Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (13 page)

Cropped tail erect, pointed ears up, Goblin scoured the air for the two-legger machines that prowled the roads. Sensing nothing, he nosed
Broke-bottom up on four shaky legs. The two-leggers would abuse and starve you, but they'd often die themselves to avoid hitting you with their machines. Goblin herded Brokebottom into the road. Sleet stung their eyes. Raw paws crunched down on the icy pavement.

Goblin heard a whosh, a hum to his right. Suddenly, another, to his left. Two machines, one closer, faster. He pushed his shoulder into Brokebottom's haunches. From around a bend—a roar, and lights flashed. The machine was bearing down on Goblin. This two-legger wasn't going to stop.

Giving his last measure of strength and love, Brokebottom wheeled around and slammed into Goblin's flank: Goblin fell away, sprayed by gravel, fumes, and wet windwash.

A dull thud. A yelp.

The silvery monster twisted around the curve, disappearing as suddenly as it appeared. Goblin heard a distant shriek of metal hitting metal, then silence. Slowly, he rose from the pavement, shook the ice from his coat. Yards away lay his old friend. Goblin approached, touched his nose to Brokebottom's. No breath, no whimper. Goblin whined and tracked in a circle, stopping once to nudge his lifeless friend. Then, a mournful howl left Goblin's throat. Those jaws could snap like a toothed clamp, but soon, they gently closed around Brokebottom's scruff and pulled the companion up the ridge. Goblin then stood motionless, ears raised as the sleet hissed around him. Inwardly, he begged Brokebottom's gentle spirit for absolution for what he was about to do. When he heard no reply, he trundled back down to the road anyway. To follow tire tracks.

Sojourner knew she should have driven. But she deferred to her brother. Her mother said never challenge manhood assertively. White people did that to our men from the day a boy emerges from our body, she'd say. “Oh God, Mommie,” she muttered through bloodied, quivering lips. Not challenging Sekou found her wedged between the twisted edge of the Navigator's front passenger seat and a panel of the right rear door; shards from the shattered side window hung like icicles. A tree branch poked through; cold wind blew across her face like a razor. “Sekou!” she cried out.

“Soje? Soje honey?” It was Adam's voice, from outside, from above. “I'm gonna open the door, slowly, 'kay? Don't look down, just follow my voice.”

The voice didn't calm her, for now she could smell gasoline, ozone. But the odor didn't terrify her as much as the noise: water, now swirling around her. The rear cargo hatch popped; Sojourner could see Adam's face. The girl, who called herself “Alize” crouched behind him, swaddled in his coat.

“Reach up, baby!” Adam exhorted, as Sojourner struggled to lift her arms. “Do you have pain . . . your shoulder, collarbone?”

“Nah-uh,” she grunted as she reached for him. Adam pulled Sojourner free just as the SUV settled into the black water. Only then did Sojourner realize that Adam and the girl had been straddling a long pine log bridging a creek that was high and fast from days of rain, and then, a dam of ice.

Adam kissed Sojourner's cold cheek. “Sekou's on the road,” he muttered. “He's pissed . . . I think he may have the .38 with him.”

“Oh, God . . . no Adam!”

“It's okay, it's okay, honey. I zipped the leftover product in the bag. Safe.”

Sojourner thrashed free, almost losing her balance and plunging into the freezing water. “
Asshole,
I meant my brother! You left him up in the middle of the road? He's high, Adam!” She broke down, sobbing, “High.”

“I-I want . . . my mama,” the girl whimpered.

“Wh-what's your name?” Sojourner asked. She reached across Adam's body and touched her, gently. “Your real name?”

“Myesha. And . . . uhhh . . .” her strained, high-pitch voice broke, “ . . . I want my
mama
.”

Sternly, Adam said, “Honey, take her hand. Slide along the log, get right up on the slope and then up to the road. I know it's dark, slippery. Take it slow.”

“You leave the package, ya hear, Adam? Forget the cops, I don't want you on this log . . . it's gonna fall, baby, and I smell the gas from the—”

“Soje please, I'll be all right. You guys go first.”

