by J. A. Kerley
“Muchos gracias, amigo,” Sergeant Leo Bander said, taking the bag of Cuban pastries from baker José Murano. Bander flicked open the tab atop the Styrofoam cup of coffee with his thumb and took a sip. Morning needed strong coffee and baked goods.
“Jugo?” Murano asked. Juice?
“A man can only take so much health, José,” Bander said, eyeing the fresh pastries cooling on a rack behind Murano. “I’ll have an orange juice mañana.”
A grin from Murano. “Pero tu esposa …”
“My old lady’s got me eating salads five times a week, José. Or fucking stir-fries.” Bander patted the two inches of belly leaning over his belt buckle. “She’s got the idea that when I retire next month, we’re gonna go hiking in the fucking Alps or something. Never marry a woman ten years younger, José. They’ll wear you out.”
“Sometimes that can be a good thing, Leo,” Murano winked.
“Sometimes, amigo,” Bander sighed, handing over his money. “And sometimes it’s just tofu and goddamn carrots.”
Bander left the small panadería reluctantly, its atmosphere thick with the smell of fresh bread and iced cakes and dense black coffee. Though dawn was an hour past, its echo tinged the sky with pink. Gulls flicked between palms on the avenue and squabbled over crumbs on the sidewalk.
Good morning, Miami, Bander thought, fresh caffeine and the promise of pastry kicking his brain into a higher gear. You’re looking beautiful today, babe.
A dozen pounds of gear squeaking on his utility belt – pistol, pepper spray, folding baton, radio, cuffs, ammunition – Bander climbed into his cruiser and pulled into the parking lot of one of the ubiquitous shopping centers a block down the street. He rolled into the shade beside a furniture store, put the cruiser in park, and buzzed the seat back to give him more room. He downed one of the sweet pastries in two bites and chased it with a swallow of coffee.
One month, he thought as he removed another pastry from the bag and took a bite. One freaking month more. He figured he’d die in the saddle, but his wife of five years now, Marilita, had other ideas, like hiking the fucking Alps.
And maybe she was right. He’d have done his full thirty when he pulled the plug, every day of it on the streets of Miami. “Fuck a desk job,” he’d once told a partner. “The street is where the action is, the glorious fucking weirdness, the insane sideshow.”
Leo Bander thought he’d seen all the sideshow had to offer in his thirty years. He had once stopped a guy doing a hundred-twenty on Interstate 95, the guy saying he’d just washed his car and was drying it off. He’d busted a whorehouse to find a famous television preacher drunk, stoned, and buried under a naked and writhing clot of male and female bodies, the righteous reverend later explaining it was simply research, that he had to know sin in order to preach against it.
Bender had arrested a seventy-year-old woman for shotgunning a rooster in the middle of Flagler Street in Little Havana, the woman explaining that the rooster held the spirit of her late husband, and had recently had amorous relations with a neighbor’s hen.
He’d once watched a guy in a silver lamé bodystocking – and wearing a beach blanket as a cape – take a nine-story dive from the balcony of a Miami Beach hotel on to the hood of a stretch limo, the limo filled with a half-dozen Atlantic City gamblers. He’d walked up to the pale and shaking group and nodded at the broken body cradled in the vehicle’s roof, cape dangling over a smoked rear window.
“So what’re the odds on that one, boys?” he’d said, as seriously as he could muster.
He’d seen bodies mangled in car crashes, people jumping from buildings to escape fire, babies roasted in hot cars while parents sat in a cool bar two dozen feet away. A man killed with a roofer’s nail gun …
Thirty fucking years, Leo Bander thought, staring at the sky through the windshield. I’ve seen it all. There’s nothing left.
He checked his watch: time to get back on patrol. He radioed his return to service and pulled to the rear of the buildings, no attempts at forced entry, just the usual gang signs on the brick.
Bander passed a stand of trash receptacles, a corpulent rat darting from one bin to another. Motion ahead caught Bander’s eye and he blinked to see the pale back of a naked man with exceptionally bright hair. The man was staggering from a loading bay at the rear of a store. He looked wasted, stoned or drunk or both.
