Bad Men

  Moloch was different. He counted the days, kept track of hours, minutes, even seconds when the urge took him. Every moment spent inside was an injury inflicted upon him, and when the time came to return those insults to his person, he wanted to be sure that he did not miss a single one. His count had reached 1,245 days, 7 hours, and—he glanced at his watch—3 minutes spent in the Dismal Creek State Penitentiary, Virginia. His only regret was that the one on whom he desired to revenge himself would not live long enough to enable him to vent his rage to its ultimate degree.

  “Stand straight, arms out.”

  He did as he was told. Two guards entered, chains dangling from the arms of one. They secured his arms and his feet, the restraints attached in turn to a chain around his chest. The arrangement was known in the system as a “three-piece suit.”

  “Don’t I even get to brush my teeth?” he asked.

  The guard’s face was expressionless.

  “Why? You ain’t going on no date.”

  “You don’t know that. I might get lucky.”

  Reid seemed almost amused.

  “I don’t think so. You ain’t got lucky by now, you ain’t never gonna get lucky.”

  “Man’s luck can always change.”

  “I never took you for no optimist.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “I know enough about you to say that you’re gonna die wearing them prison weeds.”

  “Are you my judge and jury?”

  “No, but come the time, I’ll be your executioner.”

  He stood aside as the guards brought Moloch out.

  “Be seeing you, Mr. Reid.”

  The older man nodded.

  “That’s right. Fact is, I aim to be the last thing you see.”

  There was a black Toyota Land Cruiser waiting for him in the prison yard. Standing beside it were two armed investigators from the district attorney’s office. Moloch nodded a good morning to them, but they didn’t respond. Instead, they watched as he was chained to the D ring on the floor of the SUV, then tested the chains and the restraints until they were satisfied that he was fully secured. A wire-mesh screen separated the backseat passenger from those in the front. There were no handles on the inside of the rear doors, and a second wire screen ran from the roof of the Cruiser to the floor of the trunk behind Moloch.

  The door slammed shut noisily.

  “You take good care of him now,” said one of the guards. “Wouldn’t want him getting bruised or nothing.”

  “We’ll look after him,” said one of the investigators, a tall black man named Misters. His partner, Torres, closed the door on Moloch, then climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “Settle back,” he said to Moloch. “You got a long ride ahead of you.”

  But Moloch was silent now, content, it seemed, to enjoy a brief taste of life outside the prison walls.

  Dupree was sipping coffee in the station house. It was technically his day off, but he was passing and…

  Well, that was just an excuse. He couldn’t stay away from the place. Most of the other cops knew that, and they didn’t mind.

  “Doug Newton,” he said. He was sipping coffee from the market and eating one of the doughnuts that he had bought for the two cops on duty.

  Across from him, Ron Berman was tapping a pencil on the desk, alternating each tap between the tip and the eraser end. Dupree found it mildly annoying but decided to say nothing. He liked Berman, and given that some of the other cops had far more irritating habits than tapping a pencil on the desk (for example, Dupree wondered if Phil Tuttle, Berman’s partner on this tour, had ever washed his hands after taking a leak), he was happy enough to let Berman and his pencil be, for the present.

  “Doug Newton,” echoed Berman. “I took the call and put it in the log, but frankly, we both had other things to do, and it’s not like it’s the first time he’s made that kind of claim.”

  Dupree reached over and took the log from Berman. There it was, in Berman’s neat hand. At 7:30 A.M., almost as soon as Berman and Tuttle had settled in, and while it was still dark on the streets, Doug Newton had called in a report of a little girl in a gray dress tormenting his dying mother.

  Again.

  “You went out there last time, right?” asked Berman.

  “Yeah, I went out. We organized a search. I even checked with Portland and with the state police to see if they’d had any reports of missing girls matching the description Newton gave me. There was nothing.”

  The first time, Tuttle had answered the call from the Newton place and, having kind of a short fuse, had warned Doug about wasting police time. Now, just this morning, Doug Newton had called in a third report, except this one was different.

