A Clean Kill

by Mike Stewart

  When he finished, Judge Savin was looking at the prison and arrest records of one Zion Thibbodeaux, a.k.a. Zybo. “What’s this?”

  “A background report on a Cajun hit man with a biochemistry degree from Southwest Louisiana State and one year of med school at Tulane. He spent a few years locked up in Angola for killing a man.”

  Judge Savin sat perfectly still. I could hear his breathing and mine. I could hear the ticking of the antique wall clock above Laurel Adderson’s desk. Half a minute passed before he said, “I don’t know why you’re showing me this. I see too much of it. A young man with brains and a future gets drunk in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He looked up with hooded eyes and handed me the papers. He almost whispered, “It’s tragic, really.”

  I held the judge’s eyes. “And it’s a tragedy that could spread, judge.”

  He nodded. I placed the papers back in the envelope, slid the package inside my coat pocket, and sat down on a short sofa opposite the judge. I waited.

  Finally, Judge Savin asked, “Is that yours, Tom? Did you have that report done?”

  I moved my head from side to side. I lied.

  “Then, just out of curiosity, how’d you come by it?”

  “A dead lawyer gave it to me.”

  Judge Savin nodded. “That was nice of him.”

  The engine had cooled while we were inside. Joey’s drug-dealing client had equipped his Safari-toy with heated seats. I flipped them on.

  Less than twenty feet down the driveway, Kai-Li asked, “Did it work?”

  “Who knows? His fingerprints are on every page. He knows Zybo’s identity is out, and I as much as told him that I got the report from Chris Galerina. Doesn’t mean he believed me, though.”

  “Still. You did what you came to do. And nothing went wrong.” Kai-Li hugged her coat tight around her. “We smiled. We made nice. We gorged on inferior life forms. I’d say it was a successful night.”

  I turned onto the blacktop and pointed the grille toward home. “We’ll see.”

  Kai-Li insisted she wanted coffee on the deck when we got home. It was thirty-four degrees outside, but I found myself pulling over in Fairhope to buy fresh beans.

  Back in Joey’s Safari-mobile, I could feel Kai-Li’s eyes on me as I pulled out of the parking lot and turned toward home. Being the subject of so steady a gaze was both uncomfortable and comforting. I thought about that and about Susan Fitzsimmons in Chicago and about what happens when you find yourself working closely with someone who’s sexually attractive to you.

  And those thoughts were enough to keep me from picking up on a strange sight off the road to our right. I was nearing my driveway and had just clicked on the turn signal when Kai-Li spoke in a tone that communicated alarm without raising her voice. “Look! Look, quick! Is that your house?”

  Twenty-six

  Yellow light flashed through rows of narrow evergreens along the roadside, like blinding headlights cutting between the cars of a moving train. I stepped on the accelerator, jammed the brakes at the turn, and skidded sideways onto gravel, where I punched the accelerator again. Two seconds later, I slammed on brakes and skidded to a stop fifty feet from my front door. I didn’t say anything. Kai-Li saw everything I did.

  She’d thought my house was on fire. I’d thought the same. It wasn’t.

  The front door stood wide open. The same was true for every window in the place, and all the blinds and drapes had been pulled aside. Bright light from inside, outside, and around the beach house threw a jumbled pattern of rectangles and trapezoids across grass and sand. Irregular patches of snow and ice shone like polished steel in the night.

  I reached for the door handle. “Stay here, okay?”

  Kai-Li’s door popped open before mine. “No.”

  She was right. I had the gun. Why sit alone in an idling car? I pushed open my door and stepped out in one movement. I heard the sound even before my foot hit the ground.

  Kai-Li stepped forward and spoke across the hood.

  “What’s that?”

  “Music.”

  She looked at me.

  “It’s … it’s called Zydeco.” I explained over the din. “It’s Cajun music.”

  She listened. “It’s recorded.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t really thought there was a band in my living room, but people say funny things when they’re scared.

