Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

Ulysses Grant gave a glare which mingled apprehension and defiance.

“Downtown? I ain’t been there in forty years. I don’t need anything they got to offer, ’sides which I hear it’s all been gussied up since these Yankee companies moved down here ’cos life is cheap. The War between the States might have broken the chains of slavery, Mr. Lee, but it replaced them with the chains of wage slavery, which are a hell of a sight harder to …”

He broke off, catching the look in Lamont Wingate’s eyes.

“The chase,” he said hurriedly. “Whitey two blows up at whitey one. Then the brothers arrive.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Recognize any of them?”

Ulysses Grant smiled vastly.

“Them niggers all look the same to me,” he said.

Lamont Wingate nodded.

“Go on.”

“They go to clean out the white guys. Number one breaks bad, bucks Vernon there. Someone else takes the guy down, then the other. Exeunt right.”

“I believe the correct word is ‘exit,’” Lamont observed with a malicious gleam.

“Then your belief is misplaced, Mr. Lee, account of there was two of them. You exit. Y’all exeunt.”

Utterly defeated, Lamont Wingate packed up his notebook, returned to the patrol car and called in to find out why the guys from the morgue hadn’t showed up yet. The dispatcher told him that one of the other detectives had gone to look into the drive-by, so Lamont went back to his car and drove off, munching on one of the light bread sandwiches his wife had packed and mentally composing his prelim on the Pittsburgh shooting.

On the face of it, it sounded like a no-brainer. Vernon Kemp and a couple of dudes he was down with see these two suits and go to hit on them. Kemp’d likely been aching to get a body for some time, keep any of the Jams from trashing his rep, prove he had the juice. That side of it he could see. The problem was the other guys. If the drunk was to be credited, they’d fired first, two on three, and staring down the barrel of some major ordnance. That didn’t make no sense. And what the hell were they doing there in the first place, with a suitcase full of restraint equipment and a video camera, passing themselves off as a direct-sales team for the big kahuna?

“A pistol each, handcuffs, roll of tape, video camera,” he said out loud for the benefit of his father, who had died of a stroke two years earlier.

He hung a loose right on Georgia and drifted down to Capitol, past the construction site for the Olympic stadium. To the left, the IBM tower dominated the night sky, its latticework spire illuminated from inside like a Halloween pumpkin. Lamont thought about what the old drunk had said about the northerners moving in. What broke the South wasn’t the war, it was air-conditioning. Before that came along, the Yankees couldn’t take the climate. Lamont smiled and shook his head, recalling one guy he heard of, moved down here from New England, who kept his AC going full blast in the winter so he could have a log fire. Go figure!

“Maybe a burglary?” his father whispered unexpectedly. “Make like they’re peddling religion to get the door open, then pull out the hardware and clean the place out.”

“What’s to clean?” demanded Lamont. “That area, even the cockroaches are on food stamps.”

He went north on Hill, past demolished lots lined with parked cars during the day and under the expressway opposite the grim Stalinist bulk of Grady Memorial Hospital. That’s where they’d have taken the white survivor. He stood a better chance at Grady than most anywhere else in the country. They saw so many gunshot wounds the army sent their surgeons there to gain field experience. Lamont hoped the guy would pull through, or at least hang in long enough to talk.

“A sex crime, maybe?” his father suggested tentatively. Even when he was alive, he’d never cared to discuss this subject. “Like those perverts you read about in the paper. He threatens them with the gun, handcuffs and gags them, then videotapes the whole thing to watch later at home.”

“There were two of them, Pop. Sex offenders work alone, except it’s gang rape or whatever, and then they don’t bother with cuffs, all that shit.”

Rebuffed, his father fell silent. Lamont cruised on up to North Avenue, then swung right under a railroad bridge and into a humpbacked concrete side street ending at the tracks. Looking at the Homicide Task Force headquarters, you would never have guessed that Atlanta had one of the highest murder rates in the country. A small one-story brick block with a mean row of teensy windows, it might have been the workshop for the office stamp outlet next door.

Lamont went inside and called Grady. It took some time for them to track the guy down, since neither Lamont nor the hospital had a name for him. Presently tagged as “Patient #4663981: Identity Unknown,” the individual was said to be recovering from emergency surgery. His condition was described as stable but critical.

“So you didn’t find any ID on him?” Lamont asked the voice on the phone, the fourth he’d been put through to. “Driver’s license, credit cards, nothing?”

“If we did, it’d be on the chit.”

This was getting weirder and weirder. It sounded like these guys had deliberately stripped their pockets before going out, just like a couple of professionals. Except no professional would go up against a trio of armed muggers with a twenty-two.

Lamont popped one of the little breath-freshening mints which were his only vice. He was up to two packs a day, maybe it was time to slow down. He pulled out the phone book. Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared under Business Listings. There were about twenty numbers in all. Lamont called Central Congregation, the downtown branch. He got a recorded voice which explained that the office was closed right now and invited him to leave a message or dial another number if he wished to speak to a counselor.

“This is Detective Wingate, Atlanta Police,” he recited after the tone. “Couple of individuals have been sighted in Carson Street, off McDaniel, claiming to represent your church. Could you let me know if you have anyone out working the houses in that part of town? We suspect they may be impostors.”

He left a number and asked them to call him back. This was just to cover his butt. He knew damn well the guys weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t even begin to guess, was what in hell’s name they were. The only person who knew for sure was “stable but critical,” which was the way doctors covered their butts. His father had been stable but critical for almost two weeks before he died. Another few days, they would have had to remortgage the house.

Lamont had spent the time at the bedside, reading his dad the mysteries he loved. Once he’d picked up the wrong one by mistake, read a chapter out of a whole different book. His father hadn’t even noticed. That’s when he realized for the first time that the man lying there beside him, still warm, still breathing, was no longer his father.

He pushed a sheet of paper into the machine and began typing up his notes on the vagrant in the boxcar. As for the other case, its condition was critical but stable. He might be able to track down Vernon Kemp’s accomplices, maybe trace the weapon through a ballistics test on the spent ammunition, tie it in to some other shooting. Even if he didn’t manage that, the result was merely a technical hitch which might be rectified at any time. The file would be left open, and when the perps fucked up in the future-which could only be a matter of time, seeing as they were so raw they’d run off without this seriously fly camcorder which was theirs for the taking-the loose ends would be tied up once and for all.