P. Parrish - South Of Hell

“Look, peeper,” Shockey said, “I’m just telling you that it won’t work for a judge or a jury the way it is now. I need you to change your report.”

“You want me to say I never looked in the trunk?”

Shockey reached into his pants and withdrew a second sheet of paper. “I got a blank form here,” he said. “Just like the ones we used in 1980. I want you to rewrite everything and leave out the fact that you searched the car. Say it was frozen shut or something.”

Louis took a step back so he could get a better look at Shockey’s face.

“You’re one stupid sonofabitch,” he said.

“Let’s not get personal-”

“Not only are you asking me to commit a crime, but there are other copies of my report out there,” Louis went on. “How could you expect to get away with something like this?”

“The only other copy was in the missing persons file on Jean Brandt. And it no longer exists.”

“You destroyed it?”

Shockey was quiet, his hand still extended to Louis, the blank paper growing limp in the rain. In the gray light, the lines and whiskers on Shockey’s face looked etched in dried clay, and his eyes were swimming with a sick kind of desperate hope.

Another plane whined overhead.

“You planted the bra, didn’t you?” Louis said.

“I’m telling you, it’s Jean Brandt’s bra, and it’s our only hope of getting a warrant to search the farm,” Shockey said. “Owen Brandt is a monster. He killed her, and she’s buried out there on that farm. I know it.”

“I don’t care,” Louis said. “I won’t falsify a report for an over-the-hill dick who has no other way to hang on to his job than to lie his way into a courtroom with phony evidence.”

Louis walked away from Shockey. In the distance, he could make out the mist-fuzzed lights of the runway at Detroit Metro. The heavy air was suddenly cold. He dreaded the drive back to the city with this jerk.

“I’ll pay you!” Shockey hollered.

Louis spun to face him. “Pay me?”

Shockey came to him. “Look,” he said, “if you had any guts or brains at all, you’d still be wearing a badge. I know all about you. You barely get work as a PI, and your real job is a part-time security gig watching rich people get a tan.”

“Shut up.”

“You got three hundred smackers in the bank, a car that’s damn near older than you are, and your net income for last year wasn’t enough to feed the fishies down where you live. Tell me you couldn’t use ten grand.”

Louis wanted to slug him. “Take me back to Ann Arbor — now,” he said. “And if you say one more word about any of this on the way, I’ll report you to your chief. You got that?”

Louis walked away. When he got to the gate, he looked back. Shockey had returned to the Falcon. The wind had picked up, and he was fighting to secure the tarp back over the trunk, searching for a way to fasten it down.

The blank report was lying in the mud.

The College Inn was a motel hard by the I-94 spine that connected Ann Arbor with Detroit. His room had the disinfectant, moldy-carpet smell of a place that had hosted one too many beer parties.

Louis stayed in the room just long enough to put in a call to the Echo Bay Sheriff’s Department. The dispatcher told him Undersheriff Frye was tied up all evening at a mayor’s banquet. Louis left a message and then a second one on Joe’s home phone to call him when she got in. Then he headed down to the bar.

The place was packed with bodies, noise, and smoke. Louis was wondering why a dingy bar in a rundown motel was so packed when he spotted the TV in the corner of the room.

Basketball.

Then his eyes began to pick up all the maize-and-blue ball caps and sweatshirts.

Worse, Michigan basketball.

“Turn up the fuckin’ sound, Fred!” someone bellowed.

Worse yet, the NCAA championship, Michigan versus Seton Hall.

Louis elbowed his way to the bar. It took ten minutes to get the attention of the sweating bartender.

“You serve any food here?” Louis yelled over the din of drunks and the pregame cackling of the sportscasters.

“Free tacos ’til ten,” the man said, pointing to a buffet table.

“Bring me a Heineken,” Louis said.

“Don’t got.”

Louis sighed. “Stroh’s.”

A few long pulls from the beer did a little to wash the bad taste Shockey had left. Louis ordered a second beer, and his gnawing stomach finally propelled him to the buffet, where he filled a paper plate with three soggy tacos. There was an empty stool by the waitress station, and Louis pushed in front of a beefy kid in a go blue sweatshirt to claim it.

“Hey, man!” the kid sputtered, puffing out his chest.

“Get lost,” Louis said.

The kid backed off with a scowl. Louis sat hunched over, wolfing down the tacos, his eyes on the TV but not really watching.

He was thinking about the woman with the spatula back at Krazy Jim’s and the look on her face when he screwed up his order, like she knew he didn’t belong there.

How did she know?

In his four years as a student here, he had never once set foot in Krazy Jim’s, had never gone to any of the student hangouts. No fried eggs at Angelo’s after pulling an all-nighter, no sangria at Dominick’s with a Sigma Kappa beauty, no winter-refuge pizza at the Cottage Inn, no postgame brews at the Brown Jug.

He had never felt comfortable in those places. The only place he could remember going to more than once was the old Fleetwood Diner. There he could sit in silence with his books, watching the bums and cops just coming off shift as he sipped dark chocolate milk made to order with Hershey’s syrup. No one bothered him there. He never felt out of place there.

Another lifetime ago.

“You want another?”

Louis looked at his watch. It was after ten. He shook his head, set his empty Stroh’s in the trough, and headed back up to his room.

The red button on the phone wasn’t blinking. He knew Joe was busy lately. The Leelanau sheriff, Mike Villella, was retiring, and Joe was the automatic candidate for the position in the election six months from now. She was trying hard to impress the locals, and in a town like Echo Bay, putting in an appearance at the pancake dinner meant as much as keeping the poachers in line.

Still, why the hell hadn’t she called when she knew he was only four hours away?

Louis kicked off his shoes, grabbed the remote, and lay down on the bed. He flipped on the TV. It went right to the NCAA tournament, like the satellite was programmed to pick up anything remotely to do with UM sports.

His eyes slid to the phone. He muted the game, picked up the receiver, and dialed. Mel Landeta picked up on the second ring.

“I figured you’d be at O’Sullivan’s,” Louis said.

“Raining like hell down here tonight,” Mel said. “Hold on a sec.”

The phone clattered. In the background, Solomon Burke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” fell to a whisper. Mel picked the receiver up again.

“How’s Michigan?” he asked.

“A waste of time.”

“What does the cop need you for?”

“It’s an old missing persons case,” Louis said. “A woman disappeared nine years ago, but her car was found abandoned. I was the responding. The detective who worked the case is trying to reopen it.”

“I hear an ‘and’ coming.”

“He planted a bloody bra in the trunk, and now he wants me to change my report.”

Louis could hear the click of a lighter as Mel fired up a cigarette. “What about copies of the original?”

“Only one. He says he destroyed it.”

Mel was quiet.

“He’s a burnout who’s hearing footsteps,” Louis said. “He thinks reopening an old case is going to drown out the sound.”