Southern Cross (29 page)

“Wait a minute!” Brazil turned up the volume.

“. . . made a withdrawal at the ATM, was abducted and shot to death in her own car. A gang known as the Pikes has claimed responsibility. This is the same gang that claimed responsibility for the vandalism of Jefferson Davis’s statue in Hollywood Cemetery . . .”

Brazil was beside himself. He paced furiously, his fists clenched. He was confused and disbelieving as he envisioned Ruby Sink and remembered when she had called him last.

“No!” he exclaimed.
“No!”

Brazil pounded the wall and kicked the trash can. It clanged across the floor, paper, fried chicken boxes and fast food wrappers spilling.

“How could someone do that to a helpless old woman!”

His last conversation with her sounded in his mind. He could hear her voice. He had used her to make West jealous. Brazil clenched his fists so hard his nails dug into his palms. He grabbed Weed by the shoulders.

“You know them, I know you do!”
he said in fury.
“They just murdered someone, Weed!
Someone I knew! Someone who never did anything to anybody! A human being with a name and a family and now people who loved her have to deal with what happened just like you do with Twister!”

Weed stared at him in shock.

“You’re going to protect monsters like that?”

Brazil let go of Weed and walked across the room. Brazil tried to control himself. He was trembling, his heart pounding so hard he could feel it in his neck.

“I tried to tell you on the computer,” Weed sadly said.

“Tell me? Tell me what?”

“The fish map.”

Brazil’s mind had an electrical outage.

“On AOL. A map with pikes on it,” Weed explained.

“Pikes as in fish?” Brazil came back.

“Uh huh. I did a papier-mâché pike in Mrs. Grannis’s class. Trying to tell somebody where they are.”

“Wait a minute.” Brazil pulled up a chair and sat down. “The fish on the map. That’s where the Pikes have their clubhouse?”

Weed nodded. “In the back of Southside Motel. Behind a big piece of wood.”

“You’ve been there?”

“I didn’t wanna be. I swear. But Smoke made me go and he hit me, too.” Weed wouldn’t look up.

“Who is Smoke?” Brazil said.

“He broke in the garage and took all them guns. He made me go along and I held pillowcases for him. So I guess I get locked up for that and everything and I don’t care ’cause if I go out, Officer Brazil, Smoke gonna kill me. I know it. He’s looking for me now. That’s why I told you to lock me up.”

“Do you know Smoke’s real name?”

“He’s just Smoke. Never heard no other name.”

“He go to school with you?”

“Uh huh.”

“And you don’t know his real name?”

“He’s a senior and I don’t know no seniors except the ones in art class, and Smoke never been in one of my art classes. Not the band, either.”

“He get in a lot of trouble in school?” Brazil asked.

“I never even noticed him until he come looking for me and found me after school in the band room. He asked if I wanted a ride to school in the morning and something told me not to tell him no. And next thing he’s talking about guns and the Pikes and how nobody in the school deserved to be a Pike except the ones he picked. He said he had special things to do.”

“Did he tell you what these special things were?”

“All he kept saying was everybody was going to know him. He’d be more famous than Twister ever was, ’cause there’s still pictures of Twister and trophies in the glass cases so I guess that’s how Smoke heard about him.”

“Think hard, Weed.” Brazil put his hands on Weed’s shoulders. “Was Smoke planning something that might make him famous? Maybe something bad?”

“I think he wants to shoot people,” Weed said.

A
T SHORTLY AFTER
three
A
.
M
. a SWAT team raided the Pikes’ clubhouse at the Southside Motel and found the room abandoned. Police recovered no guns or ammunition. They found nothing but liquor and trash and filthy mattresses.

Brazil was on one phone, West on another, each of them in a cubicle inside the detective division. Brazil had called Godwin’s principal, Mrs. Lilly, at home, and when she realized what it was about, she met the registrar at the high school and they started going through records.

Eventually they figured out that Smoke’s real name was Alex Bailey, but the address listed in his school records didn’t exist, the phone number didn’t work, and there was no photograph of him on file. Although the yearbook wasn’t out yet, a check of those who had gotten their pictures taken for it did not include him. All anyone really knew was the classes he had been in and that last summer he had moved here from Durham, North Carolina, where the obscure private high school he supposedly had transferred from didn’t exist.

Brazil called every Bailey in the city directory, waking
people up. No one seemed to have a family member named Alex who went to Godwin High School.

“How the hell did he get away with it?” Brazil said to West. “He uses a bogus address, phone number, name of his former high school and who knows what else.”

West was smoking a Carlton. She’d sort of quit months ago, but at times like this she needed a friend.

