Dirt Merchant Page 19

  I drank down more of the fire in my flask. The sky lit up, dimpled with billions of light bulbs across my field of vision. I experienced a new sense of clarity, like my third eye had been wiped clean.

  “This is it,” I said. “This is where it happened. Taj died right out here.”

  “You sure?” Deuce asked.

  “This is where it happened,” I said. “I’m positive.”

  “How the hell you going to be positive right now?” Reginald asked. “This ain’t even where the body—”

  “They moved the body,” I said. “They butchered him out here and moved the body somewhere else. The dumping location.”

  “How you going to know all that from just being out here?”

  “He knows,” Deuce said. “Rol, what are you seeing right now?”

  “Not much,” I said, though that wasn’t entirely true. I saw silhouettes of men carrying pistols. Pushing a hooded figure through the swamp.

  Door was open.

  “Not locked,” Deuce said.

  Reginald clicked the hammer on his pistol and nodded. I brought up the rear.

  As the door opened, the stench was immediately overwhelming. Death. Plain as the night was dark. Reginald gagged. I pressed my forearm to my mouth and nose before it infected my whole being. That kind of smell doesn’t go away. The kind of thing you smell in your dreams.

  Death had taken up residence here.

  Three bodies. Partially decomposed. Two of them rolled to one side, their arms pointing off into dark corners of the shack, as if trying to indicate some unknown information.

  The eyes, noses, and lips had been chewed off, as had the soft flesh on the biceps.

  “We might have interrupted feeding time,” Deuce said. “Be careful where you step.”

  I was beginning to hate Florida. Alligators aside, the constant of stepping in something or another was too much.

  “Rol, they giving you anything?”

  “It’s not a drive-thru window, Deuce,” I said. “These folks might be unhappy, but I’m not getting the normal creeps from this.”

  “I thought you said back in Savannah you got the heebie-jeebies all the time.”

  “I did,” I said.

  He had a point there. Two things. One: Savannah is an old-ass city, a practical force field of hyper-kinetic energy surrounding it. There, the dead are old. Ancient, so far as America goes. I imagined I’d have a similar experience walking through Jamestown or Salem, Massachusetts.

  Second: My overall senses had been superseded by a force beyond my control. The haunting, Grim Reaper-like stranger who descended upon my thoughts had been running interference somehow. Like, blocking the dead signal, or only letting through what it wanted me to experience.

  Not ideal.

  Deuce twitched and glanced over at me. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I responded.

  Weird, I thought. Had he penetrated my brain for a second there?

  A white hot knife split my skull.

  I screamed.

  My eyes burned. My throat was redolent of the taste of blood. My mind flashed with images dredged from both of my compadres, maybe, even, the minds of the deceased. But they were mere images, or collections of images. Stretches of narrative in the past of someone’s life, blurred by the passage of time. It was the half-life of a life already lived, decaying so quickly I could barely snatch individual frames from the flood that passed through me.

  “You all right?”

  Two Hispanic dudes and a black girl. Ages hard to determine. Deuce aimed his flashlight at each in turn, but the tepid light did nothing to reveal any meaningful details. They weren’t that old, but how old was not immediately knowable.

  “They been here for a while,” Deuce said, covering his nose and mouth with the crook of his elbow. “Nobody planned on dumping them, I guess.”

  “Unless they’ve been caught up with something else,” Reg mentioned. “Or, unless they figured somebody was onto this place and left it be.”

  The bodies were limp, swollen, and somewhat purple, but they hadn’t begun to actually decompose. I ventured too close to the far left body and sent a cloud of flies buzzing in all directions. Despite the coldish weather, the humidity out here was somewhat of a year-round phenomena, which kept the fly population busy well into the winter.

  In the corner, I found a gas-powered generator and a rusted can of fuel. Deuce shined his flashlight on the far wall, revealing a small collection of power tools, including a circular saw. A second flash of the light revealed a hastily-cleaned blade, streaks of red covering large parts of the formerly shiny piece of machinery.

