Michael Lister - Soldier 03 - The Big Hello (11 page)

On my way out, I saw Iris sleeping in the waiting room. Slumping in an uncomfortable chair, head back, mouth open slightly. Snoring.

She was the only one in the small waiting room.

“Iris,” I said softly.

I stayed a few feet away, not wanting to hover over her as she opened her eyes.

“Iris.”

She slowly blinked her eyes open, lifted her head, and wiped her mouth.

“Jimmy,” she said, and seemed genuinely happy to see me. “You came.”

“Of course.”

“Have you been in to see him?”

I nodded. “Just walked out.”

“What happened to your head?” she said, alarm in her voice. “And you’re bleeding through your shirt. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You sure?”

I nodded.

She slowly stood and stretched.

“How is he?”

“He’s okay,” I said. “Weak, but otherwise seemed …”

“He needs to slow down,” she said. “Just be a captain, not feel like he’s got to be on the frontline, you know?”

I nodded.

We were quiet a moment.

No one else in the entire hospital was visible––not a single soul down either corridor––and it was as if we were the only two people in an abandoned building in the middle of the night.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Who else is gonna be? Poor Gladys is in very bad shape. Did you know she’s in a sanatorium? None of the detectives will come––except maybe to see him once, later, if he survives. He has no one.”

“Except you.”

“I ain’t much, fella, but I’m present and accounted for.”

I smiled.

“Where is Gladys?” I asked.

“I told you. A sanatorium.”

“Which?”

“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. I’m a little out of it. She’s in a real nice place called Oak Cove.”

“I need to go see her as soon as I can.”

“Go tonight if you can.”

I must have looked surprised.

“No, really,” she said. “She doesn’t sleep. I usually go late at night. Staff prefers it. Just don’t tell her he got shot. It’ll upset her and then a little while later she wouldn’t even remember you said it.”

I nodded. “Probably won’t be tonight, but I will soon.”

“Killed him to have to put her in there. He’s such a fine man,” she said, nodding in the direction of Folsom’s room. “All he’s done for that woman. All he went through to try to keep her at home. All he went through to get her the best place possible. And still he’s wracked with guilt.”

I nodded and we were quiet another quick moment.

“Who’s heading up the search for De Grasse now?” I asked.

She shook her head and frowned. “You’re not gonna like it.”

“Butch?”

She nodded. “Butch.”

I let out a long, frustrated sigh.

“No choice,” she said. “With no replacement for Pete yet, we’re undermanned and Butch is ranking.”

“It’s rank all right,” I said. “You called that one. And good.”

***

I had dropped Clip by his place before going to see Henry Folsom so he could bathe and change before we started looking for De Grasse, and I decided to swing by the office to pick up some fresh clothes and ammo of my own before picking him up again.

Harrison was hopping––had been all night every night since the start of the war. I had to park an entire block down from my office and dodge people on the sidewalk to get to it.

As I neared the door to the walkup that used to be the Parker Detective Agency, a car door opened and a short, young Asian man stepped out and ushered me in.

I recognized the car.

It was a six-passenger Presidential Delux-style Land Cruiser with a black roof, whitewall tires, and a back glass with ventilating wings. It belonged to Miki Matsumoto’s uncle, a Japanese-American fugitive from an internment camp in California.

He was a thick, middle-aged man with thick black hair and thick orangish skin. Like the first time I had met him, he was wearing a three-button tan Glen Plaid sports coat and solid medium brown wool slacks with pleats and cuffs, a hand-painted tie in a thick Windsor knot, and brown and tan wingtips.

“Miki is ah missing again,” he said without greeting or preamble. “You find.”

Miki Matsumoto was a Japanese teen who had been abducted on Panama City Beach. I had found her and returned her to her mother and uncle just a few days ago. She had been beaten and raped repeatedly and was no doubt traumatized.

“How long?”

“Two day.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

He shook his head.

From an unseen source, Tommy Dorsey’s “In the Blue of the Evening” was playing, and as usual, the man known as the sentimental gentleman of swing was proving just how smooth-toned a trombone could be.

“Where was she when she went missing?” I asked. “Who was she with?”

“You ah talka to ah mother and friend tomorrow,” he said. “I ah pick youa upa in back tomorrow noon.”

