Nobody Lives Forever (5 page)

Rick insisted there was no point in trying to reason with McGee. “It's all real to him,” he said. “There is no logic in craziness.”

McGee called again ten minutes later. A secretary took the message, and Jim shuffled it to the bottom of the stack. Then, the corners of his pale lips curved into a sly smile. He decided to leave it for Dusty. She would be in tonight. Let her deal with him, he thought.

Alex heard what Harriet was thinking as she scrubbed herself in the shower. He hated to be criticized. He emerged furious, stalked into the dining room and turned up the volume on the police scanner, trying to drown out the clamor from the others. Not my fault, he thought. That dumb asshole! If that kid had stayed where he belonged, none of it would have happened. What the hell was he trying to do? Be a hero? Well, look at what all that macho shit got him. Dead. He deserved it for not minding his own damn business.

Roughing me up, bellowing that he had a gun. Stupid bastard left me no choice. Better to waste a jerk like that anyway.

He sat drumming his fingers on the table, his face softening as little Jennifer began to sob. She could not find her blankie, and Alex had frightened her by firing the gun. She hated guns. She wanted to go play with Benjie, the little boy next door. She cried more when Alex told her she could only come out to play with Benjie when they baby-sat for him.

The tears dried as Marilyn came out, prowling the room, sulking as usual and puffing a cigarette. She sat down at Laurel's dressing table and carefully outlined her apple-green eyes with mascara and pencil. Then she doused herself with cheap perfume and painted her fingernails blood-red, a shade she knew Laurel would hate. All the while she bitched and complained about not getting enough sex. She knew the others were listening. All but Laurel, who could not hear any of them.

Marilyn was pissed off at Alex for blowing away the nice-looking young Thorne kid just as she was getting to know him. She was also pissed at that fat-ass Sandy Corley, who had caught her out in the driveway earlier, flirting with Larry. He had stopped by to chat while walking their new Doberman, but Sandy had rudely interrupted their tête-à-tête and steered him home.

Chagrined, he had marched along docilely. He probably would not be allowed out again for a month, Marilyn had thought angrily. Pussy-whipped, that's what he is. Pussy-whipped She had even said it aloud, hoping they overheard.

When Marilyn's nails were dry, she filled out an order form for a leather G-string pictured in a Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue. Then she strutted over to the kitchen cabinet in her four-inch stiletto heels, hips swaying provocatively, and downed two slugs of bourbon. “If nothing else,” she said, hips slung to one side, tossing back her long hair, “it makes life easier to take in this damn monastery.”

Marilyn might be a slut, Alex thought from his place down in the tunnel that joined their minds, but she was not so difficult to deal with. At least he could reason with her. Sometimes they even thought alike. In fact, at times, like now, she was not bad to have around. Even though she didn't particularly like kids, Marilyn had fixed Jennifer a cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows, fished her blankie out of the clothes dryer and promised that she could watch cartoons on TV in the morning. Marilyn was a good ol' girl most of the time, not like that homemaker. Harriet had raged unmercifully, calling Alex stupid and sloppy. “You'll ruin it for all of us!” she cried.

Who is she to talk, he thought, that bitch, with all the shit she pulls.

Jennifer came back, her mouth still chocolate-stained, clutching her blankie, sucking her thumb and whining. That did it. He was fed up. He burst back out, using his growing strength. “You cunts think about nothing but yourselves!” He smashed his right fist into his palm, put on his clothes and stormed out.

That near disaster the other night was awkward, he thought, but think how awkward it turned out to be for the Thorne kid. He suppressed a chuckle, determined not to let one slipup stop him. He was growing stronger and feeling better about himself all the time. Temporarily, however, Alex knew he had to use extreme caution. The others were right, it could have been a goddamn catastrophe. If he could only get rid of them ail for good, especially that bitch Harriet. And Laurel, who could cause all of them real problems when she panicked, which she always did when she realized she was losing time. Stupid and hysterical, she had no idea what was going on. Occasionally one of the others came in hands when he got in a tight spot, but their nagging and complaining frosted his ass. Somebody was going to pay, he swore, for all of it. What about his pain, all his lost time? He had to find a way.

