Spectre Black

by J. Carson Black

  They were too loud. She was too loud. Like she had something to prove. In the fifth inning, he was starting to dislike her. At the bottom of the ninth, he hated her.

  He was lucky to have made it to the seventh-inning stretch. By that time he was running purely on pride.

  He couldn’t stand the stink, even if it was arousing. The sweetness of her fresh-soap skin cloyed. It gave a clean soap smell a bad name.

  And it was no fun to feel like a pile driver, looking into the eyes of not just a stranger, but an alien.

  Her eyes changed from time to time. There was lust, yes. Unquenchable lust. But also contempt. Cold contempt. He had misjudged her. She’d presented someone else to him, cool and composed, attractive and . . . normal. But now, her eyes were like fixed turquoise stones in her head, her face a mask of incredible but virulent beauty.

  His body hurt. It didn’t want to go again, but again and again she picked at him. Nasty words, contempt, belittlement—switched out with the most ridiculous of compliments, heaps of praise. A wheelbarrowful of praise like heaped roses, once beautiful, now fading, damp, smelling of the dirt and decay. The smell of the grave.

  A supernatural experience.

  She wanted to go again, and again. It challenged his manhood, it challenged who and what he was, because he knew she was willing him to fail.

  When she’d shucked her clothes, they could not wait to get at each other: a windfall. A gift. And then there were the repeat performances, three strikes and he was out. After that there was the contempt. Icy.

  He’d once ridden a horse who would not submit, and to his great shame he rode that horse and rode him and rode him and rode him until it stopped, head down, sweat dripping from its hide, and gave up. Just gave up and gave out.

  Now he felt like that horse.

  And her screaming. It felt playacted, but he knew she was enjoying herself. Had to be. But there had been knocks on the door. There had been voices outside on the walkway. There had been banging on the wall. And muttered comments he could hear: “This is a family motel.”

  Landry didn’t believe in shame—he’d dumped that Catholic idea long ago when he had to go and kill people in a foreign country.

  But he felt it now.

  He felt hollowed out, cored.

  Finally, she fell into a deep sleep. Hours later, she still slept. The sleep of the fulfilled, the slightest smile on her lips.

  Landry couldn’t sleep, though.

  He wanted to get away from her. So he took a long, hot shower followed by a long, cold shower, and pulled on his clothes. He looked through her purse and found her service weapon and FBI creds. Her full name was Carla Angela Vitelli.

  Then he went for a walk.

  A long one.

  When he returned, she was gone. There was just the smell of sex. And underneath, the smell of rage.

  He’d gotten nothing out of her on Jolie’s disappearance or where she was in the investigation. And he’d left a lot on the field.

  He walked back to the donut place. The FBI car was gone.

  He didn’t go back inside. Half of him thought she might be waiting there, some sort of weird sexual ambush.

  What did she want from him? He couldn’t figure it out. She had told him nothing. Was she working the case, the missing persons case of Jolie Burke? How did he show up on her radar? How had she made him? Did she connect him with Jolie Burke in some way, or was he just cannon fodder? He’d kept in good shape, and maybe he gave off some kind of vibe. It had happened before. But not with an FBI agent.

  She had targeted him for some reason.

  He should have paid attention. He should have caught on much, much sooner.

  When their eyes first met, mirrored in the plate-glass window, he’d felt something in his jaw—like a tiny wire being pulled. That was his warning apparatus. It had saved his life many times in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was like a sixth sense, only more visceral than that. Just a tug inside his jaw, mirrored by a not-unpleasant stirring in his gut.

  Danger.

  But he’d ignored it completely. While he’d been targeting her, she’d been targeting him.

  Whatever her game was, the FBI woman was dangerous.

  He stood outside the donut place, looking back across the bridge over the dry riverbed at the motel sign, neon-bright against the sunset. He should go back to the motel room and get some sleep.

  The sun’s orange eye squinted under a pile of black clouds. The road was dark but tinted gold. He ran out of sidewalk and walked on dirt.

  The day had been windless, hot and dry, but now it was heavy with the promise of rain. As he waited for a car to turn onto a cross street in front of him, he heard the crunch of shoes on dirt and felt a displacement of air behind him. He turned around. But there was nothing—no one. He smelled aftershave.

  He turned in a circle. It was getting darker by the minute. The sun’s eye was all but closed now. Above Landry was the embankment where cars came down the exit ramp from the bridge. Their tires hummed, amplified by the sound bouncing off the low guardrails. One after another they came, stopping before turning right in front of him.

  The sodium arc lights on the bridge came on, casting an orange glow.

  The cars might have accounted for the displaced air. If someone’s car window was open he might possibly have smelled aftershave.

  He squinted in the direction of the receding footsteps, expecting to see a figure in the gloom, but there was nothing. Just the desert and a string of stores on his side of the road.

  The wind was scented with the coming rain. He listened hard—and listened to the footsteps. They were barely there: a rhythmic crunch of shoes on dirt.

  He stared hard, but the walker was nowhere to be seen.

  But he saw something.

