“He’s
here
? In
town?”
“Was. Maybe still is.”
“Then why’re we here?”
“I told you, he might
be gone already.”
“You’re not positive?”
“It’d make this whole
thing more cut and dry, but as it stands, I’m a little bit stumped.” Strout
moved over to a park bench, sat down, and politely crossed his legs, waving us
over like a grandfather with a tall tale to tell. We didn’t move. “Suit
yourself,” he said, “it’s your neck if anyone overhears.”
Thomas and I edged
closer, convinced.
Strout said, “You want
the long version or the short one?”
“The long one,” I
answered. “As many details as possible.”
Thomas agreed.
Strout lit up a
cigarette and reclined, arms outstretched to either side across the back of the
bench. He blew a smoke ring and said, “In the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth.”
Thomas scoffed. I kept
a chuckle to myself—I would’ve made the same joke. It didn’t move the needle
on the Like Meter any further toward the positive side, but I couldn’t help but
feel a miniscule connection with him, and a rush of guilt immediately
followed. What did it say about me that I had a small correlation with Kerry’s
would-be murderer?
Not much, I decided.
Two completely different kinds of fruit.
A delicious Honey Crisp
apple compared to a putrid, rotting cherry.
Strout said, “Quit
rolling your eyes, Planck. Just a joke.” He leaned forward, elbows on his
knees, hands out, smoke wafting up from the cigarette held between his
fingertips. “Okay, so, let’s go over what you already know. Short and sweet,
Jan—or Kerry, whatever you want to call her—she had an affair with DeShazo.
The usual, stereotypical stuff—‘I love you, I’m leaving my wife, you’re the
only one’—you’ve seen enough movies to know what I mean. Bought her all kinds
of jewelry, put her up in an apartment. All that May to December romance shit,
right? She finds out she’s not the only one, gets pissed, decides she’s going
to tell his wife. Never got the chance, for a number of reasons. Instead, she
hit him in the one place that she knew would bother him the most—his wallet.”
“The two million,” I said.
“How’d she get it?”
“Don’t know. I never
got it out of her and DeShazo wouldn’t say.”
“She told
you
?”
“Jealous?”
“A little. But she
never mentioned how she stole it?”
“We can sit here and
guess all night, but it doesn’t matter how. She got it, she ran, and he went
ballistic.”
“But he’s got two
hundred million, doesn’t he? What she stole, he probably kept that much in his
wallet. Why get so crazy over pocket change?”
“Because he’s a
vengeful prick, that’s why. I’ve seen it before. Dude had a car towed for
parking too close to his Mercedes. Simple shit like that. You multiply a
minor infraction by a couple million, you got a recipe for
kapow
. So
she’s gone by this point, takes a week or two to get out west and holes up next
to Casanova here,” he said, waving his cigarette in my direction. “DeShazo is
out for blood and spends a ton of money trying to find her on his own. With
the amount of cash he was throwing around, I don’t see how he didn’t.
“This is just a guess,
but he’s such an asshole that I figure nobody wanted to help him out. They
probably took his money, said she’d disappeared and left it at that. You’d
have to talk to him to really understand. I mean, the guy, he gave a thousand
bucks to the Humane Society and acted like he’d solved world hunger. Everybody
bow at the feet of Mother Teresa DeShazo. Such a Class-A, despicable wretch.”
Bingo. Another mental
connection to Strout. If he hadn’t initially intended to murder Kerry, we
might’ve been kindred spirits. “Then what?” I asked. “He hired you? What was
it, some dark alley handshake?”
“Couldn’t be further
from it, really. I’d say he spent about a thousand bucks on this fancy dinner
trying to woo me. Some high class place in Manhattan with more than one fork
on the table.”
Thomas took a step
closer, crossed his arms. “Can we skip all the honeymoon bullshit?”
“None of us are getting
any younger, Planck. You want the details or not?”
Thomas retreated and
turned his head toward the lake, frustrated.
“Do I have your permission
to continue?”
“Speak.”
“Thank you.”
I said, “What’d he
offer you?”
“Enough.”
“So what, you’re just
some killer for hire?”
