The Clouds Roll Away

by Sibella Giorello

  But his eyes . . . his eyes resembled the clouds outside.

  “You ruined my source,” he said.

  “Sully lies, you know.”

  “Of course he lies, he’s a snitch. But he won’t even lie to me now.”

  “I understand. And I’m working on another source for you.”

  “You understand?” Heat roared into his voice. “Do you understand how hard it is for me to get informants?”

  “Probably not.”

  “My cases aren’t cold; they’re frozen solid. I finally start to thaw something out and you come along to ice it up again.”

  “Sully will come back.” I could sense the subterranean rumble rising up his throat. To avoid the eruption, I kept talking. “He’s a born weasel. He won’t make it a week on his own. Snitching is too easy. And he gets his drugs at the same time. He’ll call you before Christmas.”

  The detective stared. It made me nervous.

  “Look,” I continued, “if you think it’ll help, I’ll grovel to him on the phone. I’ll let him think he’s got the advantage.”

  “He does.”

  “But after he’s done whining, what’s he going to do—get a job?”

  “He’s got a lawyer.”

  “Okay. But the lawyer is years from getting Sully money, if he even can.”

  The detective narrowed his eyes. “Why are you so eager to help?”

  “Guess who the new undercover buyer is.”

  He nodded. “You earned it.”

  “And I’m ready to pay Sully out of my own pocket.”

  News of my punishment appeared to relax him. Reaching up, he massaged his jaw, loosening an ache, and I listened to the big wall clock. It ticked off three seconds. Four. Five. Six. A white analog face with large black numbers, the clock looked like it had been tossed out of a principal’s office.

  “Have you ever encountered any cold cases with unmarked cartridge cases?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I knew you didn’t come here to apologize.”

  “I did. But there’s more.”

  “There’s always more with you. Always.” He sighed. “All right. What do you mean, unmarked?”

  “No stamps in the brass. No manufacturer, no caliber.”

  Like all good detectives, he was an expert at concealing his thoughts. He almost managed to hide the quick light sparking through his dark eyes. “If I find something like that,” he said, “you’re going to tell me what the connection is, right?”

  “Of course. Don’t you trust me?”

  “Get out of my office,” he said.

  The body only housed the soul, I knew that. The body was not the soul. But as I walked the windy streets from the police annex to the city morgue on South Jackson, I needed reminding. Dead bodies, I told myself, were nothing more than broken shells on a beach. It was just that in the morgue, that beach so often looked like a bad stretch of the Jersey shore.

  I showed my credentials to the receptionist at the front counter, clipped a temporary ID to my coat, and walked down the hall. My mortal weakness sensed spiritual mist in the atmosphere, tangible as the condensation entrails produced by high-altitude airplanes. I pushed through the swinging double doors.

  Two stainless steel gurneys waited, each draped with a white sheet. Across the room, Dr. Yardley Bauer came through another set of double doors connected to the back offices. She wore clean turquoise scrubs, looking as peaceful as somebody returning from vacation. She hit a light switch on the wall to spotlight the first gurney. Under the pendant light, her blonde hair sparkled like faceted citrine.

  The dead man’s wrists and arms were bruised deep violet.

  “We ran fingerprints,” she said in her sandy contralto. “So far nothing’s come up, locally or nationally. And we found some more tattoos, but the images aren’t all that clear due to the pronounced swelling.”

  She placed both gloved hands under the man’s shoulder and lifted, nodding at the image on the back of his shoulder.

  The blue-and-yellow ink was as pearlescent as the contusions. But I saw faces and halos over the heads.

  “The other guy’s got one just like it.” She rested the shoulder back on the gurney. She walked to the end of the table, where his feet tented the sheet.

  “Madonna and child,” I said.

  “Mm, something like that,” she said dismissively. She lifted the clipboard hanging on the end of the table. “They ate borscht.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Stomach contents. At first I thought it was blood. But it was beets. Last meal: borscht.”

  “May I see their faces?” I asked.

