Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

On the third night, the lights in Ms. Thompson's kitchen went out and Eddie moved. In the darkness he could get closer. He left his cart and took up a position in the side yard. He inspected the grates on the side windows. He knew he could quietly turn those bolts out if he had to. And usually, if he removed the iron grate and set it down on the lawn, the window behind it would be carelessly unlocked. People didn't care, Eddie thought. They set themselves up for what they got.

He moved again, to the other side of the house into a shadow on the neighbor's wood slat fence. He could see the carport from here. The old Chrysler looked like it hadn't moved for years. The windshield was layered with dust. The tires had gone soft and there were cracks in the rubber whitewalls. His eyes moved to the carport door that led into Ms. Thompson's utility room. It was a louvered door, the dull metal handle and lockset still strong, but there was no grate over the windowpanes. With a couple of panes out he could reach through and snap open the lock.

He waited for an hour. Never dozed off. Never once did he lose his concentration on the inside noises. He saw when the living room lights went off and then the shine of the small bathroom window on the back lawn. He waited that one out, too. Eddie was patient, but the stiff hundred-dollar bills in his pocket seemed to press into his thigh. He needed to see the Brown Man.

When the house had been dark for another hour, he stepped to the carport door and slipped the socks over his hands and started on the jalousies. With his hand inside, he turned the deadbolt and slipped the chain-he would have to remember to refasten it when he left. Inside the small laundry room, the odor of bleach stung his nostrils. He moved, a single wary step at a time. A clock ticked on the kitchen wall. The hallway was carpeted and quiet. The bedroom door was ajar and the bathroom across the hallway smelled oddly of what? Cologne?

Eddie gripped the door, fingers wrapped around its front edge, and pressed it up and tight against the hinges to avoid any squeaking as he eased it open. He was surprised to see a line of light glowing at the bottom of a door inside. Another bathroom. It was wrong for this neighborhood. She must have had it installed, Eddie thought. He had never seen a second bathroom in these houses. He watched the strip for several seconds, soaking up the light, adjusting his eyes. In the high-mounted bed, he could see the line of Ms. Thompson's body turned away from him. He could see her white hair in the slight glow. Another pillow lay next to her, punched down and indented. Eddie picked it up, assessed the position of the old woman again, and then pushed the material over her face.

He was just beginning to close his eyes to her muffled groans when light burst into the room.

"Abby baby, you purrin' like a ol' lioness ain't too tired…" The man coming out of the lighted bathroom caught a glimpse of the huge thick back bent over the woman he had just recently started calling his girlfriend and yelped "What the hell?…"

The speed of Eddie's left hand swapped its hold from the woman to the old man's throat before another syllable could be uttered. The man's eyes went big. Eddie's right palm remained on the pillow and the light from the doorway caught all three of them in an ugly instant of time.

Just as the old man started kicking Eddie tightened his grip, feeling the soft flesh and then crushing the bony windpipe under his thumb. He spread the fingers of his other hand and kept the pocket of his huge palm over the mouth of the other. And he silently held the pose, watching the man's face go from red to dusty blue in the light of the new master bathroom. Eddie was a patient man and did not move until he was sure that the lives in both of his hands were gone.

I was upriver on a rare morning paddle when the cell phone chirped from my bag in the bow of the canoe. I'd been up with the sun. Found it impossible to read and was actually pacing the wood floor of the shack when I decided to grind out a trip to the headwaters. The water had been high and the morning light spackled the ferns and pond apple leaves that crowded the edges. The river twisted and folded back in on itself and if you stopped moving, the deep quiet and moist greenness could sweep even an unimaginative mind back several millenniums. In the morning light I'd seen several glowing white moonflowers nestled in a small protected bog, and I knew that back in a thicket at the end of one offshoot stream were a half dozen undisturbed orchids. By luck no one had found them. But like a hundred years ago, when exploiters of the delicate flowers had plucked them from the dark hammocks of the Everglades until they were nearly extinct, there was little optimism that these few would remain hidden.

I'd spent more than an hour plowing up past Workman's Dam and on to the culvert where Everglades water from the L131 Canal poured into the river to give it an extra flow. I had pulled the canoe up onto the grass bank and was on top of the levee looking out over acre upon acre of brown-green sawgrass. The view extended to the horizon like unbroken fields of Kansas wheat. The only break was a dark clump far in the distance that looked like bush but was actually a hammock of sixty-foot-tall pine, and mahogany and crepe myrtle rooted in high ground in the river of grass.

The bleating of the cell phone in my canoe spoiled the quiet. I loped down the bank to answer it and Richards was on the line.

"Hey. Nice to hear your voice on such a great morning," I said, sounding too chipper.

The silence on the other end dampened my enthusiasm.

"I don't know how the hell you do it, Freeman," she said. "But you've got one special nose for trouble."

I was back in the world, outside another low-slung home on the northwest side. The address Richards gave me wasn't hard to find. Three patrol cars and a crime scene truck were still parked at haphazard angles in front. A black, unmarked Chevy Suburban was backed into the driveway.

The uniformed cops were on the front lawn keeping a small gathering of people back. A black officer with a bald, shiny scalp was bristled up in front of a group of three black men. All their voices, even the cop's, were ratcheted up to a high pitch.

"What you mean they investigatin'?" said one. "Shit, they ain't done no damn investigatin' the last time. Hell, they ain't investigated nothin' on this side of town, an' you know that's true."

The cop had his hands spread out in front of him, as though the paleness of his palms facing the group would settle them.

"I know. I know. I hear you," the cop was saying. "But you got to change some things from the inside, fellas. You know what I'm sayin'."

I asked one of the other officers for Richards and as I was led up to the front door the knot of men shut down their conversation and watched me. They were the same three I had seen at Ms. Greenwood's mother's home.

"Comin' through," someone in the doorway said, and I turned as a black vinyl body bag was taken out on a wheeled stretcher. The eyes of the crowd followed it to the back doors of the Suburban. I followed the cop into the house.

No one was in the living room. A sectional couch sat against a wall of frosted mirrors. An expensive looking crystal clock was in open sight on an end table. Crime scene techs were working in the kitchen, spinning small fat brushes dipped in fingerprint powder along the window casements. Outside on the patio Richards was sitting at a table across from an elderly black woman who was chastising the detective as if she were a dull schoolgirl.

"Young lady, I have toll you and seven more of you all, no. I did not struggle. I took me a gasp of breath when I heard George go to chokin' and spittin' and I laid myself still. I didn't even breathe until that pilla eased up on my face and then I still didn't move. I knowed what was comin'. I didn't just come in from the fields young lady. I know what these mens want."