Desperate Detroit and Stories of Other Dire Places

by Loren Estleman

  A third of the way down the slope, a hundred feet below him and two hundred feet above the thicket, stood his own shack. It had been built of logs when James Monroe was president, but a later ancestor had nailed clapboard over the logs to make it resemble a proper house. A four-paned window that had been covered with oiled paper before the coming of the railroad now reflected sunlight from three panes, emphasizing the blank space where a bullet had shattered the glass.

  Now, as the sun lifted, its light struck sparks off tiny fragments on his jeans. He flicked them away carefully. Before tumbling out of the shack he had made sure to remove his wristwatch and anything else that might catch light and betray him.

  He knew who had fired the bullet. Inside the shack, its cracked black cover freshly nicked by that same projectile, lay a Bible as thick as a man’s thigh, its cream flyleaves scribbled over in old brown ink with names of his forebears and the dates of their births and deaths going back to 1789, when an indentured servant from Cornwall bought the book secondhand in London and recorded the birth of a son named Jotham. Four generations of names followed before the simple entry: “Eben Candler, murdered by Ezekiel Finlayson, Hawkins County, Kentucky, May 11, 1882. His will be done.” Eighteen similar notations appeared on succeeding pages, in differing hands, until the survivors wearied of keeping count. The final line, “Jotham Edward Candler, born September 8, 1951,” written in his father’s formal script, commemorated his own birth. Finlayson losses were not included.

  No one remembered the specifics of that first encounter between a Candler and a Finlayson, although it had something to do with the ownership of forty acres of bottomland in Unicoi County. Only the casualties were remembered. Jotham’s own coming of age had been marked by a daily catechism in which he was expected to recite, in whatever order asked, the names of the Candler slain, their murderers, and the dates of their deaths as they had been recorded in the big Bible; and when he was strong enough to lift a squirrel rifle, he had been taught to think of his small, furry targets not as squirrels but as Finlaysons.

  It did not matter that no one knew who held title to those forty acres—that was as gone as the bottomland itself, seized by the bank during the Panic of 1893—or that the fecundity of the Candler and Finlayson women had led to considerable interbreeding between the two families during the long truces. Hatred was an inheritance as solid and treasured as the old Bible and Great-Grandmother Candler’s homely samplers, their red embroidery and white linen gone the same dead-skin brown on the walls of the tiny shack. Jotham, with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and three years in Vietnam behind him, was growing marijuana on plots that had supported his father’s stills, and the Finlaysons had sold Ezekiel’s farrier’s shop to buy a funeral home and the first of a chain of hardware stores, but aside from that little had changed. Bad blood was bad always.

  As the sun cleared the mountain, its light turned leafy green coming down through the branches. Creatures stirred in the dry-shuck mattress of last year’s leaves, and the last wisp of woodsmoke left the shack’s chimney in a bit of shredded tissue that vanished into the thatch of fog now treetop-high as it lifted and broke apart. Jotham’s assailant would know by that that he was no longer inside. The waiting had almost ended.

  Jotham was the last Candler to bear that surname. His sisters were married and his only brother had died in Korea before Jotham was old enough to remember him. He would carry the name to the grave with him because of what the army’s defoliants had done to his genes in Da Nang. In view of that temptation—the opportunity to wipe out by one death the long line of Candlers—young Bertram Finlayson’s attempt to kill him in his sleep that morning seemed long overdue.

  He had no doubt it was Bertram. Eight years Jotham’s junior, he had been too young to serve in Vietnam, and had spent that frustration in turkey shoots across the state, winning a caseful of trophies to display under the antlered heads on the walls of his fine house in town. His arsenal was a legend among collectors of firearms and he often boasted that he had used them to kill every kind of animal that lived in the county but one. He was the only Finlayson young enough and mean enough to bother about a fight that most had thought was buried with Jotham’s father.

