Clay rushed through Philips’s door without knocking. He slid the door shut, making sure the latch clicked.
“Thornhill? Did you mean Sandhill, Norma?”
“Something-hill; I guess that was it. Why?”
“Where’d you hear about Sandhill?” Clay asked.
“A meeting with the police department a couple weeks back. There was this detective—former detective, I guess—and some cops wanted him to study the abductions, see if he could contribute anything.”
“
Squill
wanted Sandhill to look at the cases?”
“Squill about had a hissy-fit. It was other people at the meeting. That Zemain fellow, for one. Even Bidwell seemed for it.”
“That makes more sense. Did Sandhill take this look?”
Philips nodded. “He did, but nothing came of it, according to Squill. Who’s Sandhill?”
Clay clasped his hands behind his back and
wandered to the window. Philips watched him study a storm-ready sky, as if answers were scribed in the thickening cumulus. After a silent minute, he turned, leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.
“Let me spin you a tale about one John Conner Sandhill, Norma.”
“What kind of tale? Good? Bad?”
“No one’s quite sure,” Clay said.
Sandhill had his monthly meeting with his accountant and it was 4.15 before he returned to the restaurant. Every seat sat bare, but in an hour people would be standing in line for a table. Marie was at the door when he entered.
“Sorry I’m late, but the news is good: We don’t have to live under a bridge this week. Where’s Jacy?” He held up a bag. “I thought we’d take a break from gumbo tonight and I brought poboys.” He yelled to the kitchen. “Hey, Jacy, you back there? Get out here, girl.” Sandhill looked at Marie. “I hope you guys didn’t wait ice cream on me.”
“I thought Jacy was with you, Conner,” she whispered. “I hoped you’d picked her up at the park and gone off somewhere together.”
Sandhill’s brow tightened. “She’s not here?”
“I ain’t seen her,” Marie said, her voice starting to tremble. “And she always here by now.”
Sandhill looked at his watch. Jacy was forty-five minutes past her usual entrance.
“Call the school, see if she’s there. I’ll check outside.”
Sandhill hit the door at a run. He was at the park in a minute, jogging it end to end, looking into bushes, behind trees. Two black men in their mid-twenties were playing one-on-one. Sandhill strode on to the court.
“Yo, man, we got a game here,” said one of the players, heavyset, his shirt soaked with sweat.
“You see a little girl in the park this afternoon?” Sandhill said. “Eight years old. Blue dress.”
“I playin’ ball, man. I see the hoop.”
The heavy man turned away from Sandhill, ignoring him to sight from free-throw stance. When he bent his knees for the shot, Sandhill slapped the ball away.
“Hey, crazy muthafucker…”
Sandhill said, “You didn’t see a kid, maybe back there on that bench?”
“Said I wasn’t lookin’.”
The man glared at Sandhill and bent to grab the basketball. Sandhill set his foot on the ball, held it tight against the asphalt.
“Yo, Jack, chill,” the other player yelled to Sandhill. The man trotted over, tall and lanky and wearing a Little Richard mustache.
“This kid you talkin’ about. Black girl about this high? Always got her nose in a book?”
“That’s her.”
“She here all the time. Almost every day.”
“Today?” Sandhill asked.
The man nodded. “Sure ‘nough. ‘Til maybe a half-hour ago.”
“You see her leave?”
“Hunh-uh. She here, then I look over and she gone. Something wrong, man? You lookin’ sick.”
A half-drowned ghost walked through night rain falling in plumb-straight lines, rain sizzling over black pavement, rain roaring down the drain grates. Neon bar light shone over sheeting water, the ghost’s feet splashing through reflections, slogging, shoes squishing with every step. The sodden apparition pushed through the bar-room door and stood dripping in the middle of the floor. Voices stopped. The click of pool balls halted. Cigarettes hung in mid-air.
“I’m looking for a little girl,” the ghost said, the fiftieth time in five hours. “Black. Eight years old. Probably taken from the park on the 1400 block of Ardmore. Was anyone around there at that time?”
