never in any real danger.”
“That right? You willing to bet money?”
“Don’t file your report until we’ve talked,” said Ted. “As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.”
“But it did.”
“Okay, okay. But … hell, maybe we could get away with calling it a mechanical malfunction. There’s no way to prove it wasn’t.”
If only it could be that easy. Ted was young. He’d been working for AirNorth less than five years. His entire career was ahead of him, and he didn’t want anything messing it up. Emmett, on the other hand, would be retiring soon. He had less to lose.
“I’ll think about it,” said Emmett.
“Let’s get together for a drink, talk it over. I’ll buy.”
Emmett waited until the plane had cleared and then strode alone up the gold concourse on his way back to his car, dragging his black overnight bag behind him.
Shortly before eight, he pulled into the parking lot of Angela’s Liquors, half a mile from his house. He examined a few of the bottles, finally deciding on the Johnnie Walker Black Label. He paid the cashier and watched as she slipped a narrow sack out from under the counter and stuffed the bottle inside.
“You in the military?” She nodded to the epaulets on the shoulders of his blue uniform. Four white bars bordered by four blue bars.
“An airline pilot.”
“Wow. Cool.”
The truth was, unless you were a senior widebody captain at one of the majors, the job was anything but cool. The only part he still loved was the actual flying, which, in truth, was less than half of the time he spent on duty. He did have seniority. AirNorth generally gave him the prime times and destinations. He missed the long-haul flights he’d done in his forties, though at fifty-nine, he didn’t have the stamina for them anymore. His hair had turned gray in his early fifties. He was a man with an impossibly young face and a body wracked by arthritis.
When he finally turned into his drive and opened his garage door with the remote, he saw that his son’s car was gone. Monday night was a school night. It might not be football season anymore, but his star athlete kid still had a ten o’clock curfew. Football was everything to this boy. Rodger—called Roddy by almost everyone—was a senior in high school, the best running back in the state. This wasn’t merely Emmett’s fatherly opinion. He was proud of his son, not just for his athletic achievement, but for the kind of young man he’d grown to be. His grades were good. He was on the student council and had joined the Black Achievement Club. Emmett always felt a twinge of guilt when he thought about his work schedule, how often he had to leave Roddy on his own. Then again, maybe the added responsibility had helped the boy mature. His son wasn’t perfect. They butted heads like any father and son, but they loved and respected each other, which was more than Emmett could say about his relationship with his own dad.
Emmett had flown out yesterday morning, before the big snowstorm was scheduled to hit. Since the snow removal company he employed never did a particularly good job after a big snow, he’d asked Roddy to do the final cleaning up. As always, the work was done, the salt thrown in all the places likely to form ice. “Great kid,” whispered Emmett on his way up the back steps.
After entering the kitchen and setting the brown-paper-wrapped bottle on the counter, he felt a wave of nausea wash through him. What had happened on the plane wasn’t going to leave him alone. He removed the wrapper and held the bottle up for a few seconds, knowing the Scotch was a bad idea. He’d had some trouble with alcohol in the past, which was why he’d quit drinking. It had been fifteen years since he’d touched a drop. He didn’t think he was an alcoholic, just abusive. It was probably okay—just this once.
Shutting the cupboard, he set the glass and the bottle on the kitchen table, then pulled out a chair and sat down. An unread newspaper lay next to a familiar yellow legal pad, the first page listing the names of various colleges. These were the institutions that had offered Roddy a football scholarship. Two of the names had stars next to them—the top two. He would go with LSU if he could keep his grades up. Generally, just thinking about his son’s athletic career could pump Emmett up for hours. Not tonight. Holding out his hands and watching them tremble convinced him that a drink was definitely the right move. He poured himself an inch of Scotch and tossed it back. “Better,” he whispered, feeling the slow burn, remembering how much he’d loved that first sip.
How was he ever going to explain to his superiors what had happened? He might be close to retirement, but that didn’t mean he wanted to lose his job. He’d made a few investments over the years, none of which had ever earned him much. When he’d lost half his money in the stock market crash in ’08, he’d pulled out. His banker’s advice was to never invest in anything that would interfere with his sleep. Now that a second recession was in full swing, with the rest of the world teetering on a financial precipice, he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to invest what little money he’d managed to hang on to, someplace where the speculators and thieves on Wall Street, or the political gangsters fighting their perpetual wars in Washington, couldn’t get their hands on it.
Emmett was standing at the kitchen counter pouring himself a second drink when his son walked in.
“Hey, you’re home,” said Roddy, grinning.
Emmett stood, and they both half hugged, half slapped each other on the back.
“How was the flight?”
“Okay.”
Roddy was a good-looking kid with his mother’s eager eyes, his dad’s square chin, and a muscular body that was 10 percent heredity and 90 percent sweat and hard work.
“Everything okay while I was gone?” asked Emmett.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”
Emmett caught a whiff of defensiveness.
“Everything’s fine, Dad. Chill.” His eyes dropped to the bottle of Scotch.
“Long day,” said Emmett. “I needed something to help settle me down.”
“Problems on the plane?”
“Something like that.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take a drink before,” said Roddy.
“When you were a little kid, I used to. Not really my style anymore.”
Roddy moved
over to the refrigerator and opened the door. “We need food. You wanna go to the store tomorrow or should I?”
“I’ll go,” said Emmett. “You make a list.” An image from the flight floated in front of Emmett’s eyes, catching him off guard. He wobbled, grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.
“You okay?” asked Roddy.
“I need to eat,” said Emmett. “Why don’t I order us a pizza?”
“Great. Extra cheese, okay? Let me know when it’s here.”
After his son had headed off to his room, Emmett sank onto the chair. He downed the drink, stared at the bottle for a few seconds, then hunched over the table and put his head in his hands.
* * *
Drenched in sweat, Emmett awoke a few minutes after midnight to the sound of a ringing phone. Switching on his bedside lamp, he fumbled for the cordless. He couldn’t imagine who’d call him at this time of night. “Hello,” he managed, noticing that he hadn’t bothered to take off his clothes before he got under the covers. Not a good sign.
“We need to talk.”
Amazed that he could recognize a voice he hadn’t heard in more than ten years, Emmett said, “Vince? Is that you?”
“We’ve got to do something about Rudmann. He called me from a motel up in Brooklyn Center. He wants money. Again. He must think I’m a bank.”
“What’s he doing at a motel? Last I heard he was in jail.”
“They let him out.”
“You’ve been in contact with him? Lord, I would think you’d want to stay away from a guy like that.”
“He contacted me. What was I supposed to do? I gave him money once before. Now he wants more. That man has no self-control. He doesn’t think logically. I tell you, he’s a disaster waiting to happen. A disaster for us.”
“Meaning what?”
“Do I need to spell it out for you?”
Emmett pulled off his tie and tossed it aside. “Once upon a time we may have been on the same team, but I wasn’t any part of that.”
“Sure, buddy. It was simple guilt by association.”
“Exactly.”
