The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  * * *

  I called Richie, who picked up on the fourth redial.

  “What.”

  Not a question. Not even a statement, really. Just an acknowledgement.

  “Richie,” I said, speaking urgently, talking through the silence of what was very obviously one hell of a hangover, “I need to speak with Bellerose. I need it to happen now.”

  “McKane? The fuck?”

  I heard some shuffling around that sounded like someone’s hand probing the contents of a nightstand. “It’s fucking 10:30, man. In the AM. I’m not even awake yet.”

  “Richie, listen. Get the shit out of your ears and pay attention. I’m on the run. The cops are after me–”

  “For what?”

  “I’ll tell you later. If I don’t get a chance to speak with Bellerose now, I might not later.” I thought about Bellerose getting spooked about me talking to the police. He’d think it curious, and, to his credit, it would be. Makes a man look suspicious, getting arrested right before asking for a palaver of some kind. That’d limit my chances of walking out of the his compound alive.

  “It don’t work that way, man.”

  “Make it work that way. I’m coming to your house. Have it cleared out and be ready to go in two hours. I’ve got some business to attend to.

  * * *

  I checked out Bellerose’s goons. Not a single one of them looked like the guy from the bar, which kind of scared me. If he didn’t work for Bellerose, who, then? Who would have enough clout and audacity to pull such a maneuver as this?

  I thought about asking Bellerose but demurred. I figured I had asked my one question for the evening.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That bitch. I remember her.”

  He was the living embodiment of the end of “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” His face revealed lines of untreated scars so hideous they practically left him inhuman. White stripes across a dark face. Looked like he was missing something.

  “She took more than my seed from me,” he said, smiling. “And she took that from each and every one of my boys here. Y’all remember, boys?”

  Asking the rest of them, but his eyes never leaving me. Grinning. Testing me. Saying whatever he could to get under my skin.

  “She also take all those chunks out of your face?”

  “Rolson,” said Richie, his voice high and tight.

  Bellerose smiled. Healthy competition. Safe competition. So long as I was under his roof, my words could only come back to haunt me. “I knew that white boy done brought you here to speak with me for a reason. He called in a favor, said, ‘This here guy need to speak with you about something.’ He didn’t say it was for stand-up comedy. You real funny, even if you look so serious.”

  Suddenly, standing there, I had no idea why in the fuck I had come. What was it, exactly, that I wanted to know about Vanessa that this drug dealer would give me?

  “I have some questions, is all,” I said. “See, my ex, she passed–”

  “Oh, the bitch died. Oh, shit.” He held one curled fist, covered in tattoos, up to his mouth as he pretended to hold back laughter. “You kill her for running around on you, or because she stole some of my money?”

  My heart sank.

  There it was, laid out like old family secrets in a British novel.

  “Oh, yeah, white boy. She took some stacks of mine. Not much, because she wasn’t smart enough or quick enough to get a whole bunch. But, shit, she got away with it. Scot-free, she did. Went off to Atlanta – the big city of walking dead – and got in bed with some even more fucked up people than my old country ass. Heard she swiped a stash from them, too, and then went on the run.”

  Huh. I tried to process it, tried to think it through, but a simple acknowledgement of fact was all I was able to get through my head.

  His gaze leveled on me as he leaned forward, arms on the table in front of him. He said, “Now, I’m a good, understanding man. I got people around me advising me, telling me what would be good for business. Tracking down some skanky meth-head for a couple thousand dollars, no. Now, that’s not sound business.”

  My heart sped up. The case I was in possession of was a whole lot heavier than “a couple thousand dollars.” If I had to guess, it was packed full. Fifty, seventy-five Gs would be my guess.

  “You ought to be lucky you came to me, in fact,” he said, “because if you had gone off on your High Fidelity kick up in Atlanta – yeah, I seen that white-ass movie – then you would have ended up in somebody’s trunk down in East Point, never to be seen again.”

