Bloodthirst in Babylon Read online

  Todd finished his inadequate lunch and lit another cigarette. “Jesus, I understand you splitting after that.”

  Jermaine shook his head. “You don’t understand jack shit, partner. Wife and three kids, remember? I go back there the next night, only this time I got my .38 stuffed in my pocket. Just in case. Just like the Arabs had tole me to do all along.”

  “You registered to carry?”

  “Man, you ain’t never lived in the city. The Arabs gave me the job, they called it the Shotgun Shift. They was all proud of having had a cousin get wiped out on the Shotgun Shift ‘cuz he’d taken a shooter with him.” Jermaine paused. “Maybe that’s why they hired a nigger. They’d lost too many Arabs by then.”

  “Weren’t they pissed off about the shooting the night before?” Todd glanced at his watch.

  “Don’t worry about it. The time, I mean. Lunch is officially a half hour, but usually goes over. Not much to do on the floor anyway. But to answer your question, the Arabs musta had their insurance all paid up ‘cuz they treated it like a joke. They sweep up the glass and they’re teasing me about the bullets flying. I filed a police report, of course, but they treated it like someone stole a bike, you know? I’m sure the Arabs doubled the actual damage on their insurance claim, so everyone’s happy, right? Everyone but me.”

  “But now you got your gun,” said Todd, prodding.

  “Yeah. Now I got my gun. And the very next night, two kids come in.” Jermaine took a deep breath. Let it out. “They’re, I dunno—fifteen? Plenty old enough for the streets. I’m watching them real close ‘cuz I don’t like the way they’re huddled together at the back of the store, whispering. They take turns popping their heads up to look at me and my one or two customers. And they got these long coats, right? And their hands stuffed into the pockets, and I’m trying my damnedest to hold onto my only two customers, but then they’re both gone and it’s just me and the punks.”

  Jermaine’s face was glistening again, making Todd picture how it must have gone down.

  “One of ‘em drifts by the door—the lookout guy, right?—while the other one comes slowly up the aisle toward me. He got that nigger swagger going, this cold, dead look on his face. ‘Bout to become a player, you know? So I’m slowly bringing my gun out of my hip pocket and kinda aiming it at him, but under the counter. I know I can’t shoot through the wood like in the movies, so I gotta lift it high enough to get him before he gets me. That’s gonna take time, but then I get this crazy idea.”

  They both looked up guiltily as Beerbelly ambled past them without a sideways glance. When he started up his machine, Todd pulled closer to hear the rest.

  “I’m thinking to myself, I’m thirty-four, too old for this shit. I ain’t Wyatt Earp. I gotta wait for him to draw on me first and gamble on being able to get my Smith & Wesson up over the top of the counter before he plugs me? Bullshit. Why not just plug him first, then get the bastard at the back of the store? Element of surprise, right? Not the way the gunfighters do it, but what you do if you got no quick-draw practice and you wanna live. Then go through their coats and take out their guns and put ‘em in their dead hands and everything’s cool.”

  Todd’s throat had started to tighten as the story went on. He could barely croak out the obvious question. “Did you kill them?” Lie to me, he was thinking.

  To his surprise and relief, the other man shook his head. “The store security camera saved those boys’ lives. I don’t even know if the damn thing worked, but if it did I was screwed. So I had to wait and let the kid draw first and hope his friend wouldn’t get me from the doorway before I finished off the first one. It’s high noon in Detroit, right? I was ready for anything, ‘cept my gun hand is going numb and heavy and I got these black spots in front of my eyes like I’m gonna pass out.”

  Jermaine stopped. Pausing for dramatic effect, most likely, but Todd couldn’t stop himself from playing along. “So what happened? Huh?”

  “So the kid, the one that’s approaching. He says in this real nervous voice, ‘You got condoms?’ See, we kept ‘em behind the counter.”

  Jermaine let out a high, keening wail of a laugh that could be heard even above the roar of the printer-slotter. “That’s right. The punks want rubbers and they’re embarrassed about asking. And I almost blew ‘em away for it. Talk about effective birth control.”

