Dead Birmingham (9 page)

Flat on his back on the cement, Bone looked up at the man who stood over him. Andthen he realized what it was about the pale apparition that bothered him so much. It was his eyes. They were like a shark's, black and empty—as black as the darkness into which he was falling.

* * *

Bone was coming out of it. What had happened? Yim. Yim and he . . . had they gotten caught? No. wait. They had gotten away. His head hurt. Something stank. Smelled like a hospital. Somebody was waking him up, sticking something under his nose.

Oh my God! It was
him
! Count Dracula. Terror flood bone's body. Who are you? He wanted to scream, but he realized that his mouth was stuffed with something, one of his own socks, some still calm voice in his mind noted.

This was all wrong. He realized now that this man wasn't a store detective, wasn't anything he had previously encountered. This man was Death.

The man had donned a plastic raincoat, Bone noted with growing horror. On the table behind him was an assortment of knives, a saw, other horrible things.

Man you got to be shitting me.
Bone gnawed at the sweaty sock that filled his mouth, trying to speak. This wasn't for real, couldn't be. They were just trying to scare the shit out of him, and it was working.
 

The man began to speak. “I am in the employ of a certain gentleman,” he announced quietly, almost shyly, it seemed to Bone, as though he spoke very seldom. He had some kind of accent, Russian? German? His English was precise and refined. “This gentleman has had something stolen from him. A tawdry business. This was an important item, the safekeeping of which he had entrusted to someone. This person allowed it to be taken from him.”
 

There was a small shake of the man's head. People are so careless these days, that small gesture seemed to say. Tsk, tsk.

“I have been sent, by the owner, to deal with all concerned. Now, here is the crux of the matter. We believe that his property was stolen by you, or by one of your young friends.” He moved over to the table and picked up a long, narrow-bladed knife. “What my employer has asked me to do is to recover this item. But this gentleman was embarrassed, as you well can imagine. His reputation was damaged by this theft. So, in addition to recovering the item, a lesson is to be administered to all parties, as well. This is to insure that my employer recovers his esteem, as well as his property.”

What item? What item? But the words were muffled, his mouth full of gnawed cloth.

“Not yet. You will be allowed to speak momentarily. If you tell me where I might find the item, we can be done here rather quickly. If you resist, however, these proceedings might require quite some time.”

He put the point of the knife up to Bone's chest. It looked very sharp. “Now, my young friend. Let us get to know each other a little better.”

 

Chapter 17

 

We were still sitting there, Broom and Mack and me, mulling over the similarities in their cases, when the call came in.

Cassandra Taylor, A red-haired female officer came in from the front office while we were working on our second pot of black coffee. A uniformed sergeant, Cassandra Taylor was a still youngish woman with serious, bright green eyes that had seen a lot.

“Good morning, Sarge,” Broom offered with a weary smile.

“It's not morning any more, and it's not so good, either.” She frowned. “We have another dead kid. Over on the North Side.”

* * *

The North Side of Birmingham had once been home for the workers for its steel mills. Once called the Bethlehem of the South, she was a steel town in those days, a Nineteenth Century boom town. Housing had grown up all over the north side in those days, most of it shoddy, because people crowded in to work there, and the people lived in the shadow of the iron works that spewed the black cloud of progress over the city, and into the virgin sky, and they lived and labored and died and were buried there by the tens of thousands.

But when things improved for part of the city, they got worse for other parts. Birmingham was no longer the Bethlehem of the South. Now she was a major banking hub for the entire Southeastern United States. Downtown crime had faded to nothing, but out on the dirty fringes, murder, robbery, and the rackets flourished.

Now the former great iron works were silent rusting relics, and the original housing had long ago slid into ruin. Other housing had risen to replace it, housing projects for the hopeless, rank upon rank of unceremonious brown prison blocks, hundreds of units apiece; and new factories that turned out the disenchanted, the disenfranchised, and the desperate in assembly lines that raced out of control, faster and more productive every year.

Crime swelled the sickness of the North Side. The victim and the perpetrator each took their turn in a macabre dance that started every evening and went until dawn, and it mattered not if a dancer or two fell nightly, since there were always others eagerly awaiting their chances in the wings.

Casualties weren't any big surprise. Gangs had split the area into turfs, long ago. Crime families of a higher order had imposed districts of their own, as well. Clashes were not rare, and violence of some variety was a nightly occurrence. But that was different; that was business, at least on some lost and primeval level.
 

This killing, with its torture and mutilation, was simply evil, at least according to the likes of Detective Lieutenant Lester Broom.
 

The kid was lying in the vacant lot behind a long-closed grocery store. The sign on the store said Save-a-Million. The letters were faded to the color of a three-day-old tomato peel. Nothing had been saved there in a long, long time. Newspapers and other trash flipped and fluttered in the breeze as they walked across the vast, empty parking lot to the vacant lot in the rear. He was lying in the shrubs, and he was hard to look at.

“Fredrick ‘Bone' Mullally,” Mack was reading. “Age twenty-three. Prior convictions include shoplifting and passing a worthless instrument. Dropped out of the University of West Georgia two years ago. Parents last heard from him just over a month ago. At that time, he stated that he was staying with friends. Parents also stated that he was dating a Korean girl, name of Yim, that he wanted his parents to meet.”

“Whom,” I said.

“What? Mack looked up from the paper he held in his hand.

“You said that. It is correct to say whom, when referring to a person.”

“Uh. Okay, whatever.”

But I wasn't uptight about grammar. Yim, the Korean girl, wasn't a ‘that' to me; she was a human being.