“Who’s going to check?” she said. “You ever had your high school call you at home or come see you?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t. Most people don’t unless they get in trouble. And it sounds like he was just your average kind of keep-to-yourself nobody until a couple weeks ago. Then he cuts classes or doesn’t show up at all. Maybe the school starts calling. But guess what? By then it’s too late.”

“I wonder what his parents know.” Brazil reached for his Styrofoam cup of what once was drinkable coffee.

“Denial. Maybe protecting him. Don’t want to face it and never have. No question in my mind this kid’s not new to the system. No pictures of him anywhere, including the yearbook, just like all these other little felons, so we don’t know what they look like. I bet you anything he’s got a record in North Carolina, probably transferred from
Dillon
High School.” She sarcastically referred to the juvenile training school in Butner, North Carolina. “His fucking family probably moved him here when he turned sixteen and all his records were expunged. So the asshole gets to start all over again, clean as a Boy Scout.”

Brazil swirled the coffee in his cup. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“So. You going to bother going to bed tonight?” West said.

“There’s no night left,” Brazil said.

“You want to come over, maybe scramble up a few eggs or something?”

Sadness walked through Brazil’s eyes.

“As long as we stop at my house first,” he said. “There’s something I’ve got to get.”

• • •

The Azalea Motel on Northside’s Chamberlayne Avenue was not where the police would have expected to find Smoke. He also liked the irony of the name, since the Azalea Parade was the day after tomorrow. Smoke had big plans.

He sat on his single bed in his single room and thought where he was staying wasn’t much better than the clubhouse. The Azalea Motel was the sort of place where people did drugs and got murdered and nobody cared. Smoke got room 7 for twenty-eight dollars a night. He stared blankly at the TV and drank vodka from a plastic cup. Smoke had been monitoring the news. At five after six
A
.
M
., his phone rang.

“What,” he answered.

It was Divinity.

“Baby, they raided our place just like you said they would,” she told him in an excited voice.

Smoke smiled as he stared at the trash bags full of guns and ammunition in the corner.

“Sick and me parked the car at the dirty bookstore and we was in the woods watching, you know, baby. It was all we could do not to laugh. Them busting in there with all their stuff on and big guns and all. You sure was right about getting out when we did, sugar. But I wanna know when I’m gonna see you, huh?”

“Not now,” Smoke told her without much interest as he spun around the cylinder of a Colt .357.

“I sure could do with a little more
I miss you
enthusiasm.” Divinity’s voice was hurt on the way to being mad.

Smoke wasn’t listening. His mind wandered back to the old woman and her fear. Smoke had never scared anybody that much. He was awed by his power and as drunk from it as he was from vodka. He loved the way it felt to squeeze the trigger. He had been so high he barely heard the explosions when he blew apart her head. He threw back another swallow of vodka.

“What’cha gonna tell the others?” Divinity was asking.

Smoke came to.

“About what?” he said.

“You ain’t even listening.” Her voice was getting sharp.

One thing Smoke avoided was fighting with Divinity. She could make a scene, and that was what he didn’t need right now.

“I’m just so tired,” he said, sighing. “And I miss you and it makes me crazy I can’t see you until Saturday night. That’s when we’ll be free and clear.”

“How?”

“You’ll see.”

“What about Dog and the rest of them?”

“I don’t want them anywhere near me,” Smoke said. “None of you come anywhere near the Azalea Parade.”

“I don’t understand this big shit about some little parade named after a bush.” Divinity hadn’t softened much.

“Baby, I’m gonna be the king of it,” Smoke said.

“What’cha gonna do, ride on a float?”

He couldn’t stand it when she got sarcastic. He slammed down the vodka bottle and snapped the revolver’s empty cylinder in place. He dry-fired at the TV.

“Shut up!” he said in his voice from hell, that tone he got when the change came over him. “You just do what I say, bitch.”

“I always do.” Divinity backed down.

“Don’t you call anymore. Don’t you come around, and the others don’t know where I am, right?”

“I ain’t told ’em nothing. So you dumping me?”

“For two days.”

“Then we’re good?”

“As good as it gets,” he said.

Brazil ran into his house for only a moment and when he returned to West’s car, he was carrying a grocery bag with something in it. He had a strange look on his face.

“What’s that?” West asked.

“You’ll see,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“You got a body part in there or something?”

“In a way,” Brazil morbidly said.

West knew about Ruby Sink. The word had traveled like electricity. Everyone in the police department found out Miss Sink was Brazil’s landlady, and when West heard the truth, she felt sick with guilt. She felt stupid and ignorant. Brazil’s so-called girlfriend had been a seventy-one-year-old woman who rented a row house to him. West felt absolutely terrible and for hours had been trying to think of what to say.

She drove through the Fan. Nothing was open, not even the Robin Inn. She parked in front of her town house and turned off the engine but didn’t get out. She looked at Brazil in the dark. Her heart stirred as she stared at his face sharply defined by shadows from the streetlight.

