At what turned out to be my last wrong turn I saw an old country store and gas station. At one time there had been dozens of stores like it around rural north Fulton County. Now, though, with all the expensive country club subdivisions and strip shopping centers, it looked like something out of a time warp. It was a crumbling old white-brick building with one of those faded DRINK COCA-COLA signs painted on the side. There was one rusting gas pump outside. The price for gas was 49 cents a gallon. I guess it hadn't pumped much unleaded supreme.
I pulled up, got out, and pushed open the screen door, admiring the warped metal Sunbeam Bread sign on the bottom. Inside the store it was dark and cool. But the shelves were more than half empty and some of them were being dismantled. It was lunchtime and I suddenly realized how hungry I was, so I decided to treat myself to a car picnic. I yanked open the lid of an old chest-type Coke cooler. But instead of finding icy bottles of sodas like I'd hoped, I was greeted by a chorus of chirps. There was a metal screen cage full of crickets sitting in the box. Alongside it were stacks of small plastic tubs. An earthy smell rose up. Night crawlers. If I'd only brought along a cane pole, I could have done a little fishing. I shut the lid, glanced around, and saw the real drink cooler, a modern glass-windowed affair. The majority of the drinks seemed to be malt liquor, beer, or wine coolers. But if I drank a beer in the middle of the day, in the suddenly intense spring heat, I'd end up napping instead of snooping. Regretfully, I settled on a tall bottle of NeHi Orange.
From a rack nearby I grabbed a bag of Ranch-style Doritos, and from the bread shelf I picked up the biggest, gooeyest-looking honey bun I could find. Given the look of the other merchandise in the store, there was no telling how old the thing was. I could have finished my shopping with a Slim Jim, but you have to practice self-control sometimes.
The cashier, the only other soul in the store, was a fat teenage boy perched on a stack of beer cases behind the cash register. A set of earphones rested in a nest of dirty red hair, and his head bobbed occasionally to some secret beat. Probably Twisted Sister.
I had to wave the honey bun under his nose to get his attention.
He put the magazine down reluctantly. "That it?"
"Yeah," I said, peeling some one-dollar bills out of my pants pockets. "Do you happen to know if a new subdivision called L'Arrondissement is around here?"
He sighed loudly and slipped off the earphones. "You talkin' to me?"
I repeated the question again.
"That's Mr. Beemish's project?"
"You know Bo Beemish?" I let the surprise show in my voice.
"He owns this store," the kid said. "Bought it off my old man a couple months ago. You come by here next week, this dump'll be gone. Nothing but a pile of boards and bricks and shit. Mr. Beemish says he's gonna put in a dry cleaner and a Seven-Eleven and a video rental store. Promised my old man he'd give me a job too."
"How nice," I murmured. The last country store in north Fulton County and Bo Beemish was going to bulldoze it. What a visionary.
"So how far away is the subdivision?" I asked. "Am I close?"
"You better not go messin' around over there," the kid warned, looking up at me. Some ripe-looking zits nested in the pale peach fuzz on his upper lip. "They got private security over there all the time. With guns. Those sum-bitches will run your ass off if they catch you messin' around."
I gave the kid what I hoped was a superior smile. "I'm a real estate broker. I've got a client who's interested in building a house there," I said sweetly. "I'm sure the security officers only bother underage hoodlums who go tearing around on dirt bikes, throwing beer cans right and left."
"I never seen no real estate lady in a pink van like that piece of shit you're drivin'," the kid said. "Real estate people come around here all the time, but they drive Caddies and Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. I'm tellin' you, lady. They'll run your ass off. See if they don't."
"My BMWs in the shop," I said through clenched teeth. "That van belongs to my cleaning lady."
I held my hand out for my change, but instead he let it fall onto the counter. "Sony." He smirked.
As I was pulling out of the gravel lot I noticed a small sign pointing down the narrow two-lane county road that ran beside the store. L'ARRONDISSEMENT, it said. I looked over at the doorway to the store. The kid was leaning against the doorjamb, watching me with undisguised curiosity. He saw me looking at him and casually flipped me a bird.
