Pawnbroker: A Thriller (3 page)

Chapter 5

I didn’t sleep well that night. My psyche was under attack from three angles. First was the growing concern about the police, which RoboVoice had heightened. Second, what was he talking about? Give it to me. Give what to him? I also couldn’t get the dead guy out of my mind. Despite my intellectual position that I did what I had to do, I had never shot anybody. I kept seeing that purple hole open up in his head. Kept seeing him melt into the floor, the blood trickling from that purple hole and down the side of his head, onto the carpet.

What the hell had I done? Did I have a choice? Could I have stalled him until the police arrived? Could I have shot him in the shoulder instead of automatically taking the kill shot? Those questions cycled through my mind without mercy. When I did doze off for the occasional short nap, the same images played out in my dreams. Almost the same. In the dreams, the blood was black as crude oil. And the guy lay on the floor twitching and spasming, eyes open, staring at me.

It occurred to me in the wee hours that I didn’t know the dead guy’s name. How callous was that? I had killed the poor bastard and didn’t even bother to find out who he was. Then again, it was understandable, wasn’t it? I wasn’t exactly calm and on top of my game. No, I was pretty freaked out when the cops got there. And after they left. And after I got through with the little interrogation scene. Hell, I was still pretty freaked out at four in the morning. I got up, brushed my teeth, gazed at the circles under my eyes, so dark they looked like bruises.

I put on shorts, an old tee, and pulled on my running shoes. I’d been lax with my workouts the past several months, and this was a good time to get back in the habit. Besides, exercise clears my head. On the porch, I hit the deck and strained to get through a cycle of pushups and crunches, fifty each, then headed out. My legs and lungs lit up pretty quickly, but I fought through it and my head started to clear.

I was pretty sure I did what I had to do. No, make that very sure. He had a gun on me. Well, not on me at the moment I pulled the trigger, but that’s a technicality. At that exact moment, I guess the gun was pointed somewhere between LungFao and me, but I had to protect us. No doubt about it. Once I had that established in my newly cleared head, I moved on.

Why the hell was Tommy Mitchell acting like I had murdered someone? Not just Mitchell, either, once I thought about it. Bobby Knight, alleged friend, third baseman on the same softball team I shortstopped for, was acting the same way. Why? I picked up the pace. The run was doing me good. For sure.

By the time I turned back onto Cherokee Run the sun had turned white and hot. I sprinted the next to last block, then pulled back to a warm-down trot for the final stretch. Ours was an old street lined with big maple trees that threw nice shade. I stepped into my own yard and lay down on the still-cool grass. After a couple minutes I sat up and looked at the house. It was fifty years old but looked contemporary even now. It was long, low-slung, with big white bricks that looked like a cross between basalt and marble. The first time I saw it, I loved it. Still did. Breathing back to normal, I pushed up and went inside.

Abby was still asleep. I showered and headed downtown for breakfast. Since our house is only four blocks away, I walked, enjoying the cool air that would turn hot and sticky within the next two hours. I put on my sunglasses as I turned onto Main Street and into the sun. Montello is a small Southern town whose downtown has held up better than most. There’s Pontocola Hardware, owned and run by the third generation of the Williams family who started it. The Lyric Theater’s neon still shines brightly every night while one movie plays inside. Several clothing stores populate the street, including one called A Gentleman’s Haberdashery, a name I always loved, though pronouncing it gave me fits as a child. We even have a corner drug store with a pharmacy on one side and an old-fashioned soda fountain on the other. They still make fountain drinks with soda syrup and carbonated water.

And there is of course the law office of Charles W. Langford. I glanced inside as I passed and saw Charlie pouring a cup of coffee from the pot in the waiting room. I waved and he waved back.

I got to Hatley’s Diner, a local landmark where the food is cooked from scratch, a couple minutes before eight, and spotted Teddy in the corner booth on the back wall. Per longstanding tradition, if one of us arrives early, we wait for the other until eight o’clock. I slid into the booth and motioned for Louise, a long-time Hatley’s waitress. She arrived quickly and executed a perfect pour, starting right at the cup and raising the pot straight up in a graceful flourish as the cup filled, loosing a goodly aroma and somehow managing not to splatter a drop outside the cup. It’s how they’ve poured coffee at Hatley’s for the past seventy years.