  He erupted with one more peal of laughter, then his smile died. “Time to leave town, what I tell my ole lady. Can’t do this no more. We left the kids with Tonya’s ma and pa and tole ‘em we’d be back when we gets some jobs somewhere and saved up some money.”

  Todd blinked aside a million questions before settling on one. “Your wife found a job here, too?”

  “Took her all of two days. She’s filing books away at the town library for nine-fifty an hour.”

  Todd mulled this over. “You send for the kids yet?”

  Jermaine stared at a point far beyond Todd. Stared so long that Todd didn’t think he’d give up an answer. Then he said, “Tonya wants ‘em with us, but I’m not so sure. I keep putting it off.”

  There were lots of ways to respond to that, but Todd’s next questions sounded odd even to him. “Still got that .38?”

  “Oh yeah.” Jermaine Whittock nodded very slowly. “I keep that motherfucker greased and in prime working order back at the motel.”

  For some reason, that didn’t strike Todd as being the least bit strange.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Babylon Police Department was housed in an impressive red brick structure on Middle View Road known as the Drake Municipal Complex. It sat behind a startling expanse of green lawn flanked by rows of bright yellow daffodils and accessed by a dazzling white circular drive. Park benches sat under century-old sycamores along an inviting sidewalk. Despite the aesthetics, Paul’s affection for anything having to do with the town had been dulled by yet another conversation with Savannah Easton.

  It was time for action.

  He coasted up the drive and pulled the Lexus behind a long bus. He scanned the curb for a sign denying him the parking space so close to the brick walk leading to the front door, and was almost disappointed to find none.

  Paul Highsmith was in a law-defying mood.

  Darby’s expression had been difficult to read earlier that day as she’d handed him the phone. Paul, trying to paint his study with Tuck wailing in the background, had at first welcomed the interruption.

  “It’s Savannah,” Darby muttered, evidently eager to dash his good feelings. “She insists on talking with you.” This last part sounding like a vague accusation.

  He deliberately sighed into the receiver. “Yes, Savannah.”

  “Paul, you must sell,” she said, skipping her customarily bubbly preliminaries.

  His first thought was that the pressures of the legendarily slow market had caused the poor woman to lose it. After an empty pause in which he waited for her to explain herself, he finally had to ask the obvious.

  “You were clever to hold out for so long,” she said, now sounding unconvincingly girlish. “I told my buyer that you’d turned down their very generous offer. Well, I’d expected him to tell me to forget it, but he says, ‘Savannah, let’s quit playing games.’ That’s what he says. He tells me, ‘Let’s make it an even eight-hundred-thousand dollars.’ Can you imagine that, Paul? The town’s willing to buy your home for nearly double what you paid for it just a couple months ago.”

  He glanced at Darby and found her trying to entice Tuck’s attention away from the open paint can with a rag storybook he showed no interest in whatsoever.

  “Paul? Paul?” The real estate agent sounded panicky at the thought of losing him.

  “I’m here, Savannah.” He caught a glimpse of Darby listening in as unobtrusively as possible. “I’m sorry, but as we told you—”

  “You have to,” she said, all soft-sell pretense gone. “They won’t leave me alone until you do.”

  The line went silent, as though she’d realized she�
��d misspoke. After several beats, she issued a throaty chuckle. “My, I get dramatic, don’t I? Sorry, Paul. It’s just that they’re so insistent. I never should have let you buy in Babylon in the first place. Sometimes I see dollar signs and ignore my better judgment. But now I’m thinking about you, Paul, and your lovely family.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Savannah, who’s behind all of this?” he asked her crisply.

  “I told you. It’s the town. The whole town wants you to leave.”

  Paul sank into an overstuffed chair. What did the town” know about him? Had someone Googled his name and not liked what they came up with? He closed his eyes and tried to imagine how bad it might get.

  “Savannah, towns don’t speak. People do.” God, he sounded like the NRA. “Give me a name.”

  “No. I can’t,” she said, her voice breaking.

  What was going on here?

  He waited her out.

