by J. A. Kerley
“Carson Ryder.”
“Hello, brother. Can you believe those stupid fucking attendants lost another cell phone? I’ve been hiding this one. They’re so small all it takes is some plastic wrap and a little bit of “
“I’ll call you back, Jeremy. I got an emergency here “
“NO, YOU DO NOT! Every time I call you try to HANG UP ON ME!”
“I’m not kidding, Jeremy. A friend’s in trouble.”
“Oh?” His voice dropped to a hiss. “Is it a womb-man?”
“What’s it matter?”
“She’ll keep. They’re SURVIVORS, Carson. She’ll be here long after the cockroaches have gone belly-up. Just don’t ask them for help and you’ll be fine.”
“I’m hanging up now, Jeremy.” I started to put the phone down.
“NELSON AND DES CHAMPS CARSON!” He shrieked. “WHERE’S THE PASSION, BROTHER?”
I lifted the phone back to my ear.
“Hi, Carson, welcome back. I read the papers. They were covering the headless twins until the preacher’s daughter’s soap opera took center stage. All I gleaned was the heads had been severed. No mention of gunshots to the body meat, no axes, no thumpity-thump of the ball bat. Was it nice and clean, brother?”
“Dammit, why have you fixated on these cases, Jer “
“FIXATED, HE SAYS? I’m not FIXATED, brother. I’m not FACT SATED, either, since you won’t TELL ME ANYTHING!” He adopted a matter-of-fact tone, a college lecturer. “What happens when you tell me things, dear brother, is that it allows me to travel from my current confines, vicariously, of course, seeing the pathways of the world through your brown eyes. It’s nice to be out and about again, just like the old Joel Adrian days. And I thought I might again be helpful with some map reading. Was I not helpful in the past, brother? I’ll take your silence as an affirmative.” He shifted to the quivering voice of an old woman. “Tell a weary old traveler about the bodies, Carson. Pretty please?”
I took a deep breath and looked at my watch. One minute, that’s what I’d give him. I said, “There was no … expression in the killings….”
“Ah, lad, you’re an amazin’ fella you are. But it’s not expression. It’s passion. BLOOD! FEAR! SEX! FIRE! There MUST be passion, Carson. Bites. Or cuts. Or leetle-teensy pieces chopped out and taken away to dry. SOUVENIRS! Were words cut into the body? Messages? Was a finger missing? A dick tip? Smoke signals squirting from torn assholes?
WHERE’S THE PASSION, CARSON? Perfect hate or perfect love, perfect anger or perfect joy. Either or both, but NO MIDDLE DISTANCE!”
I watched the second hand arc around again. “We were thinking the express the passion might have been demonstrated elsewhere. On the heads.”
“Ahahaha,” Jeremy said. “Swr la tete. The ol’ cabeza. Take the canvas, leave the easel.”
“There were some attempts at communication, seeming non sequiturs.”
“Oh, ho in dribs and drabs my brother tells his tale. Words?”
In the distance I heard a siren. Ambulance. Pictures of Ava drunkenly walking down the middle of the street invaded my mind. “Yes, dammit, words on the body. I have to go, Jeremy.”
“Tell me the words, Carson. QUICKLY!”
I recited them and he started laughing. “Sounds to me like our boyo isn’t finished with his head-challenged friends. I’ll bet he wants more from them, brother. Promise you’ll come see me. Promise, promise, promise.”
“I promise. Soon.”
“We’ll discuss the words. Already they’re making me tingle. Promise again.”
“I promise?
“Don’t fib to me, Carson. I know phones: the tongue gets in front of the mouthpiece and just lies there.”
“I said I’d come see you, Jeremy. I goddamn well meant it!”
“Ahh,” he cooed. “A spike of emotion. Yes. I believe I’ll see you. Almost on the anniversary of our last little escapade. You’ll have to talk to Madamoiselle Prussy. Tell her to reserve you lots and lots of time alone with your brother.” He cupped his hand over the phone. “Oh, this is so exciting, Mama, our boy’s coming ho “
I hung up and almost bolted out the door but stopped. First dictate of fishing: Fish where the fish are. Second dictate: If you don’t know where the fish are, get a guide.
I called Bear again.
