August Snow Read online

  Not even Detroit’s few gangs risked trolling down by the river near historic Fort Wayne. Too many stories of ghosts and demons. Too many night creatures with sharp teeth and ravenous appetites. Then there’s the ghost of Oppenheimer’s “Little Boy” said to haunt the soil itself.

  This is where I brought the man thrashing about in the trunk of my car.

  Perfect place for a friendly little chat.

  He clumsily kicked at me once I opened the trunk. For this act of belligerence, I pulled him roughly out of the trunk, turned him over on his stomach and dislocated his right forefinger.

  It had been a long time since the violence in me had made its dark presence felt. It had always been there, somewhere in the pit of my stomach, in the submerged recesses of my brain. The marines had helped me focus the violence. My time on the Detroit police force had given it a purpose.

  Now, it had reemerged. Tangible and unapologetic.

  Blessed be the Lord, my rock,

  who trains my hands for war,

  and my fingers for battle

  Before pulling the man up into a sitting position against my car, I rummaged through his pockets and found his wallet. Then I undid the belt around his mouth and neck. While going through his wallet I knelt down and said, “You come for me or Tomás?”

  He didn’t answer. I motivated him by pressing the barrel of my gun to his right knee and cocking the hammer.

  “I have no compunction about making you a one-legged sideshow attraction,” I said.

  “For you,” the man finally said. “You break nose, motherfucker!” He had an Eastern European or Russian accent. Hard to tell since, as he so eloquently put it, I’d broken his nose. In the pale light drifting across the river from Windsor, Ontario, I made out the name on his driver’s license: Bob Franks.

  If this guy was “Bob Franks” then I was George Clooney.

  Three hundred cash in his wallet, plus a MasterCard, Visa and a gas card for an off-brand gas only sold on the east coast.

  And a condom.

  Bob Franks: Eternal Optimist.

  “Why, Mr. Franks?”

  “Who?”

  “Bob Franks,” I said. “That’s you.” I showed him the license. He squinted at it. “Remember? Now who hired you?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “You don’t know why you made a run at me?”

  “Just get paid,” the man said. He snorted and spat a wad of blood and mucus. “I gonna kill you, you black motherfucker piece of shit! I gonna break you nigger ass in half!”

  “Yeah, well so far you’re just breaking my heart,” I said, pressing the barrel of my gun harder into Bob’s kneecap. “Why me?”

  “Man say follow you. Give tune-up is all. Easy money.”

  “Well, Bob, ‘easy’ has gone exactly the same way as you getting lucky tonight,” I said, holding up the condom for him to see, then tossing it into the nearby darkness. “Who told you to put a beatdown on me? The man in the car?”

  “No,” the man said, still struggling to catch his breath. “Man in car partner. Other man.”

  “What’s the other man’s name, Bob?”

  “Why you keep calling me ‘Bob’!”

  I held up his poorly faked driver’s license again and shouted, “That’s you, asshole! Unless you wanna give me a real name and cut the bullshit.”

  He gave me a hard look and said nothing.

  I asked him again about the other man. The man who had hired him and his partner to scare me. After a quiet-tough-guy moment he said he didn’t know. The job came as a phone call. Half the money was left at a bus station in Toledo.

  “Why?” I said.

  The man shrugged. “Don’t know. Don’t fucking care. Money’s money.”

  “Are you shitting me?” I said. It was way early morning. It was cold. And somebody had put a lame-assed contract out on me that had put a good friend and his family in harm’s way. “You got a partner who leaves you holding the bag. An employer you don’t know. And I bet this mystery employer said half up front, other half when the job is done, right?”

  The man gave me a sheepish look then nodded.

  “Dear God,” I said standing and shaking my head. “You make stupid sound like an aspiration.”

  “A what?”

  I might as well have been talking to a freshly cut slab of slaughterhouse beef. Still, I persisted, hoping there was at least one kernel of usable information rattling around in this Neanderthal’s skull. “Did your employer happen to mention Eleanor Paget?”

  “Who’s this?” Bob said.

