East of the Sun

by Trey R. Barker

  “So how do you know he had issues?”

  “Dr. Cruz told me more than once that he and Francis had discussed meds when some had come up missing. Dr. Cruz believed Francis self-medicated. As I said, his demons were legion and I believe they were getting stronger. That’s why he worked so hard to help others.” His eyes flashed and his massive hand clenched to a fist. “And now one of those he tried to serve has killed him.”

  “We don’t know that, sir.”

  “I believe we do, Miss Bogan.” He leaned across the table to bring the three of them closer together. “You know Francis and I had a love of theater in common. He and I both loved big theatrical flourishes. More than once during intermissions did Francis horrify me with stories of angry inmates. Threats. Even physical assaults.”

  Vernezobre lowered his head into a hand and it reminded Jace of her grandfather, tired from fighting his cancer. Grapa had put his head in his hands, as Vernezobre did now, and had said to Gramma, “I think I’m done.” The next day he stopped his treatments and two days after that, he was dead in his own home.

  The doctor said, “So many inmates. Although I admire the job you ladies do, I cannot understand how you find whatever it is inside you to allow you to do it.” He cleared his throat. “Francis told me that nearly every new patient angrily wanted what they thought they were being denied.”

  “Which was what, sir?” Rory asked.

  “More medicines and more procedures. More tests. It is the way of our medical system: more of everything.” Vernezobre took a deep breath. “I have no desire to harm any man, but there must be justice for Francis’s death.” A pained look shot through his eyes. “He told me there had been an incident with a man named Mercer.”

  Rory nodded but said nothing. Catching something in her eyes, Jace held her tongue as well.

  “Before his final shift, Francis told me Mr. Mercer had threatened to kill him. Mr. Mercer told my friend he would send him to his God.”

  “Doc Wrubel told you that?” Jace sat back against the vinyl booth seat. Could it be this easy? Was Mercer so stupid as to fight with the doctor, threaten him, and then kill him?

  “Francis told me this man would harm him and now Francis is dead.” He hesitated, as though he wanted to say more.

  “Doctor?”

  “Miss Salome. Sometimes, in the course of civility, acquaintances mention one thing or another and in truth, that information probably should not pass lips.”

  “Doctor, we are not interested in insider information; we’re interested in who killed your friend.”

  The man, his aristocratic skin darkened by genetics and a lifetime spent in the Cuban or West-Texas sun, nodded. “Thank you for your discretion. I do hate to leave such a weight on her shoulders, but I have been informed that the nurse, Ms. Shortz, was . . . perhaps . . . asleep on duty.”

  Rory grimaced. “Maybe that’s how Mercer got into the hallway.”

  “Dr. Wrubel told you that?” Jace asked.

  He shook his head with a quiet dignity. “I will not divulge that, Miss Salome. Nor on the stand when Mercer is convicted for Francis’s murder. They should not have spoken when school was out, but they have helped and I will keep their names secret.”

  Rory grinned. “No problem, sir, no problem.”

  “I trust you will get this information where it needs to go? I am thankful I had the good fortune of seeing you two this morning, only hours after Dr. Cruz called me with the news.” Vernezobre stood and offered his hand to both women. “I am sorry for interrupting, ladies. I am just an old man who is grieving the loss of a friend. It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Salome. Perhaps I shall see you when Cuban jazz again fills the air of Zachary City.”

  “It was good to meet you, too, and maybe we’ll share a trumpet or piano.”

  “I look forward to it.” He inclined his head toward Rory. “Attempt to bring her, as well. She and culture should become acquainted.”

  When he was gone, Rory stared at Jace, a grin playing at her lips. “Already solved. Over ice cream, no less. Von Holton’s gonna love you.”

  A buzz of giddy excitement rode through Jace. This investigation, hers only tangentially, was finished before it was even begun.

  “Superficially, it’s about Mercer not getting an inhaler.” Jace pointed toward where Dr. Vernezobre had been. “But if Wrubel was self-medicating, wasn’t he probably also selling . . . just like Mercer said?”