  “Fu-uck,” Reginald said.

  Further inspection revealed weapons, both simple and complex. Claw hammer. Hand saw. Power drill. Handful of pistols dropped into a bin under the table. Deuce didn’t take the time to get a good look at them, but I imagined the serial numbers had been filed off.

  Just a hunch.

  A flashlight dangled above the saw, so I retrieved it. As Deuce and Reg plundered the lower shelves, I ventured back to the bodies and knelt down. Clicked the light. Under the glare of a half-functioning flashlight, they looked like kids. Barely extant facial hair. Underdeveloped features. A missing upper lip revealed a set of braces, mangled like the broken and cracked teeth beneath.

  Not just random murder victims. Brutalized and then left to rot.

  But why?

  It appeared as if, at a previous time, they had been lined up and left here.

  Didn’t make any sense. If Deuce’s little brother had been taken from this spot and dropped somewhere else, why would they leave these bodies?

  “Who are we going to tell?” Reginald asked. “I’m not talking to the police. Rolson, you’re persona non grata, far as I am concerned, since there is a manhunt out for your arrest.”

  “We don’t call the police,” Deuce said. “We find somebody to call the police for us.”

  “The porn-addicted druggies,” I said.

  Deuce punched my shoulder. “They hear some shit their overlords are into. Get scared. Have a change of heart. They go to the cops and tell them exactly what we want them to know.”

  “That’s signing their death warrant,” Reg said. “They go to the cops, they’re as good as dead.”

  Deuce shrugged. It was a hell of a gesture on such a big man.

  Reg said, “We need an in, somebody who can do some recon or whatever for us while we bash in some heads. We’re the follow-up — we’re the stick — but we need a spy.”

  “I thought that was your gig,” I said.

  “People know me around here,” Reg replied. “I’m a known quantity. Deuce, you’re a former pro ball player, so you’re out. Rolson, my man, not only are you a former cop, but you most definitely look like a former cop. It’s like you should have a Mike Tyson face tattoo, but it should say ‘NARC’ right under your eyeball.”

  “Don’t give me any ideas,” I said.

  “Do you have anybody in mind?” Deuce asked.

  “Nope. Everybody I know who’s a possibility is already connected. Anybody else would look suspicious. I’m going to keep my eyes wide for that kind of opportunity, however.”

  “Either way, this is a find,” Reg said. “Can’t believe we just happened onto it.”

  Yeah, but at what cost? I wondered, and Deuce’s eyes met mine. They seemed to glow in the darkness.

  Back in the stretch of swamp, the moon hung like a fruit bound to drop from the tree any moment. The sky was clear and wide so that our surroundings stretched out into infinity.

  The headlights of a car appeared and then immediately disappeared as the vehicle turned around and sped in the opposite direction. I ducked into a nearby set of bushes as the pop-pop-pop of handgun fire echoed in the distance. I heard a whir-kwop of a bullet passing overhead and shattering a rotten tree.

  “Get down,” Deuce said, and I submerged myself up to the neck in swampy goo.

  Whoever was in the car had
paused, shined a light out toward us. Must have seen something, because the next thing I heard was another volley of bullets. It was far enough away that I didn’t feel too endangered, but it was close enough.

  Reg pulled a pilfered handgun, but Deuce managed to grab it before he could pull the trigger.

  “You fire on them,” Deuce whispered, “and they will trudge out here and hunt us down. Right now, we at least have the presumption of a hiding place.”

  His cousin didn’t seem to want to listen, but eventually he replaced the gun in his jeans.

  Then things changed for us.

  The slam of a door. Whispered threats. The swish-swish of people wading into knee-high water. A sudden click. Light from a flashlight.

  No sudden movements, I thought. I shuffled sideways, inching toward the closest tree. Once behind it, I peered around at the first dude.

