by Lisa Black
Not. Acceptable.
FOURTEEN
‘How’s it going?’ the boss asked Damon upon his arrival at the motel off of I-90. The boss’s name was Leroy Whitman, but no one ever called him that. He sat in a folding chair outside the open door of room twenty-three. The motel had been closed for a year and still didn’t have a new owner, which made it a handy place for temporary storage.
‘Good. Took seventeen minutes to get here.’
‘No cops?’
The boss was large and black and deceptively mild looking, with a moon-like face and short wavy hair that Damon always thought looked more Italian than black. As with all his opinions, Damon kept this one to himself, speaking only of business and only when spoken to. ‘Ain’t seen any.’
‘Good.’ The stretched-out plastic weave of the lawn chair strained under the boss’s ample girth as he fished a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, diamonds glinting from thick fingers. He always had at least three other guys with him: his bodyguard, his right-hand man, and a third guy to take care of errands, phone calls, meal runs and enforcement, in order to keep the first two free for the really vital things. ‘This will be a very productive piece of undercover work. Maybe I should put somebody on all major construction projects.’
‘Don’t know if I’m cut out for an honest day’s laboring.’
The boss chuckled. ‘Some labors be worth it.’
‘You think this one will be worth it?’
The boss stilled, and Damon wondered if he’d misspoken. He hadn’t meant to question the boss’s judgment – just the opposite, he wanted to keep him talking so Damon could listen and learn. Show respect. It was all about respect. ‘I mean—’
The man waved around the cigarette to discourage the mosquitoes. ‘Sometimes you have to invest without being one-hundred-percent sure that you’re going to have a pay day. Maybe having a diagram of all the hallways and doors and plumbing and electrical work in a jail will come in handy some day. Maybe it won’t. Maybe this precious metal will make up for the income lost if your crew ain’t running so well without you there, ’cause business is down anyway. Maybe it won’t. Maybe, as some colleagues of mine suggested, that pretty new building will all fall down before they can cage up a single brother, and maybe it won’t. Long as you get paid either way, it’s all good, innit?’
‘Long as I get out of the way first,’ Damon joked, but he wondered about that. His boss was a profit man, not a political one.
‘I’m not a political man,’ the boss went on, scaring Damon practically out of his skin. ‘But when my great-great-great grandaddy, I’m sure, came to this country, he came with a chain around his neck. Like a dog. Put up on a block and sold like a dog. Now they want to put us in kennels, like dogs. Are we going to sit back and let our brothers be treated like dogs?’
‘No, sir.’
‘No,’ said the boss, taking a thoughtful puff, ‘suh!’
Damon considered this all the way back to the construction site. He had been in a group home. He had been in juvenile detention. He had been in jail twice. And between the beatings, the dramas, the constant and at times overpowering fear, he wondered if he wouldn’t have preferred the kennel. At least he could have slept like a normal person instead of the hyper-vigilant, hyper-aware animal you had to turn into in order to survive. Especially with his second cell-mate . . . Damon still had the occasional nightmare about that guy. So a cage all his own might be better, in its way. He couldn’t get out, but at least no one else could get in.
Of course, that all depended on who had the key.
He had crossed the site three times – slowly, unobtrusively, careful to look as if he had a legitimate purpose – and had not found it. Now he stood in, roughly, the center of the southern half of the building, replaying the previous night in his mind. For a purpose, this time, a purpose other than the simple joy of it, other than to create the pleasant stirrings in his chest and groin whenever he flashed back to that body flailing two hundred feet through space.
He had caught up with Samantha at the bar across the street, one of her favorite haunts. She liked to snag a place near the window if she could, so she could down a Cosmo made with cheap vodka and stare at the building, pick up guys with the line, ‘You see that skyscraper going up? I’m building that.’
As if.