  “Nothing about a bank?”

  The man shook his head. Then he laughed and said, “I know about you. Cop who couldn’t cut it. Take off with big wad of police money. Maybe some nigger cop buddies hire me. Maybe want money back.”

  Anything’s possible when you don’t know a damned thing.

  In the faint light I took note of the right side of his neck. A portion of a tattoo. I took the barrel of my gun and pushed aside his shirt collar. Two church steeples. I’d only seen tattoos like this twice, maybe three times before. And every time I’d seen them, they meant trouble.

  I pulled out a pocketknife I keep with me and flipped out the two-inch blade.

  “Hey!” Bob Franks said squirming. “What you doing!”

  I cut a slit in the knee of his slacks and opened it up.

  A star tattoo.

  “So you bow to no one, huh?” I said to Bob Franks.

  Russian prison tats.

  “Fuck you,” Bob Franks snarled. “I American citizen now! This profiling!”

  “Okay,” I said, putting my knife away, then easing the hammer of my Glock down. “I expected better from you, Bob, but you have been a disappointment.” I pressed the barrel of my Glock to his broken nose. “If you, your partner or anybody else comes within a hundred miles of that house again, I will kill you. I will shoot you in your star-studded knees. I will shoot you in your hands and your elbows. I will take a hot steaming piss on you while you bleed out. Then I will find your employer and kill him, too. Understand me, Bob?”

  I stood, got in my car and started the engine.

  The man calling himself Bob Franks struggled to his feet. Thumping his heavy body against the car, he shouted, “You don’t leave me here!”

  I rolled the window down a bit. “I give you twenty/eighty odds of hobbling back to where the streetlamps work. By the way: a lot of wild dogs come down here at night to feed on ducks, geese and fish chewed up by boat propellers. You’re fresh meat, Bob. They’re gonna love you.”

  “Fucking nigger!”

  I rolled up the window and laughed as my rear tires kicked dirt and gravel in Bob Franks’s face.

  Sixteen

  A year away from the job and I’d gotten sloppy.

  If I’d been on my game, I would have taken special notice of the black Mercedes parked a block away from Café Consuela’s. A Mercedes in Mexicantown warranted special attention, since it was a mostly dirt-under-the-fingernails working class neighborhood.

  If I’d been on my game, I wouldn’t have put Tomás and his family in danger.

  Somehow I was in this thing now. Whatever “this thing” was.

  Over the next several days, I worked out at the Y on Broadway. I found a gun range on Gratiot Avenue and fired off boxes of .9mm-and .38-caliber ammo, reacquainting myself with the weight, balance, firing action and accuracy of my two guns. I also reacquainted myself with the smell of gunpowder and hot brass being ejected. I committed what I’d learned so far about Eleanor Paget and Titan Securities Investment Group to paper, scrutinizing my notes, looking for the connections, analyzing the disconnects.

  And I made phone calls.

  Most of my calls resulted in quick hang ups, threats of legal action or strings of profanity mixed with liberal doses of vitriol. None of Titan’s board of directors or their executive assistants spent more than eight seconds talking with me about their personal or professional relationships with
Eleanor Paget. They usually ended the conversation with “Let me refer you to the bank’s legal counsel” or “Fuck you, asswipe.” Former employees at Eleanor Paget’s home quickly told me they’d already talked to the police and I should leave them alone. This group included the scared young woman Manuela. And my contacts at both newspapers were more interested in what I knew than they were in accommodating me with what they knew. Which was damned little.

  It may have been a long-shot, but the thug with Russian prison tats and Bob Frank’s license had spooked me a bit when he said maybe it was someone on the force looking to give me a twelve-million-dollar beatdown. I called Ray Danbury and asked him if he’d heard anything.