  He moved closer. Somewhere, I heard the click of a hammer. I glanced over at Deuce and Reg, human statutes, blending in with the floating logs and lily pads and decaying debris peeking out of the water.

  The figure moved closer, followed by another party from the car. They spoke in unintelligible whispers, but they didn’t seem shaken. The flashlight remained a steady presence in the dark, pressing into the corners of this watery recess.

  Once, the light passed over Deuce’s shaved head, but there was no indication they noticed it.

  Unless they wanted to draw closer. To lull us into a sense of false security.

  Finally, the beam landed on my tree. I felt the glare of the light, noticing where the light touched me. I desperately wanted to react, to fire on them, but I didn’t. I held still, kept my breathing steady, and waited. No matter the fact that they were on the other side of the tree, I didn’t dare turn my head.

  I closed my eyes, tried to force an explosion of the kind of otherworldly violence I had, up to now, been able to summon at my will.

  Nothing.

  Happened.

  In my mind, there was a blankness spreading out like dye diffusing in a clear liquid. It prevented me from focusing on pushing some kind of extrasensory mojo out into the world.

  I’d never known how to make it work. I thought I’d reached some kind of drunken mastery in Savanna, but here it had abandoned me.

  The footsteps moved closer. My mind reeled. I thought for sure we’d be found and shot to death out here in the swamp, found weeks or months later.

  Or never.

  And it was that thought, circling my head like small moons, which blocked me from doing my normal duty in these situations.

  I hoped Deuce would understand. I hope this wasn’t the end of it for me. So long as I had struggled with the prospect of being a freak, now that it was gone, I only wished for its return.

  Luckily, it wasn’t the end of us all.

  The sound of the two eventually faded, as they backed away to their parking spot. I let out a long, slow breath. Peering through the point where the tree forked, I tried to get a look at the car.

  No dice. It was just a blur of edges and the glare of the headlights. It was a newer car, but it growled like a ‘69 Camaro. Smooth-sounding car. Smooth-sounding guys. Ice water in their veins. They wouldn’t be head-faked. They were professional criminals, and we were covered in swamp shit.

  Back out in the open, we couldn’t quite gather the words to discuss what had happened. Part of me thought I’d slip in a hole and wake up, half-cocked, on the bed in Deuce’s folks’ house.

  Reginald flung one fist around, swinging at an nonexistent enemy. Some goop from his hand slung off and plopped against a nearby tree.

  I’d tried to summon some kind of supernatural response to it, but the truth was it was gone. I was drunk, and nothing happened.

  It was nothing, I told myself. Nothing at all. I didn’t always have to have it. Wasn’t a goddamned remote. I couldn’t just call up the Channel of the Dead and force them to do my bidding.

  It’d come back. Show up when I needed it. Always did. Maybe I wasn’t drunk enough, a thought I didn’t have too often.

  The vehicle revved once and then peeled off into the distance. Taillights disappearing in the dark. Then, nothing at all.

  “They got my car,” he said. “They know my license plate, man.”

  He sounded on the verge of tears. Desperation that rang hollow to me.

  Thinking about the implications, staring off at the point where the taillights had disappeared, I said, “I don’t think that’s what we have to worry about.”

  I awoke with a buzzsaw between my ears, and the first few steps out of bed were a struggle. Feet didn’t want to hold me, and so I had to press the flats of my palms against the hallway walls to keep myself upright. An electric jolt hummed in the muscles of my thighs.

  I found Deuce sitting on the edge of his bed, naked down to the waist. Bright blue sleeping shorts hung loosely from his legs.

  The man himself rested his face in his hands. He was breathing deeply, a meditative act. It was easy to see something was wrong but impossible to know exactly what it was.

  “You all right, big guy?”

  He blew out a breath and looked up. “Bad night,” he said.

  “It isn’t easy,” I said.

