Sacred (19 page)

The car lurched, and the whole bridge gave a loud creak, this one high-pitched and frantic like a scream, and the torn cement holding the car crumbled.

“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Jay said.

And the car dropped off the bridge.

Angie screamed and jerked back from the car as the torn steel coil snapped into her arm. I gripped her hand tight, and pulled her over the barrier as her legs kicked at the open air.

With her face pressed against mine, and her arm wrapped tight around my neck, her heart hammering against my biceps, and my own pounding in my ear, we peered down at the place where Jay’s car had plummeted through streams of rain and disappeared into black.

“He going to be okay?” Inspector Jefferson asked the EMT working on my shoulder.

“He’s got a cracked scapula. Might be broken. I can’t tell without an X ray.”

“A what?” I said.

“Shoulder blade,” the EMT said. “Definitely cracked.”

Jefferson looked at him with sleepy eyes and shook his head slowly. “He’ll be fine for a while. We’ll get a doctor take a look at him soon enough.”

“Shit,” the EMT said and shook his own head. He wrapped the bandage tight, running it from under my armpit, up over my shoulder, down across my collarbone, around my back and chest, and up to my armpit again.

Inspector Carnell Jefferson watched me steadily with his sleepy eyes as the EMT did his work. Jefferson looked to be in his late thirties, a slim black guy of unremarkable height and build, with a soft, easygoing jaw and a perpetual smile playing lazily at the corners of his mouth. He wore a light blue raincoat over a tan suit and white shirt, a silk tie with a pink and blue floral print hanging slightly askew from an unbuttoned collar. His hair was cut so short and tight to his skull, I wondered why he bothered
having any there at all, and he didn’t even blink as rain dripped down the tight skin on his face.

He looked like a nice guy, the kind of guy you’d shoot the shit with at the gym, maybe have a few pitchers with after work. Kind of guy who loved his kids and had sexual fantasies only about his wife.

I’d met cops like him before, though, and he was the last guy you’d want to get too comfortable with. In the box, or testifying at a trial, or hammering away at a witness, this nice guy would turn into a shark in less time than it took to snap your fingers. He was a homicide inspector, a young one, and black in a southern state; he didn’t get where he was by being any suspect’s friend.

“So, Mr. Kenzie, is it?”

“Yup.”

“You’re a private dick up in Bahstan. Correct?”

“That’s what I told you.”

“Uh-huh. Nice town?”

“Boston?”

“Yes. Nice town?”

“I like it.”

“I hear it’s real pretty in the autumn.” He pursed his lips and nodded. “Hear they don’t like niggers much up there, though.”

“There are assholes everywhere,” I said.

“Oh, sure. Sure.” He rubbed his head with the palm of his hand, looked up into the drizzle for a moment, then blinked the rain from his eyes. “Assholes everywhere,” he repeated. “So since we’re standing in the rain talking all friendly about race relations and assholes and the like, whyn’t you tell me about that pair of dead assholes blocking all this here traffic on my bridge?”

Those lazy eyes found mine and I saw a glimpse of
the shark in them for just a moment before it disappeared.

“I shot the little guy twice in the chest.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I noticed. Yes.”

“My partner shot the other guy as he drew down on me with a shotgun.”

He looked behind him at Angie. She sat in an ambulance across from the one where I sat as an EMT wiped at the scratches on her face, legs, and neck with an alcohol swab and Jefferson’s partner, Detective Lyle Vandemaker, interrogated her.

“Man,” Jefferson said and whistled, “she’s a first-class mega-babe
and
she can pump a round through the throat of an asshole from ten yards out in the pouring rain? That’s one special woman.”

“Yeah,” I said, “she is.”

