Crime Plus Music (25 page)

I wouldn't be able to sleep again, I knew it, and I panicked. My mind was filled with naked bodies, with hands and mouths and blood. I walked down the hall, took up Debbie's perch on the step stool by the phone, and punched in the number I knew by heart even though it was maybe a year and a half since I used it.

“Jesse? It's me.”

“Oh, hey.” His voice was deep and strange, sleepy and grown sounding.

“Can you talk?” I asked.

“What time is it?”

“I don't know. Late. Could we play the game?”

“Huh?” Jesse's voice went higher and I recognized it now.

“You know. The radio? I have to be quiet, but I'll be able to hear yours.”

I didn't come out and say I knew his father was probably passed out drunk in his recliner and wouldn't hear his radio.

“Yeah, all right. Hang on.”

I heard the muffled sound of him fumbling with his blankets and then his radio came on.

“
. . . I had to take her upstairs for a ride . . .”

“Stones! Point for me!” he whispered emphatically, like a quiet shout. “Hey, they're coming to the Gator Bowl this summer.”

Jesse and I must have started playing this game of Name That Tune when we were seven or eight, in our moms' cars, at the beach with his little transistor radio, and best of all, on the phone after our parents went to bed. I fell back into it like no time had passed. I felt his cheek pressed against his black phone, and saw his dark brown bangs hanging messy over his closed eyes. I remembered how long Jesse's lashes were, and how his nose whistled while he slept, his round cheeks turned pink and hot, and his curls matted into small circles that stuck to his forehead with sweat. He spent the night here when his mom worked late waiting tables like mine. It seemed normal. It felt safe. I listened to the light sound of Jesse's breath and try and slow mine down to meet his. I wanted that young, easy feeling to come back to me, but I had to ask.

“Jesse, do you think it's true? Do you think that could've happened out in Palm Valley and we know nothing about it?”

Jesse didn't answer right away, and we listened to the twangy guitars and bursts of cowbell of “Honky Tonk Woman” for a while.

“I don't know. Probably not. That was totally ridiculous,” he said when the song ended. “But, then again, that kind of stuff happens all the time. Not the bikers and the tree and all, but the rest.”

“Don't say that. That can't be true.”

Jesse heaved a big sigh and rustles his blankets.

“Haven't you ever noticed the fliers outside the grocery store? Missing girls? Don't you ever watch the news?” He was talking louder now, annoyed.

“Not around here, though,” I whispered.

“Why not here? The whole world is the same, everywhere you go.” Jesse sounded so sure.

The radio let out a watery, warbling sound so familiar it was a thrill to hear, a mix of voices and effected guitar, then drums kicked in and the whole band fired up. Jesse and I started singing at the same time, in perfect harmony just like Steven Tyler and Joe Perry,
“Sweeeeeet Emoooooootion . . .”

“Aerosmith,” I said fast, “My point.”

“Too easy,” Jesse whispered.

We sang every word to the whole song, but for the first time the lyrics seemed mean and ugly:

“
Some sweet hog mama with a face like a gent . . .”

I tried not to pay too much attention. I tried to stay with the lush sounds and keep away from the girl they're singing about. When it was over and the DJ starts talking, the girl in the story came right back to me.

I said, “It's worse than if they killed her.”

“That's nuts,” Jesse said.

“They put a bottle in her, Jesse.” I whispered. “A bat!”

Jesse cracked a mean little laugh, his breath escaping in a dismissive rush.

“You're awful,” I said.

“Sorry. I actually think that's physically impossible. Miss Walker saw that in a movie or something. Why would she know all those things about it? Like what she was wearing and all?”

I didn't have an answer. My stomach hurt and the top of the step stool was hard under my bottom. My hair was still damp and clean but my sheet and T-shirt were sweaty. Jesse was all snuggled in his warm bed and I was sitting here, uncomfortable. It all made me mad.

“You don't understand. You don't have to and you never will. Something gets crushed inside that you can't fix when you are raped. That's worse than death.” I didn't know how I knew this, and it was like Jesse read my thoughts.

“How do you know? You've never even kissed anybody.”

“God, what does that have to do with anything?”

A delicate guitar line, pretty and sad, started a new song.

“Oh, Perfect. Alice Cooper, ‘Only Women Bleed,'” Jesse said, “I'm winning.”

