Phoenix Noir

by Patrick Millikin

  Touché. It occurred to O’Toole that “Walberto” was a name of Germanic origin, meaning “one who remains in power.” The coyote had the upper hand now, and O’Toole had to get it back. “I can market the relic,” O’Toole said. “I have a buyer. I told you that. In San Francisco. One hundred thousand dollars.”

  He half-turned to see if Walberto was now holding a weapon, but the coyote’s hands were empty, and he waved O’Toole back to the front. “One hundred thousand dollars,” said Walberto. “No, I think it’s worth more now. Here, see what you think. Don’t turn around again, just put your right hand out to the side, palm up.”

  O’Toole did so, and felt a hard scrap thrust into his grip. His pulse hammering, he brought it up before his eyes. A sliver of pine wood, seven inches long at least, calcified by age. He could see places where other slivers had been torn away, and he looked back through the centuries, thinking of the remnant being passed from hand to hand, hidden under cloaks, enclosed in velvet and leather cases, being spilled rudely on a carpet by burglars, slipped into pockets foul with tobacco, held reverently up to the light of forgotten dawns, always on the move, its destiny to wind up here, in his hand.

  Walberto’s voice was urgent. “Put your finger in the blood.”

  There was a crusty black splotch—not large—near one tip of the large splinter. O’Toole tried it with a thumb, and the surface broke and wept red. Hastily, he wiped his thumb on his robe, his heart beating faster.

  “The blood of Jorge Canto,” intoned Walberto, “shed by us for the forgiveness of sins. And, I think, for two hundred thousand dollars minimum.”

  O’Toole turned the remnant over to hide the red spot, and noted older, darker stains on the wood. He thought of Christ’s hands, torn by the nails, and the spear that had slashed into his side, bringing forth blood and water. Could the blood of Golgotha really have survived all these centuries, locked in the fibers of the wood? His faith urged him toward that conclusion, but Walberto had a different interpretation.

  “You’re beginning to see it now, aren’t you, Father? Plenty of dudes like Jorge have died for that relic. That’s what makes it valuable. The price went way up the second I slipped that knife through his ribs.”

  The coyote paused, and O’Toole could not bring himself to reply. He felt a crawling sensation between his shoulder blades, and envisioned Walberto’s knife blade, plunging again and again through skin, scraping bone, exploding blood vessels, releasing scarlet geysers of life-juice. Silence fell as they knelt there in the sweaty heat, with the shadows of the church smothering them. Then, somewhere outside the church, O’Toole heard a light scraping sound.

  “Shit!” whispered Walberto. “There’s somebody out there. Let’s take this into the sin-box. We don’t want to be seen together.”

  A happenstance visitor? O’Toole didn’t believe it. He hadn’t heard a vehicle engine since Walberto had pulled up, and even the sound of moving feet—some hiker extending his distance over desolate territory—would have reached them in the dead quiet within the church walls. Most likely it was a wild dog or an actual coyote, some beast that could have made the approach without attracting notice.

  “All right,” O’Toole whispered back. He rose quickly, his big legs twitching, and started for the priest’s side of the confessional.

  Walberto took his arm. “Let me go in that side,” the smuggler whispered, grinning. “I always wanted to try out that priest’s seat. Besides, maybe you have a sin to confess.”

  O’Toole felt tightness in his throat. His mind blanked. Dumbly, he nodded, thinking desperately about favorable possibilities. The pistol might not be easy to see. Out of caution, he had tilted a missal up against it when he’d placed it on the small shelf next to the priest’s seat.

  He made his way to the penitent’s door on the confessional and creaked it open. It stuck a bit. Things in the church had never worked exactly right for O’Toole. He wondered about that. On the other side, he could hear Walberto bumping around, then settling down. O’Toole knelt on the hard bench, his face inches from the mesh that covered the square hole between them.

  The coyote’s breath rippled the cloth. “Aren’t you going to say it, Father?”

  “Say what?”

  “What you’re supposed to say—Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  Despite his nervousness, O’Toole felt anger rising in his throat. “You’re not a priest.”

  The coyote was unfazed. “And are you a priest, Father? For sure? You sure do some slick things for a man of the cloth.”

