The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  “She’s a lot younger than you, my friend,” said a cop with a distinctly not-southern accent.

  “Your business is your business, and my business is none of your goddamned business,” I said in response. I spat blood in his general direction. “Process the paperwork. Everything’s on the up-and-up here.”

  “Get a good look at him?”

  “Nope. Tallish. Kind of lumbers when he walks, but that could have been because I put two bullets in him. I got him, so check the hospitals. If he don’t turn up at an emergency room somewhere, he’ll be dead in a few hours.”

  “You positive of that?”

  “With the way my aiming felt, no way in hell. But I suspect I got him in the chest or the guts. He might not be dead, but he’s hurting. And I’m positive on that.”

  They didn’t take me in for questioning, but I got the good once-over while they were there. I was told they’d follow up with me if anything came up. I was pretty certain they’d only follow up if it happened again, but I could have been wrong about that.

  When they pulled away, I said, “It’s just getting started.”

  Jess leaned against me. I could smell the mild sweetness of her perfume. “I know.”

  “They won’t stop until somebody’s in a body bag, so if you want my help, you’ve got to take my advice, not with a grain of salt, but like the Lord Himself handed you carved tablets.”

  “Got it.”

  I kissed her.

  “My first bit of advice: stay hidden and stay sober.”

  eleventh chapter

  No sleep and two bad cups of coffee later, I was running along the historic district when a car sidled up next to me. Running against traffic early in the morning afforded me the ability to keep track of passersby. I also took detours through neighborhoods with little road-space, but I had wandered back to a main road when I saw this vehicle in my peripheral view.

  I was a split second from darting, leaping over a nearby fence, before I realized the two guys inside were cops. We can smell our own, I guess.

  “You McKane?” Her voice was molasses thick, and the words seemed to seep out of her.

  I slowed to a walk and wiped my forehead. Even though the temperature was in the mid-forties, I was sweating something awful. “I got nothing to hide.”

  “It has come to our attention you are starting to ask concerning questions about certain volatile individuals.”

  “And who told you that?”

  Richie. Richie. Richie. Richie the Snitch. Who, exactly, did he have loyalty to?

  “Doesn’t matter, now does it? Just someone. What matters is that you’re going to get yourself killed if you keep this up.”

  “No laws being broken yet. Nobody getting threatened. Just asking questions. Seems like the police force down here would have more pressing issues than this.”

  “We get a call from a source close to the department about someone venturing into the riptide of gangland disputes, we tend to get involved. Nothing more pressing than that, my friend.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘venturing.’”

  The driver turned to her partner. “Guy almost got a face full of hot steel, and he’s cracking wise. I almost want the prick to eat it.”

  “Give it time, and I probably will,” I replied. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  I turned and jogged to the corner, but the car kept pace.

  This time, they turned on the flashers.

  “I’m directly asking you, as an officer of the law, to stay right there and answer our questions. Then you can be on your way.”

  “Else, I’ll have to go to the station?”

  “Right.”

  They didn’t have a reason to bring me in, I figured, but these also didn’t look like the kind of people who reviewed the rules after their nightly prayers, either.

  The driver was strong-looking, sturdy, with arms that had seen a weight room. The passenger was a black guy with a bushy goatee. He’d been lifting weights, too. He had arms that could have been legs on other grown men.

  “You know a black drugs and arms dealer named Malachi Bellerose?”

  I didn’t. “I might,” I said.

  The passenger cop grunted. He was pretending to look out the passenger window, but his tell was the ear turned directly toward our conversation. “Trust me; you’d know that asshole if you’d ever met him.”

  I used the tail of my t-shirt to wipe sweat from my brow. “Maybe I’m not that impressed by assholes.”

  The driver, cop named Dupont, leaned out of the car and spat on the ground at my feet. She said, “He’s got people saying your name. Seems he knows who you are.”

  “They got the law adjudicating disputes between private individuals now. How’s it feel to be working for a drug dealer, maybe even a murderer to boot?”

  The plainclothes adjusted his tie, grimaced. “This ain’t a big town, but it sure ain’t Bumfuck, either. There’s a rule of law, and we got dominion over that.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “You come into town and start poking the animals through their cages, sooner or later they’ll climb the fence and fuck you up. That easier to follow?”

  I nodded. In my hand, my phone buzzed. Deuce was calling again. You always pick the very worst times to contact me, my friend. Which, up to this point, had been any time at all.

  He said, “And we’ve got some people trying to bring a case against some certain somebodies, so you going in there and trying to piece together who your ex-wife was balling doesn’t do any good for anybody. You’re better off just going on with your business. I’m sure there’s other girls here willing to give you a shot at their nether regions, or am I wrong?”

  She gave me a knowing look.

  “I got no reason to interfere in an ongoing investigation,” I said, “but I am not the scapegoat for why you can’t do your jobs. If you have a reason to get me off the streets, fine. Go get a warrant. Lock me up. Otherwise, give me the space I need, and everything will be okay.”

  Dupont said, “You just walk away from this knowing we have a radar, and you’re on it.”