  “Bill Sandy,” she finally said in such a low monotone that he had to make her repeat herself to be sure he’d caught the name. “He’s the police chief,” she added, somewhat more helpfully.

  Then her voice rose again, clutching at him like talons. “But you can’t tell him I told you. Just sell your home, Paul. Please. It’s for your own good.”

  The Drake Municipal Complex. Paul found himself in a colorless hallway with crayon art safety posters from an elementary school serving as wall decorations along with notices of senior programs and adult education classes and swimming pool hours and refuse collection schedules. He saw a big person and little person set of drinking fountains against one wall, and a handful of open doors.

  He followed pleasant chatter to its source, through a corridor leading toward the back of the building. The closer he got to the voices, the more of them there seemed to be, until the corridor was filled with the hum of conversation.

  Paul found a double set of doors standing wide, and a patch of light spilling into the hallway. He stood in the doorway and watched men, woman and children milling around or laying in cots flexing cotton-bandaged arms. Still others formed crooked lines, waiting patiently to be stabbed by sharp needles.

  He recalled the long bus parked in front of his Lexus, and understood. It was a blood donor service. With the understanding came another thought to complement his fantasy of several nights ago when he’d thought of joining the locals in the diner. The way this thought went, he’d stroll in here, roll up his sleeve and donate a pint or two.

  How could the town reject his blood sacrifice? He’d just take his place at the end of one of those ragged lines and—

  “Hey, what the hell?”

  It was a uniformed cop who’d come up alongside him and now he braced Paul’s arm in a painful grip. “Barry, get over here.”

  The second cop, Barry, was taller, slimmer and slightly younger than the first. He joined his partner on a dead run, gun belt flapping on his bony hip.

  “Barry, goddamnit, you were supposed to—what the hell are you doing here?”

  The question was obviously directed at Paul. Dozens of faces were now turned to him from the open doorway, conversations stopped. Pink-faced and sputtery with rage, the plump cop said, “Barry, you were supposed to watch the door. I said, what’re you doing here?”

  Even the younger cop seemed unsure who his partner was addressing from sentence to sentence.

  “Let go of me.”

  There must have been steel in Paul’s voice, for the pudgy cop unhanded him like he was a heated oven coil. “Sorry,” the older cop said, chuckling weakly. “I just…we’re supposed to…I got startled, that’s all. It’s kind of a private thing in there.”

  A private blood drive?

  “Marty, I was helping Mrs. Oliver with her baby ‘cuz she tole me to,” Barry whined. “That’s why I left the door for—”

  “Shut up, Barry,” his partner said. Chortling like the whole thing was a joke. “Now, Mr. Highsmith, what can I do for you?”

  The cop knew his name, just like Purcell in the Winking Dog. That might not be unusual in a town of this size, but it was unnerving.

  “I was looking for the police station,” he said. “I only wandered in here by accident.”

  “Forget it, forget it,” the plump cop said. “My problem? Too much coffee. “ He laughed gustily, and his younger partner made a weak attempt to join in.

  “Get back in there,” the cop gruffly commanded Barry.

  The older cop chatted amiably while he directed Paul, with only the lightest touch, back out into the sunshine. Now in back of the large complex, Paul could see a parking lot apparently full of the vehicles of blood donors.

  “You know, they ought to make the sign more apparent,” the cop was saying. “I mean, everyone in town knows where the police station is, so who needs a sign? Right? But someone like you comes along, what’re you supposed to do—read minds?”

  The plump cop babbled on, all the while leading Paul along a short brick path bordered by rose bushes. The walk ended at another door, an ass-backward entrance to one of the wings of the expansive building.

  “Right here,” the cop said. “We got PD, firehouse, city departments of all kinds in this monster of a building. When we need more space, we add on. It’s crazy.”

  He stepped aside to let Paul enter first.

  Most of the police station revealed itself in a single glance. The open space was painted a dull shade of white. Gunmetal gray desks occupied the floor, with old-fashioned metal and glass room dividers cubing off office space for the VIPs. A black and white framed photograph of a stern old-timer took up a significant portion of one wall. Stodgy prints of more doddering old men lined another.