  “A man has to live,” O’Toole replied.

  “Yes, that can be a problem.” Walberto seemed to be shifting around in the enclosed space. One of his elbows thumped the thin wall between them. “But once a priest, always a priest, even if you’re an asshole, right?”

  O’Toole thought about his sins. Miserably, he replied, “Yes.”

  “This is supposed to be a confession,” Walberto said, his voice now cheerful. “Have you been guilty of the eighth deadly sin, overconfidence? I think so. You thought you’d get this relic from me easy. But you won’t. The price goes up when somebody dies. And it would go up crazy for a priest.”

  O’Toole heard metal clanking on wood from the other side of the confessional. His mind raced. His fatness in the confined space locked him in, he’d never be able to shift and lunge through the door in time. He was like a doomed cow in a butcher’s chute, waiting for the electric knife to buzz and slash its carotid arteries away.

  “Look,” said Walberto teasingly, “there’s a gun in here.”

  O’Toole could see the round muzzle of the .357 poking at the mesh, could see Walberto mockingly pushing his own face into the cloth right next to it.

  “There’s a gun in here too,” O’Toole said, sweeping the tiny Beretta M21A from under his robes and firing twice. Blood bubbled on the screen as the .22-caliber long-rifle bullets punched into the coyote’s forehead. The hard chunks of meat that had been Walberto clanked and vibrated against the confessional. Then there was silence.

  O’Toole reholstered the pistol and put a hand to his chest. It took him some time to calm his pounding heart, some time to get his breath down into the range in which it no longer whistled and strained. He was sweating like a man in a steam bath. He tilted his head against the cool wood next to the penitent’s window, let his headache subside, and, eventually, composed himself.

  At last his thoughts turned to the relic and to spiritual duties. There was one more thing he had to do for Walberto.

  He crossed himself, compressed his hands, and leaned forward.

  “Oh Lord,” O’Toole prayed, “be merciful to him, a sinner.”

  DIRTY SCOTTSDALE

  BY DIANA GABALDON

  Desert Botanical Garden

  It was high noon, and 110°. The cops were in shirtsleeves, the homeowner was wearing plaid bermuda shorts and a wtf? expression. The body floating facedown in the swimming pool was wearing a navy-blue wool suit, which was odder than the veil of blood hanging like shark bait in the water.

  The girl by the pool was more appropriately dressed—if you could use that word to describe the triangles of turquoise fabric that covered her nominally private parts.

  “The poor dope,” I said, shaking my head. “He always wanted a pool. Well, in the end he got himself a pool—only the price turned out to be a little high.”

  The girl looked at me. She had a hot-pink towel clutched dramatically to her mouth, eyes wide above it. Turquoise eye shadow to match her suit, and a lot of waterproof mascara.

  “Tom Kolodzi,” I said, with a jerk of the head toward the uniformed cops. “I’m with the police.” You notice I didn’t say I was the police. “You know the guy in the pool?”

  Her eyes got wider, and she shook her head. I took out my notebook and flipped it open, turning to shield it from the cops.

  “Your name?”

  She blinked, and lowered the towel. Her mouth was blurred with red, and she
looked like a little kid who’d been eating a popsicle, breast implants notwithstanding.

  “Chloe Eastwood.”

  “Any relation to Clint?” I smiled, friendly.

  “Who?”

  I should have flipped a coin and said, Call it, friendo. Instead, I asked, “Do you live here?”

  She nodded like a bobble-head doll, her eyes going back to the body. “I just … I just came out to tan, and … there he was.”

  “You called it in?”

  She shook her head, blond ponytail swishing over baby-oiled shoulders.

  “I screamed and Cooney came running out, and the yard guys and everybody.” She waved vaguely toward the house where three nervous-looking Mexicans were clustered. A Mexican woman too, with a blond boy of five or six clutching her leg. “I guess Cooney called.”

  Her eyes went to the homeowner: Mr. Bermuda Shorts, shoulders hunched in aggression. One of the uniforms caught sight of me and opened his mouth to order me out. The two uniforms exchanged a quick look, though, then stared right through me before turning deliberately toward the pool.

