An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  The maps, the cocaine, and the guns were all in a window seat in what must have been Redden’s bedroom. But the compartment was architecturally disguised to look as though it was part of a cantilevered bay window rather than what it was, a compartment large enough for two men to crawl into.

  There was about half a kilo of recreational cocaine stored in a clear plastic container, three Uzi’s, a Sig-Sauer like Graver’s, a couple of Smith & Wesson M13’s, and a Colt Delta. Ordnance for each was stacked neatly in separate wooden crates with the tops off. There was a stack of hard-core porn films as Alice had said—and there was a satchel.

  Graver picked up the satchel and opened the leather straps. Folded in neat, nine-by-twelve squares were flight maps. There was a red, rubber-stamped rectangle on the front with a place for a date. The date, written in ballpoint pen, was the next day.

  Chapter 69

  Connie’s condominium was on a short, quiet street not far from Greenway Plaza, one of the city’s eight “business centers,” clusters of glass and steel architecture that punched up out of the heavily forested landscape that comprised the seven thousand five hundred square miles of metropolitan Houston.

  It was not a large complex, only five units arranged around a regular pentagonal courtyard enclosed by high, rusty brick walls covered in Virginia creeper and English ivy, a barrier from the noise of the streets. There was only a single entrance from the apex of the pentagon, through a single-lane drive that circled a central garden plot of decorative plantings at the hub of which bloomed an enormous mimosa with shimmering pink blossoms. Each residence had a garage that was entered off the circular drive, though each garage was situated so that its entrance was not visible from the circular drive itself.

  In many ways it was a good location to stake out. One entrance from the front. None from the back. But on the other hand it was a hell of a challenge because the architect had gone to a lot of trouble to guard the entrance of each building from its neighbors, privacy being a highly touted “amenity” of this particular complex. Access from the garage to the front door was from inside the garage so that once you entered and lowered the garage door behind you by remote control you were secure. The public entrance to the front door was through a walled courtyard with a wrought-iron gate that had an electronic lock that could be unlocked only with the resident’s key or from inside the residence.

  The problem was positioning. There could be no surveillance from a car. They needed access to one of the other condos, preferably an adjacent one. Using Arnette’s computerized crisscross directory, Dani, with Arnette looking over her shoulder, called each of the adjacent units. The first one answered and Dani asked for a fictitious name and then apologized for the wrong number. The second one had a recording saying they couldn’t come to the telephone right now, leave a message. Dani tapped into the computer for the resident’s occupation. Lawrence Micheson, sales representative for Tectronics Aluminum Fabrications. She called the employer and asked to speak to Mr. Micheson. She was transferred to his secretary who said he was in Phoenix on business and wouldn’t be back until Saturday, could she take a message. No, thank you. Dani tapped into one of the credit bureaus and learned that Mr. Micheson was not married. Odds were: the place was empty.

  It was decided that Remberto would go in. Murray would stay outside the complex on a side street that had a clear view of the entrance and let him know when someone was approaching the entrance gates.

  The afternoon was still and sweltering, and by the time Remberto walked inside the complex his shirt was beginning to stick to him. That was the thing about Houston, moving here was like having never left Bolivia. The heat and humidity was just like working the Beni River jungles. But of course there had never been air conditioners in the valley of the Beni River. Remberto loved refrigerated air. It made him smile.

  While Remberto and Murray were crossing the city, Dani had gone ahead and called the other two condos in the complex. The residents were not home at either of them. So of the five residences, the only ones that were occupied were Connie’s, where Faeber was waiting, and the one on the other side, the one immediately to the right as you entered the compound. Knowing this, Remberto did not have to worry about someone seeing him from behind or across the way. There had not been enough time to determine if there was an alarm system, and even if they had known that there was one, there had not been enough time to bring the electronic equipment to manipulate it or to contact their stringer at whichever security company had installed the system.

  So, it was back to the jungle. Remberto was going to have to find a place outside in Micheson’s courtyard where he could watch Connie’s front door without Faeber being able to see him from inside the condo. It was just going to be a matter of scouting it out to see what vantage point best served the purpose.

  Locating the right vantage point turned out to be easier than he had expected, though using it was going to be a tedious proposition. The brick wall separating Connie’s front courtyard from Micheson’s was ten inches wide. The design for the brick of which it was made called for a random placement of bricks to stick out several inches from the face of the wall creating a relatively accessible means of ascent The garages of the two condos backed up to each other having a common wall while the wall of the garages facing the entrances formed the front wall of the courtyard. Just inside Connie’s entrance court, in the corner created by the garage wall and the wall dividing the two properties, grew a healthy and shaggy Mexican fan palm, its large and verdant fronds just high enough to reach over the top of the wall.

  Remberto used the jutting bricks to climb the wall and found a place to sit atop the wall leaning his back against the garage wall and under its eave. The fronds of the fan palm completely obscured him from the courtyard and from the windows on the front of Connie’s condo. He called Murray.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m in place, on top of the wall in her front courtyard.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah, really. Listen, it’s quiet here. If someone’s coming just buzz me twice.”