  Richie whispered, “I’m sorry, man.”

  I nodded.

  “Me, I’ma just warn you: get your ass out of Savannah, before I start thinking of ways to get my money back from that bitch through you. That’s it. That’s all. You got any further questions for me, or have I given you the background you needed on Vanessa?”

  He said the last word as though it had been simmering on the back burner of his subconscious for years, and maybe that was true.

  I stood firm. “What do you remember about her?”

  He smirked, and the rest of his boys smirked, too. “After all that, you want me to tell you what I remember about being around her?”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  “Well, man, it’s going to come out the way it comes out, what with all these pent-up emotions been plaguing me since she took off, but here we go. You heard me fuck with you, give you the full nine on her, so I reckon you deserve a little bit of the other side, seeing as how you’ve stepped in the lion’s den and kept your mouth shut.”

  “That’s it.”

  He looked up, spied the fellas sitting next to and standing behind him. They quietly exited the room, until it was me and Richie and Bellerose sitting there. “She wasn’t ‘bout the life,” he said. “I’ve seen some bad bitches come through here, and she wasn’t one of those, but she was broken and looking for something. Mostly, she was looking for it in freebasing, and hell if I know what she thought she was going to find there. That’s the way I think about most addicts, though. I just sell it to them and let them make their own decisions. The fuck’d you do to her to drive her so crazy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, honestly.

  “Either way, sometimes she got a bug up her ass to go back home. She started talking about this good guy in Lumber Junction. Shit, you don’t look so good to me. I bet you’ve been in the same honeypot as most of us, one time or another. But when she started talking about you, that’s when she went batshit. Went off on a fucking rampage. Not a rampage, but a fucking rampage. Anybody who would have her.”

  He must have seen my face, because he said, “See, I told you didn’t want to hear it.”

  “I needed to know,” I said. And I did. Finding Jess had intensified my interest in Vanessa, and now I couldn’t be satisfied until I found out everything I had missed, even if it were gut-wrenching.

  “She was hooked. She had it bad. That was the bad side of her. Sometimes she looked like she wanted to tell people just how fucked up her life had been, but I don’t know she was ready to deal with it. You want to really know about your ex, you need to go back home, figure out who had it out for her, because somebody gave her the gray clouds real bad, my man, and she wasn’t ever able to get over that. If it wasn’t you, I’d go looking for who did.”

  “That it?” I asked. I felt Richie’s eyes piercing the side of my head.

  “That not enough?” Bellerose asked.

  “The men she ran off to Atlanta with, who where they?”

  “Bad dudes long dead,” he replied.

  “Any names? Any way to contact them?”

  “Not unless you got a deathwish. You got one of those?”

  “In my back pocket,” I replied.

  “No, I know what you got in your back pocket, and it ain’t a deathwish. Or maybe it is, in a way.”

  “Mr. Bellerose,” Richie began, but the big man cut him off.

  “I see you’ve got a piece on you. What, you
didn’t think I wouldn’t see it? I knew; I just wasn’t scared of you. If you want to pull it out and get on with this thing, then get to it. Part of me wishes you would. But if not, I think we’re done here. I got nothing left to say to you about your old girl.”

  “The names,” I insisted.

  “Larry, Curly, and Moe,” said Bellerose. “Shit, man, their names don’t matter. They’re just dust. Dirt ground into other dirt, and nobody remembers dirty dirt. Her boy, he’s dead, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You want information, you go seek you his boys, people he owed money to. They might be able to accommodate you on that front. Me, I’m afraid, I’ve said my fucking piece on the matter.”

  “Fine,” I said. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it had answered some questions about who was after me. Not Bellerose. If he wanted me dead, I’d be dead. But here I was, standing in front of him, defying him to his face, and he wasn’t saying shit about it.

  His ever-present smile faded. “Now get the fuck out of my sight, and get the fuck out of Savannah. This place gonna get you killed, you don’t watch out.”

