Dangerous Attachments (Dr. Sylvia Strange Book 1) (14 page)

T
HE PERMANENTLY SUNBURNED
bulk of Bubba Akins filled the doorway of the examination room of North's hospital. He shot Rosie a puzzled look and slapped his fat thighs. "I thought I was gettin' a shot or somethin'."

Rosie stood and motioned to a chair. She held her breath when Akins sat, but somehow the wood accommodated his great mass. "I wanted somewhere we could talk without interruption," Rosie said.

For a moment there was only the sound of his labored breath. His nose had been pulverized so many times it lay flat against his doughboy face.

Rosie examined him carefully. The perfect white supremacist, she thought: mean eyes, florid skin, the body of a giant oak. A chill ran down her body.

As if he read her thoughts, Akins shot her a lewd smirk. "I can't think of anythin' you and I have to talk abou'. . ." He dropped the phonic at the end of a word like he was too lazy to keep his lips working.

"Wrong, Bubba," Rosie answered.

Bubba Akins's response was to shrug his thick shoulders and rework his lips into a wet grin.

"You earned yourself a reputation," Rosie said.

Bubba's grin widened.

"Too bad that reputation can't help you on visiting day." She returned his smile. "I hear you've been talking to the compliance monitor."

The smile didn't waiver, but Akins's blue button eyes hardened.

"I thought maybe we could make sure there's no mix-up with Shug." Rosie kept her voice steady, then she
crossed her arms and waited for the thought to sink in. She could almost hear the whine of Akins's brain grinding away on all three cylinders. She began slowly, "It's so long ago now, and since I wasn't here . . . I need someone with an accurate memory of the riot."

"Yeah. . ."

Rosie felt her way around the approach to Akins and decided direct was best. "I need to know about
el chacal
. The jackal." To her surprise, Akins laughed, a breathless snorting hoot.

"Yeah . . . the jacka'. People been lookin' for him for years. You want to know who lifted that pretty little beaner's finger?" Bubba Akins shifted his bulk to the edge of the chair so two legs rose from the floor. "The jacka' shoulda cut off that dirty homie's dick, steada his finga."

"Who is it, Bubba?"

"I ain't no snitch." Bubba Akins shook his head, "That all the problem you got, pretty señorina?" He smiled. "I think the warden after your sweet ass, huh? You don't catch this body snatcha, this hungry ghost, the warden gonna blame you when the riot goes down." He wagged a finger at Rosie. "But, I don't know nothin'. We talk 'bout nothin'. I jus' here for a shot of somethin'."

"Does the jackal exist? Tell me who he is. You could stop another riot."

"Riot? You talkin' to me 'bout a riot?" With a finger digging at his nose, Bubba Akins said, "Talk 'bout my sweet Shug, 'stead. The lady been treated real bad. Hell of a time gettin' in to see her sugardaddy."

Rosie emphasized each word: "It won't happen again."

Bubba smiled. "The jacka' exist and he happy to see
anotha riot. He got a job to do. Riot jus' make his job easier." He stood up, and his three hundred pounds redistributed themselves along his frame.

Rosie wasn't ready to let him go. When she blocked his way, she had to tilt her chin skyward to see his face. "What kind of job? You mean kill someone?"

"Yes, ma'am. He gonna take somebody out." He stared at Rosie so long that sweat beaded and dripped from under her arms. Finally, he smiled and his eyes disappeared under pink lids. "The way things go, you might tell your friend, the one with the legs, she be careful."

Rosie stopped breathing. "You mean Dr. Strange? Is he trying to kill—"

"And you should watch out for yourself, too."

"Bubba—"

"Gotta go." He moved forward and Rosie had no choice but to step out of the doorway. He said, "The jacka' don' botha me none. These days, lots of folks got a hunger for the dead." For a moment, his bulk blacked out the lights in the hall, then he turned the corner and vanished.

T
HE JACKAL LET
the bucket dance against his leg as he navigated the stairway that led down to the shop areas. A new C.O. was supposed to be on day duty, but his post was empty. The jackal hummed to himself, "I did it my way."

Several inmates lounged against the walls outside the wood shop. Their blue shirts hung open, exposing white T-shirts. The piercing scream of electric saw and drill shattered the air. No one paid much attention to the jackal as he disappeared into a utility room next to the shops.