  “Will do.”

  Remberto settled in to wait He was fully aware that he might be there for hours, in fact, he expected to be. He also expected to be uncomfortable. And he was. Both courtyards were lush with vegetation which meant the humidity there was at the top end of the scale; and he felt every percentage point. The sun was just a little past meridian which meant the eave of the garage provided a ribbon of shade for the back of his head, but the ribbon was shrinking by the minute. Pretty soon he would be in full sun for an hour or so until the fan palm began to block it The steam rose out of the courtyards, and colonies of gnats moved in small congregations like clouds from palms to oleanders to azaleas to plumerias and eventually to Remberto whose sweat-drenched clothes attracted them like bees to nectar. That was okay. Remberto had lived with gnats before. Sweat poured from his hairline and ran down the back of his neck, behind his ears, down his forehead and into his eyes. That was okay. He had lived with sweat before.

  But the brick wall was something else. Remberto’s butt was wider than ten inches, and after an hour he thought his spine was going to lock up on him. After an hour and a half he was beginning to get worried about what he was going to do. This was not something he thought he could endure for five or six hours. Instead of keeping his legs and feet together, pulled up in front of him, he shifted and dropped one on either side of the wall. That was a great relief—for about eight minutes—then the ridges of the bricks began to cut into his inner thighs, and he felt like his tailbone had no flesh at all between it and the bricks.

  Then the handset buzzed twice.

  Remberto froze and listened carefully. The signal meant only that a car was entering the compound. It could go to any residence, and he strained to try to determine which. Within a minute he heard the soft wheezing of an idling car pull into the concrete drive in front of Micheson’s garage to his left It idled for a moment and then stopped.

  There wa
s a brief wait before he heard the car door open. Girlfriend? Cleaning woman? Micheson sneaking back into town early without telling his employer? He knew Murray had been watching the car since it entered and would be observing where it finally stopped, and that he already would have called in the license plate for verification.

  Remberto was not so well hidden from Micheson’s side of the courtyard. In fact he was practically in plain view. His heart raced as his mind rushed past his few options, and then suddenly he heard the car door close… softly… the single click of a door gently pushed to, just enough to keep it from swinging open, though not fully shut He froze. That was not the proper sound.

  He heard footsteps leaving the concrete drive, but they faded away rather than growing louder as they should have if the person was approaching Micheson’s gate. Then he heard them getting louder again—but they were at Connie’s gate. Just as they stopped he realized they were a woman’s footsteps, a woman wearing heels.

  She had a key to the gate and opened it. Connie? Rayner Faeber deciding to try to reason with her husband? But Graver had told Arnette that the two women had been warned to stay away. Had one of them simply ignored his instructions?

  Remberto’s change of position had been a mistake. He could feel the nerves in his groins tingling which meant his inner thigh muscles were being pinched by the ridges in the bricks. But he couldn’t move. Not now.

  The woman came into view: early forties, roan hair, a little chunky, but stylishly dressed in a business suit Attractive. She reminded Remberto of a realtor who might deal in the tonier parts of the city. There was something business-like and practical about her—maybe the way she handled her shoulder bag, sure of herself—expeditious in her manner.

  She walked straight to the front door without looking to the left or the right and again used a key to let herself into the condo. And though she did this without hesitation, she also did it carefully, making no noise. As soon as she closed the door Remberto pressed the handset.

  “Murray! Murray, what’s the deal here? Who is this?”

  When Murray spoke Remberto flinched because the voice came from back to his left side, through Micheson’s wrought-iron gate.

  “Berto!” Murray was panting heavily, his muscled arms bared by the short sleeves of his T-shirt holding onto the gate as he pressed his forehead to the bars in an effort to see around the corner of the garage to Remberto. “The plates are stolen!”

  Remberto swung his left leg over the wall. There wasn’t enough room to jump down behind the palm—he had to remain hidden until he got to the ground—so he turned around facing the wall and lowered himself by his arms onto the ground in the tiny space between the trunk of the palm and the walls of the corner. Then he moved quickly, if stiffly, along the wall and came out at the gate.

  Murray was already there having run back around the garage, and handed his Colt through the gate to Remberto as he reached up, grabbed the top of the front wall and pulled himself up and over, dropping into the courtyard with Remberto.

  “What’s going on? What’s the story here?” Remberto asked, moving his weight from leg to leg to massage out the tingling.

  “Shit, we don’t know. Computers say the plates are stolen, that’s all we know.”

  Remberto was already moving to the front door, acting more on instinct now than a progression of reason. As he guessed, she had left the door unlocked, a bad sign, and he pushed it open as he pulled his own gun from his waistband.

  Immediately inside there was a small foyer and a living room to their right and straight ahead stairs ascending to the second floor, turning halfway up and wrapping around over the entrance to the living room. They stood a moment and listened. Voices, distant and almost inaudible, came from upstairs. Luckily the stairs were carpeted, and they started up, Remberto first.

