Rose descended the ladder with an armload of clothes. Jacy looked at him, her eyes suddenly allowing a moment of hope.
“Am I going home now?”
Rose opened his hand and showed Jacy a little white pill. “I’m supposed to give you this, Jacy. To make you sleep so you’ll be quiet. But you’ll wake up with a headache. Do you want that?”
“No. Am I—”
“Promise me on a cross-your-heart that you’ll pretend to be asleep. I don’t want you to have a headache, all right?”
“But am I—”
“Shhh. Where’s that cross-your-heart?”
Jacy crossed her heart and zipped her lips. Rose turned his back while she changed into fresh clothes. Then he lifted her over his shoulder and carried her up the steps.
The old dock was a half-mile up-channel from the mouth of the Mobile River. Mattoon had bought the five-acre facility for storage until the shipping facility was complete. He had cut the main battery of security lights, the only illumination a pair of lamps a hundred feet away. He shifted uneasily in an ebony Mercedes tucked beside a green seatainer. The car had been offloaded from the
Petite Angel
immediately after the tugs had positioned the ship at the dock.
Downriver, lights twinkled across the light chop, a cool northeast wind blowing at a steady twelve knots, the heat of the day upended by the first true breath of fall. Mattoon buttoned his cash-mere jacket and heard the sound of a vehicle turning off the main road. The lights stopped at the locked gate and blinked twice.
“She’s here,” he said, feeling his heart rise into his throat.
Atwan leapt from the vehicle and ran the hundred yards to the gate in sprinter’s time. Mattoon watched him speak into the driver’s window. As the white van passed through the gate, Atwan jumped on to the rear bumper with the agility of a cat.
Mattoon slid a stocking mask over his face before exiting the car. Disguise was crucial; after the announcement of his business intentions, his name and visage would dominate the media for days.
The van stopped a dozen feet away and killed
its lights. Mattoon felt giddy, unsteady, as if the air held intoxicants instead of the smell of brackish water glazed with fuel oil.
The doors of the van opened, and Mattoon stood face to face with the abductors, grotesquely mismatched bookends, one small and slight, the other huge. The small one smiled, cocky, just as he’d been the previous year. The other one, the bodybuilder, was new. His face held concern, but not fear. There was a sense of challenge behind his eyes.
Atwan began pacing in front of the bodybuilder as if Rose’s size was a challenge, looking him up and down, sneering.
“Tenzel,” Mattoon said, “I must talk to these gentlemen alone. Please wait by the automobile until I call for you.”
Atwan spat beside the bodybuilder’s feet and slipped to the near side of the Mercedes.
“What’s bothering him?” the small man said.
“You must excuse my colleague. Land makes him nervous.” Mattoon eyed the van. “She’s inside?”
“Sleeping. A few milligrams of Demerol. She’ll come around soon. You want to know her name?”
Mattoon had tracked events via computer link to the
Mobile Register’s
website; Mattoon had tracked many things in the past weeks. “Her given name is Jacy Charlane. Though I admit a preference for Lorelei.”
The bodybuilder stepped forward. “Her name’s Jacy. If you call her Lorelei she’ll get confused. It’ll scare her.”
“Rose,” the smaller man cautioned.
“I have no intention of scaring her,” Mattoon said politely, hiding anger at being told how to handle his woman.
“She likes to read, too. She needs lots of books. Get her some books.”
Atwan strode into the group, his finger pointing at the big man’s eyes. “You listen, not talk,” he snarled.
“Tenzel! Be quiet and step aside!”
Atwan retreated several paces, his face smeared with disgust and anger, his eyes like fanned coals. The bodybuilder’s protectiveness worried Mattoon.
“You haven’t…touched her, have you?” he asked.
The small man said, “We are businesspeople. We deliver as promised.”
Despite the tenseness of the exchange, Mattoon felt a flicker of joy. He nodded.
“Bring her to the car and we shall be finished. The balance will appear in your account tonight, as soon as I get back to…where I’m staying. Hurry; I have other business to conduct this evening.”
Ryder had pushed the broken table aside and spread files and photos across the floor. Sandhill studied the papers as if walking a maze, occasionally picking one up, scanning it, and dropping it. “It’s all shit,” he whispered to himself. He’d taken a cold shower and his hair was wet and dripping.
Ryder walked counterpoint across the room, studying photos he saw in his dreams, reading words he’d read a hundred times before. He stopped at Sandhill’s rumpled, cast-off crown, plucked it from the floor.
“Hey, Sandhill, catch.”
Sandhill snatched the crown from the air, wadded it up and pushed it into his back pocket. Ryder’s eyes fell on foil-shiny paper in a zippered plastic bag that had been beneath Sandhill’s head-piece. He picked up the wrapper ends Sandhill had retrieved from Desmond’s photography studio and bounced the bag in his hand.