  The air seemed to waver. There was a rhythm to it. A walking rhythm.

  But no walking man. The landscape was intact, the road markers, the buildings, the signs. He could see them.

  Way off in the distance the shape that was not a shape seemed to catch the light, and crinkled like a funhouse mirror.

  Did he really see that?

  The sound of footsteps had long since receded, drowned out by the traffic.

  Whatever it was he thought he saw, it had dwindled to nothing.

  A dust devil, maybe.

  But it didn’t act like any dust devil he’d ever seen.

  The next morning Landry cruised by the police department parking lots and the sheriff’s office parking lots, looking for an FBI car. But there was nothing remotely like it in any of the lots, visitor lots, or any of the other surface parking. The PD and the Sheriff’s Office were both small enough entities that they didn’t have parking garages.

  How did she find him? Or did she just sense that he wasn’t legit?

  He went over what she’d asked him. Are you with the Sheriff’s Office or are you with PD?

  Why had she homed in on him? He didn’t fool himself that she just wanted to have sex. There had to be something she had wanted from him, and he was sure it had to do with Jolie.

  The woman had a strange way of interrogating him.

  He shrugged it off—for now, anyway. Some things had to just sit, off to the side, until his subconscious found the answer, or new information came to him. Perhaps she was just a sex maniac looking for a retired cop; maybe that was her thing. As far as he could recall, she’d never mentioned Jolie Burke. Never mentioned a missing cop at all.

  Time to check on Jolie’s place. This time he took the white car and left the landscaping van in the motel parking lot. Someone in Jolie’s neighborhood might have seen it. A landscaper would be there once, but probably not the following day.

  Only fifty feet up from The Satellite INN was another traffic light. Every time he reached the intersection, the light turned red, and today was no
different. So he waited and took in the ambience: an old lady sitting in the covered bus stop, two teenagers leaning against the poles holding the roof up, ignoring the old lady and each other. A female jogger in a tracksuit stretching a hamstring, affording the stopped traffic a generous look at her trim backside.

  Landry wasn’t worried about driving the white car. There had been nothing more on the shooting at the checkpoint, except the article rehashing the story and reiterating that there were no suspects. There had been mention of a white subcompact, but so far he hadn’t seen or heard of a make or model.

  He thought it was strange that there wasn’t anything new. It had the feeling of old news—already not worth reporting about. Branch was not a small town, but it wasn’t quite a medium-sized town either. Small enough, he would have thought, to consider the shooting a big story.

  Maybe the police were holding back some vital piece of information. Or else they weren’t, and were just a Mickey Mouse police department with nothing to recommend them but their uniforms. He’d seen that in many towns.

  He parked in front of Jolie’s place. Carrying a newspaper, he went up the walk to the house and rang the bell with his elbow. It bonged through the house while he looked around. No one anywhere. Unless someone was looking out, unseen, from the houses next door or across the street. In the shade of the porch, he was able to look at the camera and run it back. He saw the house sitter. A dark-haired woman, early forties, wearing jeans, a knit shirt, tennis shoes—and a sheriff’s shield on her belt.

  She walked up to the house, disarmed the alarm, unlocked the door, and went inside. He watched as she let herself back out, approximately fifteen minutes later. He wished he could see the kind of car she drove—if she had driven a car at all. Maybe she lived nearby and walked from her place. He looked at the time: five seventeen in the afternoon. Probably she came straight from work to feed the dog.

  Landry knew her pattern now, which would be helpful.

  He’d already decided what to do with the cat and the dog.

  For now, he let the hunt cam run. Late afternoon turned to dusk and then to dark, the porch security light automatically coming on above. He was about to stop and reset the cam, when someone else appeared on the screen. “Well, well,” he said.

  His sex partner, the FBI agent, appeared.

  She looked straight into the camera, a self-satisfied smirk on her face. Then she crossed her eyes.

  He drove by the donut shop. This time there was no FBI car in the lot. He parked the Nissan in the lot and walked the couple of blocks back to the cop shop.

  He hurt in places he didn’t know he had. It was enough to make him swear off sex—almost. He sat near a group of rowdy cops, who drank coffee and tucked into their breakfasts like longshoremen. Some, he sensed, had come off shift, and some were about to go on.

  From their badges, he knew they were with the sheriff’s office.

  He pretended to read the paper and drank his coffee and waited for Jolie Burke’s name to be mentioned. “You know what I’m saying. They’re all about equality, but she left Jeff Beebe high and dry. He’s doing double duty—her caseload on top of his. I heard she didn’t even call in.”

  “I know Jolie—she’s not like that,” the younger cop said. “Maybe something else is going on, like something . . . personal.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m just saying she would’ve called in.”

  “I’m sure she’s just enjoying her vacay.”

  “Unless something happened to her.”

  “A little early to think that, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s not like her to not call in,” the younger man said.

  There was a moment of quiet. Landry couldn’t tell if they liked Jolie very well or not. It felt more as if they were all contemplating their own possible disappearance.

  “Not to worry, kid,” the same cop said. “Jan’s taking care of her pets while she’s gone.”