  I relaxed a little. I’d been doing a ride-along—you always want to get acquainted with the cops in a new place—when the 410 call came through. They’d told me to stay in the car, of course, but didn’t lock me in. It could get up to 140 in a parked car, and they didn’t want to explain a dead reporter in the backseat. They didn’t want to explain a live reporter in their crime scene, either; if I kept my mouth shut, they’d pretend they had no idea how I got there, and leave it to homicide to throw me out.

  There was a sudden hum, and a whoosh made everybody jump. A timer had come on, and water was rushing down a pile of rocks at the end. It sounded like Niagara Falls, and Gonzales turned and started yelling at the homeowner, who looked confused and belligerent, like a bear in the underwear aisle at Macy’s.

  “Cooney doesn’t know how to work the pool stuff,” my new friend said, contemptuous. “My mom always has to do it.”

  I took out my cell phone and snapped as fast as I could while everyone’s attention was distracted. The blood in the water was beginning to eddy away from the floating body.

  I nodded to Chloe.

  “Be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I stepped behind a pair of palm trees, and hit 1 on my speed dial.

  “Paulie?” I said, low-voiced as I could over the artificial falls. “Where are you?” She was supposed to be at Scottsdale and Shea, shooting a traffic accident; if she was still there …

  “Kolodzi?” Her voice was outraged. “Are you calling me from the men’s room? That’s just gross!”

  “No. Get this—10236 North Forty-eighth Street. Body in the pool.” I saw the fresh-sawed stubs on the palm tree by my face and had a brain-wave. “There’s a ladder lying on the ground out front—” The Mexicans had been trimming the palm trees; I’d seen the dead palm fronds on the curb. “It’d be a killer shot from the roof.” And maybe the cops wouldn’t see her before she got it.

  The click in my ear coincided with silence; somebody’d turned off the falls. I pocketed the phone and rejoined the party.

  One cop was missing; so was the Mexican woman. The palm tree trimmers were edging slowly toward the side of the house, eyes focused on the cop talking to Cooney. The little blond boy had joined Chloe on the lounger—not willingly.

  “I wanna see!”

  “Knock it off, Tyrone! Mom’ll be here any minute! Get back here, I said! The cops are gonna put you in jail if you get near that pool!”

  “Aw, will not, fuckface!”

  “Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I said. I don’t have kids myself, but I have nieces and nephews. I learned the Voice of Doom from my siblings.

  Tyrone gave me a startled glance.

  “Siddown,” I said, in the same tone of voice.

  He did, muttering “Crap” under his breath.

  “See?” his sister hissed at him.

  Sirens were coming. I could hear the roar of a fire engine over the scream of an ambulance. 911 was taking no chances.

  A minute later, the pool gate clanged open and four EMTs charged in, intent on rescue. One grabbed a pool skimmer and began trying to snag the body with it.

  “Hey!” The cop grabbed his arm. “The guy’s dead, god-damnit! This is a murder scene!”

  “He’s not dead till a doctor says so,” a female EMT informed him.

  “Back off!” He’d wrestled the skimmer away from the EMT and stood with it braced like a quarterstaff, daring any of them to mess with his body. “He’s fuckin’ dead!”

  “He will be if you don’t let us get him out of there!”

  “What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. Here?” said a voice behind me. Whoever it was had a pretty good Voice of Doom too; it cut through the argument like a hot wire through ice cream.

  I turned to see a tall blond woman in a sun hat, Hawaiian shirt flapping open over a white bikini. Chloe and Tyrone’s mother; the breast implants must be hereditary.

  “Cooney!” she barked. “What are you doing? What’s—” She caught sight of the guy in the pool and stopped dead, her mouth hanging open far enough for me to see that one of her molars was gold.

  Cooney came trundling over, sweating and apologetic.

  “It’s okay, Pammy—”

  “Don’t call me Pammy! Who are you?” she demanded, swiveling a laser eye on me. “Are you in charge here? Who’s that in my swimming pool?”

  “Tom Kolodzi, ma’am,” I said, offering her a hand. “Do you know the man in the pool?”

  “Of course not!” she snapped, taking my hand by reflex. Hers was cold and damp and covered by a latex glove. She let go fast, peeling the glove off with a snap. “Sorry. I was drowning squirrels in the garage.”