“You ever figure out what these things are, Sandhill?”
Sandhill disgustedly threw a page of interviews to the floor, glanced at the silver scraps. “The ends of film packages, probably; there were a bunch of them. I wasn’t thinking content, I was thinking what a nice surface it was for finger-prints. I forgot the scraps after Desmond came back negative.”
Ryder poured the torn paper into his palm. With no need to handle the torn wrappers lightly, he tugged at one, tore it. “Not too strong. Cheap metallic paper.” He lifted the bag to his nose and sniffed. He frowned and sniffed again.
Sandhill noticed the frown. “What?”
“Chocolate, sort of. Or maybe carob. There’s a chemical smell in the background. It’s a candy wrapper or something similar. Take a whiff.”
“Why?”
“Smell it, dammit. I want your impression.”
Sandhill sniffed the bag, shrugged. “Candy bars? Remember how Desmond was sucking down pop and chips? Candy fits his diet.”
Ryder spread the half-dozen torn ends across the kitchen counter. “But what brand? You’ve spent as much time as me in the check-out aisle. All the candy bars are there for the kiddies to snatch up. You ever see a package this shiny?”
“Does it make a difference what was in it?”
Ryder scrutinized a scrap. “Here’s one with the
bottoms of some lettering. Come on, Sandhill, wake up. What d’you think?”
Sandhill shot a hard eye at Ryder, then spun the letter to his viewpoint. “I’d say a C for sure, followed by an…I’d make it an A, lower-case.”
“I’m with you. There’s just a snatch of the third letter. It could be one of a dozen letters.”
Ryder took another sniff from the bag. “I got a weird hunch, Sandhill. One that just flew in from far left field. Feel like a drive?”
“I could use some real air. Where we headed?”
“To a health-food joint. There’s one over on LaPont.”
“I don’t like them, Tru,” Rose whispered when the brothers were behind the van, Mattoon and Atwan out of earshot.
“This isn’t a popularity contest,” Truman hissed. “They’re customers.”
“I don’t want Jacy with them, Tru. They’re sick and nasty.”
Mattoon’s voice cut through the dark. “What are you two talking about? Hurry up.”
Truman said, “Rose, don’t fall apart.”
“Why are you whispering? Is something wrong?”
Truman leaned out past the van. “Nothing’s wrong, we’ll be right there.”
Mattoon said, “Tenzel, go help the gentlemen.”
Atwan was at the back of the van in an eyeblink. “Move away, muscle man; I take girl.”
He threw Jacy over his shoulder as if she were a rag doll. She started screaming, her voice piercing shadows and echoing between the buildings.
Atwan grabbed her jaw and clamped it tight. “Shut up, little girl.”
The veins in Rose’s neck pulsed like shocked worms. “What are you doing to her?”
Atwan sneered over his shoulder at Rose. “You shut up too, muscle man.”
Rose strode over, grabbed Atwan’s elbow. “What are you doing? You’re scaring her.”
Atwan leapt, spinning into the air, his foot connecting with Rose’s head like a brick hitting a melon. Rose tottered, then fell face down on the concrete. Mattoon hissed, “Get in the car, Tenzel.”
“Coming, Mr Mattoon.”
Atwan opened the rear door and tossed Jacy inside before sliding into the driver’s seat. Mattoon slid into the passenger’s side. He stared at Atwan.
“You spoke my name, Tenzel.”
“It was mistake.”
Mattoon said, “Was it?”
Atwan’s eyes glittered in the dark. “I can kill them.”
Mattoon looked in the back seat, the frightened eyes, the tears. The beauty. He had no further need of the pair of pimps.
“Destroy them, Tenzel,” Mattoon whispered.
Atwan grinned as he slipped a curved and
gleaming knife from beneath the seat. He gripped the handle hard to warm the tool to its task…
And disappeared out the window, feet kicking.
Truman spun the wheel and jammed the accelerator to the floor. The van fishtailed out the gate.
“Jesus, you killed the guy, Rose,” Truman said, breathless. “You pulled the guy out of the car window and killed him.”
They swerved on to the deserted frontage road. Rose turned to look into the dark behind them. “I squeezed him until he passed out, Tru. That’s all. A lot you did to help.”
“I was…making sure the other guy didn’t do anything. I had your back, Rose.”
“Oh sure. What was the other guy doing, Tru?”
“He just froze, scared shitless. I think he thought you were going to kill him, too.”
“I didn’t kill anyone, Tru. I just wanted them to go away.”
“Guess what else is going away? A shitload of money. Guess what you just cost us?”
