by J. A. Kerley
My cell rang and my hand had it out before I’d even directed my hand to move. Cruz was on the balcony and heard the first ring through the window, was inside before the second ring.
I looked down at the screen:
REIN
“Open the message,” Cruz said, my nervous fingers fumbling at the phone. “Get it in gear, Ryder.”
I tapped the button, saw a long stream of text:
wAstra til tmrw nite? @ 11267 Mill rd. notfar fr Brnsn MO 234EA. Lv thngs undr rosebsh s side f prch asap. I gt soon! &: w/2nd UR wmn, Treeka, tgthr nxt stp at least.
Cruz laughed. “The girl’s writing a novel.”
I grabbed a pen and paper and between us we doped out the meaning in under two minutes. I read from the scribbles and mish-mash.
Cruz said, “OK, as we get it now, the message is ‘With Astra until tomorrow night? The address …’”
“It’s somewhere around Branson,” I said. “We can get closer from the cell tower location.”
“She’s put in the damn vehicle tag number, Ryder. The lady’s a champ! ‘Leave things under the rosebush on the south side of the front porch and I’ll get them soon!’”
“Shit, we can’t do it.”
“Maybe we can, Ryder. It depends on how far away she is. She’s fine, that’s the big news. She’s simply moved another step, now with a woman safekeeper. Finish the translation.”
“‘And I’m with a second underground railroad woman, Treeka from Boulder. We’re together on the next step at least.’”
“Seems like she’s got a traveling companion,” I said.
“I’ll run the plates,” Cruz said.
“And I’ll call the wireless service and get the cell tower location. Get ready to roll.”
We looked at each other with a simultaneous sigh of relief. We’d soon have Rein back under our wing. I called Harry, almost giddy at the chance to deliver good news.
“Where are you headed?” Rein asked Treeka. “I don’t mean exactly.”
“Southeast toward Florida. I want to look out a window and see a life that’s all different: no mountains, no snow, no Tommy.”
“You got people there?” Rein asked Treeka. “Florida?”
“No, which makes it even better, given the kind of people who make up my people.”
Rein nodded. “Gotcha.”
“There was a poster I saw in a hippie shop on Pearl Street in Boulder, saying ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your life.’ That’s how it’s gonna be when this is over and I’m standing on a beach and squeezing my toes in the sand and looking out over the ocean. The first day of the rest of my life.”
Treeka smiled and leaned back and Rein saw how her companion’s face was relaxed and smooth, beatific, as though her vision of the future had momentarily washed her clean of fear.
Then, as swift as if a switch had been thrown, Reinetta watched Treeka’s face distort like melting wax, her smile dissolving into the shape of horror.
“Treeka,” Rein asked, “are you all right?”
Treeka didn’t answer, eyes and mouth wide and unbelieving, staring at something behind Rein’s back. Rein’s head snapped around. In the doorway stood a slender man in denim jeans and shirt, his brown Stetson tipped back to display eyes glittering like wet coal. There was a ten-inch hunting knife hanging from his belt. He was holding a huge chrome revolver and grinning like a child whose every Christmas wish had been granted.
“Hey, Treeks,” he said softly. “How you been, baby?”
The man started laughing.
Blood draining from her face, Rein turned to Treeka. She was crying. And whispering a single name over and over.
Tommy.
Chapter 46
Rein never had a chance. The man named Tommy made a weeping Treeka tie Rein’s wrists behind her back. The knots were clumsy but Tommy kept saying “tighter” until they cut into Rein’s flesh. Through the ordeal Treeka kept apologizing to the man.
Tommy went outside, gone five minutes, then Rein heard an approaching engine. The man’s vehicle had been hidden nearby, she figured; he’d been fetching it. Tommy entered with a six-pack and walked to Rein, pulling off his hat and touching her hair with the sweat-stained brim.
“You got some nigra in you, don’t you?” he said, looking at Rein with a mixture of fascination and disdain.
Rein nodded.
