Late Rain (9 page)

A year later, her mother and new husband named Kelly had dropped Corrine off at Corrine’s grandparents’ house in Bradford, Indiana, a small town north of Gary.

Her mother and Kelly drove off in a blue Thunderbird. It was the last time Corrine saw her.

Corrine sat through one last red light and then took Queensland through old downtown Magnolia Beach past the town square that doubled as a small park with its gravel pathways, gazebo, granite war memorial, and central fountain surrounded by thick-trunked trees whose leaves appeared painted on the evening sky.

Corrine drove through five blocks of cheek-to-jowl red and brown brick buildings, mostly two or three stories, caught in a stalemate between gentrification and neglect, boarded-up or empty storefronts alternating with trendy coffee shops and law offices and specialty boutiques.

Queensland eventually T-boned with Atlantic Avenue, the north-south commercial strip that roughly paralleled the beach. Corrine took a right and drove three blocks. She pulled into the lot of the Maritime Bank and Trust.

I get scared sometimes
, Corrine’s mother had said.

Corrine couldn’t afford that luxury.

At the ATM, she withdrew the last installment of the front money she would pass on to Raychard Balen. Corrine had taken pains not to draw attention with her transactions, carefully spacing each out, everything a matter of time.

She’d call Raychard Balen tomorrow morning and give him the final go-ahead.

Then she could literally begin to number Stanley Tedros’s days, the phone call making it real again, Stanley Tedros’s death now clearly on the horizon, positioned and in place like the morning star, something not so much to wish upon anymore but to navigate by.

BEN DECOVIC responded to a domestic disturbance in northeast Magnolia Beach, a couple who’d taken their late-night argument from the kitchen out into their front yard where in addition to an operatic display of obscenities, they had begun flinging pieces of the Colonel’s extra-crispy at each other, each with a full bucket tucked under his or her arm and a seemingly inexhaustible set of grievances, Ben finally able to calm them down, surrounded the whole time by neighborhood dogs combing the front yard for stray drumsticks and wings.

He swung by Miriam Holmes’ and reassured her with an all’sright-in-the-world check-in and left with his obligatory piece of pound cake.

He broke up the knot of teenage boys loitering and working on their best impersonation of disaffected gangbangers in the parking lot of a Taco Bell after the manager called in the complaint that the crescendo of competing bass lines from their car stereos was drowning out customer orders at the drive-thru window.

A half hour later, he raced to the residence of a panicked single mother with a break and enter in progress only to discover that it was one of the wannabes from Taco Bell attempting to sneak in after curfew.

He handed out two DUIs. He shut down an impromptu electronics shop run out of the trunk of a rust-eaten Buick. He assisted a Statie at the scene of an accident, directing traffic until the ambulance and wrecker arrived.

He ran paper on three missing or stolen property stops.

He drove through an hour and forty-five minutes of nothing, his patrol sector gone eerily quiet, the world on hold.

Throughout the shift, Ben kept his eyes open, hoping to spot either of the two guys from the Passion Palace. It was going on four days since he’d been attacked, and it wouldn’t be unusual for them to still be in the area. Most criminals, outside the pros, were stupid or vain or arrogant enough to trip themselves up, given half a chance.

The vanity, though, cut both ways, and Ben didn’t like to admit it, but he’d been more embarrassed than angry that the guy who’d ambushed him had gotten away with his service pistol. The post-shift session with La’Shawn Samuels, his supervisor, had done nothing to improve his mood either. Ben had decided not to mention the incident with Carl Adkin. He didn’t want to push things just yet. La’Shawn Samuels had let Ben off with a verbal reprimand about going in solo and too soon.

For a while, Ben worked on reconstructing the image of the man who’d assaulted him in the parking lot, but hard as he tried, the results were unruly. He could not bring an impression into focus. In the moment he’d pulled the Kermit the Frog mask loose, Ben thought he’d seen gray hair and a blue or green eye and square chin. The flesh tones of the face, however, had seemed to belong to someone much younger. He was sure the man had been short, but his arms had seemed out of proportion to his height. The problem was the whole thing happened too quickly in light that was bad to begin with, and the longer Ben attempted to coax out the image, the more the man began to resemble others that Ben had rousted or arrested in the past, the car slowly filling with jailhouse ghosts. When Greg Hollinger threatened to appear, bringing with him everything that had led to Ben’s resignation from the Homicide squad and the move to Magnolia Beach, Ben dropped the whole thing and concentrated on the job. He ran the routine and tried to keep things simple.

