by Matt Coleman
Pausing at a landing between floors, Mark pulled a pack of American Spirits from the inside pocket of his sports coat. Four cigarettes and a disposable lighter rattled around in the pack. He lit one and scoffed at the Indian on the packaging. Fucking hipster cigarettes.
His girlfriend bought them for him—said they had less tar, not quite as horrible as his normal brand, which cost half of the American Spirits. He shook his head. To Mark, her logic sounded about like cutting back on drinking by switching to light beer. But she did it out of love. No doubt about it.
For reasons Mark would never understand, the girl loved him. They met when her kid witnessed a mugging. The victim got stabbed in the neck and ended up dying the next day. The kid was five. Mark managed to pull in a transient to pretend to have seen what the kid actually observed. It kept him from having to testify and made his mom incredibly grateful.
Mark may not have helped the girl and her kid for gratitude, but he sure didn’t reject it. She was fifteen years his junior and drop dead gorgeous. And she imagined something in him which two ex-wives and a slew of passing acquaintances never did. Most of what she envisioned had to do with the kid. The little shit was nine now and Mark would be goddamned if he hadn’t fallen in love with the kid every bit as much as the mom. He never gave kids much thought. A fact which ended one marriage and didn’t help the other. The job always seemed like a cruel thing to put on a kid.
The job ruined everything it touched. Like a cancer. Dry rot. Being a cop ate away at your whole family from the inside out. Give it enough time, and a detective’s beat would leave nothing but hollowed out bones and crumbling wood. Cigarettes and booze and fast food were bush league threats. The job could seize a heart before they got the chance. In every conceivable way.
Mark smoked and thought about his make-shift family at home. He had a year—one goddamn year—and then he would draw a little pension and go cut lumber at a Home Depot or some shit. Teach history to middle schoolers. Deliver packages in dopey brown shorts. Anything. Anything would be better. He’d get married and settle and raise and do all those things a man’s supposed to do. Cut out the smoking and cut back the drinking and eat a salad every now and again. He’d do it better than his dad or any of his uncles or his grandfather.
He dropped his half-smoked cigarette and ground it out with a toe of his loafer. None of that would happen if they didn’t clean up this mess. Sweat beaded up across his forehead at the thought of huffing it back down those stairs. But before he traveled another flight, he heard screams from above him. He paused and listened. They didn’t sound female. And then, crash! A car alarm swirled to life.
Mark grunted back up the stairs and stumbled out the door, pulling his gun from its holster. Jolly was gone. Mark ran for the edge of the rooftop parking lot where Cary stood. He skidded to a stop and leaned out over the edge, looking down. His partner was painted across the hood of a parked car—a cop’s car from the look of it. He swirled around and found Cary fighting his car into gear. Tears swelled into the corners of his eyes. When he called out, his voice cracked. He raised his gun, but stopped. He thought of the cop whose car had just been smashed. Who was down there?
Lowering his gun, Mark sank down with his hands on his knees. He pushed vomit back down his throat. No time for this shit. He needed a car—an exit plan. He holstered his gun and ran for the stairs. Weak heart be damned, Mark threw his forty extra pounds down three and four steps at a time.
Jolly fell to the west. The entry to the Parker Building was north. The parking garage had an old maintenance entrance near a loading dock to the south. He had to make it out through there and find a car somewhere on the streets of Old Town. Two blocks south was a shelter. They usually had seven or eight employees parked in a lot out back. If he remembered right, a couple of them drove old, shitty cars he could jump-start by popping off the steering column.
By the time he came falling out of the stairwell, Mark was wheezing. His chest ached and his gut burned. Stumbling past the loading dock, he almost laughed. Perfect. Have a heart attack and shit yourself, why don’t you? You fat bastard. An old gate lay bent over enough to walk through. Before he did, Mark stopped and listened for sirens. They were coming, but they were all north. He gambled right.
He crossed the street and hit an alley running between forgotten buildings. Past one more street and there was the shelter. Mark hung back at the corner of the nearest building. He could see the whole employees’ lot from where he lurked. At least two cars looked old enough to hotwire—an ugly ass tan Celica and a little Ford pickup. He pulled his gun and worked to catch his breath. He’d have to break a window. Picking a damn lock took too much time.