  “Couple guys on the job still got it in for you,” Danbury said nonchalantly. “Think you sold ’em out—sold us out—with the trial and the money. Cops you took down are either serving time in Jackson or Huron Valley. One of ’em—Kirby—served ten months and found Jesus in Atlanta. Got his own public-access halleluiah TV show. Jacoby—Martin Jacoby—ate a bullet eight months ago. Left a fuck-you suicide note. It’s still in evidence if you ever wanna catch up on your reading. The mayor and his crew? Mayor’s trading cigarettes and cookies for TV time at Parnall and his contractor buddy’s stamping license plates in Jackson. Most still on the job just don’t give a shit about you anymore. That said, I’ll keep you posted I hear anything.”

  “Thanks, Ray,” I said.

  “Still,” Danbury said. “I wouldn’t be callin’ 911 down here any time soon, ma brotha. Might just go unanswered.”

  “And that would be different from any other day how, Ray?”

  Jimmy Radmon had made inroads with some of my other neighbors, fixing old hot-water radiators, doing drywall work and some electrical. He wasn’t quite sure what to charge so he told my neighbors they’d get a bill from me. Tips, however, were acceptable.

  “You find a place to stay?” I asked him over coffee and crullers in my kitchen.

  “The Monterey Inn,” Radmon said, munching a cruller I’d picked up from LaBelle’s Soul Hole donut shop on Michigan Avenue near the old train station. I’d never seen anybody so skinny eat with this kid’s appetite. “Over on Mt. Rainier. Nothing glamorous, but it’s pretty clean and they got cable. Front desk dude’s mostly high, so he don’t know if I’ve paid or not—which works out for me.”

  “Karma’s a bitch, Jimmy,” I said. “High or not, pay the man.”

  Radmon nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  I asked Radmon if he was enjoying the honest life and he shrugged and said it beat the alternative—which was me dumping his lifeless body in an abandoned house. He said the neighbor across the street—Carlos Rodriguez—was always staring at him when he worked at Carmela and Sylvia’s house. Giving him the “evil eye.”

  “You didn’t do much to win his confidence with your first visit to the ’hood.” I eyed the last of the crullers but knew Radmon would soon inhale it. “Plus, you’re black. Mexicans and blacks have never really embraced each other in this town.”

  “Looks like somebody done did some embracing,” Radmon said.

  When I realized he was talking about my mixed heritage I fell out laughing. I told him I’d talk to Mr. Rodriguez.

  Radmon asked if I was planning on buying any of the other houses on the block; there were four others that were up for sale. Houses that in a northern suburban market would have brought in six-digit sales figures. In Mexicantown? Four figures. Maybe five tops.

  “Hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

  “Well, you should, man,” Radmon said. “This city’s comin’ ’round, dude. All them rich hipster kids from West Bloomfield and Birmingham, they buyin’ up shit down here left and right. Why not have a brotha—or whatever you are—be they landlord?”

  “Interesting proposition.” I wasn’t really interested in being anybody’s landlord.

  After crullers and coffee, Jimmy Radmon strapped on his tool belt and walked to Carmela and Sylvia’s house to work on their kitchen. I think the old girls had sort of adopted the lanky black kid.

  I made a trip north.

  The private security guard—Frank—who had once guarded the formidable gates of Eleanor Paget’s estate had been fired from Digital Defense Home Security: his former company thought it might be bad for business if they retained a guard who had allowed the gunshot death of one of their wealthiest clients, even if her death had been officially declared a suicide.

  Frank was working at a Kroger’s in Farmington Hills, twelve miles northwest of the city.

  “You’re that guy,” Frank said as he bagged a squat Chaldean woman’s groceries. The woman was busy arguing with the cashier in broken English about a coupon that had expired.

  “I’m that guy,” I said.

  We shook hands and Frank asked the cashier if he could take five. The cashier, a middle-aged black woman who was in no mood to argue with the old woman and was in the process of honoring her expired coupons, nodded and waved us off. Frank told another bagger—a pimply white high school kid with Dumbo ears and a mouth full of steel—he was taking a smoke break. The kid slurred okay over his braces and took over Frank’s station.

  Frank and I went outside and he lit up a Marlboro Light.

  “Work is work,” Frank said after exhaling a plume of smoke. “Some ways, baggin’ groceries is better than working security. Especially at that crazy bitch’s house.”

