Wanda gasped.
“I do,” Kerry said. “That little nappy-headed knucklehead who ran around the neighborhood with me? We had a lot of good times, Aunt Wanda.”
Wanda sobbed quietly into her tissue. Kerry squeezed her frail arm.
“But Kareem, Aunt Wanda. When he grew up? He wasn’t a good man. And I wasn’t a good man when I was with him. You were a single mother. You did your best with Kareem. My single grandmother did her best with me. But Kareem and I…we weren’t good people. You know that. And one day I reached my limit. I couldn’t live with myself—”
“At least you had a conscience.” Wanda’s face crumpled into despair. “Kareem never did.”
Kerry gaped at her.
There it was. The best absolution she could possibly have given him.
But the admission took everything out of her.
She collapsed against his shoulder, sobbing almost to the point of convulsions.
“Jesus will have to forgive me,” she wailed, rocking as he held her. “I tried my hardest with that boy. I just never knew what to do with Kareem. I tried to love him harder because his daddy never wanted anything to do with him. But nothing I did ever made any difference.”
“You did what you could.”
“It was never enough. I think he was born bad. He killed his pet turtle when he was five. Smashed him with my meat tenderizer, then told me he’d dropped him. When he was five. And I pretended to believe him, because I never thought a son of mine would—”
“It’s okay, Aunt Wanda.” Kerry kissed her forehead. “It’s okay.”
Long minutes passed. When she finally wore herself out and raised her head, she seemed lighter somehow.
Until sudden horror took over and she gripped his arms.
“Kerry…oh, I’m so sorry, baby.” She covered her mouth. “I didn’t mean— Some man came around asking questions the other day, and I told him—”
“Who I am and where to find me,” he said dully. “I know.”
“Oh, Kerry. I’m so sorry.”
She showed every sign of lapsing into hysterics again, so he quickly raised a hand. “It’s okay. You were hurt and angry. I understand. And he would have found me sooner or later anyway. I’m not hiding.”
Wanda’s grip tightened. “Well, what did he want?”
“He’s going to kill me,” Kerry said flatly.
“Oh, Kerry!”
“He wants me to do something that I’m not going to do. And if I don’t figure a way out of this mess…” He shrugged.
“Did you call the police?”
“The police can’t help me.” He snorted out a laugh. “You know that. That’s why I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“I want you to think, Aunt Wanda. Did Kareem ever tell you anything about what went on in Miami?”
Wanda flinched.
“Did he ever, I don’t know, mention a name or a connection, or…?”
Wanda looked to the ceiling, tears streaming down her face again as she wrapped her arms around herself and resumed rocking.
“Oh, Lord, I don’t know what to do. Please help me.”
“Aunt Wanda?” Kerry palmed her face so she’d look at him again. “Do you know something? You’ve got to tell me. Even if you promised Kareem you wouldn’t.”
“I just don’t know, Kerry.”
All in all, Kerry thought he’d done a decent job keeping his shit together on what had to be one of the top three worst days of his life, but at this glimmer that Wanda a) knew something that might help him stay alive to love Jayne another day; and b) might withhold it from him, he lost a good chunk of his mind.
“Wanda! You’ve got to do the right thing and help me!” he shouted. “You’re the only chance I’ve got here. If you don’t help me, I’m dead. Dead!”
“He told me to keep it quiet,” she muttered to herself, her unfocused gaze drifting away. “But he told me I’d know when the right time came…”
She squeezed her eyes shut. Blew out a breath. Looked him in the eye, her gaze searching and intent.
He stared back, letting her see his desperation. And his hope.
“I think it’s the right time,” she finally said.
Kerry couldn’t suppress a hoarse shout of triumph.
She went to the bookshelf and came back. When she held out her hand, he saw a silver flash drive, the twin to the one he had.
The sight of it was a sucker punch to his throat. It was all he could do not to flip the coffee table and rampage through her living room breaking knickknacks and smashing Kareem’s pictures.
