Her Last Scream (12 page)

We met with Cruz the next morning. Perhaps knowing our Southern systems wouldn’t take well to tofu smoothies or whatever fuels the bodies of Boulderites in the a.m., she took us to a buffet joint where we could have eggs and bacon while Cruz nibbled prosciutto-girdled melon.

“When officer Early comes home, so to speak, we have a special suitcase for her. It has a powerful GPS device built into a false bottom. The satellites keep track and you watch on an enabled phone or laptop. You’ll be living out of the vehicle hours, maybe days at a time.”

Cruz was dead-on about living in the car: Staying close to Rein meant staying in motion. If she got to a safe house and it had a low threat index, we might be able to get a motel room if one was close, but everything would be dictated by circumstance.

“How do you see this going down?” Harry asked after Cruz had filled us in on other planned aspects of the operation.

“officer Early should return from the center’s safe house in a day or two. She’ll have to do the act a few more times, bring the threat home to the folks at the center. You’re on stage tonight, right, Detective Nautilus?”

“So I’m told.”

“Break a leg,” Cruz said.

“This looks ridiculous, Carson,” Harry said, staring into the full-length mirror. Ten hours had passed since breakfast with Cruz and we’d re-played our roles a dozen times. My partner was wearing a purple pinstriped suit with extra padding in the shoulders. We’d found the improbable getup at a costume store, maybe created for XX-size Dick Tracy wannabes or Sky Masterson impersonators. Harry was born with shoulders you could set pumpkins on, the outsize pads making his profile Frankenstinian. His silk shirt was silver lamé, open to the third button. The chains around his neck were fake gold, but we didn’t think anyone would get close enough for an appraisal. Ditto the rings on Harry’s sausage-thick fingers; dime-store crap, but they sparkled like the first ten seconds of cheap champagne.

“Stop whining,” I said, standing behind him like a tailor, picking lint from his collar. I reached to the box at my back and revealed a black fedora with scarlet band, size 7 7/
₈
. When I’d tried it on, the chapeau had fallen to the bridge of my nose. I set it atop Harry’s noggin, a perfect fit.

“Your crown, sire,” I proclaimed. “Thou royal pimpness is complete.”

Tonight’s performance involved shortening the length of time it took for a potential runner to be accepted by the center. We’d established Rein as smart enough to get off drugs and make something of herself, and lacking family in the area to either turn to or keep her anchored. My concerned-neighbor scenario had established a viable threat to Rein’s safety via her procurer. She was, in short, a candidate for the underground railroad.

Now it was time for the final straw, ratcheting up the threat index. Harry was in costume, Amica Cruz had supplied the wheels, a ride confiscated from a fer-real pimp in Denver a month back: a chartreuse Hummer with twenty-four-inch spinning rims and two month’s worth of Zimbabwe’s chromium exports. The upholstery was fake leopard. There was a wet bar in the rear. The buggy sat outside our door where it seemed an attractant for a group of nameplate-wearing conventioneers from Cincinnati, and I had to twice shoo them away and wipe sweaty fingerprints from the smoked windows.

I reached into a bag on the nightstand and picked up the final piece of subterfuge. “Hey, bro,” I said, tossing a small package to Harry. “Catch.”

He stared into his hand. “Grillz?”

Grillz were metal jewelry worn over the teeth; like pants worn around the thighs, medallions the size of pies, and side-facing ball caps, they were another fine gift from the hip-hop culture. Harry slipped the monstrosity over his teeth, turned to me and stretched back his lips, showing a row of silver fangs studded with diamelles. The effect was freakish, a grillz-wearer’s metallic grin as unsettling as a person with no irises, just white.

“Well?” Harry asked.

“You look like a piranha.”

He thought about the simile. “Seems to fit.”

Time to boogie. I went to the window, the parking lot now dark, the conventioneers off to steaks and a strip club. Harry snapped his lapels, canted the hat to a menacing angle, and checked the mirror one more time.

“You got my back?” he asked.

“I’ll be at the bar across the street.”

Harry had to walk a fine line: menacing without being call-the-cops threatening. The last thing we wanted was for the folks at the center to bellow for the constabulary, resulting in our outing. I’d be nearby in case we had to explain the charade.