Strout flicked a look
over at Thomas, possibly trying to decide how he should answer, how much he
should reveal in front of an officer. “I’m a P.I., actually. The best you’ll
find.”
“That’s a confident
answer.”
“Confidence is
warranted when it’s the truth.”
He would’ve made a good
Pendragon.
“Goddamn it,” Thomas
said, “will you just tell us what happened?”
Strout stamped out his cigarette
and stood up from the bench. “You asked for details, remember? Anyway, here’s
the quick and dirty. I found her through Clarence—he’d have been less subtle
with a bullhorn. I found her, I met her, and I broke my own damn rules. I got
too
close. I couldn’t do it.”
I said, “You realize
you got her killed by not saying anything, right?”
“I was going to, but he
got to her first.”
“How? How’d he find
her?”
“I couldn’t figure it
out—not initially; I’d been so careful. A lot of times—and I’m not saying this
from experience,” he said, which I knew was a lie, “—people tend to get antsy.
They muck things up and ruin the job, so they’re only allowed to have the
slightest bit of detail. The only thing I told him was the area where she was
living. I never gave him an address or a phone number—nothing. I didn’t find
the tracking chip on my car until this morning. Motherfucker was hedging his
bets.”
“Hedging his bets?”
“You don’t get a couple
hundred mil in the bank by being an idiot.”
“You watch the news,
don’t you? I’d say it gets you billions.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
Trying to keep us on
track, Thomas said, “So you were there last night? Did you see anything?”
“I wasn’t. I was back
at the hotel, trying to figure out how to break the news to her. All I can
guess is that maybe he’d tracked me to her place within the past couple of
months. I’d been there a few times, scoping out the territory. It’s the only
thing I can think of. I told him yesterday morning that I was out. He
flipped, of course, then showed up at my room last night.
“I hadn’t found out she
was dead by then, but it couldn’t have been more than a half an hour after she
was murdered. He was cussing me out, demanding his money back, waving a gun in
my face. Yelling about how I was too chickenshit to finish what he’d paid me
for. I don’t keep that kind of cash on me—too dangerous. He finally told me
he’d be back, that I had a day to have it ready for him, and then he left.”
Thomas asked, “He say
anything about doing it on his own?”
“Nope.”
“Then how can you be so
sure?”
“I wasn’t. Not until I
found out she was dead. And aside from a couple of interactions with Pendragon
here and a quick visit to Clarence, I spent the day looking for him. No luck,
though. Wherever he’s hiding, he’s doing a good job.
If
he’s coming
back—which I’m sure he is—then I figure he’ll be showing up at the hotel here
in about, oh…” he said, checking the time, “thirty or forty-five minutes.
Thought you boys might want to meet him.” Strout stuffed his hands in his
pockets, smiling, waiting.
The possibility of
confronting Kerry’s murderer both excited and terrified me. Redemption could
be minutes away, but there was also the chance of encountering an armed
lunatic. I had no choice. Thomas and I might not get another opportunity like
this one. “Damn straight,” I said. “I’m in.”
“Hold on,” Thomas
said. “Let’s think about—”
“What’s there to think
about?” I interrupted. “DeShazo. Hotel room. Forty-five minutes. We got
him, man. We got DeShazo. We know when and where he’ll be—we don’t have to
run around half the country looking for him! If we catch Kerry’s killer maybe
you’ll get a promotion. That’s what we need to think about.”
My intent was to hint
at the positive possibilities for Thomas and his situation. Always looking for
ways to help people. And while I’d manipulated him into helping—that sounds so
negative—maybe “persuaded” is more suitable—I also wanted to provide some
encouraging reinforcement. I owed him that much.
“I don’t care about
that, dipshit.”
“He’s right,” Strout
added. “Could mean big things for you.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
Thomas grabbed my arm. “It’s so, so…so
convenient
, bro. What if he’s
trying to trick us? He killed Kerry and now he’s covering his tracks.”
I hadn’t considered the
possibility. It seemed feasible. I swallowed the disgusting, cherry-sized
lump in my throat.
Strout laughed. It was
a high-pitched, cacophonous squeal that didn’t match his persona, causing the
birds roosting overhead to scold us. “If I really wanted you dead, Planck,
they would’ve been zipping up your body bag already,” he said. “You two do
what you want, but I gotta get back.”
