Crystal Queen

  Crystal Queen

  A Rolson McKane Prequel Novella

  T. Blake Braddy

  Copyright © 2017 T. Blake Braddy

  All rights reserved.

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  This book is a prequel for the first novel in the Rolson McKane series. You can get this title for free, if you join the mailing list at

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  1.

  The Money Man showed up again today. The guy in the black suit. The guy Jerry calls the Devil Incarnate. The guy with the yellow eyes and the perpetual smirk.

  He showed up and knocked, and I didn’t want him to come into the house. Him being near me always makes my bones quiver, so I met him out on the porch of our place.

  Plus, we didn’t have much of an apartment to look at. We’d sold most of the furniture, and the air reeked of addiction.

  Didn’t matter to him. He just smiled, like he always does, and asked me about Jerry.

  “How the two of y’all doing?” he asked, eyes never leaving me. “You all doing all right?”

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “Fine. I mean. Jerry’s good for the money, you know. He’s just—He’s got back on his feet. I mean, you know?”

  Scratching at my neck. Feeling the words come out without being able to stop them. It’s been awhile since I’ve been able to control myself, and I just have to ride it out.

  The Money Man didn’t care. He knew we’d been tweaking. So what. What you did didn’t matter, so long as you had his money. Money was his life’s blood, and he was unrelenting in pursuing it.

  We’d just hit a bad patch, was all.

  “Jerry cleans money,” he said, his eyes remaining steady. Like his hands. They never moved. They never do. Each time he comes around, he just stands there, as if he doesn’t have to scare us shitless.

  He did, every single time, though, even without actively trying.

  “If Jerry can’t clean money, then why are we giving him so much of it?” he asked.

  “He’s working,” I said, trying to stall. Jerry hadn’t been working in a month, and we were on the verge of losing our apartment, but he didn’t want me telling anybody that. Especially not the men we owed money to. “He’s looking for work. He’s got a few things — a few irons in the fire.”

  My mouth running away with me. Threatening to reveal that the money had gone up our noses or into our pipes.

  I thought about asking him for a little money. Just a loan, a quick loan, until we could pay him back. Just add it to the vig, or whatever the mobsters used these days.

  It was the way he looked at me after that which bothered me the most. “You are in a precarious position,” he said, “and your boyfriend has put you in it.”

  “I know, I know,” I told him, saying anything to keep him from coming inside, from understanding where all the money had gone. “Such a precarious—what does that mean?”

  I wondered if he could tell we were using. I fought the urge to grind my teeth, but I caught myself clicking them a few times as we talked. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “It means that your boyfriend’s probably done fucked up,” he said, “and if you can’t get us that fifty Gs by the end of the week, it’s going to come down on you—both of you.”

  “Okay, all right,” I said, thinking maybe there were a few rocks left under the table in the living room, and so my mind trailed off to that. “I know. Precarious stuff—so bad. I’ll tell him.”

  It was then I opened the door and backed in, trying on a smile that didn’t include my teeth, because they had gone in a sorry direction since moving to Atlanta. But I showed him I understood, but I needed him to get the hell away from me.

  “Vanessa, right?” he asked through the crack in the door.

  “Yes, that’s right. Yup, Vanessa.”

  “None of my business who you run around with, but this guy, Jerry, he’s going to get you killed. He’s like an animal doesn’t follow his biological imperative. That money doesn’t show by the end of the week, I’ll be back. You understand that?”

  “Yup, totally,” I said, and closed the door.

  From the other side, he said, “I’ve got some other business to go tend to. I’ma come back and see y’all tonight, after I’m done with this other stuff. Y’all take care, now.”

  After the Money Man left, the man whose name is Limba Fitz, I spent some time thinking to myself. I was up and moving around, going from room-to-room in this basically empty apartment, contemplating how to make all of the bad stuff go away.

  I crawled on hands and knees until I found something to smoke. I didn’t need it or anything, but the conversation with the Money Man — Limba, Limba, Limba, that was his name — stressed me, and I needed to even out.

  I got high and went out for a walk around the neighborhood, trying to get myself under control. Thinking I needed to get my shit together.

  This is not the way to live life, old girl, I thought. This is the exact opposite of life.

  But, eventually, that old feeling came back, and I had to feed the beast.

  Jerry came home, and he hit the roof when he heard about the Money Man.

  “He can’t come to my home,” he said. “This is my fucking home.”

  Waving one arm around violently, as if to make a point.

  He’d lost some weight. Maybe forty pounds. Normally, people look good when they shed pounds, but Jerry had long since lost the physical characteristics which had first attracted me to him. He’d been—robust. Healthy. Something like that. Now, he was just gaunt and wild-eyed. He made love like a man thinking about somebody else, but I knew there was no other her.

  The other her was the money. He was thinking about Limba Fitz, about those bosses.

  I was just another problem to fix.

  “You could go out and find a job,” he said, picking at a scab on his forearm. “You could, I don’t know, be a bank teller. Work at a convenience store. Isn’t that what you did back in that shithole down south?”

