Turning Angel

Iola cackles. “Ain’t been seeing nobody! Ain’t had to, thank God. Ain’t got no money to see one. I tell you, though, old Arthur starting to get me now that I’m getting up in years.”

  Dad gives the woman advice about her arthritis, and then we walk out to James Ervin’s truck. As the engine rumbles to life, Jaderious’s terror comes back to me, and with it his description of Cyrus’s acts of retribution: I’m talkin’ ’bout mutilating people, man. Cutting off parts and shit! Drilling holes in their bones. While they still alive, dog

  “It’s time to get Annie out of town,” I say softly.

  “Past time,” Dad agrees. He turns to Ervin. “Thank you, James.”

  The retired cop shakes his head, his beagle eyes filled with pain. “This world be goin’ down, Dr. Cage. I never seen it this bad. It’s like the end times or something.”

  Dad squeezes Ervin’s knee but says nothing. Then he turns to me and says, “I read that Mayor Jones finally stepped down.”

  Perfect timing, as ever. “I heard that, too.”

  “You heard what James just said. Do you still think you want that job?”

  “I’m considering it. Caitlin seems to think this town doesn’t want to be saved. I recall you expressing that sentiment not long ago.”

  “Not precisely that sentiment.” Dad reaches into his pocket, takes out a cigar, and begins unwrapping it. “There’s a quote I remember—I don’t recall where it’s from. It may be the Torah.”

  “What is it?” I ask, ready to hear a proverb about the wisdom of knowing when to walk away from something.

  “ ‘Just because you will not see the work completed, does not mean you are free not to take it up.’ ” Dad smiles and takes out his lighter. “Or something to that effect.”

  “Like Moses,” intones James Ervin. “He never saw the promised land, but he sho’ led his people there. Sho’ did.”

  Dad’s eyes twinkle with mischief.

  An hour after we left Brightside Manor, Annie and my parents were on Highway 61 South, bound for the relative safety of Jackson. When I got home, I found Caitlin sitting on my front steps. It was odd to see her at rest, without even a cell phone in her hand. I started to ask if she wanted to cook dinner together, but before I got five words out, she stood and put her finger to my lips. Then she took my hand and led me through the blue door. She didn’t stop in the kitchen, but walked me down the hall to the door of my bedroom. There she stood on tiptoe and gave me a long, gentle kiss. The resentment that kept me from making love with her two nights ago still simmered somewhere within me, but I’d been through too much in the intervening time to worry about who was right or wrong about anything. Desire rose in me with primal intensity, and Caitlin responded with passion bordering on violence. As our clothes fell around us, she turned and splayed both hands against the wall, then thrust her hips back against me. I stood back for a moment, enthralled by the black mane of hair falling over her shoulder blades.

  “Hurry,” she said roughly.

  Chapter

  35

  I’m sitting in the Center City Grill, a microcosm of New Orleans located at the geographical center of downtown Natchez. Center City has a brick courtyard, wrought-iron tables, lush ferns, a fountain, a good bar, and well-traveled owners of some cultivation, as the local euphemism goes. Seated across the table from me is Jaderious Huntley. The snitch is wearing black sweatpants and a dirty T-shirt, and he looks about as twitchy as a junkie waiting for his next fix.

  This morning, Jaderious called me to say that Stoney Washington was willing to talk to me about Cyrus, but only face-to-face. That smelled like a trap to me, so I said the meeting would have to happen at a public place of my choosing. Jaderious put this to Stoney, who reluctantly agreed. I chose Center City Grill because it’s always busy at lunch, and also because Jaderious and Stoney are unlikely to run into anyone who would recognize them here.

  “Why didn’t Stoney come with you?” I ask.

  Jaderious looks anxiously at the nearby tables. They’re filled, but nobody’s paying attention to us. “Stoney don’t want to be seen with me. Bad for his health. Don’t worry, he’ll be here.”

  My cell phone vibrates. It’s Caitlin, calling from the newspaper office. I’ll call her back after the meeting. I can’t relax my vigilance with Jaderious for even a moment. He looks like he’d bolt if a waitress dropped a tray.