  “Hey, would you wait here?” the plump cop asked.

  Paul sat in a cold plastic chair behind a display of news and sports magazines while the now friendly officer promised to return as soon as possible before disappearing behind a room divider.

  Letting his gaze follow the low buzz of voices, Paul saw two heads bobbing in conversation behind the glass portion of one of the cubicles. The plump cop was waving his arms as he apparently explained the situation. Paul was fairly certain the younger cop, Barry, earned a mention. The second man had gray hair, a bushy mustache and a grim expression that showed itself every time he raised his head over the partition and glanced Paul’s way.

  Paul picked up a magazine and pretended to read it. When he heard a chair on wheels squeal, followed by slow, plodding footsteps, he innocently raised his gaze.

  “Mr. Highsmith? Bill Sandy.”

  The chief carried most of his excess bulk right behind his gun belt. His holstered weapon, massive enough to singlehandedly end a coup, dug into the soft flesh. He wore a pained expression that seemed to speak of arthritis and career disappointment—not to mention the gun pressed deeply into his gut. His handshake was more of a touch than a grip. Both parties released quickly.

  The chief nodded toward his cubicle. “Let’s talk, can we?”

  His voice was unexpectedly mild for someone Paul suspected of trying to bully his family out of town. Somewhat taken aback, Paul followed him past the oversize photos of long-dead civic leaders and into Chief Sandy’s office. He no longer knew what to expect.

  The space had been carved into a corner, so it featured two partitions and an equal number of plastered walls. There was a neat wooden desk, two shelves full of forms, a narrow bank of file cabinets and a fern. The nearly colorless walls carried the expected assortment of plaques and diplomas, but Paul’s eye was immediately taken to two large photographs on a low cabinet behind the desk.

  Where had he seen the white-haired gentleman before? It bugged him.

  “Sorry. Got to get you a chair,” the soft-spoken police chief said.

  While he was gone, Paul approached the color photo and read the brass plate affixed to the bottom: Miles Drake. The name nagged him until he remembered he was in one wing of the Drake Municipal Complex.

  Then: Drake. He recalled w
here else he’d heard the name.

  “Oooh, Duane, you’re gonna get us in trouble with Drake.”

  Chief Sandy came back, grunting softly with the weight of the metal chair he cradled. “Please, have a seat,” he offered, patting the chair which he crashed in front of his desk.

  “Thank you. I won’t take much of your time,” Paul said.

  He sat and shot another glance at the white-haired man in the photo on the cabinet, just behind the chief. It was a formal portrait, the subject resplendent in a loud jacket and tie ensemble, the lapels looking to be half a foot wide. The resemblance to the huge photograph of the man in the lobby was startling. They had to have been relatives, though they looked identical. The photo in the lobby had the grainy, overly posed look of photography from the Forties, while this photo had obviously been taken in the Seventies.

  “Mr. Highsmith, I’d like to apologize for the way you were treated by my young officers. Marty admitted that he came on a bit strong. He felt terrible about it, but that’s no excuse. You’ll get a written letter of apology.”

  Paul nodded. Now he really was off-guard. “It wasn’t that big a deal,” he said, the wind knocked out of his righteous anger. “I guess I was just taken aback that the police would be so protective of a blood drive. I was about to volunteer myself when we had the run-in.”

  “Well, thank you for your generosity,” the chief said. “Now, how can I help you?”

  The subject of the blood drive was obviously closed. Paul glanced once more at the photograph of Miles Drake. The old man was seated, back ramrod straight, both hands loosely clasping a bony knee. The pose was casual, but the subject made it look like it hadn’t been any easy photo to get.

  “Mr. Highsmith? Is there anything else I can help you with?” The police chief’s desk chair squealed.

  Paul refocused his attention and tried to gather his thoughts. “My real estate agent, Savannah Easton,” he said, then paused to see if his listener gave any significance to the name. He didn’t show anything. Paul continued, “She tells my wife and me that you’ve been pressuring her to get us to sell the home we just bought.”