Killing a Cold One

by Joseph Heywood

  “I did not call to debate or argue with you, Grady. I’ve talked to Chief Waco. You are to hunt down this creature, whatever and wherever it might be. And having located it, you will do whatever is necessary. Am I clear?”

  “Because you and your crack political team have surgically parsed the situation and concluded a little crime might hurt your party’s chances against the Republican candidate?”

  The Republican candidate was a filthy-rich, squeaky-voiced man who had started chasing the office years before the election, spending millions of his own dollars, which disgusted Service. “Have you been drinking?” he jabbed for good measure. More and more it was becoming clear that buying political office was the route to power for some rich people.

  “You fight dirty, Grady. You always go right for the throat. But this time that’s good: I want you to go right for the throat of this damn thing, whatever it is. Find out who killed those women, and make it go away.”

  There was no turning her down if Chief Waco had already been pressured to sign on. “All right, but here’s the deal: I pick who I need and want to help. And it’s all on your budget bucks, not Chief Waco’s.”

  “All right. Who are you thinking of?” she asked.

  “My call, not yours,” he told her.

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Treebone, Glenn Noonan, and Allerdyce. Tree and Noonan used to be top detectives, and Limpy’s the best man in the woods I know. Tree and Noonan will help Friday. Limpy and I will work our own angles. I shouldn’t have to pull any other law enforcement,” he added.

  “You need more, you call them,” she said. “You amaze me. You analyzed this and decided on a course in an instant. Your talents are wasted in the woods, Grady.”

  “Especially in a fricking, horseshit wild goose chase like this,” he said. “My team, your budget, Governor.”

  “Carte blanche,” she said. “Whatever and whoever you need. Just get that damn thing, fast. You have your orders,” she concluded, and hung up.

  Little Maridly was back beside him. “Was that Lori?” she asked

  “It was.”

  “Is she coming to breakfast with us?”

  “She’d like to, but she’s busy ruining the state and forcing individual citizens to dive into trashbins.”

  “Is Lori the boss of me?” the girl asked.

  “She thinks so.”

  The little girl’s face hardened into a grimace. “I’m my own boss, Bampy.”

  “Good for you, hon. Your mum awake?”

  “Yep, I jump-ed on her and tickle-ed her.”

  “Did she laugh?”

  “No, she said a real bad word. Wanna hear me say it?”

  “No.” Grady Service smiled as Shigun came running from the bedroom, arms outstretched, and jumped to be caught. “Was Maridly nice to you when she woke you up?”

  The boy smiled.

  I’ve got the Mosquito Wilderness back and a great start on a patched-together family. Why the hell can’t the governor mind her own damn business? Fucking dogman!

  Karylanne and Friday padded in at the same time, both in long fuzzy robes and slippers, neither fully awake. Friday mumbled, “Coffee,” and held out a cup. Karylanne did the same.

  “We’ll talk to you two when you get closer to the runway,” Service told the women. To Maridly, “Get the platter. We’ve got to get food into these poor old women.”

  Ten minutes later the breakfast was on the table, and they were all working at it slowly. Service nodded for Friday to follow him to another room.

  “I just got a call from Lori,” he said when they were alone.

  “I know. My boss called me from Lansing a few minutes ago, too.”

  “I didn’t hear your phone.”

  “Vibrated. I’m leading the case, but you’re going to work to find the so-called dogman angle. What the devil is a dogman?”

  Service told her what he knew.

  “You knew about this and never told me?” She’s pissed.

  “It seemed irrelevant. And still does. Hell, it is irrelevant. It’s bullshit.”

  Friday flashed a dark look. “Any chance said investigations will converge?”

  “Only in our governor’s zany political fantasy world.”

  “What else have you withheld?” she asked.

  Service got his cell phone, pulled up a photo of the tracks he and Denninger had found near Twenty Point Pond.

  Friday raised an eyebreow. “And that would be?”

  “We’re not sure,” he said. “Could be a humongous wolf track.”

  “A wolf is like a dog, right?” she asked.

  “This is not a dogman,” he insisted.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “When will you know?” she pressed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t even started to try to find out, have you?”

  “I have to do some thinking on it,” he said.

  “Where was that damn track?”

  “By the rifle cache.”

  “And you never said anything.”

  “Seriously, I didn’t see a connection, and I still don’t. Did Forensics find any animal evidence on the vicks?”

  “No,” she said.

  “There you go.”

  “But the governor thinks differently.”

  “She wants me to hunt the dogman, which does not exist,” he said. “It’s all political posturing—all PR.”

  “So why does she want you chasing a phantom?”

  “Our governor has gotten it into her mind that this thing is theoretically an animal, which drops it in the DNR’s lap. Her thinking is not just stupid, it’s twisted.”

  “She actually said the thing is real?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Did you piss her off?”

  “I’m not sure. She hides her emotions like an actor.”

  “Duh: She’s a politician,” Friday said. “What’s next for you?”

  No time to think it through thoroughly. “Lori said I can have who I want, and it’s all on her dime. The first thing I’m gonna do is pull Tree in.”

  Grady Service and Luticious Treebone had both finished college, Service at Northern Michigan University, where he had been only a fair student and a competent hockey player, and Treebone at Wayne State, where he had played football and baseball and graduated cum laude. They had both been on the verge of being drafted, so they volunteered for the US Marine Corps, met at Parris Island, and served together in the same long-range recon unit in Vietnam. They had been through hell together and had rarely spoken of the war since.

  When they got back to “the world,” they had both joined the Michigan State Police; two years later there had been an opportunity to transfer to the Department of Natural Resources, and they both accepted, but within a year his friend had taken a job with the Detroit Metro Police. He had retired a couple years back as a lieutenant in one of Metro’s vice squads, and Service had bought a camp in remote Chippewa County for his friend, a place called North of Nowhere, where they could escape to hunt and fish. They had remained close friends for going on thirty years, during which time Tree’s idea of wilderness had been unhappily reduced to Belle Isle on the Fourth of July. But now that he was retired, he was spending a lot of time at his camp.

  Service couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about his two years as a state trooper in the Detroit area. The post had been on Grand Boulevard in the city. He wasn’t even sure if the post was still there, much less still operating. The MSP had been forced by budget losses to drastically reduce the number of posts—manpower, too, but not as much—over recent years.

  Detroit had been an incredible assignment right out of Vietnam and Troop school. Those had been the days of smack, and before cr
ack cocaine. Actual zombies (not the living dead, but the dying-live) crawled alleys at night, whacking anything with warm blood, stealing anything that could be hocked to fuel habits, even prying gold fillings from teeth, the dead serving to keep the dying alive a little longer. They didn’t call heroin “horse” for nothing; upkeep on a golden arm was steeper than maintaining Secretariat. And deadlier.

  Service remembered when Sergeant Jack Creekmore one morning described to the shift a series of six killings that had left body parts strewn around three Detroit police precincts. Creekmore gave Service a piece of paper with a name: Arthurine Snowden. “See the woman,” his sergeant said.

  “Metro has its own homicide dicks, right?”

  “Don’t question me, rook. See the woman,” Creekmore growled, and added, “Metro’s got so many bent dicks they don’t want no good leads to get shat upon. You the man, Service. Arthurine, she the woman, and she claims she got most righteous poop. We copacetic?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Arthurine Snowden ran a news kiosk outside a black biker bar called Lazy Fare. She also worked numbers for a crew called B&B (for Black and Bad) and traded favors with the law. The Cass Corridor in downtown Detroit was filled with genetic defects, losers, mouth-breathers, and sundry bottom-feeders. They were predatory and omnivorous, consuming anything and everything, but they were not without their own rules and ethics.

