Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (14 page)

Beyond the windshield, the climbing sun bludgeons blue shadows into gutters and doorways. The wind sends sprays of garbage through
the early morning. Soot rises into miniature tornados. An old woman in garters pushes a shopping cart piled high with junk. An emaciated man, fists clenched at his side, howls at invisible demons. An empty beer bottle rolls into his foot and he kicks it viciously. The old woman scuttles after it, stuffs it into her cart, grunting with satisfaction.

But this ever-changing scene with all its sad detail nevertheless seems distant and dull compared with the interior of the car, which is alive with Gus’s fevered presence. It is as if his inner rage has frightened the very molecules of the air around him. It feels hot in the car, despite the roar of the air conditioner, and Jack somehow intuits that this unnatural heat is exceedingly dangerous.

Jack went once to the zoo with his class at school, while he was still going to school. He was both drawn to and terrified by the bears. In their black bottomless eyes he saw no malice, only a massive power that could never be harnessed for long, that could turn instantly deadly. He imagined such a bear in his room at night, raising its snout at the small sounds his father made, its wet nostrils flaring at the scent of his father’s approach. The music would mean nothing to the bear; it ignored Mama Cass and the others. And when the door to the bedroom swung inward, the bear would swat the man down before he could raise the belt. Of course, no such creature existed—until the moment Jack stepped into the white Lincoln Continental, felt the electricity sizzling and popping as it had through the bars of the bear’s cage.

“You know where Andre hangs out,” Jack says because he has a desperate need to banish a silence that presses on him like a storm descending.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Gus says as they round a corner.

Jack is trying hard to follow, but everything that’s happened to him over the last several hours is so out of his ken, it seems a losing battle. “But you said—”

Gus gives him a swift look, unreadable, implacable. “It’s not for me to punish Andre.”

They drive on in silence, until Gus flicks on the cassette player. James Brown’s umber voice booms from the speakers:
“You know that man makes money to buy from other man.”

“It’s a man’s world,” Gus sings, his voice a startling imitation of Brown’s. “True dat, bro, it fo’ damn sho is.”

At length, they draw up in front of the All Around Town bakery on the ground floor of a heavily graffitied tenement. Through the fly-blown plate-glass window, Jack can see several men talking and lounging against shelves stacked with loaves of bread, bins of muffins, tins of cookies.

When he and Gus walk through the front door, he is hit by the yeasty scents of butter and sugar, and something else with a distinct tang. The men fall silent, watching as Gus makes his way toward the glass case at the far end of the narrow shop. No one pays any attention to Jack.

“Cyril,” Gus says to the balding man behind the counter.

The balding man wipes his hands on his apron, disappears through an open doorway in the rear wall, down a short passageway lined with stacks of huge cans, boxes, and containers of all sizes, into a back room. Jack observes the men. One curls dirt from beneath his fingernails with a folding knife, another stares at his watch, then at the third man, who rattles the pages of a tip sheet he’s reading. None of them look at Gus or say a word to each other or to anyone else.

The balding man returns, nods at Gus.

“C’mon,” Gus says, apparently to Jack.

Jack follows him behind the counter. As he passes by, the balding man plucks a chocolate-chip cookie off a pile in the case, gives it to him. Jack chews it thoughtfully, staring at the containers as he walks by.

The passageway gives out onto a cavelike room with a low ceiling the color of burnt bread. It is dominated by a line of enormous stainless steel ovens. A cool wind blows from a pair of huge air-conditioning grilles high up in the wall. Two men in long white aprons go about
their laconic task of filling the kneading machines, placing pale, thin loaves into the ovens in neat rows.

Standing in the center of the room is a squat man with the neck of a bull, the head of a bullet. His wide, planular olive-gray face possesses a sleekness that can come only from daily shaves at a barbershop.

“Hello, Cyril,” Gus says. He does not extend his hand. Neither does Cyril.

Cyril nods. He takes one glance at Jack, then his round, black eyes center on Gus. “He looks like shit, that kid.” He’s got a curious accent, as if English isn’t his first language.

Gus knows a put-down when he hears one. He chews an imaginary chaw of tobacco ruminatively. “He looks like shit ’cause a Andre.”

Cyril, divining the reason for the visit, seems to stiffen minutely. “What’s that to me?”