  This time, he’d claimed the little girl had tried to climb through the window of his mother’s bedroom. Doug had heard the old woman’s screams, and had come running just in time to see the little girl disappearing into the trees.

  Or so he’d said.

  “You think he’s going crazy?” asked Berman.

  “He lives with his mother and has never married,” replied Dupree.

  “Maybe he just needs to get laid.”

  “I never took you for a therapist.”

  “I’m multiskilled.”

  “You think you could multiskill that pencil back into your drawer? It’s like listening to a drummer with the shakes.”

  “Sorry,” said Berman. He put the pencil into the drawer, then closed it just in case the temptation to retrieve it proved too great.

  “I guess Doug’s maybe a little odd, but I’ve never taken him for crazy,” said Dupree. “He doesn’t have the imagination to make up stuff. He’s only ever been to two states in his life, and I reckon he’s not sure the other forty-eight exist, seeing as how he’s never visited them himself. So either he’s going crazy or a little girl in a gray dress really did try to get into his mother’s bedroom last night.”

  Berman thought about this.

  “So he’s crazy, then?”

  Dupree tossed the log back at him.

  “Apparently he’s mad as a coot. I’ll go have a talk with him today. Last thing we need is Doug taking potshots at Girl Scouts selling cookies. Anything else on your mind?”

  Berman looked troubled.

  “I think Nancy Tooker, down at the diner, may have a thing for me. She gave me extra bacon yesterday. For free.”

  “There’s a shortage of eligible men on the island. She’s a desperate woman.”

  “She’s a big woman.”

  “I’m sure she’d be gentle with you. At the start.”

  “Don’t say that. That woman could break me in two.”

  “She’s also kind of old for you.”

  “She’s seriously old. You think it would make a difference if I told her I was married?”

  “You’re not married.”

  “I know, but I could get married. It would be worth it to keep her away.”

  “My advice is, don’t take anything else from her for free. Tell her it’s against department policy. Otherwise, you’re going to end up paying for that bacon in kind.”

  Berman looked as if he was about to upchuck his breakfast.

  “Stop, don’t even say things like that.”

  It struck him that Dupree was in surprisingly good humor this morning. Berman guessed that it might not be unconnected to Dupree’s slow courtship of the Elliot woman but he decided not to comment upon it, partly out of sensitivity for the big cop’s feelings and partly out of concern for his own personal safety.

  “I think you’d make a nice couple,” said Dupree. “I can just see the two of you together. Well, I could see Nancy, anyway. You’d be kind of lost somewhere underneath…”

  Berman unclipped his holster.

  “Don’t make me shoot you,” he said.

  “Save the last bullet for yourself,” said Dupree as he headed out. “It may be your only hope of escape.”

  Far to the south, close to the town of Great Bri
dge, Virginia, a man named Braun walked back to his car carrying two cups of coffee on a cardboard tray, packets of sugar poking out of his breast pocket. He crossed the street, slipped into the passenger seat, and handed one of the coffee cups to his companion, whose name was Dexter. Dexter was black, and kind of ugly. Braun was redheaded, but handsome despite it. He had heard all the redhead jokes. In fact, he’d heard most of them from Dexter.

  “Careful,” he said, “it’s hot.”

  Dexter looked at the plain white cup in distaste.

  “You couldn’t find a Starbucks?”

  “They don’t have a Starbucks here.”

  “You’re kidding me. There’s a Starbucks everywhere.”

  “Not here.”

  “Shit.”

  Dexter sipped the coffee.

  “It’s not bad, but it’s no Starbucks.”

  “It’s better than Starbucks, you ask me. Least it tastes like coffee.”

  “Yeah, but that’s the thing about Starbucks. It’s coffee, but it doesn’t taste like coffee. It’s not supposed to taste like coffee. It’s supposed to taste like Starbucks.”

  “But not coffee?”

