Dirt Merchant Read online

  Deuce raised his pistol and fired a round into the wall next to Benji’s head. Benji screamed, trying to press his ear into his shoulder.

  “My ear! Oh, Jesus, dude, my ear!” he screamed.

  I peered through the blinds at the surrounding houses. No new lights. No neighbors running out to see what the commotion was. They must be used to a certain amount of gunfire on any given night, which we would use to our advantage.

  “Reflex,” Deuce said. “Remind me, again, what you said about the dead man? Was it the swamp, or was it a Taco Bell?”

  In all of this, there was a line. I knew it, and Deuce knew it, because he glanced at me a few times in a knowing way. And Reginald…well, Reginald was younger than the two of us, but he was no dummy.

  I was no psychic, yet the future was laid bare before me. I saw a shallow grave with two bodies in it. I didn’t know if Deuce saw it, or if Reginald did, but that was the path we had started to embark upon.

  In the midst of this, a flash of black passed through the room, and I was intimately aware of someone else’s presence. Neither Deuce nor Reginald reacted.

  Over my shoulder, the darkness billowed. It was a darkness I was beginning to know well, and I didn’t like the feeling.

  It was the Red-Eyed Stranger. My supernatural companion. The unwanted guest Buford McKibben had released into my custody back in the swamp.

  “Maybe we should back off,” Deuce said.

  I didn’t care. Not about these two. I polished off Deuce’s beer and my own before digging into the fridge for another one.

  “Do what you’ve got to do,” I said.

  Deuce eyed me with suspicion, as if he expected me to be the voice of reason. I could only shrug, and I raised my new beer to him.

  He turned back to his grim work.

  “Nonononononono,” Benji’s friend began, pleading with a growing sense of panic. If he only knew what was actually coming, he’d have been saying prayers instead of wasting breath.

  Deuce wailed on the both of them. He and Reginald took turns slamming fists and elbows into their faces. I probably let it go on far longer than I should have. It didn’t take long for them to start offering up information they had about the whereabouts of the gang that might have murdered Taj.

  Yakamura’s lip poured blood. Benji’s nose bent sideways. They begged, but received no quarter. When Deuce busted his knuckles up, he started using his elbows.

  They called out the names of every drug dealer, pimp, pusher, and prostitute they knew. I wrote the names on a sticky porno mag I pulled from the coffee table. When something wasn’t clear, Deuce asked follow-up questions, which regularly required one of them to spit a significant amount of blood onto the floor before answering.

  Reginald seemed to be enjoying this. He smiled, taunted them. Fake punched to watch them flinch, before going in for the real thing.

  Deuce, on the other hand, went at this like he did everything else: with workmanlike intensity. He spoke little, emoted less, and waited patiently for them to answer, when they seemed to be struggling with the information. He took no particular pleasure from this, but he did it because it needed to be done.

  “Please, man, fuck, you’ve got to stop them,” Benji begged. Parts of his face had bloated to double their normal size. A boxer on the losing end of an ass-whipping. An MMA fighter in the worst case scenario.

  “It’s your own pile you stepped in, friends,” I said, swilling their beer. “I’m just the resident weirdo, you know?”

  “We told you what we know. It’s the Black Reapers, man. They’ve got it out for gangs stepping in on their territory. It’s them.”

  “Give me a name.”

  “I don't—”

  “The next man up on the food chain,” Reginald said.

  “I don’t know, man. Some dude. I only know his nickname.”

  Deuce, who had up to this point remained basically silent, said, “This is your last chance to tell the truth. We’ve broken a few bones in your faces, roughed you up a little bit. But we haven’t killed you. I can promise, though: if we don’t leave satisfied with the information you give us, you won’t walk out of here on your own.”

  Benji started crying, a bereft sob that ran through his whole body. He was done. “I told you everything, man. I think you’ve already killed my friend.”

  Yakamura wasn’t moving, and his head drooped at an unsettling angle. I couldn’t exactly remember the last time he’d actually contributed to the conversation.

