Magic City

by James W. Hall

  “Listen, I’m at the second passing lane. It’s three-fifteen—this time of day, it’ll be thirty, thirty-five minutes max, till I’m there. What’s the difference, Thorn, thirty minutes?”

  “I’m on the clock, Sugar. Like I said, they gave me an hour.”

  “A few minutes more or less, they’re not going to do anything.”

  “Hey, I’ll tell you what’s truly dangerous, Sugar. Driving one-handed on this freeway with all these lunatics. Yammering away with a phone at my ear, now that’s life-threatening. All these daredevils out here. Man, I’m going to have to hang up, Sugar, use both hands. I’m getting the willies.”

  “Thorn, goddamn it!”

  Thorn clicked off. He exited I-95 at 135th Street and was heading east at a moderate clip when Lawton came awake, rubbed his eyes. Looking over at Thorn blankly.

  “Where you taking me now, you weasel?”

  “We’re going to pick up Alex.”

  “You’re the guy from Key Largo. That idiot lives in a tree house, ties fishing lures.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  Fingering the butt of the aluminum bat, Lawton looked out at the neighborhood. Bars on the windows, lawns eaten away by exhaust fumes and cinch bugs, flaking paint on the houses. Even the trees were stunted by some essential lack of nutrients. There was too much sky showing, the land parched. Traffic and more traffic. Sidewalks swarmed with high school kids, black teenagers, the guys wearing baggy jeans, triple-extra-large T-shirts hanging down like skirts, scuffing along, crossing against the red lights, daring motorists to run them down.

  A few blocks east, they passed the public school where the kids originated from. Graffiti covered the walls, Styrofoam cups tumbling down the middle of the street, a house here and there with a flower box out front and a green lawn, surrounded by tall, spiked wrought iron. Folks making their defiant stand.

  The cell phone peeped and Thorn picked it up, checked the blue screen. Sugarman again. Thorn set it back on the console, let it ring.

  “What’s my daughter doing in a neighborhood like this?”

  “Good question,” Thorn said.

  Lawton continued to babble, but Thorn focused on navigating the congestion. Kids cutting across the street, cars packed tight but clipping along.

  Spotting the turn for West Dixie up ahead, Thorn swerved into the left lane and barely missed the front bumper of a red pickup truck. The guy honked and shot Thorn the finger. Ahead of him the light turned red, but Thorn bulled ahead, making the left onto Dixie against oncoming traffic, drawing a couple more honks. Fitting right in.

  A block down Dixie, Buck lurched across the backseat and thrust his head out the window behind Thorn and let out a single woof.

  “What is it, boy?”

  The dog went quiet, nose tilted up. In the outside mirror Thorn watched Buck swinging his head from side to side through the half-open window. The cemetery was still ten or fifteen blocks ahead, but Thorn guessed it was possible Buck had already caught a trace of Alexandra. From what he’d seen of Buck’s search-and-rescue skills, nearly anything was possible.

  People shed dead skin cells every second of the day. Human bodies were like smokestacks pumping out particles nonstop. Body heat sending everyone’s personal soot up in the air, each flake of skin carrying a microscopic trace of bacteria—the body’s aromatic signature. Sit in one place long enough, the particles of smell pooled up around the chair. Skin rafts, they were called. Every flake carrying a grain of scent. And dogs swam endlessly through that torrent of odor. A few parts per million was all they needed to catch the trail. A few more parts to home in.

  The way Alex explained it: a person walks into someone’s house where a pot of stew is simmering, he can name the scent, no problem. Beef stew.

  Take a search-and-rescue dog into that same house, if the dog could talk, he’d say, “Pinch of oregano, dab of thyme, cup of onion”—every ingredient.

  Thorn kept one eye on the road, one on Buck. The dog was swinging his head from side to side. He had something. A trace. A whiff of Alex.

  The neighborhood turned grim and commercial. A few two-story apartments with broken windows and missing roof tiles, hard-luck pawnshops, an open-air Laundromat, check-cashing shops, a boarded-up Taco Bell. An occasional twenty-four-hour market or cut-rate gas station with cashiers stationed behind bulletproof glass. A purple-and-green funeral home. Strip malls with liquor stores, topless clubs, and gun shops. All your basic needs.