Cobwebs drifted from the sagging ceiling tiles. A soiled mattress leaned against the naked block wall. Rags were piled in one corner along with several mildewed textbooks. Home sweet home. The jackal settled himself between the mattress and the rags.

He took a square of butcher paper from his pocket and creased and folded it neatly. When he peered down into his bucket, pine fumes assaulted his nasal passages and made his normally labored breathing even more difficult.

Inmate Daniel Swanson's penis, a gray morsel, drifted rhythmically to and fro in an inch of cleaning fluid. It had not aged well during the week since Swanson had cut it off. The jackal acknowledged a momentary pang of disappointment but shook off the feeling. Science was so often the collaboration of many not-so-impressive parts fused into the Lord's magnificence.

Word in the joint was that Daniel Swanson wanted his penis back. The jackal felt no remorse. If you couldn't take care of your things, you didn't deserve to keep them.

The pint of wood preservative was stored in its usual place—the hollow center of a loose cinder block. The jackal used his finger as a tool, pried off the lid and brushed the pungent oil over flesh and butcher paper.

Today, as he began his military fold, he was distracted by thoughts of his younger sister. After Nam—all that dirty business—she had been brutally disappointed in her hopes for her brother. But there was still time to change all that, to renew her faith in him.

He thought, also, of the nosy shrink. She wrote a book about inmates, and Lucas Watson had showed it
around and bragged that she was going to get him out of the joint. She was a snafu, all right. But the jackal didn't kill casually these days. Maybe, if she backed off, he would let her live.

Satisfied that the treatment was complete and his new package was ready to go into storage, the jackal tidied up, took a moment to disappear inside himself, and left the utility room. Walking the hall, surrounded by a stream of inmates exiting the shop areas, he was as obtrusive as air.

B
ILLY
W
ATSON DRAINED
the last of the beer in an effort to chase away the sickening taste of cops, courts, and lawyers. Hours of interrogation with that dick-ass cop Matt England—not to mention the arraignment when he was forced to talk to his dick lawyer Herb Burnett—had made him crazy. The old man put up the seventy-five grand bail bond, but didn't show his face in public. Big fucking surprise. Assisting an escape and conspiracy. With his old man pulling strings, Billy knew he could walk.

He got out of the 'vette, slammed the door, and traversed a rough stone walkway. Broken leaves scuttled like tiny crabs across the porch of the white house on Lena Street and came to rest on the welcome mat. Curtains covered the windows facing the street, and a large sign with black block lettering against a white plywood background hung near the door:
TATTOOS.
And in smaller letters,
RING BELL.

Billy hunched both shoulders as if an invisible weight had settled on his leather jacket. He took a last drag off his cigarette and tossed the butt on the sidewalk. It took him a moment to find the doorbell, a tiny
steel nipple hidden high on the edge of the door frame. While he waited, he watched cars pulling into the parking lot at the corner. The Sabrosa restaurant was popular with the lunch crowd. State secretaries in high heels and tight skirts maneuvered between parked cars and potholes. A charmed snake, Billy watched their hips dancing under winter clothes.

He rang the bell again, then opened the door and entered what looked like a living room. Even in dim light, the furniture was visibly threadbare. A pillow rested in the elbow of a vinyl sofa, a braided rug covered the linoleum floor, and a pay telephone was mounted on the wall. His attention fixed on the myriad tattoo designs above the sofa. Snakes, skulls, and guns. Breasts, blondes, and buttocks. Saints. Virgins.

He inhaled deeply and pushed his hair away from his face. A feeling of sudden relief surprised him and propelled him into action. There were two interior doors in the room. He opened one and stared at the upturned face of a man seated at a desk. The man was whip-thin, and he had leathery skin, long black braids, and restless eyes. Two sheets of paper, pencils, and packets of disposable needles were spread in front of him. A cord extended to a circuit in the ceiling.

"You're Gideon," Billy said flatly.

The man stared.

"You did a tattoo for my brother." He took two steps into the room and sat down on a wooden stool. "You remember the tattoo you did for Lucas? It was five years ago."

"You got a picture?"

Billy pulled two Polaroids from his jacket pocket.

Gideon stared down at the Virgin of Guadalupe. The
fluidity of line, the depth and perspective, the detail work—this Madonna was beautiful. A man worked a lifetime to achieve some small speck of perfection. Gideon knew his art was parasitic; when the host died, so did his art. He grunted in recognition. "Yeah, she's mine."