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Take it.” She thrust it at him.
“What’s on it?”
“I don’t know, Kerry. Do I look like I know how to use one of these things? And there’s one other thing he gave me, too. He mailed them to his PO box here when he was in Miami. Then he gave me the key in case anything happened to him.”
“But…” Heart plummeting, Kerry took the flash drive. “You never got anyone to help you see what’s on it?”
“I didn’t know who to trust, Kerry.” Her lower lip trembled. “And I couldn’t stand to hear anyone say one more bad thing about Kareem. I just couldn’t take it.”
Kerry shoved aside his sickening disappointment and focused on her pain.
“It’s okay. Thank you, Aunt Wanda.”
“You stay alive, Kerry,” she said sternly.
“I intend to,” he said, his mind shifting to the one other person who could possibly help him now.
45
Brady was already waiting for Kerry in their usual spot, the one where they’d met when Kerry was working as his confidential informant and they were both trying to take Kareem down, behind the BP gas station about an hour north of Cincinnati on I-71. The place was deserted, isolated and dark, which, along with the ongoing headache, only added to Kerry’s general feeling of desperation. It would be nothing short of a miracle if he got himself out of this mess, the kind of thing that necessitated a call to the Vatican. He parked behind Brady, grabbed his things and climbed into Brady’s car, wondering how he’d gotten caught up in this nightmare Groundhog Day loop so soon after embarking on his so-called new life.
He remembered the time he’d been there with Brady right after Kareem shot Yogi in the back of the head, when Kerry was scared shitless and thought things couldn’t get any worse. Then there was the knifing, when he’d lain in pain all night, certain he was about to die. All of it was abject terror, no question.
Compared to what he was facing now, though?
Those incidents were almost quaint.
Back then he’d had only his own sorry life to lose, and, let’s face it, he’d anticipated death as an escape from Kareem’s reign of terror.
Now? Death would rip him away from his great new life with Jayne and break her heart in one fell swoop. He hadn’t come this far to experience ten minutes of a dream life only to have it all implode.
Death could go fuck itself.
The brief flash of the dome lights gave him a detailed glimpse of Brady’s tight-jawed irritation as Kerry sat and shut the door.
“I just saw you this afternoon, Randolph,” Brady said darkly, and sipped a cup of coffee. “I’d hoped it’d be another three months before I had the pleasure again.”
“I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t an emergency,” Kerry said. “Trust me.”
“It’d better be. I don’t like leaving my warm bed in the dead of a cold-ass night.”
Kerry took a deep breath. “Someone from the Miami organization reached out to me. Showed up in my bedroom tonight. Put a snake in my bed. A live fucking snake. It was a black mamba. I don’t know if you know anything about black mambas—”
“Yeah.” Brady looked startled. “Kira likes to watch all these animal shows. Black mambas don’t mess around. It was a warning. What’d you do to piss off Miami?”
“I didn’t do anything. Your old frien
d Kareem left them hanging when he died. They want to follow up on some plans they made before your girl did the world a favor and bashed his head in.”
“What plans?” Brady asked sharply.
“Kareem was behind the formula for W-80.”
“What?”
“It’s his product. He gave the formula to me on a flash drive for safekeeping. I didn’t know until recently that any of it had ever hit the street. I’ve been sitting on it. I’d planned to either destroy it or let it die with me.” He hesitated, then decided not to sugarcoat anything. “Or use it as a bargaining chip if I ever needed it.”
Brady made a strangled sound. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t arrest your duplicitous ass right now.”
“Pace yourself. There’s more.”
Brady cursed. His curses got more colorful as Kerry told him the whole story, including the parts about the assets he’d hidden in the storage unit and his desire to handle the situation himself.
“How the fuck do you plan to do that?” Brady snarled. “Just for laughs, please tell me how you plan to get out of this mess. With no DEA backup and no immunity deal. Let’s hear it.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Yeah, you’re working on getting dead as soon as possible. Listen. You’re going to set up the exchange and we’re going to get you wired up—”
“No. If I show up wired, I’m dead on the spot.”
