White Shadow (39 page)

RIVERA HAD held the girl’s head in the dirty soapy water of the sink for more than a minute and still she wouldn’t say shit. She didn’t yell at him in Spanish or yell or scream again; she just took what Johnny was giving out. Even when he started asking her about the book in Spanish, she turned away and tried to hold her breath as he held her down under the water and Johnny was left to wait, a clump of her wet black hair in his hand.

He stared back at his reflection in the mirror.

He winked at himself as he brought her up for a quick gulp of air.

He backhanded her and she stood solid on the wooden floor. He punched her again and she spit blood into Johnny Rivera’s face.

He laughed and pulled the .38 on her, while yanking out drawers from chests and the little desk by the door. He flipped over both mattresses and kicked at the iron beds until he found her leather satchel. With his brow sweating and a hungry look on his face, he emptied the contents on the floor and the old ledger fell out with a flop.

The mambo music played on.

Johnny opened his mouth as Lucrezia buttoned herself back into her sleeveless shirt and spit on the floor. He tucked the ledger in the high waist of his trousers and went for the door.

Rivera winked at her and gave her a half-assed salute with two fingers.

The door broke open with a kick, and he heard the hard
snick
of a shotgun as he dove for the floor and pieces of wood flew up in splinters across his face.

CARL WALKER pointed to Bill and Jack right before he kicked in the door and leveled the Winchester 12 at Rivera. He pumped off a round as the Wop dove for the floor and kept on pumping, hitting the son of a bitch in the thigh. Rivera screamed out and dragged himself across the floor into a corner like a wounded animal, squeezing off a .38. Walker dropped back untouched and out the door and got even with the porch floor. Two more shots sounded, and young Jack hustled up to his side with his .45 drawn.

Walker got to his feet and nodded at the kid. Bill, the old man, ran across the lot toward them. Lights clicked on in the little cottages.

The old man smiled and Walker saw his rotted teeth.

Someone yelled: “Police.” The old man turned.

Then Walker heard the loud boom of a .44.

Bill crumpled to the ground. Jack jumped flat onto the porch, and the kid was shaking.

Walker crawled into the room where Rivera waited, bleeding and armed.

He heard the kid scramble to his feet behind him, and there was another loud boom of the .44 and a heavy thud. Walker looked back and saw half the boy’s face was gone, his entire jaw shot away, and he writhed on the ground trying to hold it all together as he twisted on the porch and screamed.

Walker could not see the girl. Or Rivera. He could not see who’d shot the .44.

He belly-crawled, like he was taught to do in the Corps, and searched under the beds. He saw Rivera’s black shoes, and he held the pump action of the Winchester in his hand.

He could pop up and get a head shot with ease, reload, and deal with whatever kind of shitstorm had kicked up outside when he was done.

He counted it off, and then the door opened and a monster filled the doorframe and bent down to get inside, a blue-steel .44 in his hand and trained at Carl Walker’s head.

“Shit,” Walker said, looking at the giant man’s star. He smiled. “I’m a cop, too.”

The huge man waited as Walker looked as if he was getting his badge. The giant reached down and grabbed Walker by the front of his shirt and pulled him in close and that was enough for Johnny Rivera to get a head shot and drop Carl Walker like a limp doll, his cowboy hat rolling to the floor like a lost quarter.

LUCREZIA WAS held tight in the crook of Johnny Rivera’s arm as more mambo from the Nacional played and the announcer discussed the beautiful women and Presidente Batista proposing a toast. Rivera kept her close and she felt herself choking for air as he used her to stand and find a perch against the wall where he kept a gun tight into her ear and told Al, the Giant, to step back or he’d blow her fucking brains out.

He used her to walk, and he limped with her past Al. She remained wordless as Al backed up, keeping a big gun on Johnny Rivera, and stepping past a dead man with a hole in his forehead the size of a half-dollar and over a bloodied boy on the porch who was screaming and crying and praying for God while holding a mass of flesh and loose teeth in the cup of his hand.

The man thrashed with gurgling screams, and when Rivera looked down at him Al yanked the gun out of his hands and threw it far off the porch. He gripped Rivera by the front of his shirt, twisting it into a knot, and used his other hand to hoist him off the porch and hold him off the ground. Al shook Rivera several times and Rivera screamed from his wounded leg before Al tossed him into a heap at the base of the steps.

Lucrezia tried to get past him, but Rivera grabbed her leg and had found another gun to hold on her.

Al stepped to a spot in the middle of the motor court where another dead man lay still, his bloody back open and torn. He held his big gun loose in his hand as he stood next to the body. Lucrezia could see the small half shape of Jeanie looking on from the back door of the diner. And now the music sounded tinny, the trumpets and bongos small and far away from her, as Rivera reached for his door handle in a car she’d never seen him drive and slowly let himself into the seat. He threw her to the ground and cranked the car, and for a moment he held her in his headlights, perhaps about to kill her.

Al was about to shoot.

But across the way, she saw Al and Jeanie’s small daughter, Judy, walk past the Cadillac and over to her father, who brought his big gun to his side and let her grasp one of his fingers with her entire hand.

