The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  I stopped. Did I just see someone peeking around the side of a building, someone with a camera? It looked like someone had held a camera or a phone in my direction.

  “And then you what?” Jess asked.

  “Then I found evidence she was cheating on me,” I said absently, staring ahead. Watching for that someone I thought I’d seen to appear again. “By then, the cheating was the least of my worries. I thought she was headed toward overdose, which, you know.”

  “I didn’t even know you could OD on meth,” she said.

  Just past the tree, I had a view of the alley, but of course there was no one lying in wait. Something lay on the ground, and I glanced at Jess. She was staring back, a question spreading across her face. I thought seriously about going to pick that thing up, whatever it was. My tormentor was fond of leaving little items, just to let me know I wasn’t safe.

  In the end, I held fast, let it go. I just kept walking

  “It was a heart attack,” I said. “Lethal dose. Maybe some other stuff in there. Cocaine, maybe. Shit, I don't know.”

  “And it happened just like that? She came back, got sober, and then OD’d, out of nowhere?”

  “She and I had a fight. Pretty big one. She was trying to get sober, and in my drunkenness, I thought she wanted to get back together. Something went wrong. We screamed at each other, and then she split. The next morning, they found her.”

  “Jesus,” Jess said. “I’m sorry.”

  We let the silence build for a time. I took my fork and tapped it desultorily on the able between us. Anything to stave off the feeling that was expanding within me.

  “McKane?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Van wasn’t all bad,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “Yeah, but do you?”

  “Course I do.”

  “She could be real sweet. Loved animals. Made goofy faces at toddlers.”

  That last one tugged at my heartstrings. “I remember that.”

  “Did you also remember that she cared deeply for you?”

  “It’s a theme, coming from anybody who says anything about Vanessa.”

  She said, “I know, but listen: she did. Even bebopped around with a little shoebox full of–”

  “Memories,” I said.

  “For lack of a better term, yeah. She ended up selling off everything wasn’t tied to her – and a few things that were, I guess – but that shoebox never left her. She lugged it around, even when she was at her worst. Part of me thinks it was, I don’t know, a representation of reality. Long as she hung onto that, the less detached she felt.”

  I thought of the ways her memories had been used against me, who might have ended up in possession of them.

  “She just. Okay. So, you can’t leave here with this impression that she was braindead, some zombie to her curse. She loved, and she had a good time. Being fucked up was not the only aspect of her, and you’ve got to walk away from here realizing that, to some degree.”

  “I do. She started to clear up toward the end, and I saw an older, more sympathetic version of her,” I said.

  “Well. Good.”

  After a pause, I said, “Did you know anything about a whole bunch of money? Maybe she owed some cash to a bad dude, had to get out of town?”

  She shook her head. “Richie would be the guy to ask on that. He’s got connections everywhere, knows about all of that, even though he’s not in the game anymore.”

  I thought about that house, about the shadows surrounding it. I didn’t trust myself going back out there, and I wasn’t entirely certain it would be a pleasant reconvening, especially if I started talking about money.

  But Richie was the next lead, so off to the Isle of Hope I went.

  eighth chapter

  The limbs of the oaks lining the road seemed even closer on this drive out to Richie’s makeshift mansion, as if they were trying to prevent me making my pilgrimage. Branches dangled like bony, dessicated fingers into the view of the windshield. Spidery moss swayed in the late October wind, and the natural evening sounds outside my window were more bone-chilling than the Son House I had playing in the car.

  Pulling into the driveway, I saw a carload of teens passing around an enormous joint, the smoke billowing out of cracked windows. They were in an old junker of a Chevy Nova, with rusted quarter panels and a spiderwebbed windshield. I stuck out one hand in a dry wave as I passed them. They didn’t seem to notice me.

  A whole row of cars filled the path as I made my way toward the back door. People spilled out of an upstairs door, leading onto the second story porch. They were drinking and laughing, the red embers of their cigarettes glowing in the hastily-approaching darkness. They weren’t actively doing drugs, but they were talking about doing drugs, and a few of them sounded slurry.

  Inside, the house was brimming with people. Some were drinking from red cups, while others snuck away to pour liquid from flasks into their Coca-Colas. The digitized sounds of video games weren’t blaring over the surround sound system this time, but some new pop music I couldn’t stand. It hadn’t been good in the ‘80s, and it wasn’t good now, I thought.

  People danced to it, however, so it did the job. Others came and went, slipping through the narrow passageways of elbows and arms to refill their cups. The people I asked about Richie’s whereabouts vehemently denied any knowledge of the man.

  I had to ask if I looked that much like a cop.

  “A bad one,” a kid in a faded Breaking Bad shirt said.

  I made my way through the crowd to find Richie.

  People were spread all through the house in small groups, smatterings of people who either were engaging in fervent conversations about inane topics – “I can’t feel my face, man” – or were leaning contemptuously against the railing, watching other people have fun.