He stroked his chin and nodded to himself. “I’ll tell you what my problem is here, Mr. Kenzie. It’s a matter of discerning who the real assholes are. You see what I’m saying? You say those two corpses over there—they’re the assholes. And I’d like to believe you. I would. Hell, I’d love to just say, ‘Okay,’ and shake your hand and let you go on back to Beantown. I mean, really. But if, oh let’s just say, you were lying to me, and you and your partner are the real assholes here, well, I’d look awful stupid just letting you go. And seeing how we don’t have any witnesses as yet, well, all we got is your word against the words of two guys who can’t really give us their words because you, well, shot them a few times and they died. You follow?”

“Just barely,” I said.

Across the median divider of the bridge, traffic seemed heavier than it probably was normally at three in the morning because the police had turned the two
lanes of normally southbound traffic into one southern and one northern lane. Every car that passed on that side of the bridge slowed to a crawl to get a glimpse of the commotion on this side.

In the breakdown lane, a black Jeep with two bright green surfboards strapped to its roof was stopped completely, its hazards flashing. The owner I recognized as the guy who’d shouted something at me just before I shot the Weeble.

He was a sunburnt rail of a guy with long, bleached-blond hair and no shirt. He stood at the rear of the Jeep and seemed in heated conversation with two cops. He pointed in my direction several times.

His companion, a young woman as skinny and blond as he was, leaned against the hood of the Jeep. When she caught my eye, she waved brightly, as if we were old friends.

I managed a half wave back at her, because it seemed the polite thing to do, then turned back to my immediate surroundings.

Our side of the bridge was blocked by the Lexus and the Celica, six or seven green and white patrol cars, several unmarked cars, two fire trucks, three ambulances, and a black van bearing the yellow words
PINELLAS COUNTY MARITIME INVESTIGATIONS.
The van had dropped four divers at the St. Pete side of the bridge just a few minutes before, and they were somewhere in the water now, searching for Jay.

Jefferson looked at the hole Jay’s car had left behind in the barrier. Bathed in the red of the fire engine’s lights, it looked like an open wound.

“Fucked up my bridge pretty good, didn’t you, Mr. Kenzie?”

“That wasn’t me,” I said. “It was those two dead assholes over there.”

“So you say,” he said. “So you say.”

The EMT used a pair of tweezers to remove pebbles and slivers of glass from my face, and I winced as I stared off past the flashing lights and dark drizzle at the crowd forming on the other side of the barricade. They’d walked up the bridge in the rain at three in the morning, just so they could get a firsthand look at violence. TV, I guess, wasn’t enough for them. Their own lives weren’t enough for them. Nothing was enough.

The EMT pulled a good-sized chunk of something from the center of my forehead and blood immediately poured from the opening and split at the bridge of the nose and found my eyes. I blinked several times as he grabbed some gauze, and as my eyelids fluttered and the lights of the various sirens flickered like strobes, I saw a glimpse of rich honey hair and skin in the crowd.

I leaned forward into the drizzle and peered into the lights, and saw her again, just for a moment, and I decided my fall from the car must have given me a concussion, because it wasn’t possible.

But maybe it was.

For one second, through the rain and lights and blood in my eyes, I locked eyes with Desiree Stone.

And then she was gone.

The skyway bridged two counties. Manatee County, on the southern side, consisted of Bradenton, Palmetto, Longboat Key, and Anna Maria Island. Pinellas County, on the northern side, was made up of St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg Beach, Gulfport, and Pinellas Park. St. Petersburg police had been the first on the scene, as had their divers and their fire trucks, so after some arguing with the Bradenton PD, we were transported off the bridge by the St. Pete cops, and driven north.

As we came off the bottom of the bridge—Angie locked up in the backseat of one cruiser, and me in the back of another—the four divers, dressed in black rubber from head to toe, carried Jay’s body from Tampa Bay, up onto a grassy embankment.

As we passed, I looked out the window. They laid his wet corpse down in the grass, and his flesh was the white of a fish’s underbelly. His dark hair plastered his face, and his eyes were closed tight, his forehead dented.

If you didn’t notice the dent in his forehead, he looked like he was sleeping. He looked at peace. He looked about fourteen years old.

“Well,” Jefferson said as he came back into the
interrogation room, “we have some bad news for you, Mr. Kenzie.”