  Kai-Li walked around the front of the truck and stood beside me. “Thomas, this is where a smart person would leave and come back with the police.”

  I nodded again. I was studying the house through open windows and scanning the lighted yard.

  Kai-Li put her hand on my arm. “This is what your friend in Birmingham was talking about, Thomas. You need to learn to back off sometimes.” A few seconds passed as a falsetto yelp—backed by accordion, guitar, a scrub board, and a wailing harmonica—echoed across the yard. She turned to face the house. “You’re going to go in there, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I changed my mind. I’m not going.”

  “Don’t blame you.” I waited for her to get into the driver’s seat. I tapped on the window, and she rolled it down. “If something goes wrong or if it feels like I’ve been in there too long, head back to town. Find a place with lots of people—the grocery store where we stopped—and call the sheriff’s office.” I glanced up at the house. “Be careful.”

  Kai-Li shook her head. “I will never understand this American male thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “me either.”

  I circled the house, staying to shadows when I could, then checked the Browning’s safety and rushed in through the back door. The lamps were lit, the overhead lights were on, and my stereo speakers were pounding the glaringly bright house with Louisiana swamp music.

  Zybo would expect me to go first to the stereo to get relief from the crashing cacophony, but I did it anyhow. The din was swirling my thoughts, and the too-bright house was more disconcerting than it would have been in darkness. I crossed the room and hit the power button on my receiver. Silence filled the room with the intensity of the music.

  Now he knew for sure that I was there. I called out his name. “Zybo!”

  A door closed upstairs. I moved to the stairwell and looked up to the second floor—to the place where I slept and bathed and occasionally made love—and thought about what a good place it would be for a killer to corner someone. Then I thought how much easier it would’ve been for Zybo to have plugged me stepping out of my car onto a dark driveway. I stopped to breathe and to think.

  The lights. The music. This was something different. I started up the steps, slowly. A car horn blared, rippling nerve endings and scattering my thoughts—every thought but the image of Kai-Li sitting outside in Joey’s Safari vehicle. Alone.

  I was down the stairs in one stride, then through the house and out onto the porch too fast for someone expecting trouble. Glancing quickly at the driveway and scanning the yard like a running back clearing the line, I glimpsed of jumble of pictures—Kai-Li’s form inside the Land Rover; gravel, sleet, and snow gleaming in the moonlight; dark grass edged with pale sand.

  I caught the middle step with my toe as I leaped into the yard and sprinted fifty feet to the car. Kai-Li was inside. She stared at me through frosted glass. I looked at her. I straightened up to look once again at the empty yard. I heard the buzz of an electric motor. Kai-Li was rolling down the driver’s side window.

  Before she could speak, I said, “You scared the hell out of me.” Then I stopped short. She was no longer looking at me. Her eyes moved in spastic rhythms, scanning the ground behind me. The fingers of her left hand moved against her temple the way they did when she focused on work, only now I could see the pale tips of her fingers trembling in the moonlight.

  I looked around the yard again and then back down at her. This time I whispered. “What?”

  Kai-Li didn’t meet my eyes. She couldn’t stop hers from roaming the yard. “He was here.”

/>   “Zybo?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I didn’t really see him. Just …” She started, and her breath caught up short. She pointed toward the beach and then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I thought I saw …”

  I passed the Browning to my left hand and reached through the window with my right to touch her arm. “Kai-Li? Look at me, Kai-Li.”

  She turned and held on to me with those amazing green eyes.

  “I need to know what happened.”

  “He attacked the car. Maybe he was trying to get in. I’m not sure.” She pointed back over her shoulder. “Look.”

  Frost clung to the side windows, blurring my view of whatever she was pointing at. I stepped back and walked to the rear bumper.

  Just left of center, the back window had taken a blow from a heavy object—something like a pipe or a jack handle. A spider web of razor-sharp breaks radiated out from a six-inch circle of glass that looked now like crushed ice.