He drove within the speed limit and was careful to signal properly. It wouldn't do to be stopped. That could ruin his plans. The moonlight was radiant and the night air was wonderful, soft and warm. He sighed. The days always took so long to die.

The convenience store was one he had visited before, some time ago. There would be more cash on hand now, since they had started selling Florida lottery tickets. He felt like a winner tonight. It was time to act.

The store glowed in the dark, jutting out of a small strip shopping center. Closed shops, a shoe repair and a take-out pizza joint slumbered on either side. The front entrance was guarded only by pay phones and trash receptacles. Nobody browsing in the racks of magazines. The only customer strolled out with a six-pack. Alex pulled on his cap, adjusted his shades and stepped boldly through the front door into the light, heart swelling with excitement. He could see anyone approaching through the big plate-glass storefront. Of course, that meant they could see him, too, so he had to be quick.

The thin, dark man behind the counter—flanked by the frozen slush machine and the sausage sticks—was Pakistani.

“Is late at night for sunglasses,” he said. Alex smiled and showed him the gun. The cold metal was far more eloquent than words.

Alex enjoyed the man's stricken expression. His brown eyes were wet and enormous, his body twitched. Alex gestured impatiently toward the cash register. Frightened, the man abruptly reached for something below the counter. Alex squeezed the trigger. He did so without thinking. The clerk sank to his knees, then crumpled over onto his side, his body jerking and convulsing. Alex peered over the counter to see what the man had reached for. A paper bag, to hold the money.

Too late. Now, more trouble. It is harder than ever to make a living in Miami, he thought. He never intended to hurt anyone. Shit just happens.

He emptied the cash drawer and eagerly stuffed a handful of lottery tickets into his jeans. Humming, as though a casual shopper, he strolled by the case of ready-made sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies, through the door and out to his car. What was that song running through his mind? Very catchy, a show tune—“If They Could See Me Now”—that was it. He did a little dance step, eased himself into the front seat and drove away. He couldn't help but smile. Wouldn't the next customer be surprised? He wished he could stay for the excitement.

What had happened was not his fault, Alex told himself. The counterman made a bad move. This case would not generate as big a deal as the next-door neighbor of a hotshot homicide detective, but it would keep the cops on their toes. Nothing like keeping the cops on their toes.

They say these things become easier with experience. They're right, he thought. Pawing through the bills and the coins on the front seat with one hand, he fingered the lottery tickets. A huge smile spread across his face, and he broke up, into high-pitched laughter. Hey, asshole, he asked himself, what are you going to do if you have the winning ticket?

The city stayed busy. Detectives Dominguez and Mack Thomas went out to investigate a shooting at an all-night convenience store. Rick and Jim eventually quit to catch some sleep. But Jim did not go directly home. He glanced at his watch and saw that he would be able to make it on time after all.

Red-eyed from lack of sleep, his suit rumpled, but stepping lightly for a man of his size and state of weariness, Jim slipped quietly into his usual rear pew. Sunday morning services had always been a soothing contrast, a little R and R for the spirit after the chaos of Saturday night life and death in Miami. The serenity and beauty, the traditional words and music and the good and decent people around him, they salved his soul.

He and Molly had been married in this church, almost thirty years ago. Happy memories still dwelt there, even though the place was no longer a sanctuary. Over the years the city and its inhabitants had changed. The church had been invaded repeatedly by thieves who stole everything from Baby Jesus, snatched from his crèche at Christmas time, to the baptismal font and the vestments.

As bad, if not worse, were the street people and mental cases whose faithful attendance might have been admirable, had they been lucid. Their only contribution was chaos. You never know, he thought, watching an elderly, shabbily dressed woman. He had been to many scenes where survivors of the depression had died alone, often malnourished, under circumstance of abject poverty, with a small fortune, their hoarded life savings, stuffed in a shoebox or a mattress. They had refused to trust banks, or spend their nest eggs, no matter what.