  Even without the inflicted damage and swelling, these were homely men. Rough-featured, almost grotesque noses. I moved my eyes down the neck, the chest. An archipelago of blisters had scabbed over, stretching across the sternum.

  “Friction?” I pointed to the injury.

  “Some kind of burn, but not abrasion. I sent tissue samples to the lab. It’s on both of them.”

  I leaned down, recalling the photos Nettie Labelle gave me. Compared to what lewisite was supposed to do, this looked minor. “When do you expect the tissue samples to come back?”

  “With the holiday?” She walked over to a stainless steel sink stretching along one wall. She yanked off the gloves and hit the soap dispenser with the back of her wrist, lathering to her elbows. “I wouldn’t expect anything until after New Year’s.”

  “I can give you a prediction,” I said. “If you’re interested.”

  “Oh, I’m always interested in your guesses, Agent Harmon.”

  Hard to tell with her—sarcastic, authentic?—but I offered a brief summary of lewisite’s blistering capabilities, along with mustard gas. “Somebody around here got hold of these chemicals,” I said, “although our government insists they destroyed all of it.”

  “These guys don’t look like chemists.” She dried her hands, moving the paper towel between each finger. “Send me what you have. I’ll alert the lab.”

  For one brief moment, she seemed taken aback by not knowing. But with my next question she reverted back to her old self.

  “May I see the bullets?” I asked.

  She reached under the sheet draping the first body, offering me a steel bedpan. When she tilted it, the two copper-jacketed bullets and one cartridge case rolled across the metal, a dull pitiless sound.

  “One bullet went all the way through,” she said. “The cartridge was stuck in a shirt collar.”

  “May I borrow the case and one bullet?”

  “I don’t see how much good they’ll do. They’re unmarked.”

  “That’s exactly why I want them,” I said.

  chapter thirty-two

  One of fashion’s all-time worsts ravaged my years at Mount Holyoke College: pegged jeans.

  They fit tight, so tight it looked like we showered in them. But as a teenager far from my Southern home, hoping to fit in with my stylish New England peers, I wore a pair to a mixer down the road at Amherst College. I spent the entire evening standing with my back to the wall, too self-conscious to dance.

  I never wore the jeans again, but I was a squirrel who rarely threw things out. Wednesday afternoon, dredging through my closet, I found the jeans next to the flowing white dress worn in Mount Holyoke’s laurel parade, the graduating seniors linked together by botany representing classical wisdom.

  Now, feeling stupid, I lay flat on my bed trying to squeeze into the jeans. When I stood, I was one Big Mac from bursting the zipper. Pulling on a fire-engine red sweater, purloined from my mother’s closet, I slipped my bare feet into my three-inch black heels and wiggled over to the mirror on the back of my bedroom door.

  I still looked too healthy.

  Wiggling down the hall to the bathroom, I dampened my hair and applied way too much gel, scrunching Zennie’s cut into a dysfunctional shape. I traced my lower lashes with a blue eye pencil and applied too much mascara. Throwing on my overcoat,

  I carefull
y made my way down the carriage house stairs. The alley cobblestones were already coated with frost, but I tried to run anyway, jumping into the icebox K-Car because if my mother saw me like this, there would be no explaining how it connected to geology.

  I drove out to Parham Road, parked, and went directly to Pollard’s office. He had dressed down for the occasion too—the Virginia gentleman’s version. Dark jeans with perfect creases, pristine tennis shoes, blue sweater. If Pollard saw what passed for casual in Seattle, he’d have a heart attack.

  “I talked to Phaup about the wire,” he said. “She agreed to take it off.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “How do you know there’s more?”

  “When it comes to Phaup, I’m like Pavlov’s dog.”

  “She’s giving you ten minutes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Get in there, Raleigh, make the buy, get out.”

  “And what if they don’t do the deal in ten minutes? I’m supposed to say, ‘Sorry, guys, but my boss at the FBI says I have to go now.’”

  “That’s her compromise.”

  “That’s not a compromise, Pollard. That’s a death sentence. You know these buys. They’re rarely clockwork.”

