LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

have one, they were going to invent the guy. Make Tampa the next great city it had always promised to be.

      Some kids playing behind a small electronics-manufacturing facility had smelled something strange, and being kids, they’d opened the lid of the dumpster and found the body of a young Vietnamese prostitute named Phuong Van Tran. The woman had been tied with curtain cord, ankles to wrists, simple square knots, slipped into two plastic bags duct taped together at her waist, and then hoisted into the dumpster. If anyone in the neighborhood Delbert and Aimes had canvassed had seen or heard anything on the night she was dumped, no one was admitting it.

      The method chosen for killing Phuong Van Tran was execution-style shooting. Phuong had a single .22-caliber bullet hole in the back of her head. The ligature marks at her wrists and ankles were not deep or abraded. They came from postmortem swelling. When she was tied up, she had not struggled. She had not been beaten. She was fully dressed in panty hose and a cocktail dress with a label from one of the low-end clothing outlets in a local mall. She had been bound and shot in a way that was matter-of-fact, or maybe curiously gentle. Looking at her, Aimes remembered thinking that she must have gone along with it, must have thought it was some sex game she’d play and get paid for, must have been smiling or at least not screaming when a firing pin had struck a primer sending a bullet into her brain. However curious or gentle or playful it had been, murder was murder, and Aimes and Delbert had been out talking to people about what they might have seen or heard.

      They’d finished a long afternoon of walking and knocking and talking, and then they’d gone to La Teresita for that Cuban sandwich and the dubious but delicious Russian trout. Then Malone’s Bar. Now Delbert glanced over at Aimes and said, “Your sister’s boy, huh?”

      Aimes knew that Delbert, his new partner, wanted to hear about it. Knew Delbert wouldn’t push. Knew that if he just said, Yes, my sister’s boy, and a surprisingly nasty piece of work he is, Delbert would nod and that would be the end of it. Nobody pushed anybody in this car: that was Aimes’s rule with his partners. No prying and no lying. But they would learn about each other. They would learn a lot. Some of it by inference, some of it by telling, most of it by experience. And some of the experience would not be pretty. Aimes was teaching Delbert the detective business.

      Aimes didn’t look at his partner. He guided the Crown Vic through the rush-hour traffic toward the police station on North Tampa Street. He said, “Yeah, he’s my sister’s boy. I don’t know him all that well. His daddy and I didn’t get along. His daddy was in the Navy. Served on a tanker. He was killed in an accident, fueling a destroyer at sea. It happened when the boy was ten. I never got close to him after his daddy died. He’s supposed to be a good kid. The family hope. Straight As in school. All-state on the football field. Hell, the kid could ride his brain or his jockstrap to college. You don’t see that too often.”

      Aimes looked over at Delbert as they sat at the traffic light at Fowler and 30th Street. Delbert nodded, touched his stomach, leaned to the side, and belched quietly. Aimes said, “Why do you eat that stuff, man? You know it hurts you.”

      “Same reason you eat that fish in a puddle of oil. It tastes good. I like it. I’m a creature of unbridled appetite.”

      Aimes laughed. “You’re a creature of a great deal of bullshit.”

      Aimes had twisted one of his fingers when he’d grabbed Tyrone Battles by the front of his shirt, and it was throbbing now. He laughed again, and it felt good. Thinking: And a creature of some particularly fucked-up grammar. And wait a minute. Where did “unbridled appetite” come from? That isn’t the Delbert I know and educate. Aimes figured it came from some soap opera or some girl or both. One of the gum-snapping, line-dancing, short-term loan officers Delbert dated. A woman who liked to watch soap operas when she and Delbert weren’t two-stepping to the “Cotton-Eyed Joe” at Zichex or wherever it was they went in their snakeskin boots and up-the-crack jeans.

      “So,” Delbert said, looking ahead at the traffic, “the good boy was just having a bad day?”

      Aimes thought about it. What in the hell was his nephew doing in that bar? Blacks didn’t go into Malone’s. Hell, the boy wasn’t even old enough to drink. What had he been doing in the restroom with those two white men? Had the boy really said, “Give it up”? Both of the white men had said so, though the fat one had thought the boy only had to pee and was asking for a place at the porcelain. Well, something had made the fat guy piss his pants. And something had made the other one, the big handsome guy with the confidence and the aging athlete’s body, thump the boy upside the head.

      Aimes had never seen Tyrone in a scuffle, but he had seen the boy work on the football field. Aimes had played some football himself, enough to appreciate the boy’s talent. He knew it wasn’t just local. So maybe the white guy had sucker punched the boy. How else could a middle-aged pharmaceutical salesman coldcock a kid with the physical gifts of Tyrone Battles? Well, something had happened in there, something strange.

      Then Aimes thought, Wait a minute. Teach? James Teach? He knew the guy. Knew him by reputation at least. Didn’t the guy play football? Where was it, Florida? Yes, that was it. Jimmy Teach, the walk-on quarterback from some one-light town up in the Panhandle. Teach had been good, very good. It made sense now. Tyrone had met his match in that men’s room.

      Delbert waited until they caught the next stop light. “So,” he said, “you think they gone let it go or not?”

      Aimes thinking, They gone? He said, “Delbert, my young friend, this world is full of fools. If those two have the sense God gave a tin-dick dog, they will most certainly let it go.”

      “Fools will be fools.” Delbert scratched the side of his face with the stubby ends of his fingers.

      He bit his fingernails to the quick, another thing that endeared him to Aimes. Aimes had offered to paint the fingers with quinine, something really nasty-tasting. Said he’d bring the bottle himself and the Q-tip every day, do the painting. Help Delbert break the habit. Delbert had declined, said the women he dated didn’t mind his fingers that way. Said they liked vulnerable men. Delbert said he told his women he was in a dangerous line of work, and he hoped he could be forgiven some scuffy-tuffy fingernails because in every other way he was a straight and unwavering public servant.

      “You tell them that?” Aimes had asked. “That thing about straight and, what was it, unwavering?”

      “Words to that effect,” Delbert had told him.

      Aimes: “And it works?”

      Delbert: “Sure does.”

      Aimes thinking that no self-respecting black woman would fall for a line of bullshit like that.

      They turned off North Tampa Street, drove through the gate into the parking lot at the rear of the police station. Delbert said, “Pretty weird, we go in that bar, and it’s your nephew.”

      “We didn’t need it, did we?” He wasn’t going to remind Delbert that someone could have told the dispatcher to let the uniforms handle it. You didn’t last long with a partner if you dealt in might-have-beens.

      Aimes was going to cover his and Delbert’s ass with the paper of a very carefully written report. He’d write it brief and general. It would describe an altercation in a bar. It would include the names of those involved, the names of the witnesses, the time of day. It would say that Teach had admitted drinking. It would say that both men claimed to be the victim and neither requested medical attention. It would say that Teach alleged there had been a razor which later turned out to be a comb. It would say the scene was cleared without an arrest. Period. Those were the facts, and Aimes would not move an inch beyond them.

      He collected his possessions from the front seat of the car, checked the floorboards for anything he might have dropped, then turned to Delbert. “I hope that boy has sense enough to leave our man Teach alone. No good can come from those two meeting again.”

      Delbert nodded.

      Aimes knew the people in that bar thought he had lost his temper with the boy, grabbing him by the shirt, sitting him

Скачать книгу