  Deuce knelt down in front of him, a coach providing valuable information. “Then it’s really important you give us everything.”

  “I already—”

  “Everything.”

  Benji sobbed, released a fresh string of reddish drool.

  Seconds ticked away. I watched death lean in closer.

  “His name,” Benji began.

  “Come on, man,” Yakamura whispered. “They’ll fucking kill us.”

  “Oh, that might happen either way,” Reginald said.

  “It’s over,” Benji said. “It’s over. His name—.”

  “Yeah, man, we got the pen at the ready,” Reginald said.

  “His name is Dietrich,” Benji said. “Most people call him Rich D.”

  Reginald lowered his pistol, and a few moments later, Deuce did, too.

  “Your lucky day,” I said.

  “Had nothing to do with luck,” Yakamura said. “We just earned our snitch jackets. They’ll be dragging our bodies from the swamp within a week. Just watch.”

  Tendrils of a dark substance that looked like smoke but moved like viscous liquid spread out in a wide cloud in front of me. It settled on the bodies of the men duct taped to their chairs. Their eyes didn’t register the change.

  “What is so special about Rich D?” I asked. “He blooded in?”

  Yakamura glanced at Benji, then back at me. In this light, his features shined through. Strong brow, prominent forehead. A small, pursed mouth.

  Benji nudged him. “Come on, man. It’s out now.”

  The corner of Yakamura’s mouth twisted up into a defiant sneer. “He’s legit. He’s not a gangbanger the way you probably think he is.”

  “We just heard about him,” I said. “We’ve got no frame of reference.”

  “He runs a record company out of an old drug den in north Jax.”

  “Address?”

  “No, man. I never been there. He bounces around. He’s not paying taxes on all that money.”

  “I see,” I said. “And why is it we want to speak to with him?”

  “He knows everybody,” Yakamura said. “You want to know something about somebody, he knows. He can probably tell you details nobody else can.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He keeps his ear to the ground. People fuck up, and he knows it before they do. You can’t do nothing in Jacksonville without him knowing it.”

  Deuce turned to leave, and Reginald and I followed.

  “At least cut us loose, man. Whoever finds us will know something’s up. You want them to know you’re coming?”

  “Guess so,” Deuce said, and we turned and walked out.

  I glanced back once, saw the oily blackness tethered to the both of them, and I closed the door behind me.

  3

  “We just doomed them.”

  “You’ve always been a pessimist,” Deuce said.

  “I say ‘fuck ’em,’” Reginald added. “They have a death wish anyway.”

  “What you think, Rol?”

  “I just said,” I replied. “They snitched on some people who have cash registers where their hearts should be. I think they got their number tonight, and they’ll be called up soon.”

  “I’m not concerned with those junkies. I mean, what did you see in them? Were you able to get a bead at all?”

  “You mean, like…?”

  “Like the hoodoo stuff. The stuff you contracted from the old man in Lumber Junction.”

  “I told you, Deuce, it doesn�
��t work that way, man.”

  “How does it work, then?”

  “Yo, yo, what the fuck you talking about?” asked Reginald.

  “Don’t even pay attention to this conversation,” Deuce said. “Rol, tell me.”

  “I don’t know how it works,” I said. “Sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I get visited by the recently deceased, and other times I can walk by a graveyard and get not so much as a whisper.”

  “Huh,” Deuce said.

  “I do know that I can’t read people’s minds. That has nothing to do with it. I’m not a psychic, or a precognitive or whatever. I don’t elect to have experiences. I don’t have a choice — it happens to me.”

  We drove in silence for a while after that, Deuce staring out the window, probably regretting bailing me out of Savannah.

  “What’s the next part of this plan?”

  “When’s the funeral?” I asked.

  “Few days. ME’s still got the body.”

  Deuce looked surprised. “What? Body’s supposed to be released within 72 hours, even in the case of homicide.”

  Reginald shrugged. “Don’t know, homie. All’s I know is, they been hanging onto him, and they told us it was the investigation.”

  “Huh,” Deuce said.

