A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,31

more bitter than he had a right to, considering he worked for the white-collar insurance world. But he was right. No different than the drug trade or Internet scams. The guys with the investment capital never saw the streets. They sat high above, just doing business.

“So you have a line on any of these middlemen?”

“I’ve got an eye out, Freeman. And you ought to, too. Your boy Manchester is pretty good at trackin’ the fìnancials on whatever names I give him. I’ll just follow the money trail.”

McCane took a long pause. I could almost hear the whiskey sliding down his throat.

“How much money do you pay a man to kill old ladies in their beds?” I finally said.

“Depends on the man, Freeman. Depends on the man,” he said. “So what have you got for me, Freeman? I assume you ain’t leavin’ this all to me.”

I told him about my tour of the neighborhood, my meeting with a local detective I knew and the suspicion that they had a serial rapist who had progressed to choking his victims to death. Whether it had any connection with our case, I wasn’t sure. Hell, I wasn’t even sure we had a case. But if I believed what McCane was telling me, he wasn’t just dismissing it.

“So you’re with me on this?” he repeated.

“You stay on the middlemen, McCane. Leave the locals to me,” I said.

I hung up and sat on the top step of my porch and watched a heron fishing in the shallow waters under a stand of pond apple trees. The bird’s roving eye seemed to be everywhere at once, but I knew it was focused on a target. The tapered beak was always poised. I sipped from my cup and watched the filtered sunlight dance around him and then, with a flick, the beak struck and came up with a small pilchard fish pinched at the head, its tail flapping furiously. Nice lunch, I thought. But instead of flying away with its catch, the heron stood frozen, its eye still worrying. I looked up into the canopy, scanning the top foliage, then twisted around and saw him. The big osprey was perched in the top of one of the twin cypress trees that marked the entrance to my shack. He was looking down at the heron, or perhaps at me as if to say, “Now that’s how to catch a fish.”

After a minute the standoff ended. The heron finally bent its legs, unfolded its wings and took flight. The osprey didn’t move. He sat there, as if waiting for me to decide on a course to take. I stared at him for a few minutes, then got up and went inside, closing the door softly behind me.

14

This one was not as weak. Eddie replaced the metal lid on Ms. Thompson’s garbage can in the alley behind her small house on Thirty-fourth Avenue. Inside there had been empty packages from frozen dinners, the smell of shaved pork from a wad of tin foil and a confetti of small ripped pink packages of sugar substitute. It was not like the garbage he’d seen on earlier forays. The others had eaten little or nothing. Their cans had been near empty, holding only mounds of tissues, a few half-filled cans of protein substitute and bags of medical trash. Ms. Thompson was not waiting on the edge.

Eddie knew she lived alone. Her husband was long dead. But he had seen her move about in the past. Had even watched her drive that old Chrysler till just a couple years back. She was more like his own mother, feisty and bitchy and always getting on him about how he needed a job. Humpin’ ’round all day pickin’ trash and bein’ laughed at by everyone in the neighborhood ain’t no job, she would say. And why don’t he clean hisself up and go on Sunday with her down to Piney Grove Church like he used to and her not thinking that was twenty-five years ago when he was still a boy. No, this one would be more like his momma, who wouldn’t get off him, constantly pushing on him about making money to help her out and how come he can’t be like other sons and what was he going to do when she was gone and where would he stay and who would take care of him then. Well, today he had three new hundred-dollar bills in his pocket down by his watch and he was