Bander sighed and rolled the cruiser a half-dozen feet behind the guy’s skinny white ass, the guy oblivious to the sound of approaching tires. Bander gave the siren a hit: Whoooooop. He leaned out the window. “OK, buddy, let’s put a stop on it right there.”
The man twitched. Moaned. Turned around.
Leo Bander’s heart stopped in his chest. He was wrong. He had seen everything in thirty years …
Except that.
40
I awoke in the chair at two a.m. and moved to bed, too tired to remove my clothes. I arose at seven, showered and performed three days’ worth of shaving, then dined alfresco on sausage, eggs and grits as workers filed into the surrounding buildings and buses whined from stop to stop. Rain had passed through before dawn and the air felt renewed, at least until a bus sizzled past.
I was finishing my coffee and wondering if Morningstar had gone in early this morning – the new pathologist was in town, ready to be filled with knowledge – or if she was still abed. I pictured her tan body across snow-white sheets (I’d never known anyone who could sprawl so picturesquely) and felt the need to hear her voice, thinking it a good way to start a day likely destined to fall downhill from here.
My phone riffed and I hoped she’d been on the same thought track, just a faster dialer, but it was Vince Delmara.
“Howdy, Vince. You’re out and about early, and on a Saturday.”
“Like days have any meaning any more. Listen, Carson … you filed a Missings report day before yesterday, right?”
“It was filed by Patrick White. I was just making sure it moved quicker and—”
“Thirty minutes back a male of Prestwick’s approximate age and size was found southwest of Florida City. Hair’s silvery?”
“The photo should have ID’d him, Vince. They check it?”
A pause. “Um, unknown.”
“How’s his condition?”
“Vitals are stable, I hear. Uh, listen, Carson. You know this guy, Patrick White very well?”
“He’s a nurse at MD-Gen. He’s a good guy, solid. Why?”
“You may want to be there when he visits his buddy. Gotta go, Carson. I’m on a fast track today. Stay sane, OK?”
Something in Vince’s call – stay sane? – ramped my heart up and I turned on the screamer and flashers, pulling into the Emergency intake. An ambulance was in the bay with rear doors open and I wondered if it had delivered Prestwick. I entered to see four medical types studying a chart, their faces tight and tentative. I shoved the badge and ID in the air.
“I’m here about a recent intake, young male, silverish hair. Can anyone help me?”
It was like everything stopped. All faces craned to me. A fortyish man I assumed to be a doc – green scrubs, stethoscope around his neck, intense expression – ran my way.
“Prestwick’s down the hall. Name’s Doc Brown, yeah, like the soft drink.”
I followed Brown to the first room. Stepping in I saw the lower half of Prestwick first, legs sticking out, fine there. My gaze continued upwards to a head completely wrapped in gauze and stained with seepage. A breathing tube was inserted into the mask of gauze. A pale arm was strung with tubes and wires and a nurse was changing out an IV bag. Two other doctors were conferring in a corner. One was shaking his head in what seemed disbelief.
“What happened to his head?” I asked Brown.
“Not his head. It’s … his face.”
“Injured?” I asked.
“Removed.”
The words didn’t fit in my head and I stared at the gauze orb, a slit over the mouth emitting low moans.
“Explain that to me, Doctor
.”
Brown blew out a breath. “Think of the face as a mask of flesh over the skull. Someone incised a line under the jaw line, ran it front of the ears to the top of the forehead, grabbed the mask and pulled it off.”
My stomach upended itself and I only barely got it righted.
“My God,” I whispered. “What’s left?”
“Underlying tissue. Muscles. Have you ever seen the Chinese exhibit, Bodies?”
I had and closed my eyes. Prestwick was moaning louder. Brown looked at the nurse. “Fentanyl, quick.”
“Dr Brown,” said the paging system. “Dr Brown to Emergency.”
“Shit. Gotta go.” Brown shot a look at Prestwick as the nurse pushed a plunger on the syringe. He shook his head.
“Someone must really hate him.”