  “No matter how much work they do on him, it’s going to be a closed casket. I shit you not, he was—”

  “I don’t even need to be hearing that,” Deuce said.

  “Sorry, man. Sorry. I know.”

  We rode without talking for a while, the music from Reg’s sound system providing a steady rhythm to our silence. Eventually, Deuce asked, “Who you know in the game?”

  “Like, doing dirt? Plenty, man.”

  “They know people who got contacts in—”

  “The game? I know some folks. I’ll set y’all up with some people, but I’ve got to keep some distance, man. I’m the one calls Jax home, know what I’m saying?”

  “You give us a good start,” Deuce said, “and this will all be over within the week.”

  Nothing like this ever ends, I wanted to say. Instead, I kept my mouth shut and stared out the window. I was feeling kind of off, the way I used to when visited by people from the realm of the dead. If we weren’t driving through some kind of horrible pit of despair, I was on the verge of one of my otherworldly experiences.

  I wasn’t thrilled, but maybe it would get this whole investigation started off in the right direction. When the feeling, that sixth sense of mine, sputtered, I shrugged it off.

  It’ll be back, I thought. This is when I need it the most.

  That night, I opened my eyes to the sight of a blinking light, pulsating alongside the vvvvv-vvvvv-vvvvv of my phone’s vibration.

  I checked the time. 4:13 a.m.

  Hangover still had a ways to go before it started to fade. A swimmy feeling up in the cabesa, but otherwise okay. I’d suffered worse.

  But the phone. I wasn’t sure if I should answer. A number I didn’t know flashed across the screen. Bastard didn’t give up, though. The phone just kept ringing. Vvvvv-vvvvv-vvvvv. Vvvvv-vvvvv-vvvvv. Vvvvv-vvvvv-vvvvv. I fiddled with the settings, tried to turn off the goddamned ringer, but nothing worked. Finally, I held down the power button and tossed the damned thing in the bedside table.

  Oddest thing happened, though. I woke a few minutes later with it resting in my hand. I was face up in the bed, staring at the ceiling. Had to piss so bad I thought something might burst.

  But there was this buzzing.

  Vvvvv-vvvvv-vvvvv.

  Vvvvv-vvvvv-vvvvv.

  Like it’d always been there.

  The annoying little box wasn’t even on. The screen black as the room, and yet it continued ringing.

  Then, a message appeared. The screen lit up: Voicemail (1).

  I shrugged and unlocked the cheap-o burner. Who knew how these things worked, after all? Maybe I’d been pressing the wrong button. Technology was a young man’s game.

  I held the phone to my ear, closed my eyes through the instructions and nonsense. When it came to the actual message, the voice on the other end sent me into immediate paralysis. It echoed distantly through the handset like reverb in a blues club.

  “Hey there, Rolson,” it said. “You got a minute to chat? Just got back from a looooong swim and decided to get in touch.”

  Limba Fitz. He sounded like his lungs were waterlogged, but there was no mistaking the voice. It was the Butcher of Savannah, the man I’d nudged out to sea after filling him full of slugs.

  I slid out of bed and slunk toward the window. Peeked through a crack in the blinds. A black car was parked across the street, headlights on, wipers going. A light rain was falling amidst the swaying trees and drooping streetlights. I thought I saw the flicker of a light inside the cab. Could have been a cigarette lighter or a cell phone.

  Or my imagination. There was always the wackadoo factor. Couldn’t forget about that. Peering into the darkness at cars that might or might not be housing dead men.

  The cackle on the other end mocked me, but I didn’t end the call.

  “You’re dead,” I whispered into the phone. “I watched the tide carry your bleeding fucking body out to sea.”

  “Funny how you leave a job undone,” his voice said. It was more ragged than I’d remembered. Could’ve been the salt water. “You want to finish this out of doors, or should I let myself in?”

  I thought of this group of people, who had taken me in without so much as a question about what I was doing with them at their most defenseless and vulnerable.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “Don’t what, McKane?”

  “Don’t come in here,” I said. “Don’t — fuck. Okay. I’m coming out.”

  “No gun?”