Before he broke for the lot, a teenage girl came trotting out with a couple of jugs of tea. She went straight for the Celica and started it before moving around to the back to put the tea in the trunk. The girl went trotting back in for another load, leaving her car running.
Mark looked up. “Are you fucking kidding me with this? Don’t make it easy. I’m an asshole.” He laughed to himself and ran for the car. He grabbed the tea and set it on the ground, shut the trunk as softly as possible, and hopped in the driver’s seat. He watched for the girl, but he rounded his first corner before anyone appeared.
Once on the road, he let himself cry. Jolly was a horrible person but a great partner. The guy was a war vet. It did something to him. He didn’t value life the way normal people did. What he valued was loyalty. And he was the most loyal motherfucker on earth. Jolly was the guy you called to help bury the body. With him, it was never a question of why. He didn’t care. If you were his people, he took care of you. All the way down the line.
The problem with Jolly was he took it too far. He didn’t have to kill Karen Webster. It was a batshit crazy move—psychotic. But Mark couldn’t help letting one thought take over his mind: Jolly killed Karen Webster, and Jolly shot Dante. Even if he couldn’t catch up with Cary and shut her down, Mark might skate on everything. There would be suspicions, sure, but not enough to convict him or pull his pension.
Mark slammed his hand into the steering wheel and cursed at himself. What was he thinking? Jolly laid everything on the line to pull them out of the hole they dug together. It was the difference between the two of them. Mark could talk it. He broke a few fingers every now and then to make a guy say what they needed to hear. But Jolly was nuts. A man with no dimmer switch. And everything he had done for the past two days he did to help them out of a bind. Mark cursed himself again for being so quick to use his partner’s dead body to step out of his own grave. He couldn’t do it. He still needed Cary.
By now the whole force would be looking for her. She would be implicated in the deaths of her friend out by Graffiti Creek, Karen Webster, and now Jolly. Mark knew they’d be looking for him, too. If they caught up with him now, it would look fishy. But if he tracked down Cary, put her down in self-defense? Well, he would look like a cop trying to do right by his partner. Everybody would respect that. He might get looked at pretty hard, but it would drag out for months, maybe a year. If the world would hold together for ten and a half months, he’d offer to retire and they’d jump at the bait. Mark Thompson may not receive a hero’s send-off, but he didn’t mind. Heroes die bloody. Cops with a little dirt on their hands make it home in time to wash up for dinner.
If he was going to find Cary, he would need a few things. With his car gone, he needed a police scanner. He couldn’t keep one step ahead if he didn’t know where they were headed. He would also need some help. Reynard was still as much on the hook as he was, so he could count on him. Doyle was a wild card, but Marlowe was still useful. Cary possibly still trusted him, and all Marlowe cared about was getting his sister out of the crosshairs. Mark needed to convince him she was still in them. He also required a little walking around money. If they were going to start looking for him, he needed to stay off the grid until he could put Cary’s neck in his hands.
Among the many perks of being partnered w
ith Dick Jolly was the petty cash account he kept at a local bank. Jolly busted this bank president with a hooker when he worked vice. He recognized him from one newspaper photo of the grand opening of Spring Valley Bank and Trust. Mark glossed right over shit like newspaper clippings and lobby photos of board members. But not Jolly. The guy always worked an angle. And letting SVB&T’s president off with a little ribbing and a slap on the ass got Jolly and his partner a petty cash account at the downtown branch. They couldn’t go crazy, but there was always a few hundred available for an emergency. Mark had used it to pay a bum to testify in place of his girlfriend’s kid. Now he needed a couple hundred bucks to keep his credit card from showing up anywhere.
He called Reynard on his way and told him to meet him in the parking lot. While waiting, he strolled in and went to the designated teller. They were always changing, but this month it was a cute blonde college student with a titty tat peeking out of her blouse. She was sleepy-eyed and snarky. Jolly claimed to be in love with her. Mark sauntered up to the counter and tapped on the desk with a grin. The teller looked down at his two outstretched fingers. She jerked two hundred dollar bills from underneath the counter, jotted something down on a notepad, and Mark was on his way back to the Celica.