Johnny Rivera was gone in a second, and she heard the gears changing and engine roaring all the way down the highway.

Lucrezia began to cry, feeling like she was in a spotlight in the center of the Fish Camp with the huge moon over the bay showing on her and all the cottage guests warily poking their heads out from their cabins and silver trailers.

She sat on her backside, crunching up her knees to her chest.

She watched Al holding his daughter’s hand, and the young girl walking over to the dead man who lay in the middle of the lot like a bloated dead dog. Lucrezia watched as the girl felt for the body with her hand and then kicked hard at the corpse with small white shoes. She kept kicking until Al pulled her away, and they were left alone with the gay sounds of the radio mixing with the violent sobs of the man on the porch.

Lucrezia watched the man on the porch struggle to his feet, his face cupped into his hand, blood draining onto a cowboy shirt and dripping down his forearms and onto the crisp, washed lot. He screamed out sounds as if trying to make words. Lucrezia believed that he was asking Al to go ahead and kill him.

He stumbled and walked and drew his gun, and Al—still holding his daughter’s hand—fired two rounds into the kid’s head, dropping him to his knees, leaving his hands free of his grotesque face. When he died, he fell forward hard to his face, and now there was only the radio.

The announcer read the winners of tonight’s Cuban National Lottery again and the band struck up. She knew someone in Ybor had hit bolita and would be dancing and smiling right now.

Jeanie made her way on her knuckles to her child, and the three of them hugged in the moonlight. The lurching figure of Al bowed his head, gun dangling in his hand, and held his family tight.

WE CALLED IT “The Showdown at Showtown.” Hampton Dunn had called me at home at six a.m. and told me to hotfoot it down to Gibsonton, where three cops had been killed at a motor court. I grabbed my notebook, didn’t take a shower or make coffee, and thirty minutes later, pulled into Giant’s Fish Camp and found a carnival set up in the little motel’s lot. There were maybe ten Hillsborough County Sheriff’s cars and some unmarked units and a mess of onlookers. Some had already set up stands to hawk lemonade and biscuits, and the Fish Camp had set a long white table outside where they had a big coffee urn and paper cups.

I saw the Giant first. Hell, everyone saw the Giant first. I’d heard about the Giant, who’d been the chief of police and fire chief and mayor and about any goddamned thing in Gibsonton, from Wilton Martin. But you have to understand that Martin moon-lighted as a PR man for traveling sideshows and was known to gleefully stretch the truth. How could a man be more than eight feet tall with a size 22 shoe?

But there he was.

In the crowd, I saw a prune-faced black woman with a thick wispy beard that grew on her face and around her neck. She had dark black eyes and seemed to notice my stares and I turned away. The lemonade stand was worked by two women, and when I walked past I saw they were literally joined at the hip.

I felt off center and odd, and everything seemed hazy like a hallucination.

In the middle of it all, by a lump covered by a blanket in the center of a lot, I saw Ed Dodge talking to Ellis Clifton and Sheriff Blackburn.

“You’re slow this morning,” Eleanor said behind me.

I didn’t turn. “What did I miss?”

“Not much,” she said. “I grabbed a few witnesses who heard the shots. But nothing from Blackburn yet.”

“What’s Dodge doing here?” I asked.

She shrugged.

We’d share things like that at a scene, because at a scene everyone got pretty much the same thing and you only didn’t help out those reporters that you really didn’t like.

“How about the Giant?”

“It’s his place,” she said. “I think he’ll have something to say.”

“Any idea?”

“One of the local deputies said the men killed weren’t local.”

“So they weren’t cops?”

“They were from Pasco,” she said.

I narrowed my eyes. She shrugged.

I watched Clifton and Dodge walk to another blanket-covered hump. Clifton was drinking coffee from a paper cup and pulled back the blanket for Dodge. Dodge shook his head.

A cop I didn’t know walked from one of the little cottages. He wore rubber gloves and held a wallet in his hand. Blackburn, Dodge, and Clifton met him at the foot of the steps and he opened the wallet and the men talked.

It was a humid early morning at the Fish Camp. The air smelled salty and brackish, and flies had begun to collect on top of the dead men’s blankets. I watched a dragonfly take off and land from pocket to pocket of last night’s storm water as if pacing.

“How you been?” I asked Eleanor. I knew we were going to be here for a long time.

“Restless,” she said.

I nodded. She didn’t smile.

“You written the headline yet?” I asked.

“I don’t write headlines,” she said.

“Neither do I,” I said. “But in your mind.”

“I don’t know. GIANT SLAYING.”

I shook my head. “Dunn has a great one cooked up.”

“Even before you know what’s happened?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m out here in formality only. They may use a few quotes, but as soon as Dan Fager comes back with the picture of the Giant and the Half Woman it’s in the can.”

“Who?”

“The Half Woman is the Giant’s wife.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll have a special edition out this afternoon.”

“And I’ll have to spend all night looking for a new angle on the damned thing for the morning.”

I blew against my knuckles.

“You bastard.”

“Keeps you on your toes.”