  “No, not coffee. Coffee you can get anywhere. Starbucks you can get only in Starbucks.”

  Braun’s cell phone buzzed. He picked it up and hit the green button.

  “Yeah,” he said. He listened for a time, said, “Okay,” then hung up.

  “We’re all set,” he told Dexter, but Dexter wasn’t paying attention to him.

  “Look at that,” said Dexter, indicating with his chin.

  Braun followed the direction of the other man’s gaze. On a corner, a small black kid who might have been in his early teens but looked younger had just exchanged a dime spot with an older kid.

  “He looks young,” said Braun.

  “You get up close to him, see his eyes, he won’t seem so young. Street’s already worn him down. It’s eating him up from the inside.”

  Braun nodded, but said nothing.

  “That could have been me,” said Dexter. “Maybe.”

  “You sell that shit?”

  “Something like it.”

  “How’d you get out?”

  Dexter shook his head, his eyes losing their glare just momentarily. He saw himself in his brand-new Levi’s—Levi’s then, not those saggy-ass, no-rep jeans that the younger kids wore now, all straps and white stitching—walking across the basketball court, glass crunching beneath the soles of his sneakers. Ex was sitting on a bench, alone, his feet on the seat, his back against the wire of the court, a newspaper in his hands.

  “Hey, little man.”

  Ex, short for Exorcist, because he loved that movie. Twenty-one, and so secure in himself that he could sit alone on a fall day, reading a newspaper as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “What you want?”

  He was smiling, pretending that he was Dexter’s best buddy, that he hadn’t crippled a twelve-year-old the week before for coming up short, the kid wailing and crying as Ex knelt on his chest and put the gun barrel against the kid’s ankle, that same smile on his face as he pulled the trigger.

  The kid’s street name was Blade, on account of his father being called Gillette. It was a good name. Dexter liked it, liked Blade too. They used to look out for each other. Now there was nobody to look out for Dexter, but he would continue to look out for Blade, as best he could.

  Ex’s smile was still in place, but any residual warmth it might once have contained had begun to die from the eyes down.

  “I said, ‘Hey, little man.’ You got nothing to say back to me?”

  Dexter, thirteen years old, looked up at Ex and removed his gloved hands from the pockets of his Lakers jacket. He was unused to the weight of the gun, and he needed both hands to raise it.

  Ex stared down the stubby barrel of the Bryco. He opened his mouth to say something, but it was lost in the roar of the gun. Ex toppled backward, his head striking the wire fence of the court as he fell and landed in a heap on the ground, his legs splayed against the back of the bench. Dexter looked down at him. The bullet had hit Ex in the chest, and he was bleeding from the mouth.

  “Hey,” he whispered. He looked hurt, as if the young boy had just called him a bad name. “Hey, little man.”

  Dexter fired the final shot, then walked away.

  “Dexter? You okay?”

  Braun nudged Dexter’s arm with an elbow.

  “Yeah, I’m here. I’m here, man.”

  “We got to go.”

  “Yeah, we got to go.”

  He took one last look at the kid on the corner—Hey, little man—then started the car and pulled away.

  By coincidence, some twenty miles to the north, two men with a similar racial profile were also drinking coffee, except they had found a Starbucks and were drinking grande Americanos from big Starbucks mugs. One of them was Shepherd, the gray-haired man of few vices. His companion was named Tell. He was small and wiry, and he wore his hair in cornrows, like the basketball player Allen Iverson used to wear his, and probably for the same reason: because it made white folks uneasy. Tell was reading a newspaper. Tell was very conscientious about reading the newspaper every day. Unfortunately, that day’s newspaper happened to be a supermarket tabloid, and in Shepherd’s opinion, Tell could have been reading the back of a cornflakes box and been better informed. The gossip sheets weren’t big on analysis, and Shepherd liked to think of himself as an analytical kind of guy.