Near dawn, he pulled into a twenty-four hour convenience mart and parked at the far end of the lot and went in for a soda, nodding to the clerk and heading to the rear of the store. Near the cooler was a large placard of Stanley Tedros holding up a can of Julep with the slogan
You Know It!
emblazoned across its top.

Leon Douglas was sitting in the front seat of the cruiser when he got back.

“You late,” he said. “And you forgot to lock the door.”

Ben handed him the soda and a palm-sized bag of Skittles. “These ok,” Leon said, tearing into the bag with his teeth, “but Shock Tarts, they the one I like best.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Ben said.

Leon Douglas had started working on his credentials as a renaissance man of misdemeanors in his early teens, and even with the juvie records eventually being sealed, he managed to add a couple pages to his resume before he turned sixteen. Last November, Ben had busted Leon boosting a late-model Explorer destined for a chop shop in Charleston, and facing an entry-level look at some serious time, Leon had offered a deal and said he’d work for Ben.

Ben was under no illusions that Leon wasn’t still working his own action, but Leon’s news was almost always solid. Unlike a lot of other informants Ben had worked with, Leon did not pad out the inconsequential to look good or attempt to deliver last week’s weather as tomorrow’s forecast.

“I’ve been expecting a phone call,” Ben said.

“No sign of your Glock,” Leon said. “Someone either be sitting on it or already move it out the state.”

“Anything you turn up,” Ben said, “you call me. No waiting until the usual meet. I want that pistol.”

Leon nodded and thumbed a yellow Skittle into his mouth.

“Ok.” Ben drummed his fingertips on top of the steering wheel. “Say I’m in the market for a few copies of
The Annihilator
.”

“
Annihilator One
or
Two
?” Leon asked.

“
Annihilator Two
. And let’s also say I might be interested in
Death Squad Three, Hotel Torture, End of Sleep,
and
Sing Me A Nightmare
.”

“How many you looking at?”

“Roughly four hundred or five hundred of each.”

“You might be wanting to talk to Robbie then,” Leon said. “The flea market, Section D, Row Five. Robbie’s the one got himself one of those Fu Manchu mustaches.”

“He’s not trying to move that kind of volume through the flea market, is he? He can’t be that stupid.” Ben looked over at Leon. “Or lucky. Somebody would have busted him by now for sure.”

Leon shook out another Skittle and held it up between thumb and index finger before popping it in his mouth. He went on to explain that Robbie with the Fu Manchu was the go-to guy and that if anyone wanted bootleg video games, CDs, or DVDs, Robbie would put him in touch with Tommy, his brother, who rented any number of empty buildings around town and kept the inventory moving among them.

“Ok, then,” Ben said. “The fires that have been springing up. Anything?” At last count there’d been nine, all contained with minimal damage, but no pattern in the intervals between occurrence or location.

Leon took a hit of soda, then shook his head. “Figured you be asking about that and I check around, but I’m not hearing anything about any Match Artists in town.”

Ben gave in to a long yawn. To the east, the skyline was edged in a pale yellow line. A warm wind rose and sent a Styrofoam cup bouncing across the lot.

“What about Sonny Gramm’s Mustang?” Ben asked finally. “You hear anything about why someone went after it in the first place? Gramm wasn’t exactly helpful when we interviewed him.”

Leon crumbled the candy bag and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “What I hear is Mr. Sonny Gramm been talking to some of the brothers.” Leon paused and shook his head. “And everyone know Mr. Sonny never be a big fan of Dr. King.”

“Why then?”

“He looking for a new bodyguard,” Leon said, “but no brother want to work for no crazy white man.” Leon finished off the soda and set it on the dash. “Mr. Sonny get scared, he have himself a few drinks. Or Mr. Sonny decide to have a few drinks, and then he get scared. Either way he end up crazy and mean.”

“What’s Gramm scared of?”

Leon shrugged.

“Ok,” Ben said. He took a folded bill from his breast pocket and handed it to Leon. “I appreciate the news. You take care of yourself.”