  I didn’t see Allison or Jess, even though I searched in a half-assed way for both of them. I wanted to mend what seemed to be a weird situation with Allison – no word from her since our first “date” – and bridge an entirely different weird gap with Jess. The prospect of sex danced in my head like the melody to a really catchy pop tune, but it also seemed very distant, the echo of that very same song in an old phonograph. I didn’t know if I wanted anything at all with either of them, but sex had been kind of a remote possibility in the months I’d been pulling my life together , so anyone taking a more than platonic interest in me was something of a novelty.

  In the kitchen, people dove into the pepperoni pizzas in a way reminiscent of the end of Dawn of the Dead. The bottles and bottles of soda – Mountain Dew, mostly – were being taken down with fierce determination, red cups filled to the brim, some with no ice, and I noticed a few people reaching into jean pockets for flasks or airplane bottles of booze. I turned away and made my way to the second floor.

  Couples leaned against the railing on the stairs, making out in plainly humiliating ways, unaware of the audience surrounding them. The heavy, raw smell of weed smoke accompanied their public displays, and I pushed through it, slipping along the corridor among the numerous bedrooms. The familiar bump-and-squeak in a few of the rooms kept me from knocking, and a ghastly, near-supernatural moaning in another pushed me to check elsewhere. He wasn’t on the second floor veranda, where a group of people huddled together to share a pipe filled with something I had no business inhaling. I went back inside, starting to feel a panic welling up inside me. Had I been tricked before? Was this merely a front for a drug den, presumably for people too young to know any better. My lungs hurt, and my head was beginning to follow along.

  Finally, I found him.

  Richie had holed up in one of the upstairs bathrooms, apparently, and came out twenty minutes after my first knock, sweating and wide-eyed. I was waiting patiently, leaning against a banister with my arms crossed, when he finally emerged. Sobering up had taught me to clench my teeth and endure long periods of disappointment, I guessed. Smiling a little too broadly, he yanked me in for an all-
enveloping hug.

  “Hey, man, hey! What do you need from me? I mean, or you know, just what do you need?”

  He was yelling over the music, and the twinkle in his eye was coming from something synthetic; that much I was sure of. So much for being sober and out of the game.

  “On the phone today, we talked about you and me chatting about Vanessa.”

  “Who?” He cupped a hand to his ear, but before I could repeat her name, he blinked rapidly a few times and said, “Right right right. Vanessa. Really pretty brunette? Few years back?”

  I nodded once.

  “We need to turn the music off?”

  “I think maybe just stepping outside might do the trick,” I said.

  He smiled and laughed, pretending to hit me in the stomach. “I could just kick all these motherfuckers out, right?”

  As we made our way through the throng of people, it became apparent his whole happy addict schtick was fake. He looked back once, a smile plastered on his face, but even that could not mask the fear in his eyes. Something was going on, just underneath the surface, and my desire to figure it out was renewed in a real bad way. It was apparent I was stepping into a whole new dangerous scenario, one which didn’t offer me the feeling of home-field advantage, so I needed to watch my step.

  The second floor deck reeked of pot and something a little more insidious, and most of the perpetrators of said smell scattered when they saw me this time.

  “Guess they can sense a former cop, right? You know?” he said, laughing. “You used to be a cop, you know.”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  His eyes gleamed. He was waiting for the question. How did you know? He wanted to show me he knew about my past, knew things about me. But I didn’t give him the satisfaction. I folded my arms and leaned against the balcony. Setting up shop for a serious conversation.

  The deck itself stretched around the entirety of the second floor, complete with a screen to keep the bugs out. From where I stood, the river was visible, just barely, through the trees. The moon shone on the surface of the water, which sparkled like cheap tinsel.

  Richie’s eyes focused on me. This was his serious look. It wasn’t intimidating in the least. “Lot of people would be freaked out to know that. They don’t like cops much ‘round here.”

  “They got nothing to fear or loathe from me. I’m here strictly for personal reasons. We get our conversation over with, and I’ll be a bolt of lightning out of here, my friend.”

  He laughed, a sick bark of a thing, and ran one forearm over his face. He had the sweats real bad and was probably hankering for some more of what he had taken.

  “Oh, yeah. Your wife. Your wife. Your. Fucking. Wife. She spent some time over here. I think. Yeah, yeah. She did. Never alone, though.” He paused, tilted his head to one side, as if his own statement had surprised him. “You sure you want to hear this, man?”

  “Sure as shit,” I replied.

  He barked again. Laughter like a rusted chain saw. “Okay, man. The unsullied truth it is, coming right up.” He turned and pressed one finger against his nostril and shot a bolt of bloody snot out the other, through the screen to his right. “She – I guess you could say, she was fucking her way through this cadre of drug dealers. Every time she showed up here, she was working a different one. I’m not trying to get in your Kool-Aid, but she was fucked up. Ratchet beyond repair, my man, and I know it doesn’t jibe with what you probably know about her, but you wanted the truth, and the truth is a lot worse than you probably could have imagined.”

  This. Coming from a drug dealer. Or just a junkie these days. It was almost too much to take. I gritted my teeth together, found my center. My fingers started to tingle with the want of something alcoholic, but I fought the sensation off.