  “Hang on; we don’t know for sure he was self-medicating, okay? He smoked some weed and I know that because he told me. But I don’t believe he was into anything harder than that. And I sure as hell don’t believe he was selling. But even if he was, Mercer’s our guy.” Rory motioned to the grandson. When he came over, she ordered the number 2: two eggs, two sausage, two toast. “Scrambled eggs and hot sauce, please. Wheat toast.”

  The kid, his eyes wide that she trusted him with her order, nodded and dashed to Alley B. Alley B listened, then looked at Rory and questioningly held up two fingers. Rory nodded.

  The case was over, as easily as that. Yet if that were true, then why did Jace feel the need for a second stress-management sundae?

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 8

  A bit later, Jace stood at her apartment door, the key as talisman.

  Frost on windshields and trees naked of leaves and all the Sea Spray tenants wearing heavy coats and knit caps, and yet Jace Salome stood here drowning in sweat. It was a simple thing, putting a key in a lock, turning that lock, and opening a door. There should be no terror, no panic or dread. It should be a simple matter of unlocking the brushed-brass knob and the two deadbolts—one old and one new—and going inside.

  Yet almost every homecoming to the apartment Grapa had built from two hotel rooms stacked atop each other and that gave her a duplex-type residence resulted in this battle. She stood on this spot, watched the key shake in her hand, and worked feverishly to convince herself that Will Badgett was not still in the apartment.

  She always got inside and then felt like an utter fool for the ritual. Yeah, it was getting better. Each day her ritual shortened by a breath and she found a smidgen more strength to charge in and reclaim her home. Yet during that moment when she did hesitate, she wondered if she’d ever be who she was before Will Badgett.

  You changed me, you bastard. You came into my life and changed it fundamentally and I still haven’t figured out how to deal with that or what it means down the road . . . if anything.

  Jace swallowed, gritted her teeth, and unlocked the door. She rushed in, closed the thing tightly behind her, and shot the deadbolts home.

  “Nobody here, Jace. No one at all.”

  “Well . . .” Preacher’s lazy voice came to her from her small living room. “Somebody’s here.”

  Jace bit the inside of her lip and tasted a spill of warm blood. Not now, she thought. Preacher, I love you but get the hell out.

  It wasn’t just Preacher. It was Gramma, too. They sat on her couch, beneath Jace’s towering poster of Wonder Woman plastered on the wall. Preacher had a handful of her jazz CDs spread on the coffee table, reading liner notes to Dave Brubeck’s Time Out, while Gramma read the back cover of a DVD about patrol tactics.

  Jace took the DVD from her grandmother. The woman looked at her, sadness in her eyes. “Rory let me borrow it,” Jace said by way of apology. Gramma’s silence bothered Jace more than if the woman had spoken.

  For a long moment, no one spoke. Jace saw the silent messages flashing back and forth between them. Years of days and nights together, of dominoes and drinking with the rest of their little cohort—Jace called them the Hot Five because it had been Grapa’s poker buddies and he’d so dearly loved Louis Armstrong’s trumpet. The Hot Five was one of Armstrong’s first groups. Grapa, Gramma, Preacher, Hassan, and Galena had spent so many years together there was no language required. It was a silent language Jace could only rarely understand.

  This morning, Jace understood all too well. “
You heard.”

  Gramma nodded. “You need to quit.”

  “No.”

  “I hate that you work there. It’s all violence and death and blood and horrible people.”

  “Now, it ain’t all like that for our little baby girl.” Preacher shook his head. “Jace be helping people, too.”

  Gramma jerked the Time Out CD out of his hands. “Violence and death. Guards killing inmates and now inmates killing doctors.” Gramma paced the apartment, like a mother waiting up for a daughter not home yet as the rain makes the streets slick and dangerous. “Hell, you already can’t sleep.”

  “I sleep just fine.”

  “You sleep like shit and we both know it.” Gramma tapped a wall. “Too thin. You were sleep-talking last night.” Gramma put her hand beneath her chin, her sign of confusion and concern. “But not about your mother. Or Badgett.”