“You po-lice done been here two times axin’ that,” a woman’s voice said. “Nobody saw nothing.”
The ghost studied the faces; no averted eyes, no looks of lying, several faces stunned sober by the moment, struck with concern and sympathy.
Conner Sandhill turned and ghosted back into the night. The rain was so loud and Sandhill so deep in his thoughts he didn’t hear the heavy black SUV slip up behind him. The light from the 500,000-candlepower spotlight seared his eyes and blinded him. He threw his hands between the light and his face.
Doors slammed and hard hands gripped his arms. He spun from the grip on his right into the person holding him at the left and brought his elbow up hard, feeling it connect with a jaw, hearing a pained grunt. Someone put a chokehold on him from behind, a thick arm wrapping his neck like a python. Sandhill gripped the arm, held it tight and went limp, two-hundred-forty pounds pulling his attacker with him as he fell to the pavement. He rolled as he hit, flipping his attacker over and breaking his grip. He drove rigid fingers into the soft tissue at the base of the man’s throat, pushed to his feet…
And heard a round jacked into a chamber.
“Freeze your ass, Sandhill!” a voice yelled. “Get your hands up where I can see them—now!”
Half blind from the beam, Sandhill turned to the voice and saw only a dark shape against the light. He glared at it and kept his hands open and wide.
“Screw you, Ducky.”
His two attackers struggled to their feet. Sandhill saw Bobby Tandy and Corly Watkins, two pencil dicks from Internal Affairs and longtime enlistees
in Squill’s sycophantic army. Sandhill was happy to see Tandy with hand to throat, gasping for air.
“You’re under arrest, Sandhill. Stay cool.”
Commander Ainsley Duckworth stood three paces distant, rain sluicing from his hat brim to the wide shoulders of a brown raincoat, his ninemillimeter service weapon aimed at the center of Sandhill’s chest. Sandhill moved his hands away from his body.
“Arrest. What the hell for?”
“We’ve been following you an hour. You’ve been interfering with police business…”
“You’ve been following
me
? An eight-year-old girl snatched off the street and you people are following me, you sick fuck?”
“…and maybe impersonating a police officer.”
Sandhill swiped wet hair from his eyes and glared at Duckworth. “How’s it feel, Ducks? Is it like being back in Internal Affairs again? I’m surprised you’re here; you always did your best work from a distance.”
“In IA I went after piece-of-shit cops. You’re just a piece-of-shit civilian.” Duckworth gestured with the muzzle. “Get in the car, whorehill. But first lose the ankle piece.”
“The only place I’m going is home.”
Tandy and Watkins were snarl-faced and circling Sandhill, but not moving into range. Duckworth said, “Don’t add to your worries. Pass over the iron and get in the car. Chief Squill wants to talk to you.”
“This is going to come back and haunt, you, Ducky,” Sandhill said.
“Not a chance. Pass over the iron, scumhill.”
Sandhill bent, lifted his pant leg. He wanted to keep the holster on; having the illegal lockpick drop out could complicate matters.
“Don’t get your undies in a wad, Ducks. I’m pulling the piece and handing it over.”
He two-fingered the .32 to Duckworth’s wide palm and they headed downtown.
“All that’s going on and you’re following me?” Sandhill said from the back seat. “You’re absolutely frigging useless, Ducks.”
“
I’m
useless, Sandhill?” Duckworth’s grin was palpable in the dark of the car. “Which one of us was supposed to be watching the Charlane girl?”
Rain beat against the starboard windows of Mattoon’s quarters, a line of squalls coming in from the east as the ship nosed higher into the Caribbean. A dozen white tapers burned from sconces secured to the bulkheads of the main room.