  “You just walk away, Officer. I don’t need a warning for something I’m not doing.”

  She sucked her teeth. Petulance didn’t look good on this asshole.

  “Quick check on you brings up a couple of homicides–”

  “Maybe not homicides,” said the other guy, whose name tag I couldn’t read. “Homicide adjacent, maybe. Happened more or less within eyesight of you, and you didn’t have the slightest involvement in them.”

  “Funny how investigations sometimes happen near crimes,” I said.

  “Civilians who investigate crimes are vigilantes. You are no longer a cop, let me remind you, so you have no right to go off and get yourself killed. Spark some kind of goddamned gang war and get the city in an uproar.”

  “Well, I’ll keep all that in mind.”

  “Don’t go shooting anybody else.”

  “Tell Bellerose’s people to stay out of my house, and I won’t have a reason to.”

  It was a bluff – I really had no idea who Bellerose was – but it struck a nerve. Dupont squinted, sucked her teeth, sighed, and then drove off, leaving me to finish my workout.

  When I got home, I thumbed out an awkward text to Jess – since I was new to the texting game, they were all awkward – asking if she had heard of this guy Bellerose. I showered, and she still hadn’t responded when I had dressed and was putting on my sneakers.

  * * *

  I took my .45 to a shooting range near the Bonaventure Cemetery and greased the gears on what used to be one of my greatest assets as a cop. It took some time, but I started to feel that sensation come back. As a man without his next drink on the horizon, I found it much easier to focus, even if I had to stamp down all the negative thoughts swirling around up top.

  “Not bad,” the wiry, tattooed old guy behind the counter said as I checked out. He was a craggy Navy guy, with faded blue ink and a l
eathery tan to advertise his allegiance to the sea.

  “Little rusty,” I responded.

  “You should see half the jackasses who come in here. They think they’re Dirty Harry, but I’d just as soon put a firearm in their dog’s paws as theirs.”

  I bought a box of hollow point rounds, just in case, and afterward met Winston for lunch at Sisters of the New South for some oxtails and rice, covered in brown gravy.

  Winston, to his credit, was circumspect about my whole situation. “You often find yourself in these kinds of jams, Rol?”

  “Starting about a year ago, yes,” I said. “Though, thinking about it, I suspect my whole life has been one big situation.”

  “God, don’t I know it.” He forked off a piece of his pork chop, smothered in gravy, and popped it in his mouth.

  I leaned back in my seat, sipped my sweet tea.

  “You ever heard of a dealer, maybe a distributor, name of Bellerose?”

  Winston’s face grew serious. He pointed with his fork hand. “Don’t go throwing yourself in that briar patch, now, you hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “He’s a scorching hot stove, surrounded by hot stoves. He’s nothing but a bad time in the worst possible way, and he’s got a penchant for blood.”

  “He’s got something I can’t get from anybody else.”

  “Oh, I bet you could say that about a few people around town.”

  “He’s got a handle on some memories I need access to.”

  “You don’t need them that bad, I can tell you.”

  “What if I do?”

  He scrabbled together a forkful of food and lifted it to his mouth. “It should go without saying you need to be careful.”

  “I will.”

  He chewed his mixture of veggies and gravy. “If I am using my powers of deduction correctly – and there is no guarantee I am – you came to Savannah to get away from the nonsense that nearly got you killed back in your hometown. How’s the gunshot wound, by the way?”

  Point taken. “Mostly healed,” I said. “I’m not digging in anybody’s graveyard here. Just my own. You’ve got to make space for a man’s desire to understand the missing chunks of his life.”

  “I do my best to let go of what I can’t control.”

  “To accept it.”

  “Right. Mantra of the afflicted.”

  “What if coming to terms with the past means digging around in it a while?”

  “Oh, man, I doubt you’ll come to any sense of peace after meeting up with Bellerose. He’s nothing but a storm cloud with legs.”

  I tried to change the subject. “Oh, did I tell you: I saw Yaelis down by the river the other day?”

  He paused. “No, you did not. What was she doing?”

  “Shopping, I think. It was pretty early in the morning, but she was alone.” Somehow, I thought the last bit would counterbalance the fact that I appeared to be giving up Yaelis for some kind of terrible punishment from her father.

  Winston placed his fork very gently on his plate and steepled his fingers. “She’s– I guess she’s growing up,” he said.

  “She is.”

  “Sometimes, she sneaks out. I don’t suspect she’s doing anything terrible, but she’s always talking about leaving.”

  “That’s just something teenagers do. Remember how badly you probably wanted to leave Savannah when you were that age?”

  That brought a ghost of a smile to his lips. “I was too busy chasing girls around, hitting on women down at the beach, to even think about leaving. I had a thing for Hispanic girls, so that’s who I went after. Black guy with a Latin lady; that was the dream. I was mostly praying for a miracle, though, a long shot, with a tall, slender girl named Camila.”

  His eyes drew up into thin slits, and he wiped wetness from the corner of each.

  “I’m sure she was an amazing woman,” I said.

