R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 01 - Black Beast Read online

  I pushed the paperwork back across a pine-top desk scarred with cigarette burns. “It was a long time ago.”

  “Time for the fiddler to get his. Maintain the yellow line,” he replied, the eyes falling involuntarily to where my jean fit too loose on the prosthetic.

  Like skin over meatless bone.

  There was a solid, faded yellow stripe that ran down the corridor, five feet from the three holding cells. The guard buzzed me in.

  Ebony Durning was in the first cell, closest to the guard station. He didn’t get up as I stopped in front of his door but finished drawing on a small roach, extinguishing it by licking the tips of his fore and middle finger and pinching the small coal. There was an audible hiss and the aroma of bad weed: pungent, like something already dead.

  “The bulls are lenient here at Hotel California on D-day,” was the first thing he said to me.

  “I’m glad,” I replied.

  “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leeeeve,” he crooned.

  “I know the song. Do we have business, Eb?”

  “They’re gonna do me this time, Detective. No more appeals. The Governor ain’t too friendly to cop killers. Eleven hours and change. Ain’t much of a future.”

  “More than my partner got.”

  “Officer Wells, it was. And the old lady at the store,” Durning said. “I sent letters.”

  He was still supine on the narrow, wall-mounted cot.

  “Fuck you, Eb. You don’t get to tell me the names.”

  He swung his long legs to the floor and stood. He was a full six five, all bones and loose flesh. Ganglier than I remembered. Durning’s mother was white and his father black—Eb’s skin was the color of sun-bleached cardboard.

  “Bobby Mac. Basketball legend.”

  He threaded his spidery arms through the rungs and leaned on the crossbar, his veins bulging beneath an aqua jailhouse tattoo that was too faded to make out.

  He looked awful: afro reduced to patches and tufts, like a lawn with fungal rot. His complexion was dull and fishy.

  “What’s this about, Eb? I came early because of Lucinda. She said this was important.”

  “They’re gonna pump my veins full of potassium chloride. Last cocktail I’ll ever have, Mac, stop my heart dead. Is that important enough?”

  “You’ve earned your station, Eb, and then some. A little late for redemption, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t believe in that shit.”

  “Good. You have a nice trip. I won’t be losing any sleep over it.”

  He was hollow-eyed, as if he’d already checked out with the bellhop. His were the marble eyes of the shark: lifeless.

  “Do you remember the nineteen-eighty-five State Championship, Mac?”

  “Ancient history,” I said.

  Durning played forward for Mullen and I played for Cherry Creek. The game exhausted three overtimes before Durning hit a running jumper with time expiring to end our run of three consecutive championships.

  He bottomed out three years later when a hooker overdosed in his small apartment on Colfax and he tossed her in a dumpster at King Soopers with a case full of needles with his prints all over them.

  Since doing the unlawful death time he hit a couple foul balls—county lockup stuff, mostly. Then he poked one out of the park by participating in the murder of my partner Danny Wells and an old woman—the oriental shopkeeper who ran a local market on Broadway.

  Durning got into his getaway car in the parking lot, bouncing off the other vehicles like a pinball, and crashed into my patrol car, pinning me and turning my left leg to ground round.

  “We were so fucking happening in eighty-five, Mac. Like shit just turning to gold.”

  And for a moment I saw it: the perfection of adolescence—when the slate is clean and everything is possible; when all that mattered were how many points per game and who was getting laid.

  His flat eyes flickered with the memories of a better time—a distant, furtive glow at the center of his being. It was as if he were back there: the squeaking of gum rubber on hardwood, the roar of the crowd, the perfect backspin of the ball as it arced through space, the crisp snap of the net.

  It was a magical time. But it was over.

  “You brought the world crashing down, Eb. No one else.”

  “True enough,” he allowed. “But I never meant for it to get as fucked up as it did. You gotta know that, Mac.”

  “Is this an apology for getting my partner killed and sacrificing my leg, Eb? Because if it is I think you need to spend a little more time in front of a mirror.”