  “It was the best I could do. Come out that door nine minutes fifty-five seconds after you go in, or SWAT comes in.”

  “They’ve got assault rifles, Pollard.”

  He gave a tight nod. “I want you to brief SWAT on the layout of the house; we want to know about everything you saw in there.”

  “How many SWAT?”

  “All six.”

  “It could be a bloodbath.”

  He didn’t bother nodding. “Ten minutes,” he said.

  When I pulled up in the K-Car, the Raiders were in jovial moods, laughing about something, and through the cold night they tossed a football, the pigskin arcing under the only streetlight that wasn’t shot out.

  Pretending to watch the football, I climbed out of the K-Car and let my eyes roam the street. Somewhere, in the dark recesses of abandoned houses and overgrown lots full of dead cars and broken glass, six SWAT guys waited for me to walk through that door so they could start their stopwatches.

  “Hey, that ride still going?” one of the Raiders called out.

  I smiled with annoyance and wiggled toward the front steps. Taking hold of the icy metal handrail, I heard nylon friction. The ball getting tossed. I climbed the stairs and heard the thwuck of a football getting caught. But then it got quiet. Too quiet. I felt their eyes on my back. Or maybe the jeans. Just like that night with Sully, I sensed something slipping out of sync. The happy mood, the casual atmosphere. But I opened the front door, clinging to the foolish hope that uncertain success could repeat itself.

  In the amethyst living room where Linus had witnessed to the two children, half-naked women danced around the modular couch. Moon sat front and center with three other men lounging on the other sections. The ceiling projector beamed a rap video— more dancing, more women wearing less clothing.

  Moon glanced over as I closed the front door. He nodded and a girl dropped on his lap. She wore a leather miniskirt and a white tube top that was losing its battle with gravity. Running her eyes over me, she made me feel invisible and known at the same time.

  “XL’s in the kitchen,” Moon said.

  I walked down the hall. The front door opened behind me, but I didn’t immediately turn around. I waited two counts, then casually glanced back. A Raider stepped inside, pushing back his hood. He followed me down the hall and I tightened my grip on my clutch purse. Cell phone, money. The Glock.

  “Right on time,” XL said as I came into the kitchen. “I like a lady who knows when to show up.”

  I could barely breathe. The stench of scorched microwave popcorn was so thick I could taste it. Outside, the dogs woofed, clawing at the back door.

  “I hope it’s ready this time,” I said, annoyed.

  He smiled in a way that never reached the sloe and languid eyes. “Make yourself a drink. It’ll be ready in about fifteen minutes.”

  “You said it would be ready.”

  “Chill, girl. Hang with the party.”

  “I’ve got an appointment.”

  It was the last word. Even as it left my mouth, I knew it was wrong. But it had already passed over my lips and when XL’s eyes shifted, a quiver of adrenaline shot across my shoulders. I turned around. The Raider held a gun to my head. Nine-millimeter Beretta. With silencer.

  “Gimme the purse.” The Raider held out his free hand. His mustache looked like grime.

  I glanced over at XL. “You’ve got to be kidding. You’re gonna pull this crap?”

  “Precautions, baby.”

  “You play too many games.” I shook my head, disgusted. “Forget it, keep your stuff. I’m outta here.”

  I was two steps across the filthy kitchen floor when the wall exploded, spitting chunks. I dove, trained to instinct. Hitting the floor, I rolled left and shoved my right hand inside the clutch. My hand came up, index finger beside the Glock’s trigger.

  But nobody had moved.

  XL wasn’t even looking in my direction. Staring into the aluminum pans, he poked the white slop with his knife. The Raider poised the Beretta at my forehead.

  “What I thought,” XL said. “You know exactly what you’re doing.”

  A second Raider stepped into the room. He held a .45 and grabbed my right wrist, squeezing the gun from my hand. He tossed my purse to XL. The little man with the horn-rimmed glasses caught it effortlessly. I looked down, shaking my head, and stole a glance at my watch. Three minutes something.

  “If you’re not a cop,” XL said, “what’re you carrying a piece for?”

