Little Girls Lost (11 page)

Marie’s hand flew to her mouth. “Conner, there’s someone outside!”

Sandhill spun to the window. A slender black man stared through the glass. He pointed to the entrance. Sandhill flung the door open.

“We’re closed.”

“I know, man. I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

The man fanned his face with his hand. “It hot out here, man. Share some AC.”

Sandhill stepped aside and the man scooted by low and fast. He was young, late teens or early twenties, with a gold stud in his right lobe, black jeans and a blue uniform shirt with
Ace Taxi
embroidered on a pocket.

“I know you from somewhere,” Sandhill said.

The man smiled hesitantly and a gold tooth gleamed between his lips.

“About two weeks back you was gonna shoot me.”

Sandhill stared, nodded. “Devon Green, that the name?”

“TeeShawn Green.”

“We got some stuff going down here, Green. Speak your piece.”

“I heard about it, mister. I’m sorry. About the little girl, I mean. But what I’m here for, man, is about that lady…the girl’s mama?”

Sandhill stepped forward, eyes narrowed. “What do you know about—”

Green held his hands up defensively. “I driving a cab, now, mister. Doing it almos’ a week. After that stuff in the alley, I started…thinking ‘bout how all I could say after nineteen years was what a fuck-up I was. It shamed me. I know the city good, so I got a job humpin’ a hack. I figure if I keep at it and get a good work record—”

“Save the soliloquy, Green. Tell me about Nike.”

Green walked to the window and glanced across the street at the cab. “I was driving by earlier on and that woman Nike waved me down and wanted me to carry her to a place on Brevard near Twentieth. It ain’t nowhere a decent woman wants to be.”

“You talking about the Full House?” Sandhill said. “After-hours club?”

Green nodded. “A
nasty
place. Lotsa bad shit to get into.”

“She’s there now?” Sandhill asked, resignation in his voice.

“No, man. She across the street in my taxi.
When I saw she the one lost that little girl, I told her I wasn’t carrying her no place like the Full House. I told dispatch I was taking my break and took her out the causeway. I parked where she could look at the water, like I do when I’m sad. I got outta the taxi and walked forty, fifty feet, but could still hear her crying. When I went back she said she wanted to come here.”

“She high?”

“She didn’t fix or smoke or drink or nothing I saw. She in bad shape though, man, sick with the grief, hurting all the way through.”

Sandhill started through the door, then stopped to pull out his wallet. Without a thought he yanked all the bills out—tens, twenties, a fifty—and thrust them at the cabdriver. Green looked them over and carefully plucked out a ten and four ones.

“This pays the taxi company, man. I ain’t taking nothing cuz I still owing…you know?”

Sandhill laid a hand over Green’s shoulder, squeezed it, and followed him out the door. A minute later Nike slouched in a few steps ahead of Sandhill and walked to the center of the room, staring blankly at the walls. Sandhill tried to ease her to a chair.

“Don’t touch me, Conner,” she said, pushing his hands away. “You don’t want to get your hands dirty.”

Marie stepped forward. “No honey, don’t do this.”

“Do what, Marie? I’m scum…I promised
Thena I’d keep her daughter safe. But could I stay straight enough to take care of her even before all this madness started?”

Sandhill said, “Don’t go that road, Nike. It was my—”

“Fault? Your fault I was in treatment? Your fault I can’t honor a deathbed promise to my own sister? What you did, Conner, was everything I asked you to do.”

Nike dropped into a chair, eyes on the floor. “You’ve worked on these kind of cases before, Conner. What are the statistics? What are the chances?”

“You can’t ask me that, Nike. They’re all different.”

Nike slammed her open hand on the table, salt, pepper, condiments and sweeteners pitching to the floor.

“I said tell me the goddamn chances.”

“The odds are pretty good, Nike. We just have to keep pressing the cops to—”

“You’re a lousy liar, Conner. Jacy’s going to die, isn’t she?”

Sandhill closed his eyes. “Nike…”

“He’s going to hurt her and kill her, throw her in a house and set it on fire, isn’t he, Conner? Aren’t those the odds?”

Marie stepped closer, opening her arms. “Baby…”

Nike turned away. A shiver took her body like a seizure. “What’s happening to Jacy? Is she calling for me? Crying for me? Is she even…even…”
Her voice broke into wet shards and she stood violently, knocking over the table. She kicked it away, picked up a chair, and threw it at the window. Glass exploded outward. The shattered signage of
THE GUMBO KING
hung against the air for an instant, then crashed to the floor. Nike clutched her head in her hands, fell to her knees, and began screaming like her soul was in flames.