  “You know I never wanted it to go down like that, man. C’mon, Mac, we played ball together. It’s your leg.”

  “I know damn well whose leg it is, Eb. And what about my partner? What about Danny? He had a wife and kid.”

  “Well, I guess I ain’t too proud about any of it.”

  “Damn. A dozen years to reach such profundity. You gotta love the system.”

  “Listen, this just ain’t comin’ out right. I-I wanted to tell you if I could somehow give you your leg back, I would. This ain’t redemption because I don’t believe in that shit, Mac.

  “I wake up nights and see that leg, all ruined and shit. It will be the last thing I see. I have no doubt.”

  He seemed to mean it, and I had relinquished my clutch on pity years earlier, but now, standing in front of Durning, the horror show came rolling back in. All I could think was how much I wanted to see him suck that last breath; watch his body spasm involuntarily against the clutch of the chemical reaper.

  Exit stage left, the curtain falls.

  “Tell it to the spiritual advisor, Eb. I don’t have any more room.”

  “I’m sorry,” Durning said.

  “Not a chance, man. No vacancy.”

  “You want to know the funny thing, Mac?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I play it over and over, and I don’t want it to happen, but I know if it went down the same way, I’d probably be caught up in it just the same.

  “I was crazy on the shit, man, and my perception wasn’t right, but that’s how it played. It’s fucked up, man, I know that. It’s hard to live with.”

  “You want to know something, Eb? If they’d let me push the plunger on the syringe I’d do it right now. No hesitation; no questions asked.

  “That’s some messed up shit, too, but I’ll live with it.”

  “You gonna be there for the big show?”

  I ignored the question.

  “Hold Lucinda’s hand. She couldn’t ask you herself.”

  “You could have left that in a message with the PA,” I said.

  “There’s something else,” he said, fidgeting nervously.

  “I’m still here.”

  “Maybe nothing, but I’ve been going over it for a long time.”

  “Time’s running out, Eb.”

  “Something was strange that night, the night we knocked over that store. We shoulda been in and out, but Jackson took too much time. He let the old lady see him. Said that was why we had to kill her.”

  He was talking about Arliss Jackson, a homeboy Durning cruised with; the only perp I had ever killed. It was Jackson who shot my partner before I could get a draw on him. At trial, Durning claimed it was Jackson who wanted to stay and finish the old Chinese woman—allegedly because the old woman called Jackson “hei gui”, meaning “black ghost”—on the streets.

  Chinese slang for “nigger”.

  “I heard this crap at trial.”

  “We shoulda never been there, Mac. Shoulda been long gone. I think maybe Jackson wanted the cops to get there. I think he was counting on it.”

  “You have any reasoning on this?”

  “A week before, Jackson gets this visit from a guy. Big white dude. The two of them, they go off in the white guy’s car. I asked around when Arliss wouldn’t come clean, started acting all strange and shit. Somebody recognized the description. Guy’s a big dumb muscle-thug they call Br
ain. Works for Calypso.”

  Calypso was a major pot smuggler from Ocho Rios, Jamaica, who ran much of the dope business in the city. Vice and the DEA had a major hard-on for Calypso. Jackson had been small time; a neighborhood punk who stole televisions and boosted cars during Bronco games.

  An arrangement between him and the big Jamaican made no sense.

  “What does this have to do with anything, Eb? Jackson is dead.”

  “Arliss was a gambler. Played the ponies. Owed a lot of money. No secret about that. Word was he tried to set up a dope deal that went south. Owed some even bigger scratch to Calypso.

  “Dude’s henchmen carry blowtorches, Mac, they don’t fuck around. I think Arliss was scared. Maybe he cut a deal.”

  “To kill my partner,” I said.

  “It don’t make sense, Mac. I can’t figure out why we were still there. What the hell does Arliss Jackson care if some old woman calls him nigger? Arliss was careful, man, he didn’t want to go back to prison. It don’t figure.”