Reynard was waiting for him when he got out. He leaned against the Celica and smirked. “Nice piece of shit, Thompson.”
Mark scowled at him. “It’s Detective, Reynard. Shut the fuck up and get in.”
The two men got on either side of the front seat. Reynard glanced around casually. “Where’s Jolly?” Mark shot him a look and he hung his head. “Detective Jolly.”
Mark shook his head. “Don’t worry about Jolly. Did you get my scanner?”
Reynard handed over a radio he unclipped from his belt. “I checked the message board. Your boy wants to meet.”
Mark’s eyes widened. “Who?”
Reynard searched for the name. “Marlin, Martin, Marty…”
“Marlowe?”
Reynard pointed. “Marlowe. Yeah. The brother.”
Mark nodded. “Good. Message him back.” He pointed toward the bank with his head. “Tell him to meet me here. ASAP. In the lobby.”
Reynard pulled a cellphone out and started typing. “Want me to stick around?”
Mark shook his head. “No. I got this. I need you on the house. Good old fashioned stakeout, Reynard. Consider it a promotion.”
Reynard rolled his eyes and climbed out of the car. He called back, “Promotion my ass. Watch your six, Detective Thompson. And when you see Jolly tell him to suck my nuts.” He grinned and headed back to his car.
Mark smiled back. And then hung his head and let himself cry while he waited.
Chapter 29
Cary tried to focus on driving. The top of her head tingled with sweat and her brain filled with white noise and electric fuzz. Her tires screeched around the curves of the parking garage, but the road noise was overshadowed by a steady buzzing. A hum mixed with the shushing of a thousand locust wings eating at her thoughts. Her hands slipped on the wheel, jerking the car. When she erupted out of the garage into the street, she slid into a curb before spinning forward again.
Detective Jolly was dead. He had to be. Although she couldn’t look, the sound was horrific. It was the last noise she remembered over the rattling static in her head. No thought substantiated what she did. It was pure survival. Jolly, and the homeless giant, and Johnna… Johnna. Cary felt responsible for all of them. They were all dead. They had to be dead. No one could take a jagged board to the gut. No one could fall like that. He hit a car, she thought. The car alarm—she remembered the wailing now. And Thompson, screaming. He sobbed.
Cary shook her head. No. Don’t feel bad for the asshole. He wants to kill you. As she drove, she started feeling around in the console, the glove box, anywhere for something useful. She didn’t even know what she was looking for. And whatever it was, she didn’t find it. The two detectives were slobs, but they didn’t leave a trail of anything useful.
Doyle and Marlowe. She needed to find them. They may not be trustworthy, but Doyle saved her ass back at the Parker Building and Marlowe had helped her out of several tight spots. They were all she had. If there was another Cary Trubody, which she began to doubt, then all of this began with her. She needed to know why. And Doyle and Marlowe held more information than they let on. One of them tipped off Thompson and Jolly. And they definitely knew each other.
Cary took a sharp turn and heard a thudding rattle from the dashboard. She had been hearing the noise all along, but her brain just began to catch up. She pulled off into the parking lot of a fast food joint and parked. She fished around on the dashboard until she came back with a cell phone. It had to be Jolly’s. He must have left it in the car.
She pulled up his contacts, but they were a sea of initials and numbers and code names. There was no way to decipher Jolly’s system in time to do anything with it. She tapped the phone in her hand trying to think what would be available. Jolly was obviously a paranoid guy. Not the type to have an informative text or email. Sure enough, both were empty. So what do people forget to clear? She spent thirty valuable minutes lost in a Facebook app which yielded nothing. Jolly wasn’t the sharing type. Cary opened up Safari and flipped through the most recent pages: a lunch menu, a PDF of a police briefing, and an Internet chat room. Jolly didn’t strike her as the chat room type either.
Opening the chat room link up didn’t help much. It was on a Reddit thread. The message board heading read, “Ask a plumber…” Cary scrolled the messages and found nonsense. They weren’t even questions. Pure gibberish: a number or a location. Maybe arranging meets? The last one posted minutes ago. It read, “Spring Valley Bank, downtown, lobby, now.” It came from someone called “Gr8t8” in response to a post of a simple string of three question marks. From “Leander.”