Mattoon sat at his keyboard, a crystal tumbler of absinthe beside him, the shimmering green liqueur poured from a Belle Époque bottle of Pernod Fils, one of a dozen he’d purchased at four thousand dollars a bottle. He allowed himself a journey with the hypnotic distillation of wormwood every few weeks, the drug seeming to heighten and focus his senses.
His fingers danced over the keyboard as he entered a code he could recite in his sleep. His heart pulsed in his throat.
The screen flickered. It lit to a photo of Lorelei in a pink blouse and blue jeans. She slept on a double bed, head cocked to one side, her wrists and pink-socked feet loosely bound with clothesline. The photo appeared to have been taken in the dark by flash. His heart soaring, Mattoon read the accompanying communiqué.
Your product has been secured (encrypted photo file enclosed) and is in excellent condition. We will use the same transfer method as last year unless advised otherwise. The 50% upfront fee should be directed to the following account number…
Mattoon felt the absinthe rise in his mind like an icy wind. He made the financial transaction from his keyboard, then walked to the window and looked across the storm-dazzled night. The rain seemed to strike the ship in rhythmic sheets, a symphony of water. He started dancing, a jittering tiptoe shuffle, shoulders bouncing, hands held high. The rain beat harder against the windows. Mattoon removed his shirt and continued dancing, elbows above his shoulders, hands clawing at the air.
He removed his pants. In Mattoon’s mind the rain became a sonic river of harmonies, shifting and iridescent. Mattoon danced naked through the
river, feeling it sweep and flow and surge toward flood. He threw the door wide and danced on to the walkway. The rain drove his eyes shut, beat his hair flat. Mattoon grabbed the rail and screamed his name at the sky until the lighting answered. He screamed again and again, until his voice broke like glass against the wind.
Mattoon cried, and as he wept, he laughed. His hands grabbed for rain, pulled it close, wiped it across his face, down his body, rinsing himself clean with rain and tears and thunder. He stumbled back into the room. Water fell from his skin, from his eyes, spurted from within him; it was all glorious water. He slid to the floor with unfocused eyes.
His grin was all teeth as he lay spent and gasping, the carpet behind him as wet and glistening as if tracked by a legion of snails.
The booking room smelled of fear and anger and wet bodies. Sandhill sat for half an hour, watching the dismal parade of wife-beaters and drunks, barfighters and car-boosters, pickpockets and dope peddlers.
Squill finally arrived, grinning like a man who’d just discovered a hundred forgotten dollars in a pair of pants.
“You bought yourself some real trouble, Sandhill. Assaulting an officer.”
“Won’t work, Terrence. Your piss-monkeys were too fired up to ID themselves before crawling over me.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of impersonating a cop.”
“You mean in the bars? I never ID’d myself as a cop; I’m not that stupid.”
“You didn’t do much to correct the notion, did you?”
“I can’t be responsible for the misconceptions
of others when I’ve done nothing to contribute to those beliefs. People occasionally mistake you for a cop, Terrence. It’s not your fault.”
Squill put a mirror-bright black wingtip on the bench beside Sandhill and bent low.
“You can’t piss me off, Sandhill, so don’t wear yourself out trying. I know how shitty you must feel, having fucked up your babysitting job so royally. But if I ever hear of you interfering in police business again—and you and I both know that’s exactly what you were doing tonight—I’m gonna slam-dunk your ass in jail. Then I’ll make sure your cell-buddies know you’re an ex-cop. You might be able to boot around Tandy and Watkins; let’s see how you do in a concrete box full of blacks and bikers.”
Sandhill’s knuckles whitened. He whispered, “Are we done here?”
Squill pushed off the bench. “That’s up to you. Stay where you belong, slinging hash, and it’s over. Mess in the case and it’s just started.”
Sandhill stood until his eyes were level with Squill’s. “Your investigation is foundering, Terrence. This isn’t your usual drooling sicko out there—it’s got a different feel. I can help; you know it, I know it. But this isn’t about the girls, is it? It’s because I dropped the dime on your little sideline security business way back when. Get past it, Terrence, for the sake of the—”
“Get out,” Squill hissed through clenched teeth. “Get out while you can.”