“I’m working a case right now,” I said. “I’ll be here if I can.”

“You be here or we kill one-leg girl.”

I had pushed Ruth Ann and her brutal slaying from my mind until this moment.

“Somebody beat you to it, pal,” I said.

“Then you or ah somebody else you care about.”

As much as I felt bad for Miki Matsumoto, as much as I wondered what had happened to her and wanted to help find her again, I had no intention of doing anything until I found Lauren. But it did me no good to let him know that, so I just nodded.

“You ah very ah persuasive,” I said. “See you ah in back of ah here tomorrow noon.”

***

I walked up the stairs to my office wondering what could’ve happened to the kid. Her uncle and his men had killed the man responsible for her abduction, imprisonment, torture, and rape after burning his place to the ground, so I knew it wasn’t him. Did he have a partner? Had I missed something?

I was so deep in thought, so exhausted, so out of it, I didn’t realize someone was in my office until some sixty seconds after I should have.

I reached under my coat for my gun as I approached the top of the stairs, but didn’t withdraw it once I saw who it was.

Sitting there behind what once was July’s reception desk, lit only by the pale glow of the desk lamp, was the young Japanese girl I was supposed to be looking for. Miki Matsumoto.

I blinked several times to make sure it was really her.

She smiled up at me, her bruised face small and beautiful, wincing as she stood and made her way over to me.

“Miki? What’re you doing here?”

“I work for you now,” she said.

She removed my hat and started taking off my coat.

In my confusion I let her before I realized what I was doing.

I shook my head, wincing at the pain that caused. “You don’t work for me,” I said. “You don’t owe me anything.”

She reached up with her tiny hand and touched the bump on my forehead. Her fingers were cold, her touch tender and felt good on the swollen spot, and I realized how cold the office was.

“Thank you,” I said.

She gave a slight bow.

“I be very good worker for you,” she said. “Help you help other poor soul like me.”

“Your uncle is looking for you,” I said. “He was just outside.”

Her eyes grew wide in alarm and she looked over my shoulder toward the staircase.

“He’s gone,” I said. “But he’ll be back. You have to go home.”

She shook her head. “I am disgrace. Defiled now. No man want me but old, dirty man. They make me marry him. Say it only thing for me to do. I not go back. I work for you. I already work for you. Clean office.”

I looked around. The office was as clean as I had ever seen it.

“I not just wait for you. Work. I be very much good for you. But we talk later. You have man here to see you. Wait very long time. He in here.”

She turned and led me to Ray’s office.

Who would be here in the middle of the night? Surely she’s confused.

“This your office?” she asked.

I shook my head. “That one,” I said, indicating mine. “But it’s okay. This is fine.”

“Sorry. Get right next time, boss,” she said, then gave a small bow and walked back over to July’s desk.

When I opened the door, I was surprised at who I saw standing there, but I shouldn’t have been.

“Burke,” I said.

“Soldier.”

Coleman Burke, a small, thin man with a boyish face, was the best hired gun this side of Miami––maybe the other side too. Emotionless, exacting, precise, professional.

“What can I do for you?” I asked, closing the door behind me.

“I was hired to kill you,” he said.

“Then I’m dead,” I said.

He nodded.

The last time I had seen him he had just shot a woman in the center of her forehead. He had been hired to kill me then too, only the guy who hired him was killed before he had a chance to do it so the job expired instead of me.

I tried to figure any angle I could, any way to stay alive for Lauren, but it was no good. If I went for my gun, he’d put a hole in me before the tips of my fingers even grazed it.

I couldn’t have drawn faster than him even when I had my right arm. With only my left it was even less than hopeless.

What would happen to Lauren? Would Clip and Henry Folsom find her? Would Clip try to square this with Burke and get killed himself and not be able to help Folsom, Lauren, or anyone else?

“Who?” I asked.

“Come on, soldier, you know I can’t tell you that.”

I nodded.

Unlike everyone else I had encountered since it happened, he hadn’t asked about the bump on my head or the blood on my shirt. He didn’t care. They were irrelevant to his mission––except to make it easier.

“Who was I working for the last time I saw you?” he said. “Oh that’s right. Mickey Adams. What was the fat bastard’s name that––”

“Truman Jackson Weller,” I said.

“That much fat, you kind of need three names, don’t you?” he said.