Cary sat back and thought. Leander. Where was the name from? She recognized it. There was a Leander in mythology. Hero and Leander. She sat up. Hero and Leander was also a poem. By Christopher Marlowe.
She sped off in the direction of the bank. She had been there before. They offered to put fifty bucks in your account if you opened a checking with them. Anyone who’d been a poor twenty-something like Cary was familiar with Spring Valley Bank and Trust. Marlowe had to be meeting Thompson. Things had taken a shit turn, and they needed to regroup. She would much rather be going to find Doyle, but she would take whatever she got. And she had Thompson’s car. Maybe it would give her some leverage.
The bank’s parking lot was full enough for Cary to slip into a spot and hang back, unseen by anyone in or close to the building. The lobby of Spring Valley was huge, with several seating areas—comfortable chairs positioned around coffee tables littered with glossy magazines. Offices lined the lobby on all sides in an open plan. People huddled over desks to discuss loans and financial problems in private, but Cary had been in there before.
The thirty-foot ceilings swallowed all conversations. Spring Valley Bank and Trust had all the sound qualities of a large library. Along one wall sat a row of kiosks, but Spring Valley had an old-fashioned vibe. They still had about seven tellers lined up and waiting to pull the next number. She positioned herself where she could see most of the lobby and the front doors. And within minutes they slid open for someone familiar.
He got out of a car somewhere up the rows; Cary couldn’t tell which one. Luckily, he never turned back to see her, either. Mark Thompson surely would have recognized his own car. He shuffled inside with the beginnings of a limp—not like he had hurt himself, but more the way Cary’s uncle used to walk when his sciatica acted up. Cary followed Thompson as he hobbled over to a chair by a front window and plopped down with a foot on a stack of magazines like he owned the place. He sat and rubbed at his temples, waiting on someone else to show.
And they did. Marlowe drove up in a little black SUV. He parked and hopped out, headed for the front doors. Right behind him was Doyle. They were together. Whichever one
of them she hoped she could trust walked arm-in-arm with whichever one of them she knew she couldn’t.
The meeting between the three was terse. Cary felt the tension from across the parking lot. As she monitored them, she chewed at a thumbnail. This was it. She was out of people. There was no other Cary Trubody. No one on the police force, not even the chief—especially not the chief—was going to help her. The cavalry would not be showing up. Marlowe double-crossed her, Doyle abandoned her, Johnna died, and that fat jackass was still trying to kill her.
Cary caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror. She sighed. “Screw this.” She reached over, popped the trunk, and got out. Moving around to the back of the car, she started fishing around. What she hoped to find was shoved off to the side under an old police department sweatshirt. A shotgun. The only thing Cary ever learned about guns she assembled from a single duck hunting trip she went on with her grandfather when she was twelve. This shotgun was a pistol grip—it looked like something the dirty cops kept off of some street thug. But the principles had to be the same. Besides, she didn’t need shells; merely the threat—a way out once she got in.
With the gun tucked up under her ripped dress, Cary started the long walk to the front doors of the bank. This was insane. But what was left for her to do? She had been running for two days now. It was time to stop running. If Thompson wanted her dead, she was going to make him kill her somewhere it would be captured on film. These cops did anything they wanted, but once she caught them on film they’d go from gods to monsters in one viral video. It was the least she could do. For Johnna.
By the time she got within twenty feet of the doors, Marlowe, Doyle, and Thompson all turned to stare at her with wide eyes. She read Thompson’s lips as he shook his head and said, “What the fuck?”
Cary kept the shotgun concealed in her dress as she worked her way inside and over to the last empty chair around the table by the window. Her back was to the window, with Marlowe across from her. Doyle was to her left and Thompson to her right. Doyle and Marlowe sat up with their hands or elbows on their knees, but Thompson kicked back with his legs crossed. Cary tried to mimic his posture without revealing the gun up her dress. She looked at each of them. “You guys didn’t tell me you started a book club. I want in. What are we doing? Romance?” She raised her hand. “Who likes erotica?”