  Last night, it had been especially vivid; the house on cinder blocks, the house with the fluttering and tattered curtains, with the windows broken until they were nothing but glinting bits shaped like jagged teeth, with the door long since stolen, with the dirty cream walls stained by slashes and splashes of brown paint, with the floor covered in dirt and weeds and used condoms and syringes, while a blistering morning sun blasted up over the western horizon.

  She’d dreamt, again, of the house she didn’t understand.

  “What was it, honey?” Gramma came to Jace and hugged her fiercely. The warmth of her hugs always knifed Jace’s heart.

  “Just a bad night.”

  “I can get’cha some sleep helpers, you need.” Preacher winked. “Some candles and incense. Get’cha some books on relaxatin’ and some’a them nature albums. Rivers and oceans and whales singing and I don’t know what all.”

  “They’re CDs now, Preacher,” Gramma said.

  “Hah. Not even CDs anymore, it’s all downloads, but I get what you’re saying.”

  “Warm milk will help, too.” The old woman smacked her lips.

  “I thought you preferred letting Mr. Daniels help you.”

  The woman nodded. “I do, but I’m retired and you have a real job to worry about.” There was just a slip of silence and

  Gramma added, “A job I wish you didn’t have.”

  “Gramma, please. I like my job and I’m good at it.”

  “Yeah, but people die at your job.”

  “People die at all kinds of jobs. Hell, motel clerks get killed all the time.” She pounded her chest. “At least in my job, I get to catch the people who do the killing.”

  “What?”

  “I know who killed Dr. Wrubel.” At least, I think I do, she left unsaid. “And, yeah, I saw his body and I saw the blood and it was awful and made me want to throw up and come home so you could sing to me but I figured out who did it and I’m going to help our detectives prove it and lock him up forever.”

  “And that makes it better? Seeing all that nastiness is better because you can lock someone up forever?”

  Jace ground her teeth until her jaw was bright with pain. “Damn it, Gramma, this is my job. And yeah . . . I think it does. It makes it easier to live with what I’ve seen if I know the bad guy goes to prison. That’s justice.”

  Clearly surprised, the woman stepped back and cleared her throat. “I apologize, Jace. I didn’t mean to start another argument. I just . . . well, I love you and I worry about you. I just want you happy and safe, and—cop or not—I’ll always want you happy and safe and I’ll always love you.”

  Jace pulled the old woman back to her and hugged her hard. “I’m sorry for that. I love you, too. You are my heart.” She hesitated, then she goosed her grandmother. “Besides, if I piss you off too badly, who’s going to clean my apartment?”

  Grinning and twisting away, Gramma snorted. “You are bad, Jace, nothing but bad.”

  Preacher looked at Jace, his serious, Sunday-morning sermon face on. “Do you need us to stay?”

  She wanted them to, thought she might need them to. But she also wanted to sleep without them. This was the job she’d chosen and this was part of the cost. She would sleep alone, after the ritual of her second bedroom, to prove to herself she could.

  “I’m okay. Thank you.” Gramma was out the door first, humming as she headed down the second floor balcony to her own apartment. Preacher hesitated at the doorway. “You got that face on.”

  “What face?”

  “Robison’s face.”

  Preacher’s son’s face. Robison’s face.

  “You maybe wanna go look for him?”

  Jace averted her gaze and eyed the Wonder Woman poster on her wall. It was the early heroine, and in the picture, she stood slightly cocked, her head angled up as though looking into the heavens. She wore the bulletproof bracelets and had the magic lasso at her side. “They changed her.”

  Preacher frowned. “What’s that?”

  “She was an Amazon princess. She was a superhero because she was a superhero. Beautiful and intelligent and strong and all her super powers were hers alone.”

  Preacher was confused.

  “They took that away from her. Later on they said her powers came from the gods.”

  “It all comes from God, babydoll.”

  “You know what I mean.” She sighed. “People got her and changed her.”

  “Ever’body changes ever’body, babydoll. Cain’t meet someone or know someone or love someone without leaving a part of yourself with them.”

  Jace took a deep breath, her eyes on the closed door to her second bedroom.

  “Jace?”

  “How long has Robison been gone, Preacher?”