  Two seats down from them, in the otherwise deserted coffee shop, an Arab was talking loudly on his cell phone, tapping his finger on the table before him to emphasize his points. In fact, he was talking so loudly that Shepherd wasn’t even certain that his phone was turned on. The guy behaved like he was trying to shout his message all the way to the Middle East, and was holding the cell phone only out of habit. He’d been talking like this for the better part of ten minutes, and Shepherd could see that Tell was getting pissed. He’d watched him start the same story about some has-been pop star’s face-lift three times already, which was once more than Tell usually needed to take in what he was reading. Truth be told, Shepherd was kind of unhappy about it himself. He didn’t like cell phones. People were rude enough as it was without having another excuse to be bad-mannered.

  Tell looked up. “Hey, man,” he said to the Arab. “Can you keep it down?”

  The Arab ignored him. This led Shepherd to suspect that the Arab was either very arrogant or very dumb, because Tell didn’t look even remotely like the kind of person you ignored. Tell looked like the kind of person who would remove your spine if you ignored him.

  Tell’s face wore a puzzled expression as he leaned in closer to the Arab.

  “I said, can you talk a little quieter, please? I’m trying to read my newspaper.”

  Shepherd thought Tell was being very polite. It made him nervous.

  “Go fuck yourself,” said the Arab.

  Tell blinked, then folded his newspaper. Shepherd reached an arm across, holding his friend back.

  “Don’t,” he said. Over at the counter, a barista was watching them with interest.

  “You hear what that raghead motherfucker said?”

  “I heard. Forget it.”

  The Arab continued talking, even after he’d finished his coffee with a slurp. Tell stood, and Shepherd followed, blocking his partner’s access to the Arab. Tell bobbed on the balls of his feet for a second or two, then turned and walked out.

  “Show’s over,” said Shepherd to the barista.

  “I guess.” He sounded a little disappointed.

  Tell was already waiting in the van across the street, his fingers tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel. Shepherd got in beside him.

  “We going? You know, we got a schedule to keep.”

  “No, we ain’t going yet.”

  “Fine.”

  They waited. Ten minutes later, the Arab emerged. He was still talking on his phone. He climbed into a black SUV, did a U-turn
, and headed north.

  “I hate SUVs,” said Tell. “They’re a top-heavy cab on a pickup’s chassis, they drive like shit, they’re dangerous, and they’re ecologically unsound.”

  Shepherd just sighed.

  Tell started the van and began following the SUV. They stayed with the Arab until he turned into an alleyway at the side of a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant. Tell parked, then opened the driver’s door and headed toward the alleyway. Shepherd followed.

  “Hey, you prick.”

  The Arab turned to see Tell bearing down on him. He tried to hit the alarm button on his car keys, but Tell wrenched them from his hands before he got the chance. He hurled the keys to the ground, tore the Arab’s cell phone from his left hand, and threw it after the keys. Finally, he dragged the Arab around the back of the building, so that they were hidden from the pedestrians on the sidewalk.

  “You remember me?” he said. He pushed the Arab against the wall. “I’m Mr. Go-Fuck-Myself. The fuck do you get off talking to me like that? I was polite to you, you fuck. I asked you nice, and what do you do? You disrespect me, you SUV-driving motherfucker.”

  He slapped the Arab hard across the face. The Arab’s face contorted with fear. He was fat, with chubby fingers overloaded with gold rings. He was no match for Tell.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, you ain’t sorry,” said Tell. “You’re scared, and that ain’t the same thing. I didn’t come down here after you, you wouldn’t have given me a second thought, and next time you was in Starbucks you’d have shouted your damn head off all over again, disturbing people and giving them a pain in the ass.”

  He punched the Arab in the nose and felt it break beneath his fist. The Arab curled up, cupping his damaged nose in his hands.

  “So don’t tell me you’re sorry. Look at you. My people came over here in chains. I bet you flew your ass over here business class.”

  He hit the Arab hard across the head with the palm of his hand.

  “Don’t ever let me see you talking on that phone again, motherfucker. You get one warning, and this is it.”