Dead Fast

by A. J. Stewart

  “Are you okay?” asked Danielle.

  Lucia smiled. “Seems we’re getting somewhere. Harrow told me I was hassling important people without reason, and that I was lucky to not be suspended.”

  Danielle frowned. “What did you say? Nothing silly I hope?”

  “I apologized and told him I was simply following up an official complaint from the victims. Harrow said you had made no complaint, and I told him that in fact you had, at the front desk, to me. I told him I was unaware that he had been involved in the matter, and he backtracked and said he hadn’t, but he wanted to see the complaint.”

  “That’s a problem,” said Danielle. “The complaint was never put in writing.”

  Lucia stepped to the duty desk and grabbed some papers, and then came back. “That’s why I need you to fill these forms out.” She handed the papers to us. The top of the paper read Police Report.

  Danielle smiled again. “Good girl.” She took a pen from Lucia and began filling out the form.

  “So what happened in the end?” I asked.

  “The assistant commissioner warned me off the issue until he had personally had time to read the complaint. He asked me when my next leave day was, and I told him tomorrow. So he said I should go home early, and he’d speak to me when I was next in.”

  “Maybe that’s a good idea,” I said. “Laying low for a day or two might be the prudent move.”

  “Prudent my eye,” she said, with a cheeky grin. “I’ve still got the ownership details of the van that ran you off the road. I’m off duty now and I’ve got nothing better to do. What say we pay them a little visit at home?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  DANIELLE COMPLETED THE police report on the drive. We wound away west from town, to a collection of fiberboard cottages that had seen better days when Victoria was queen. Lucia checked a note she had scribbled down against the location, and although I didn’t see any kind of street signage or house numbering, she turned off the engine.

  “That’s it there,” she said, pointing to a shack that might have once been lime green but had turned closer to white by years of constant sun.

  “We should come with you,” said Danielle. She was checking the police report as she spoke, and then passed it to me to cosign. I did so, without bothering to read it, and then I gave it to Lucia.

  “With these guys, I’m not going to say no to the backup,” said Lucia.

  We let Lucia take the lead. It was her turf and she was still in uniform, so it all looked official. She banged her small fist on a thin aluminum door that reverberated like a drum. It took a second go to encourage a response from inside the house.

  “Who it?” came a voice that sounded half asleep, or high.

  “Mista Winston,” I called.

  There was a long pause, then the door cracked open and a face appeared, and then recoiled from the sunlight. I didn’t recognize the face but I didn’t expect to. It had been dark when we were run off the road, and being attacked with cricket bats hadn’t left much time to draw up sketches of the perps. But what I did recognize was Danielle’s handiwork. The face in the doorway looked like he had a broken nose. There were black and purple welts creeping from under the plaster that covered his nose and half his face. Evidently he either didn’t recognize us, or he couldn’t see that far right now. Lucia stepped forward.

  “Corporal Tellis, JCF. I’d like a word. Can I come in? Thanks.”

  She pushed the door open and the guy stepped back, unsteady on his feet. We moved into a small room that might have been called a living room in another house, but in this case was covered in mattresses. Several bodies lay snoring, splayed out in the heat. The heavy scent of ganja hung in the air.

  “Whadda ya wan, mon?” said the guy with the busted face. Lucia paid him no mind. She moved slowly around the room and into a kitchen full of trash and unwashed steel pots. The countertops might have been laminate, but it was hard to say under the thick layer of cooking grease that covered them.

  Lucia checked the two other small rooms for any surprises, and then looped back to us. I stopped by the kitchen doorway, and looked over a guy who was propped up against the wall on a torn mattress. He had a bandage around his head that looked like it had been wrapped by a first-timer. It wound around his head side to side, and then top to bottom. Dried blood caked the side of his head. It looked like someone had attempted to repair a broken jaw without a visit to a hospital. He was staring into the middle of the room but seeing something altogether different from the rest of us, in a universe I was yet to visit. No doubt the ganja, and whatever else the guy was taking to dull the pain inflicted by Danielle when she cracked the guy in the chin with his own cricket bat. The net result was that the guy wasn’t telling us anything.

  I looked back at Lucia and shook my head, so she turned to guy who had let us in. He was lucky. Danielle had only thrown a cricket bat at him, so he’d just received a busted nose. Whether that meant his dose of painkillers was less or he just had a higher tolerance I didn’t know, but it meant he was the only one with the power of speech, so we gathered around him.

  “Wat, mon?” he said.

  “Do you remember me?” I asked.

  He wobbled his head, which I took to mean no.

  “What happened to your face? Looks like someone threw a cricket bat at you,” I said. I smiled and waited for his drug-fuzzed mind to play catch-up, and even then it took longer than was necessary. But the look on his face changed as it all came back to him, and he took an involuntary step backwards, only to find himself face-to-face with Danielle. She smiled and the guy lurched away from her, bent over and threw up. It was nasty. Nausea always is, but the fact that his lunch landed on the unconscious body lying on the mattress at his feet made it worse. We waited for the guy to gather himself a touch, then Lucia stepped forward.