  “She was,” he said. “Yaelis looks just like her. Wish she had her personality, too. Yaelis’s more like me. I mean, what’s weird is, Camila used to talk about traveling all the time. We had Yaelis, and that sort of went away – we were always just shy, moneywise, of being able to go anywhere interesting – but she always talked about it. And now, so does Yaelis.”

  “She’s got to grow up a little bit. You should be excited she’s got big dreams.”

  “I am,” he said, looking down at his plate, “but she’s also got my genes. And I think you know what that implies.”

  “I get that.”

  “It’s a delicate thing. I want her to grow up learning her own lessons, but I don’t want her to have to learn the same way I did, through nearly killing myself with trial and error.”

  “She’s got a good head on her shoulders.”

  “She’s also got the inclination for experimentation,” he replied. “She’s come home on more than one occasion smelling like bong water, and I keep it to myself because telling her might push it forward. That’s what happened with me and my folks.”

  “Can’t imagine it,” I said. “Me, I just happened to become an alcoholic.”

  He made a pffting sound. “I bet. Just jumped up and grabbed you.”

  I scooped up some oxtail. “For me, it started in high school. Me and Vanessa, we– it was just innocent.”

  “Happens that way.”

  “Drinking on the weekends. Sneaking cans of beer into the movies in Dublin. Going to backwoods parties with a fire barrel and nipping on whiskey to keep warm. Then it got–”

  “Real.”

  “Yeah, then it got real. I got bad, but then Vanessa, she started supplementing the drinking with other stuff, which I didn’t do. Drinking was always enough for me. I mean, it was all I could handle. I didn’t need anything else. When I hit it, I hit it hard.”

  “Wish the same could be said for me. It started with a couple drinks at a party, then progressed to drinks plus a little coke when I got sleepy from the drinking. Then the coke took over, and I was using it all the time. Thought I was big time. This was the ’80s, maybe early ’90s. I didn’t have the right kind of mirror, you know? Didn’t see I was gaunt and poor and losing a grip on reality and my relationship with Camila, not to mention my life.”

  He went back to his food, though he ate more slowly this time.

  “I was mostly out by the time Camila first got sick. This was almost ten years ago. I would still do a bump here and there, drink with my buddies, but I had been through the ringer. Paranoia. Violent outbursts. Hell, every key on my key ring was caked with a combination of coke, snot, and blood. I still have trouble with faces and names, and I was never good with that kind of stuff.”

  “I’m coming out the other end, too, slowly. I’m reaching the point where my brain has got me tricked into thinking–”

  “That you can drink again? Ha! No. That’s the demon talking. That’s the addiction.”

  “I almost slipped.”

  His eyes widened. “When?”

  “Day I saw Yaelis. She showed up, said ‘hey,’ and instantly I re-shelved the beer I’d bought, so to speak. Left it on the bench out by the river.”

  His gaze softened. “So that’s two lives she’s potentially saved.”

  “Won’t know ‘til I’m dead,” I said.

  “Keep fucking around with people like Bellerose, and it won’t be the drinking that kills you.”

  “Cops gave me the same static.”

  “They ought to know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, now. One of theirs got a little taste of this guy last year. Bellerose found out they had a snitch in their midst, working for the SCPD, and shortened the guy by about a foot.” He made the universal throat-slitting gesture. “They never found the head, but the body turned up weeks later in Wildlife Refuge. The gators had gotten to it, but they managed to ID the body.”

  “Seems like they got the yips about this guy.”

  “They just don’t have anything on him, I reckon. Not enough to convict. He’s got
a whole slew of lackeys, and they do his dirty work for him.”

  I finished off the last of my rice and pushed my plate away from me. “Well, I’m not trying to be Serpico. I’m no longer a cop, and I’m not on a personal mission. But somebody’s fucking with me, and I need to figure out how to stop it. Else, I’m going to end up in a shallow grave somewhere.”

  “I understand – I do. I’m just saying, you have to watch your ass.”

  twelfth chapter

  I went to some morning meetings. The dreams had started up again, but I wasn’t sleepwalking or teleporting or whatever to some other place, waking up in a new location with memories of a ghost in my head, so I thought I was mostly okay.

  Still, it was imperative I keep myself grounded with something, and nothing better for staying humble than hearing tales of how people ruined their lives with drugs and alcohol.

  The morning crew was intense, and there were several holdovers from the afternoon group.

  “I go twice a day, every day, man,” Bernie Watson said, when I asked him about how often he went. He stood six-four with shoulder-length dreadlocks and cinder block arms. “If I don’t, I get to tasting that OE in my brain pan, and then the next thing I know, I’m on the street and headed for a liquor store.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said, though it was usually a dead man and not booze I was looking for when I hit the streets like that.

  He said, “I’ll get halfway there, and I just stop and think, ‘What the fuck I’m doing?’ You know what I mean?”

  “People without it don’t get it.”

  “Right? My mama, man – she don’t even drink. Not even a little bit, so she’s always asking me how come I gotta go to meetings to not drink. She’s like, ‘Just don’t drink. Don’t go to the store. Don’t hang out with them fools that be sitting on the front steps and chugging that brew.’ Man, if it was just that easy–”