Ava stumbling across Bienville Boulevard, a car full of partying teens racing down the street, distracted …
“Yo, Cars, what can I do for you, brother? How’s that problem with “
“She rabbi ted before I got home, Bear. Probably not long ago. What kind of place would she look for to go drinking? She’s white collar professional … “
“The first place she finds. She’s not looking for conversation among her social equals, Carson, she’s looking to stop the pain. She know the neighborhood?” No.
Ava taking a drunken walk on the beach, deciding to swim, a rip current sucking her far past the breakers …
“Did she pass any bars or package shops on her way in last night?”
“A couple. But she was sozzled.”
“Was she conscious? Able to make some conversation?”
“Yes.”
“Alkys’ eyes pick up drinking holes like owls scope out mice. She’ll have crawled to one if she had to. She gets a couple drinks in her she’ll relax and maybe look for ambience.”
“Thanks, Bear.”
“Like I said, I got a chair for your friend over here, Cars. It’s in a real safe place.”
“Here’s hoping, Bear. Later.”
I started out the door and remembered her clothes. They were in my dryer. What was she wearing?
Like every nautically themed bar from Boston to Boise, the Wharf Bar & Grille had nets strung from the ceiling, life rings on the walls, and false pilings lashed with sisal. The wait staff wore pirate hats. Owner and barkeep Solly Vincenza smiled and ambled over.
“I’m looking for a woman, Sol. Brown hair, slender, maybe five seven “
“Wearing a big-ass T-shirt saying “Laissez les bons temps router’ and probably nothing on under it? And a ball cap says Orvis?”
My shirt. My hat. “That’s my girl.”
Solly wagged his Etruscan head. “Came in an hour ago, said, “Double vodka and grapefruit juice.” She grabbed it with both hands, banged it down in about five seconds, and called for another. That’s when I saw her eyes, them bad, haunted ones. I said, “That’s the last one, lady, I think you’d be better off at home.” She called me a name or two, tossed some bucks on the bar, and rubber-legged out. Having some problems, Cars?”
“Not a night I’m gonna frame, Sol,” I said. “Where’d she go?”
The sad head again. “Last I saw her she was heading down toward the inlet past the marina.”
The closest bar to the inlet was a dive frequented by blue-collar locals, service people, charter-boat crewmen, and the like. It reminded me of the beery, atmosphere-deficient places my snitches preferred. Inside it was chilled to the point of condensing breath without freezing out the stench of stale beer and vomit. The barkeep was a heavyset guy with hooded eyes, razor burn, and a blue chain tattooed around his neck. If he’d been a bulldog, I’d have named him Spike. Spike was counting cash into the register and talking to the only patrons, three roofers, judging by the tar on their clothes and shoes.
“I’m looking for a woman ” I called over the jukebox spew of eighties heavy metal, theme music for the lobotomized.
“Ain’t we all, sport,” Spike interrupted.
I smiled. “She’s five seven or so, slender, brown hair, T-shirt …”
“Like a virgin,” one of the roofers sang as his buddies hooted. The place was a regular comedy club.
“It’s important,” I said. “She might be in trouble.”
“If you’re her boyfriend, sport, I’d say she is,” Spike said.
It takes me a while to catch on, but I do. Since I’d started my day with Clair, I’d dressed up, tie and light suit. I’d
sparked a touch of class consciousness with the mokes in the bar. You don’t often see it on an island catering to the wealthy, but when it breaks through, it can be ugly. You can fight it or roll with it and I figured rolling was faster. I pulled out my wallet and flipped a fifty on the bar. I put my finger on the bill.
I smiled self-consciously. “Aw, c’mon, guys. This is important. You know how it is, we had a little argument and if you can lead me in the right direction I’ll pick up the drinks tonight.”
Suddenly, they had a choice: continue the taunts and lose the fifty, or get skunk drunk on found money. Spike eye’d that money hard, since it would all end up in his till.
He said, “She had a few, then took off. Feeling damn feisty too.”
“Which way’d she go?”
“Went off with the Gast brothers. They got a boat down on the “
“I know where it is,” I said, heading for the door as the roofers started calling out their drink orders. I heard Spike’s happy voice as the door slammed shut. “You don’t want to mess with them brothers, sport. They’ll rip your face off and shit in it.”