Leon hesitated, folding the bill another time before slipping it into his pocket. He glanced over at Ben. “You don’t mind me saying, you need to do that too. It showing, man.”

“It?” Ben said. “What?”

“Whatever you chasing or whatever chasing you.” Leon opened the door, got out, and then poked his head back inside. “It showing, man.”

Leon stepped back, waved, and disappeared around the back of the convenience store. Ben cranked the blue and white and pulled out of the lot and headed back to the City-County Complex.

Against the dawn, the downtown skyline of Magnolia Beach looked as if it had just caught fire.

As Ben drove past, he noticed a side door at the Passion Palace was open and flapping back and forth in the wind.

An old red pickup listing on the driver’s side from worn shocks was parked alongside the Palace’s north wall.

Ben got out of the cruiser and checked the door, poking his head inside the frame, calling out Sonny Gramm’s name and identifying himself.

The chairs were up on the tables and the lighting minimal. The place shared in the same forlorn quality of any bar after closing. The floor was damp, and the smell of disinfectant hovered like a layer of ground fog.

Ben thought he heard a noise coming from the other side of the room. He called out Sonny Gramm’s name again.

He unsnapped his holster and started to draw his pistol, but someone had already placed the barrel of a gun against his spine.

“Face forward,” he said. “Hands where I can see them.”

Ben recognized the voice as Sonny Gramm’s and identified himself.

Gramm prodded him across the floor and through the office door. “Take off your badge and set it on the desk and then do the same with the pistol.”

Ben did what he asked about the badge but refused to surrender the Glock. He said he’d already lost one semi-automatic at the Palace and wasn’t about to let that happen again.

“Fuck it,” Gramm said. “Lower yourself, and I mean slowly, into that chair and sit on your hands.”

Gramm was slurring his words and seemed none too steady on his feet. He waited for Ben to sit and then moved behind the desk, whose top held an open newspaper, an ashtray, a bottle of Beam, and a smudged glass tumbler.

Sonny Gramm picked up Ben’s badge.

“Give me your number.”

Ben did.

“Ok, but that doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Anyone can memorize a number.” Gramm dropped the badge, sat down, and a moment later, poured himself a drink. His hands were slow-dancing, and the bottle rattled against the lip of the glass.

The office was small and windowless, its walls covered in cheap imitation pine paneling and holding black and white publicity shots of some of the Palace’s strippers, one of Sonny Gramm’s boat, another of the vintage Mustang that had been vandalized, and one that must have been taken at a family reunion, a group shot under a large live oak, many of the men sharing Sonny’s squint and high-rise pompadour. Directly behind and above Sonny was a faded Confederate flag thumbtacked to the wall.

“How’d you get in here?” Gramm asked.

“I’m on the job. I was checking up. The side door on the north side of the building was open. I identified myself before I came in.”

“That door was locked. I checked it myself, not more than a half hour ago.”

Ben spoke quietly, reiterating the sequence of events, wary of the level of Beam in Sonny’s mood, the early morning hour, and the gun he kept, more or less, trained on him.

When Gramm squinted, his face broke into competing networks of wrinkles. “I checked it,” he said. “I’m sure I did. It was right after I had to fire that bastard Melvin for showing up late.” He looked over at Ben. “What good’s a bodyguard who doesn’t show up on time? Tell me that.” Gramm closed his eyes for a moment and rubbed at his forehead as if he’d forgotten Ben was there.

Ben cleared his throat. “I work Patrol, Mr. Gramm. The Palace is in my sector. I was one of the officers responding the night your Mustang was vandalized.”

Gramm coughed into his fist.

“It won’t stop with the Mustang,” he said. “But you already know that, don’t you?”

“No,” Ben said, “I don’t.”

“I can take care of myself,” Gramm said. “You tell Wayne LaVell that. Or that shyster, Balen, who’s fronting for him. Whichever one of them sent you.”

“I don’t know a LaVell or Balen,” Ben said. “And I’m an officer of the law, Mr. Gramm. You have my badge in front of you.”

“You shake hands with either LaVell or Balen,” Gramm said, “you better count your fingers afterwards.”

Gramm tipped back the glass and then wiped his hand across his mouth. “LaVell will have all of you in his pocket soon enough. He’s already working on the mayor.”