A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,76

the light of a still-lit candle.

Then I caught the muffled electronic ring of a phone.

“It’s not mine,” she said, turning from the nightstand.

“Then let it go,” I said, and reached out to touch her back with my fingertips. The ringing stopped.

“See?”

She was quiet, and raised a single finger.

The ringing began again.

“Shit,” I said, getting up and walking naked through another man’s house and finding my phone on the porch, wrapped in a bundle of my dirty clothes.

“What?” I snapped into the mouthpiece.

“Your motherfuckin’ boy busted my damn hand,” came the shouted answer.

“Who the hell is this?”

“I knew they was gonna be trouble. Soon as those dogs from the other side come askin’ bout hundred-dollar bills I knew I shoulda kept my mouth shut.”

“Is this Carlyle?” I asked, putting it together.

“Don’t you call me that,” he snapped. “Your got-damn junk man done come over here lookin’ for trouble and I shot his ass up.”

“He’s there? You killed him?” I said, trying now to keep my voice controlled.

“I didn’t kill the motherfucker. He come round tryin’ to buy more shit and I tried to chase his ass off and the simple motherfucker done grabbed at my piece and it went off into his own damn belly.”

“Is he still there?” I repeated.

“Hell no, he ain’t here. He ran his ass down the road.”

“You hurt?”

“Damn right. Dude’s got hands like a damn vise, man. He crushed every fuckin’ bone in my hand.”

“Alright. Call nine-one-one. Call an ambulance and I’ll be right there.”

“I ain’t callin’ nobody. You get that fool’s ass or I waste him my own self, know what I’m sayin’?”

“Right,” I said and hung up. I was standing on Richards’s back porch, naked in the moonlight with a cell phone and a shiver that had just started down my back.

33

Richards called in the shooting to dispatch while we both dressed.

“No report, not even an anonymous call on gunshots fired,” she said, pulling a T-shirt over her head and then grabbing her radio and a holstered 9mm from the nightstand drawer. While she locked the house I went out, started my truck and then opened the passenger door when she came out through the gate.

When we got to the dope hole, two patrol cars were spinning their lights, a shift sergeant was on the scene, and the Brown Man was gone. The sergeant was pacing the sidewalk, and the Brown Man’s stool was lying tipped over in the grass. I could see another uniformed cop standing on the porch of a nearby house, speaking through a barely cracked front door.

“Good morning, Detective,” the sergeant said as Richards approached.

“Sergeant Carannante,” she answered. “Anything?”

“Nothing but your call, Detective. Unusually quiet for a Saturday night, but the trade usually ends at midnight or so.”

The sergeant was a thick, Italian-looking man with an insouciant demeanor that said he’d seen it all before. He took me in with his eyes and did not bring them back to Richards until he was introduced.

“Uh, Max Freeman,” Richards said. “He’s been working with us on a case.”

Carannante shook my hand.

“OK. Nice to know who’s on the field,” he said and turned back to her.

“Street was empty when the first unit got here. We swept the area best we could and then came back to see if we could pick up something with the flashlights. No blood spots, no shell casings, nothing. I got unit nineteen doing a canvass of residents who of course haven’t seen or heard anything. And I sent another car to our man Carlyle’s to see what’s what.”

He was a veteran cop. Giving the facts, not passing judgment on the call or the possibility that violence had occurred. Richards was herself looking unsure.

A hiss came from Carannante’s radio and he spoke back, then walked back toward the patrol car. I stepped over to the toppled stool, then took a few steps further and looked across the street. I was standing on the spot where Eddie Baines had stood the first time I had met his eyes.

“Walker!” the sergeant yelled past us, signaling the cop on the porch and then moving with a purpose toward his own car.

“Dispatch says twenty-seven Bravo has spotted a big guy pushing a cart over by the river where, what, this guy Baines left his mother for dead?” It was half report, half question and directed at Richards.

“Going home to lick his wounds?” she questioned right back.

“Let’s roll over there. If it’s him they’re going to need help throwing a perimeter,” Carannante said. The cop