  “Darrin? It is Darrin, right? I’m a police officer. We know you ran these people off the road, and tried to assault them,” she said.

  The guy started shaking his head but Lucia didn’t wait for his denials.

  “And we know Cornelius Winston hired you to do it.”

  “Nah, mon. I don know nobody like dot name.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Nah, I don know nobody.”

  “Really? Because he seemed to know you.”

  The guy looked at Lucia and blinked hard. From the waist up he wafted like a reed in the breeze as he tried to process what she was saying.

  “Yes, Darrin,” continued Lucia. “Mr. Winston said he knew you when we confronted him about the assault. He called the assistant commissioner who gave me orders to look into it,” she lied.

  “Nah, mon, he don do dot.”

  “Who don’t do that?”

  “Mista Winston.”

  “So you do know him?”

  The guy blinked hard again. It was taking a lot of processing power just to keep himself upright. Blinking seemed to be the way he pumped electrical current into his brain.

  “We do some gard’nin fo’ Mista Winston. Dot’s it, dot’s all.”

  “The van that ran them off the road is registered to you, Darrin,” said Lucia.

  Darrin shook his head and nearly fell over. I was pretty sure this interrogation wouldn’t stand up in court, but that wasn’t the point.

  “Me van got stolen.”

  “It wasn’t stolen,” I said, getting right into Darrin’s face. His breath smelled like a peat bog. “You said I could take it, remember?”

  “No, I neva, mon. You just took it.”

  “So you were there.”

  Darrin blinked again, but nothing seemed to click inside and he stayed silent.

  “So just tell us,” I said. “Tell us what Mr. Winston told you to do.”

  “Mista Winston tell us to stay inside da house, so we is stayin’ inside da house.”

  “Is that all Mr. Winston told you?”

  “Mista Winston tell us to stay in the da house until he come back.” The effort of so much
speech made Darrin unstable, and he looked like he might throw up again, so I stepped back from him.

  “Until he comes back?” asked Lucia. “Where did Mr. Winston go?”

  Darrin wobbled in place, looked blankly at Lucia and shrugged his shoulders. Lucia, Danielle and I traded looks, and then we turned back to Darrin as he promptly crumpled like one of those Vegas casinos they blow up every now and then. His knees buckled beneath him and he dropped straight down, crossing his legs and landing in a seated position on the mattress. Then he flopped onto his back and began to snore. He might have been faking it, but I didn’t give him that much credit for coming up with the move in his state. I stepped by Danielle and put my fingers to Darrin’s neck, checking his pulse.

  “He’s sleeping now,” I said.

  “Are you sure he’s okay?” Danielle frowned.

  “I’m sure he’ll live. Okay is a matter of perspective.”

  We left him sleeping and wandered back out into the sunshine. It was blindingly bright after the dull ambience of the ganja house, and we stood by Lucia’s car for a moment.

  “So we know for sure these guys are linked to Winston,” said Lucia.

  I nodded. “He said Winston told them to stay in the house until he got back.”

  “Got back from where, though?” asked Danielle. “Where is he?”

  Lucia looked at us both. “That is the sixty-four million dollar question.”

  Lucia drove us back to the resort. Danielle told her to take the time off and chill, but neither of us believed she would. We wandered back out past the restaurant, the line forming for the lunch buffet. The waiters had cleaned away the coffee and fruit we had left by the pool, so I asked Danielle if she fancied some lunch. She declined.

  “A swim?”

  She shook her head.

  “I feel like going for run,” she said.

  I couldn’t think of an argument against the idea, so we got our gear and ran along the beach. The people lying on the loungers down on the sand looked at us like we were crazy. But a good run really makes you feel alive. Do it enough and your body rewards you. We’d really gotten back into our runs in the past months, along the Florida coast where we lived, from City Beach to the State Park. It was long enough to work out the kinks, but not so far as to leave us in pain. The resort beach wasn’t designed for running. It sat between two breakwaters, large rocky outcrops where no runner dared go. We ran to the end, then back, and then turned again. As we reached the part of the beach opposite our room Danielle slowed.

  “Okay?” I asked.

  She wore Lycra running shorts and top, bare midriff showing the kind of abs that a hundred sit-ups a day earns. Her tanned skin was peppered with pink spots where the shotgun spray hit her when she had been shot. I noticed they were disappearing with time. I also noted that she wasn’t puffing in the slightest.

  “I feel like a hamster in a wheel,” she said.

  “We could go out of the resort. Run along the road. If you dare.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” she said.

  She took my hand and we marched up to our room. She pulled off my t-shirt, pushed me back onto the bed, and leaped on top of me.

  She smiled, that half grin that did all kinds of things to me. “Let’s work out the old-fashioned way,” she said, laying a long wet kiss on me.