  “Lumber Junction,” I said. “And it’s not a shithole. It’s just not Atlanta.”

  “Yeah, yeah, not a shithole,” he replied, leering bug-eyed at me. “That’s why you fucking left it, right? Because it was just so quaint and awesome.”

  “Shut up,” I told him, and I flinched, mostly out of habit, but he didn’t hit me. He only hit me when he was freaking out, and this was nowhere near a freakout.

  He chewed his fingernails for minutes on end. Then, he said, “I’m going to find something. I’m going to score. I need to chill the fuck out.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “We need to chill.”

  “I’ll be back, and we’ll figure the money situation out.”

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  I echoed everything he said, because he didn’t have any real answers, and I was too whacked out to be able to offer anything meaningful.

  After he was gone, I cried for a while. I thought about my old life, thought about how I had ended up here, and it was then Rolson entered my mind.

  Even saying his name gave me that old sensation, that ineffable thing love offers you. It’s the thing no drug, no alternative state of consciousness could provide.

  I packed up what belongings I had left and made the decision to leave. I had to see Rolson. He would know what to do with the money and the drug addiction and the late period.

  2.

  I never intended on leaving Rolson. It just sort of...happened. He loved me so fully, so unabashedly, but there was always something reserved in the way he went about showing it that I never felt like I got past his armor.

  Not to mention the fact that I had my own problems.

  Rolson was a good man,
but he and I mixed like oil and water.

  We fell in love too young, got married when we should have been getting our lives together.

  I blamed him for the way my life had turned out, because I couldn’t get to a point where I could comfortably blame myself. He was like a puppy dog in a lot of ways, and in the ways he wasn’t, he was like an abused animal, tentative and standoffish in a selfish way.

  It became almost impossible to take.

  Rolson and I knew each other forever. It wasn’t until high school that he paid any attention to me, or I to him. I dated guys before Rolson, but those were just dinner-and-movies kinds of things, the way high school kids tend to date. Some guy would cart me off to Applebee’s and then try to finger fuck me in his pickup truck outside my house.

  It never felt right.

  But with Rolson, it did. There was something tender and bruised about him that I liked. He always trembled when I touched him, and I never got over the first time we kissed. It was like finding a picture of some distant relative who favored you. It was life-affirming.

  Jerry was a phase. Jerry was new. He was the exact opposite of Rolson, and for this time in my life, I needed that. Jerry lived his entire life on the surface of his emotions. Everything he felt was right out there, right up front, and that was refreshing, considering my husband’s penchant for brooding.

  Ex-husband?

  I spent some time thinking about whether or not I considered Rolson an ex or not. There was no paperwork. No official documents. No declaration that it was over, even.

  I had just decided I needed to go, and so that’s what I did.

  Rolson contacted me a few times, but like a stray dog that’s not been fed in a few days, he moved on. I presume he took up with his side piece, Miller, because he had been on a pretty steep decline in the last few weeks, either way. If he wasn’t careful, the booze was going to have him fairly soon. He was on a knife’s edge of crippling addiction.

  I realize I’m no better. I’m stuck.

  But there was something fundamentally broken about Rolson, something he needed to fix.

  ***

  Part of me missed Lumber Junction. Very few people, given the opportunity, would trade the luxury and convenience of having every single damned thing at your fingertips at all times.

  It was amazing. You could just up and order falafel in the middle of the night, and it would be on your doorstep in a half hour. The best Lumber Junction could do was keep the Subway in the mini strip mall open until 10 pm on weekends.

  The vibrant, bustling nature of Atlanta and its various suburbs provided it with a life no other city I had ever visited possessed. Even Savannah, with its sense of constant celebration, paled in comparison to the Empire City of the South.

  But every so often, I caught a whiff of the air here, and something about it reminded me of home, and I fell suddenly homesick as I could be. It was usually in the midst of a dry spell, where I couldn’t score for the life of me, but either way it sent me headlong into a fit of pique that could only be remedied by indulging in all the carnal pleasures Jerry had introduced me to.

  I missed the feeling of the main strip on Saturday mornings. Driving up and down the drag, rolling down the windows, blaring old-school country music, and waving at everybody I knew, which was basically everybody. The community experienced through repeated patterns. Knowing how some people did their shopping at the same time every weekend, so if they weren’t answering their cell phone you could just wander into the Piggly Wiggly and expect to find them in the chip and candy aisle.

  I missed the Friday night football games and the Lumber Festival every year and the stupid Christmas parade.

  Most of all, though, I missed my family, no matter how much I thought I hated them at any given moment. But even when I thought I might go back, it was so obvious how true the old saying was: You can never go home again.

  3.

  Dollar Bill, a dealer from down the way, got shot in his apartment today. Jerry dragged me to where the police tape spread across the front entrance and made me stand watch while he tried to sneak in and take some things he thought were owed him.