“I’m not—”
“Let me sweeten it for
you—come with me, and I’ll tell you why I’m not so certain it was DeShazo.”
Thomas frowned, shook
his head.
“Last chance.”
“Tell us now.”
“Hotel or nothing,”
Strout said. He turned away and took three steps toward the parking lot.
Thomas’s gun manifested
itself out of thin air.
I’m kidding. Sometimes
it’s hard to resist giving a simple action like pointing a gun a small taste of
dramatic flair. Still, it happened so quickly that I couldn’t have gotten the
word “poof” out of my mouth before it made an appearance. It happened almost
the same way when Shayna showed me the 9mm she’d purchased. One second it
wasn’t there, then it was. You could
almost
say it manifested.
I said, “What the hell
are you—”
“Don’t move, Strout.
Turn around.”
Strout glanced over his
shoulder, kept walking. “Put that thing away before somebody gets hurt. I’m
at the Phoenix, room three-oh-two. Keep it loaded, though, because we might
need it.”
I’d stayed at the
Phoenix Hotel before, plenty of times, after Shayna had decided that my presence
was no longer welcome in our home. It’s your typical rundown,
hasn’t-had-a-good-sidewalk-sweep-in-ages hotel over on Franklin Avenue. The
kind of place that’ll rent you a room for a couple of hours, if that’s all you
and your “friend” needed it for.
It’s cheap, with faded
white paint that’s chipped off so much you can see the cinderblock underneath,
and potholes in the parking lot so deep, they remind me of the moon’s surface,
or maybe like a bunch of landmines went off.
To Strout, it would’ve
been the kind of place where a hired murderer can keep a low profile. But to
anyone watching or keeping tabs on the riff-raff that frequented the place,
Strout could’ve easily been targeted as a black sheep interloper because he
wasn’t dealing meth, smoking meth on the stairwells, or bribing a hooker with
meth in exchange for a quickie on top of a mattress that she and another
dopehead had stained earlier that morning.
Thomas had been quiet
the whole ride, silently fuming, and in an effort to engage him, I asked if he
was familiar with the Phoenix when we jostled across the pockmarked blacktop
and he said he was, that he’d almost gotten shot there three weeks ago when
he’d tried to arrest a prostitute.
He said, “Chick was
buck-ass naked, standing out on the sidewalk. High as a freakin’ kite, bro.
Cops see some weird shit when we’re out dealing with these people on a daily
basis, but this was about the craziest thing I’d ever seen. I’m standing
there, trying to get her to calm down so I can take her in, right? Get this,
she reaches down—and this is the absolute truth—she pulls this tiny,
single-shot pistol out of her
vagina
like it was some kind of purse. I
was laughing so hard I almost got shot.”
“Gross.”
“Yeah, well, you didn’t
have to handle the thing. She almost bit me, too. I could’ve gotten rabies.”
The story seemed to
cheer him up, at least enough that he decided it was okay to keep talking to
me.
Once we’d parked, he
shut the engine off and said, “Gut’s all wrong. Something’s up, I can feel
it.”
I didn’t want to spook
him any further by admitting that the slightly unreliable Pendragon intuition
had slowly pegged out, as well. I
wanted
to believe Strout. I
wanted
to believe that anyone who could’ve been taken in and smitten by All That Was
Kerry, anyone who would risk his life by not killing her, would be on our
side. I
wanted
to believe that he would offer up DeShazo, wretch that
he was, and that would be the end of it.
I’d decided that I
would let Thomas cuff him, that the courts could choose his fate, and that
getting a broom handle shoved up his ass in prison by some giant, burly dude
named Hacksaw for the rest of his life would be justifiable punishment.
How did I come to that
conclusion? Death, by my hands or anyone else’s, would’ve been too easy. And
besides, I’m too pretty. If I were the one to kill DeShazo and go to
prison…let’s just say that Hacksaw would parade me around like a trophy wife.
I wanted to believe
that everything would be okay, but something felt indescribably
off
, like
the moment you’re about to board a plane and some intangible sensation (call it
“The Force,” if that gives you a frame of reference) tells you to go back to
your hotel, that you’re not supposed to be on that flight, and for some unknown
reason, you listen.