  I was led out through a side door, and the first time I was kicked, I tensed up, ready for a fight. Then the blows descended on me, and I was helpless to do anything but endure them. I took the ass-whipping with a resigned knowledge that it was obligatory. I thought I might try to defend myself, in a simple attempt to fend off the worst of it. Then, I heard the sound of a pistol being cocked, so I stopped defending myself, and I just let them beat the shit out of me.

  It all came down in a flurry, fists and feet and spit. Kidney shots from size thirteen boots. Three to the shoulder and who knew how many to the back and legs. I’d be pissing blood and limping for days, but maybe it’d be all right after that. One man leaned down and elbowed me in the jaw. Blood seeped between my teeth and out the corner of one side of my mouth, pooling on the concrete.

  It wasn’t the worst ass-whipping I’d ever experienced, but it was close. I feel like Richie got it worse, but that could have been because he was screaming the entire time.

  They beat me until they were tired of beating me, and then they dragged me and Richie to our car and put us inside. Every inch of me ached. I felt like I had been thwacked repeatedly with a sock full of quarters. Blood and snot and tears dripped onto the front of my shirt.

  “Forget how to find your way out here,” a guy in a black blazer said. “Richie, you too. You’re cut off, and if you speak the name of Bellerose again, it’ll be the last time. You hear?”

  “I do.”

  He leaned in closer. “I said, ‘Do you hear, boy?’”

  “I do,” Richie said, panting.

  The guy reached in and smacked him across the face. “Now, you go on and get out of here. We’ve got other business to attend to, and you ain’t it.”

  * * *

  I slept in a spare room at Richie’s, and so long as I could ignore the din of video game-based bursts of gunfire, it wasn’t a bad place to crash. Kept me out of the cops’ eyeline, so it was enough.

  Not that I slept. I thought about a lot of things. Vanessa. My growing list of adversaries. The tattooed guy.

  My dog.

  Willie. That poor fucking dog. Feeding the scraggly little bastard had kept me focused while I dried out here in Savannah. What I didn’t want to imagine but did anyway was that he’d met up with the business end of a car tire, which was why he hadn’t returned. Truth be told, I hadn’t been home very much to keep an eye out, either way.

  The underlying fact was that if I had a real murder beef to contend with, Willie wouldn’t see me again anyway. Looked like I was being framed, and an unsympathetic jury could put me in lock-up for the better part of two decades, maybe longer.

  But the cops had to catch me first, and I had my money on the cops who had pulled me over while I had been running that day. They had a particular kind of hard-on for me, so I imagined they wanted to see me burn, or else they wouldn’t have given me that “warning.”

  For a while I listened to the sounds of deathmatches from beyond the walls, the participants screaming about “kill-streaks” and plenty of other content-specific lingo I had virtually no understanding of.

  At a certain point, incapable of keeping my eyes closed and off the ceiling above me, I ambled out to the main living room and took residence on a couch opposite the two combatants.

  They were ostensibly sober but looked ragged in an stoner kind of way.

  “Sup,” said the one on the left. He was clad in a Shaun of the Dead tee. He ran one hand through his greasy mop of hair. Struck me as a throwback to the days of yore, when grunge still walked the earth.

  “Sup,” said the one on the right. If the former could have been the guitarist for Mudhoney, this one embodied punk. Shaved head, tattoos. I thought I noticed a Black Flag emblem inked on one arm, but I didn’t peer too closely. A cigarette dangled precariously from one corner of his mouth. He wasn’t smoking it, but merely hung onto it like a talisman.

  “Mind if I have one of those?” I asked.

  “Pack’s on the table,” he said, eyes never leaving the screen.

  I turned to watch the action for a while, but I didn’t much understand it, so I grew bored pretty quickly. So far as I could tell, it was a game about being in as realistic a war setting as humanly possible, trying desperately to track down the others and cap them in the face.