The usual crazies were present in full force today, including the one who always spent the moments of silent meditation rummaging noisily through her crinkly shopping bags. A bearded young man, the picture of health, always coughed continually through the sermon—nonstop. During the fellowship hour in the adjacent social hall later, he would never cough. Not once. He did talk, at length and eagerly. He did know his scripture. That's the hell of it, Jim thought. They always know their scripture.

A painfully thin woman, wrinkled and snaggletoothed, always insisted on sitting way up front, then swiveled in her pew, scowling, grimacing and occasionally giving the finger to innocent worshipers seated behind her. A raspy-voiced man, dirty, agitated and unable to sit still, bobbed up and down, shuffled in and out, mumbling all the while, genuflecting constantly. Sometimes he simply dropped to his knees in the center aisle.

The church was under siege and struggling to survive, yet the ushers were forced to hold on to the collection plates, rather than pass them, to prevent some of these characters from helping themselves. Had they been well-heeled contributors, Jim reasoned, they could be tolerated as eccentrics. But as thing stood, the church definitely needed a bouncer.

He had volunteered. He would have relished the job. The patient and good-natured pastor had politely declined his offer without an explanation. Board members agreed that a problem existed but rejected his second suggestion, that the ushers, all men of retirement age, be equipped with mace.

He realized that his impatience and anger at these people was probably not by-the-book Christian. Still another example, he thought, of how going by the book no longer works.

The deranged chorus was in rare form this morning. In the good old days, he reflected, he had put people in jail for less. More evidence that America's misfits and criminals now own more rights than the law-abiding, long-suffering taxpayers. Go by the book, turn the other cheek, and they overwhelm you.

He was uncertain anymore if there was a damn God or not. He could not help but doubt it much of the time, on the job. But something always brought him back to this place, with its old and worn wooden pews. Perhaps it was habit, or the memories. He used to consider the church his only lifeline to sanity in a world gone mad. Now he was not so sure. But without this, he had nothing left to believe in.

So he still came, and sometimes lingered in the walled courtyard. The coral rock enclosed a garden with trees, flowering shrubs and a carillon that sometimes played “Amazing Grace,” his favorite hymn. Maybe this place reminded him of Pennsylvania and the Sunday school he had attended as a child.

He was seventeen when he learned that nobody lives forever. He had lied about his age to land the job. He told them he was eighteen. Fresh out of high school, young, strong and eager. His second week there the world exploded in his face.

They were working on experimental airplane fuel at the Apex Gunpowder Plant, an eight-mile-square building barricaded inside a horseshoe-shaped mountain. Explosions were not unusual. The plant had been built with the blasts in mind. The constant concussions would pop out the wooden frames of windows that were plastic-coated screens, instead of glass. Both doors and windows were linked to steep chutes, safety slides for the employees. They were taught to land on their feet, running for the metal rings that hung about forty feet from each exit. When a man grabbed the ring, high-pressure jets of water would tear the clothes off his body. He would be left naked, but not burned.

All the workers wore fire-resistant work suits. The day it happened, Jim saw some burned down to their belt loops.

The blast erupted in a solvent recovery building that was always wet and considered safe. Twenty-five two-story tanks were each surrounded by thick red-brick walls. Each tank held ten thousand pounds of smokeless powder.

The explosion pulverized the bricks into red dust. Men tried to escape by fleeing up the sides of the mountains, but fire and heat overtook them.

Sixty people were killed and hundreds hurt. Jim was coated with red dust but not seriously injured. He ran back to help other survivors. None of the late-model cars parked near the blast site would start. Pressure from the blast had collapsed the hollow copper floats inside their carburetors. Older cars with cork floats were unaffected. Jim loaded injured men into his Ford jalopy and careened to the nearest hospital, back and forth several times. He lost his eldest brother, his father and his best friend. Dozens of young men he had gone to school with were among the dead. He believed later that all he saw that day helped prepare him for police work and for investigating murder in Miami. Nothing he saw now ever bothered him, he said, nothing ever happened that he had not already seen as a teenager or later as a Marine at Panmunjon.