Harry slipped to the Hummer and rumbled away. I pulled on a University of Colorado ball cap and followed, blowing past Harry a minute later at a stoplight, not honking nor waving. I knew my partner was generating the imperious attitude copped by whore-sellers since creating the World’s Oldest Profession. I figured glittery-eyed pimps had crawled like flies through the camps housing the builders of the pyramids, offering human wares to masters and slaves alike.

Within minutes I was inside the Beacon, a narrow bar with a slender visage on the street, its sole sign announcing
Fifty Beers!
We’d scoped it out yesterday, finding a quiet neighborhood bar built around local brews. I’d figured I could grab one of the two front-window tables and keep an eye on the women’s center a hundred paces across the street. Even better would have been the second-floor balcony, but given the bicycle slung up there, it was someone’s apartment, student housing being ubiquitous in the university area.

Most of the Beacon’s action was in back, folks dividing their attention between a pool game and two darts matches. Behind the bar was a door to a side room. Some kind of meeting was in progress, a dozen middle-aged people at pushed-together tables. Someone was talking about making posters and sponsoring an awareness-raising dance. Yesterday the folks in the room had been younger and the topic was an arts festival. A bulletin board beside the door was plastered with info about a charity car wash, a block party and so forth. I figured the Beacon was the de facto neighborhood center.

I noted an older guy at one of the front tables, late forties or early fifties, big and fit-looking and heavily bearded, in a dark suit and open-neck white shirt. He had an old-school briefcase at his knee and was nursing a whiskey and scowling into the night. He sat where I wanted to and I cursed his presence under my breath, ambling toward the bar weighing my options.

“Mind if I sit here?” I chirped, walking to him. As if the answer was already
Yes
, I set my foamy green Grasshopper on the table, not one but two cocktail umbrellas rising from the rim, along with the heady vapors of crème de menthe. The dark eyes turned the scowl from the window to me. He nodded at the adjoining wooden circle. “There’s another table over there.”

I brushed hair from my eyes with my fingers, venting my gayest persona, stolen from the Georgia Peach hisself, Little Richard. “You look lak a pro-fes-sor,” I tremoloed. “Do you work at the universiteee?”

He looked away. “Not interested.”

“Just talk?”

“Get the fuck away from me.”

I sat at the table two feet over and threw one leg over the other. “This is such a nice place,” I said. “Are y’all a reg’lar?”

He vacated the bar a moment later, muttering as he went past. I traded the candied froth for a bourbon and slipped into Mr Professor’s still-warm chair, checking my watch. Two minutes later the big Hummer rolled to a stop across the street. I whispered
Good luck, bro,
and leaned back into the shadows.

Hearing the door, Carol Madrone looked up from folding her birds. She saw what had crossed the threshold and loomed above. She swallowed hard, hoping her terror didn’t show.
Where was Meelia?
She’d been here a second ago. “Meelia …” she called to the door at her back. Meelia Reston was a dozen feet away, one door down the hall in the file room.

“What is it, Carol?” Reston called.

“Could you come here, please?”

Madrone pasted a tight smile on her face and looked at the arrival, a black man approximately the size of a refrigerator crate, his garb leaving no doubt as to his occupation. Madrone glanced at the phone, estimating the time it would take to call 911.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

The hulking monster said nothing, studying the surroundings like an appraiser. He went to the window and parted the curtains, peeking outside as if checking the safety of his vehicle. Madrone saw an outlandishly green Hummer outlined in the dim streetlight, mirror-bright reflections from chrome and polish.

Madrone cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she repeated, trying to keep the fear from her voice. “May I help you with something?”

The man turned from the window as if seeing the woman for the first time. His eyes were like twin drills boring into her soul. “I’m looking for a friend. There’s a chance she might have come here.”

When he spoke, his teeth were like flashes of silver lightning and his voice was a cross between a rumble and a hiss, the most frightening voice Madrone had ever heard.

“What’s your friend’s name?” she asked. Three numbers and the police would be on the way.
How long would it take them to get here?

The man seemed to consider the question carefully. “Her name’s Sondra, but she don’t go by that all the time. She’s a fine-looking sister: mid twenties, real light skin, five-nine. Big eyes, long legs, short hair. She got a pretty little mouth, too. Her lips look like candy tastes.”

