Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

I watched his eyes jump to mine without a movement of his head.

"I know he was a bull here for some time and your years overlapped some before he was, uh, dismissed. I was hoping you might tell me something about him."

"Ol' Milo," he said, a grin coming to his face. "An insurance man, you say? Ain't that a hoot."

Moticker took another slow drag and smiled with a set of bad teeth.

"You're familiar?"

"Oh, anybody who was around then is familiar with Milo," he said, lowering his already soft voice. "Mean sombitch and king of the pound, too. But that's a sore subject round here now, Mr. Freeman."

"I can appreciate that. But the record isn't too clear on his dismissal," I said. "I need a sense of the man without going to someone who might have been a friend or might get back to him."

This time Moticker's pale eyes stayed on mine, the eyes of a man with nothing to lose, but also one who rarely came across the opportunity to gain anything close to payback.

"McCane ran every damn thing in here at one time," he started. "He had a piece of the inside drug trade. He decided whose homemade buck got confiscated an' whose got sold. He controlled the inventory coming in and out of concession.

"Anybody had money, he squeezed 'em. Anybody had anything, he dealt it. Didn't matter what color or what kind. Pure mean and pure greedy, Mr. Freeman, that's the sense of that man."

Moticker finished the cigarette, carefully snubbed it out and put the butt in his pocket. He cut his eyes to the shop again.

"Milo was running the drug trade. Had other guards bringing the stuff in and then flushing the packages down the toilets before they came on the pound," he started, barely whispering.

"He knew the pump station. Would plug the thing by flushing an inmate shirt at the same time. Then he'd order one of the cons down into the station to clear it. Guy would go through the shit while the shooters and assistant warden just watched him get down in there and he would stuff the drug packages in his pockets and then come up with the shirt.

"Hell, nobody was gonna frisk that boy all covered with stink, and he'd get sent to the showers and later pass the dope off to Milo for a cut."

He refocused his eyes on the group of welders inside and seemed to reshelve the memory. "He was the kind of man who knew how to use people and still make them feel inferior," he finally said.

"The kind of man who might be involved with murder for money?" I asked.

The inmate seemed to roll his answer around in his mouth for a while.

"Not by hisself," he said. "Milo wouldn't be that dumb."

Moticker stood up and for the first time I could see a con's deviousness in his face.

"They'd be hell to pay if that ol' boy came back here as an inmate," he said, a crooked grin playing at his lips. "Hell to pay."

I could tell the possibility left him with a vision that could keep him warmly amused for a lot of boring nights on his bunk.

"One thing," I said. "Why Milo?"

He looked quizzically at me.

"The nickname?"

"Oh, hell, that was his own," he said. "Character out that old war movie Catch-22. Milo Minderbinder was the guy that was doin' all the underhanded dealin' getting' hisself rich off the war. McCane loved that."

We went back inside the shop and I shook his hand.

"Hope things work out," he said, and I wished him the same.

I sat on the hood of my truck, waiting for twilight, second-guessing my trust, and shooting holes in my own plans.

I'd ground out the possibilities during the flight back from Georgia and wasn't sure I hadn't wasted a bunch of time and Billy's money just to satisfy my need for logic. As the plane had lined up its approach several miles to the west of the West Palm airport I'd stared out on the unbroken sawgrass of the Everglades. Acres and acres of still untouched land glowing gold in the low sunlight. I missed my river. I wondered why I was not back on it, paddling, listening to it.

I had used the river to try to bury the memory of two bullets fired during a stickup on Thirteenth Street in Center City, Philadelphia. The round fired by a sixteen-year-old punk on the sidewalk had caught me in the neck, boring through muscle on its way through. The second round, mine, dropped a twelve-year-old accomplice as he bolted out the door behind his friend. The sidewalk vision of his small face and skinny, quiet chest had gouged my dreams ever since. Out of the hospital, I'd taken a disability buyout and moved from the city streets where I'd grown up the son of a cop. I wanted out and I wanted different. I'd sworn off the cops, but today I was back out in the northwest section of the city, watching the light leak out of the alley and then the trees. I'd turned another corner and wasn't sure why.

When the strings of cloud in the west turned a burnt orange on their edges and the sky went to a cobalt blue, I climbed into the truck and drove toward the dope hole.

I knew from my time on the beat how much the landscape and rhythm and people of a place change when the light seeps away. When I patrolled the downtown areas of Center City on the graveyard shift I would get up in the daytime and patronize the same delis and music shops along Thirteenth and Arch when the real people dominated the sidewalks instead of the hustlers and bums of the night. More than a few times I questioned which world I felt more comfortable in.

I turned at a light with a hanging street sign labeled Thirty-first Avenue in large letters and M.L. King Boulevard in smaller script below. On either side of the road were one- and two-story apartments, arranged like old cheap motels with long, grassless courtyards down the middle and the doors and single windows facing in. They had been painted a bilious green and you could tell from the texture of the paint that there were uncounted layers underneath. Down the street a sign stood in front of an identical block of buildings that read, FOR RENT. HOUSING AUTHORITY. SECTION 8 UNITS AVAILABLE. INQUIRE AT HOUSING OFFICE.

The physical structure was different, but it was just another version of the Washington Street projects in Philly, where I once answered a sick-baby call and had dishes and a brick tossed onto my patrol car from some apartment above.

I turned at another intersection onto the seller's avenue. There was movement along the sidewalks: people, women and older men, who seemed to have places to go. But there was also a nervousness gathering in the air, an anticipation among the younger men waiting for the early evening trade to begin. I found a spot on the east side of the road in the shadow of a big oak about a block from the action.

In a few minutes I could pick out the players. The sullen guy with his head down and eyes up had spotted me right off. But he was cool. The long black pants with the ironed crease set him aside from the young ones who were no doubt his runners. The dope would never be on any of them for more than a few seconds and only during the exchange for money through an open car window. The stash would be back in some hidey-hole in the alley or under some fender of an innocent man's bumper. The customers would pull up-some white, some black-and slow or stop in front of the man, looking for a signal which was not going to come as long as I was parked down the street. Some were bold enough, or desperate enough, to roll down their passenger windows and call out to the dealer. He ignored them, turning his head away in my direction and saying nothing.

After forty-five minutes I watched a woman of indeterminate age come up the sidewalk, hips swinging unsteadily. She was dressed in a wrinkled summer skirt and a short top that showed her bare midriff, ribs poking out from the bottom. She stumbled once on her blocky high heels. She was trying to look like an unconcerned girl on a stroll. But her path was deliberate.