  “Squirrels?”

  “Ground squirrels,” she said through her teeth. “They eat the goddamn plantings. Are they going to get that—him—out of the pool?” Her eyes kept sliding toward the water, where the body had resumed its dead man’s float. Another siren—police, this time.

  Slamming car doors and a radio crackle, and the brass was with us. The homicide lieutenant didn’t glance at me, and made short work of the EMTs, who retreated, muttering, under the edge of the patio roof, from which misters had begun to spray. The Mexican tree trimmers had evaporated during the cops’ confrontation with the EMTs. The scene-of-crime people arrived on homicide’s heels, and a police photographer was taking shots of everything in sight, including me and the squirrel-killer. I wanted to look up at the roof to see if Paulie had made it, but didn’t want to draw attention to her if she had.

  The dead guy beached, flotsam in a navy-blue wool suit. Everybody leaned forward to look at his face—not least, Pammy.

  I was looking at her, and saw the blood leave her face and her mist-on tan go yellow. Saw her glance, laser-sharp, at Chloe. Chloe’s mouth fell open, and her mother grabbed her shoulder, fingers digging in, before she could squeak.

  “Take your brother in the house, darling,” Pammy said, in a pleasant mommy voice. “He doesn’t need to see this, and neither do you.” Chloe nodded like a robot, and took Tyrone’s hand. He didn’t resist; he’d seen the dead guy’s face too, and was the color of skim milk.

  Nobody looks good soaking wet and dead, but this guy probably wasn’t a GQ model on his best day. Maybe fifty, with a good-sized gut, long strands of graying hair on a balding head. Weak chin, and a nose that was trying to make up for it.

  There was a little black hole in his shirt front. The shirt was white, pasted to his body; I could see the curly black hairs on his chest through the cloth. I looked away in time to see Cooney, who was talking to one of the plainclothes people, glance in my direction and shake his head with a puzzled frown. Time to go.

  The dead guy’s chest filled the screen of Paulie’s Mac. The black eye of the bullet hole sat in a vortex of water-swirled chest hair. She zoomed in so all you saw was the hole, then pressed something and the picture went from black-and-w
hite to full color.

  “Guh!” said MaryAnne, recoiling.

  “Isn’t that cool?” Paulie asked me, ignoring the editor. “See the shades of blue all around the hole?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Really cool.” It was, but my stomach agreed with MaryAnne, who had clamped a hand to her mouth.

  “We can’t run that!” she said, removing the hand and then putting it right back.

  “I know, I know,” Paulie said impatiently. “Don’t worry, I got plenty more. Thanks for the tip, Kolodzi,” she said, giving me an eye. “I almost died of heatstroke on that roof, but it was worth it.”

  She looked like she’d been boiled alive, even after an hour in the chill of the newsroom, but she’d used her time well.

  There were some prize-winning shots of the body in the pool, as well as close-ups of Chloe, Cooney, Pam—several focused on her chest—and a heartbreaker of Tyrone, looking small and stricken and not saying “Crap.” Still better, Paulie’d heard everything said on the pool deck.

  “Nobody knew the dead guy—or that’s what they said. But look at this.” She tapped a key and a soggy white rectangle popped onto the screen. A zoom in and I could see it was a wad of stuck-together business cards.

  Howarth ap Gruffydd, PhD, one read. Director, Llangeggel-lyn Botanical Institute.

  “Damn,” said MaryAnne. “What the heck is a Welsh botanist doing dead in Cooney Pratt’s swimming pool?”

  “Maybe the gardener did it,” Paulie speculated. “He’s gone.”

  “What, one of the guys with the ladder?” I asked.

  She shook her head, cheeks sucked in to get the last dregs of Mr. Pibb through her straw.

  “Nope, those guys were door-to-door palm tree trimmers. You know—cash only, and probably illegal.” A good bet, given the way they’d faded at the sight of the police. “There’s a regular yard guy, though; a guy named John Jaramillo. He should have been there today. But he wasn’t.” She popped the lid off her cup and tilted it up, sloshing ice.

  “The cops asked for his phone and address, of course,” I suggested. She gave me a smug look and held out her arm. She’d scribbled the numbers with what looked like eyeliner.