It's true, I thought. I'm losing and I'm bleeding. I could feel my cheeks go hot with shame when I imagined telling Jesse about my period. We quietly listened to the spooky, pretty song about a man hurting his wife.

“. . . he slaps you once in a while and you live in love and pain . . .”

“Do you think the girl could have been Denise?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Denise, from last year. Mrs. Johansen's class. Do you think maybe that's why Denise's mom took her out of school and moved her away?”

“Nah, why would you think that? Her folks just got a divorce and moved.”

“But they lived in a trailer,” I said. “Not in Palm Valley, but it was out in the woods somewhere. We never did see her again or hear anything after her mom took her out of school. She had a white dress, too.”

“Don't you have a white dress? And she said the girl didn't go to school. Why are you making this such a big deal?”

I heard the whirling static of Jesse changing the station, stopping at a nasty guitar riff.

“. . . I feel like making love! Feel like making love! Feel like making love to you!”

“Uh . . .” I say.

“You don't know this one?” Jesse asked, sarcastic.

“Yes, I do. It's Sweet, the band not the song. It's dirty.”

“Nope. It's Bad Company! I'm still winning.” I could hear Jesse grinning, and he suddenly seemed stupid and younger than me. I thought of all the stories in all of the songs I knew and it made me shake inside. It didn't matter if Sherry Walker's story was true or not. There were a million other stories just like it, some true and some made up, but all of them were awful and all of them were about women doing wrong in one way or another. A private, peaceful place inside me was filling up with confusion. From now on, I wouldn't even be able to hide inside of songs.

“Why is every song about sex or women getting hurt or being awful?” I asked.

“Don't be a bitch,” Jesse said, flat. He sounded just like his daddy.

“Wow,” I said. “Fuck you, Jesse!” I hung up. It was ruined.

I waited for a few minutes, but he didn't call back.

I
WENT
BACK
TO
MY
room and turned on my bedside light. I opened my closet and slipped my white dress from Easter off its special padded hanger and threw it on the floor. I pulled off mom's T-shirt and smoothed out the sheets on my narrow bed. Laying on my side in my underwear and awkward maxi pad, I stared at the Rolling Stones poster on my wall. Now even the cartoon lips parted by the fat red tongue disgusted me. Why did Sherry Walker plant this girl inside of me? What good would scaring me do? Was her story supposed to terrorize Jesse and the boys too? It didn't seem to. Jesse wasn't thinking about that girl and how she had to live her whole life always thinking of those men hurting her. Every time anyone touched her, she'd remember. Every damn pine tree, every motorcycle or extension cord she ever saw would be like a poisonous snake wrapped around her ankle, rearing back to strike.

I leaned over the edge of my bed and saw a dusty extension cord and yanked it out of the wall. I wasn't really thinking; I had slipped inside the girl's scraped knees. Her bloody thighs and cut-up wrists were mine. I tasted her metallic fear in my mouth and I wanted to feel it. I wrapped the end of the cord around my left wrist and looped it through the iron post of my headboard. I pulled the cord tight and twisted it around my wrist again before I made a double knot. I laid back on my pillow. It hurt. I couldn't straighten my tied arm, but I tugged it a few times just to test it. The plastic coating over the wires pulled at my arm hair like a burn. I wished I had thought to turn off the over head light. I closed my eyes and concentrate. I tried to feel their heavy bodies pressing against me, one after the other, the rough beards scraping my face. I tried to smell their sour breath and hear their hooting laughs, and I tried not to feel afraid.

I knew the end of the story. I knew we get away, the girl and I, so I explored it. I imagined hiding in the deepest part of myself where no one could touch me. I put one finger slowly inside myself to see what it would feel like to be entered, and an immediate warmth rose up through my legs. The men disappeared and the night sky arched over my head, a dizzy dome of clear white stars. I let myself settle against the strong body of the tree and felt the cold piney breeze on my skin. The tight cord melted off of my wrists and ankles and my body was free. Before I understood what I was feeling, a stunning pleasure began in my belly. I kept my finger inside and waited for the sensation to stop, but it built up like pressure. It felt so good. I didn't think about what I was doing and just did it. I let go of the story and went deeper into my body. Behind my closed eyes was an eclipsed, molten sun, a velvety black orb surrounded by wisps of golden light. I was rocking in a warm explosion that made my limbs tingle and sing as the orb moves away and the light became blinding. Every bit of fear and confusion and shame was simply gone: melted, evaporated, vaporized. It was the most beautiful feeling I had ever felt and I rested inside of it for a long time. Then my heartbeat slowed, my breathing deepened and sleep finally took me down.