  The old man thought for a while. “Well, it was the beginning of the school year. Ain’t but about Christmastime now. ’S just a few months.”

  Twenty years, actually. Robison was Preacher’s son and he’d disappeared while walking to school just after the start of his first-grade year. Preacher believed, with a fervency Jace found both disconcerting and comforting, Robison would be back soon. Somewhere deep in his dented and tired brain, when times were good, Preacher believed his son had gone to visit his mother. When times were bad, Preacher believed Robison had gotten lost and just needed finding.

  “You’re a good father, Preacher. Good night.”

  “Good morning, babydoll.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The apartment was empty.

  Preacher and Gramma were gone. Will Badgett was not here. He was not in the kitchen or the bathroom. He was not downstairs in either of the bedrooms, and the upstairs living room where he’d beaten her so savagely before soaking her with pepper spray had been cleaned months ago. The blood-stained carpet had been torn out and replaced by hardwood floors, and the head-and fist-shaped holes in the walls were long since patched.

  In the far bottom corner of the Wonder Woman poster, Thomas’s booking photo stared at her. He didn’t look scared in the picture, like he had later when he begged Jace to save him. In this picture, he looked bored; a guy who’d missed a court date and been caught driving with a suspended license.

  A few days, that look said, and I’ll be right with the law.

  Jace stripped quickly, her naked skin cold in the apartment’s winter air. She touched the tattoo at the base of her neck. It was half of a heart and in her head, though she knew it was stupid, her mother had the other half.

  Maybe time for a new one?

  Maybe Thomas’s eye? Just a reminder?

  In her hand, she clutched last night’s flyer. She took a deep breath, and opened the door to her second bedroom.

  The flyers filled the room.

  Spread across the walls like arms waiting to grab her and smother her. From the floor up, every wall, creeping onto the ceiling. Some askew and crooked, some perfectly aligned or in deliberate rows. They trailed and spun, wound and hopped, with the walls of eggshell crème paint peeking out from beneath, between, and behind. The intensity gave her vertigo and her stomach rolled as though she were standing on a precipice. Enor
mous rats and dickless rangers, deputies and rage, dead and bloody cops. Worms. Children. Pictures of handcuffs, too, symbolic of those who’d been arrested and of her being immobilized and unable to get away. Words cut from magazines, arranged haphazardly into threats and intimidation, promises of retaliation. Over and over again was her departmental photo, staring back from everywhere, enlarged and violated, savagely sliced, painted with blood. That picture had also been ruined with black marker and nearly lost beneath crude drawings of female genitalia.

  But also of huge penises emitting a steady stream of piss onto her face.

  It was a reminder, like Laimo’s words, that Jace had pissed herself when the ERTs had exploded into A Pod the night Thomas died.

  It was a reminder, like Laimo’s words, of the most humiliating moment in Jace’s life.

  Later, when her dreams took her, she squirmed. Eventually she cried.

  Her young-girl dreams had been soft and gentle and always had horses. Her teenager’s dreams were built on edges sharpened by Mama’s death. At first, her sheriff’s-deputy dreams had been exciting and nerve-wracking yet always with scores and legions and brigades of other cops backing her up. Since Badgett, her dreams had become corrupted; they were incomprehensible nightmares. Lately she found herself in the unrecognized shack repeatedly, but also in the A Pod go-between and it was sometimes difficult to tell the difference between the two. In the shack, there were holes in the walls and windows broken, and in the go-between there were non-existent bars on the doors. The lurid colors, oh so reminiscent of Rory’s Skittles, that spewed from the dream streetlights antagonized her, too. Brick-hard reds and liquid greens and yellows that came through the broken windows no matter how hard she tried to keep them out. Electric purples and oranges that reminded her of a wet downtown on a night someone might die. Downtown Chicago, maybe, Detroit or Kansas City.

  Frequently, she stood in the middle of the dream-shack, surrounded by bent syringes and handcuffs and flyers and the empty aluminum cans of 40s. She stared at a sun that she knew was rising up from the west and had no idea what the hell that meant. She sweated a harsh fear because the shack, which was sometimes the shack and sometimes the go-between and sometimes both at the same time, scared her.