Bone Key (12 page)

Chapter Fourteen

“You’re John Deal?” the old man asked doubtfully. “The one going to work for Stone?”

They’d helped him inside his house and propped him in a chair at the kitchen table, where he sat now, holding a towel full of ice cubes to the knot on his forehead.

“Have a look,” Deal said. He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to display his driver’s license.

The old guy checked the license, then peered into Deal’s face. “Not much of a picture,” he said.

Deal wasn’t going to argue that point. He glanced at Annie, who’d been on her cell phone, checking admissions at the emergency room at the only hospital on the island. She broke off the connection and shook her head dismissively at Deal. “No luck,” she said. “One drunk who was in a car accident, one woman in labor. That’s it.”

Deal turned to glance at the old man. “You think we ought to have you looked at?” he asked.

“For this?” the old man said, pulling the ice pack from his head. He glared at Russell. “I been hit harder by small children.”

“Take it easy,” Russell Straight said. He was standing in front of the sink, shaking his head. “You already caused enough trouble for one evening.”

The old man’s eyes flashed. “I didn’t cause trouble for nobody,” he said.

“You could have killed
us
,” Russell countered, gesturing at the ancient double-barreled shotgun that he’d propped in a far corner.

The old man snorted. “I fired straight up in the air, sonny-boy. I wanted you dead, you’d
be
dead.”

Deal gave Russell a warning glance, then turned back to the old man. “I just want to be sure I’ve got it straight. You’re Dequarius’ grandfather—”

“
Great
-grandfather,” the old man corrected.

“Great-grandfather,” Deal repeated. “How about telling me your name?”

The guy took a last look at Deal’s license, then folded the wallet and handed it back across the table. “Spencer is my name,” he said. “Ainsley Spencer. And don’t ask me for any driver’s license because I don’t have one.” He glared up at Russell. “Never have, never will.”

“Take it easy,” Russell said.

The old man ignored him, turning back to Deal. “I was asleep when they come for Dequarius,” he said. “If I hadn’t been, maybe I could’ve helped.” Despite the jut of his jaw, his eyes had reddened as he spoke, and Annie put a soothing hand on his shoulder.

The phone still lay in a corner of the kitchen where someone had tossed it, its cord ending in a multi-hued snarl where it had snapped. One of the shotgun blasts had peppered the front of an old Kelvinator refrigerator, and another had torn out a gouge of plaster beside the back door. There was a smear of blood at the doorjamb and other spatters on the back stoop, which the old man had pointed out to them a few moments before.

“I don’t understand why the police aren’t here,” Annie said, staring at Deal, who thought of that growling voice he’d heard on the telephone.
Perhaps they’ve been and gone
, he might have told her, but it was only a fleeting thought.

“That’s just the way it is here in the quarter,” Ainsley Spencer said. “We don’t bother the
po
lice, and they don’t bother with us.”

“Even if someone gets shot?” she said in disbelief.

“Specially if someone gets shot,” he said, fixing his red-rimmed gaze upon her.

“What about Dequarius?” she persisted. “He could have been hurt.”

The old man glanced at the scarred wall across from him. “He’s someplace he don’t want to be found,” the old man said. “Not till the ones who came after him get taken care of. What do you think I was doing out there?”

“But the police could help—”

“Give it a rest, Annie,” Deal broke in. She glared at him, about to protest, then clamped her lips shut and turned away, her arms folded tightly to her chest.

Deal turned back to Ainsley Spencer. “Do you have any idea where Dequarius might have gone?”

The old man stared at him for a moment, then turned away.

Deal followed his gaze to the smear of blood by the doorjamb. “How about the people who were here, Mr. Spencer?”

“That was my father’s name,” the old man said quietly, still staring at the blasted doorway. “Mine is Ainsley.”

Deal nodded assent. “Ainsley it is, then,” he said, still waiting for an answer.

The old man turned back to him. “Dequarius had him a few run-ins, of course…”

“A
few
?” It was Russell, still shaking his head.

“As I can tell you have,” the old man countered, nodding at one of the jailhouse tattoos curling from beneath Russell’s shirtsleeve. It stopped Russell, and the old man turned back to Deal. “They was white, that’s about all I can say, because I heard them talking while I was getting my gun out from under the bed. By the time I made it into the kitchen, they was gone, all of them.”