“Damn fuckin’ shame,” he said. He backpedaled to Treeka, now huddled on the floor. “I wanna show you something, baby,” he said. “Look this way.”
Tommy walked through the kitchen, opened the back door and pointed to a blue truck, dusty, like it had traveled a long distance over back roads. A silver livestock trailer was hitched behind the truck.
“You can’t see through the dust, Treeks,” he said. “But someone wrote some real hurtful words on my door.”
“I’m so sorry for what I did to your truck, Tommy,” Treeka whispered. “It was mean and hurtful and I’m ashamed.”
“Guess what it cost to paint my door, baby? Two hunnert an’ seven bucks. I can’t even see how the new paint looks cuz the truck’s all covered with dirt.”
“I’ll clean it for you, Tommy,” Treeka pleaded. “Get me a hose and some soap and rags. I’ll shine it so pretty it’ll be like new, just you wait and see, hon.”
Tommy tipped back his hat and studied the dusty truck for several seconds. He broke into a grin.
Cruz grabbed my computer and keyed in the password for the law-enforcement system. She waited until the information returned, stared at it.
“What?”
“Maybe I made an error … no, I typed it in right.”
“What’s the problem?”
“The license tag for Astra belongs on a 2003 Nissan Pathfinder registered to a Howard Redfeather in Medicine Lodge, Oklahoma. He’s eighty-three years old.”
“He must be a true believer.”
“Mr Redfeather has a driving restriction, daylight hours only. Kinda limits working on the railroad.”
“Astra might be his daughter,” I said, mulling over possibilities.
“Or maybe wife. You don’t look happy, Ryder.”
“I want to know exactly who Astra is.”
Cruz frowned in thought. “Gimme a couple minutes. Can you grab me a Coke?”
I snatched up the ice bucket and rummaged in my pockets, came up with a couple bills. I jogged down the balcony to the pop machine. When I returned to the room Cruz was looking at notes on her pad. Her eyes were tense.
“What’d you get?” I asked.
“I called Mr Redfeather and said I was a friend of Astra’s, trying to get in touch with her. He didn’t know who Astra was.”
“Astra’s a fake name.”
“Mr Redfeather has no daughter, and his wife’s dead. Here’s what it all came down to, Ryder: Mr Redfeather parks in the alley behind his home. I told him I was a cop, asked him to do something for me. It took a minute for him to check his vehicle. The car’s there, but …”
“But the license tag is gone,” I said, feeling the room start to whirl.
Rein lay in the corner, initially hearing wails from outside, but eventually they gave way to just an occasional sob from Treeka, or a threatening murmur from Tommy. She struggled mightily against the bindings, but they hadn’t yielded a millimeter.
When the door burst open an hour later, Tommy had a look of insane pleasure in his eyes. He was dragging Treeka across the threshold, the woman’s face brown with dirt, the front of her blouse crusted with mud.
“Learnin’ to be a woman!” he yelled, shoving Treeka across the floor. She collapsed beside Rein, sending a chair tumbling as her head banged the hardwood, coming to rest two feet from Rein’s face. Tommy walked back outside, pausing a second to click kinks from the small of his back.
Treeka moaned and vomited brown foam. It pooled between the two women like a sticky pond. “I think I’m gonna die,” Treeka said. Her cheeks ballooned again and she puked a river of brown clots
.
“Oh my God,” Rein said. “You didn’t …”
“Tommy made me lick all the dirt off his truck.”
Treeka turned her head away, shame closing her eyes. A half-hour later, crows arguing in a nearby tree and yellow sunlight drowsing into blue twilight, Tommy reappeared, a gasoline can in each hand. He ignored the women and poured the liquid over the furniture, sloshing it across the carpet in the next room. He whistled as he worked, the air filling with acrid fumes.
It was over, Rein knew. All she could think of was Harry. How her being burned up would destroy him, how he’d blame himself. Rein knew him so well that sometimes it seemed like she was alive inside his head and he in hers. Harry’d stop being a cop, turn inside himself and never let an hour pass when he didn’t tell himself he’d failed his mission and let her die.