  Then the older guy said, “You heard about the robbery in Tejar.”

  No one said anything.

  Finally the gruff older guy said, “I wouldn’t put too much stock in what the media says.”

  “Yeah—assholes.”

  There was quiet. Then another guy said, “But Jesus—if it was true. It was like a Clint Eastwood movie.”

  “Yeah, so they say,” the deep-voiced guy said. “Probably, they made it look bigger than it was.” Added, “You ask me, someone like that, who shoots up a city street? Trouble. She probably asked for trouble and got it. Hate to say it, because she seemed OK, but . . . that kind of shit comes back to bite you in the ass.”

  Landry listened, a half smile on his face. He’d been there. Not for the bank’s ATM smash-and-grab, not for the subsequent shooting (Jolie had used her long gun), but later, for the cleanup.

  They’d done a good job, cleaning up. One of the robbers had a brother, and that brother came looking for the famous cop who killed his sibling.

  If he and Jolie Burke were lucky, no one would ever know what happened to that fourth member and ringleader—the one who stayed in the comfort of his own home while the others drove a car into the wall by the bank’s ATM and came running out with the money.

  The ringleader had been cremated. The only problem for the cremators: there was no name to go with the person they cremated; all they had was ash.

  Landry and Jolie. They had worked together. Like a well-oiled machine.

  “Hey, how’s your daughter doing?”

  “Good. She and John named the baby after me.”

  They talked about that for a while.

  Then one of them said, “You seen the FBI agent?”

  “What FBI agent?”

  “What’s she doing here?”

  The older guy glanced at the younger guy. “Maybe she’s looking for Burke. Maybe that’s her assignment.”

  Another voice said, “Yeah. She’s hot.”

  “Where’d you see her?”

  “Here.”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah, you must’ve been asleep at the switch.”

  Another cop said, “She was right at that table over there. Yesterday.”

  “The woman with the long hair? The one with the great ass?”

  “You got it, brother.”

  The cop who was quiet—there was always a quiet one—spoke up. He said, “I think she’s a cousin or something.”

  “A cousin? What’re you talking about? Whose cousin?”

  “Jace Denboer. She’s his cousin.”

  “That little shit? The one with the Camaro? Took the leg off that homeless guy and didn’t even get a traffic violation?”

  Someone else said, “No, she’s his sister.”

  “Half sister,” someone else said. “She’s his half sister.”

  “So the Denboer kid has a half sister who’s an FBI agent. Cozy.”

  “He doesn’t need a cousin who’s an FBI agent, you ask me,” another cop, the skinny one, said. “Nobody gonna give him any trouble.”

  “Got that right.”

  “Untouchable,” the oldest cop said. “And don’t you forget it.”

  Landry drove back to the motel. The FBI agent, Carla Vitelli, was related to some rich kid who was a reckless driver and took a homeless man’s leg off. Jace Denboer.

  Every town had one. A royal family. The tradition had probably been handed down from the dawn of time, down through the ages—the Dark Ages, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Age. The wealthiest families and most royal of the royal, the cattle barons and railroad barons and captains of industry all the way down to small-town mayors. Every municipality, every small town, had a family. It had become a meme: “To the manor born.” Apparently, in this small city, the Denboers were the royal
family.

  Which explained a lot. It explained why Vitelli had felt entitled. It explained why she’d run roughshod over him—

  Literally.

  There was at least one family like that in every town.

  Vitelli had felt extremely entitled. In fact, Landry was still recovering from her right to entitlement.

  He approached The Satellite INN from behind, across an empty lot, a scrub patch of desert. The white subcompact rental car was in back, one of ten to twenty other cars there, give or take. His van was out front.

  A sheriff’s cruiser had pulled up catty-corner to the rental Nissan, as if planning to stop an escape in its tracks. Landry could hear the crackle of the unit’s radio.

  He looked up at the open door to his motel room on the second floor. A hive of activity. Deputies in tan uniforms, big-hipped from their duty belts, coming out with white trash bags in their gloved hands.

  Landry felt the tickle of hair on his neck just before he heard a loud engine gun down the side street and screech into the dirt lot.

  “Police! Don’t move! Hands on your head!”

  Landry obeyed.

  Chapter 7

  “Can you tell me what you’re charging me with?” he asked the deputy who had cuffed him and was marching him toward a sheriff’s car.

  “You have the right to remain silent, and if I were you I’d do just that.”

  “I’ll take it from here,” a gruff voice said. Landry turned his head to look at him. The man was older, beefy, with a gray mustache like a whisk broom.

  Landry had already been to the Tobosa County Sheriff’s website, and he knew who the man was. He was the Tobosa Sheriff’s Office’s undersheriff, Walt Davis.

  The undersheriff grabbed Landry’s shoulder and spun him toward his own plain-wrap Crown Vic.

  Landry was delivered to the Tobosa County Jail in the back of the undersheriff’s car, already handcuffed and chained. They must think he was dangerous, or perhaps it had been reported that he was dangerous, and they were taking no chances.