  I asked him what would happen to the surveillance recordings from Eleanor Paget’s house. He told me the Grosse Pointe and Detroit police had given them a cursory once over. But since her death was declared a suicide, nobody had much time for or interest in a lengthy interview with the gate guard, or sitting through hours of footage of a member of the way-upper class getting her lawn cut. The company would probably keep most of the recordings for a while, then dump them like a bad first date.

  The only thing to remain would be the digitized versions of Frank’s security logs. Which read largely like the owner’s manual for a cordless drill.

  “If you were a betting man—” I began.

  “Which I’m not. ’Cept for maybe a stupid lottery ticket now and then.”

  “Who would you say had the most personal access to Eleanor Paget?”

  He sucked the last bit of smoke from his cigarette and snuffed it out in a nearby standing ash bin. Then he looked at me with narrowed eyes and said, “You think she was zeroed, don’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  He smiled.

  “If I was a betting man,” he said, “which I’m not, I’d say the odds-on favorite was that Atchison guy. The guy who runs the bank. I’m pretty sure he was feeding her a pork roll at least twice a week. Guy gave me the creeps and I don’t get the creeps.”

  Frank and I talked for a few minutes more, mostly about our time in the service, the Tigers being in the postseason playoffs and the Lions’ modest if negligible chances at securing a playoff berth. He said working his second job as a janitor at Wayne State was nice because, even though he wasn’t enrolled, it showed him what a real school looked like.

  At the end of our conversation I took out my checkbook, wrote a check and handed it to Frank. He looked at it and then back at me.

  “The fuck is this?” he said. “This a joke or something?”

  “No joke,” I said. “You’ve been helpful. I appreciate it.”

  “And I owe you—what?” Frank said with no small amount of justifiable suspicion. “Nothing,” I said. “Paid in full, Army.”

  Frank smiled, looked at the check again, stuffed it into an inside pocket of his green Kroger’s vest and offered his hand.

  “Semper fi, Marine,” he said.

  We shook hands and I left.

  On my way home, I got a call from Ray Danbury.

  “Well, you’ve been a busy little beaver, haven’t you?” he said brightly.

  He went on to tell me that several days earlier a patrol had picked up a badly beaten man on Jefferson Avenue near the waterfront at fo
ur in the morning. The man said he’d been beaten and robbed by a man fitting my description. Apparently I had only stolen his driver’s license and left him his wallet with three hundred dollars and credit cards. When the interview delved a hair deeper, the man clammed up. Under a little more pressure the man said he didn’t want to file a police report and that he just wanted to go home, which I imagined was some cum-stained roach motel on 8 Mile Road near the Lodge Freeway.

  “You still looking into Eleanor Paget’s death?” Danbury said.

  “Just keeping myself busy,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, get yourself a wood-burning set or take up macramé,” Danbury said. “I don’t need you up in this Paget business which, if you haven’t already gotten the memo, is closed out as a suicide. Anything else and I’ll tie you up, August, swear to God and my Sweet Lord Jesus.”

  He disconnected. A couple seconds later I got another call. The ringtone this time was a Detroit techno classic, Octave One’s “New Life.” I answered.

  “S’up, Snowman?”

  “How do you do that, Skittles?” I said, slightly irritated and a bit amused by the fact that he could remotely change my ringtone.

  Skittles thanked me for the payment I’d dropped off at Rocking Horse. I’d put a little something extra in the navy-blue gym bag. I’m sure for what I was paying him he could afford to buy his own mountainous supply of Skittles. But this had been our agreement for a while and who doesn’t need the occasional warm-and-fuzzy tradition? “Got me a couple new Alienware 20 laptops,” Skittles said. “’Course I had to boost ’em up, but still kickass machines, bro.”

  “Only use them for good, Skittles,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay, Mom.”

  He said he’d been reviewing the information he was able to safely capture from the bank’s computer systems. The FBI had inserted a worm into the system, but their worm was simply making endless monitoring and reporting loops—“Gordian Knots”—in the “amusement park.”