The two women shot each other a glance. “We’ve never heard of anyone with that name,” Madrone said.

“Or description,” Reston hurriedly added. “Why would you think she’d be here?”

The hulking monster thought about the question for several seconds. “She gets confused,” he said quietly, eyes roaming the walls, posters, windows. “About who she is and what she needs. It’s been a problem.” The man nodded toward the hall at the rear of Madrone’s desk. “Who’s back there?”

“It’s just an empty room and a door to the outside,” Reston said. “Check if you wish, but there’s no one here but us.”

Madrone took a deep breath and stood. “I don’t mean to be rude, but we’d prefer that you leave. This is a place for –”

The man stepped to the desk with motions as smooth as quicksilver over glass. He picked up the paper crane from Madrone’s desk, grinning with his fierce metal teeth.

“Pretty birdie.”

“Take it,” Madrone whispered. “My gift to you. Your gift to me is leaving, like I just asked you to. Please leave before there’s a …” Madrone’s voice failed.

“Before there’s a what?”

Madrone steeled the courage to let her hand rest on the phone, an implied threat to call the police. “Before there’s a problem.”

The man looked between Madrone and the phone. “I got no problems with you fine ladies,” he said. “My problem is with Sondra. She owes me money. All I’m looking for is what I’m owed.” He paused, twirling the white bird in his black fingers. “If my friend shows up here, I want you to tell her something.”

“What’s that?”

Nautilus cocked the hat, lifting his arm enough to open his jacket, giving the women a glimpse of the holstered nine-millimeter. “Work starts tomorrow. Same time, same place. If she ain’t there, she ain’t nowhere no more, get my drift?”

He squeezed the bird into a broken clump and let it drop to Madrone’s desk, grinned the metal teeth, and slid out the door, leaving it open as he walked down the drive like a man without a care in the world. He slid into the Hummer, stared for a long moment toward the women at the center, and was gone.

“Holy shit,” Reston whispered, leaning back against the wall, sweat beaded on her forehead. “What the fuck just happened?”

“I’m getting everyone together for a decision,” Madrone said. “This is an emergency.”

Professor Thalius Sinclair was still muttering as he arrived home, having walked for a half-hour to vent his anger at being cruised by some preposterous gay. Probably should have lifted the flit like a sack of feathers and pitched him from the bar, and maybe would have, except there was something odd about the guy – something in the fluidity of his walk, maybe – that said he wouldn’t go that easy. Something had felt off in the exchange, but what? Sinclair was a good reader of people and thought maybe he’d held his fire because there was something –
threatening? was that the word?
– about the gay guy.

Sinclair shook off his thoughts, rolled a joint, and sat at his computer. He steered to the familiar website, five users online. He watched the conversation for several minutes until all had signed off save for Drifter.

Sinclair’s phone rang. He reached to shut it off – no one important ever called this late at night – but instead pulled it up and saw the caller’s coded name. His fingers ran back to the computer keyboard.

Sinclair logged off and re-dialed the phone to the last caller. Heard it picked up on the other end. He felt sweat prickle on his forehead.

“Do we have one?” he asked.

I waited in the Beacon until Harry drove away. The meeting in the side room broke up, spilling laughing people out into the street, their mirth late counterpoint to the menace Harry projected as he left the center. When I arrived at the motel Harry was stripping off the costumery like it burned his skin. The fedora was upside-down on the bed, the grillz inside, still shiny with saliva.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“There were two women in the center, a stout lady doing origami, and a skinny lady with big glasses. I said I was looking for a friend who might have gotten confused.”

“They were scared?” I asked.

“The lady at the desk kept her hand on the phone. I was afraid she’d freak and call in an air strike. But she stayed cool.”

“I’ll go in again tomorrow, say you’re out on the streets threatening everyone, trying to get Rein back.”

“Will I go in again?” Harry asked.

I shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully it’ll just take a couple–three days to convince them this is a get-Rein-gone situation. We’ll fix her up with the electronics and start following.”

I heard Harry tossing through the night. This was a guy who could sleep standing up, like a horse.
Rein’s safe somewhere only blocks from us,
I thought, hearing the springs complain beneath him.
What’s he going to be like when she’s undercover and on the road?