Gus puts one huge hand on Jack’s shoulder with an astonishing gentleness. “Jack belongs to me.”

The bakers are looking furtively at the two men as if they are titans about to launch lightning bolts at each other.

“I would venture to say Andre didn’t know that.”

“Andre an’ his crew beat the crap outta Jack.” Gus’s voice is implacable. The inner rage informs his face like heat lightning.

Cyril waits an indecent moment before acquiescing. “I’ll take care of it.”

“I warned you ’bout that muthafucka,” Gus says immediately.

Cyril shows his palms. “I don’t want any trouble between us, Gus.”

“Huh,” Gus grunts. “You already been through
that
bloodbath.”

The Lincoln Continental is singed with invisible fire as Gus drives them away from the bakery. Gus, brooding, is like a porcupine with his quills bristling.

“That muthafucka,” he mouths, his eyes straight ahead. And Jack doesn’t know whether he means Andre or Cyril.

“You know that bakery isn’t a bakery,” Jack says. “First off, there were no customers, just some men standing around.” He’s afraid of what he’s said, afraid that Gus’s seething will find its outlet in him. But he can’t help himself; it’s part of what’s wrong with him. His brain is exploding with everything he saw, heard, intuited, extrapolated upon.

“Course it ain’t only a bakery. Fuckin’ Cyril runs drugs ’n’ numbers outta there.”

Times like now, when he can focus on what his own brain has recorded, when it shows him the big picture, when he can “read” the signs and from them build a three-dimensional model in his mind, he has a clarity of thought he finds exhilarating. “I mean they’re making something more than bread there.”

Brakes shriek as all at once his words sink in. Gus pulls the Continental over to the curb. The engine chortles beneath them like a beast coming out of a coma. Gus throws the car into park. His seat groans a protest as he twists around to stare at Jack.

“Kid, what the
hell
you talkin’?”

For once Jack isn’t intimidated. He’s in his own world now, secure in what he has seen, what he knows, what he will say.

“There was the smell.”

“Yeast and butter and sugar, yah.”

“Underneath
all those things there was another smell: sharp and blue.”

“Blue?
” Gus goggles at him. “How the fuck can a smell be blue?”

“It just is,” Jack said. “It’s blue, like the smell when my mother takes off her nail polish.”

“Acetone? Nail polish remover is all acetone. I use it to take glue spots offa stuff people bring in to my pawnshop.” Gus’s expression is thoughtful now. “What else, kid?”

“Well, that cookie the guy gave me was days old. It should’ve been fresh. Plus which, whatever he had on his hands wasn’t flour or yeast, because his fingertips were stained orange by what he had on them.”

Gus appears to think about this revelation for some time. At last he says, as if in a slight daze, “Go on. Anything else?”

Jack nods. “The room with the ovens should’ve been hot.”

“Course it wasn’t hot,” Gus says. “It’s hugely air-conditioned.”

“Still,” Jack persists, “no heat came from inside when they opened the oven doors. The loaves were too thin to be bread. That wasn’t dough they were putting in, it was something that needed drying.”

“How the hell—?”

“Also, that guy Cyril is scared of you.”

“Huh, you betta believe he is.”

“No,” Jack says, “I mean he’s scared enough to do something about it.”

Gus frowns. “You mean he actually wants to move against me?” He shook his head. “No way you could know that, kid.”

“But I do.”

“Cyril an’ I have a treaty—an understanding. Between us now it’s live an’ let live.”

“No, it’s not.”

Something in Jack’s voice—some surety—gives Gus pause. “What are you, kid, a oracle?”

“What’s an oracle?” Jack says.

Gus stares out the side window. “You like fried pork chops an’ grits?”

“I never had grits.”

“Shit, that figures.” Gus makes a disgusted face. “White folk.”

He puts the car in gear.

13

Alli Carson saw the handsome man smile, remove himself from the doorway, pull a folding chair from the shadows. He straddled it, arms folded across the metal-tube back. He radiated a kind of magnetism, strong as her father’s, but entirely different: steely, opaque. All she saw when she looked into his face was her own reflection.

“They tied you up, poor girl,” he said gently. “I asked them not to do that, but do they listen to me?”

“Who—?” Alli’s tongue felt thick and gluey. “I’m so thirsty,” she managed to choke out.