I
N
THE
MORNING
, C
ARRIE
CAME
skipping down the hall and threw her little pajamaed body against my door until it swung wide. She had her stuffed blue rabbit in a headlock and something that looks like pink milk was smudged around her mouth.

“What are you doing?” she called to me.

“What time is it?” I said, sitting up straight until my tied up arm pulls me back down flat.

“Who cares? It's Saturday! Jim is making pancakes! Hey . . . why is your hand like that?”

“I was playing a game,” I said weakly. Carrie stood above me, leaning her waist against the edge of the bed, looking down at my wrist. It's marked with red streaks, the extension cord still tightly wrapped. I reached up to untie myself and saw that my other hand was covered in dried blood. I quickly hid it under the sheet, mortified by the memory.

“What kinda game gets your hand tied up?” she asked.

“It doesn't matter now. Anyway, I won,” I said. “Get out of my room.”

“It don't look like you won, ” Carrie said bouncing back up the hall into the kitchen.

O
N
M
ONDAY
MORNING
, I
FELT
queasy and uncertain as I watched the bus slow to a halt at my stop. I wasn't sure how I would greet Miss Walker. But when the glass doors folded open, at the top of the steps in her high black seat sat an old black man with puffy white hair and a brushy white mustache.

“Good morning!” he said.

I was too surprised to answer him and too shaken by Miss Walker's absence to sit in my usual seat. I walked all the way to the back of the bus and took the empty seat across from Jesse's usual spot. I saw that Davy was absent too and wondered if he freaked out and told his parents about Sherry Walker's story. Maybe he got her fired.

When Jesse climbed the steep steps into the hull of the bus two stops later, he didn't even look up; he was busy digging around in his bag. He finally pulled out a magazine and folded it in half, looked me in the eye with a little smile and cocked it toward me twice before I raised my hands to show I was ready to catch it. Jesse tossed it, then slid in the seat across the aisle and watched my face.

I opened the fold to the glossy cover of Ultimate Outlaw Magazine, the smell of Jesse's dad's cigarettes wafting up out of its warped pages, and there it is.

A blond woman in a white bikini with hair to her waist and black makeup tears streaked down her cheeks was chained to a tree. All around her were men in black leather jackets straddling motorcycles, leering, awful looks on their faces. There was a huge bonfire raging behind them. The biggest man was standing right in front of her, his back to the camera, holding a big silver knife.

“I told you it wasn't true,” Jesse said.

VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING

BY TYLER DILTS

I
T
WAS
THE
PHOTO
THAT
got to Beckett. An old black-and-white eight-by-ten, yellowing around the edges, in a timeworn black frame. In it, a man wearing nothing but a bathing cap, Speedo briefs, and sneakers was lying prone on an ancient motorcycle, his arms reaching forward to the narrow handlebars, his crotch perched over the rear wheel, and his legs extended back into the air while he Supermanned across the desert floor.

The old dead man had the photo in his lap when he shot himself and some of the blood spatter had misted the glass. He hadn't done a very good job of it. The muzzle of the snub-nosed revolver wasn't angled squarely at the center of his skull and the bullet ripped open his forehead. A flap of skin and bone hung down over his right eye. Beckett wondered if there had been enough damage to the brain to kill him, or if he'd bled out. Either way, he was still just as dead.

Beckett took a closer look at the revolver. It was an old Smith & Wesson Chief's Special, with ivory grips and the bluing worn away around the edges of the barrel and cylinder from years of holster carry.

It was the hospice nurse who found the body. She came every Tuesday and Friday afternoon. Drove her Corolla all the way to the far end of the trailer park where the wall backed up against the refinery on the other side. Only two times a week, she told Beckett, that's all they could do with his Medicaid benefits. Should have seen him at least twice as often.

His name was Burke and he had liver cancer that would have ended his life within two or three months if the .38 hadn't done it last night. Judging by the condition of the body, it had probably been less than eight hours, and Beckett wondered if the act had been timed so the nurse would find him before the neighbors detected the smell. It was the middle of winter, but in Long Beach that didn't mean much. Still, it would have contained the putrid odor a little longer, and with the burnt-oil stench drifting over the wall it probably would have delayed discovery of the body another day or two.