He was stoic, even on the day Molly announced she was leaving.

He was certain she would change her mind, but she did not. So he simply decided that when he retired he would return home to Pennsylvania, where she had resettled, and reclaim her. He had no doubt that it would happen until their married daughter in Orlando telephoned with the news that Molly had remarried.

Rick was the closest thing Jim had to family life now. He had trained Rick as a rookie, seen him promoted to sergeant and was content to work for him. For years Jim had avoided promotional exams because promotion always meant a transfer and he liked nothing better than being a homicide detective. His plan was to wait until retirement loomed and then push for promotion. Rank, even a sergeant's stripes, would bring a bigger pension. But he had delayed too long. Who could have foreseen that South Florida, the city and the department, would change so much? Few Anglo males would ever again win promotion no matter how high they scored on exams.

No matter. He and Rick were a good team. Despite widely diverse backgrounds, they had clicked from day one. Rick was accustomed to being a star, a stranger to hard times. A native son, born in Miami, an only child, all-state quarterback at Beach High, football scholarship to the University of Florida, he was always spoiled—by his mother, his teachers and eager cheerleaders of all ages. He reverted to beach bum after college, spent a year as a sun-bronzed lifeguard, then joined the department, disappointing his father, who had hoped to hand him the family business, a small chain of appliance stores. Women loved him. Men liked him. He was a hell of a detective. Rick and Jim worked well together, achieving a nearly 90 percent clearance rate on their cases, a major accomplishment in an era of difficult-to-solve drug murders.

Jim felt vaguely uneasy about Dusty rejoining their team. She was good, probably the best female detective he had ever seen, and he more than liked her, but he still yearned for the good old days before affirmative action and the women's movement. Female cops are fine in their place, he always said, as long as that place is the juvenile bureau or the shoplifting detail. Who wants a woman to back you up in a brawl or a riot? And in homicide, detectives spend most of their waking hours with their team partners—how can you relax when one of those partners is a woman? Sex is always present, especially with a woman as good-looking as Dusty. He was always uncomfortably conscious of a woman's presence, although he noticed that it was not that way for most of the new generation of young cops. He knew Dusty had had the hots for Rick. She probably still did, and the heat had once generated both ways. Jim had actually felt more comfortable when Rick was screwing Dusty. At least everybody knew where he, or she, stood.

When that romance was in full flower, Jim and Rick still went fishing a few times a month, still hit their favorite spot for a couple of cool ones at least twice a week, still followed the fortunes of the Miami Dolphins and still talked incessantly about their cases. On duty, off duty, city time, their time, it all blurred together. They lived the job, solved a lot of cases and enjoyed themselves. Then along came Laurel. At first Jim was convinced that it was just the transient attraction of a new face and a firm young body. He never really believed it was serious until the day Rick borrowed his pickup to move Laurel's belongings into his house. Rick seemed happy—so far. Love is what counts, until it ends, and end it will, Jim thought. That's what loves does. Nobody lives forever, nobody loves forever.

He drove from the church to a Beach deli for a rare roast beef on rye and a side order of coleslaw to go. In the small kitchen of his condo apartment, he dumped the cardboard dish of slaw over the roast beef, slapped the lid back on the sandwich, popped a cold beer from the refrigerator, sat down at the table and opened his Sunday newspaper. Rob Thorne smiled at him from a photograph on the local page, under a headline that read PROWLER SLAYS COLLEGE BASEBALL PLAYER.

The story quoted a police spokesman, who said the usual: “An arrest is imminent.”

“That asshole must know something we don't,” Jim said, swallowing another swig of beer. “I wish it was that easy.”

He sighed, took off his shoes, peeled off his socks, dropped them in the clothes hamper and yawned. Then he padded barefoot to the window, drew the blackout drapes to shut out the sun as it climbed a brilliant sky, turned the control on the air conditioner up to high, took off his clothes and went to bed.