The Burning Day
Authors: Timothy C. Phillips
THE BURNING DAY
The Roland Longville Mystery Series #6
Written by Timothy C. Phillips
Kindle: 978-1-58124-084-9
ePub: 978-1-58124-297-3
©2012 by Timothy C. Phillips
Published 2012 by The Fiction Works
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
This book is dedicated to
James Cecil Phillips, 1947-2009.
Home is the Sailor, Home from the Sea.
For behold, the day cometh, burning like a furnace; and the wicked will be as chaff;
and on that day that cometh, they shall all be consumed in its flames.
— Malachi 4
Prologue
It was about noon when they shot Little Tony. It was a Tuesday. It had been raining, but it was clearing up when it all went down. The water vapor hissed off the streets and made the early spring day muggy and humid.
There he was, hanging around the entrance to some run-down old building that everybody called a barber shop, although they all knew that no one had gotten their hair cut there in a very long time.
Here’s the way it happened: Little Tony was out there on the corner, talking animatedly on his cell phone. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that he was the nephew of Don Ganato, the local mob boss, and that he was there to sell drugs. Since he was who he was, nobody said or did anything about it. Little Tony, just hanging out and selling his wares on the block. It was best not to notice.
Cars came by and slowed and people talked to Little Tony through their lowered windows. He preferred to do business this way, people in the neighborhood whispered, because it showed people he wasn’t afraid of anything. It showed everyone that he was able to do business for himself, and he didn’t need his uncle’s say-so, or his help. It also showed what an idiot he was, because Don Ganato had run the family business in Birmingham for over thirty years and never gone to jail. He had managed to do this supremely difficult thing because he kept a low profile. Don Ganato did not approve of his nephew’s flamboyance, and had tried to counsel him and bring him into the fold repeatedly, always without success. The old ways of secrecy and keeping a low profile were lost on Little Tony. He was part of the new world and its new ways. “You gotta front, get your name out there,” he had told the Don. This contradicted everything the Don stood for, but still he tried.
Only a month before, on Little Tony’s twenty-first birthday, Don Ganato had attempted to counsel the youth one final time. He had taken his nephew aside for a few moments of quiet reflection. Turn it down a notch, Don Ganato had advised Little Tony, before you come to grief. Little Tony had nodded but smiled slyly to his uncle. Don’t worry, he had told his uncle, it’s a brand new scene out there and I got it covered. I’m The Man. People know I’m The Man. He had spoken with such bravado and conviction that there had been a moment’s self-doubt flicker in the old Don’s eyes.
Maybe he’s right, that flicker in the Don’s dark eyes seemed to say; the world has changed so much, and Little Tony is young . . . but it was only a flicker. After that, Don Ganato had simply shrugged and moved on. He had not spoken with Little Tony again about such matters.
That was last month, but now it was a certain rainy Tuesday, and the grief his uncle had prophesied for Little Tony was bearing down hard upon him, though he had no way of knowing that. Little Tony was on the corner, where he was in his element and on top of his game—a game that was all about drugs and dough and hot cars and hot girls—and things were moving fast, really fast. The rain didn’t slow Little Tony’s business, because nothing slowed the drug trade. Morning, noon and night, monkeys needed feeding all over town, and Little Tony’s cell phone never stopped ringing.
Little Tony had just dropped a quarter of pink ice on two Latina honeys in a cherry-red 1978 Grand Prix with chrome spinner rims, a classic from the ground up, and the girls had just pulled away from the curb when a brand-ass new, banana-yellow Chrysler 300 rolled slowly toward him, directional tires hissing on the still-wet pavement. The windows were tinted to a near black-out shade.
Little Tony smiled to himself. Man, it looks like hot wheels all day today, he thought. Probably brothers, he figured, which would mean they were most likely looking for herb. That was fine because he had some kind bud in his rain slicker that would stone the most hard-core gangsta wannabe on the North Side to the point of drooling.
The Chrysler 300 pulled up to the curb and the window cranked down. Little Tony looked up and down the street, just for show, really, since even if cops patrolled this block, which they didn’t, none of them would dare mess with him. He stepped out to the curb like a man who owned the world.
“What’s up?” Little Tony said with practiced bravado.
“Got a message for you, you dirty little wop,” a rough voice from inside the car growled. There was a ripping burst of gunfire. Little Anthony went down on his back, eyes staring at the sky. But after a few seconds, he didn’t see anything, and he didn’t even hear the sexy hum of the Chrysler 300’s Hemi as it roared away down the street.
