The Hundredth Man (20 page)

“Screw your meeting. You’ve ruined my life. Take me home now!”

“You’re staying here until you promise to meet Bear.” I couldn’t guarantee she wouldn’t back out after giving her word; it was just something I felt.

“No fucking way. I want to call a cab.”

I handed her my cell phone. She fumbled at it. “It’s not doing anything.”

“I took the batteries out. I locked the other phone in the closet.”

I ducked as the phone zinged over my head and exploded against the wall, plastic and circuitry flying like shrapnel.

“I’m getting the cops, say you’re holding me against my will,” she wailed.

“Order the meat loaf.”

“What?”

“The jail contracts with the Windbreaker Cafe. The meat loaf is excellent.”

“I’m calling the cops on you!”

I started laughing. “Too many people saw you crawling the bars last night like a drunken hooker, babe, the cops won’t listen. Plus I have a cabdriver who’ll swear you couldn’t pay the fare. I’ve got bartenders who saw you spending money. Remember stealing sixty bucks from me? Or did that get lost in the blackout too?” I neglected to mention the IOU.

Her mouth opened and closed like a beached fish. “You rotten bastard!”

“You have two ways home, Ava. Promise you’ll do what I ask, or …” I snatched her hand and studied it. “Is your thumb sober enough to hitchhike?”

She jerked it away and woozily struggled to sit upright. “I’ll fucking well do it, I will.” She tipped over.

I ticked off the situation on three fingers. “Do you want to go home? Then I want you to meet Bear. And I want your promise to meet him.”

“I want to go home now!”

What she wanted, according to Bear, was for the pain and the guilt to stop, and that meant more alcohol. My act made me feel lower than a stable worker’s bootheel, but Bear had told me to stand firm. He also suspected if Ava got drunk again she’d be ruined for working Monday. Her shoulders were hard against the bricks.

“I want out of here, now!”

I pointed to the door. “Out is that way, Ava, as you recall from last night. Wait. You don’t remember last night, do you? Here’s the gist: Our lovely young pathologist went bar hopping She ended up with the Gast brothers, dirty, amoral lowlifes. She wore a T-shirt and a cap and no underwear. I found her sitting on a picnic table with her legs spread and her tits jiggling. Earl Gast was playing with our lady’s boobs but she was too drunk to notice. The three playmates were about to take a nighttime cruise.”

I stared into her eyes. “A dozen miles out in the Gulf with the Gast brothers. Guess what the price of that cruise would have been, Ava? Paid over and over and all night long.”

She clenched her eyes tight and tears squeezed from them. I heard waves crash and repeat a dozen times before she spoke.

“I promise,” she said angrily, though I knew the anger was not at me. “You win.”

“It’s not a competition,” I told her. “We’re on the same side.”

Ava said she’d need fifteen minutes and went to her bedroom and closed the door. Too late I realized she might have liquor squirreled away in her room. I flung wide the drapes in her living and dining rooms and let the light pour in. Her furniture was eclectic, Shaker to contemporary, and everything fit against everything else. There was art on the walls, well-wrought re pros of van Gogh’s Aries period, the fields and flowers of France, plus some lilies courtesy of Monet. I noted several small multimedia works by an artist I didn’t recognize glittering concoctions of paint and silk and metal foil, abstract birds frozen in time against her roseate walls.

I opened and closed cabinets in her kitchen until I came across a half gallon of Dark Eyes hundred-proof vodka, one-third full. No mixers or liqueurs. No bottle of port or brandy to celebrate special occasions, just high-speed obliteration for the brain. The booze went down the drain and I put the bottle back in the cabinet.

I was in the living room admiring one of the jewellike paintings when Ava reappeared. Her weary frown said she hadn’t kept a stash in bedroom or bathroom. She wore faded jeans and a tee from St. John’s Hospital. Her hair was wet from the shower. The strings of one white Reebok slapped the floor as she walked.

We were on the porch when she tapped my arm. “Whoops. Forgot my purse. I’ll grab it. Please, Carson, get the AC running in your truck.”

Bear told me AA members define insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I got in the truck and waited for Ava to discover her bottle was empty, half expecting she’d simply lock her door until I went away, the easy way out.