Usually she had either settled on a catch for the evening or had a circle of two or three other women who needed to pretend to be there to enjoy each other’s company when instead they would abandon their own gender in the blink of an eye if something with a penis came along. But for once she sat alone, chin propped by one hand. In a booth – plenty of seats available that time of the night – so he could slide right in across from her. She had just smiled at him, quickly and not sincerely, before turning back to the window. She said nothing, as if he’d merely returned from a trip to the men’s room.
He said hello and how are you doing tonight.
‘I’ve been thinking about my daughter,’ she said without preamble, again as if continuing a previous encounter briefly interrupted. ‘I don’t want her to repeat my life. I don’t have any complaints, but still. She needs more opportunities.’
Like he wanted to hear about her kid, but then pretty girls did that. They could spout any sort of crap because they knew you’d hang on their every word no matter how dull or inane it got. He just let her talk, let her stare at the window instead of him.
‘I need to start a savings plan. I’m finally making decent money; I could sock some away and move us out to the suburbs. Someplace where she could play outside and have some friends. Get into a decent high school, you know? Get some tutoring.’
‘Great idea. This is a high-profile job; it should help you get good gigs from now on.’ He didn’t glance once at the building that she couldn’t take her eyes off of, not wanting to waste this opportunity to gaze at her breasts straining against the material in her top. He imagined touching them. Then he imagined squeezing them. Then he imagined cutting them.
‘I thought I had heard of a program where the city bought houses. Gave you a good price, then tore them down trying to rout out the drug dealers, but I called city hall and they had never heard of it. It would just push the dealers out into the suburbs anyway. Stupid idea.’
‘Lots of those around.’ He moved his gaze to her throat, to the pulsing tubes that swallowed liquid and pushed blood along. He imagined them broken open, disgorging their contents to the open air. Blood was blue until it hit the air, right? Or just really dark red?
‘That’s why I have to get my kid out of where we are now. There’s a drug house next door, and she’s got this bad habit of sneaking out. I can’t blame her, really – what kid wants to spend her life locked inside? I know she climbs down the tree. She tries to tell us she just left for school early but somehow the door is still locked from the inside. So I can either nail her window shut or move us the hell out of Dodge.’ She swallowed another mouthful of that sickly sweet stuff that pretty girls like to drink. ‘Anyway, that’s what I need to do. Get my life together. I’m going to be thirty next year, unfreakinbelieveable.’
‘You look twenty.’
‘Really?’ That finally got her attention away from the window, as he figured it would. He had only a few no-fail lines, but that was one of them.
‘Really.’ And when her eyes drifted toward the glass, he leapt. ‘You know what? Let’s go over and look at it. Take the zip lift to the top floor and be king of all we survey.’
A delighted smile crossed her face, and when she drained the Martini glass she’d been merely nursing all this time he knew he had won.
He slipped an arm around her waist as they crossed the street, but she giggled and knocked him away with one hip. ‘I suppose you hoped I’d think that was a chivalrous gesture, protecting my delicate body from traffic.’
‘Gave it a shot.’ He hadn’t thought any such thing, figuring that a grab at her flesh wouldn’t need to be disguised as anyt
hing but exactly that. But if she wanted to pretend to be a blushing virgin, he’d play along for a while. It would be a short while.
They turned the corner of the fenced area. ‘Hang on a sec,’ she said, and trotted over to her car.
Was she going to jump in and escape? Had he blown his chance, startled her too much – ‘Come on!’
But she didn’t get in the car, merely fumbled around inside for a moment and then backed out of it, slamming the door, trotting back. He had to keep from gasping in relief. Her expression, what he could see of it in the dark, once again seemed flush with excitement and the delight of a misbehaving child. She opened the lockbox, retrieved the key, opened the gate. He kept his hands to himself and closed the swinging panel behind them, so that any passer-by would have to really look to realize the chains were undone.
Then he followed her through the benign minefield of the construction site, keeping his impulses under control until they reached the building proper. Then the sight of that tight ass in her snug jeans as she climbed up the high step of the foundation – he spread his fingers over one cheek.