  I lay on the bed, listening to the sounds of water and the laughter from the swim-up bar. Sweat was being lifted from my brow by the constant beat of the ceiling fan. Danielle lay snoozing on my chest. A good workout and an afternoon snooze and I could feel a twinge of hunger coming on. I wondered what had brought out Danielle’s amorous side, whether seeing a young cop like Lucia at work had her thinking about her own role. I knew Danielle worked in mysterious ways, and that I would never really understand her. But when I was the beneficiary of her mood, who was I to complain? My reverie was disturbed by the shrill sound of my phone. Danielle stirred as it rang across the room, and I wished I had turned it off. I apologized as I dashed across the room to quieten it, and was about to kill it when I saw who the caller was. Instead I answered, standing there in my birthday suit.

  “Miami Jones.”

  “Miami, it’s Aaron Katz. I’m just calling back about your kid, the runner.”

  “Yeah, I figured. What’s up?”

  “I showed the video to our track coach, Allan Lombardi.”

  “Your track coach is called Lombardi.”

  “Yeah, and his nickname is The Trophy, but he don’t get it. He’s not a football guy. Anyway, he thinks the kid’s got some stuff.”

  “That so?”

  “Aha. He was impressed by ten thirty-five in flats. Now we might be able to do something for him for next academic year, but here’s the thing. We would have to verify that time.”

  “Like in an official race?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Aaron, when I was recruited by UM I did an official school visit. The school flew me down from Connecticut. Is that something we can do?”

  “There’s a wrinkle with that. Lombardi has used all his official visit budget for this recruiting cycle. He spends a lot of time in Europe, and the money goes fast.”

  “Nice work if you can get it. So a visit is out.”

  “Well, no. A school-funded visit is out, but prospective athletes are always welcome to do an unofficial visit.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “No difference. Just one we pay for, one we don’t.”

  “But you’ll host him.”

  “Absolutely. We can arrange class visits, a student chaperone. He can stay a night in dorms, and Coach Lombardi will show him the facilities.”

  “But he has to pay to get to Miami?”

  “That’s the only problem. Budgets are tight, and when they’re gone, they’re gone.”

  I looked across at the bed where Danielle was sitting up, her arms wrapped around her knees, still naked and hair suitably mussed. She could read me like I was the oath of allegiance. She gave me that half smile, and she nodded.

  “Okay, Aaron. Let’s say I can get him there. You can watch him run and make a call on it?”

  “That’s the other thing. NCAA rules disallow try outs for non-students.”

  “They don’t make it easy.”

  “No, they don’t. Can you hold while I run this past Lombardi?”

  “Sure.”

  Aaron put me on hold, and I heard an announcement about upcoming games in all sorts of sports, and a booster rally that was being held at Mark Light Field. I had been to my share of those, and it took me back almost twenty years. Then Aaron was back and so was I.

  “Miami, you there?”

  “In the flesh.” Literally.

  “Okay, Lombardi says there is a regional track meet here in Miami on the weekend, and he can get the kid a wildcard entry if you can get him here.”

  “Great. I’ll confirm with his mother. Danielle and I are flying back day after tomorrow, so I’ll arrange for him to come with us. I can deliver him to campus on Friday morning. That work for you?”

  “Perfect. The race is Saturday morning, so that will give Lombardi time to do the tour and for the kid to see the campus.”

  “Alright. Well, I’ll call to confirm after I speak to his mother later today, but assume it’s a go.”

  “There’s just one other thing I need to confirm, Miami. And this is just to make it official-like. You’re not representing the kid, right?”

  “You mean like an agent?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No, Aaron. I was a student-athlete. I know the rules. No agents, no exceptions.”

  “So your role in this is . . .?”

  “A friend of the family just trying to give the kid a chance to get into his alma mater.”

  “That’s what I thought. I just needed to check. We can’t afford more NCAA scrutiny.”

  “It’s a clean deal, Aaron. I wouldn’t sell you a bill of goods.”

  “I never t
hought that. So I’ll see you Friday.”

  “You will. Thanks.”

  I hung up and looked at Danielle. Her impish smile was gone.

  “No agents, no exceptions,” she said.

  “NCAA rules,” I replied.

  “So what is Desmond Richmond?”

  “A benefactor.”

  “And the difference is?”

  “A very thin line.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I GOT INTO some shorts and an old St. Lucie Mets t-shirt, and crawled across the bed and kissed Danielle. She returned it with interest, then bounced off the bed and headed for the shower. I had to talk with Mrs. Swan and Markus, preferably together, but I had to do it when Desmond Richmond wasn’t around. I was also worried about Lucia. She was walking a tightrope, doing her job for sure, but potentially annoying some serious people in her small community at the same time. I knew from experience that you could only effect change if you were in a position to do so, and being fired or sent to whatever the Jamaican equivalent of an Antarctic post was would not serve her well.

  I wandered out to the small balcony and watched a catamaran skipping across the deeper emerald water. An attendant from the resort was at the helm, taking couples and families for joy rides on the placid ocean. I supposed that allowing guests to take their own boats out might end up in recovery efforts off the coast of Cuba. The lunch crowd had retreated back to the beach and the poolside bar was standing room only. It was a squat building, concrete and hurricane-proof, except for the roof, which was palapa style, and reminded me of Longboard Kelly’s back home. Which made me think of Ron. Which made me go back inside, grab my phone and call.