The man stepped into the shadows, returned with a glass of water. Alli stared at it, desire flooding her, but fear, too, because there was an unknown world all around her. What horrors lurked there, waiting?

Leaning over her, he tipped the glass against her lower lip. “Slowly,” he said as she gulped. “Sip slowly.”

Despite her aching thirst, Alli obeyed him. When at last the glass was drained, she ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who are ‘they,’ who are you? Why have you brought me here, what do you want?”

He had soft eyes and such a large masculine presence, it seemed to fill the entire lit space.

“Be patient,” he said. “In time, all your questions will be answered.”

She wanted to believe him. That way lay hope. Hope that she’d soon be freed. “Then can’t you at least untie me?”

He shook his head sadly. “That would be most unwise.”

“Please. I won’t run away, I swear.”

“I’d like to believe you, Alli, really I would.”

She began to cry. “Why won’t you?”

“The others might come in at any time, you see, and then who would be punished? Me. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

She felt desperation fluttering in her breast like a caged bird. “For God’s sake, before they come!”

“Are you kidding me?” He said in a voice that lashed her like a whip, “You can’t be trusted. You’re a liar—and a cheat.”

Alli, confused as well as disoriented, said, “I—I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

He produced a thick manila folder, which he opened on his lap. With a shiver, she saw a snapshot of herself stapled to the top sheet of paper. Wasn’t this a scene from a film she had seen? And then with an internal shriek she realized that her mind and body had parted company, that she was looking at herself from a distance, or another dimension, where she was safe, would always be safe because nothing could touch her.

She heard someone with her voice say, “What are you holding?”

“Your life.” He looked up. “You see, Alli, I know everything about you.”

The schism inside her deepened—or widened, whichever. “You don’t … You couldn’t.”

His eyes flicked down, skimming information with which she could see he was clearly familiar. “You were born Allison Amanda Carson—Amanda was your maternal grandmother’s name—on January twenty-third, daughter of Edward Harrison Carson and Lyn Margaret Carson,
née Hayes, married thirty-seven years this past September fourteenth. You were born in Georgetown University Hospital, your blood type is O-negative. You attended Birney Elementary, Lincoln Middle, and—let’s see—Banneker High School. At age five you fractured the ulna in your right forearm. At age eight you twisted your left ankle so severely, you were required to wear a cast for seventeen days. Neither injury had a lasting effect.

“In ninth grade you were diagnosed with Graves’ disease by your pediatrician—what’s his name?” He turned a page. “Ah yes, Dr. Hallow. He recommended you for treatment at Children’s Hospital, where you stayed for six days while tests were being performed, medication prescribed and evaluated in your system.”

He looked up into Alli’s stricken face. “Have I left anything out? I thought not.” Returning to the file, he struck himself lightly on the forehead and a smile spread over his face like taffy melting on a July afternoon. “But of course I have! I’ve failed to mention Barkley. Philip Barkley. But you called him—what? Help me out here, Alli. No? All right, all on my own then. You called him Bark, isn’t that right? Bark was your first love, but you never told your parents the truth about you and Bark, did you?”

“There was a reason.”

“Of course. There’s always a reason,” Kray said. “Human beings are so good at rationalization. Did you or did you not tell your parents the truth about Philip Barkley? A simple yes or no will do.”

Alli gave a little moan, appearing to sink as much as she was able into the chair.

“You see the futility of your current predicament?”

It was a measure of her mental paralysis that it wasn’t until this moment that the thought occurred to her. “How could you possibly know about Bark? I never told anyone about—”

“That night on the raft?”

She gasped. “It’s impossible! You
couldn’t
know!”

“And yet I do. How to reconcile this seeming impossibility?” He cocked his head. “Would it help if I tell you that my name is Ronnie Kray?”

Some inarticulate sound got caught in the back of Alli’s throat, and she almost gagged.

I’m a prisoner, Lyn Carson thought for the first time in her life. She, her support staff, and her bodyguards were in a motorcade, on their way from a luncheon, where she’d spoken to the Washington Ladies’ something-or-other, to a fund-raiser where she was standing in for her husband, who was God knew where, doing God knew what. This morning, she had been on
Good Morning, America.
She barely remembered what she’d said.