“I can pick up my gun, Terrence? Since no charges seem to be being filed in this little, uh, misunderstanding?”
Squill spun on a heel and retreated into the station. Sandhill retrieved his weapon from a desk sergeant who wouldn’t meet his eyes. Outside, the rain had been replaced by a sprinkling of stars. He heard a horn, followed by Ryder squealing to the curb in a battered gray pickup.
“Jacy?” Sandhill asked, climbing inside.
Ryder shook his head. “Nothing yet.”
“Take me to Brill Street. I’ve got some places to check.”
“There’s nothing you can do, Sandhill. I’m dropping you at your truck.”
Sandhill’s voice bristled. “Jacy’s out there, Ryder.”
“So are about a hundred cops. Plus the state and county boys. We’ve got BOLOs stretching from Florida to Louisiana.”
“Be On the Look-Out for what?” Sandhill said, voice rising with anger. “You have no description of the perp, car, anything. What the hell they going to do? Stand in the fucking street with a sign saying, ‘Honk if you’ve got Jacy?’”
“Crank it back a notch, Sandhill. You’ll need the energy soon enough.”
“What the hell for?”
“For the girl’s mother,” Ryder said gently. “She’s back at the restaurant. Waiting.”
Turn Left at BP Station, go 2.4 miles to sign for Terry’s Fish Camp…
Wallace Wainwright Benson III, fifty-six years of age, sat on the boards of a major bank, a stock brokerage, an old-line insurance firm. Politicians sought his benediction. His wife having divorced him twelve years previously, he ate daily at one of three exclusive clubs. He enjoyed golf, but not slinging the clubs into the car, so he’d purchased a small estate bordering the fourth fairway of one of the three finest golf courses in Ohio. Twice named “Mr Charitable Giving” in the
Columbus Dispatch
, Benson’s company had recently endowed a chair at Ohio State University’s College of Business and Finance.
But tonight he was just a terrified man in a Mercedes-Benz, fourteen aching hours south of home. Though his AC was set to the highest register, he was sweating like a roofer in July, stopping every few minutes to consult instructions on a sheet of paper.
Turn right, proceed 1.6 miles
…
He’d driven like a scared old woman on his way south, until he realized it was the drive north that demanded utmost care.
See old boat on blocks. Go 0.2 past, turn left on dirt road
…
Before leaving he’d transferred a down payment of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to a Caribbean bank. It was no big deal, his guest-house cost twice that. And he never had guests.
Road dead ends. Turn right down dirt path to old farmhouse. Stop and wait.
He pulled up to a gray wooden house in the last stages of rot. Spanish moss ghosted the live oak above his car. He turned down the AC so he might hear any motion in the night, but heard only burring crickets and the jackhammer of his heart.
A heart that nearly stopped when headlamps from a white van tucked back in the trees flicked on, then off. He heard doors creaking open. The sound of feet lifted high to trample through weeds. Two men in dark clothing and stocking masks appeared in front of his car. One was a rail, the other large as two men, at least across the chest and arms.
“Cut the lights,” a voice hissed. Then, dark, the only light from wheeling stars in a sky of ink. Footsteps drew closer. Light from a flashlight struck his eyes, blinding him.
“Christ, not in his face,” the skinny man said.
“You fucking hold it next time,” the big one said. Then, “Let me see the trunk. Did you make a good nest?”
“A wh-what?”
“Get out and open the fucking trunk,” the huge man commanded.
Benson complied with trembling fingers. The man scowled at the mish-mash of blankets and pillows. He yanked them out and hung them over Benson’s quivering shoulders, then carefully replaced them one by one, crafting smooth layers,
tucking, folding, giving the trunk interior a soft evenness. He removed the two pillows, fluffed them, set them back inside.
“Air?” he grunted.