Disguised as a high-class real estate agent, I restrained myself from doing the same. "The little shit," I muttered. I drove a few miles down the road, following the same little signs. Here and there along the way I saw a crumbling rock chimney and an outcropping of bushes marking the foundation of an old home, long gone. In one old yard a flame-orange azalea bloomed, oblivious to the kudzu vines trying to strangle it out of existence. There were even a handful of little houses, wood-framed, mostly, with peeling paint and a battered car or two in the dirt-swept front yards. Blue jeans and underwear hung on a washline, signaling that there were still working folk living out here, fighting off the creeping prosperity that had taken over this part of the county.
Mostly, though, the houses were abandoned. Every quarter mile or so I saw signs. RIVERFRONT ACREAGE FOR SALE they said, and COMING SOON, RIVERWOOD ACRES, and things like that.
Finally, I spied a larger sign on the right-hand side of the road. A raw red gash showed where a new road had been cut back through the swath of greenery that lined both sides of the little road.
I slowed down. An ornate sign set in a massive gray river-rock wall announced in curving script that I had reached L'Arrondissement. An exclusive shopping and living community. Thirty-five fine estate homes starting at $800,000. WDB Enterprises, Developer.
At the entrance to the project, work had begun on what looked like a small stucco kiosk. The security shack, I guessed. Wire tornado fencing had been strung on metal poles along the road, probably to act as a temporary gate, until Beemish could build a six-foot-high wall to keep out the riffraff.
I pulled into the road. A marker showed that I was driving on Lilah Lane. How sweet. A little farther along I noticed signs tacked up on tall pine trees that lined the street. Each tree was wrapped with an orange ribbon. I guess that meant they wouldn't be cut down. Or would be. It was hard to tell which. POSTED: NO TRESPASSING, the signs read. PRIVATE DRIVE. NO TURNAROUND, NO EXIT, they announced.
The street was caked with mud and tire tracks. As I rolled slowly forward I saw up ahead where the clearing had started. Half a dozen pieces of heavy equipment were parked there. Two-story-tall pine trees and mounds of underbrush had been bulldozed aside and stacked in a pile. There was a small mobile home, which was obviously the construction trailer, and a couple of pickup trucks parked beside it, but I didn't see any human activity. It was twelve-thirty; I hoped all the construction workers were on their lunch break. My plan, such as it was, was to look around, to see what kind of "problems" Kristee Ewbanks might have been blackmailing Bo Beemish over. If stopped, I'd simply tell anybody who asked that I was a real estate broker scouting out potential homesites for a client.
I cruised slowly down the road, admiring the scenery. In a few places, the road broke where the developer obviously planned to put in lateral streets. Ancient-looking oak trees dotted the landscape, interspersed with an occasional dogwood, magnolia, or sweet gum. I even saw a couple of towering old pecan trees. God, this was a gorgeous spot. No wonder Bo Beemish had such big plans for it. Land with these kinds of hardwoods, level, with river frontage, had all but disappeared from this part of Atlanta.
The road curved back through the underbrush for maybe half a mile. Close to the side of the street, red clay showed where the vegetation had been scraped away. It looked like a scar. Finally, the street ended in a wide cul-de-sac. I pulled in, parked the van, and got out.
Lot clearing hadn't reached the back part of the property yet. I could hear blue jays and mockingbirds high up in the branches of the trees, and squirrels sc
ampered around in the mat of fallen leaves. I stood still for a minute and stretched. The sun shining down on my head felt good. Off in the distance I could hear a faint trickling noise.
I headed through the underbrush toward where the water seemed to be, carefully trying to step over rotted logs that might harbor snakes. I don't do reptiles. I was also looking out for poison ivy. That stuff tears me up.
A couple of hundred yards in, I could feel the air grow cooler and moister. The bigger trees dropped off to scrub, then to nothing but tall grass. After walking only a few feet, I could feel my sneakers squishing in wet mud. The land curved gently down toward the riverbank. Maybe five feet away, I could see the green-brown waters of the Chattahoochee River swirling past in a swath about forty feet wide.
I walked down the bank a short way to get a better look at the river frontage and was so busy admiring the view I almost stumbled over an outcropping of rock.