‘Stop that! Geez, what gave you the impression you could feel me up?’
He laughed again, couldn’t help it. ‘Gee, I don’t know. Maybe the tight pants? The make-up? The fact that you were drinking alone in a bar at nearly three a.m. on a week night? Face it – everything about you gave me the impression that you live to be felt up by somebody. Why not me?’
In the near pitch dark her face turned ugly. ‘Because I said not you. Just because I happen to be a living human being doesn’t mean my services are at your disposal, asshole. Forget this, I’m going home.’
She turned away from him, just as she’d knocked him away while crossing the street, but she hadn’t hopped in her car and driven away when she had the chance. She thought she could handle him. She still thought she could handle him.
She was wrong.
He grabbed her hair, that long silky stuff, with his left hand and punched her in the face with his right. It stunned her more than hurt her, he thought, because she didn’t shut up.
‘What the – what do you think you’re doing?’
He punched her in the stomach.
That was when she tried to defend herself with that damn screwdriver, which she must have snagged out of her car. Thinking ahead, just in case he didn’t slow down with the grab hands. Smart, he guessed, but not smart enough because Samantha Zebrowski was no Lara Croft when it came to hand to hand combat. He snatched the driver from her fingers, tossed it away, and slammed her a good one right in the eye. That took the fight out of her.
That had been right – here. Just south of the elevator pit. Where he should have walked right over it as he left earlier, but he hadn’t. Because the angel/demon/child had picked it up.
Shit.
He had to find that kid.
FIFTEEN
Driving Ghost home provided an annotated tour of the city Theresa thought she knew. The eleven-year-old pointed out that the cemetery had a faded headstone that seemed to show a little boy sitting on a bench with a sailor’s hat, and there were pretty gardens around the university’s medical education center, and a maze of alleys behind all the fancy restaurants on East Fourth where the wait staff would take their breaks, smoke cigarettes, and explain to you what a sous chef was.
But when she walked in to her house she went upstairs without so much as a hello to her grandmother. Mrs Zebrowski seemed beyond caring about minor points of courtesy, however. ‘I’m just glad you called, I was nearly beside myself. I’d given up worrying about her, she does it so much – shouldn’t have done that. It’s got to stop. Now with Sam gone, I just can’t take it.’
Theresa handed the woman a small brown envelope with Samantha’s cell phone, had her sign a receipt, and then sat down at the table with its vinyl tablecloth and napkin holder and box of tissues within Mrs Zebrowski’s reach. The kitchen smelled of stuffed cabbage and grief. Neighbors must have stopped by – five Tupperware containers of various sizes sat on the counter and no doubt there were more in the refrigerator. It was at once clichéd and exactly what Theresa loved about human beings: their drive to nurture however possible. No one starved while in mourning. ‘Can I make you a cup of tea?’
The woman snorted a laugh. ‘Thank you, dear, but I’ve practically drunk five pots already. And eaten four muffins and who knows how many cookies. Help yourself.’
‘No, thank you. I just – I’m not trying to pry, Mrs Zebrowski, but what did happen to Ghost’s father? Is he deceased?’
The woman leaned one elbow on the table and said without rancor, ‘I don’t have any idea.’
‘She showed me his picture, told me he was a soldier and killed in a training exercise, but—’
‘That wasn’t her father.’
Theresa waited.
The old woman rubbed her forehead with one hand, glanced toward the staircase, and then leaned forward. ‘I don’t have any idea who Ghost’s father is. Samantha told Ghost that boy in the picture was her father, except that picture was taken when Samantha was sixteen. The boy, Nathan, did go and join the army and did get killed, but that happened at least a full year before Ghost came along. Sam loved that kid, too – Nathan. I think losing him, after losing her father –’ now the woman rubbed both temples – ‘is why my girl turned so wild. Little after eighteen she got pregnant and wouldn’t tell me a single thing about who did it. I guess she was ashamed of herself. Maybe ashamed of him, I don’t know. Or maybe she thought I’d go after him, make her get married. And he must have been all right with getting off scot free because no man ever came around here looking to help out, that’s for sure.’