  “What you gonna do if you find Cyrus?” he asks.

  “Talk to him.”

  Jaderious shakes his head. “You crazy. You want to stay far away from that cat. You ought to just walk away now. Both of us. There’s still time to call Stoney and—”

  “Forget it. After this, you might be free of me, but you’re staying for this meeting. You have to make sure I’m talking to the right guy.”

  Jaderious freezes, his eyes fixed on something behind me.

  I turn and glance at the main entrance of the restaurant. To get in or out of Center City, patrons walk through a long courtyard lined with wrought-iron tables, then pass through a door with windows set in it. Right now, a black man of about twenty with a red rag tied on his head is standing outside that door, surveying the tables inside.

  “Is that Stoney?” I ask.

  Jaderious’s chair screeches on the floor.

  I whirl and grab his arm before he can run. Jaderious is half out of his seat with terror. I grab his arm and hold him tight. “Who is that?”

  “One of Cyrus’s guys! I gotta get out of here!”

  “Okay. Just stay calm. He won’t do anything while we’re sitting with all these people. I can have cops here in two minutes.”

  Jaderious looks at me like I’m insane. “Man, he’ll shoot all these motherfuckers to get me. We gots to go now.”

  I look toward the kitchen. There’s probably an exit there, but I’ve never seen it. There is, however, a small door in the back wall of the main dining room that leads to an alley. On busy days, I’ve sometimes parked in that alley and entered the restaurant that way.

  “What’s he doing now?” I ask.

  “Looking straight at me,” Jaderious whispers. “I’m dead, man. Aw, shit.”

  “There’s a back way out. A door in the wall almost directly behind you, about thirty feet away.”

  “He’s coming in, man!”

  I rise and pull Jaderious to his feet. As I lead him between the tables toward the door, I reach into my jacket pocket for my cell phone.

  “You got a gun?” Jaderious asks.

  “Yes. Tell me if he pulls his.” I pull out my cell phone and dial 911.

  A female voice says, “911 emergency.”

  “This is Penn Cage,” I say quietly. “There’s about to be a shooting at the Center City Grill. Get some squad cars here as fast as possible. Call Chief Logan and tell him what I said.”

  We’re almost at the door. I pocket the phone and grip the butt of Dad’s Browning. “You open it,” I tell Jaderious.

  He does.

  “Penn Cage!” warbles a woman from the table nearest the door.

  It’s one of my mother’s friends. I smile at her, then slip through the door and pull it shut after me.

  Jaderious is already sprinting toward Main Street.

  “Wait!” I yell.

  “Fuck that shit!”

  I charge after him. He’s younger than I am, but I’m betting a junkie’s wind won’t last long. Jaderious slows down to slip around a work van blocking the alley. I speed up, hoping to finesse the gap between the van and the wall at high speed. As I twist my body, someone leans out of the van’s side door and slams a fist into my chest.

  The breath explodes from my lungs. As I tumble forward, the man who hit me catches me under the arms and drags me inside the van. He throws me onto the metal floor, steps on my chest, and jerks my gun from my jacket. While he slides the side door shut, the engine roars to life, and the van races up the alley—away from Jaderious.

  When the foot leaves my chest, I see that I’m lying in an open space with p
ower tools all around me. My assailant, an enormous black man wearing a purple Alcorn Braves football jersey, is sitting on a homemade bench that runs the length of the van’s cargo area. The van lurches to the right, onto Franklin Street, then left again.

  “Hello, Mr. Cage,” says a deep voice from behind my head.

  I tilt my head back.

  A heavily muscled black man is sitting against the bulkhead of the van. He has a bald head and dark, penetrating eyes. A solitary gold chain adorns his neck.

  “Cyrus?” I ask.

  The bald man grins. “Oh, yeah.” He looks back at his compatriot. “Hold him down, Blue.”

  The mountain of a man who hit me rises into a crouch and plants what must be a size-16 Nike running shoe in the center of my chest again.

  “I stomp on your heart,” he says, “you’ll be dead. So don’t do nothing.”

  “I won’t.”