  “No gun,” I lied. “We go somewhere else and deal with this. I get in my car, and I follow you. You’re the black sedan outside?”

  “Bingo,” he said.

  The phone died in my ear with a digital whimper.

  I poked my legs into a pair of Goodwill jeans and tucked myself into an old black Metallica shirt before heading barefoot into the yard. My heart thudded a thunderstorm inside my chest.

  I put my gun into the waistband of my jeans.

  Through the house and out the front door, I noticed, first and foremost, that the black sedan was not there.

  Was this another one of his games?

  I walked out to the road, looking around. It occurred to me to call him back, maybe start this cat-and-mouse game all over again. When I brought the phone up to make the call, it wasn’t in my hand.

  Funny, I thought. I’d been holding the phone as I exited the house. I was sure of it. I’d felt the warmth of the battery in my hand. I patted my front and back pockets. Nothing.

  Back inside.

  Except, when I turned, the house behind me wasn’t even the Gaines residence. The lights throwing wide swaths of orange along the streets revealed a place that wasn’t Jacksonville, wasn’t even Florida.

  This was Lumber Junction. Not the place I remembered, though. A much older version of my hometown. The Stephen King flashback version of the Junction.

  I stood in the middle of the road where my parents had raised me.

  As I walked, I listened to the scrape of rocks under my feet. I suspected Limba Fitz to come racing out of the bushes and try to hack me in two with a machete.

  Down the driveway and up to the front door of my parents’ place, I stopped basking in the feeling of being here. The pale glow of the lights from the inside gave me that old feeling again.

  I tried to open the door but didn’t actually need to. I passed through the doors and the walls and found myself facing my entire family: my mom, my dad, and my Aunt Birdie. The only member absent was, well, me. But even that wasn’t entirely untrue.

  “He’s not strange,” Birdie was saying. “He’s a sensitive boy, and he keeps to himself. Doesn’t make him abnormal.”

  The old man’s eyes
twinkled. “Quiet doesn’t bother me,” he said. “Quiet doesn’t make him weird. Hell, Norman Bates was a quiet boy.”

  “At least he listened to his mama,” my mother said.

  Aunt Birdie whooped with laughter. “Don’t you start! I’ll blow a mouthful of Budweiser out my nose.”

  The old man grimaced. “That’s sick. Don’t talk like that.”

  “Aw, lighten up. He’s just a little…peculiar.”

  “He’s got a touch of your family’s gypsy nonsense. The way he talks in his sleep. The sleepwalking. The drawings and the stories. He’s not like most boys.”

  My mother sat up, drank from her red-and-white can. “I take it as point of pride. You know what happens to them? They end up turning into perverts and fuck-ups, the lot of them. They hang out with all your friends down at the junkyard where you play cards, talking about the good old days like they did anything more than chase chubby girls.”

  “And what’s little Rolson going to do? You don’t need to chase corpses around. Or maybe he ends up touching some little girl and we have to commit him up in Milledgeville.”

  “All right,” Birdie said. “That’s enough. That’s plenty. Rolson’s not going to end up in some drooling pen with all the other psychos. You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t know,” my father replied. “He might. Might just be one of the quiet ones. That’s what they always call them. ‘The quiet ones.’ You start hearing about all them fruitcakes taking little boys home and burying them in their crawl spaces. I just want to look reality full in the face.”

  “For once” my mother said under her breath.

  At this, the hallway door opened, and a set of pajamas appeared, but I didn’t get a chance to see this version of myself.

  I woke up face-down in the Gaines’ yard, a knot the size of a ping pong ball rising on the back of my head. I got up slowly and walked barefoot through the neighborhood, nursing the aching that coursed up and down every nerve ending.

  What I was looking for, I had no idea.

  Limba Fitz, maybe. A black sedan. Maybe I’d just fallen and knocked my fool self unconscious. That wasn’t the most unheard of proposition. There was a good chance, in fact, that everything — the dream, the phone call, the bump on the noggin — had to do with the pint of whiskey I had slow-guzzled in the bedroom.