Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

It took her another thirty minutes to get a clear fix on the Evanston case. As soon as she had, she called Atlanta. At first it seemed that she was in for another round of the old crapola with some dickette who’d flunked out of charm school, but the woman who answered the phone turned out to be merely a call catcher. Detective Wingate, she informed Kristine, wouldn’t be on duty for another three hours.

Kristine glanced at the clock. The idea of waiting seemed intolerable.

“Can you give me his home number?” she begged.

The steel magnolia replied that she was not authorized to give out such details, and offered instead to connect her to Wingate’s colleague, one Charlie Freeman. There was silence, then another ringing tone.

“Homicide,” said a male voice.

“Detective Freeman?”

“Yeah.”

“My name is Kristine Kjarstad, I’m a homicide detective working out of King County Headquarters in Seattle. You want to call me back, check my credentials?”

“That’s OK, ma’am, I know a cop when I hear one. Besides, this way it’s your nickel. What can we do for y’all?”

Freeman’s voice was deep, slow and sexy. Kristine found him easy to talk to. It remained to be seen whether the opposite was true.

“I’ve just seen a CRS from your Detective Wingate regarding an individual named Dale Watson. I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about that case.”

She braced herself for another bout of stonewalling, but Charlie Freeman apparently took a more relaxed view of his work than Eileen McCann.

“Sure. Not a whole lot to say, though. Two white guys go for a stroll in a black neighborhood, for some reason we don’t get. They meet up with three of the brothers and someone pulls a gun. One guy on either side gets dead and the white survivor is in IC. Half an inch to the left and he’s history too, the doc says.”

“And he’s Dale Watson?”

“No, Watson’s the one who got whacked. He was shacked up with a teenage runaway. We got the name from her, plus the idea he was maybe from Seattle, which is how come we faxed you guys. You got anything on him?”

“Not under that name. But we’ve got a case on the books which looks similar.”

Charlie Freeman sounded skeptical.

“You sure about this, ma’am? I have to say the incident here looks like one of those classic street things.”

“This guy in the hospital, have you got a name?”

“Booked himself in as John Flaxman at the hotel, but that don’t mean jackshit. He’s out of danger now, but he still won’t say a word about what they were doing that evening. Just lies there staring up at the ceiling.”

“Does he have any links to Seattle?”

“Not that we know of. I searched his hotel room, but he didn’t have no ID, no tickets, no nothing. These guys were stripped. All I found was a pile of clothes and some athletic shoes, could have been bought anywhere.”

“Athletic shoes?”

“That was his own stuff. They dressed up as holy rollers that night, see? Bought themselves the outfits right here in town.”

Kristine stared at the wall. It seemed to be moving, bulging in the center like a sail.

“What kind of athletic shoes were they?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t rightly recall, ma’am. Some kind basketball shoe. But this is a doozy whichever way you look at it. Take the hardware they went in with. You go looking for trouble in a neighborhood like that, you gotta pack enough gun. Now sure, a two-two can be a work of art, I got a couple at home, but out there on the streets you’re up against Uzis, Cobrays, you name it. The toddlers pack magnums in their diapers, even our guys are outgunned half the-”

“If we could just get back to the shoes for a moment …”

Freeman sighed.

“What can I tell you? They were standard basketball shoes, the kind all the kids wear.”

“What brand?”

Her tone was almost rudely abrupt. Charlie Freeman sounded taken aback.

“I don’t recollect, ma’am. What’s with the shoes, anyhow? They were black, far as I recall. Yeah, and there was some kind of logo, a little red outline. Some guy doing a slamdunk.”

“Was the brand Nike?”

“How’s that?” asked Freeman.

“N, I, K, E.”

“Is that how you say it? I always thought it rhymed with ‘Mike.’ Let me just look up my report here. Yeah, that’s right. Nike Air Jordan. You sure it’s spoke like that? Sounds kind of weird.”

Kristine Kjarstad let out a long, slow breath.

“That’s because it’s a Greek name, Mr. Freeman. Nike was the goddess of victory.”

“Well, hey, learn something new every day. Nike, huh? So who was she? Some kind of feminist?”

“Just a woman who hated to lose. You’re talking to another. One more thing. Were there traces of paint on the soles of the shoes?”

This time there was a lengthy silence.

“Now you come to mention it,” Freeman replied in a different tone, “I think there was something on them. I figured it was bubblegum or some-”

“Because it was pink, right?” Kristine interrupted.

Another long silence.

“Now how in hell did you know that?” asked Charlie Freeman quietly.

“I’ll tell you when I get there.”

“You’re coming down south?”

“Correct. I’ll call you back once I have my reservation. I’ll want you to set up an interview with this guy in the hospital. Make it as long as possible. I plan to go to work on him, and I don’t want the doctors getting in the way. This is our one chance to crack this case. It may be the last we ever get.”

“But I told you already, he refuses to say a goddamn-”

“I think he’ll talk to me, Mr. Freeman. I’m pretty sure I can get him to talk to me.”

