Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

The light woke me. A midday sun left bright and clean by a high pressure system that had swept the sky clear of cloud. I was not used to sleeping in daylight.

"The evils of city nightlife," I said aloud, with no one to share the joke. I got up and set the coffeepot going and rummaged through the rough pantry shelves for canned fruit and a sealed loaf of bread. As I ate I could hear the hard "keowk" of a tri-colored heron outside, working the tide pools on the western bank of the river. I looked for a book in my sloppy stack on the top bunk and picked a collection of stories about the Dakotas by Jonathan Raban. I took it outside and sat on the top step, propping my back against the south wall. I was deep into the fourth story when the cell phone started chirping.

"Yeah, Billy?" I said instinctively into the handset.

"Ya'll wait till I say hello an' you wouldn't make that mistake," McCane said from the other side of the connection.

"McCane?" I said. "Who gave you this number?"

"Well, that'd be your pal Manchester. He doesn't seem too eager to deal with me one-on-one, if you know what I mean."

I could hear a tinkling of glassware and the strains of a Patsy Cline song in the background.

"What do you need?" I said.

"I need to get with you on this little purchase group I've been sniffin' out, Freeman. Why don't you come join me? We'll sit down and have a drink and sift through it a bit."

"Why don't you sift through it over the phone? I'm afraid I can't make it back in today," I said. It was early afternoon and I could hear the softening of the hard vowels and drawn out s sounds in McCane's speech, telltale patterns I'd heard too many times in my youth. He wouldn't be sober by suppertime.

"Okay. Have it your way, bud," he started. "We got a bit of a trail working here. But it's not exactly clear where it's leadin'. Through our company I pulled some private documentation and laid out the purchases on our insured. Then I got some friends with the other companies to do the same."

He was clicking back into business mode and I had to admire the transition.

"Now, these investment boys pull these life policies in from a lot of places. The so-called gay community was a choice target when that AIDS thing was knockin' 'em off a few years back. And there wasn't too much illegal goin' on, since these boys figured they had a death sentence anyway so let's get the money and party. Hell, the investors bought 'em up for twenty cents on the dollar. The boys spent the money while they shriveled up, and when they died, the investors cashed out."

Even with a few drinks in him, McCane still only bordered on displaying the homophobia in his voice. Nothing that an e-mail or printed deposition would ever show.

"But the money guys needed a go-between," he continued. "They sure as hell weren't gonna go hang out in the boy bars themselves recruitin' business."

"So you're saying there's a go-between here also?"

"There's always a go-between Freeman. You know that. The money men, especially the white-collar money men, never get their hands dirty."

McCane sounded more bitter than he had a right to, considering he worked for the white-collar insurance world. But he was right. No different than the drug trade or Internet scams. The guys with the investment capital never saw the streets. They sat high above, just doing business.

"So you have a line on any of these middlemen?"

"I've got an eye out, Freeman. And you ought to, too. Your boy Manchester is pretty good at trackin' the financials on whatever names I give him. I'll just follow the money trail."

McCane took a long pause. I could almost hear the whiskey sliding down his throat.

"How much money do you pay a man to kill old ladies in their beds?" I finally said.

"Depends on the man, Freeman. Depends on the man," he said. "So what have you got for me, Freeman? I assume you ain't leavin' this all to me."

I told him about my tour of the neighborhood, my meeting with a local detective I knew and the suspicion that they had a serial rapist who had progressed to choking his victims to death. Whether it had any connection with our case, I wasn't sure. Hell, I wasn't even sure we had a case. But if I believed what McCane was telling me, he wasn't just dismissing it.

"So you're with me on this?" he repeated.

"You stay on the middlemen, McCane. Leave the locals to me," I said.

I hung up and sat on the top step of my porch and watched a heron fishing in the shallow waters under a stand of pond apple trees. The bird's roving eye seemed to be everywhere at once, but I knew it was focused on a target. The tapered beak was always poised. I sipped from my cup and watched the filtered sunlight dance around him and then, with a flick, the beak struck and came up with a small pilchard fish pinched at the head, its tail flapping furiously. Nice lunch, I thought. But instead of flying away with its catch, the heron stood frozen, its eye still worrying. I looked up into the canopy, scanning the top foliage, then twisted around and saw him. The big osprey was perched in the top of one of the twin cypress trees that marked the entrance to my shack. He was looking down at the heron, or perhaps at me as if to say, "Now that's how to catch a fish."

After a minute the standoff ended. The heron finally bent its legs, unfolded its wings and took flight. The osprey didn't move. He sat there, as if waiting for me to decide on a course to take. I stared at him for a few minutes, then got up and went inside, closing the door softly behind me.

This one was not as weak. Eddie replaced the metal lid on Ms. Thompson's garbage can in the alley behind her small house on Thirty-fourth Avenue. Inside there had been empty packages from frozen dinners, the smell of shaved pork from a wad of tin foil and a confetti of small ripped pink packages of sugar substitute. It was not like the garbage he'd seen on earlier forays. The others had eaten little or nothing. Their cans had been near empty, holding only mounds of tissues, a few half-filled cans of protein substitute and bags of medical trash. Ms. Thompson was not waiting on the edge.

Eddie knew she lived alone. Her husband was long dead. But he had seen her move about in the past. Had even watched her drive that old Chrysler till just a couple years back. She was more like his own mother, feisty and bitchy and always getting on him about how he needed a job. Humpin' 'round all day pickin' trash and bein' laughed at by everyone in the neighborhood ain't no job, she would say. And why don't he clean hisself up and go on Sunday with her down to Piney Grove Church like he used to and her not thinking that was twenty-five years ago when he was still a boy. No, this one would be more like his momma, who wouldn't get off him, constantly pushing on him about making money to help her out and how come he can't be like other sons and what was he going to do when she was gone and where would he stay and who would take care of him then. Well, today he had three new hundred-dollar bills in his pocket down by his watch and he was making it just fine in her house without her. No, this Ms. Thompson would not be as easy as the others. She'd be more like his momma.

He watched the house from the cover of a ratty hedge. The smell of the alley didn't bother him. A trail of ants led from one of the trash cans to the base of a shed across the way. Their industry was constant. It was an odd, jiggling ribbon of life that would only be temporarily interrupted when Eddie slapped his boot down, crushing half a dozen. Then he would again study Ms. Thompson's window lights, marking her habits. He'd push his cart up and down her street. And by the time he came back, the ants would have resumed their marching. Eddie wondered what would happen when a car or truck rolled through the alley and mashed the whole line.