Neither was this young black man, the same age as my sister's son, also a young black man who currently attended the same university that Fredrick “Bone” Mullally had dropped out of. They were somebodies, whatever life they chose, and they deserved respect, like anyone else.

Like the other young man that Broom had told me about. Frederick had died hard. Anyone could see that. His body had been lacerated, and his hands cut off. An ancient gesture, I thought. They still do that in some countries. Punishment for the thief. Was this gruesome act somehow tied to the age of the stolen items? What did Malvagio know about this, if anything? Was he afraid? Was he, too, dead?
 

I looked at the young corpse and I wanted to shout in his young, dead ears:
Don't live this way. Don't die this way. Give yourself a chance!

But no, the kid had followed some lost light of the young, and so he had come to this.

We live in the world any way we can, because we realize that life is all hell and the world tries to kill you every way that it can. If you are lucky, and there are not many who are, you will live to a ripe old age and have kids to leave behind you, and a home of your own to die in. You'll never know hunger or what it feels like to have no place to go.
 

As I said, if you are lucky. Most people aren't. You weren't. And I'm sorry.

Broom was talking. “This killing is going to hit the newspapers Monday morning. If we can keep a lid on it until then. If one of those ambulance chasers comes around asking the right questions, we're screwed. One thing we don't need at this stage is a general panic, of reporters following us around while we try to find this son of a bitch.”

“You think that it's one man?” I asked softly, still looking at the corpse.

“Absolutely, and the same man. He started out the same way each time, and followed the same procedure. You can follow his cuts. He has a method. The cuts get worse, and are in more painful places, as he goes along. This guy is some kind of professional, all right. Some kind that I've never seen the like of before, but a professional.”

Mack nodded. “I've seen hits, seen mafia jobs, gang interrogations. But this is just, I don't know. Evil. There's a note of . . . just plain brutality to it,” he said, and spat in the trash can.

“You're right there, Mack.” Broom pointed to two long, diagonal incisions that ran down the chest of the young man's corpse. “Those were made gradually, probably taking several minutes each. But the second cut tells us that the first one didn't work. The perpetrator had to make several deep cuts, taking his time at it, and all the while you can bet he was trying to get some kind of information out of this kid. The kid was cut on the arms, the abdomen, the back, and then sometime later his throat was cut. Probably after the killer was fed up.”

After a pause, I said, “No, I think he did it after he was satisfied.”
 

“Talk, old partner. What's on that overactive mind of yours?”

“Just this. I agree with what you've said. These kids got their hands on something that somebody out there wants awfully bad. Maybe a lot of people want it, for that matter. But I think this killer may have already learned something that we're still trying to figure out. Maybe these kids don't know what they have. Maybe they don't have it, any more. Maybe . . . ”

“Maybe one of the kids stole it and didn't tell the others,” Mack said suddenly.

Broom and I stood silently looking at him for a second.

“Yeah,” Broom whispered, at last. “You're right there, Mack. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. Let's suppose for a second that these kids work the same way all the time, using teamwork. We know how boosters work. From what Malvagio told Roland, that sounds like the M.O. here. But let's just say that one kid spotted a plum item he could lay easy hands on. Maybe he got greedy, maybe hid this thing away as a little nest egg. Just maybe the other ones don't have a clue.”

“So when the killer comes with his knives and his questions, none of them have answers,” I said, rubbing my chin. There was stubble there. It had been a long day, and it was far from over.

“Which means that he hasn't caught the right kid yet. Because that kid won't be this mutilated. He'll talk, because he or she's the only one of them who can talk,” Mack expounded.

“We have to find those kids before he does.” Broom drew himself to his full mythic height and grabbed his keys.

“Not all of them,” I said to both of them. “Just the one.”

 

Chapter 18

 

After Mule had disappeared, they had waited two or three days. Maybe he had gotten nabbed. They expected him to show up, with his toothy smile and a story of a night or two in jail. After a week they had sent two of the girls, Angel and Dextra, to go nonchalantly check. No, they were told, there was currently no one named Mueller in the Birmingham jail. Nor had there been.

They became alarmed. There was much excited banter. Was Mule hiding out for some reason? They checked all the message drops, but he had left no word. Scott told them he must have gotten picked up by the cops; there is no other reason he would leave them. They were his family. Which raised the question: What if Scott was wrong? Had he gone back to his real family? Decided to leave the life they were living, go back and finish college? They would have to find out. They had to know for sure.

* * *

“They just busted in here and started shooting the place up,” said the big red-headed man. His name was Tim Finnegan.
 

The paramedic who was looking at Finnegan's leg looked up at the patrol officers who stood nearby. “The bullet's still in there, so we'll have to transport him. You'll have to question him at the hospital.”

“We just have a couple of questions.”
 

“Oh, I can answer a couple of questions before you cart me off to UAB Hospital,” Finnegan scoffed. He seemed rather proud of the bullet wound. He reached behind the bar and grabbed a bottle of Johnny Walker Black, and a tumbler. “For the pain,” he explained to the paramedic, who gave him a dour frown. Finnegan shrugged and poured himself a belt and drank it anyway. He nodded to the policeman. “Ask away.”

“Had there been an argument, anything like that?” The patrol officer asked, his notebook out, pen at the ready.

“A couple of fellows came in to have an eye-opener, around eleven o'clock. They had a drink, then left. A second later, they run back in here with this crowd of big Wops on their heels, and they start fighting, breaking my furniture and shootin' the place up.”