"That's what I want," Billy said.

"I never repeat anything, man. It's part of my art."

Billy leaned over the stool and shook his head. "Not this time, bro. This time it's got to be the same . . . line for line." He set his wallet on the table. A thick fringe of bills was visible.

Gideon stared at the money, then licked his lips and nodded.

I
N THE CAFETERIA,
a line had formed for chow. The jackal bypassed this, nodding greetings to C.O.s Salcido and Mora. He waved at Joseph "Greasy" Spoon, who had been running the kitchen almost as far back as the jackal's first day at PNM, May 23, 1974. The man was doing twenty and a "bitch. Greasy twitched his left eye in greeting and leaned casually against the edge of the counter.

"You gonna add some Lysol to sweeten the stew?" C.O. Mora laughed as he cruised by the two men.

The jackal set the bucket on the counter and Greasy accepted it without looking inside. Before the jackal left, he rubbed his palm over the shiny chrome surface of the counter.

"I've told you not to do that a thousand times," Greasy snapped. "I just polished with Windex and now you smeared it." With a scowl, he turned his back on the jackal and took the bucket through the kitchen right
past inmate Andre Miller, who was chopping onions, past the steaming twenty-gallon double boilers, through the prep area, and beyond the stacked crates of tomato sauce, peas, and reconstituted potatoes. In the deepest recesses of the kitchen, next to the door that opened onto the sally-port loading dock, Greasy unlocked the padlock on the old walk-in. The aroma of stale ice and Freon blasted him as the twelve-inch-thick door groaned open. At the very back, behind plastic crates of salt pork, mountains of white bread, logs of yellow cheese, and several unidentified and long-frozen boxes, Greasy paused. He set the bucket on the ground and tucked the jackal's neatly wrapped parcel in the corner of a milk crate. It matched its half-dozen neighbors in outer wrap, if not in size. Greasy stuck his finger in his ear, dug for wax, and considered. One parcel was the shape of a shoe box, another barely as big as a finger. But one tube, long and heavy and propped against a crate of wieners, must've weighed at least thirty pounds. He'd rotate the parcels soon. He liked to keep them moving from the old walk-in to the new freezer and back. Whatever they contained, he didn't want to know.

T
HE INSTANT
S
YLVIA
opened her front door, she smelled pine and raw chemicals. The pungent smell was disinfectant. She held a shiny key in her hand. The Merry Maids had left a set in the mailbox, and this one fit the new dead bolt.

She forced herself to enter. She almost regretted refusing Rosie's offer to accompany her, but the need to face the house on her own was paramount Rocko stuck close to her heels sniffing anything at nose level, his fur bristling with suspicion. Sylvia assessed the living room.
The sofa was upright and two cushions had been reversed—to conceal lacerations, she thought—while the third was missing completely. The tile floor gleamed from scrubbing and several coats of acrylic finish. The abstract pastel canvas had been rehung on the east wall. The portrait of her great-grandmother rested in a cardboard box by the standing lamp. The cleaning crew had done their best to sort out those items that could be repaired.

Her books had been placed on the shelves of three large bookcases. Later, she would reorganize the volumes by subject. She pulled a first edition of Tony Hillerman's
Dance Hall of the Dead
off the shelf, and she ran her fingers over the now-battered jacket. She replaced the mystery between a worn leatherbound copy of Proust and a psychiatric reference book.

Two additional shelves held her collection of more than two hundred classic videos. Most had survived intact. When she had the energy, they would be rearranged by filmmaker and decade: D.W. Griffith's
Broken Blossoms
, 1919, through Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho
, 1960.

The room, the whole house, impressed her with its sterility. It was as if her own past had been eradicated by scrubbing, washed away with dust and dirt, all traces tossed out with pail after pail of grimy water.

In the kitchen, the smell of cleanser was even stronger. Salty, almost invisible swirls of scouring powder covered the countertop, the stove, her fingers when she rubbed them together. The refrigerator was bare except for a few assorted bottles of condiments, jam, and Parmesan cheese. The Merry Maids had left a bill for $399.00 and a note taped to the refrigerator: "The alarm company we
recommend is booked for the next week but will send a rep out ASAP. We'll drop by a second set of keys for the new dead bolts tomorrow or the next day."