“Damn Harry Cochran,” Teddy said, vocalizing some mental tirade he was engaged in before I arrived, as if I had any idea what he was talking about. He’s done that his whole life.

“What’d Harry do?” I said.

He took a sip of coffee, set the cup down. “Asshole.”

“You ready to order?” Louise said.

“We had a deal,” he said to me, totally ignoring Louise, “and now he’s bugging out.”

Louise rolled her eyes and moved on to another booth.

“Deal on what?”

“That piece of crap bait shop,” he said, stabbing the air with his finger for punctuation, eyes ablaze in something like fury, which I knew would disappear as quickly as it came. “Makes my hotel look like shit. Hell, who wants to look out their window and see some redneck sign about worms and crickets?”

“Come on, Teddy, that store has been in his family for what, three or four generations?”

“It’s standing in the way of progress.”

I laughed. “Progress?”

“Don’t be an asshole, Gray.”

“Ready to order?” I said.

“I’m thinking about putting a Baskin Robbins counter in the convenience store.”

I motioned Louise over and we placed our orders in between Teddy’s rantings about the profit margin in ice cream cones and banana splits. Five minutes later, Louise was back with our food. She put mine on the table, then Teddy’s.

“Christ almighty, Louise,” he said, sounding exasperated. “You’d think as long as I’ve been coming here, you’d remember I’m left-handed and arrange my plates and silverware accordingly. Is that too much to ask, Louise? Huh? Is it?”

Louise tilted her head, put her hands on her hips, and stared at him.

“What?” he said. I don’t think it’s as—”

She gave him the finger, a satisfied smile, and walked away.

“Service sucks here,” he said.

“Quit whining and eat,” I said.

After consuming a couple pounds of grease and cholesterol, I told Teddy about RoboVoice.

“Bizarre,” he said over and over again. “Bizarre.”

“I know it’s bizarre, Teddy. Any other ideas?” I said.

“You told the police?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Why would I be kidding? Speaking of comedy, have I—”

All at once, his cavalier attitude rubbed me raw. “Yes, you’ve told me about the plan for stand-up comedians in the hotel lounge. If you don’t mind, my situation is a little more important to me than ice cream and hucksters at the moment. More important than worms and crickets and fish and rednecks and whatever other bullshit you seem determined to talk about instead of the fact that I’m in trouble.”

This loss of patience rarely happens, because after being around Teddy for decades, I understand how his mind works, the way it hops from topic to topic. He always has a number of projects underway, and any one of them may be the topic of his next sentence. Until you know him, it’s easy to think he’s a nutcase dreamer. In reality, he’s brilliant, a dreamer who makes those dreams come true. And he really is a good friend.

Right now he looked like a kid who just got scolded, head sagging, staring at his coffee. “Sorry, Gray. I get carried away. Didn’t mean to.”

It was impossible to stay angry at him. “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have snapped like that. Truth? I’m worried, Teddy.”

“Don’t be. I don’t know why Bobby Knight and Tommy Mitchell have their panties in a wad, but they’ll get over it. Trouble came calling and you kicked its ass, plain and simple. Nothing to worry about.”

Chapter 6

Carmen Rodriguez took one last look at the bathroom mirror in Room 211, checking for streaks, missed corners, or lint left behind from her cleaning towel. The other girls in housekeeping didn’t take such pains—the mirrors were lucky if they were touched at all—but to Carmen, this was more than a job. It was a lifeline, an answered prayer that was to be cherished and guarded.