“You think Dequarius got away?”

The old man glanced at the smear of blood on the doorjamb. “I think he’d still be lying out there if they got him good,” he said.

Deal glanced at Russell, then back at the old man. “Your grandson called me just before this happened—” Deal began.

“Great-grandson,” the old man interjected.

“Right,” Deal said.

“I only got one great-grandson,” the old man continued.

“We were still on the phone when the shooting started.”

The old man simply shook his head.

“I’m wondering what it was he wanted,” Deal said.

The old man gave Deal a neutral look. “He wouldn’t have told me, that’s for sure.”

“He usually tell you when he’s got some scheme cooked up?” Russell asked.

The old man glanced coolly at Russell. “The boy sells a little weed sometimes, but that’s mostly in the neighborhood, and this man here don’t seem the type.” He finished with a nod at Deal.

Deal cut a glance at Annie, but her gaze stayed on Ainsley Spencer. “Sometimes he peddles some trinkets to the tourists, too,” he added, this time to Deal. “But you don’t strike me as stupid, either.” He shrugged then, as if that ended the matter.

Deal sat back in his chair, wondering just what he should do next. Comb the island for Dequarius Noyes? Without some clue as to his whereabouts, he doubted he could find the boy if he had a cordon holding hands and marching from one end of the town to the other.

Sleep was a prime consideration, another part of his mind suggested. His head was hollow with fatigue, his body drained. There was an acrid taste in his mouth, still lingering from the dope he’d smoked, he supposed, and a soreness in the small of his back, courtesy of Deputy Conrad’s fists.

There was the undeniable upside of Annie Dodds’ presence at his side, but even that was leavened by the knowledge that she was involved in some as-yet-undetermined way with Franklin Stone. Add to all that the events of the past hour, and he was more than ready to put this day into rewind. Go to sleep, wake up, and discover that some of this mess had been a dream.

He rubbed his face with his hands and glanced around the kitchen, trying to bring some focus to his thoughts. Save for the blood and the buckshot scars, it was a tidy place, which somehow seemed at odds with his impression of Dequarius Noyes. “It’s just you and Dequarius who live here?”

The old man nodded.

“How about his parents?” Deal asked.

The old man lifted his shoulders in a barely perceptible motion. “His momma passed a few years back. I couldn’t tell you where his daddy might be.”

Deal took it in with a nod. “You mind if I look at his room?” he asked the old man. Maybe there was something there that would give him a hint of what the kid had been up to, or where he might have gone.

The old man gave him a sharp glance, then seemed to relent. He gestured down a hallway that led away from the kitchen. “Help yourself. The one on the right is mine. Across the hall is Dequarius’.”

Deal stood and walked out of the brightly lit room into the dim recess of the hall. A few paces along, he caught a glimpse of the old man’s neatly arranged room through an open doorway—single bed, oak dresser, padded rocker—then turned to the facing door and nudged it open. He found the light just inside the jamb and snapped it on.

Dequarius’ was a small room as well, with its own chenille-covered single bed, a painted chest of drawers, and a small desk with a wooden straight chair drawn up in its knee-hole. Nearly as tidy as the old man’s digs, Deal thought with renewed surprise. Either Dequarius had learned a few things or the old man kept house for the both of them.

He crossed to the closet and pulled it open to loosen a faint smell of marijuana as well as expose a few pairs of slacks and an array of basketball jerseys on hangers. There was a stack of shoe boxes on the shelf, one of which he suspected held something other than the advertised brand of sneakers. On the floor below the clothing was a pair of scuffed black work boots and a wooden tennis racket with its strings exploded. He was about to close the closet door, taken with the image of Dequarius Noyes loping around a tennis court in Afro, baggy shorts, and Heat jersey, when he noticed something else and paused.

He swung the closet door open wide, to be sure it wasn’t just a trick of the light. But the image remained: In the corner opposite the boots and the blasted racket was a perfect rectangle outlined by dust. Dequarius’ housekeeping skills had certain limits, Deal saw, squatting down to run his finger through the thin film of dust covering the opposite half of the closet floor. There’d been a box or carton here until recently, he realized, though just how long ago it had been removed was open to conjecture.