  At the head of the stairs the landing went in both directions, so they had to stop and listen again. The voices were louder, from the left. Together they advanced down the narrow hall, past an open doorway to a darkened bedroom on the left, an open door to a darkened bathroom to the right, the voices coming from another room straight ahead. The woman’s voice grew louder as she stepped to the door of the room, almost in the doorway, her muted shadow from the oblique light of the sunlit room falling on the opened door. She must have been inches from being visible to them. Remberto ducked into the bedroom; Murray disappeared into the bath on the opposite side of the hall.

  “The sooner the better,” she said. “I’ll do it if you want. It’s what I came for.”

  “Jesus,” the man sobbed. “No… no. Just… just step outside… just… downstairs.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m going.” She stepped into the doorway and out of the room into the hall. Her left hand rested on a shoulder bag hanging from her left shoulder, and her right hand hung straight down at her side, holding a handgun with a silencer. She took several steps but then stopped, turned, stepped back to the door and raised her gun straight out level with her shoulder.

  In that instant both Remberto and Murray burst out into the hall and yelled at her in the same instant that the explosion of a single gunshot reverberated from inside the room. Wheeling around smoothly, her arm never dropping from its leveled position, her silencer coughed one, two, three times, ripping into the door facings on either side of the hall as Remberto and Murray fell back into the rooms. They looked across the hall at each other and waited—the advantage was theirs.

  Silence.

  Murray turned on the bathroom light and found a hand mirror on the vanity. He turned off the light, and in a moment the mirror moved out from the door frame. She was standing squared at them, her feet planted firmly, slightly apart, her legs flexed in competition shooting form, both arms out in front of her now supporting the gun. The silencer coughed again, and Murray’s mirror disintegrated.

  Silence.

  “What are you going to do?” Murray yelled. “Jump out the window?”

  Silence.

  “Who are you?” she asked, her voice calm, almost conversational.

  “We’re not police,” Murray said. “And we’re not a follow-up from Kalatis.”

  Silence.

  “You didn’t shoot him,” he said. “We know that.”

  “Does that make any difference?”

  “It does to me,” Murray said cryptically.

  Silence.

  “I don’t want this to have a bad ending,” Murray said. “Why don’t you—”

  The silencer coughed again—once—followed by the sound of a falling body. Murray grabbed a shard of the broken mirror and held it out against the door frame. He could see her lying on the floor.

  “Shit,” he said, and darted his head out, then back. “I think she did it,” he said, looking across at Remberto.

  Remberto looked around and saw the dark spreading on the carpet under her head, her body lying almost inside the bedroom door she had just stepped through. The gun was out of her hand, partially concealed under the hem of her skirt.

  “Yeah,” he said, “she did.”

  They came out of their doorways and approached her carefully, nonetheless, but she was clearly dead. Remberto stepped over her into the bedroom which actually had been turned into a study with a desk and bookcases, a sofa, and chairs. Faeber was sprawled on the floor, his legs over the legs of an overturned chair in which he had been sitting, facing the windows. The blow from the large handgun he had used had knocked him over backward.

  Remberto stepped back into the hall.

  “Faeber shot himself too,” he said.

  Murray was down on his knees pulling off one of the surgical gloves that the woman had been wearing.

  “I want to see just who the hell this gal is,” Murray said. “Look in her shoulder bag. I need some paper.”

  Remberto opened the purse; it was completely empty.

  “Shit,” Murray said.

  Remberto stepped into the study and found an envelope which he brought back. Murray too
k it, lifted the woman’s bare hand, bent her arm back, and dipped the ends of her fingers in her blood. He carefully made two complete sets of prints and then dropped her hand and stood, waving the envelope to dry the prints.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “I don’t know,” Murray said finally, shaking his head. “What a goddamned creep show. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Chapter 70

  Even if Graver could understand the maps, he knew it was going to be to his immediate advantage to have as much leverage as possible against Ledet.

  The first thing he did was to bring everyone into the bedroom. He put Ledet on the floor, cuffed now at his ankles as well as his wrists, and had Alice sit on the edge of the bed. He laid out all the firearms on the bed and called out the serial numbers on each of them to Neuman who jotted them in his notebook. Then Graver called a friend at ATF and gave him the information, Redden’s telephone number, and hung up.

  Then he turned on the television that was standing on a bureau across the room from the foot of the bed, punched on the VCR, and slipped in the first tape. The first several were standard, low-budget, professionally-produced porno films, and Graver fast-forwarded through them, suspecting these weren’t going to have what he was looking for. Cassette number four was home-produced right there in the bedroom where they were sitting. It “featured” Eddie Redden—Neuman identified him—and a couple of girls, a thin, black-haired girl with prune-sized breasts and bruises on her buttocks, and a narrow-hipped blonde with black pubic hair and bosoms as large and distended as overfull udders.

  “Goood Lorrrd!” Alice blurted, leaning forward on her hands on the bed and gaping at the television. “My Gahhhd! That’s Katie Mayhew and… and that old girl that hangs out at Remo’s Inn in Kemah! What’s her name… Deena… or Reena or something like that? Look at thaaaat! Look at what…”