“It’s ventilated,” Benson said, his voice cracking. The big man said nothing. He clomped into the woods, returning a minute later carrying a slumping cylindrical bundle, which he lowered into the trunk as gingerly as if it were antique porcelain.
“Come and see your dreams,” the skinny man said.
Benson shook so much he could barely walk. The small man’s hand peeled back a flap of black cloth. Two incredibly beautiful eyes stared back at him. The mouth was covered with thick courses of tape. The eyes were wet and terrified.
“Kittinia,” Benson whispered, breathless.
The skinny man smiled. “Her real name’s Maya. Or whatever you want to name her. You can do that, you know. She’s all yours.”
Wallace Wainwright Benson III, a man who joked easily with senators, uttered a dry squeak.
“She was fed an hour ago,” the man continued. “Don’t open the trunk until you’re where it’s safe. You understand?”
Benson nodded and the huge man flicked the trunk closed with a fingertip. The man stared at Benson for a long time, then followed his skinny partner into the trees. Twenty seconds later the van was gone.
Benson waited for the wild beating of his heart to subside, then retraced his tracks until he saw the lights of Interstate 10. Joining the anonymous eastbound traffic, his night exploded into blossoms of black flowers, the décor of a world where every wish was granted.
“Where’s Nike, Marie?” Sandhill asked, standing in the dining room and smelling of rain and sweat and anger. It was past midnight. The sign and most of the lights were off, a single bank of rear fluorescents casting long shadows across the dining room.
Marie stopped pacing. She shut her eyes and shook her head. “After the po-lice axed all their questions, that poor girl walked back and forth two hours, quiet as death and shaking like a scared lamb. I say, ‘Nike, sit down, get some rest ’til Conner come in.’ Then ‘bout a half-hour back she said she needed to go out. I told her it wasn’t the way, but I couldn’t keep her in here, Conner, Lord knows I tried.” Marie dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “If she gets messed up, it’s gonna tear her apart when she come out of it. For a long time after that, too.”
“She can’t help it, Marie; it’s a disease.”
“I told her it was my fault, but she didn’t hear. I tried to say—”
Sandhill shook his head. “No, goddammit, Marie. I’m the one Nike left in charge.”
“…how I wasn’t thinking, how I shoulda axed
you to pick her up at school or gone myself. I shoulda—”
“Marie…”
“I’ve got two grandbabies, Conner. I watch them like a mama hawk. But I wasn’t watching over Jacy like I shoulda been.”
Sandhill picked up a chair, banged its legs on the floor. “Dammit. How many times do I have to say I don’t want to hear it, Marie.”
Marie’s eyes flared. “Don’t you be telling me what to—”
The chair banged down again, a leg splintered off.
“Enough!”
Marie started to yell back, caught herself. Sandhill sat and looked away. Marie closed her eyes and shook her head, then walked to Sandhill. She sat and put her hand on his forearm.
“I got my right to feel bad too, Conner. Nike talked to me before she picked you to watch Jacy. She picked you for more reasons than you know.”
Sandhill closed his eyes. “One of the reasons was that you’d be around to help out.”
Marie nodded. “She knew you ain’t big on kids and wouldn’t be easy with the idea of keeping Jacy, but you’d be able to ax me things if you needed.”
Sandhill took a deep breath, released it slowly. Marie watched, started to talk, checked herself. He walked to the window and stood behind his sign, looking through the dark tubes of chargeless neon.
“Another reason was that you and Nike believed in me, Marie; as an ex-cop I could protect Jacy from horror.”
Marie walked to the window, turned Sandhill to her, pulled him tight and laid her head against his chest. “It wasn’t that you was a cop, Conner. Nike and I both believed there was a special light acrost you. Evil would pass us over if you was around.”
Marie and Sandhill stood by the window looking like lovers frozen in a slow dance. Outside on the street a taxi rounded the corner and glided toward the restaurant. It slid by, but a hundred feet down the block it made a sharp U-turn, cut its lights, and returned to park in the shadows across the street.