Beckett let the crime scene technicians do their work and went back outside.

The uniforms who had responded to the nurse's 911 call had cordoned off the small area outside Burke's door between his dilapidated trailer and the next one up the row. There wasn't much room along the narrow drive that led from the street to the back of the park, only enough for the crime scene investigator's and coroner's vans, so Beckett walked the hundred-plus yards out to Cherry Avenue to where he'd parked his unmarked cruiser along the curb behind the black and whites. He opened the trunk, unzipped his big black duty bag, and dug around inside until he found it—the small .380 in its nylon ankle holster. It didn't see much use anymore. Beckett had worn it religiously when he'd been in uniform, but even then he'd always hated the feel of the thing, the lopsidedness of it, like having an ankle weight on only one leg. He bent over, pulled up his cuff, and velcroed it snugly into place.

Stan Burke, a veteran patrol sergeant who also happened to be the dead man's son, was waiting for him in the driver's seat of one of the squad cars. Beckett bent over and leaned into the passenger-side window. A song was playing on the phone Stan held in his hand. Even through the tinny little speaker, Beckett recognized Richard Thompson's distinctive acoustic finger picking. He'd been a fan for years. The bittersweet motorcycle ballad drifting across the front seat was one of his favorites.

“Hey, Danny,” Stan said to him. They'd known each other for years. He'd been the second Field Training Officer Beckett had worked with after graduating from the academy. And the best one, too, Beckett thought.

“Let's talk,” he said. There was a little grass area between the chain-link fence and the first row of trailers and they sat at an old wooden picnic bench under a jacaranda tree. A purple trace of the sunset still hung in the sky to the west.

Stan was wearing jeans and a dark-blue fleece vest over a T-shirt.

“You off duty today?”

He nodded.

Beckett crossed his legs. The bottom edge of the ankle holster poked out from under his cuff. “Where should we start?”

“I don't know.” If he was upset about his father's death, it didn't show.

“Were you close to him?”

“No,” Stan said. “Not at all.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Five days ago. That was the first time in over twenty years.”

Beckett nodded. “Why now?”

“He called me up out of the blue, said he was dying, asked if I'd come.”

“And you said ‘yes.'”

Stan shook his head and scoffed. “I told him to go fuck himself.”

“What changed your mind?”

“Carolyn.” His wife. Beckett had celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with them last summer. First time he'd ever had Cristal and finally learned what all the fuss was about. “She talked me into it. Thought it might give me closure or some shit like that.”

“And that was enough to change your mind?”

“Not really.”

“Then what did?”

Stan exhaled through his nose. Beckett could see that he didn't want to talk about this but knew he had to.

“There was this stupid old photograph he gave me when I was a little kid. Some idiot setting a motorcycle speed record back in the forties. He asked me if I still had it.”

“And you did.”

Stan nodded and looked off into the distance. The purple was gone from the sky.

“Tell me about it,” Beckett said.

S
TAN
'
S
EARLIEST
MEMORIES
WERE
OF
his father's old shovelhead Electra Glide, sitting in Jimbo's lap, his little knees straddling the fire-engine-red gas tank, not being able to reach the handlebars, his mother saying, “That's enough,” and pulling him off, burying his face in her red hair that smelled like apples.

That was his childhood. His father pulling him toward the Harley, his mother pulling him away. How old was he the first time Jimbo disappeared and left his mom bruised and crying, trying to hide it behind sunglasses and a blue silk scarf? Five? He must have been. Because he'd been at school and she brought him back to the empty house and told him father was gone for good this time. “Stay out of the kitchen,” she told him, “until I clean up this broken glass.”

He remembered being happy the first time his father returned, when he heard the shovelhead rumbling in the driveway, when he tore the brown paper wrapping off the present Jimbo had brought him, the framed black and white of Rollie Free flying across the Bonneville Salt Flats breaking the American motorcycle speed record on his Vincent Black Lightning. “A hundred-and-fifty miles an hour,” Jimbo said, “a hundred and fifty!” Together they hammered a nail into the wall and hung it over Stan's bed.

But that memory always bled into the next, his mother's broken eyes when she told him his father was gone again.

Somewhere along the way he learned what colors were and what the winged skull patch on the back of his father's leather vest meant.

The cycle went on and on. After six months, after a year, Jimbo would come back, break everything, then leave again.