‘So she let Ghost think that Nathan was her father.’
‘He must have made a much prettier story than the real guy. She put his name on the birth certificate even though the dates would make it impossible if Ghost ever really looked it up. And Sam really loved him. She wanted Ghost to think she entered the world through love.’
‘I can understand that.’ Though eleven years of child support would have been of assistance. Especially now, without Sam’s income . . . But now it couldn’t be helped. The only person who had known the man’s identity had died.
Ghost was chasing a ghost.
Theresa handed the woman a piece of paper. ‘This is my card. I’ve put my cell phone number on it, too. Call me if there’s anything I can do. And please tell Ghost I said good night.’
She slipped out of the house without further ado. She couldn’t possibly tell the little girl where she was headed.
Kyle Cielac could probably commit any crime he wished without leaving evidence; he had no fingerprints. The pads of his digits were worn and pitted with only a patch of ridge detail here or there. When fingerprinted – because the construction company had done that almost at the start, wanting to be sure who they were working with – the inked ovals were pockmarked with white voids. Cement work did that. Sam had rubbed in hand lotion day and night and it hadn’t helped. She hadn’t had any fingerprints, either.
Good thing they found her while we could still recognize her face, Kyle thought, and his stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch.
‘You OK there, pard?’ the cop asked him.
‘Fine.’
The cop placed his Styrofoam cup of coffee on the table’s gleaming wood surface. They always met here, at his temporary office in city hall, but always after hours when the coffee had grown stale enough to grow legs and walk around by itself. ‘So you had some trouble at your site today?’
‘You could call it that,’ Kyle said.
‘She’s dead,’ Todd said. He had a cup in front of him as well, but hadn’t touched it. ‘Dead. They said she fell twenty-three floors.’
‘Smush,’ the cop said, and Kyle gritted his teeth.
‘He killed her. She figured out how he’s doing it and he killed her.’
‘Todd, Kobelski is a crook. Novosek is a crook. They are stealing money b
y using substandard concrete from Decker and Stroud in the county’s new jail and pocketing the difference between the cheap materials and the wad that the county is spending on this new and stunning facet of the criminal justice system. Thieves. They don’t kill people.’
The lawyer said nothing. He often didn’t. He didn’t even seem to be listening.
‘Do you know how much this project is going to cost?’ Todd demanded of the cop.
‘Eighty-five million, five hundred and thirty thousand. Give or take some odd change.’
‘Of that price, one quarter of it is the concrete. One-quarter – over twenty-one million. One quarter of that is the equipment and personnel – the trucks, the troughs, my paycheck. The other three-quarters is the materials.’
‘Yes.’ The cop rubbed his eyes, not even pretending to look interested. He wasn’t really a cop but an agent for the State of Ohio’s Congressional Task Force on public corruption; Kyle thought of him as a cop because he had the good one/bad one pattern down. Problem was he fulfilled both roles himself, his temper and impatience zinging him so quickly from patronizing empathy to whip-snapping overlord that Kyle had stopped trying to keep up.
‘If you could shave ten percent off the cost of the raw materials, you could pocket over one point six million dollars.’
‘Yes.’
‘So if that’s not worth killing for,’ Todd said, ‘what is?’
A momentary silence descended upon their little group.
Kyle sipped. ‘He’s got a point.’
The cop, state investigator John Finney, said: ‘Fine. So help me catch him. How is he faking the slump test?’
‘What’s that again?’ the lawyer asked.
He would know if he hadn’t daydreamed through the first half-hour, Kyle thought; wonder what’s got him so distracted? Maybe he’s not as sure as Finney about the non-lethal tendencies of career thieves. ‘Every truckful of concrete is tested for consistency – both the consistency of the mixture and how wet it is, so that it is consistent between loads. A hollow funnel is filled with a sample from the truck and then overturned on a flat surface.’