  A line of light caught my eye, and I looked down at a thread of bare metal. I reached out to touch what I feared was a wire. Instead, my fingers ran across fresh scratches in the Land Rover’s paint.

  I asked Kai-Li to step on the brake pedal, and a red glow lighted large, misshapen letters gouged into the tailgate. Someone had scratched the word IOWA into the vehicle while Kai-Li sat inside deafened by swamp music.

  I straightened up and, once again, scanned the yard, examining shadows, looking even harder for something out of place. There was nothing. There was, however, someone inside my house. Or, at least, there had been. Someone had closed a door.

  I walked back around to Kai-Li’s window. “Are you okay? Did any of the glass hit you?”

  She took in a chest full of air and dropped her head back against the headrest. “I felt some glass hit up here, but I don’t think I have any cuts.”

  “There’s someone inside the house. I heard a door close after I turned off the music.”

  This time Kai-Li reached through the window for my hand. “Can we please not be brave anymore? I’m scared, and you should be.”

  I tried to smile. “I am.”

  “Good.” The strength was coming back into her voice. “I’m leaving. Are you coming?”

  I pointed at the cell phone dangling from the dashboard. “How about if we call 911 and then just sit here and wait on the sheriff?”

  Kai-Li said, “I’d rather leave,” but she handed me the phone.

  The deputy seemed like a nice guy. He went into the house alone, holding an oversized revolver in both hands. He came out shaking his head. Later, he even helped me close windows and turn off lights while Kai-Li called her ex in Iowa to make sure Sunny was okay. I could hear the tone and cadence of Kai-Li’s voice change when she spoke with her daughter.

  As Kai-Li spoke into the phone in hushed tones, the deputy spoke to me about whether I had a licensed firearm. He wanted to know if I had an alarm. He spent a lot of time looking at Kai-Li while he was supposed to be talking to me. He promised to drive by a couple of times during the night to keep an eye on the place. He left.

  I walked out to the Land Rover to collect the coffee beans we’d stopped for in Fairhope. When I stepped back into the house, I dead-bolted the door and set the alarm before taking off my coat. I found Kai-Li standing by a window in the living room, looking out at the bay. I said, “It’s pretty at night, isn’t it?”

  She looked over her shoulder and then turned back to the window before speaking. “I imagine, living here, it’s pretty all the time.”

  “It is. How’s Sunny? Everything okay there?”

  She nodded. “Fine. They’re spending Christmas at the farm of a woman Stephen is seeing. He says his parents and I are the only ones who know where he is.”

  “Does he live in Iowa? I mean, is he just spending the holidays there or does he live there all the time? Because if he’s just there for the holidays …”

  She ended my sentence. “That means whoever was here may know where my daughter is. But, no, I don’t think that’s it. Stephen teaches computer science at the University of Iowa. He’s ninety miles away from the campus right now.”

  “So you’re okay?”

  She looked out over the bay and nodded.

  “Do you still want coffee? I got the beans out of the car.”

  Kai-Li turned and stepped away from the window. “Do you have any cognac?”

  “Sure. You want some in your coffee?”

  She smiled. “I want some in a glass.”

  “Good idea.”

  She turned back toward the beach. “Best one tonight.”

  I was being reprimanded by the professor, which was fine. She’d earned the right. I walked into the kitchen and came back with two snifters of cognac.

  “What about dinner with Judge Savin and Dr. Adderson?”

  Kai-Li walked across the rug to meet me. “I’m sorry.

  What?”

  “Oh. You were saying a drink is the best idea of the night. I was trying to surreptitiously redeem myself by mentioning it was my idea to meet with Judge Savin and let him know that we know about Zybo.”

  “This is you being surreptitious, huh?” She smiled. “Needs work. And, anyway, how do we know that meeting with Savin tonight isn’t why this happened? Maybe this Zybo character wanted to teach …”

  And something clicked into place.