  “I live two blocks from Gilpin Court. I sell product. You think I’m stupid?”

  He flipped open my cell phone. “No name?”

  “Yeah, Nadine.” Agent phones had no identifying names, and our names didn’t come up on other people’s caller ID.

  He smiled. This time, his eyes went along with it and my blood ran cold.

  He pushed the buttons on the phone, searching. My heart bumped a pulse into my neck and I took a breath of stench. I inhaled four beats, held it four beats, and released it on another four. Then I started over again.

  The phone rang. I assumed he hit something accidentally.

  But he looked up, his grin bigger than ever.

  “Let’s see who this is,” he said, as if this was a fun game.

  He stared at the LCD display. But his grin disappeared. He looked at the second Raider with a face like granite. “Tell Moon to get in here.”

  The Raider stepped over the blasted pieces of drywall.

  “Now!” XL yelled.

  Moon came running down the hall, heavy feet like thunder. XL lifted the ringing phone, holding it out.

  “It’s Zennie,” he said. “Why is Zennie calling her?”

  Moon shifted his eyes toward me, unfazed by the gun at my head. Taking the phone from XL, he hit the talk button. “Zennie?”

  In the quiet, my pulse pounded. Too hard, too fast. Down the hall a girl laughed. It sounded like a scream.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Moon said.

  Another pause.

  “She’s right here.”

  I rolled my eyes, glancing at the windows. Moisture dripped on the dark glass. And the dogs were quiet. My pulse kicked up.

  “Talk fast. XL’s got a piece pointed at her head.”

  There was a long pause while he listened. Moon’s eyes shifted around the kitchen, calculating her words. I tried another four-count breath, but adrenaline killed it at two.

  Moon grunted and handed the phone to XL. “She wants to talk to you.”

  XL held the phone away from his ear, as though it carried a disease. Zennie’s voice sounded like a malicious bee. XL reached into the purse, throwing the wad of bills to Moon.

  Moon counted out hundreds. I reached up, scratching my neck, glancing at my watch. Seven minutes something
. My neck was damp.

  “One G.” Moon rolled up the bills.

  On the phone the high buzz took off again.

  “Watch that mouth, Zennie.” XL snapped the phone shut. “You buying for her?”

  “Why, is that a problem?” I said.

  XL looked at Moon.

  “Zennie’s running her own deal here,” Moon said.

  “You believe her?” XL asked.

  “It’s Zennie. She cuts us out, that surprises you?” He shrugged. “I ain’t that surprised.”

  Down the hall, the girl laughed again. No dogs barked. I imagined SWAT approaching, hitting the animals with tranquilizer guns.

  “How do you know Zennie?” XL asked.

  “She’s my hairdresser. I told her what Sully did. When I said I was buying, she put in some money.”

  “And Sully . . . ?”

  “From school, that’s how I know him. Look, if I’m a cop, why did I drive back here with Sully? That’s insane.” I opened my hand, my fingertips numb. “Gimme my money.”

  XL glanced at Moon.

  Moon said, “Zennie’s mean, but she ain’t stupid.”

  I rolled my fingers, one thought slamming against my skull: Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  XL put the phone back in my purse. “No hard feelings.”

  “Maybe not for you. I want my money and my gun.”

  He gave a smile that turned my stomach, placing the roll of bills in the purse. “My associate will walk you out,” he said. “You can have the gun outside.”

  I turned for the front door, clicking down the hallway. The heels and tight pants felt like lead on my ankles and I begged time to stop, stop, please, stop. But it was like racing down an endless tunnel. The faster I walked, the more the front door receded. I no longer heard music, only blood rushing through my ears, my pulse pounding.

  But another pounding told me time was up.

  Glass shattered in the kitchen behind me.

  “FBI, on the floor! Down! Down!”

  The front door burst open. I threw my hands in the air, holding the purse away from my body. I made eye contact with the masked SWAT agent, diving in the direction he indicated. I rolled across the floor. Two grenades passed over my head. I squeezed my eyes, clamped hands to my ears. And red fireballs ignited my eyelids. Shock waves punched my bones.