I smiled.

“You cleaned up all that real good,” he said. “Saved me a lot of hassle––or worse.”

I nodded. “That worth anything to you?”

“What? Like your life?”

“Maybe not that much,” I said. “But something.”

He thought about it then nodded. “Why I’m here,” he said. “Figure I owe you something.”

“Such as?”

He shrugged. “Not sure.”

If I thought it would help I’d tell him about Lauren and what I was trying to do, but it was irrelevant to him and what he did. It had to be. It didn’t matter that I was one of the good guys or that whoever hired him wasn’t. Nearly all of the people who hired him were wicked, and nearly all of the people he was hired to kill didn’t deserve it. It didn’t matter. He was hired to do a job and he did it. He was good at it in part because the whos and whys didn’t enter into it for him.

“I’d offer you a running start,” he said, “but I know you wouldn’t take it.”

The reason Burke was here, the reason I was able to do what I did, was because of the code I lived by––a code not as dissimilar from Burke’s as you might imagine. My word was good. If I said I’d do something, I did it. My morality was not completely contingent on legality. I would never shoot anyone in the back. I came at you straight. Dealt with you like a man––even if you were a criminal. I could never be bought off. Scared off. Once hired, I worked a case ’til it was done. No matter what. Burke knew these things about me, knew I could be trusted. And over the years I had done a good turn or two for him. All of which might be about to save my life and, in the process, Lauren’s.

“Not under normal circumstances,” I said.

“You wouldn’t run under any circumstances,” he said.

I tilted my head and shrugged. “Actually …”

“Spill,” he said. “See if you can make me believe it.”

I did.

He thought about it for a long time.

“You’re a stand-up guy, soldier,” he said. “You don’t run. You don’t scare. You … You’d let a dame make you run?”

“If it meant I could save her.”

He looked genuinely perplexed. What I was saying just didn’t track for him.

“You’re not a coward,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I’m not.”

“You don’t back down. You don’t walk away. You damn sure don’t run.”

“For her,” I said, “I would.”

He shook his head.

Not for the first time I had the thought that I might not be made out of the right metal for this work. Maybe what Collins told Dana Shelby was right. Maybe I’m not cut out to be a cop or detective or soldier or tough guy of any kind, and maybe I wasn’t even before I lost my arm or fell in love with Lauren Lewis.

“Then run,” he said. “I’ll give you a day. Then I’m coming for you.”

“Anything happens to me, you’ll still find Lauren and take care of her, won’t you?” I said.

Clip looked over at me from the passenger seat, studying me a long moment before saying anything.

I had gotten Miki Matsumoto my old room at the Cove Hotel, had picked up Clip, and we were now headed toward St. Andrews.

I had been concerned that Miki might be uncomfortable staying there by herself or too fearful given the hell she had just experienced in a hotel room, but I needn’t have been. She was sound asleep before I made it to the door.

“Why you think you gots to ask?”

“I just wouldn’t want you thinking you had to square something for me. Lauren is all that matters.”

“Where this comin’ from?” he asked.

I shrugged and shook my head. “I know it goes without saying, but I felt the need to say it.”

“Oh, you just felt the need to say it all of a sudden,” he said. “Out of the blue?”

I nodded.

We were driving down Eleventh Street in a night that had grown gradually darker and colder, our half headlamps no match for the low fog hovering over the road. The street was empty and there didn’t seem to be any movement anywhere around us for miles.

Four or five hours ’til dawn. Would the rising sun, when it arrives, bring hope or only a less dim despair? Would I even be here to see it?

He said, “Didn’t have nothin’ to do with going to your office? Your two previous partners being dead? The place haunted for you? You run into they ghost?”

“Somethin’ happens to me,” I said, “means somebody made it happen. All I’m sayin’, I want you to let it go. Just find Lauren and bring her home. Make sure she’s okay.”

“Who threaten you?” he asked.

“You think I’m cut out for this kind of work?” I asked.

“Jesus, Jimmy. What the hell happen while I was bathin’ my black ass?”

“I want an honest answer,” I said.

“Only kinds I gots. You wants to know whether you’s cut out for thuggery or not?”

“For what I do, for what we do … for what we’ve been doin’ together for the past few years.”

“You think I be runnin’ these streets with you if I didn’t think you was?”