  She was right. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. Zybo had already sent his nighttime messages, and, earlier that day, he had delivered his message in person. There really was no reason to pay another spooky visit to the McInnes home unless it was tied to our meeting with Judge Savin and/or Dr. Adderson. And tonight the intruder’s message had been much less subtle than before. This time, there had been no quiet trespassing, no living-room sculptures, no dead squirrels. This time the warning had been almost overdone. Plus, the zydeco music seemed wrong; it was too obvious. And, I thought, what about the busted window on the Land Rover and the implied threat scratched into the paint job? That was evidence of a crime, evidence of an attack on property and of an assault on Kai-Li inside the vehicle …

  “Thomas? Hello, Tom! Are you in there?” Apparently, Kai-Li had been talking, and I guess it had been just as apparent that I wasn’t listening.

  “Sorry.” I took a sip of cognac and paused to feel the burn in my throat, to let the scent pass up the back of my throat and into my nose. “I was thinking.”

  “Yes. I was able to determine that much.” She sipped her drink and said, “It’s a gift.”

  “What? Rudeness or the inability to focus?”

  “You’re not unable to focus. You do it too well. I do too.”

  “I’ve seen you work.”

  She nodded. “Like I said, it’s a gift. Like perfect pitch or a good eye for art. You thought of something, didn’t you? You think you’ve figured something out.”

  “Maybe.” I sloshed the copper liquor around in my glass. “I’m not sure. Let me ask you this. How sure are you that it was Zybo who bashed in the window on the Land Rover?”

  Kai-Li walked to the sofa and sat down. “Not sure at all. I just caught a glimpse of movement.” She had a strange look. “Why? What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not sure it makes sense.”

  Kai-Li patted the cushion next to her hip. She smiled a little, and her eyes were dilated.

  She said, “Tell me.”

  Twenty-seven

  The rain was back. A thousand rivulets on the beachside windows dissected and warped the lead-gray expanse of Mobile Bay. Diffused lightning touched one corner of the smudged-charcoal sky and then another. Inside, the fire cast twisting gold reflections across the hearth and floor.

  Joey stretched his legs out from the chair, crossed his ankles, and laced his fingers behind his neck. He started to speak, and a yawn caught him before he started. The giant man’s eyes watered as he tried to hold back.

  I asked, “You comfortable?”

  “Tired.”

  “I just wa
nted to make sure the conversation’s not growing tedious for you. That you’re engaged and, you know, comfy.”

  “Bite me.” He repeated, “I’m tired. Been running around checkin’ on our boy Zybo. What’s he’s been up to since he got outta the pen. And he ain’t exactly been droppin’ bread crumbs.” Joey gathered in his legs, sat up straight, and cracked his neck by rotating his jaw first to one side and then the other. “Truth is, though, this whole friggin’ case is gettin’ tedious. The way I see it, it’s pretty simple.”

  I knew Joey was getting ready to make a list. I’ve always admired the way he does it. Joey could break down the invasion of Europe into three or four basic ideas.

  “Number one, Zybo’s playing head games with you ’cause either Judge Savin or Russell and Wagler, or maybe both, told him to. Number two, Judge Savin—let’s say it was him—told Zybo to screw with you ’cause you wanna screw his money pooch.”

  “Screw his money pooch?”

  Joey smiled. “Like that one?”

  I held up a hand, palm down, and wiggled it.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “number three is we don’t know what’s goin’ on with Jim Baneberry. But you’re more or less covering that by havin’ Sheri playin’ spy,” he paused, “for whatever that’s worth.” He stood and walked to the window. “That about it, or am I missin’ somethin’?”

  Kai-Li strolled in during Joey’s analysis. She said, “Yes.”

  Joey drew in his chin and moved his eyes over the floor. “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, you’re missing something.”

  Joey pushed his hands down deep inside the hip pockets of his khakis. He had been studying Mobile Bay through the window, and it seemed he was fighting off cold absorbed by just looking out at the weather. “You gonna tell me what it is?”

  Kai-Li looked over to check my reaction before answering. “You’re failing to consider the progression of events … the various levels of harassment, if you will.”