  Six, seven blocks in the distance Thorn could make out the white-columned entrance to the cemetery. He was slowing for a red light when Buck freaked. The dog tried to pry his head out the window opening, and when that failed, he began digging his claws against the glass.

  “Whoa, Buck. Hold on, boy, hold on.”

  Thorn skidded to a stop in the parking lot of a shabby concrete bunker called the Bamboo Lounge.

  “You stay here, Lawton. Stay right where you are.”

  Lawton thumped the head of the bat against the floorboard at his feet.

  “Yeah, right. Like I’m going to take orders from Mr. Weasel.”

  “I mean it. Lock the doors, keep the windows up. And don’t get out of the car, no matter what. Goddamn it, do what I say for once, you old fool.”

  Lawton stared at Thorn for a moment, then his face caved in. Eyes brimming with hurt. In that instant Thorn saw Alexandra’s features emerge from Lawton’s bone structure, a ghostly appearance of the woman he loved. Her eyes were shadowed with unspeakable rebuke.

  “Christ, I’m sorry, Lawton. But stay here, please. Stay here.”

  The old man shook his head with such finality, it was clear no simple apology was ever going to undo Thorn’s words.

  No time to make amends. Thorn threw open the back door, grabbed Buck’s collar and hitched him to the lead, then let the dog jump out.

  As Thorn shut the door, Buck yanked him sideways across the sidewalk and into the busy thoroughfare. Stumbling into the northbound lane, Thorn threw up an arm to halt the traffic. A motorcycle whisked by Buck’s nose, but the dog advanced without a flinch.

  Cars flashed around them, more horns and obscenities flung his way. Fixed on the scent trail, the dog hauled Thorn across four furious lanes of traffic and into the parking lot of a shopping plaza and heaved forward toward a windowless one-story building with flashing neon out front. As large and gloomy as a slaughterhouse, the structure was painted a washed-out red.

  PINK GOLD—ADULT EMPORIUM. PEEP SHOWS, FULL LENGTH MOVIES, ADULT TOYS, LINGERIE, TRIPLE X. On the marquee above the door a lit sign advertised this week’s double feature: Ass Traffic and Nuns in Leather.

  Buck towed him to the front door. The wrought-iron security bars were latched open, the solid inner door shut.

  Two black men stood a few feet away, smoking cigarettes and sharing a pint in a paper sack. Both of them desperately thin with the weathered hides of vagrants punished by endless hours of sun and fiercer weather from within.

  “Yo, white boy, what’s up with dat dog?”

  The tall one pushed himself away from the wall and staggered toward Thorn. Buck shoved his nose against the doorjamb, then turned his head and fixed his eyes on Thorn’s. It was called an alert. The dog displayed that signal only when he was closing in on a target.

  “Take a fucking dog in there,” the other man said, “perverts’ll be humping that thing before you can spit.”

  Grinning at Thorn, the shorter man joined in.

  “You can’t be taking no animal in there. Ain’t allowed.”

  “Watch me,” Thorn said, and shoved the door open and stepped into the fluorescent interior.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Carlos Morales paced in front of the three grave markers, two large, one small. Next to those gravestones were two empty plots, a patch of grass waiting for the rest of the family.

  One by one, Carlos mumbled the names and dates off the three headstones. Snake looked at the slabs, the date of birth and date of death with
a short line between them.

  Depressing thought. That was all it came down to. A slab of marble in a sunny field. A life summed up by a dash between the dates.

  “Tell me something, bro,” Carlos said. “They’re off in heaven, got all the fucking time in the world, why the hell don’t they send messages or something? Like clue us in how it is up there. How they’re getting by.”

  “Maybe they do,” Snake said. “But you just don’t get that channel.”

  Snake stood in the shade of a small oak. He looked down Dixie, watching for the gray Camry he’d seen in front of the house in South Miami. The roofer was still within the hour deadline. Thorn was his name. A tight-lipped bastard. Hard guy.

  Snake came up with the hour time limit so the guy wouldn’t have the leisure to throw together something with the cops. Though Snake didn’t make him for that kind. Struck him more as the freelance type. Swagger in his walk. The way he’d handled Carlos this morning, that probably jacked him up even more, gave him confidence he could handle this alone.