In the muted red light, Sojourner could see him smile. She then took
Myesha's hand. “Hold on to the hem of my coat, all right?” They crawled along the log like inchworms in the dark, leaving Adam to shout encouragement.

Adam couldn't see them anymore after they'd crawled only a few feet. Now it was time to fetch the bag he'd rescued from the wreck. He shimmied toward the other end of the log; the bag, a North Face pack, hung from a branch. He reached into the blackness for the padded nylon strap.

It felt like his sweater sleeve had snagged on a branch. Before he could yank his arm free, something jerked him forward. For a second his brain mused that it was Sekou, playing, taunting.

But when he looked up, he saw two red eyes staring back at him and felt a hot musty breath on his face. Adam's mouth formed a scream, but his throat couldn't make the sound, because Goblin was tearing it out. Quietly.

“Unh-unh, I don't see your brother nowhere,” Myesha said, stumbling barefoot through the ice and newly fallen snow. “There go his cap.”

Sojourner stooped to pick up Sekou's Kangol driving cap. It was visible in the meager glow from a streetlight maybe a hundred feet down the road.

Both young women whipped around, shuddering when they heard a splash from behind and below. “Adam?
Adam!
”

“
I
ain't goin' back down there!” Myesha mewled, backing away.

Sojourner grit her teeth and tumbled back down the embankment to the fallen tree. It was more familiar now, by touch, and her eyes were adjusted to the dark. “Just look for my brother, Myesha!” Sojourner hollered over her shoulder. Then she called into dark enveloping the other end of this pine bridge. “Adam, damn you, I said leave the fucking bag!” She lurched forward. “Adam?”

His body flopped out of the blackness. It hung like a limp rag over the end of the log, blood drizzling into the swollen creek. Mute with horror, Sojourner backed up the log, crablike. Stopping only when she heard panting behind her. Then a snarl. Low, almost monotoned.

Myesha heard a woman's wail, followed by another splash. Then
nothing. She stood petrified on toes she could no longer feel. Blurred vision caught the sight of something large and black, scampering up the embankment. Loping toward her, now. Accelerating. Leaping. Eyes red as hot coals. And she saw her Mama again, in an eternal dream.

“You all right, Chief Miller?” Calvin Beauchamp quizzed. He was leaning into the open passenger-side window of Miller's huge Ford F150 pickup. Miller was sucking shallow breaths; each exhale was laced with Dickel. “And I noticed . . . your right headlight's out. Dangerous in this weather.”

“Then I'll write m'self a ticket an' pay the fine,” Miller huffed. He'd been squeezing the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turned from pink to white. He was sweating, despite the cold. “Listen now—this ain't no drug homicide. Ain't never been no drug homicide in this county. Not on my watch!”

Calmly, Beauchamp scanned the passenger compartment. A cell phone was on Miller's lap, still glowing green from a call. “Checking in with Animal Control over that dead dog?”

“Huh? Um, nah, m'wife . . . fifteen years, and she still frets. Look . . .
damn . . .
I'm tired, is all . . . an' it's cold as a brass monkey's nutsack out here.”

Beauchamp said, “Chief, perhaps it's time for candor, now. It's no accident that I'm on this case. You see—”

Miller's two-way beeped. “This is Miller, g'head.”

“Dog looked like it was dragged, too. Coroner's investigator says the animal's pretty busted up. But the human . . . I dunno, the C.I.'s on her way down to get some equipment.”

“Say again?”

“Well . . . uh . . . she says an autopsy might say different, but from what she sees this minute, this fellah here looks like he died of a coronary.”

“O.D.? Using them drugs GBI found?”

“Naw sir. Like he up and died of fright.”

Miller's jaw tightened for an instant. “I'm headin' back up.” He clicked off the handset, grabbed the cell phone, and slid out, leaving the
key in the ignition and that sole headlight burning snowflakes as if they were moths. “You comin'?”

“Soon. The DEA's finally checked in. Cooper's speaking to them now.”

Agent Cooper arrived as soon as Miller struggled up the rocky slope. “We all set, Cal,” Cooper reported. “Give the word, and we'll go up and get 'im.”