She charged out the front door a minute later, slamming it hard enough for me to feel the concussion twenty feet away. She strode to the truck and got in, cold fury on her face.

“Let’s get this the hell over with,” she said.

Mr. Cutter brought the photos to his office. He had decisions to make and time was growing short. He had three choices left, though only one more was necessary for the project’s completion. His eyes scanned them from behind the security of his locked door. The men in the photos were from the same mold: broad shouldered and slender of waist and hips, differing mainly in hair and eye color and degree of musculature.

Something wasn’t right.

It had to be exact. This selection was the most important, the final incarnation: Boy, Man, Warrior. Boy and Man had been perfect, but Warrior needed raw fury and unbridled power. And size. Mama could melt steel with a glance and needed a man equivalent to the task. He picked up the photos and studied again. His choice for Warrior seemed to have shrunken in the past few days.

Or maybe he was growing beyond his own dreams.

A new vision of warrior formed in his head and he set the photos on his desk, picture side down. He already knew the man, had seen him, heard him speak. You could tell he was a fighter, an avenger. Was he a fit adversary for Mama? The one to take her, kill her, save her?

Yes. He was a warrior and had the strength.

Mr. Cutter relaxed into his desk chair. The universe had answered again. First Mama, then the boat, now the Warrior. It was beautiful. All he had to do was claim the warrior as his own, whisk, whisk, whisk.

Footsteps outside and the voices of his coworkers. The drones were returning. They’d soon be scratching at his door.

I need, I need …

Mr. Cutter gathered the now unnecessary photos and notes in an edge-aligned stack and pulled an envelope from his jacket. He carefully placed the photos in the envelope before folding it over, aligning the blank end with the return-address end, the one printed Bayside Consulting.

“I don’t want to be here.”

“Nobody does their first time. After you.”

I pushed open the side door of a small former church on the south side of downtown, now a meeting place for Alcoholics Anonymous. Ava reluctantly entered a spacious room with tables and chairs, a pool table, an ancient pinball machine, and two pop machines. A bulletin board advertised meeting times and alcohol-free dances. Beside it was a rack of literature. Steps near the back led upstairs. There was a small snack counter. Behind it an older guy with Einstein hair attended a restaurant-sized coffee urn. Four guys played cards at a back table. Two women were shooting pool and trading barbs with the guys at the table. Words passed between the pool players and card game and they all started laughing. A man in a business suit sat alone near the back, sipping tea and reading The Wall Street Journal. He whistled and fiddled with his tie. Ava studied the faces from the corner of her eye.

“Where are all the … people with problems?”

“They’ve got us surrounded.”

“Have they been drinking? They’re laughing.”

“They’re laughing because they haven’t been drinking.”

Ava started shaking and sprinted to the rest room with her hand over her mouth. The guy behind the window smiled. “New,” he said.

“First-timer,” I affirmed.

“She’s in the right place. You in the fellowship?”

“No. But a believer, nonetheless.”

He gave me a thumbs-up and returned to his coffee ministrations. Ava returned two minutes later, face red and eyes wet. She still shook, withdrawal jitters kicked in by fear of this place, at first telling her only what she was instead of what she could become.

“I can’t take this, let’s get out of here, Carson. Let’s come back tomorrow.”

Footsteps thundered down the stairs beside us, big feet with a Bear above them, a bear in jeans and a blue sweatshirt, a cap from Bass Pro Shops covering an ursine shock of brown hair. A two-hundred-eighty-pound embrace lifted me from the floor like a sack of feathers. Bear’s delight was electric, transferable; jumper cables for my attitude.

He said, “Damn, just look at you: lean and mean and that same stupid-ass grin.”

“It’s not the same stupid-ass grin, Bear, it’s an upgrade.”

Bear yelled to the coffee guy. “Hey, Johnny, this is my old partner, Carson.”

Einstein shuffled back to the counter. “You’re the one stole the wheelbarrow and rolled him in here?”

Bear turned to Ava. Her hand disappeared in his massive paw. “Hello, Ava. Carson’s told me all about you.”

Ava turned to me as if I’d betrayed her again. Bear laid his arm lightly around her shoulders. “A bit rocky?” he asked, turning her toward the steps. “You should have seen my first day Carson dumping me on the floor like a load of bricks, me howling mad, shaking like a dog shitting peach pits..  ..”