Looking down I saw I'd stumbled across the construction workers' dining room. Fire had blackened an area inside a ring of rocks. Beer cans, Gatorade bottles, fast-food wrappers, even an old cooler had been stacked in a garbage heap about three feet high. There were charred pieces of two-by-fours. Flies buzzed about. I wrinkled my nose in disgust. The workers had picked the prettiest part of the property for a trash dump.
Angrily, I kicked a heap of trash and cursed when my sneaker-clad toe struck something hard.
I looked down and kicked aside a half-burned clump of paper bags. I could see a smooth-worn gray stone poking out of the ground. I kicked at the trash some more, clearing away enough to see some kind of carving on the rock.
I knelt down and gingerly pushed aside some more trash, wishing for my rubber gloves that were back in the van with the rest of my cleaning gear. The rock—it looked like granite—had been partially buried. I dug away some of the damp dirt until I could see what looked like a carved lily flower. There were numbers too, something that looked like part of a date, maybe 1923, but it was hard to be sure because the rock had been broken and the numbers were worn nearly smooth.
I was so busy digging in the dirt I didn't even hear the crunch of leaves underfoot. Didn't hear the whir of a quiet motor.
What I did hear was a sudden loud pumping noise, followed by a huge boom. I even saw a little plume of sawdust and bark exploding from the trunk of a pine tree not five feet from where I stood.
After my feet touched the ground again, I whirled toward where the shot seemed to come from. A candy-apple-red golf cart was moving quickly along a path carved through the woods, a path I hadn't noticed before. There were two men in the cart. The driver wore a blue work shirt. The passenger didn't wear a shirt. He did have a shotgun, however. He was standing up in the cart, pointing it at me, grinning evilly.
Blind anger welled up from within me. "What the hell are you doing, you asshole?" I screamed. "You could have killed me!"
In answer, the man with the gun lifted it, aimed, and fired again. This time a Styrofoam Big Mac container at my feet exploded into about a million nonbiodegradable pieces.
I didn't wait for any further communication from the golf cart. I took off running, parallel to the river, where a screen of underbrush promised to give me a little cover and them a somewhat bumpy ride. Branches tore at my jeans, scratching my face and ripping at my arms. This time I wasn't watching for poison ivy or poison snakes. I glanced behind, to see if the cart was following me. It wasn't. The men had stopped at the trash dump and had gotten out to see what I was looking at.
I ran a short way up the river, then angled back through the woods toward where I hoped the cul-de-sac was. Through the trees I could see the pink paint of the van. I stopped and crouched behind a fallen oak tree to see if anyone was guarding it. There was no one around. I tried to catch my breath, but my chest felt like it would explode. My thighs were shaking uncontrollably. I thought I might pee in my pants, I was that scared.
I looked over my shoulder in the direction I'd come from. There was no whirring sound, no flash of red golf cart bearing two homicidal rednecks, which was enough to get me out from behind that oak tree and over the hundred yards between me and the van in less than twenty seconds.
With my right hand I turned the key in the ignition while my left hand was locking the driver's side door. As I was backing the van up, I heard that whirring noise again. In the rearview mirror I saw the golf cart emerge from the path that I'd overlooked before. When he was about sixty yards away, the guy with the shotgun raised himself to a standing position in the cart and pointed the gun at me again. I gunned the motor of the van, then heard it. He was screaming a rebel yell.
I didn't take the time to see what Johnny Reb would do next. I backed the van out, threw it in first, and spun out of there. The van lurched forward and, miraculously, didn't stall out. I heard the shotgun go off again, somewhere to my left this time.
The scenery was pretty much a blur on the way out. I did see a bunch of men standing around the heavy equipment, but I didn't stop to wave howdy.
In fact, I didn't slow down until I had to merge onto Georgia 400. It's stupid, I know, but I kept glancing in the rearview mirror the whole way home, half expecting to see a red golf cart tooling down the interstate. Every time I saw a glimpse of red, I urged the van a little faster. I did maybe 50 miles an hour the whole way home, a new land speed record for the Chevy. And I didn't slow down until I pulled into our driveway back in Candler Park.