“If you don’t have our help, you’ve got no chance,” Brady said, his voice rising with frustration.
“You can help me. Just not with the meeting—”
“Are you crazy?” Brady roared. “What the fuck am I supposed to tell Kira when your body turns up in a field with the head blown off like Yogi’s, and she wants to know why I didn’t do anything for her old friend?”
“Tell her I’m being a man,” Kerry said quietly.
Harsh sigh from Brady.
Long silence.
“You know what?” Brady snapped his fingers. “I don’t need your cooperation. I’m going to put eyes and ears on you, and then when you meet up with your Miami contact, we’ll have eyes and ears on him, too. You’ll be dead by that point, but it’ll be easy enough to follow him back home to Miami and see who he’s reporting to. Then we’ve got the new Miami kingpin and we can all go home by dinner. Happy ending for everyone except you. And Jayne. But it sounds like Jayne’s not your number one priority—”
“Don’t you tell me what I feel about Jayne!” Kerry shouted, enraged by this judgmental SOB who already had everything he needed in life and had never taken two seconds to consider that Kerry might be trying to do the right thing. “Don’t you fucking tell me about Jayne. I’m doing this so I can have a future with her. So I don’t have to ask her to give up her career and move with me to East Bumfuck, where we get to spend the rest of our lives as farmers in hiding. And if my plan doesn’t work out, then yeah, I’ll be dead, but I’ve been nearly dead before, and it wasn’t so bad. At least this time I’ll be dead with a clean conscience.”
In a sign of how truly unhinged he’d become, he concluded this diatribe by pounding his fists on Brady’s government-issued dashboard. “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
By the time of the fifth or sixth fuck, Brady had put a supportive hand on Kerry’s shoulder and squeezed it. Kerry took it as an indication that he was dead for sure, because Brady wasn’t the one for kind gestures, especially where Kerry was concerned.
Still, it helped.
It really helped.
“What can I do?” Brady asked quietly, turning him loose.
Kerry ran his shaky hands over the top of his head and tried to pull his shit back together. He took a deep breath. “I had a little bit of good luck. I went to Wanda to see if she knew anything about Miami. Turns out Kareem was busy with the flash drives. He left her a video. Well, it’s got another copy of the formula on it, too, but the video’s the interesting thing.”
“Kareem? A video? Are you shitting me?”
“You’ve got to see it to believe it.”
Kerry got out his phone, where he’d transferred the video from the flash drive, pulled the video up and adjusted the volume. And even though he’d already watched it, there was still no way to brace for the sight of Kareem alive and moving, or the deep sound of his voice, cocky as ever.
Apparently, Brady felt the same way, because he gasped.
“Hey.” Kareem, with a tan, a new nose, cheekbones and cleft chin, sat in the driver’s seat of some car and apparently shot the video on his phone, which he was holding at arm’s length. Outside the windows, swaying palms and a rainy Florida day were clearly visible. “It’s Kareem Jason Gregory here. The date is, ah…” He checked his watch and gave the date.
“Three months ago,” Brady said. “Right before he came back to Cincinnati to try to kill you and Kira.”
“Right,” Kerry said. “Shhh.”
“…and I’m outside Miami right now. I’m shooting this little video as my insurance policy.” He repressed a smile, shrewd eyes gleaming. “I’m going to shoot this video, then mail it to my PO box in Cincinnati, and it’s going to sit there and hopefully I’ll never need it. But you just never know what can go wrong. If my Cincinnati plans blow up and I don’t make it out of this alive, or if I run into any other trouble, or if I decide that the motherfucker’s flipped on me or rubbed me the wrong way for the last time, well…” He shrugged, his expression alight with triumph. “If I go down, he goes down. That’s how I roll.”
“That’s our boy,” Brady muttered.
Kerry snorted.