  “The idea of prison does that to some people. Makes a scumbag willing to do what he has to do. It doesn’t always make sense.”

  “We shoulda been gone when you got there, Mac. He took his time with that old woman. I almost booked.”

  “That would have been the best decision you ever made. You’ve earned the needle, Eb. I gotta go.”

  Durning lowered his head and pressed it against the bars. “My hair’s been falling out all week. I was never even scared or nothing and it started falling out just the same.”

  He rubbed his left hand along the top of his head. He looked like someone had taken the shears to him while he slept.

  “Do you know about Samson, Mac?”

  He was looking up, tears brimming in those lifeless eyes.

  “His strength was in his hair. I wasn’t even scared, Mac, and the shit started fallin’ out anyway.”

  I stared at him. I could imagine the stress he was feeling but I didn’t care. Then again, maybe all this was just Durning’s way of tuning up for the long trip.

  “Do you believe in God, Mac?” he said.

  The question startled me. I didn’t answer.

  “Do you believe he will forgive you if you’re truly sorry?”

  “I believe in God, Eb. You worry about the forgiving part.”

  He turned around and shuffled back to the bed. He sat down slowly, like a decrepit old man, steadying himself with shaking arms. He was sweating and I again smelled the reality of his predicament. It permeated the cell, the hoary smell of the end.

  If Hell had a distinct odor, this was it. I think Eb Durning had figured that one.

  “You want to know something? That thing about having anything for your last meal is bullshit. You gotta order off a menu,” he said.

  “That so?”

  “I’m havin’ me a plate of meatloaf, two slices of whole wheat bread, and some ketchup packets, because when I would come home from basketball practice my moms would slice me a big piece and make a cold meatloaf sandwich.

  “Things was golden then, Mac. Golden.”

  “I’ll be seeing you around, Eb.”

  “Don’t forget about Lucinda, okay Mac? She got no one and she trusts you.”

  His words were fading, as if he was getting sleepy, but he was still sitting erect, staring blankly at the wall.

  “She’s my sister and now she got no one.”

  “Lucinda will be fine,” I said as I moved toward the exit.

  “Vaya con Dios, Mac,” he said quietly.

  “Not me, Eb. You need him more.”

  Outside I found a grassy patch of shade under a dense clump of young Aspen near the truck and dropped down, swallowing the fresh air in deep, greedy gulps.

  I no longer dreamed about Jackson, but the grisly visage of the three sucking chest wounds was never far from center stage. Every cop reacts differently to killing, but it’s my belief that no one can fully deny the beast within that feeds on the power such action implies.

  It’s a grotesque, exhilarating feeling I will never be able to fully describe.

  The visit with Durning had stirred up a macabre flash of slides in my mind. I could see Jackson rushing us from the market; gun leading, eyes fixated; the concussion of the heavy loads as he fired.

  I could hear the back of Danny Wells’ head splitting apart—see my Beretta placing three slugs in Jackson’s center mass, stopping him cold and turning him into a hundred and eighty pounds of falling meat.

  Durning escaped through the back of the store at the service entrance, but there were already two more squad cars arriving. He slipped into the parking lot and made it to the getaway car.

  I was standing over my dead partner, trying to get it together and decide what to do next when I heard Durning bring the engine to life. I came around the front of our patrol car, low and coiled, gun ready.

  Durning never saw me. He was stoned, panicked, foot to the floor—trying to get control of the old Cutlass. The engine was roaring as the huge boat careened into one car and then another. Three uniformed officers materialized from behind and Durning saw them bar his exit, guns drawn, shouting for him to stop.

  He jerked the wheel, and the last thing I saw was the shock on his face as he bore down on me.

  We’d never been friends, Eb and I, but we shared a part of history. The satisfaction I felt with the knowledge that his life was now on a grisly timer was not unlike what I felt when the Beretta fired and I saw the horror on Arliss Jackson’s face as the life was torn from him.

  Both came from a place inside I knew well; the same place I buried the last few months of my wife’s life, when she was ravaged by the sickness.

  My duty was to be above contempt and vengeance and loathing, sworn to protect under the fragile but vital curtains of code and law. Yet all I could think about was how glad I was to see Durning suffering through his last day on this earth.

  I removed my DPD badge and polished the gold center with my thumb.

  It was the patrol officer’s badge and we all wore it, even the detectives.

  The three primary elements were the star, the eagle, and the seal. The triumvirate represented the three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial.

  The silver eagle on top represented the police officer’s readiness to defend the rights of the individual.

  The seven points of the star represented the qualities of each officer: honesty, integrity, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope, and charity.

  That shield represented the bedrock of everything I believed, symbol of the faith I had in a world that was still a worthwhile place in which to have a wife and raise a son…

  And I would toss it into the incinerator for five minutes alone with Durning.

  I ate a large, early lunch at Captain D’s Seafood: a basket of boiled shrimp, a fresh piece of lemon-basted trout, a helping of wild rice, and two pints of Railyard black and tan.

  I paid the bill and took the truck west toward the Royal Gorge and the world’s largest suspension bridge, one thousand feet above the Arkansas River.

  Durning had given me something to think about. His conspiracy theory had been eating at me all morning, like a rat chewing on the basement wiring.

  Danny Wells and I were partners out of Division One and I suppose I knew him as well as anyone. He and his wife, Laurel, seemed happy. I never saw him flirt—at least not more than what would easily fly beneath the Human Resources radar. He drank infrequently, attended the occasional football, hockey, or baseball game.

  He was your average good guy.

  Sure, there were cops that were on the take within the department, to think otherwise was foolhardy.

  But Danny?

  Calypso wasn’t even in our league, or at least he wasn’t then.

  The idea that somehow Danny’s death was a setup was so foreign it was laughable. Still, there was something there, something I wasn’t remembering, irritating like a pebble in the shoe.

  And I was det
ermined to root it out.

  At eight thirty I met Lucinda at the visitor’s lobby. She was attractive in that hardy way of the working tomboy—handsome, not pretty. Back when I was in physical therapy, she came by the hospital regularly, making amends for her brother.

  It had obviously been a hard twelve years for her. I checked up on occasion. She was working a job at a supermarket days and moonlighting nights as a cocktail waitress in a dive on Federal and 32nd.

  That day she was dressed in a frumpy gray sweater over plain white blouse, navy skirt that didn’t quite cover her pockmarked knees, and tan flats with no socks.

  “Bobby,” she sighed as she wrapped her arms about my shoulders and hugged me too hard.

  I let her linger, smelling the swath of cheap perfume. Lucinda was a good woman and I knew Durning was right about her needing someone to get her through this one final nightmare.

  “How are you holding up, Lucy?” I said, taking her hand in mine.

  Lucinda and I had been friendly over the years. I once attended an Easter mass at her church.

  She pulled away her large prescription glasses and dabbed a handkerchief at wet, dark-brown eyes that bore no discernable resemblance to her brother’s.

  “Oh, Bobby, I can’t face this.”

  “You’ll do fine, Lucy. Eb is going to need you there, strong for him,” I said.

  This seemed to help her and she nodded without speaking.

  We stood quietly, waiting for the escort.

  Huddled in the opposite corner of the lobby was a wizened Chinese man and a thirty-something woman. The husband and daughter of the shopkeeper, Ming Huai.

  Laurel Wells wasn’t coming.

  There were two other witnesses present: Durning’s newest attorney, a pimply youth from the Public Defender’s office, and an Assistant D.A. from the county: a steam-pressed, attractive woman whose name I couldn’t recall.

  Lucinda Durning kept her eyes averted to the cold copper-colored tile at her feet, heavy from the shame of the cataclysm her brother had forged.

  At eight-fifty we were escorted through the sterile administrative corridors to the witness viewing room: a small, nondescript, concrete hut painted off-white. Straight-back wooden chairs were arranged to face a glass window with curtains closed.