  Cass-peeps believed in let-live among their own crowd, a rather wide-sweeping definition, but mass and serial murderers attracted jazzed-up cops, which jeopardized enlightened self-interest. Snowden pointed him at an address with unspoken hopes that busting the murderous shitbird would return life to its abnormal shade of normal. Working Detroit, Service came to understand that even Hell had its own version and vision of normal. Enlightened self-interest was not the exclusive domain of suits, uniforms, and forked-tongue sky pilots.

  Service found himself looking into darkness at a shotgun house in an area off Cass and Mack. The place was set on a block torched flat during the ’67 riots. The frames of seven houses still stood, charred and falling over, several basements inhabited by nomadic subterranean life forms, which emerged only when the streets went deep-dark. Most of the block was overgrown with weeds and strewn with garbage. There were two ’67 Pontiacs, stripped of wheels and everything salable, but left as rusting, burned-out hulks, like blown-up tanks on an old battlefield. Six months back he’d been in on a raid of a blind pig in the next block, and it had been scary from start to finish. And exhilarating, a reaction that bothered him for reasons he didn’t understand. Certainly, he was no cherry to violence; he remained idealistic, believing police intervention would eventually turn the tide in Detroit. Now he knew better. Don’t fight a battle you can’t win.

  Entering the building, he quickly found a body in a bathtub of congealed blood. He remembered staring and trying to decide what to do when a rawboned country boy with a fluffy red Afro and huge hands came through the door, swinging a double-bit ax. Service’s reflexes saved him. He mostly blocked the downstroke, but the handle had glanced off his head, the blade nicking his arm, the blow jarring him and leaving him loopy. Somehow Service had knocked the assailant off balance, hitting him hard on the shin bone with his sap, the impact sounding like a crisp single off a Louisville slugger on a cool spring day. The wounded man crab-crawled away like a cockroach. Service couldn’t follow, as blood from a head wound left him nearly blind.

  Bad karma. Only then did it occur to him to call for backup. A beat cop named Noonan was first on the scene, checked him over, said, “Head’s nothing serious. Tourniquet your arm, motherfucker, you’ll live.” Noonan had dead eyes, no meat on his body, all gristle, wired like he was on crank, weight 140 max, giving off deadly vibrations of a tightly wrapped krait on a night-hunt for warm prey. The snakes, neurotoxic banded kraits, had been common in Southeast Asia.

  Service heard two shots just before the cavalry arrived in force. There were more body parts in other parts of the house, and especially in the old cellar, trash bags stuffed into fifty-gallon metal drums, in old freezers and fridges. The media had a field day with the gore, which was always their priority.

  By the ambulance Service asked Noonan, “What was his name?”

  “Gives a fuck?” the cop said. “Shitbag like that don’t deserve no name.”

  Forty stitches to close the wound where the blade had grazed Service’s arm, and twelve more in his head from the handle. It was standard operating procedure that all shootings got an Internal Affairs look-over, but this was ruled a righteous shoot in two days, and Noonan went back to the street.

  Service had other negative thoughts that lingered, and he had gone to see the cop one weekend and got right in his face: “The perp was in a different room,” he told Noonan. “I heard no warnings, only shots. The fucker was crawling away and had no weapon. He dropped his ax with me.”

  “You trying to make a point, asswipe?”

  “You killed that man.”

  “Fucking eh.”

  “In cold blood.”

  “Scribble a note in the public service column,” Noonan said. “No extra charge.”

  “It was murder.”

  Noonan picked up a paper bag, emptied dozens of black-and-white and color photographs on the floor. “You can’t murder a murderer, ass-pump. But if you got your monthly conscience like some big State pussy, go right ahead and whine to them IA assholes, and let’s see who’s standing when this dance gets done.”

  Service had seen plenty of war dead and ugliness, but the shotgun house and the photos were his first real experience with seriously aberrant human behavior.