  Several times since Jotham had returned from college on the G.I. Bill, Bertram had tried to draw him into something in town, from which Jotham had always walked away. Witnesses said it was because he had had enough of killing in Asia. But those who said that were thinking of other wars, did not understand that the object of his had been to stay alive; killing came secondary, if at all. And now here he was, twelve years and ten thousand miles later, trying to stay alive in another jungle.

  A squirrel began chattering, a high-pitched coughing noise like a small engine trying to start. Something was annoying it. Not him; the squirrel was too far away, high in an ash on the other side of the shack. He spotted its humped profile on the side of the trunk sixty feet up and scanned the ground at the base. A treefall twenty yards down the slope looked promising. He raised the .30-06, lined up the iron sights, and sent a bullet into the center of the fall. Something jumped, startled. Dead leaves rattled on the inert branches.

  The echo of his first report was still snarling in the distance when he fired again, into those moving leaves. Almost instantly, a section of bark on a cedar a foot to Jotham’s right exploded in a cloud of splinters, followed quickly by the crack of a .30-30. He hurled himself and his weapon headlong down the slope, rolling and coming up on the other side of a clump of suckers grown up around a pine stump. The squirrel had stopped chattering.

  Bertram was a cooler hand than he’d thought. After the first shot he had waited, then fired at Jotham’s second muzzle flash.

  Again the waiting began.

  Once, after exchanging fire with a Cong he had never seen, Jotham had waited for eleven hours in a fog of mosquitoes and heavy air, unmoving, his survival dependent upon his either killing the guerrilla or boring him into moving on. At the end the Cong had lost patience first, and when he rose from cover to investigate, Jotham had taken his head off with a burst from his M-16. How to wait was the hardest lesson of all. He settled himself on the other knee to give that haunch a rest.

  The sun climbed into a thin sheeting of clouds that parted from time to time, changing the light as in an ancient motion picture. The air warmed, grew hot and thick. Twice he was attacked by wood ticks, once on the back of a hand, the other time, very painfully, on his neck. He did not move to brush them away. Eventually they’d crawled off drunkenly, bloated with his blood.

  When the sun was directly overhead, he knew a terrible urge to get up and find out if Bertram was still there. More than the heat, it made the sweat stand out in burrs on his forehead and greased his armpits and crotch. It must have been what the Cong had felt just before he committed suicide. But Jotham held his position and it subsided.

  No one came up the mountain. In other years, uninvited visitors had met moonshiners’ buckshot, and now even the authorities counseled against wandering the hills and chancing the protective wrath of marijuana growers and mad survivalists.

  Around midafternoon the sky darkened and big drops pattered the leaves on the ground and rolled along the edge of the bill of Jotham’s cap and hung quivering before falling to his raised thigh with loud plops. He swung the rifle horizontal to keep moisture out of the barrel. But the rain passed swiftly. A rainbow arched over the shack and melted away.

  The air cooled toward dusk. Bertram would have to move soon. Jotham’s new knowledge of his enemy’s instincts told him that he would not again risk darkness in the woods with an experienced jungle fighter. Jotham reversed legs again, working the stiffness out of the long muscles in his thighs.

  The woods to the west were catching fire in the lowering sun when a buck mule deer that Jotham had never heard went crashing off through the trees on the opposite side of the shack, blatting a warning to others of its kind. At that moment the treefall shook and a pair of bull shoulders with a h
atless head nestled in between reared against a sky striped with tree trunks. Light sheared along something long and shiny.

  Jotham raised his rifle without aiming, trusting to the barrel to find its mark because he could no longer see the front sight, and touched the trigger. The butt pulsed against his shoulder, but he did not hear the blast. It had been that way when he’d killed the Cong. In roaring silence the bull shoulders hunched and the hatless head went back and the silhouette crumpled in on itself like a balloon deflating. The long and shiny thing flashed, falling.