He sniffed at the pungent odor emanating from the closet again, wondering if that, in fact, was what had prompted the invasion and shooting. Someone after Dequarius’ stash.

Deal stood and began going through the boxes on the top shelf. The first box, in fact, held a pair of sneakers—an outlandish zebra-striped pattern, their soles worn smooth—as did the second, in this case a black leather pair with red lights that still raced about the perimeter of one heel when Deal jiggled the container. Not the thing to wear when fleeing the scene of a crime, Deal thought. Maybe that’s why they seemed scarcely used.

The third box was so heavy it nearly plunged to the floor when he pulled it from the shelf. Inside he found a glittering array of treasure—treasure of a sort, anyway. Golden coins stamped from a press, shiny silver bracelets, pendants bearing bits of colored glass; it wouldn’t take a genius to spot it for carnival loot, Deal thought, replacing the lid. If Dequarius Noyes had made a living selling crap like this, he deserved every penny of it.

He slid the heavy shoe box back in its place and brought down the next, as feathery light as the last had been brick heavy. He glanced at the label skeptically. If there was indeed a pair of Reebok running shoes inside, then he was going to scour
Runner’s World
for a matching set the moment he got back to Miami.

The odor that struck him the instant he loosened the top told him his suspicions had been correct, however. He removed the top and glanced at the contents—the dark green buds obscured beneath what looked like doubled Ziploc bags—already discounting his earlier theories about the invasion. He put the top back on and replaced the Reebok box, then found three more on the shelf very nearly like it: Nike, Adidas, and Tommy Hilfiger.

Deal stared at the line of boxes, had a sudden vision of Dequarius out on the street, offering his wares by brand. “Now your Adidas ain’t bad, but your Tommy, that’s some bad shit, my man. And your Nike is one-hit city…” He shook his head and swung the closet door shut, wondering what had been so intriguing inside that carton missing from its spot on the floor.

He crossed to the desk, scanning its bare top, then slid the chair back to get at the single drawer. Inside, he found a scattering of pens and pencils, and a pad with the telephone number for the Pier House scrawled on the top page, beneath it some random doodlings and scribblings. “Vino, vidi, vici,” Deal read in one corner, the familiar phrase misspelled but triple underlined, as if Dequarius—street corner scholar—had been planning some major campaign of his own. He tore off the page and folded it into his pocket, then went to join the others, snapping off the light as he went.

When he walked back into the kitchen, he noted that Russell Straight was staring at him with a defiant look, as if Deal might be somehow responsible for Dequarius’ hard road. Deal turned back to the old man. “You sure you don’t want to talk to the police?”

The old man stared at him tolerantly. “Mr. Deal, I appreciate you coming over here on account of Dequarius and all…” He trailed off, his gaze traveling to the shotgun propped in the corner. “…And I feel bad if I scared you all.” He put the bunched towel down on the tabletop between them and gave his earnest gaze to Annie. “But it’s like I say, there’s just no point to getting the police involved.”

“But if Dequarius is hurt—” Annie cut in.

“The police don’t care about Dequarius, ma’am,” Spencer said gently. “That’s one thing we know for sure. When he wants us to hear from him, that’s when we’ll hear.”

She stared back at him, ready to jump out of her skin with frustration, or so it seemed. “Look at that bump on your head,” she said after a moment. “We ought to have
that
looked at, at least.”

The old man mustered a weary smile for her. “A couple of aspirin and a good night’s sleep, I’ll be just fine.”

“Where do you keep your aspirin?” she said. She stood, glancing at Deal and Russell as if daring them to interfere with these small ministrations.

Spencer pointed over Russell’s shoulder. “In the cabinet there,” he said.

Deal watched as Annie brushed by Russell and pulled open a tall cabinet door above the sink. As she rummaged about, he caught a glimpse of a box of Kix—his daughter Isabel’s favorite cereal—a bag of rice, and what looked like a bottle of wine. In a moment Annie was back with the aspirin and a glass of water she’d drawn from the tap.

She shook a couple of aspirins into her palm and handed them to the old man, along with the water. As he dutifully swallowed the pills, Deal opened his wallet and found a card. He copied the number of his room at the Pier House on the back and handed it to Spencer. “If you hear from Dequarius, would you let me know?”