  I smoked cigarettes under a bright spring sun. A few guys thought they could skeeze on me, but I told them off and they went away. It was a skill I’d needed to pick up in the wilds of Atlanta, one I wished I could retire whenever I settled back down into a normal life.

  He returned a few minutes later. “They’re not letting anyone in his place,” Jerry said. “They’ve got it scoped out and roped off. Maybe you can get in.”

  “The hell makes you think that?”

  “You’re unassuming, I guess,” he replied.

  I rolled my eyes, but considered it a thing I just had to do. Nothing Jerry requested of me was optional. He was not so much convincing as he was demanding. I’d slept outside a couple times after denying him something he wanted. The worst was the one time he’d tried to share me with a guy sold good product, and I told him he could fuck himself and that guy if he wanted a threesome.

  I’d ended up on a bench down by Little Five Points in the dead of winter.

  “Fine,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “Girl, you know what to get,” he said. “That sorry sack of shit owes me money and speed. Cop anything isn’t tied down.”

  “Whatever.”

  ***

  Upstairs was crowded as a two dollar whorehouse, but I managed to make myself small enough to pass among the locals untouched. Luckily, there were some people who lived on the floor fighting with the Atlanta PD about how they were supposed to get to their homes if they couldn’t walk down the goddamned hallway.

  I used their unintentional distractions as cover for my own purposes.

  Bill’s doorway was wide open. Somebody’d kicked in the deadbolt and surprised him. The door itself dangled loosely on the hinges, so I pushed it open.

  That’s when I saw what was left of Dollar Bill.

  The coroner or whoever hadn’t taken him out on a stretcher yet, and some dude was snapping pictures. He moved with a calm purpose that seemed out-of-place with what he was taking photographs of.

  Kneeling next to the body. Flash.

  Standing over Bill’s corpse. Flash.

  It was all so sickening, and I had to cover my mouth and nose to keep my food down. Or, barring that, bile and other stomach juices.

  Still, no amount of cover was able to mask this smell. Bill had the odor of convenience store perfume and dirty kitty litter, and it was getting worse by the moment.

  I didn’t plan on lingering for very long.

  The body lay on the floor next to the couch.

  He looked like an open garbage bag. Guts and blood spilled from open wounds onto the beige carpeting and surrounded him. It was obvious someone had taken out some kind of vendetta on him. No one just does that to a human being, not unless they’re sick in the head.

  A video game still blooped and bleeped on-screen, and in Bill’s hands I saw a white controller. He’d died in the midst of a campaign against nazis or zombies or something similar. There was not a gun in sight, so Bill had been caught completely off-guard.

  This made the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.

  Bill was not the most stable of guys, so if he thought something was wrong, he’d have been carrying heat. The fact that he wasn’t armed said something about the level to which he was surprised.

  I moved quickly through the front rooms and down the hallway to where he slept. His bedroom was small and cramped and filled to the ceiling with drug paraphernalia.

  Being in there made it feel like he was more than simply a dealer. It was almost like he was a collector of the stuff. Bongs of all sizes and shapes. Scales. Plants. Supplies. Baggies. Pipes. Razor blades. Syringes. Coke vials. Everything.

  The abundance of stuff made it difficult to focus on what was important.

  If I were a stash of drugs, where would I be?

  Behind me, I heard the murmur o
f a few cops talking. They were all the way in the front of the apartment, but it was likely they’d be heading back here at any minute.

  I had to be quick.

  Quietly tossing the place, I looked for anything that might be useful to us. I thought about the Money Man and what he’d said, the insinuation of his presence on our stoop.

  I own you, his demeanor had said. Just wait for me to come and collect.

  I pulled the mattress away from the box spring. Looked amidst the shoes in the closet. I pulled desk drawers open and picked through the pockets of his jackets.

  I found nothing.

  The voices were coming closer. Any minute now, and I’d be caught, taken down to the station and booked on several different charges.

  Then, sunlight hit something, and it sparkled in the sunshine.

  A smallish case. Like a briefcase but made from some metallic substance.

  I snatched it up by the handle without looking inside and hurried back out into the hallway.

  Turns out, there was a cop way closer, because I ran smack dab into him.

  “I’m sorry officer,” I said, pushing my way past him.

  It must have taken him a second to register what was going on, because I was already in the living room by the time I heard his voice.

  “Hey! Hey! This is an active crime scene.”

  I threw one hand up to acknowledge he had said something, and I hurried through the mass of pressed-together people. They continued to argue, and I used this situation as a way to disguise myself, but the cop — or maybe it was cops, now — followed close behind.

  I felt the weight of the case and promised myself I wouldn’t give it up. This was now mine, and I wasn’t going to let go, no matter what happened.

  It might save our lives. It might get me back to zero.

  It might be my ticket out of Atlanta.

  By time I reached the stairwell, footsteps echoed from behind me, pushing me down the staircase that much faster. I counted the steps the way I used to when visiting my dad at the police station. He’d hold my hand and walk me up to his second floor office down in Lumber Junction, reciting each number aloud as we went.