  Snake and Carlos were on foot. Taxi parked a block away, the porn emporium eight blocks south. Five pedestrian exits out of the cemetery. If the cops did show, he and Carlos could wander off, one of them head east, the other west, disappear into the warehouse district or the scumbag neighborhoods. If they made it, fine; if they didn’t, that was okay, too.

  Worst case, the cops managed to surprise them, throw them on the ground. Two unarmed guys at a graveyard.

  What the hell were they going to say when they found out the two guys they were manhandling were Stanton King’s adopted sons, and Snake and Carlos Morales were simply paying a visit to the graves of their own long-departed parents and sister?

  Yeah, he’d like to see that.

  “What’re you, crazy? Ain’t no fucking animals allowed in here.”

  The woman behind the counter was closing in on seventy. Her hair was bleached platinum and hacked and gelled into a spiky mess with streaks of neon red and green. Piercings in her face and ears. Her black tank top showed off the tops of her deflated breasts and a tangle of green and blue tattoos crawled from her wrists to her shoulders. A biker granny.

  “Turn around and get your punk ass out of here.”

  She drew a foot-long section of rebar from beneath the counter and tapped it against her open palm.

  Buck pawed the linoleum, struggling for the back of the store.

  “Don’t worry,” Thorn said. “He’s housebroken.”

  “Take another step, shithead, I’ll housebreak you.”

  Thorn relaxed his hold on the leash and let Buck steer him down the transvestite aisle past the gay paraphernalia, toward a door where a hand-lettered sign said EMPLOYEES ONLY AND THIS MEANS YOU JERKOFF.

  As he was pushing through the door, he took a glance over his shoulder, saw the biker granny on the phone. Calling in the troops.

  Thorn hustled on. The lights in the big store seemed to be winking, or else Thorn’s optical nerves were shorting out. Sharp pings chimed in his ear as if the submarine he was riding was free-falling into bottomless depths.

  Maybe he’d been as full of rage once or twice before in his life, but he couldn’t remember when.

  Behind the EMPLOYEES ONLY door a narrow hallway stretched fifty feet and ended at a fire exit. Buck pulled him past the first few doors and came to a stop before the third on the left and prodded his nose against the metal knob, then pawed the slick concrete at its base. Buck looked back at Thorn with something like desperation in his brown eyes. What was the delay? Master in trouble. Master in trouble.

  Thorn dragged open the door and stepped inside, and in that same moment Buck jerked free and loped away into the shadows.

  It was a bigger room than he’d expected. He could hear the dog’s nails on the concrete twenty, thirty feet away. Thorn turned and smoothed his hands across the wall until he found the switch. Flipped it and turned back.

  A storeroom. Metal shelves stacked high with boxes of sexual equipment. Movies, dildos, inflatable dolls, cartons of magazines and DVDs.

  Buck was at the far end of the room in an open space where a gray metal army surplus desk was shoved into the corner.

  He saw Alexandra’s legs stretched out across the floor. Lying on her back. Thorn felt the angle of the earth lurch forward, and he raced down the narrow aisle and dropped to his knees beside her.

  Her eyes were shut. She was bound with the black nylon straps and the Velcro cuffs of a cut-rate bondage outfit. A red ball was wedged into her mouth and held in place with a web of black bands. On her forehead was a dark knot, and in the center of the bulge her flesh was puckered and split. Old blood smeared across her cheek.

  Thorn spoke her name, and her eyelids cracked to slits.

  He wrestled with the bands holding the rubber ball in place. It was just larger than a golf ball, smooth and hard, gouged with teeth marks. Thorn fumbled with the clips and metal rings, trying to figure it out, do it fast and light-fingered, to inflict as little damage as possible to Alexandra’s already damaged mouth and cheeks.

  He had to lift her head and cradle it with one hand while he unbuckled with the other, and finally he felt the device loosen. Buck stood watching nearby, his tongue out, his eyes hazy, head slumped with fatigue and pain.

  The tangle of straps came free, and Thorn drew the hard rubber ball from her mouth. Her expression changed then, growing softer, as though she were about to take a deep breath and sink away into a swoon.