  My imagination went bonkers, throwing images of her grinding against some disinterested piece of shit, somebody she was willing to let inside her because he could help her score, and I almost lost my sense of composure. I had seen her zombified look, had been there at the outset of it, probably. I knew what Van could be like when she was on the track for something she wanted.

  “It’s the truth I want,” I said.

  His eyes gleamed. “You got brass balls, my friend. I don’t care much for the girls who show up here. Guys, either, as long as that goes, but I’m not trying to get with them. But I couldn’t imagine hearing what you’re hearing right now.”

  “Just give me what you know about her time here.”

  “What I told you, man. There used to be lots of girls here. In and out, like magazines on a newsstand. They’d show up, do whatever for their score, and then they were out.”

  “What made Vanessa stand out?”

  He eyed for the first time with a look that wasn’t off-kilter bravado. “You really need the answer to that question?”

  “I guess. I’m looking for some specific information. Information about the men she was with.”

  He shrugged. “She’d slip off with two or three of them–”

  “Enough,” I said. I felt my jaw tightening. “I’m not trying to hear that. She did what she did. I don’t need more details.”

  “Then what do you need? The details is all’s I got, big guy. She slept around, plain and simple. Some of the guys were pretty skeezy, but some of them weren’t. Seemed like maybe she was working her way up the ladder.”

  “Who were they? What were they into, business-wise?”

  Richie turned and stared into the distance. Swaying willow trees. Glimmering water. He seemed to glean information from the majesty of it all.

  “All right, man,” he said. “Jess said you were an intense guy, but shit. You’re a whole lot tougher than I had you pegged for. I figured you for a head-smasher, but you’re a lot cooler than that.”

  He waited for me to accept the compliment, but I only stretched my neck, listened to the bones crack and snap into place. The comment about Jess had sent my heart to shivering, though.

  Richie shook his head. “Matter of fact, I got a few guys inside, waiting for me to call on them, just in case you decided to try to pull my brains out my ears or something.” He snorted once and blew another snot rocket through the screen.

  I didn’t think he needed me to tell him I wasn’t afraid of his skag goons, so I hung onto that particular statement.

  “And Vanessa?”

  “She was into sex, drug dealers. No rock-and-roll, so far as I know. What else?”

  “What were their names?”

  His red-rimmed eyes glistened. “Oh, yeah. Okay. Listen, I know back where you come from, you was a cop and all, but these aren’t the types of guys you want to go fucking with. Not. At. All.”

  I cleared my throat, chewed one fingernail. “Let’s start with the end. Who’s the last guy you remember seeing her with?”

  “That’s some real trivia. This was back when I was doing the dirt, as well as selling it, so my memory gets a bit like old dreams.”

  I gritted my teeth together. A headache began to form at my temples. Inside the house, the music changed to something frenetic and shrill, like a chainsaw massacre as played by broken personal computer.

  I tried again. “The names, Richie. Any names at all. The last person you remember.”

  “Jesus, I can’t – okay, I got one. The last person I got a feel for was a dude named Baldwin.”

  “Last name or first name.”

  “First name. Baldwin. Baldwin. Baldwin.” He snapped his fingers a few times, looking at the floor, trying to conjure up the last name. “Baldwin Reedling. Everybody called him B-Win.”

  I filed the information away. “Dealer, I assume.”

  Richie nodded. “One step up the totem pole. He’s got his own big crew now. Guy last year got three in the dome outside a nightclub down in Miami, so Baldwin’s the guy now. He’s big shit.”

  “He still in Savannah?”

  “Somewhere. Finding him won’t be easy, and he’s picky about who he sees.”

  �
�I can be convincing.”

  He laughed. “I’m sure you can, man.”

  “Any other names?”

  He looked away, ran one hand across his nose.

  “Richie,” I said.

  “I don’t know. I need time to think about it.”

  “Time, we don’t have.”

  “Time, you don’t have.”

  The penetrating buzz of music filled the silence.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me. I’ve got a house to make sure my friends don’t destroy.”

  I said, “Those people aren’t your friends. They’re human leeches.”

  His face grew sincere for perhaps the first time tonight. “They’re all I have, man. When you’re in the game, nobody is your friend. Everybody’s a client. At least, now I’m not having to sell them on anything but time in my house. That’s a start.”

  Then he turned and went inside.

  ninth chapter

  I went home to an empty house and sat in the dark, my mind creating a sickening parade of sexual misconduct I was forced to amble through. Vanessa thrashing cheap sheets with two other guys in the bed with her, untold numbers cheering them on. Each of the men wearing a mask, which obscured the ugliness of their true faces. Vanessa slipping into the backseats of dilapidated cars, sliding a thin camisole over her head, revealing drug-induced rashes.

  It was a near-hallucinatory experience, something beyond slight fantasy. I sensed the sex, experienced the bizarre pleasure of it. Inhaled the reek of used drugs and stained sheets. Perceived subtle moans of reaching orgasm and the strain of old box springs.

  Could have been my imagination, I suppose. My mind had trumped up far worse scenarios in the past, although they usually involved the distinct presence of brown liquor.