  A strange and powerful hissing sound comes from behind my head. Filled with unreasoning panic, I jerk my head back again. Cyrus is holding a small blowtorch in his hand.

  “Wait!” I scream, recalling Jaderious’s tales of torture. “What do you want to know?”

  Cyrus belly-laughs at my terror. The man called Blue just shakes his head. I’m trying to think of a way to bribe Cyrus when he picks up a stainless-steel spoon from the bench and holds the flame of the blowtorch to its bottom. He smiles as he watches the spoon, then kills the flame and sets the spoon on the bench. A white blister pack like those in my father’s medical bag appears in his hand. Cyrus rips it open and removes a syringe. Then he draws whatever is in the spoon into the syringe.

  “What are you doing?” I ask. “Are you going to give me an overdose?”

  Cyrus holds up the syringe and taps it a couple of times. “Naw, man. Gonna give you just the right amount. Give you a nice little ride.”

  I try to twist away from the needle, but Blue puts more weight behind his Nike. It feels like a tree trunk pinning me to the floor.

  “Get his vein up,” says Cyrus.

  Blue cocks Dad’s Browning, presses the barrel against my forehead, then closes his free hand around my left biceps with an iron grip. “He got good veins, man.”

  Cyrus squats beside me, his black eyes gleaming. Then he slips the needle into my antecubital vein with the casual expertise of a phlebotomist. I don’t feel the prick, but when he depresses the plunger of the syringe, I feel absolute terror.

  “What was it?” I scream.

  Blue releases my biceps. Cyrus pats my inner elbow, then gets back up on the bench. “You’ll find out,” he says, his eyes shining. “Here it comes.”

  The first thing I feel is a rush of warmth to my stomach, just below my heart. Then it spreads outward, suffusing my limbs with a wholly unfamiliar numbness. Panic balloons in my chest, but just as suddenly the pressure evaporates, and my muscles go limp.

  “Don’t fight it,” urges Cyrus. “Let it find the place.”

  “What…?”

  “Jesus Dust,” says Cyrus.

  “Look at his eyes,” says Blue. “Shit, dog, he gone now.”

  Cyrus laughs deep in his chest.

  “Where we going?” asks an unfamiliar voice.

  The driver? I can’t make my head turn to look. My muscles refuse to obey my nerves.

  “You know where,” says Cyrus. “You still with us, Mr. Cage?”

  I try to answer, but what emerges from my mouth is one long, meaningless syllable.

  “Yeah,” says Cyrus, infinitely amused by my behavior.

  Blue leans over me and laughs like a father watching his baby trying to speak his first words.

  I come awake on a sleeping bag on a hard floor. A metal floor. I roll over and squint against bright fluorescent lights.

  “Here he is,” says a deep voice. “Here he comes.”

  Cyrus is sitting in an office chair about eight feet away from me, his elbows on his knees, his dark eyes on me. The huge man called Blue leans against the wall behind him.

  “How you feel?” asks Cyrus.

  “I don’t know. Weird.”

  “That’s the dust. You never done heroin?”

  A ripple of shock courses through me, but the reaction is strangely muted. “No.”

  Cyrus nods happily. “Sweet, ain’t it?”

  My watch is gone. So is my cell phone. “What time is it?”

  “Party time!” laughs Cyrus.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Blue. His voice can’t be much higher than Barry White’s.

  “Where are we?”

  “Look around,” suggests Cyrus. “You don’t know?”

  The room appears to be a laboratory of some sort. Thirty feet wide by forty feet long, it contains several pieces of what appears to be industrial electrical equipment. In the far corner, a Naugahyde recliner sits before a small television on a counter. A sleeper sofa stands against another wall. Against the wall to my right is some sort of mechanical cart. Emblazoned on its steel side is a blue trident with the letters “TBC” beneath it.

  “Triton Battery?” I ask.

  Cyrus nods. “My old employer. They helping me out now in ways they never dreamed.”

  “I used to work here, too. The summer after my freshman year in college.”

  “Yeah? Most everybody worked here at one time or other. Here or IP.”