You should always be allowed a note, Rein thought, tears in her eyes as she heard the sound of empty gasoline cans flung to the floor. When the Universe flashed alive it made a lot of laws for itself: nothing goes faster than light, objects in motion continue in motion until acted on by another force, and so forth. It should have thought things out better and made one final law: when people are going to die and that death will hurt other people so bad that they’ll never be the same, the person about to die should be able to leave a note that sets people straight.
Dearest Uncle Harry,
Stop being an idiot and blaming yourself,
you hear? The choices I made were always
my own …
The cell tower was in rural Missouri, a dozen miles above Branson. Cruz took the wheel and I tracked down the chief of the county police force, Larkin Teemont. There seemed a lot of commotion at Teemont’s end, a background clamor of voices and equipment, like Teemont was on a construction site.
“Could you repeat that, Detective Ryder?” Teemont said. “Pretty noisy on my end.”
“We may have a situation in your county, the potential of an officer in trouble. Can you do a drive-by of an address, just to take a look, especially at a license plate? We’ll fill you in when we get there.”
“Might help if you filled me in now, seein’ as it’s my jurisdiction.”
I laid out an edited version of the story, making sure Chief Teemont knew the operation was cleared at state level.
“What was that address again?” Teemont said. “The one you want us to check out?”
I repeated it.
“Detective, Ryder, I’m right now looking at the house at that address. Buddy, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ left but a hole in the ground when them firefighters leave.”
“You’re saying it’s burning?”
“I’m saying it’s about done burning. It was a bad-ass fire.”
“Was there anyone …” I couldn’t complete the sentence.
“Inside? That’s not confirmed yet.” A pause. “You ever been around a fire where someone was burnt up, Detective?”
“Several times.”
“You know that meat smell?”
“Yes.”
“I’m smellin’ it now.”
Cruz and I entered town after dusk. The house was a charred frame lit by the white lights of emergency vehicles, steam rising into the sky, a crew of firefighters kicking through rubble. I caught a whiff of a bad smell, lost it. Told myself it was just stuff in the fridge or freezer cooking down.
I saw one fire truck, one ambulance, two cop cruisers, and a dark blue van marked Coroner’s office. Larkin Teemont was a tall and rangy guy who reminded me of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, except he was in a green uniform. We shook hands, I introduced Cruz, and we replayed my story, short and simple.
“I’ll git that tag number out on an APB,” Teemont said. “You don’t know the kind of vehicle?”
“No.”
Teemont nodded to the smoldering ruin. “It’s just starting to cool enough the fire guys can check inside. You know who did this?”
“We don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s the problem.”
“Fire Chief says there was an accelerant,” Teemont said. “Gasoline, by the smell. A neighbor saw smoke, called the FD. The house was engulfed when they arrived.”
“Body!” someone yelled. “Down in the tornado shelter.” My heart froze to see a firefighter at the edge of the foundation pointing a flashlight downward. “No,” the man amended as he kicked aside a fallen rafter. “Not a body. Two bodies.”
Cruz and I sprinted over. A pair of local cops tried to jump in front of us, but Teemont yelled, “They’re OK, let ’em by.”
The corpses were in a room below the kitchen, a tornado shelter, brick-lined, the entry not into the house but through a steel trapdoor beside it, a tight hideaway revealed when the floor burned away, embers tumbling into the shelter and turning it into a barbecue pit.
After photos were taken, several firemen dug a corpse free of ash and charred timbers. When the cooked body was on the ground, they turned their attention to the second body, pulling it up and into the pulsing lights.
“Outta the way,” a short and bespectacled man in a suit said when both bodies were up; the county coroner. I was staring at the charred forms and shaking like I was freezing. There was something tight around my body: Cruz’s arms. I realized she was holding me up.
“Hang on, Carson,” she kept saying, the first she’d ever used my given name.