My head was throbbing so hard I was sure a band of majorettes had taken up residence in my skull and the inside of my mouth felt like sunbaked leather. I couldn’t move my left arm, wouldn’t have been able to even if the bandages had permitted it, and the cuts on my face and head had caked and swelled.

“How’s that?” I managed.

Jefferson dropped a manila folder on the table between us and removed his suit jacket and placed it over the back of his chair before he took a seat.

“This Mr. Graham Clifton—what’d you call him back on the bridge—the Weeble?”

I nodded.

He smiled. “I like that. Well, the Weeble had three bullets in him. All from your gun. The first entered his back and came out through his right breast.”

I said, “I told you I fired into the car while it was moving. I thought I hit something.”

“And you did,” he said. “Then you shot him twice as he came out of the car, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s not the bad news. The bad news is you told me this Weeble guy, he worked for a Trevor Stone of Marblehead, Massachusetts?”

I nodded.

He looked at me and shook his head slowly.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

“Mr. Clifton was employed by Bullock Industries, a research and development consulting firm located in Buckhead.”

“Buckhead?” I said.

He nodded. “Atlanta. Georgia. Mr. Clifton, as far as we know, never set foot in Boston.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“’Fraid not. I spoke to his landlord, his boss in Atlanta, his neighbors.”

“His neighbors,” I said.

“Yeah. You know what neighbors are, don’t you? The people who live beside you. See you every day, nod hello. Well there’s a whole bunch of these neighbor types in Buckhead, who swear they saw Mr. Clifton just about every day for the last ten years in Atlanta.”

“And Mr. Cushing?” I said as the majorettes in my head started banging their cymbals together.

“Also employed by Bullock Industries. Also lived in Atlanta. Hence the Georgia license plates on the Lexus. Now your Mr. Stone, he was mighty confused when I called him. Seems he’s a retired businessman, dying of cancer, who hired you to find his daughter. He has no idea what the hell you’re doing down in Florida. Says the last time he talked with you was five days ago. He thought, frankly, that you’d skipped town with the money he paid you. As for Mr. Clifton, or Mr. Cushing, Mr. Stone says he never heard of them.”

“Inspector Jefferson,” I said, “did you check out the owner of record of Bullock Industries?”

“What do you think, Mr. Kenzie?”

“Of course you did.”

He nodded and looked down at his folder. “Of course I did. The owner of Bullock Industries is Moore and Wessner Limited, a British holding company.”

“And the owner of the holding company?”

He looked at his notes. “Sir Alfred Llewyn, a British earl, supposedly hangs out with the Windsor family, shoots pool with Prince Charles, plays poker with the queen, what have you.”

“Not Trevor Stone,” I said.

He shook his head. “Unless he’s also a British earl. He’s not, is he? To the best of your knowledge?”

“And Jay Becker,” I said. “What did Mr. Stone have to say about him?”

“Same thing he said about you. Mr. Becker skipped town with Mr. Stone’s money.”

I closed my eyes against the burning white fluorescent overhead, tried to quell the banging in my head with sheer willpower. It didn’t work.

“Inspector,” I said.

“Hmm?”

“What do you think happened on that bridge last night?”

He leaned back in his chair. “Glad you asked me, Mr. Kenzie. Glad you asked me.” He pulled a pack of gum from his shirt pocket, proffered it to me. When I shook my head, he shrugged and unwrapped a piece, popped it in his mouth, and chewed for about thirty seconds.

“You and your partner found Jay Becker somehow and didn’t tell anyone. You decided to steal Trevor Stone’s money and skip town, but the two hundred thousand he gave you wasn’t enough.”

“The two hundred thousand,” I said. “That’s what he told you he paid us?”