For two hundred bucks and up depending on the season, you can get a private or semiprivate fishing charter for a half day. Your money buys a competent captain who knows tides and currents and where the fish are running. Forty to sixty bucks buys you space on a “party boat,” standing shoulder to shoulder with a hundred others and crossing lines for four hours. Twenty percent of the customers will be bee red up and get violently seasick. They’ll be the ones standing next to you.
The Gast brothers ran the Drunken Sailor, a slum with scuppers and the ugliest reputation of all the party boats on the island. Tourists didn’t know this, so the Gasts scratched a living out of puttering a few miles out and handing customers a fishing rig guaranteed to jam, backlash, or flat-out disintegrate. If a mark wanted to keep his catch, the Gasts charged a usurious fee to toss a couple of ice cubes over it, and a buck for a plastic bag to put it in. The Coast Guard was always hauling the Gast brothers’ boat back to the dock and I figured they planned it that way to save on fuel. No one sailed the Drunken Sailor twice.
The Gasts were even dirtier and uglier than their boat, white trash on water, as amoral as sharks. They lived in a cinder-block sweat haven on the mainland and only crossed to Dauphin to run their rat ass enterprise.
The Drunken Sailor bobbed against pilings. Shoreside was a small picnic area with figures moving in the semidark, lit by a sputtering yellow light on a phone pole. The air was thick with the smell of rotting fish. I cut the headlamps and parked on the crumbled macadam and jogged the hundred feet to the picnic area. Ava was sitting on a picnic table and sucking from a quart of Dark Eyes. My shirt wasn’t doing a good job covering her. Johnny Lee Gast, about two hundred twenty pounds of tall white trash, had a grubby paw on Ava’s thigh. Earl, a loudmouthed runt, was leaning against her, laughing and sucking a beer so loudly it sounded like he was gargling.
“All right, party’s over,” I said, coming into the light.
Ava turned to me with a cockeyed grin. “Carshon! Guess what? Jimmy and Lee are gonna take me on a boat ride. C’mon ‘long.” She waved the bottle like ringing a bell and took a gurgling swallow.
“Come on, Ava, we’re heading back,” I said easily, knowing it wasn’t going to be easy at all. I knew how the Gasts fought. Little Earl was the bait and Johnny Lee the trap. I also knew that Johnny Lee didn’t know when to stop hitting, and he’d done three years on a manslaughter conviction to prove it.
“Ah, c’mon, Carshon. Have a li’l drinkie.”
“Private party, Ryder,” Johnny Lee said.
“Let’s go, Ava.”
“I said private party, boy,” Johnny Lee growled from somewhere around his groin. “Move on.”
Earl had a whiney singsong voice straight from the playground. “What you gonna do, Ryder? Maybe you’re a dee-tective in Mobile, but here you ain’t shit. My brother says git, you better git, bitch.”
“You guys be nice,” Ava said and followed it with a burp. She giggled. “S’cuze me.”
There are important lessons learned as a street cop. One is that street fights have no rules; the trick is to take out the other guy before he can hurt you. If you prefer not shooting anyone, one of the best assets is the nightstick. I’d been taught how to use it, legally and otherwise, by two wood-slamming pros, one being an Okinawa-te expert in the shore patrol, the other my ice-breaking bud, Akini. He’d taken the Koga method of baton usage and added a good deal more kendo. I always kept a short, straight stick in the truck as a fish billy. It was currently jammed down the back of my pants with my shirttail over it.
“Come on Ava,” I said, “I’ll mix you a drink back at the house.”
Her eyes lit up. “Promise?”
“Cross my heart.”
Ava wobbled off the tabletop. Earl grabbed her, a hand cupping her breast. She was more concerned with checking the level in the bottle.
“Good-bye, Ryder,” Johnny Lee said. “Ain’t saying it again.”
Ava chirped, “I think I’ll go with Carshon. Thanks, guys,” She tried to step away from Earl. He grabbed her wrist. “You got shit in your ears? Is that why you ain’t listening, Ryder?”
Johnny Lee was slipping almost imperceptibly to my side. Earl pulled Ava to him and cooed at me over her shoulder. “Hey, Ryder, hey, Ryder. Missy here says she’s a doctor. You play doctor with her, Ryder? Hey, Ryder, look at me. I asked do you like to play doctor with little missy here? Give her a checkup?”
“Stop spitting in my ear,” Ava whined at Earl, trying to push away from him. “An’ get your hand off my boob.”
“Let her go, Earl,” I said, reaching for the stick.