  Weeks later he’d driven down to Metro HQ at 1300 Beaubien and found Noonan in one of the cheap, baggy blue suits that would become his hallmark. He had just been promoted to homicide detective. Service returned the bag with photographs. “He couldn’t walk,” Service said. “He was crawling.”

  Noonan said, “Yeah, in your direction, with a fucking knife. Thing like that ain’t human.”

  Service held out his hand and hated himself for it. “What makes us different than him?” he asked Noonan.

  “We still breathing.”

  “Whoever breathes longest, wins?”

  “Fucking eh,” the new detective said, and smiled . . .

  “Kalina won’t like it,” Tuesday said, breaking his reverie. Kalina was Tree’s longtime spouse.

  “Doesn’t matter. I need him.”

  “Maybe he won’t want to. He’s retired and out of the shit.”

  “Semper fi. He and I are brothers. He’ll come, but I’m gonna go down and fetch him, find out who he knows in the Detroit Indian community.”

  “Today?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Today is ours. Might be a while before we get another one.”

  She leaned her head on his chest. “You’ll check in, okay?”

  “Roger that, boss.”

  Bluesuit Noonan: Still alive and available? Semi-human? This case might be one where a true barbarian could provide a distinct advantage.

  13

  Monday, October 27

  DETROIT, WAYNE COUNTY

  Service had called Treebone from Rapid River the day before, and his friend answered, “Yo, Big Dog.”

  “I need help.”

  “What is it this time?”

  “Some very nasty stuff.”

  “Where you at?”

  “Headed south to your place, be there around seven.”

  “Cool. Dinner waiting.”

  “Tell Kalina I’m sorry to barge in. And pack your winter gear.”

  “Am I going somewhere?”

  “Hell, maybe.”

  “Heard Hell was hot.”

  “Not the one I have in mind. There a head Shinob mucky-muck down in Motown?” Shinob was street talk for Anishinaabe, slang for Chippewa o
r Ojibwe.

  “Huh. Been long time since I danced with that crew.”

  “I just need a name.”

  “Let me make some calls.”

  “Bluesuit Noonan still around?”

  “Yeah, he’s still aboveground. Owns a block of fix-it houses on Blackfish Avenue, safest block in the city, and he doesn’t even grease city cops or pay for extra muscle. What you want with that crazy motherfucker?”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “You sure?”

  “I think.”

  “Okay, I’ll call the man, and check on the Shinob social scene. Seven, right?”

  “Tell Kalina I’m sorry.”

  “Tell her yourself. She’ll just yell at my ass. Hey, I heard you’re back in the Mosquito.”

  “How’d you hear that?”

  “I’m a cop, remember?”

  “Retired.”

  “So they say,” Tree said, and hung up.

  •••

  Treebone lived in Grosse Pointe Woods in a small house he’d added to over the years. Manicured lawns, topiaries on neighboring lots, mansion estates flanked the cop’s house in several directions.

  Treebone came out of his garage and waved majestically down the street. “My people, man. Kalina’s got fixings,” Treebone said, grabbing at Service’s bag.

  “Leave it. We’re pulling out tonight, right after dinner.”

  Treebone grinned. “Works for me.”

  They ate the finest jambalaya Service had ever tasted, but passed on alcohol.

  Kalina wanted to know all about Tuesday Friday and her son Shigun, and Karylanne and Little Maridly. Service quickly grew weary of the social small talk, his mind already locking into the mission ahead.

  They said their good-byes after dinner, and Kalina glared at Service the same as she had for as long as he’d known her.

  The two men got into the truck and headed west on Jefferson, eventually pulling down a street that ran down to intersect the Detroit River. A creek ran behind the block.

  “Last spring Noonan made a big case for your DNR boys. Locals were selling silver bass to a local eatery. He tracked ’em, set ’em up on a damn tee for your guys, but he was the true author of their legal demise. Your boys here love his ass.”