This happened. True
story: I didn’t get on a certain flight in Milwaukee. I didn’t die that day
like the woman that would’ve been my first wife. She had a conference she
couldn’t miss—it would’ve been bad form, as she was the keynote speaker. I was
selfish. I lied. I told her I wanted to stay behind and go on a couple more
sightseeing tours, that I would catch up with her later in a day or two and
we’d spend some time together then.
Why did I let her get
on the plane?
Here’s the worst part:
I wanted to call off the engagement. I was desperate, but I couldn’t bring
myself to do it. Don’t tell me you’ve never been there. You’ve been in that
bad place before—the one between protecting someone else’s feelings and saying
fuck-all to your own. I got that slight jolt of impending doom, and in the
back of my mind, in some dark corner where the light never gets turned on, a
notion—hardened like the pit of a cherry—
manifested
in my subconscious:
What
if something happens?
Here’s a question that has plagued me since that
day: Did I commit murder by allowing her—almost encouraging her—to board that
plane?
I don’t know. I don’t
know.
I don’t talk about this
much. Or ever, so feel privileged that I’ve lowered the drawbridge and allowed
you to cross the moat into Pendragon Castle.
Thomas double-checked
the safety on his handgun and tucked it behind his back. “I can’t believe I
let you talk me into this. I hope she was worth it.”
“She was. I wouldn’t
let her get on a plane, that’s for certain.”
“What?”
“Sorry, figure of
speech.”
“You seriously get
weirder by the minute. I’m starting to think there might be something wrong
with you.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Okay, well, try to
contain yourself. You ready?”
“No. Yeah.” I pushed
the door open, paused. “Do we have a plan?”
“Stay close. Don’t
die.”
“That’s it?”
“You asked. That’s all
I got.”
***
Strout’s room resembled
all the other ones I’d stayed in before while taking an involuntary leave of
absence from my home, per Shayna’s request—or “demand,” however you’d like to
phrase it. Burnt orange walls, brown carpet the color of Kerry’s garden dirt,
blue comforters covering the dual full-sized beds, and a black and white
television. Strout sat in a corner chair, watching Letterman and drinking a
beer as we entered.
“Leave the door
cracked,” he said. “DeShazo called about the money. He’ll be here in twenty.
You gents want a beer?”
We declined. I sat on
a bed. Thomas moved around so his back wouldn’t be facing the entrance.
I said, “Do
you
have any kind of plan? Like, should we hide in the bathroom when he comes in
or what? I was thinking it’d be best for you and me to take him down and then
Thomas can put the cuffs on.”
“Best to wait and see,”
Strout said. “I’ll introduce you two as my associates—maybe he won’t be so
eager to wave that gun around.”
Thomas found an empty
spot on the wall between a painting of Jesus praying and one of him on the
cross and backed against it. “Why aren’t you a hundred percent on DeShazo?”
Strout drained his beer
and sat it on the nightstand. He belched, rubbed his stomach, and said,
“Couple of reasons. Guy like that, it goes against everything I know about his
type. I’ve dealt with them for thirty years. They don’t like to get their
hands dirty, you see. They pay people like me to do it for them.”
“Doesn’t mean he
wouldn’t.”
“You’re right, it
doesn’t, but it’s not in his character profile. Not that I’d completely put it
past him. He was angry, said he wanted to teach her a lesson, but I’m not
convinced he’d go through with it.”
“Enough with the
tap-dancing, Strout.”
“Yeah, yeah. You ask
for answers then get snippy when I give ‘em.”
“If you don’t—”
“She had another tail.”
I realized what he was
getting at—Kerry’s diary had mentioned the possibility of someone else following
her, but I hadn’t given it much stock because I was so blinded by the surety of
DeShazo’s involvement. “That’s right,” I said. “A cop.”
Strout flinched, raised
his eyebrows, then smirked. “Well, damn, Pendragon, I don’t know why you need
me when you already have all the answers. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say
you might make a good sleuth.”
I didn’t bother telling
him that I’d had all my information handed to me. Besides, it felt good to let
him think I wasn’t some naïve mark that he could tease with secrets. He
reminded me of a deep-sea anglerfish, trying to lure us in close enough to snap
down with a mouthful of jagged teeth. There was trouble behind that smile.