Chapter 1
It was a bright and sunny Wednesday, a beautiful spring day in Birmingham. One hundred percent humidity sent rivers of sweat down the backs of the people, whether they were in markets, bistros or coffee shops. Power bills climbed and people panted.
Regardless of the heat, people were on the move in the middle of the work week. The weather was relentlessly humid, because of heavy rains the day before. I had just returned from Mobile, so I had missed the rain. In Mobile, I’d been looking for a man who had dropped out of sight, leaving a pregnant wife and three children trying to survive on their own.
The police had searched for him without any luck. They’d been looking for him in the wrong places. I’d found him, right there in Mobile, living under an assumed name, with a girl young enough to be his daughter. I usually make short work out of a case like that, and I was pretty happy, all things considered, that I’d found the man in question so quickly. He could have just as easily taken his new name and young girlfriend and headed for parts unknown. Against all odds, I was done and back home inside of a week.
Home for me is Birmingham, a city that is sliding relentlessly into bigness and urban sprawl. It is a patchwork of rich and poor, big and little, urban noise and suburban quiet. I grew up here. I spent my childhood in the old Westmoreland Heights Housing Project after my dad didn’t make it back from Viet Nam. Mom worked as a waitress, and put herself through school.She then became a teacher and got us out of the projects. I went from a skinny black kid to a big brown man in about five years. I stopped growing when I was around seventeen.
I’m six-foot three and a half, and though I’ve met plenty of bigger men, my size and speed was good enough to get me onto the football team at Shade’s Valley High School. I won a scholarship to the University of Alabama, where I employed my skills as a halfback for four years while studying English Literature.
Mom had always wanted me to follow in her footsteps, since, largely due to her tutelage, I could read from an early age and had always loved poetry and literature of all kinds. I had gone to college and majored in English, but a career in teaching didn’t await me. Instead, when I got out, I joined the army. I became a Military Policeman, and later, when I got out of the army, a civilian policeman, right back here in my old hometown, Birmingham. Later on, I’d made detective.
I married Patricia, a young black girl I’d met in college. She was from a little town in Georgia. Life looked like it was going to follow a predictable pattern; we were going to have kids and careers and a future together. But fate seldom sits idly by when human beings think they have it all worked out.
I made some mistakes along the way, and my young marriage turned rocky, early on. Patricia and I started fighting. It was about that time I started drinking. Not college era beer guzzling, but really hitting the sauce. Then there was a disaster, the kind of thing that changes people and their lives forever. I’d failed to properly heed the advice of another officer, a young female patrol cop, and she’d been killed at a crime scene where the perpetrator had hung around and blended in with the crowd.
I blamed myself and stuck my head in a bottle for over two years. I used up a lot of favors and burned a lot of bridges while I was drunk. That’s the way that goes. When I’d crawled out of the bottle, my wife, career and future prospects were gone.
Sobriety was just the first of my challenges in the long crawl back up to the light. I was eventually able to transform myself into a private investigator, a very sober and reliable one. Over time, working dingy little cases of whatever kind I could find, I’d made a name for myself. Nowadays, I have a good reputation; people seek my services, sometimes for tough, high-profile cases. Not too bad for a former alcoholic from the projects, if I do say so myself.
As I rolled into town, I cranked my window down and turned up some classic Isaac Hayes I had in the CD player. Isaac was singing about love and pain, pleading with his lady not to let go, and he sure sounded like he knew what he was singing about.
I turned off on the Oxmoor Exit and headed toward Homewood, then took the ramp for downtown. I wanted to go by the office before I went home, to check e-mail and messages. It was sort of late in the day, so I didn’t expect to have any clients in my office.
My secretary, a thin, pretty young brunette woman named Jeannette Oliver, looked up as I came in. She smiled a sardonic smile. “You’re going to love this,” she said, her bright blue eyes twinkling with a mischievous light. “You’ve got a surprise client, and he’s a real piece of work.”
I had found Jeannette working for a crooked private eye in Atlanta. Things hadn’t gone well between her boss and me. By that, I mean I had shot him. Dead. I had a good reason, I promise. After a month or so, she had shown up at my office and noticed that I had no secretary, and had rather bluntly suggested that she would make a good one. Seeing as I did in fact need a secretary, and I was also the direct cause of her unemployment, I agreed. She’s been with me ever since. She is the best at what she does, and knows the business from the ground up.