  Jotham let the sun slip to a red crescent before rising. In gray light he approached the treefall, lifting his feet clear of the old stumps more from memory than from sight, his eyes fixed on the dark thing draped over the fallen tree with the .30-30 on the ground in front of it. Carefully he used a foot to slide the rifle farther out of the reach of the dangling hands, then took another step and grasped a handful of straw-colored hair and raised a slack face with open eyes and mouth into the last ray of light. It was Bertram Finlayson.

  He let the face drop and started down the mountain toward town to tell his sister Lucy that she was a widow.

  Cabana

  When the old The Armchair Detective decided to publish fiction, I was offered a tempting fee to take part. I was jammed up and begged for time. That night, I dreamed the following story, something that had never happened before. I awoke with the plot all laid out, and wrote it in three hours. But the really inexplicable thing is I’d had no previous exposure to anything remotely resembling it when I went to bed.

  Amusing aside: Petitioned by AD for permission to illustrate the story with a photo from its archives, the Brazilian tourism commission asked to see the story, to ensure it didn’t paint a bleak picture of Rio. Its request was granted—and its permission to use the photo withheld.

  • • •

  Hale thanked me for the glass of water and used it to chase down a yellow pill the size of a cuff link.

  “I’m on medication,” he told me helpfully. “I will be for the rest of my life, I guess. That’s a tough admission to make at my age.”

  I figured that to be around twenty-five. He was a small, slender specimen with fragile wrists and features and thick black hair cut short up front and long in the back, the way they’re wearing it now. He looked healthy enough. He had the sinews of a runner under his tennis shirt and shorts.

  “What’ve you got?” I refilled my glass from the pitcher of martinis on the wicker table, no pill.

  “It has a Latin name I can’t pronounce. As I understand it, it’s a benign growth on my brain, hanging down like a stalactite at the base of the occipital lobe. Without the medication, any exertion or great shock can cause it to move and touch my spinal column. I black out. Afterward I can’t remember anything from a few minutes before the blackout. I’m told I become abusive, even violent.”

  “And with the medication?”

  “I’m a little better. Do you know where Sharon is, Mr. Gardener?”

  I looked past him at the ocean. Nothing new there. At that hour of the afternoon it was teal-blue, the long swells coming in like wind blowing across satin and creaming on the beach. I’d been living in the little cabana behind me for two years and nothing ever changed, not the ocean or the throbbing blue sky or the growling and honking of Rio beyond the palms on the hill.

  “I found her,” I said, “I think. I’ve sent someone to confirm her address. Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll have it for you.”

  He gulped down the rest of his water. “I was told you work alone.”

  “I farm out some of the grunt work. Don’t worry. He doesn’t know about Detroit.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you. I still don’t know how you got it out of me.”

  “Relax. There’s no extradition between the United States and Brazil. At least half the people I work for are thieves. Most of them are like you, amateurs who embezzled a bundle in one shot and took off with the briefcase for romantic Rio. Amateur thieves fall into patterns. I needed to know she was one before I started looking.”

  “Sharon isn’t a thief,” he said. “Not really. I took that money. She didn’t even know about it until we were in the air, on our way to a two-week vacation in South America; or so she thought.”

  “Plenty of women here. Why bring her at all?”

  “We were going to be married. We still are, if I can find her and apologize. I—had an episode. In the Rio de Janeiro airport. I woke up in jail. The officers told me I tried to tear the place apart. Sharon was gone. So was the suitcase and six hundred thousand dollars.”

  “And you want to apologize to her?”

  “I must have frightened her. She never saw one of my spells before. I was nervous; I forgot to take my medication. That was two weeks ago. She must be terrified, with all that money in a strange country and no way to get back home. She’d be afraid to buy a ticket with stolen bills.”

  My glass was empty again; evaporation’s a problem in Brazil. I filled it again and drank. I felt the familiar gnawing at my ulcer. “Is it her you want, or the money?”