  The Triton Battery Company came to Natchez in 1936 to build batteries for Pullman railcars. In 1940 they retooled the line to manufacture batteries for diesel submarines. After the war it was truck batteries, marine batteries, whatever fit the changing market. When the plant shut down three years ago, Triton was using its ancient equipment to produce motorcycle batteries for European and Asian manufacturers.

  “What part of the plant are we in?”

  “Testing area. It’s the only part where the air-conditioning still works. This and the guardhouse. This is my temporary crib.”

  If I’m not dead, it’s because Cyrus needs me alive for something. Probably information. Again Jaderious’s stories of torture zing through my head. How should I play it? Tell everything I know right away? Or hold something back so that I’ll have something to “give up” later? A predator like Cyrus won’t believe I’ve revealed everything until he sweats something out of me. But what does he want to know?

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You on ice, man. That’s what they call it in the gangster movies.”

  “Why am I on ice?”

  “’Cause I can’t have you running around town stirring up shit and causing aggravation. Old Shad’s got the right idea, and we need to let him get his business done.”

  “Are you talking about the trial? Or the election?”

  Cyrus looks puzzled. “The mayor’s election?”

  I nod.

  “What you got to do with that?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m talking about the trial, man.”

  Of course. “You don’t want me investigating Kate’s murder?”

  At the mention of her name, the humor vanishes from Cyrus’s eyes. “Like I said, I can’t have you stirring up any shit. And you been stirring up a lot of it this past week.”

  With drug-induced stupidity, I say, “Did you kill her, Cyrus?”

  His bullet head draws back on his neck. “You think I did that?”

  “I don’t know. I know you wanted to sleep with her.”

  A slow, almost reptilian blink. “Yeah, I wanted her.”

  “But she didn’t want you.”

  He looks over at Blue, then studies me in silence.

  “I read your e-mails,” I say softly. “You threatened her.”

  The drug dealer’s black eyes flash with anger. He gets up from his chair, closes the distance between us, and squats beside me. “That wasn’t any of your business, you know?”

  “You’re right. I just…it’s the dope talking.”

  Cyrus flexes his right forearm as though doing imaginary curls. “Everybody know who killed that bitch anyway
, right?”

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Elliott.”

  An image of Cyrus tracking Kate’s cell phone by computer comes into my head. But arguing with him about Kate’s murder under these circumstances could be suicidal. “How long am I going to be here?”

  “That depends. How long you think the trial will take?”

  “A week, maybe?”

  “That’s how long you gonna be here, then.”

  When Blue first dragged me into the van and I saw Cyrus’s face, I was certain I would die. When that fear lessened, the horror of torture rose in me. But now the reality is settling in: I’m going to be held prisoner until Drew’s trial is over. I won’t be able to investigate further for Quentin. He’ll be facing the trial in two days with little or no good information. A private detective hired at this point won’t be able to learn anything meaningful. And that’s why I’m here—to ensure Drew’s conviction.

  The side effects of my kidnapping will be more personal. Unless Cyrus demands some sort of ransom, my family will believe I’ve been murdered. My father and mother. Annie…

  “You gonna be on the nod most of the time,” Cyrus says. “That week’s gonna go by like a day for you. Maybe two. You ain’t gonna get hungry, you ain’t gonna get horny…you just gonna get happy. Numb, baby. The weight of the world gonna be lifted off your shoulders. You gonna be thanking me.”

  “And when the trial’s over?”

  He shrugs. “That’s up to you.”

  “You’re going to let me go?”

  “If I wanted you dead, you’d be lying in that alley behind the restaurant.”

  “I don’t get it. From what I hear, you’re not a half measures kind of guy.”

  Cyrus begins cracking his knuckles, starting with his left forefinger. He maintains his squat as effortlessly as a Major League catcher during this operation.

  “I tell you how it is,” he says. “I’m thorough, all right. I checked you out. You ain’t no civilian. You sent a lot of people to Huntsville Prison. Bangers, killers, Klan, everything. And about five years ago, you damn near got the head of the FBI sent to jail.”

  It’s true. Of course, the crime committed by the FBI director was not committed as director, but as a field agent assigned to Mississippi in 1968.