The Broken Souls - J. Kerley A.

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looking strange.”

      “’Flu coming on, maybe. I don’t feel good.”

      “What didn’t Taneesha understand, Harwood?”

      Harwood wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “I’m feeling rotten all of a sudden.”

      “Tell me about Taneesha. Then you can head to the infirmary.”

      Harwood suddenly stopped speaking and looked into his lap. His eyes widened.

      “Jesus.”

      “What is it, Leland?”

      “I pissed myself, and didn’t even feel it. What the hell’s happening?”

      He dropped the phone to the counter and stood unsteadily. His blue institutional pants were dark to the knees with urine. His face was white, his hair sweat-matted to his forehead. He convulsed from somewhere in his midsection, dropping to his knees, toppling the chair.

      “Guard,” I yelled to the uniformed man in the corner of the visitors’ area. “Sick man here.”

      Harwood clung to the counter with his tattooed fingers, weaving. I watched him shudder to restrain vomit, saw his cheeks fill, his mouth open. A flood of yellow foam poured over his tongue. His eyes rolled into white and he slid to the floor.

      Doors on the containment side burst open and two uniformed men rushed to Harwood. He convulsed on the floor, heels and head slamming the gray concrete. His bowels opened.

      I suddenly found myself alone on the visitors’ side, the man beside me having retreated from the horrific spectacle. The monstrous convict visitee was still across the glass, watching as the two guards rolled Harwood onto a stretcher. I saw the convict lean over for a closer look, his eyes a mix of fear and concern.

      Then, for the span of a heartbeat, I saw him smile.

      We pulled away from the prison. Harwood had been taken to the infirmary. When we’d gone a couple miles, I climbed in the back seat, lay down with my hands behind my head. Harry and I had traveled this way often, him driving, me reclining in back. When I was a child and my father’s psychotic angers would infest his brain, I slipped from the house and hid in the back seat of our station wagon. A back seat felt secure to this day. It wasn’t the officially sanctioned method of travel, thus we limited it to backroads and anonymous highways.

      “Harwood exploded like a volcano?” Harry asked the rearview mirror. “Think it has anything to do with our case?”

      I thought a moment. “He was a smug smart-ass, a gamester,” I said to the back of Harry’s square head. “Probably didn’t make a lot of friends. Could have been payback.”

      “Or just some bad prune-o,” Harry said, referring to an alcoholic concoction brewed up in prisons everywhere. “What’d he say about Taneesha?”

      “He was being a funny boy, but when I mentioned her murder it was like throwing ice water in his face. He serioused up a bit, said she was naive and didn’t know how the world worked. And that he was going to be set up when he got out. He wasn’t going to be a day laborer anymore.”

      “Set up? Like being taken care of financially?”

      I said, “That’s what I took it to mean.”

      “So Harwood thought Taneesha didn’t know how the world worked?”

      “We’ve met a hundred guys like Harwood, Harry, how do all of them think the world works?”

      Harry thought a moment. Looked in the rear view.

      “You got enough money, you do what you want. When you want. To whoever you want.”

      “That about sums it up,” I said.

       CHAPTER 10

      To Lucas it looked like any deserted warehouse near the State Docks: brown brick, busted windows with boards behind them, shattered glass on the sidewalk. There was a single door in front, rippled steel painted green, the kind of closure that retracted upward. A loading dock was to the side of the building, strewn with crumbling pallets. He could smell the river in the distance.

      Lucas took a seat on a short wall a quarter block away, dropped shoplifted sunglasses over his eyes, and watched as twilight settled in. Friday night would be a good night, Lucas figured. If, that is, the name his five hundred dollars bought wasn’t bogus. If he’d been lied to by the guy, he’d go back to that bar and cut the obese bastard’s lying throat – what was his name? Leroy Dinkins? – slice Leroy’s fat throat open like a –

      “Clouds, Lucas. Concentrate on the clouds.”

      Lucas heard the words in his head and closed his eyes. He replaced the violent thoughts with pictures of clouds. White and puffy and gentle. Clouds from earth to sky.

      “Float on the clouds, Lucas,” he heard Dr Rudolnick intone in a hypnotist’s voice, deep and soothing. “Float like a boat on a calm pond. Breathe away the anger as you float. Out goes a breath, out goes anger…Let it flow out like water.”

      Lucas listened to Dr Rudolnick for two minutes, breathing deeply and floating on the clouds. When his eyes opened, he felt calm and refreshed.

      He resumed watching the warehouse. The street was one-way. Semis drove by with containerized cargo racked on trailers. It was almost twilight before the first car arrived, a Corvette as white as snow. The second, a half-hour later, was a black Benz. Forty-five minutes passed before the third car rolled into view, a silvery T-bird, a classic. The green door swallowed them whole and quickly.

      I bought the right name, Lucas thought, slapping his knee in delight. I invested well. He stood and ambled to the warehouse. Stars were beginning to poke through a darkening sky. He walked past the door to the corner of the building, leaned against it and waited.

      Twenty minutes later he heard a vehicle enter from a block down, headlights shining across the deserted street. The car stopped and Lucas figured the driver was phoning inside the warehouse. Seconds later, he heard a whining electric motor and the sound of the door ratcheting open.

      He stepped around the corner and saw the taillights of a gold Lexus disappearing inside the warehouse, the door dropping like a portcullis. Lucas sprinted to the door and rolled inside the warehouse.

      A dozen vehicles sat in the wide space, several little more than automotive skeletons. The burp of pneumatic tools punctured air smelling of petroleum and cigarettes. A short man, bald, his outsized arms blue with tattoos, jumped from the Lexus, eyes widening when he saw Lucas.

      “Who the fuck are you?”

      Lucas stood and brushed himself off. “I’m looking for Danny or Darryl Hooley. They around?”

      The guy yelled, “Intruder!”

      In seconds Lucas was surrounded by three men in grease-stained denim, two holding tools, the third pointing a black pistol at Lucas’s midsection. The men muttered among themselves as Lucas stood with his hands held innocently out to his sides.

      “Who is he?”

      “Guy rolled under the door.”

      “Somebody get Danny.”

      “He’s coming.”

      A trim, thirtyish man appeared from the rear of the building, pencil tucked behind one ear, cigarette above the other. Red hair flowed from his head. He wore a blue work shirt tucked into denim jeans. A few steps behind him was a younger and skinnier version of the same man, hippie-long hair ponytailed with a blue bandana. His T-shirt touted one of the Dave Matthews Band tours.

      “What do we have here?” the older man asked, raising an eyebrow at Lucas.

      “It’s a bum,” one of the

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