  “Both. I love Sharon, but I threw away my career for the money. What good’s a career if this tumor turns malignant? If I’m going to die young, I want to be in a villa overlooking the ocean with the woman I love at my side.”

  “Romantic. Come back tomorrow morning.”

  The sun was barely over the sill when someone banged on the cabana door. I stumbled to the window in my shorts and looked out at Hale standing on the little flagged patio where we’d sat the previous afternoon. The pitcher with its puddle of melted ice looked sad.

  “Have you got it?” he demanded when I opened the door. Today he had on a Sea Island shirt over white flannels.

  I gave him the address. “It belongs to a cabana like this one. It’s a twenty-minute drive down the coast. Want me to go with you?”

  “No, thanks.” He handed me an envelope full of cash. He watched me count it. “Are you all right, Gardener?”

  “Damn ulcers kept me up all night.”

  “You ought to give up drinking.”

  “What else is there to do down here?”

  He thanked me for my good work and left. The wheels of his rented Jeep spun and spat sand.

  I gave him five minutes, then dressed and went after him in my Mexican Oldsmobile.

  The cabana was about the same size as mine, but nicer, with a red Spanish tile roof and recent white paint on the stucco. There was a little flower garden in front, professionally tended. Nice view of the ocean out back. Apparently Sharon didn’t mind spending stolen money on overhead as much as she did using it to buy a ticket home; but that had been Hale’s assessment, and he was no judge of character. His Jeep was parked in front.

  The front door stood wide open. Inside, the place looked like hurricane footage: furniture dumped over, cushions slashed and bleeding white cotton batting, holes kicked in the plaster. Hale was sitting on the floor in the middle of it all, next to the woman’s body. She had on a halter top, shorts, and sandals. She had been a pretty blonde before someone had caved in her face with something hard and heavy.

  He looked up at me. I could see his skull through his pale skin. “Did I—? Did I—?”

  “Black out? I guess so.” I leaned down, felt the woman’s throat, and wiped my hand on my pants. “She’s dead, okay. You want to tell me anything?”

  “I don’t remember. I don’t—I wouldn’t hurt Sharon.”

  I said nothing. He saw where I was looking and glanced down at the object in his hand. It was a stone carving of one of the Inca gods like you find in the better souvenir shops, plastered with blood. He dropped it as if it had suddenly sprung to life.

  “That’d do it,” I said, nodding. “You’d better get up. We’ll figure out something to tell the cops. They’re down on norteamericanos here, importing their troubles to peaceful Brazil.” I held out my hand.

  He stared at it for a moment, as a dog will. Then he grasped it.
He was almost upright when I stuck the little Czech automatic into his belly and pulled the trigger three times.

  The cabana had no telephone, so I walked down the beach and gave a dollar to one of the boys who sell Pizarro’s sunken gold to fetch an officer. Then I went back inside to wait.

  I hadn’t counted on the shock of his finding Sharon’s body triggering one of Hale’s blackouts, but it didn’t matter. Even if he never remembered being innocent of her murder, he wouldn’t forget the money. I’d spent most of the night looking for it after I’d killed her, and had only just gotten back to my cabana with it and undressed for bed when he banged on the door. It was a good set-up, considering how little time I’d had to rig it after I found out about Hale’s condition. The medical examiners in Rio are among the best in the world; once a thorough autopsy brought his tumor to light, I’d have no trouble convincing the authorities I’d shot him in self-defense when he attacked me after bludgeoning the girl to death in one of his blind rages.

  By the time they found out about the six hundred thousand, I’d be out of this country, with its unchanging sky and monotonous surf and too many thieves.

  Lock, Stock, and Casket

  When the commercial publications begged off, I placed this one with a dusty literary magazine, which is a sign of shabby honor in certain circles. I think what makes this kind of story work is the wisdom behind proving motivation in court: In order for the jury to convict the defendant, it must on some level understand the reason behind the crime, and agree with it.