“That’s not a real answer.”

“Hell it ain’t,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, deciding to let it go.

“You different,” he said. “That what you want me to say? Told you that earlier when you’s busy tellin’ me I didn’t owe you nothin’ for what you did for me.”

I thought back to our earlier conversation. It seemed like several days instead of some nine hours ago.

“I ain’t your friend ’cause of what you did for me,” he said. “And I don’t help you ’cause I feel like I owe you. But I ain’t sayin’ what you did got nothin’ to do with ’em.”

I nodded.

“World need a man like you,” he said. “So do detecting and thuggery. Way you do it––your fuckin’ code and conscience and all––may make it harder, may even mean you don’t do it as long. Don’t mean you ain’t meant for it. Hell, it may even mean you’s made for it.”

At first I couldn’t say anything. He’d never said anything like that to me before––no one had––and I was touched beyond telling.

The intervening silence was neither awkward nor pregnant, and he sat there comfortably, feeling no need to say anything else.

Eventually I managed a “Thank you,” and that was the end of it.

***

We searched Adrian Fromerson’s art gallery and anarchists meeting house thoroughly, guns drawn.

The huge house was more meeting hall and museum than home, with books and brochures in the foyer, a lecture hall in the living room, crooks and crannies of couches and pillows and a surrealist art installation everywhere else.

From the outside, it appeared to be an old three-story Victorian, but inside it was both bohemian and radical.

Clip and I moved methodically through the creaky hardwood-floored house searching every possible space De Grasse could be hiding in, the works on the walls around us disturbing and disquieting, combining distorted images, odd perspectives, eerie elements, asymmetrical arrangements.

Human bodies, mostly women, deconstructed, disassembled, rearranged. Elongated humans with the heads of animals. Female torsos cut open with manger scenes and city skylines inside them. Men with erect penises and boat oars for legs. Heads coming out of navels. Shapes. Impressions. More semblance of things than actual depictions of the things themselves.

I recalled Adrian Fromerson leading me through here the first time, remembered some of what he had said … “See how the work involves elements of surprise, non sequiturs, and unusual and unexpected juxtapositions? What you’re seeing is liberation. A truth beyond the real, a kind of sur-real truth that transcends the obvious and actual.”

I had been so close to him. How many lives could I have saved if I had known he was actually Flaxon De Grasse? Would Lauren be back with me now? Would Ruth Ann still be alive?

We continued to the second floor, passing Henry Folsom’s blood on the staircase. The paintings and sculptures there were far better than those on the first, their juxtapositions more startling, their disjointedness and disorientation more disconcerting, more sexual and colorful and radical.

But nothing compared with the third floor where De Grasse had placed his own work, including, eventually, displaying one of his victims. It was a single room known as Black and White Butchery and looked nearly identical to the crime scene photos of De Grasse’s female victims.

All black, including the floor. Faceless female mannequins painted white were posed on black silk drop cloths in various stages of disassemble and dissection, the poses identical to those De Grasse had used in arranging and displaying his victims.

“Be a fuckin’ service to humanity to put this motherfucker down,” Clip said.

I nodded. “Somethin’ I should’ve already done.”

“You hear they’s bastards like this,” he said, “but you don’t believe it. Not really.”

I thought again about what was done to Ruth Ann, how I had been made to watch, how the inhumanity and butchery didn’t seem real even after witnessing it with my own eyes.

After completing our search of the entire house, which meant having to walk through Henry Folsom’s blood twice, it was evident Flaxon De Grasse was long gone.

“What now?” Clip asked.

“The dock house,” I said.

Flaxon De Grasse was supposed to have lived at the end of a dock in a small shack on St. Andrew’s Bay. When we had investigated it earlier we found a rickety dock, the gaps in its planks like missing teeth in a demented smile, leaning pilings and empty slips, the entire structure appearing abandoned and soon to be at the bottom of the bay. There was no sign that De Grasse had ever lived there, and though there was a workshop with the tools necessary for what he was doing to the women he killed, there was no evidence he ever had used them or that location to do so.

“Thought that place’s just a decoy?” Clip said.

“Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t use it to hide in now,” I said.

“True,” he said.

I killed the lights of the old Victorian and opened the front door.

When we walked out Butch was standing there with a couple of uniform cops waiting on us.