Two months earlier, Carmen had come north and east, leaving behind the squalor of her life in rural Mexico. The trip itself was horrible: forty-eight people in a cargo trailer lightly converted to haul people. By the fifth day, the stench was all but unbearable, but then her sense of smell seemed to adapt. Though the heat still grew stifling during the day, the March weather was mercifully mild enough that there were no heat strokes. (Carmen had heard the tales of people dying from the heat.) There were other ways to enter the United States, of course. One could always sneak across alone or in a small group, but without stateside friends, you were a fugitive from the first day. There were also the paid trips. Come up with two thousand American dollars and you got passage and a place to stay for a month or so while you found work and permanent housing.

Carmen chose the newest and most popular means of getting here. The ride cost nothing, and housing and a job were waiting when you arrived. The catch was that you had no choice about either. It was completely pre-arranged and mandatory, and you were obligated to stay at that job for at least three years. Sixty hours a week. $100. You also had to stay in the crowded living quarters with too many other people—fourteen others shared a two-bedroom, one-bath house with Carmen—for at least a year. Easy to keep tabs on should anyone decide to cut out for a better deal. A teenage boy had done just that. He was gone for four days. Now he walked like a crippled old man.

The deal would sound horrible to most Americans, but Carmen knew they couldn’t possibly understand what she had left behind. A shack built from cardboard. No running water. Less than one American dollar per day, if you could find work at all.

Her job here with a small company that provided housekeeping workers to hotels was a dream. The Courtyard Marriott was the nicest hotel she had ever seen. (Of course, it was the only hotel she had ever been inside in all her seventeen years.) She worked with several other Mexicans who got here the same way, but none from her house and none from the group she came with.

She didn’t know why they did it that way, and didn’t really care. Only one other person here really concerned her: Emilio. His transport should’ve arrived a month ago. They carefully arranged their trips to be sure they came to the same town, and she had sent a letter that explained exactly where she worked and what to do.

Every day at 9:15, she took her morning break and sat beside the service entrance on the back of the hotel. And at 11:45. Then again at 2:15. But Emilio never came. Two weeks ago she mailed a letter to Emilio’s sister back home, but there had been no reply. She kept up the brave face, and she tried to keep believing that it was just some kind of mixup, some kind of delay, but she grew more worried by the day.

Carmen stepped back from the mirror and looked, not at the glass now—it was immaculate—but at herself. Her black hair was thick and shiny, her eyes a strange light brown color. The other kids back in the village said her eyes made her look loco, but here in Mississippi, men looked at her all the time. Some of them said things, dirty things. She never made trouble, though. She couldn’t. All she could do was smile and leave. She turned sideways, straightened her posture. She rubbed her hand over her stomach, and looked closer. A soft beep sounded and Carmen looked to the plastic digital watch on her wrist. It read 9:13. She wheeled her cleaning cart out of the room, locked the wheels, and walked quickly to the elevator.

Chapter 7

We needed to get the blood out of the carpet, so I put a sign on the door saying we’d open at 10:00 instead of the normal 9:00. The spot fought off my and LungFao’s best efforts and left a stain, although it at least wasn’t red, just dark.

At 9:40, I picked up the phone and dialed Bobby Knight’s office.

“Detective Knight,” he answered.

“Bobby, Gray here.”

“Yeah.”

“In the excitement yesterday, I forgot to even get this guy’s name.”

“Excitement? That’s what you call it when someone dies?”

“Give me a break, will you? You know what I meant.”

“Right.”

“What was the guy’s name?”

“You know damn well who he was.”

“The hell I do! You people—”

“I don’t have time for your shit, Gray. The name is John Patrick Homestead.”

Clueless as to why he was acting this way, I was trying to think of something else to say, when he, in a much lower tone of voice, said, “I know why you killed him, Gray.” Then he hung up.

I stared at the receiver as if it might contain the answers to this crazy mystery. None came, so I dropped it back into the cradle, fired up my computer, and logged on to the internet. Homestead was an unusual name and I figured I might get lucky and pick up an article that mentioned him in an arrest report or crime story.

I Googled his name as an exact phrase and got eight hits, but they weren’t arrest reports. Far from it. I heard RoboVoice in my head: You don’t understand what you’ve stepped into. That was an understatement.