17
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET, EMPTY. It was Edna's day to work late at the beauty shop. After I sucked down the last beer in the refrigerator, in one gulp, standing at the kitchen sink, I stopped being scared and got on with the business of being pissed off.
Jesus Christ, I'd nearly had my head shot off by those rednecks in the golf cart. And for what? Trespassing?
I toyed with the idea of calling Beemish and threatening to sue but quickly decided against it.
Why in hell had those morons shot at me? What was going on in that subdivision that was worth maiming or murdering over? I hadn't had enough time to see if Beemish had established a marijuana farm, and the guys who'd shot at me didn't look like illegal aliens, so I could rule out at least two kinds of criminal enterprise. The only thing I'd seen at L'Arrondissement was land. Beautiful land, yes, but Beemish had paid a lot of money for it and he obviously stood to make a lot more once the project was finished.
What had Kristee been blackmailing Beemish over? Had it been something so serious he'd been willing to kill her to keep it quiet? The only thing out of the ordinary I'd seen at L'Arrondissement was that trash heap. And as far as I knew, messiness hadn't yet been declared illegal in Georgia.
Instead of calling the Kensington Park cops to report a murder attempt, I called Bucky Deaver and got him to give me Eddie Shaloub's work number.
"Callahan," Shaloub greeted me. "I've been thinking about calling you for a week now."
I looked down at the goose bumps that still covered my arms. "A girl senses these things, Eddie."
"You ready to buy some beepers for that cleaning business of yours? I'll make you a deal you can't refuse."
Shaloub was always doing business. Always. Even when he was on the force he always had some minor scam going, selling life insurance policies, buying and selling run-down rental properties.
"You never stop, do you, Shaloub?" I said. "I don't need any beepers just yet. But I promise, when I'm ready, I'll call you. OK?"
Shaloub's nasty little chuckle was as oily as ever. "As I recall, Callahan, you usually do call when you're ready. And say, Callahan," he continued, "since you called, would you mind telling me what you were doing trespassing on private property out in Kensington Park earlier today?"
"You gonna have me arrested?"
"I'm not, but WDB Enterprises might."
"How'd you know why I was calling?"
"I didn't," Shaloub said. "One of their security people called our police department to report scaring off a trespasser suspected of trying to van
dalize some of their heavy equipment. They gave a description of a woman with dark curly hair and a pink Chevy van. The license plate was registered to an outfit called House Mouse. Sound familiar?"
"What?" I sputtered. "I never got near their equipment. And I vandalized nothing. You know me better than that. Did those fuckheads happen to report that one of them tried to blow my head off with a shotgun?"
"I take it they missed," he said calmly.
"Damn straight," I said. "This is rich, Shaloub. I call you up to complain about being shot at and you end up threatening to have me arrested. How'd you find out about this so fast, anyway?"
"Old habits die hard. I've got a police scanner on my desk. Anyway, I'm chairman of the public safety committee, so it's part of my job as city councilman."
"Since it's part of your job," I suggested, "why don't you have one of Kensington Park's finest go out to L'Arrondissement and charge the slob who shot at me with assault with a deadly weapon? He's easy to find. Look for a fat turd about six feet tall with long black hair in a ponytail. Last time I saw him he wasn't wearing a shirt and he was toting a twelve-gauge Remington pump action. I want his ass arrested."
"Just calm down, Garrity, OK? You were a cop once; you know how this works. You want this guy arrested, you come out here and swear out a warrant against him. But to be frank, I doubt Chief Norman is gonna arrest this guy. For God's sake, Callahan. You were on clearly posted private property. Witnesses saw you poking around out there. They've had several thousand dollars' worth of thefts and vandalism out there in the past two months. Day before yesterday, somebody poured sugar into the gas tank of their motor grader. Tires have been slashed, temporary power lines cut, and that construction trailer out there was broken into two weeks ago. Somebody trashed the place and stole an answering machine, a fax machine, and a typewriter. If one of our patrol officers had caught you out there, they would have arrested you on the spot. Count yourself lucky they only shot at you this time."
Every Crooked Nanny Page 11