He nodded. “So you find Jay Becker, but he gets suspicious and tries to get away from you. You chase him on the Skyway, and you’re both jockeying back and forth when this innocent pair of businessmen get in your way. It’s raining, it’s dark, the plan goes awry. All three of you crash. Becker’s car goes off the bridge. No problem there, but now you’ve got the matter of two bystanders to take care of. So you shoot them, plant guns on them, shoot out their back window so it looks like they fired from the car, and that’s it. You’re done.”

“You don’t believe that theory,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s the stupidest theory I ever heard. And you’re not stupid.”

“Oh, flatter me some more, Mr. Kenzie. Please.”

“We want Jay Becker’s money, right?”

“The hundred grand we found in the trunk of the Celica with his fingerprints all over it, yeah, that’s the money I’m talking about.”

“But the hundred grand we used to bail him out of jail,” I said. “Why’d we do that? So we could trade one stack of hundred thousand dollar bills for another?”

He watched me with his shark’s eyes, didn’t say anything.

“If we planted the guns on Cushing and Clifton, why did Clifton have powder burns on his hands? I mean, he did, didn’t he?”

No response. He watched me, waiting.

“If we drove Jay Becker off the bridge, how come all the collision damage to his car was done by the Lexus?”

“Go on,” he said.

“You know what I charge for a missing persons case?”

He shook his head.

I told him. “Now that’s dramatically less than two hundred grand, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would.”

“Why would Trevor Stone shell out a combined four hundred thousand dollars, at least, to two separate private investigators to find his daughter?”

“Man’s desperate. He’s dying. He wants his daughter home.”

“Almost half a million dollars, though? That’s a lot.”

He turned his right hand, palm up, in my direction. “Please,” he said, “continue.”

“Fuck that,” I said.

His front chair legs came back to the floor. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Fuck that, and fuck you. Your theory’s a crock a shit. We both know it. And we both know it’ll never stand up in court. A grand jury would laugh it out.”

“That so?”

“That’s so.” I looked at him, then back at the two-way mirror over his shoulder, let his superiors or whoever was back there see my eyes, too. “You have three dead bodies and a wounded bridge and front-page headlines, I’m assuming. And the only story that makes sense is the one me and my partner have been telling you for the last twelve hours. But you can’t corroborate it.” I locked his eyes with mine. “Or so you say.”

“So I say? What’s that mean, Mr. Kenzie? Now, don’t be coy.”

“There was a guy on the other side of the bridge. Looked like a surfer dude. I saw cops interviewing him after you got there. He saw what happened. At least some of it.”

He smiled. A broad one. Full of teeth.

“The gentleman in question,” he said, looking at his notes, “has seven priors for, among other things, driving under the influence, possession of marijuana, possession of cocaine, possession of pharmaceutical Ecstasy, possession—”

“What you’re telling me is he’s a possessor of things, Inspector. I get it. What does that have to do with what he saw on the bridge?”

“Your mama ever tell you it’s impolite to interrupt?”
He wagged his finger at me. “The gentleman in question was driving with a suspended license, failed a Breathalyzer, and was found with cannabis on his person. Your ‘witness,’ if that’s what you think he was, Mr. Kenzie, was under the influence of at least two mind-altering substances. He was arrested a few minutes after we left the bridge.” He leaned forward. “So, tell me what happened on that bridge.”

I leaned forward. Into the twin beams of his studied glare. And it wasn’t easy, believe me. “You got nothing but me and my partner holding smoking guns, and a witness you refuse to believe. So you’re not letting us walk. Are you, Inspector?”

“You got that right,” he said. “So run the story by me again.”

“Nope.”

He folded his arms across his chest and smiled. “‘Nope’? Did you just say ‘nope’?”

“That’s what I said.”

He stood up and lifted his chair, brought it around the table beside my own. He sat down and his lips touched my ear as he whispered into it, “You’re all I got, Kenzie. Get it? And you’re a cocky, white, Irish motherfucker, which means I hated you on sight. So, tell me what you’re going to do.”

“Send in my lawyer,” I said.

“I didn’t hear you,” he whispered.

I ignored him and slapped the tabletop. “Send in my lawyer,” I called to the people behind the mirror.