Morning had arrived clear and fresh. Mattoon and Dear walked the rails of the weatherdeck, sternward, his hand over the girl’s bare shoulder. He’d asked her to wear the long gown, green as the morning sea, its hem gently swirling at her toes. Behind her ear was a rose of white silk.

“You look beautiful this morning, Dear,” Mattoon said quietly. “Like a princess.”

The girl looked away.

“Do you know what day this is?” Mattoon prodded. “Our anniversary. One year together. What do you say to that?”

The girl said nothing. Mattoon turned to the sound of a low whistle. Tenzel Atwan appeared from an internal staircase two dozen meters away.

“Wait right here, Dear. I’ll return in a moment.”

Mattoon went to the shirtless Atwan. The man was incapable of standing still, his muscles coiling like snakes under his oiled skin as he twitched and shifted weight from foot to foot.

“Yes, Tenzel?”

“Radar say no ships in area. Closest behind us is four hours to get here.”

Mattoon considered the information and nodded. “Very well. Start dumping the garbage.”

Atwan disappeared back into the stairway. Mattoon studied the turned-away girl for a long moment, as if fixing a portrait in his mind. He returned to her side and led her sternward until they ran out of ship. Mattoon leaned against the white rail. Five stories below the ship’s turbulence roiled the water, sending vortices spinning from the stern like twisting sparks.

“We’ve enjoyed a wonderful year, Dear,” Mattoon said. “You came to me as unformed clay and I molded a woman. Then, with the twin gifts of my mind and body, I saved that woman from her base nature and made her truly
live
. Remember how well you lived, Dear? Few get such chances in life, reap such rewards.”

The girl stared away. Mattoon put his hand at the small of her back and coaxed her to the railing. “You’ve had a year that millions of women would trade their sorry little lives for.”

The crew began jettisoning accumulated garbage and other detritus. Mattoon smelled rotting food, human waste, broken-down oil from the engine room. The churning wake glistened with flotsam and sewage.

The girl’s face began to quiver and weep. Mattoon pulled her close. Lifted her face to his.

“It’s a beautiful day, Dear. Isn’t it? Let me hold you in my arms.”

When he lifted her, the girl seemed as light as a sparrow, Mattoon noted. Or a kite, green against the sky for a moment, then fluttering end over end into the foaming water.

After Marie took Nike home, Sandhill covered the broken window with a sheet of plywood. He wrote
Closed Due to Family Emergency
on boxboard and taped it to the door. He put coffee in the machine for thirty cups and water for ten, then turned on his police-band scanner. He pulled out the case reports and began looking for anything he might have missed.

When the phone rang at eight a.m. he was expecting Ryder.

“Mr Sandhill, this is Thomas Clay from Mayor Philips’s office. First, let me offer you my deepest sympathy; I understand the Charlane girl was under your care when the abduction occurred.”

Sandhill said nothing.

“But that’s not the full reason for my call, sir. The mayor would appreciate it if you could drop by to see her this morning.”

“Why?”

“She doesn’t discuss everything with me, Mr Sandhill. Can you come over, say about ten?”

Sandhill looked at his watch and sighed. “I suppose. Listen, Clay, I’m not into any politician’s long-winded—”

“Neither is Mayor Philips, sir. She’ll expect you in two hours.”

Sandhill tossed the phone back in the cradle and cursed bureaucratic madness. Ten-to-one this was one of Squill’s gambits; it had been the mayor who’d sparked Sandhill’s fleeting return to the MPD, now Squill was probably using her to make sure Sandhill kept his nose out of things. Under some proper political guise of condolences, no doubt. He muttered darkly beneath his breath and began sifting through the cases again.

Something in there was bothering him, but what?

It surprised the manager of Security Devices, Inc. to find a customer waiting at the door at eight a.m., a monster of a man, bull-chested, arms like a normal man’s thighs. The manager, a slender bespectacled Hispanic man in his early thirties, pulled out his keys.

“I don’t usually find people waiting. What is it, an emergency?”

Rose said, “I need one of those small cameras. One I can hook up to my TV.” He followed the manager inside, where it was cool and quiet and smelled of carpet cleaner.

“Color or black and white? Color’s a few hundred more.”

“I want the best picture I can get.”

“High-res color. Step over here and I’ll show you what I’ve got.”

Rose inspected several systems as the manager explained their differences, then chose a remote-zoom model. The man rang up the purchases and looked Rose over.

“Damn, man. Wish I had a build like that. What’s your chest…fifty-two, fifty-four?”

Rose sucked in a deep breath, said, “Fifty-five and a half, last I checked.”

“Women go for that super-ripped look, do they?”

Rose grinned and Elvis-Presleyed his hips. “Drives them wild, buddy. Like animals.”