“Here’s the deal: David Martin is in charge of Miami. Feds have probably never heard of him because he runs a tight ship and he’s not on anybody’s radar yet. He’s a ruthless motherfucker with about five people in the crew that work directly with him. They’re the only ones who know he’s the guy. He’s got contacts with Mexico, Columbia, Russia and China. He’s put me up in his house for the last six months. He helped me blow up my house, kill my lawyer and fake my own death. His legit money comes from some Colombian emerald mine. Google his ass. You’ll see him all over Miami at charity events and shit, but he’s the kingpin.”
Brady had already pulled him up on his own phone. He showed Kerry one of the images. “Crazy-looking dude, isn’t he?” Brady said. “Looks like a llama.”
“He runs his shit out of his mansion,” Kareem continued, swinging the camera around to a sick Mediterranean villa right on the water, with the address clearly visible. Then he turned the camera back on his own face. “Like I said, only those inner four or so know he’s the guy. Some dude named Jason Weathers, one named Blackwell out of Brooklyn, they call him Big T, I think, one named Juan Fox, and one named Henry Gustavson out of Phoenix. They’re almost always with him. Always armed. They’ve got a lot of firepower at the house, so DEA, if you’re watching this, you need to be careful.” He laughed. “And don’t say I never did nothing for you.”
“It’s a shame he’s already died twice,” Brady said around his gritted teeth. “I’d give my right nut for the pleasure of killing him again.”
“Will you shut the fuck up?” Kerry said. “You’re about to miss something important.”
“…but I don’t expect anyone to take my word for anything,” Kareem said. “So I got hold of this.”
He held up something wrapped in what looked like a white cloth napkin.
Brady squinted at the screen. “What is that? I can’t make it out.”
Kerry opened the small box he’d brought with him and passed it to Brady. Brady moved the napkin and looked inside.
“A teacup?” he asked blankly.
“Run the fingerprints,” Kareem said. “Do DNA analysis or whatever the fuck it is you people do. Then put the prints through the system and see what turns up. I’m betting this dude’s gotten away with all kinds of shit…until now.”
Brady turned to Kerry, looking dazed. “I feel like I just won the lotto.”
“So,” Ka
reem said, “that’s it for now. I’ve got to get this little video onto a flash drive, get it to the post office and delete it from my phone. Then I need to get back to Cincinnati and knock a few heads together.” His expression darkened. “I need to take care of the bitch and the snitch.”
Brady made a low rumble that was just this side of a growl.
“Goodbye, people.” Kareem kissed his first two fingers and held them up in the peace sign. “Kareem out.”
The video ended. Kerry turned to Brady, whose face glowed with excitement.
“I need you to run the prints on this, too.” Kerry passed over the other thing he’d brought with him. “And there’s one other thing. I hung on to some of my collectibles when I should have surrendered them as part of my deal. I know, I know, it was a stupid-ass move, and Jayne’s already ripped me a new one, so you can spare me the rant. I have an idea what to do with them now that’ll get me off the hook and Jayne out of the hot seat with her office. Can you help me, Brady?”
Brady nodded with grim satisfaction. “You bet your ass I can.”
46
Kerry arrived at his storage unit two hours early the next day, to wait and prepare for the meeting he’d arranged with Henry. His headache was finally down to a manageable dull roar courtesy of several ibuprofen, which meant he could think straight again. He’d reviewed his plan over and over again, finding weak areas and shoring them up until his brain was fried and his nerves shot. He kept reminding himself that the element of surprise was on his side like it had been when little David showed up to fight Goliath, but that wasn’t much reassurance when he was about to face down the representative of the big-ass Miami giant.
He wished he had courage. Maybe then this wouldn’t be so hard.
But his mind was made up. Either he’d leave here in a while and breathe the cool fall air as a free man, or he’d leave in a zippered body bag.
He couldn’t see any other options, and yet both outcomes seemed inconceivable.
He looked to his Egyptian mantel clock. He’d put it on top of the safe and wound it earlier. He found its loud tick oddly reassuring, as though he wasn’t alone.
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