Thomas said to me,
“Wait, you
knew
about this?”
“Yeah, but it was such
a—I don’t know, such a far-out idea that I didn’t think it was worth the
trouble.”
Thomas rolled his eyes
and hung his head, shaking it back and forth, unable to stay still like he was
standing on a bed of hot coals. It seemed like he was ready to launch into
another tirade about full disclosure and chastise me again for leaving out some
important detail that we could’ve focused on a long time ago.
Instead, he let it go.
Maybe he thought it was useless, who knows. And really, going another round
with him about what I should’ve told him and what I should’ve keep to myself
and how I should’ve tried harder to not be
me
would’ve been futile. A
leopard can’t change his spots, a zebra his stripes, a Pendragon his core.
He asked Strout, “What
makes you think it was a cop?”
“Instinct. Intuition.
My gut.”
“Your
gut
?”
“The fact that he drove
an unmarked sedan. A black one. The fact that he walked into your station.”
“Who?”
“Can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?” I
asked.
“Can’t. And that’s the
truth. I never saw him from the front.”
“Bullshit,” Thomas
said, taking a step forward, leaning over, and pointing at Strout. “You’re
making this up, trying to throw us off. If it were true, you’d know. You’d
know.”
“Pinky swear on my
life.”
“Pinky swear? What are
you, four years old?”
“Hand on the Bible, I’m
clueless.”
“
Bull
. Shit.”
“Hear me out—not that
you’ll listen—but here’s why. You gotta remember, I was in this to, uh, to
dispose
of somebody—sorry, Pendragon, but that’s what it was—and since I was in that
position, I didn’t want to risk getting made. I couldn’t go snooping around
and take a chance on a cop getting a bead on me. Make sense? I pop up on his
radar, mission’s off. I’m good at what I do—damn good—and you see this right
here, this nose? I still got the tip of it because I don’t stick it out there
to get chopped off. I’m not that stupid.”
I nudged up to the edge
of the bed. “But
why?
Why’d she have a cop on her?”
“Beats me,” he said.
Strout bent over and pulled another beer out of the mini-fridge. He popped the
cap off, then sent it flying across the room with a snap of his fingers.
My friends used to do
that back in college. I never mastered the trick. One more item on my growing
list of reasons to dislike him. Not jealousy, mind you. Envy.
He took a swig from his
beer bottle and then picked at the label. “About a month ago, I’m cruising up
to her house one afternoon, all set and ready for a little recon. The usual
stuff—marking her patterns, tracking when she’s coming home, when she’s
leaving, any visitors stopping by on a regular basis, maybe somebody I could
frame. I’d gotten close to giving up on the idea because the girl didn’t have
any friends—I suppose she hadn’t reached out to anyone so she could keep her profile
low.
“Maybe that’s why she
took to me—I made the effort and she needed somebody to have a drink with.
People, we’re built to congregate. It’s in our nature, that want for
companionship. You ever wonder why you can be sitting alone in a theater and
some jackass walks in and sits down two seats away from you? Two hundred empty
chairs and he’s so close you can taste his popcorn. It’s that need to form a
bond.”
I have to tell you, I’d
often been bothered by the same predicament at the movies, and the fact that
Strout and I had another thing in common felt like putting a shoe on the wrong
foot. Sure, it serves its purpose as protection from the elements, but it
feels awkward and
wrong
. Plus, I became nauseated sitting there
listening to him describe how he’d planned to kill Kerry, drawing her in under
the false pretense of friendship.
It was such a strange
juxtaposition—identifying with the man but wanting to smash the beer bottle and
slit his throat with it at the same time.
He also had a tendency
to drift from the original point of his story—another misgiving of mine that
I’m aware of and trying to control—but if it adds to the depth of what you’re
trying to say, why not include it? Flesh it out. Create the whole skyscraper
instead of just putting up the steel beam framework. Shayna never understood
this about me, never got how it added to the pictures I attempted to
construct. One example: “I asked if you got milk at the grocery store and
you’re telling me about a squirrel falling into a dumpster. Did you get milk
or not? That’s
all I want to know
.”