“I know,” she said.

He was quiet.

“I know about Ruby Sink. That she was your landlady. The landlady I heard you were seeing.”

Brazil turned to her, baffled.

“Seeing?” he said. “Where the hell did you hear something like that?”

“The talk was all around the department from day one,” West replied. “People told me you had a thing going with your landlady. Then I heard you on the phone with her and . . . well, it sounded like it was true, in a way.”

“Why? Because I was nice to her when she paged me?” Brazil said with emotion. “Because she was lonely and always bringing me cookies, cakes and things?” His voice wavered. “Leaving them on my doorstep because I was never fucking home and never gave her the fucking time of day!”

“I’m sorry, Andy,” West gently said.

“It’s like my mother.” He dissolved. “I don’t call her. She’s so fucking drunk all the time and I can’t stand it and won’t listen to the awful things she says. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

West moved over and put her arms around him. She held him close to calm him. Her blood got hot and her chemistry woke up.

“It’s all right, Andy,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.”

She wanted to hold him forever, but suddenly the awkwardness of it overtook the magic. She thought of her age. She thought of his talent, of everything that made him so unusual and special. He was probably hugging her back because he was terribly upset, no other reason. His heart probably wasn’t pounding like hers. He probably wasn’t as aware of their bodies touching as she was. She abruptly pulled away.

“I guess we should go in,” she said.

Niles heard them long before they gave a thought to him. He was waiting by the front door when his owner and Piano Man walked in.

Piano Man took a moment to pet Niles, while Niles’s owner couldn’t be bothered. Niles stayed where he was, tail switching. He watched with crossed eyes and plotted as they went into the kitchen.

When they were out of view, Niles jumped up on the table in the foyer. He hooked a claw into the florist’s card. He jumped down, landing silently on three legs.

West did not think she could eat the sweet potato pie. She stared at the slice Brazil set before her. The idea that Ruby Sink had made it before her cold-blooded murder was too much for West to process.

“I can’t throw it away.” Brazil sat across from West at the kitchen table. “It would be heartless to throw it away. I just can’t. You couldn’t either, Virginia. She would want us to eat it.”

“This is kind of sick,” West said, blinking, focusing, looking at him. “I don’t think I can.”

Brazil picked up his fork. He flinched as he cut off the point of his slice. He raised it. He took a deep breath and put it in his mouth. West watched him chew once or twice and swallow. It surprised her that he looked enormously relieved. Tension left his face. His eyes brightened and got that fierce blue flame in them that she had learned to recognize and take very seriously.

“It’s okay,” he told her in a strong voice. “Trust me.” He nodded for her to eat.

West had never backed down from a challenge, especially in front of him. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done when she took a bite of that pie. It surprised her that it didn’t taste weird or dead or who knows what. She had no idea what she had expected.

“Brown sugar, coconut milk, cinnamon,” said Brazil, who spent more time in the kitchen than West did.

He took another bite, this time without hesitation. West matched him.

“Raisins, vanilla extract.” Brazil concentrated on his tongue as if he were tasting fine wine. “Ah. Ginger. A hint of it. And a breath of nutmeg.”

“Breath
of nutmeg?” West said. “Where the hell does that shit come from?”

Brazil took another bite. So did she. She might just eat another slice to spite him.

Neither of them heard Niles, not that they ever did. He walked in holding up a paw, a white square of paper caught on one of his claws.

“Baby?” West said in alarm, certain he was injured. “Oh sweetie, what did you do to yourself?”

She didn’t realize what was on his claw until Niles was in Brazil’s lap and the florist’s card from the hallway table was in plain view. Brazil got a confused expression on his face.

“Schwan’s Flowers and Gifts? Charlotte?” he read aloud what was on the envelope as he pulled out the card. “ ‘Thinking of you, Andy,’ ” his voice trailed off.

West tried to act nonchalant and failed. She hated Niles and would pay him back for this.

“How did this end up on your hallway table?” Brazil wanted to know.

“How do you know it was on the table?” she said coolly as she imagined leaving Niles out in a hailstorm.

“I saw it there when we were here working on the computer!”

“Why were you looking at anything on any table!” Old anger and hurt jumped off the shelf where she had been storing them for months.

“Because you put it there so I would see it,” he exclaimed.

“How arrogant of you!”

“Then why?” he said. “And don’t tell me Niles did it.”

West pushed away her plate and stared past him. She tried to think how to say it. Confessing feelings was as dangerous as counting money when you walked down a dark street in a bad part of town.

“Because you didn’t care about me anymore.” She was out with it.

“That’s because you didn’t care about me first,” he argued.

“And that’s because I thought you dumped me the minute we got to town and started seeing someone else without even having the courtesy to tell me.”