  “Quit your camping,” said the clothed one. “You’re fucking camping, thrashing on noobs, and if I get you, motherfucker, you’re dead as shit.”

  “Cry to your goddamn mother when it’s done. Just do your job, you pansy.”

  My gaming experience had ended back in the ’90s sometime with a secondhand Super Nintendo and a red cartridge of DOOM, which was mostly like the game those dudes were playing, but way less sophisticated. I’d played other games, some of the Super Mario ones, and I liked DOOM all right – it had a weird visual aspect to it – but the violence had eventually alienated me. No way I could participate in something like that, especially after what I’d witnessed in real life. Made my head hurt.

  And this game was a ramped-up, highly-detailed version. Just a shooting range with human-shaped dummies. I couldn’t watch it.

  Instead, I left the gaming to the gamers and went upstairs, stepping out onto the patio, which stretched all the way around the second floor.

  Popped the pilfered smoke into my mouth and eyeballed the darkness. It wasn’t an unwelcome sight, but the prevalence of shadows was difficult to withstand, so I ended up walking around the entirety of the porch, trying to find something interesting to keep me company.

  I never actually lit the cigarette, didn’t even bring the lighter with me. Just kept it propped there, savoring the return of something familiar.

  Who would have been a good wall to bounce ideas off of right about now was Deuce, but I had been ignoring his calls for the better part of six months. He’d called every few days that entire time, without fail, but I hadn’t received a call recently. Maybe he’d given up. Probably better off. The way my luck was going, one of us would probably have been in a coffin by the end of the week.

  I thought about the laundry list of people dragged into my dark business.

  Jess. Allison. Winston. Mickey. To a lesser extent, Yaelis. Even Willie the Dog had been submerged in my personal shit.

  And all because of a woman I fell in love with twenty years ago, the ghost of whom still haunted me. Now it was the sins of her final hours which had been visited upon me, and I was somehow paying penance for her transgressions. Which I didn’t mind. It gave me something to do, something to worry about. If I couldn’t be happy, I could at least be busy with my misery.

  I flicked the cigarette down on the porch and found a seat on one of the giant porch swings. All this space, wasted on a man who couldn’t or didn’t enjoy it.

  Richie.

  Richie was the wild card here, in a deck full of them. I couldn’t quite understand wha
t would make him help me, especially at the risk of his own life. He didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would give up anything of his own to be able to see someone else’s happiness come first. He had a slightly ratty appearance, not necessarily in the face. Just, I guess, in the way he carried himself. He was a user, a self-conscious bug, crawling around under the rug of his own self-perception. It’s obviously why he had collected a harem of groupies to his cause (which, obviously, was dedicated to building a white trash monument to himself).

  And then there was the issue with Jess. If her accusations were true, then by staying at Richie’s, I had accepted the hospitality of a violent, abusive sociopath, one capable of fooling even me. However, if the opposite were true, if he were guilty only of being friends and lovers with a woman capable of falsely accusing him of hitting her, then he was a slightly more tragic figure. Tragicomic, maybe, but something more than a dunderheaded drug dealer with a penchant for video games.

  * * *

  I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of my phone buzzing. Somehow, I had drifted off to sleep on the porch swing, the gentle swaying having taken me off to a place where I dreamed but couldn’t remember them upon waking.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” I said.

  The voice on the other end of the line was shrill. “There’s a man.”

  I sat up, bolting upright. “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” Jess said. “Maybe a pervert. Maybe a killer or a Peeping Tom. I don’t know. Just please come over. Please.”

  She started to cry, a half-dry sound that reminded me of a crow. Ack-ack-ack. Hitching, somewhat unintelligible sounds. Heartbreaking, in their own bizarre way.

  “I’m kind of far away.”

  “I don’t care. Oh, God. He’s looking through my front window, through the big one. Oh, God. Oh, God. Hurry. Hurry!”

  My mind was telling me to move, but my body held fast. I distantly heard the sounds of the hanging chains scraping against the ceiling screws.