  “No, it ain’t, and I’m beginning to think there’s something really wrong with me, Rol. It started out with dreams, but now it’s like I cannot get up and get on with my day without a little something to help me out. Like, back in the days, we had…stuff to help us get up on Mondays after big games.”

  “I think I know where you were going with that.”

  “Only, this feels worse than getting your ass whipped by the Bucs. This goes a hell of a long way to making me feel like I’m dying.”

  “I wish I knew of a cure. I can tell you, I think you’ve got something eating away your insides, and I don’t know what the cure is, besides laying down and dying, and I don’t think you’ve got an aim toward.”

  “At least no time soon.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “What you want to know?”

  “Tell me what the major dysfunction is, and maybe I can help. Not likely — can’t promise anything — but I can try.”

  “Oh, man, it’s nothing I can’t handle. Just a little bit of the foggy brain.”

  “Deuce, it’s a hell of a lot more than that, and you and I both know that. Denial is no way to suffer through this.”

  “If it gets bad—”

  “Don’t start,” I said.

  “If it does get bad,” he said. “If I start to turn into something like the thing inserting itself into my dreams, you know how to deal with it.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. Yes. You. Do.”

  He let that linger in the atmosphere for a while. Then, he said, “It’s not complicated. I may have a poltergeist in my” — he tapped his temple — “but I can’t fix this right now.”

  The air grew thin in there. I got up and circled the room.

  Deuce said, “I can’t be visiting voodoo doctors and palm readers and shit.”

  “If you don’t, I might be calling a priest.”

  “The Exorcism of Darron Gaines.”

  “I’ll keep you away from the crucifixes and pea soup, just in case.”

  Jacksonville gangs weren’t of the same ilk of the kind you see in big cities, but they were present in the town and expanding, so we recruited Reg to help us discern where to pinpoint our search to. He came back at us with a laptop and some YouTube videos.

  A video called “Brick Brick” featured some prominent gang-controlled locations he recognized, and he helped us pick through them, though he demurred at being part of the questioning process because he was afraid of the repercussions associated with it. Deuce told him he didn’t want to ruin a potential rap career, and Reginald busted into a freestyle that was so pitiful, even I thought I could top it. Only time I heard Deuce laugh that day.

  After we had watched “Brick Brick” a second time, I had
no better idea of where to look than before. The rap video was filled to the rafters with hoods in black: black shirts, black bandanas, black jeans and shoes. Even their guns and cars were black. That much I could tell. Where it took place, though, that flummoxed me. There were so many cuts and canted angles, I couldn’t tell one shot from another.

  “What neighborhood is this shot in?” I asked.

  He went through the video, shot-by-shot. “It’s all over,” he said.

  He scrubbed the clip to one particular moment. On-screen was a two business strip mall consisting of a low-rent grocery store and a car wash attached at the end. “That food store right there,” he said, “is in Cleveland. I drive by that all the time.”

  “So the Reapers rep Cleveland,” Deuce said, as if in conclusion.

  Reg sucked his teeth, staring at the screen. “I can’t say for sure. I mean, this is shot all over. That’s one of the points, right? They want to show that they run this town, not just one area code or one street or whatever.”

  “Where else are they filming?”

  He chewed one fingernail as he watched the video again. “That right there is Phoenix. That shot right there is Davis Street. They supposed to keep to the north, up in Soutel, but this video is literally from north, south, east, and west. They probably going to get some retaliation for that.”

  “But no evidence that they’ve been taking women hostage and cutting people up,” I replied.

  “None. These niggas — ‘scuse me. These homies run up in somebody’s crib and shoot them. They don’t take the time to do, you know, what they did.”

  I typed some places into my terrible phone.

  “I’ll start with these places,” I said. “It’s only bound to get better from there, right?”

  “Unless you step up on somebody who’s all colored up, and then it’ll be getting worse. And worse. And worse. And worse.”

  I hit the pavement in the turf controlled by the Black Reapers in search of some kind of lead. I was basically just stirring the pot, but I hoped I’d be able to turn something up.