Feeling poleaxed, I drifted into the hall and realized it was up to me to call Patrick White. He answered halfway through the first ring, like the phone had been in his hand, waiting.
“Patrick? This is Detective Ryder.”
“I can tell by your voice … it’s bad. Is he, is Billy …”
“Billy Prestwick is alive, Patrick. He’s in no danger of dying.”
A released breath. “Thank God. Oh, thank God.”
“Can you come to the hospital, Patrick? I think it’d be a good thing.”
White arrived twenty minutes later. I had been by the elevators hoping to catch him and break the news, but he used the back stairway and I only knew he’d been in Prestwick’s intensive-care room when I saw him exit it. He looked drunk, his legs loose and his head drowsing and he leaned the wall for support. I got to him just as his legs looked ready to buckle.
“Come on, bud,” I said, steering him to a visitor alcove and easing him into a chair. His mouth was open and his eyes closed, and I knew they were seeing horrors. I booked to the nurses’ station and got a cup and ice water.
“Drink this, Patrick.”
He drank clumsily, water dribbling to his shirt. He set aside the cup and shook his head. “Who could do that to another human?”
I pulled a chair across from Patrick and sat. “The man who did it is sick, Patrick. His mind has cancer.”
He turned to me. “You’ve got pictures. Why can’t you find him?”
“All we really know is his basic size and his underlying facial structure. He’s likely changed everything else.”
“But it’s your job, right? This is what you do?”
“We’re trying, Patrick. It’s just that this guy—”
His fists pounded the couch, his face reddened. ‘NO! I don’t want to hear what you can’t do! You want to see what you did do? Go look down the hall!”
“Patrick …”
“MY BEST FRIEND IS DOWN THE HALL AND HE HAS NO FACE! YOU DID THAT! YOU KEEP SAYING YOU’RE TRYING … SCREW TRYING. HOW ABOUT ACTUALLY GETTING SOMETHING DONE!”
White’s anger echoed down the hall. Nurses’ eyes looked our way, two physicians leaned from Prestwick’s room. I wanted to disappear, to be anywhere but in this hospital hall filled with pain and despair and the results of my failure. When Patrick White sunk deeper into the chair and began sobbing, I started to walk toward the station, but realized it was the coward’s instinct and it was my penance to keep within the umbra of White’s grief, to feel the negative power of my ineptitude.
So I sat on a couch beneath the alcove’s window. My head fell into my hands and I tried to find a place of quiet for just a few seconds, a place where all my chaotic thoughts might resolve into an insight, a possible solution. And there I sat until I felt a hand tremble on my shoulder and the weight of another presence on the couch. I turned to Patrick White, his eyes red and cheeks wet.
“I’m sorry,” he said, swallowing hard. “It was cruel and terrible and I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s all right, Patrick. It’s been a terrible last few hours.”
He pulled a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “I know you’re doing everything. I’ve never seen anyone more determined.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “He’s your best amigo, Patrick. You have every right to your anger.”
“Not when it’s misguided. I can’t imagine how it must be to deal with the kind of creatures who can do something like, like …” He could only nod toward Prestwick’s room.
“Creature is the right word, Patrick. But this one’s uncannily smart. We can’t find him by his looks, so we have to find him by how he thinks. Like why did he select Billy as a target? That’s where you can help, Patrick. You told me a bit about Billy the other day. Tell me more.”
White moved from the couch to the chair, pulling it close as he measured out his words. “It’s … it’s difficult because there are two Billys. One’s outrageous, over the top, vain as a peacock … almost a cartoon character. That’s the Billy most people see.”
“The other?”
“Caring, intelligent. He’s good at hiding that one, because he’s insecure. Billy thinks if he’s not the center of attention, he’s failed. Not so much failed himself, but failed everyone. If there’s not a crowd surrounding him and laughing, he’s doing something wrong.”
“Can he be hurtful with his words? Insulting?”
A long pause.
“Patrick?” I prodded.
“Years ago, when we were in our late teens, early twenties, Billy could say hurtful things. So did the crowd he hung with … like they had to be mean to be cool. They were a bunch of nasty little bitches.” He paused. “I was one of them, Detective Ryder. I can’t believe I could have been so terrible.”