“You always said this was a partnership. That means I own half of her. I’ll pay for your half from my money.”
“We can’t do business like this. The point is to anticipate client needs and then—”
“Screw your junior college bullshit.”
Truman jammed on the brakes, the van skidding to a dusty halt. “How much money can we make from the girl business, Rose? How long
would it take you to make that working construction? You don’t work most of the time, staying home and lifting those damned weights. You think I want to spend the rest of my life saying ‘Smile’ and ‘Say cheese’ and ‘Watch the birdie’?”
Rose continued looking over his shoulder, studying a line of ships tethered in their slips. “Pull over there, Tru. Into the shadows.”
Truman’s voice lifted in hope. “You’re going to take her back, make things right?”
“I want to see where those guys go. I bet they’re from one of the ships. Pull behind that building.”
“Haven’t you done enough damage tonight?”
“They’re sickos, Tru. You got to keep an eye on people like that.”
It was ten when the brothers returned to Truman’s studio. He tucked the van into the dark beside the metal dumpster serving the small strip center. Rose jumped out and walked to the driver’s side. He yanked the door open.
“Get out of the van, Truman; I’m leaving.”
“You’re going home?”
“I’m going where it’s quiet and I can think. All you do is make noise.”
“You’re going to the farm, aren’t you? Every time you don’t want to face something, you run to the farm.”
“Get out, Truman.”
“That ratty farm’s not going to save you. Those days are gone, Rose.”
“Out.”
Truman reluctantly slipped to the pavement.“You saw where they were from—Pier B-2. It’s not too late. If we take her back now—”
“I said I’m not doing that, Truman. Don’t you ever listen?”
Eden’s Garden grew in a foundered Dollar General store. The space overflowed with merchandise in racks and shelves. Cartons cluttered the floor. There were bins of nuts, barrels of beans, coolers packed with produce and juices. A sound system played whale calls punctuated by banjo.
Ryder leapt a crate of organic papayas and strode to the counter, where a dour purple-haired woman watched over the top of a paperback on chemical-free living. Her scowl said she judged the pair less than a hundred per cent pure and organic.
“We close at nine,” she snipped. “That’s in two minutes.”
Ryder held up his badge and laid the pieces of wrapper on the counter. “You ever see anything like this?”
“It appears to be a badge.”
“No, these—” Ryder tapped the wrapper shards.
“That’s quite evidently torn paper.”
“Silvered outside, uncoated inside, blue lettering. You know anything might come wrapped in it? Any products?”
“Like I said, we’re getting ready to—”
“Close up. You mentioned it. Concentrate on the wrapper, please.”
The woman tweezed up a piece of wrapper with her fingernails, as though Ryder’s touch had made it leprous. “Granola bar, maybe. Or a nutrition bar. We have dozens, something for everyone.” The wrapper fluttered to the counter.
“Where are they?”
“I keep telling you, we close in—”
Ryder spun away, jogged the aisles until he located the nutrition products. Sandhill started checking at the far end of the shelves. They scanned the products, dug at boxes behind boxes.
“Here’s a maybe,” Ryder called, plucking a silver-wrapped bar from a rack proclaiming
Nature Made Right.
Sandhill ran over and compared the wrappers.
“Not the right shade. Not as metallicized either.”
The woman appeared beside them, glaring, arms crossed, foot tapping beneath the hem of her tiedyed skirt.
“We just closed. I insist that you leave this very—”
Ryder handed her a folded sheet of paper. She snapped it open and narrowed an eye at the curled amorphous shape in the copied photograph.
“What is this nonsense?”
“It was a young girl,” Ryder said. “We’re looking for her killer.”
The woman turned still as stone. She quietly refolded the page and handed it to Ryder.
“What can I do?”
They searched for ten minutes, finding several silvered packets, none fitting the size or color of the pieces Sandhill had spirited from Desmond’s studio.
“Damn,” Ryder said. “It just felt right.”
The woman frowned at a memory. “Hang on a sec.” She disappeared into the rear of the store.
“Back here,” she called after several seconds. The detectives ran to a storeroom, stocks of inventory on wooden shelves. The woman was tearing open a brown carton, a dozen more piled beside it.
“A delivery came this afternoon.”
Sandhill and Ryder fell to their knees and began ripping at cartons.
“Shampoo,” Sandhill said, peering into a box.
“I got bottles of vitamins here.” Ryder grabbed another carton.
“Aloe creams,” the woman said, throwing her opened box aside and reaching for another.
Ryder tore the top from a package. “Bags of kelp.”
Sandhill paused in mid-rip. “Kelp? What in the hell do you—”
“How about these?” the woman said, holding aloft a silver-packaged bar, its wrapper showing an overdeveloped bicep above the words: