Damaged Goods (11 page)

“Sarge, this is Hannibal.”

“I recognized the voice, man. I'm working you know. What's up?”

“Listen, can you get someone to cover for you for the rest of the night?”

“Are you kidding?” Sarge asked. “Man, I just got here.”

“I know, but I need your help, brother. Got a job here that's liable to take all night, but it calls for a man who can be tough and who knows how to go easy too.”

“You mean right now?” Sarge growled into the phone.

“It's pretty important. Besides, how much can they need a bouncer on a Wednesday night?”

When they met, Sarge was homeless, hanging at the shelter where Hannibal volunteered. Sarge had stood with him, fought with him against junkies, winos, and in he end, the drug dealer whose living depended on a crack house. Today Sarge had both a home and a steady job, but Hannibal knew the risks they faced together bonded them in a way that made Sarge's answer absolutely predictable.

“Where you at?”

After sharing Marquita's address, Hannibal considered the present challenge of cleaning her up. He decided it had to be a multi-step process. First, he lowered her head to the relatively clean pillow. He pulled the down comforter from her bed and folded it twice lengthwise on the floor. Next, he lifted her from the bed, startled at how light she was, and lowered her sleeping form onto the comforter. Then he pulled the sheets from the bed. In the fully finished basement he found both a laundry area and a linen closet. After shoving the soiled sheets into the washer he went back upstairs, made
the bed and transferred his charge to the fresh, crisp sheets. Her faint moan implied that even in her sleep she appreciated the difference.

The next step was to clean out the available poisons. Starting with a sweep of the bedroom and progressing to a full circuit of the house, Hannibal picked up a veritable saloon's worth of bottles, most of which had been opened but only one or two already empty. The woman was partial to serious whiskey - Jack Daniels, Yukon Jack, Jim Beam, Chivas Regal, and Courvoisier. He found a trash bag under the kitchen sink and filled it with the bottles.

As he opened the medicine cabinet in the master bathroom, Hannibal wondered if his actions would meet Dr. Roberts' definition of compulsive behavior. Here he was, scanning a total stranger's shelves for drugs that might offer themselves to abuse. He supposed she could sue him for emptying prescription bottles into her toilet. Had she asked for a guardian angel? The truth was that he had shoved himself into her life without invitation, or even permission. His internal monologue halted when his fingers wrapped around an unmarked vial. It contained white pills, marked “Roche” on one side with a small number “2” under the word.

The doorbell jerked his head around.

“Sarge,” he said, pocketing the bottle as he jogged down the stairs. A grim face greeted him when he opened the door. Sarge stood in a black, sleeveless tee shirt and jeans, a baseball bat in his right fist.

“All right, what's the problem here?”

Movement spotted over Sarge's shoulder froze Hannibal's answer in his throat. Was someone actually crouching behind the car parked across the street? Hannibal pulled Sarge inside while his left hand eased toward the holster under is right arm. The world became very still, except for the stuttering crackle of crickets. He slipped his sunglasses from his face, staring hard at the BMW across the street. After a full minute of staring his eyes ached, but he saw no signs of life. Irritated with himself, he drew Sarge inside and closed the door.

“Man, something's sure got you jumpy,” Sarge said. “What
the hell is going on?”

“I'm sorry,” Hannibal said, heading for the kitchen. “I thought I saw something. Been thinking I was being followed, but not really sure.”

Hannibal pulled a glass out of a cabinet and rinsed it several times before filling it with water. It carried the sharp taste of chlorine and fluoride and all the other things they add to city water to kill germs and discourage human consumption. While he drank, Sarge looked around the kitchen, and then glanced into the living room.

“Maid's day off?”

“Maid's month off I think,” Hannibal said after his drink. “The woman who lives here, she's in bad shape. She needs looking after, and I needed somebody who'd stay here all night and baby-sit. Somebody I could trust to stay alert, and could also trust to not do anything to harm her.”

Sarge nodded his comprehension. “Bad shape? In what way?”

To answer, Hannibal waved Sarge to follow him. They mounted the spiraling staircase in silence, as if they were walking through a library, or a morgue. At the bedroom, Hannibal eased the door open. A narrow shaft of light fell across Marquita's bed. Now that she was finally resting, her features appeared delicate, frail, the way Hannibal imagined Snow White when he was a child.

“She's been abused, buddy,” Hannibal whispered. “Physically. Emotionally. Sexually if I understand the story. The man responsible is the man I've got to find to help my client. Can you watch over her for the night?”

“God, she looks so helpless. Fragile, like a doll, you know?”

As if she sensed that she was being talked about, Marquita's eyes fluttered open for a moment. Hannibal watched Sarge's rough face soften as he stared into Marquita's fawn colored eyes. He seemed to make a connection there. Perhaps it was the empathy of a man, homeless not long ago, who could see this woman as downtrodden despite her apparent financial status. While they
watched, the ghost of a smile touched the edge of Marquita's lips and she slipped back into sleep.

“Don't you worry,” Sarge said. “I'll take care of her.”

Hannibal's tee shirt was soaked by the time he was approaching the end of his morning run. He felt a little stitch in his left side, but nowhere near enough to slow him down. It was a good day. He had started on time, and would finish a little early. He took a perverse pride in his own anal retentive nature, suspecting that certain people he waved to five mornings every week used him to determine whether or not they were on time for work.

It was getting harder to keep his breathing quiet, but he tried anyway, relishing the morning sounds and not wanting to blot them out of his own ears. Anacostia was one of the roughest of urban inner city areas, yet it still offered an early morning symphony for those awake to hear it. Even there, birds chirped and whistled and sang at the edge of dawn. However, the main theme there was carried by groaning garbage trucks, and the taxicab horn section. The overhead whine of jet engines replaced the woodwinds, and all the sounds melded together in a way neither nature nor an orchestra could imitate.

As he reached his own block Hannibal slowed to a walk. The view to his home was a path of brick buildings, cracked sidewalks and broken bottles. This area of the nation's capital was rundown and generally impoverished, yet it tried hard to
cling to its dignity. Hannibal loved his neighborhood because it was a real neighborhood. He knew his neighbors, and his neighbors knew him.

As rough as it was, it was a neighborhood in transition, within a city in transition. Ahead lay a few blocks of abandoned or condemned buildings, many still inhabited. But a few block to his left stood a series of new, high-priced town houses. If he ran in the other direction, crossed the Anacostia Bridge and went a few blocks up Potomac Avenue he would bump into the congressional office buildings that flank the Capitol, less than two miles away. In Washington, it was an easy walk from the halls of power to the abandoned halls of slum apartments.

Having almost regained his breath, Hannibal leaned on the sandstone banister and mounted the steps up to the stoop at number 2313. Hannibal remembered the first time he walked up those steps. The building was a crack house then, and the owner had paid him to flush the squatters out. He looked down at the dark stain on the stoop left there by his own blood after his first attempt to do his job. He had returned with a small team of men gathered from the homeless shelter where he volunteered. Sarge and the others had helped him take the building back. Ray, a former client, had helped too. Afterward, he had decided to stay there, and the others did too. They had fought for the building and found a home.

Closing the outer door behind him, Hannibal glanced to the right out of habit to read his own name on his office door. Then he walked left around the central stairway. He unlocked and opened the fourth of five doors down the side of the hall. Once inside he took a deep breath. It was refreshingly cool inside, since the owner had replaced the ancient boiler with a modern furnace and installed central air conditioning.

The flat wasn't luxurious, but it was just enough for Hannibal. Big, sliding double doors stood in for walls between the rooms. With all of them open he could see through his two extra rooms to his bedroom at the front of the building. To his right, past the bathroom door, his small but functional kitchen waited. For just a moment he debated with
himself whether breakfast or a shower should come first, but the shower won out.

After arranging to meet with Anita in the afternoon, Hannibal drove to Marquita's house. Pulling into the driveway around ten o'clock he was met with a few surprises. First, the sprinklers were running. Then he noticed that the lawn had been mowed. Curiosity drove him to open the mailbox. It was empty. Even greater curiosity spurred Hannibal to the door. Five seconds after he pushed the doorbell, Sarge pulled the door open.

“Hey, Hannibal. Good to see you man. The doc's already here, doing an exam on her.”

Hannibal followed Sarge into a house that was transformed. The carpet had been vacuumed, maybe shampooed. The mail was stacked neatly on an end table. Swiping a black-gloved finger across the entertainment center proved it had been dusted.

“So I guess you kept busy through the night,” Hannibal said.

“Well, they taught me in the Marines to keep my quarters ship shape,” Sarge said. “The galley gave me the most trouble. I don't know how the woman could stand to get food in that place. Anyway, I figured she'd find it easier to get back to normal if she wasn't living in a crap hole.”

Hannibal lowered himself onto the edge of the sofa, almost afraid to ruin the house's showroom appearance. “You did quite a job. Did you get any sleep at all?”

“I caught a few winks off and on up in the bedroom.”

Hannibal cocked an eyebrow. “Her bedroom?”

Sarge shook his head with a grin. “It ain't what you're thinking. Markie woke up screaming in the night. The night terrors, you know, like I've seen alcoholics get.”

“Markie?”

“That's what her friends call her,” Sarge said, dropping into the recliner. As he spoke, his fingertips slowly rubbed his
left palm. “We got to talking a bit. She was too scared to stay in there by herself so I sat with her a while. She dozed off and on, and so did I. You were right, buddy. She sure as hell didn't need to be out here by herself last night.”

Hannibal nodded. “And she dug her nails pretty deeply into your hand, I see. You're a good man, Sarge.”

“She's a good woman,” Sarge said. “Hannibal, how could a man break a woman down like that?”

Before Hannibal could answer he heard his named called from upstairs. He and Sarge stood immediately and jogged up the stairs to Marquita's bedroom. The door was ajar, but Hannibal pushed slowly on his way in. Marquita was under the comforter, just as he had left her, but nothing else was the same. Both the disorder and the smell he had faced the first time he entered the room were gone. Roberts perched on the edge of the bed, speaking to her in hushed tones. Marquita had regained a little color and Hannibal could see a hint of African heritage, although her background was overwhelmingly French, judging by her features. She looked more centered than she had the night before, but her knit brow told Hannibal that it was still hard for her to focus.

“Now, will you be all right in here alone, while I go outside to talk to Mr. Jones?” Roberts asked. “He's a friend.”

“I know,” Marquita said, smiling for a second in Hannibal's direction. “He's the man who was here when I collapsed. He was very sweet to me when he could have taken advantage.”

“Yes, but we need to speak out in the hall for a moment.”

“I'll be fine, doctor, if Archibald can sit with me for a little while.”

Hannibal's face jerked toward Sarge. “Archibald?”

Sarge raised a finger in front of Hannibal's face, his course voice bristling. “You don't never need to call me that, hear?”

“Hey,” Hannibal raised his palms toward Sarge. “I'm the last guy who'd make fun of anybody's name, man.”

Still, he was chuckling as he backed out of the room. Roberts followed him into the next room and pushed the door
closed behind himself. Hannibal waved Roberts into the vanity chair while he stood rather than sitting on the bed.