I watched numbly as the coroner used a white towel to brush char from the face of a body, a distorted mask. The smell of rotten meat was overwhelming, the coroner holding a handkerchief to his nose as he worked. It seemed wherever he touched, skin or meat sloughed from the bodies.
“You able to make an ID, Earl?” Teemont said from the far side of the house, staying upwind.
“I’m only sure of two things,” he said. “Both bodies are female …”
“And the other thing?”
The coroner stood, snapping off latex gloves. “They’ve been dead a while. No matter how long you cook meat, you can’t cook that rot smell off it.”
It took a few beats for his words to gel in my head. I grabbed his arm as he passed. “The bodies were putrefying?”
He nodded. “They might have been there a couple weeks, maybe more. It depends on how cool and dry it was in the shelter.”
“It’s not her, Carson,” Cruz said. “It’s not Rein.”
Chapter 47
The medical wagon was backing to the victims when Teemont stepped over, studied the bodies, shaking his head. “One body’s slim, the other’s hefty. You can tell that even through … everything else. I think it’s Katka Kassolian – the slim one – and her partner, whatever, Delma Thorne. They’ve lived out here for years, decades. It’s a damn shame.”
“Partner? Were they gay?”
“You saw one, you saw the other. I patrol this road a lot. On hot days they’d wave me over and give me a glass of ice tea or lemonade, tell me how much they appreciated us, the force. I had no problems with them two ladies at all.”
“They were the sole occupants?”
“Now and then you’d see another woman on the porch or sitting out back. It’s sometimes a safe house for women here.”
Cruz and I turned to him like synchronized robots. “You know that?” I asked.
Teemont leaned against his cruiser and tipped back his hat. “Y’know how some people ain’t got enough to do in their lives they gotta sneak around and look at ever’one else’s?”
“Too much,” I said.
“There used to be this busybody ol’ hen down the road, called once to say Miz Katka and Thorne was holding some young girl here, like running a white-slave thing. I came out and Miz Katka introduced me to the woman … not a girl, a lady in her middle twenties who was gettin’ away from a guy who used her like a punching bag. I guess the ladies did that sort of thing now and again, and I say good for them.” Teemont shot another look at the bodies, forlorn shapes against the dry grass. “You people say you’re working on something along them lin
es?”
“I’d appreciate it if you could look long and hard for that license plate,” I said.
“You got it, buddy,” Teemont said.
“I’m moving toward Dodge City. Everything’s cool.”
Tommy Flood left his message in the voicemail box, flicked his cell phone shut, and set it atop the dashboard beside the packs of cigarettes and lighters and fast-food wrappers. He cranked the Dwight Yoakum CD up, hard bass and twanging guitar again filling his cab and pouring out the open windows as he shot an eye at the speedometer, careful to keep the rig below the limit and safe from the prowling eyes of the occasional cop. It was ten p.m., the sky like a black blanket pulled flat over everything for a hundred miles. Only occasional flashes of heat lightning shivered under the far edges of the blanket to display scrubby plants of brown and gray.
Tommy was two-thirds of the way through Kansas, more than halfway home, the threads of lightning edging the sky like God telling him he was on the side of the righteous. He’d gotten justice, right? Got back what had been stolen from him?
Tommy lit another cigarette, smiling at his fortune. Hell, he hadn’t even known Treeka’d been snatched away by a system of dykes. He’d been looking for her all over the county when the phone call had come in.
“Brother Flood?”
“Who’s this?”
“Your wife betrayed you, didn’t she? Ran off.”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“A friend, Brother Flood. One of many who understand you. We’re a band of brothers, Tommy, helping one another. Let me show how we can help you … what’s the thing you want most in the world right now?”
“My goddamn prop’ty back.”
“It’s not that hard, Tommy. She’s just settled into a house in south Missouri. Would you like the address?”
“You damn bet I do.”
“It’s yours in return for a few small favors, payback to your brothers …”