“Fuck you,” Earl spat, shoving Ava toward me.
Johnny Lee slammed behind my legs like a wheelbarrow full of bricks. Ava spun away as I hit the ground. My chin smacked my shoulder and blue sparks exploded behind my eyes. Earl scuffed a hard kick off my back as I rolled away. Johnny Lee came at me and I cracked the stick across his shins. He howled and jumped back. The lights of the marina swooped and whirled as I rolled to the edge of the oily water. Somewhere in there I dropped the stick. Johnny Lee thumped a kick off my hip and I heard a yell, mine. I scrabbled in the dark for the stick when Johnny Lee slammed a kick off my bicep. If it had hit my face I’d been finished.
I grunted and rolled and the stick prodded my back as I went over it. I got a finger through the handle loop as Johnny Lee dropped on me and snaked a ham-thick arm around my neck. He pushed my face into the sand. The world started to blur. I tasted blood and heard the sparkling hiss of approaching unconsciousness. I heard Earl laugh, about a hundred miles away. I pushed up on my elbows and got my face slammed right back in the sand. My head whirling toward black. I gripped the stick in both hands and speared it over my shoulder with the last of my breath.
A howl nearly blew out my eardrum and I felt Johnny Lee’s arm pull away. I stumbled to my feet, fell, stumbled up again, sucking air, waiting for the world to stop spinning. Johnny Lee was squirming like a cut worm, hands over his eye, screaming he was blind. Figuring he needed something to take his mind off his eye, I bounced the stick off his shins and shoulders, sharing my thoughts about men who preyed on intoxicated women. Earl was a hundred feet gone and gaining speed. When my arm got tired of hammering Johnny Lee, I let him crawl off, leaving a snail trail of stink and body fluids.
Ava was passed out by the picnic table. I eased her over my shoulder and limped to the truck. “Ava, this would be damned funny if it wasn’t damned serious,” I lectured. She vomited down my back by way of response.
CHAPTER 18
Until I was introduced to Bear’s shuddering treks back from a hinge, I’d had no idea of the snake-venom toxicity of large amounts of ethanol. At 6:00 a.m. I came in from breakfast on the deck, stacked my dishes in the sink, and heard low moans from Ava’s bed. She had spun herself into a tangle of blankets and was shaking uncontrollably, fist
s knotted beneath her chin. The shaking hit in spasms; attack, relent, attack. Bear described this phase as being eaten by buzz saws I sat by her head and slipped wisps of hair from her eyes. She pulled the covers tighter. Her lips were parchment and I brought her a large glass of apple juice and held her head up to suck at the straw. She fell back, an arm thrown over her forehead.
“What happened last night?” she whispered, hiding under her arm.
“You took a walk. Thankfully, I’d pinned a note to your collar with my address on it.”
She saw the scrapes on my face and closed her eyes. “Do you have anything to drink?”
I tapped the cup beside her. “Apple juice. Soda water. Gatorade. Tea. Coffee.”
“Something stronger. Just a little bit. I hurt so bad. I really need a drink, Carson. God, I swear I do, just one. It’ll help me make it to work.”
“You’re not going to work.”
“I’ll lose my job. I’ve got to get home, clean up, and head in.” She pushed herself up on an arm and her eyes floated with vertigo. I pulled the wastebasket over and she emptied her stomach into it. She fell back, eyes red and wet, sweat beading her forehead.
“One drink, that’s all. I need it. I’ll lose my job, Carson.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “You’re not expected at work today, Ava. I told Clair about your problem. It’s all ri “
“Oh, Jesus, no … you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”
“If you can stay sober she’ll “
“Why did you do that to me? Oh God, oh fuck, oh God…”
I tried to explain but she recoiled at my words and spun deeper into the covers. Time was a failing commodity; Monday was five days away and if Ava didn’t get more help than I could give, she’d never make it. I went to the kitchen, called Bear, made plans, and returned to the bedroom. I figured there were two ways I could push her toward a meeting with Bear: Calm and reasonable and reassuring, easily the safest. Or I could go in swinging, using sarcasm, insult, even ridicule. If I’d thought she was weak in spirit, corroded in her underpinnings, it could only be the former. I made my choice as I entered the bedroom. Her red eyes blazed through pain as she wrestled free of the bedclothes. Her hair looked styled by a tornado.