“No, too many uniforms around. They're as loyal as puppies. Plus this crime scene's . . . bizarre.” Beauchamp was staring at that darkened, cracked headlight as he spoke. “Cooper . . . I'm about to do something utterly capricious.”

“You, Cal? Naaaaw.” But Cooper frowned when Beauchamp crouched and pulled out his penlight.

There was a red smudge along the headlight crack, as if someone gave the glass a hurried wipe. Beauchamp took off his leather glove and ran his finger in the silver pickup's wheel well. It came away caked in sticky, unoxidized blood. Beauchamp knew it by that coppery smell. Cooper dropped down beside his mentor as Beauchamp aimed the narrow penlight-beam at a six-inch stand of brown hair.

“He was wound up about dog tracks,” Cooper whispered, “and that awful howling. And we got a dead dog up there laying next to a dead amateur dealer.”

“Go get the State Troopers now,” Beauchamp said. Softly.

Some officers had positioned their Maglites in the deepening snow as ersatz spotlights on Sekou Belleweather's frozen corpse.

“Don't nobody touch him till the C.I. gets back up here,” the chief ordered. “Matter of fact, go down and see what's holding up the GBI folks.”

“You be okay alone, Chief?” an officer asked. “That other dog might be—”

“Gw'on! I look helpless to you?”

Once the officers ambled down the hill, the chief rifled Sekou's jacket pockets. Nothing but lint, till he slipped his hands into an inside seam flap and pulled out a slip of blue paper. A check. Payor: Def Sounds Productions. $13,500. “Shit.” He shoved it into his trouser pocket, then peeled
away toward a grove of tall pines when the officers returned with the coroner's investigator.

The snowfall was intensifying, the darkness, palpable; Miller could hardly see even though the lights around the dog and Sekou were barely one hundred feet away now. He tugged out his cell phone; the lit keys made his face and the snow glow green. “Y'awl had problems before,” Miller spoke. “Now y'awl got
trouble.
Cleaning this up gonna cost you extra!” The listener cursed, and Miller shot back, “Yeah and I did try to scare 'em, not kill 'em, so don't blame this clusterfuck on me! Road was icy! Hell anything coulda happened—and that's why you asked me to chase 'em down, huh? Blame it on the ice. Well, somethin'
else
got to 'em, and it weren't no ice.”

Whomever Miller had called hung up. Miller spit angrily at the ground then took two steps toward the glow of his officers' flashlights. He halted when he heard the thud of feet in the snow. From behind. He whipped around, chest heaving. Nothing. He grinned, then turned back to the lights, squinting through the blowing flurries.

A shadow moved into his path. Miller stopped, dead.

“Aw shit . . .”
he gasped.

Two eyes that belonged to Inspector Calvin Beauchamp bored him through the near-white-out. “Wofford Miller Jr., I have a material witness and detainment order issued for you on behalf of the Georgia Attorney General's Office . . .”

“Git the hell outta town!”

“. . . in connection with conspiracy to obstruct justice, conspiracy to traffic in controlled substances, and acceptance of bribes by a public official.” Beauchamp smiled for the first time that cold night. “Let's get in out of the snow, Chief.”

“You crazy! You ghostin' me all this time—waitin' for this here stupid car accident to—”

“Clearly, Chief, this wasn't an accident. Though you seemed to have been in one very recently. Georgia weather's a killer in January, eh? Now, I don't want to cuff you, nor make a scene in front of your people. Agents and state police are on their way to the home of Darius and Solange Johnson, he of the Atlanta Falcons, and she, well, a ‘pharmaceutical rep' for
some of her husband's teammates, sycophants, and her ‘music industry' acquaintances. You had a nice gig, Miller. Couldn't stem the tide of all us ‘culud' folks moving out here, so you might as well augment your pension by making money off the
bad
apples among us. Poetic justice?”

Miller backed up. “
Fuck
you . . . y'awl think I'm stupid . . . I know what's goin' on here . . . you tryin' to kick out . . . the last white man in charge . . . in this county! Blame drug murders on me an'—”