“You grew up. How about Billy?”
“Growing up? He equates it with being serious, and being serious with being a drag. But he’s turned being mean into being funny, always clowning.”
“What’s he do for a living?”
“He dresses windows for a few small shops, really creative set-ups. He’s got flair. He also relies a lot on the kindness of strangers, to lift a line from Tennessee Williams.”
“He hooks?”
“He accompanies. Some men hate getting older, losing their youth and virility. They enjoy walking around in public with someone young and attractive. Others like to talk, to bask in his, his … Billyness. He makes them feel a part of things again, and in exchange, they give him clothes, liquor, money. And yes, sometimes there’s sex involved.”
“He uses his looks.”
A nod. “He once told me he couldn’t imagine looking regular, that it would be such a drag to have an ordinary face.” White paused, and tears began rolling down his cheeks.
“Cosmetic surgery can do a lot these days,” I said, trying to be comforting. “The pros will fix his face.”
He looked at me and swallowed hard.
“But to fix a face, Detective Ryder, you first need to have one.”
The scene investigators were still on site when I arrived. Prestwick had again been dumped in an urban area, again behind a strip of shops. It was as private a drop zone as a city offered and I found Deb Clayton studying a standpipe, as if wondering whether she should fingerprint it.
She pointed to a loading dock holding broken pallets. “We found a blood trail starting below the dock. An MDPD cruiser was patrolling, saw the victim, called for a bus.”
“What was the vic’s condition?”
“Stunned, staggering. Naked. According to the patrol officer, Leo Bander, it was the freakiest thing he’s ever seen. And Leo’s about to finish thirty.”
I climbed the steps to the rear door and banged. When nothing happened I picked up a chunk of broken pallet and did a timpani solo. Seconds later the door opened and a balding fortyish guy in a brown suit stuck an angry head out.
“What the fuck is going …” He saw the copmobile and forensics unit. The anger dissolved. “Oh shit, another fucking body?”
I shouldered past him. It was cool inside and I saw a lot of wooden crates and boxes. “That a frequent occurrence?” I said. “Dead bodies in the back
yard?”
The guy shook his head. “Just once, a homeless guy. It was last year and the paper said his heart gave out. Poor fuck was forty-two. I found him, and I coulda swore he was eighty.”
“It’s a hard life,” I agreed. I looked at the rows of wooden and cardboard cartons, sized like they could hold all sizes of picture frames. “What do you sell here, by the way?”
He walked toward the front, waving for me to follow. I caught up with him as we passed through a door to the retail area. It was bright and cheery and filled with dozens of Carson Ryders.
When my mouth dropped open, so did theirs.
41
I went to the office. Roy was in Tallahassee, probably schmoozing the yo-yo legislator. Gershwin had been out with the second team, taking Donnie’s picture to the chemistry and botany departments of local colleges and universities.
“Please tell us you know this guy …”
Gershwin returned and reclined on my sofa with hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling as we discussed recent events, Jeremy not included.
“Donnie left Prestwick behind a mirror store?” Gershwin said.
“A discount mirror outlet, every size and shape of mirror you could ever want.”
“Meaning?”
I pushed aside the mess on my desk to give me a place to rest my heels. “Donnie knows. I don’t. Appearance, mirror to the soul, a reflection of whatever. It may make no sense to us even if we knew what it meant to him.”
“You said he’s changing shape?”
“His madness is changing shape. Something spurred him into extreme violence, and he liked it.”
“Enough that his next move is cutting out a man’s tongue?”
“Violence is replacing sex, or they’re now the same. He’s probably getting more release from suffering than sex.”
“Donnie took Prestwick, tore off his face, and dumped him. He kept him what, sahib … thirty-something hours?”
I blew out a breath. “The more violence, the less time he needs to keep them.”
“Concentrated thrills. You have my next question figured out, right, Big Ryde?”
I pulled my feet from the desk and leaned forward, nodding at Gershwin.