The last time he got out of prison and tried to come home, Stan was twelve. He hid in his bedroom while they screamed at each other. “I'll cut you off,” Jimbo yelled again and again. But his mother held firm and after what seemed like a lifetime, Stan listened to the roar of the Electra Glide fade into the distance one last time.

His mom went downhill after that, and Stan always blamed himself for not understanding what was going on. A year and half later, when he came home from school and found her dead in the bathroom, they tried to explain to him that it wasn't an overdose, but a tainted batch of black tar. He couldn't understand why that mattered.

At her funeral, his grandparents, her parents, who until that point had only been vaguely remembered ghosts from his toddler years, told him he would be coming to live with them in Pomona. He only took a few things with him—a favorite brush of hers, with a few forgotten strands of her red hair tangled up in the bristles, the faded blue scarf she wore so often, and, for some reason he never understood, that damn photograph.

He only saw his father two times after that. The first was a decade later, when Stan was celebrating the end of his rookie year with the LBPD. He was in a bar downtown with several members of his academy class, when an old biker with a graying horseshoe mustache came up to him and congratulated him. Stan was confused until the recognition slowly washed over him and he broke the beer bottle in his hand on Jimbo's jaw. Before he knew it, his father was on his back on the floor and Stan was driving his fist again and again into the old man's face. It took two of his colleagues to pull him off. By the time the commotion settled and the on-duty cops arrived, someone had planted a switchblade in Jimbo's hand and three off-duty officer had made statements that they'd witnessed the old biker pull the knife and attack Stan with it.

And that was it, until five days ago. He came home to a voicemail on the landline from his father, pleading with him to return the call. Stan tried to delete it, but Carolyn wouldn't let him. “Talk to him,” she said.

The message was so pathetic it nauseated him.

“Ain't gonna insult you asking for forgiveness,” Jimbo said when Stan finally caved to his wife's pressure and made the call. “But I am gonna ask for one thing.”

“I
DIDN
'
T
EVEN
REALIZE
I still had the photo until I got up on a ladder in the garage and pulled the old box down out of the rafters,” Stan said to Beckett. “I put it in the dumpster during the last move, but Carolyn pulled it back out without telling me.”

“What happened when you saw him?”

Stan shook his head. “Nothing, really. I knocked on the door, he told me to come in. It was a mess, smelled like piss and death.” He sat there quietly for a few moments, as if he were replaying the scene in his head.

Beckett didn't press him, he just sat there, a sad smile on his face, waiting for Stan to fill the silence.

“He told me I looked good, I told him he didn't. He was all shriveled, like he'd been ground up from the inside out. But he still had that fucking mustache.” Stan knitted his eyebrows and looked down at the ground. “And if I'm going to tell you the truth, I was glad. Glad. I wanted him to suffer. I wish he still had a few months of misery left.”

“What else happened?” Beckett asked quietly.

“I gave him the picture. He said thank you. I left.”

“What did Carolyn say when you told her about it?”

“‘Sorry, I guess I was wrong.'”

Danny chuckled with him.

“Part of me hoped she was right, though, you know? That I'd feel something. Resolution or closure or some shit like that. But I don't. I don't feel anything.”

A uniform came up to them. “Detective Beckett?”

“Yes?”

“The coroner's ready to take the body. What should I tell him?”

“Unless he found something else, I'm ready to call it a suicide. Let him know I'll come find him in a minute.”

Beckett watched him walk back toward the crime scene. He crossed his legs again.

Stan looked down at the ankle rig. “What do you got there?”

Beckett pulled his cuff up to show him. “Glock .380,” he said.

“Good choice.”

“Remember that first day I rode with you?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“You wanted to see my backup. I didn't have anything to show you.”

Beckett saw the memory flash in Stan's eyes. He thought of the photograph of the man on the motorcycle in Jimbo's lap, misted with blood.

“You told me to always have a backup because you never know when you'll need it. Then you pulled out that Chief's Special with the ivory grips. I asked you if you'd ever used it. Remember what you said?”

Stan sat motionless, his head up, eyes fixed on the night sky.

“You said, ‘No, but I bet I will someday.'”

Beckett stood, put his hand on Stan's shoulder, and let it rest there for few seconds. “Give Carolyn my best,” he said. He turned away and heard the song on Stan's phone again, the melancholy guitar fading away behind him as he headed back.