Bear turned to me and winked. Then he guided Ava upstairs, one step at a time. She stayed for an hour and then I took her home. We’d both fulfilled our parts of the bargain.

“You’ll be all right?” I asked.

She looked toward her house and back at me. “Listen, Carson. I want to say “

I shushed her with a finger over her lips. “Just stay safe.”

We had an awkward moment nodding and mumbling until she turned away. When her door shut I heard a high whine in my head as I tried to remember how to drive, what lever performed what function. My hands lost the notion of grasp and I forgot what I was doing and where I was going. After a deep breath I finally coordinated the machinery and began pulling away into air as coarse as burlap.

“Carson, wait!”

I jammed on the brakes, turned, and saw Aya running stiffly toward me.

“I’m afraid of what could happen. Could I would it be too much to ask …”

Her hand clutched tight to my arm. She looked ragged; spun and wrung and flung a hundred directions. But I saw something else too: a sense of resolve, loose but gathering, like pieces long apart but finally, with the seamless and inexorable pull of gravity, coming together, needing to be whole.

“Let’s go pack your bags,” I said.

Just like that the air turned to velvet.

CHAPTER 19

“F
rom this Friedman you figure Nelson was humping and pumping in Biloxi,” Harry said, pulling off his lime-green tie and jamming it in the side pocket of his jacket. The tip hung out, looking like the head of a flattened frog.

“All expenses paid, from the sound of it.”

A group of day-shift patrol officers charged into Flanagan’s, hooting and hollering, out of uniform, free for another day. Harry and I nodded to familiar faces and turned back to the table. I’d settled Ava at my place and returned to meet Harry for brainstorming and a bowl of gumbo.

Harry was in a contrarian mood from a day filled with too many walks down dead-end streets. He pitched his spoon into his empty bowl. “Probably has nothing to do with anything.”

“There’s the shadow man Shelton saw with Nelson. The one that wasn’t like the others. Plus Nelson’s blabbing about having found his bottomless honey jar, easy street.”

“So? Messer said that was his theme song, always on the edge of a major score.”

“Nelson was the first. Someone’s grabbed stuff from his apartment. There’s got to be lines right to Nelson.”

Harry flicked an invisible string in the air like plucking a harp. Silence.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, slumping in the booth.

“What’s eating you most about this thing?” Harry asked. I watched across the barroom as a patrolman demonstrated how a DUI bust had failed the walk-the-line test. The cop held his arms out like stepping onto a tightrope, teetering, putting one toe inches in front of the other. The onlookers howled and clapped.

“It all comes back to the lack of passion,” I said, quoting my brother, again running on his ideas, hating it because it was my only choice. “It’s not vengeance killing or serial killing. It’s something different. There’s no sense of finality. He wants more from them than their deaths.”

Harry shot me dubious. “Like zombies, you’re saying? The living dead.”

“The working dead. They have a job to do. I just don’t know what the hell it is.”

Across the room the patrolman finished his act by pirouetting into a stumble and falling facedown on the floor. The crowd went wild. Harry glanced over, frowned, looked back at me. “I don’t know, Cars. My head’s jammed up enough just trying to lay scenes and vies over one another and come up with places they match.”

“Bodies are similar,” I said, tapping my swizzle stick against my cocktail glass like ringing a bell, bing. “Ages are close” Bing.

“That’s about it,” Harry said. “Even the venues don’t have many matching points.”

I tolled the venue information. “One outside, one inside.” Bing

I tolled the time of day. “One daylight, one night.” Bing

I tolled coloring. “One guy rather fair, the other dark.” Bing

I tolled status. “One white-collar guy, one bottom feeder.” Bing

Harry grabbed the swizzle stick, snapped it in half, and handed it back. “Even the damn temperature was day and night. I cooked at the park and froze at Deschamps’s.”

I thought about it a moment. “It was cold there, wasn’t it; not just me.”

“I put on my jacket. It was an icebox.”

The plucking of a distant string, soft, but distinct. I said, “Even with the door opened and closed, people coming and going. Maybe the killer bottomed out the AC to keep the body fresh as long as possible.”