I awoke shortly after dawn to find a figure standing beside my bed. My dreams had been unusually vivid and elaborate, and for a moment I thought the intruder was another illusion, an escapee from that nocturnal melodrama. Then it moved, and I saw that it was female, and naked.

The covers were stripped back and I felt flesh touch mine at many points, chill on the surface but brimming with internal warmth. A face was buried in my neck and hands roved over my body. Firm breasts were crushed against my chest, the nipples knotted with cold. My cock, already thick with early morning tumescence, stirred and hardened as wiry pubic hair brushed against the bud.

I was still in that ambiguous state between sleep and waking, where the normal rules and standards do not apply. The woman was shivering, so I hugged her. It must be Andrea, I thought drowsily, come to bring me comfort and news of my son. Then the woman turned and raised herself slightly, looking down at me. The light was dim, seeping in through the cracks in the exterior walls and under the door, but it was enough to reveal my mistake. This was not Andrea. It took another few minutes, by which time we were almost coupled, before I realized who it was.

My erection immediately began to sag. I pulled away, giving myself space, studying the plain, feral face with its high cheekbones and stubby nose. My companion was none other than Ellie, the plump nymphet whose enthusiastic compliance Sam had so brutally vaunted the day before.

“Fuck me,” she whispered imploringly. “Please fuck me.”

It should have been a perfect wet-dream scenario. Maybe it was its very perfection which gave it away, that and the fact that her desperation was evidently not erotic. Certainly she played her part well. She sucked on my lips and her knee pushed in between my legs, and as my traitorous cock stiffened up she grasped it and squeezed so hard I gasped. In any other situation I would have been only too happy to go along and ask questions afterward, but I knew I couldn’t afford that luxury.

“What are you doing here?” I croaked.

“Just fuck me!”

She sounded impatient to get it over. The next thing I knew she was on top of me, her breasts in my face, trying to cram my flaccid cock inside her. We tussled like that for a while, but she was dry, and her clumsy and increasingly frantic attempts to force penetration removed any remaining traces of desire on my part. My prick had collapsed to a little bundle of slack flesh, as though trying to make itself invisible. I rolled her off me and pushed myself up on one elbow, looking down at her.

“You’ve got to fuck me!” she cried with a mixture of petulance and fear. “You’ve got to!”

“You don’t even want to.”

“Just do it!”

She heaved herself up with surprising energy and started wrestling with me again. I pushed her off.

“Cut it out, Ellie!”

“What’s the matter?” she cried in what sounded like real distress. “What am I doing wrong?”

I stroked her hair.

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s the whole thing that’s wrong. I haven’t even spoken a word to you, and here you are climbing into my bed and trying to rape me. What the hell’s going on?”

She fixed me with a determined stare. Just as she had been trying too hard to be sexy, now she was trying too hard to be adult.

“Sam sent me. I’m supposed to bring you to see him. But first we’ve got to fuck.”

I ran my eyes over the chunky, pubescent body which wore its womanhood like a badly fitting prom dress.

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know! You’ve just got to do it! If you don’t, he’ll say it was my fault and he’ll beat me up.”

I looked her in the eyes. There was no doubt that she meant exactly what she said.

“Has he beaten you before?” I asked.

But she was already regretting her candor.

“Listen, you going to fuck me or what?”

I got out of bed.

“Consider it done.”

“But we haven’t done it!”

I started to get dressed.

“So? Who’s to know? Is he going to give you a swab test or something?”

I tossed over a light cotton bathrobe I found lying on the floor, which she must have discarded before I awoke.

“Listen, Ellie, I’ll tell him you fucked me all ends up. I’ll swear you were the best piece of ass I ever had in my life and you made me come ten times in a row. And if he lays a finger on you, you come straight here, OK?”

She pulled on her robe with a sniff of disdain.

“I don’t need nobody to look after me,” she said in a tough little voice. “I can take care of myself just fine.”

Even though she had been acting under orders, I got the distinct impression that Ellie felt resentful that her advances had been spurned. I followed her out into the open spaces of the hall, barely illuminated by the early-morning light. There was no one around. Ellie marched resolutely across the boards to Sam’s door and knocked four times, a little rhythmic figure that sounded like a code.

“Who is it?” said a voice inside.

“Me,” Ellie replied.

“Phil there?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else?”

“No.”

There was a loud thump. The door opened a crack and Sam’s ferrety features appeared. He inspected us for a moment with a beady eye, then threw the door open. The automatic rifle in his hands was pointing right at us.

“Come on in,” he snapped. “Close the door after you. Ellie, put the bar on.”

The girl picked up a length of wood from the floor and slipped it into the metal brackets bolted to each side of the door frame. Only then did Sam lower his weapon.

“Hi, Phil,” he said tonelessly. “Did Ellie show you a good time?”

“She sure did! Best wake-up call I ever had.”

Sam smiled coldly. He nodded at Ellie.