  “Stay with me, Alex. We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  She groaned an attempt at language, but her jaw seemed to still hold the yawning shape of the rubber ball. She worked her mouth, then found the words.

  “Where’s Dad?” she said.

  “He’s outside in the car.”

  “Outside in the car, Thorn? You left him outside?”

  “There weren’t a lot of options.”

  “These guys want some photograph.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s the one you asked me about on the phone, isn’t it? The one Alan gave Dad.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What the hell’ve you been doing, Thorn?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that one thing led to another.”

  “Jesus Christ, Thorn.”

  On hands and knees, Thorn set to work on the rest of the nylon straps. Velcro held some of them, and knots tied with haste and incompetence held the rest. He dug the knots open and stripped back the Velcro bindings and had her hands free and was working on her legs when he heard the voices.

  Men running down the corridor.

  “They’re coming.” He looked around at the narrow aisles, the tall metal shelving stuffed with merchandise for unimaginable appetites. “I’ll be over there. An ambush.”

  He nodded at an alcove sectioned off by fiberboard. A makeshift office consisting of a cluttered desk with an adding machine and a telephone.

  “Close your eyes. Pretend.” He pressed the ball back into her mouth and laid the straps across her face, close to their previous positions.

  As the door blew open across the storage room, he herded Buck into the alcove and crouched down behind the desk.

  Seconds later they were down the aisle. Snake and Carlos.

  Carlos held the pistol, and Snake was empty-handed.

  They halted beside Alex, and Snake knelt down next to her.

  “Where’s your friend?” he said. “I know he’s here.”

  Thorn rocked back to throw himself on Carlos, but Buck broke first, snarling and leaping at Snake’s back.

  Thorn was a step behind. He nailed Carlos with a forearm to the face and sent him sprawling into a shelf of dildos. The rack tipped and slammed into the one beside it, a row of clumsy dominoes cascading toward the far wall.

  Lying on his back, Carlos brought the pistol up and fired. Buck squealed and fell away from Snake. Then the gun was aimed at Thorn.

  “Bring it, pimp. Let’s see you run into the machine
-gun fire. Come on, where’s your macho now, superdude? You make one move, you’ll be tore up from the floor up.”

  Ten feet away, Carlos rose, keeping the pistol trained on Thorn.

  “You okay, Snake?”

  The tall man struggled to his feet.

  Buck lay down beside Alexandra and shut his eyes. The bullet had grazed his right shoulder. Thorn could see the gouged flesh, the darkened fur.

  “Where’s the photograph, Thorn?”

  “Let me pop him, Snake. Just one in the knee, show we’re serious.”

  Snake glanced at Carlos and shook his head.

  “Only if he tries anything.”

  “The photo’s outside,” Thorn said.

  “Where outside?” said Snake.

  “You’ll get your damn photo. Right now the lady needs medical help.”

  “The photograph first.” Snake stepped closer.

  “Hey, pretty boy,” Carlos said. “You’re a tough hombre when you’re flying off the goddamn roof, jumping on a guy’s blind side. But not now, hey, roger dodger?”

  “Shut up, Carlos.”

  “The dude messed with me, now the fucking tables are fucking turned.”

  “I said shut up.”

  “Yeah, shut up, Carlos,” Thorn said. “Let Snake handle this.”

  “Let’s keep this simple,” Snake said. “Tell me where it is, Carlos will get it, bring it back, then your friend and you leave. Happily ever after.”

  Carlos was smiling at something over Thorn’s shoulder.

  “Well, looky here. Who we got now? Babe Ruth, Cal Ripkin?”

  Lawton stalked down the center aisle. He had the photo in one hand, his aluminum bat in the other.

  “Who buys this smut?” Lawton said. “That’s what I want to know. What kind of pathetic loser needs to look at shit like this? Creepos and weirdos, that’s who.”

  “Is he holding what I think he is?” Snake said.

  “Stay right there, Lawton,” said Thorn. “Right now. Stop.”

  Lawton halted a dozen feet away.

  “Since when do I take orders from Mr. Weasel?”

  “Please, Lawton. This man and I are having a conversation.”