“Have a seat, Mr Sandhill,” Norma Philips said from behind her desk, pushing aside a stack of official papers.

Sandhill stood motionless, arms crossing his faded denim shirt, studying Norma Philips as if uncertain of her species.

She said, “Fine. You can stand if you want.”

“I don’t have time for whatever Squill put you up to. In case you haven’t heard—”

“Acting Chief Squill put me up to nothing. And you have my deepest sympathy.”

“I don’t want your deepest anything. What I want is out of here.”

“And what I want is fifteen minutes of your time.”

Sandhill adjusted his watch. “You get five. When it beeps, I’m gone. Talk.”

Philips slipped on reading glasses. She pulled a manila folder from her desk drawer, licked her fingertip, and opened it.

Lifting a slender eyebrow, Philips said, “You’ve quite the interesting resumé, John Conner Sandhill.”

“I can die content. Is that all you wanted to say?”

Philips ignored Sandhill and began thumbing through the sheets in the folder. “You went to law school. Tulane. Three years later you dropped out.” She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “Was it too tough for you?”

“Reading and memorizing? Listen, lady, if I wanted to—”

She held up her hand to cut him off; it was Philips’s turn to study Sandhill as if he were an exotic species. “No, it wasn’t tough, was it? If anything it was too easy. Too pat. Maybe you needed more of a challenge. Maybe you wanted to work the front edge of the legal system, right out there on the streets. Was that it?”

“You want payment for this analysis, doctor?”

Her eyes returned to the file. “Helluva record. Top rank at the academy. Three years as a patrol officer, then detective: Crimes Against Property, Vice, ending up in Sex Crimes division and working cold cases at the same time. Around here that’s a rocket-fueled career. Easy to see why: You had a knack for solving crimes. The tough ones.”

Sandhill turned toward the door. “It’s been great fun, Mayor, but I’ve got things to do.”

Philips looked at her watch. “Stay, Mr Sandhill. I’ve got two minutes on the meter.” She again lifted
the folder and read. “Commendations. Citations for excellence, citations for bravery. But despite your exceptional record, you were never Officer of the Year. May I ask why?”

Sandhill snorted. “It’s a political recognition.”

Philips slipped a page from the folder and gave it a glance. “Maybe another answer is in your performance reviews. No one could ever accuse you of being a team player. My, my…what does it say here? ‘Detective Sandhill refuses to recognize that a chain of command is essential to the efficient operation of the department.’”

“A comment from a desk jockey who should have a chair bolted to his ass to save him time looking for one.”

“Yet you continued to receive commendations. Then, four years back, like a car slamming a wall, your career’s over. ‘Self-initiated termination’ is what it says in your records. A cryptic term I’ve never encountered before. Your pension is revoked, all benefits cut off. What’s that about?”

Sandhill started to speak, changed his mind. Philips dropped the folder on her desk and stared into his eyes, gray into brown. The alarm on Sandhill’s watch beeped.

“It’s been a picnic, Mayor. Let’s do it again next year.” He turned and walked to the door. When his hand closed around the knob Philips spoke, almost in a whisper.

“Mr Sandhill, there’s something else I know about you.”

Sandhill rolled his eyes again. “My hat size?”

“No,” she said. “You’re a thief.”

Sophie gave Ryder a dark eye, then wheeled from the front door and hustled wordlessly into the kitchen. He hoped she was too involved in some cooking task to monitor his time with Harry. Tiptoeing to Harry’s room, he considered asking a point-blank question about retirement, but wasn’t ready for the wrong answer.

Nautilus was cranked to half sitting in the rental bed, the white wires of an iPod headset running to his ears. He saw Ryder and thumbed off the music, tossed the earpiece to the bed.

“Hey, bro,” Ryder said. “How’s the head machinery?”

“Infection’s cleared, no big deal. I’m feeling pretty damn good, actually.”

“So how’s the old memory? They fix it so you can recall—”

Sophie appeared, a small sand-filled timer in her hand. She brandished it in Ryder’s face.

“Man’s just out of the hospital, Ryder. You can talk ‘til the last grain of sand rolls down that egg timer. Then you’re seeing the welcome mat from upside-down.”

Ryder frowned at the mini-hourglass. “How long do your eggs take?”

“Three minutes.”

She inverted the timer on the bedside table, shot Ryder a glare and left the room. Ryder reached to
turn the timer, grab a couple extra minutes. “Don’t you dare,” Sophie called from two rooms away. Ryder drew his hand back as if it had been slapped.

Nautilus shrugged, then tapped his temple, “I hear a voice in my head, Carson. Maybe it’s just a dream. It’s hardly there, like an echo.”

Ryder pulled up a chair and sat.

“And this voice is saying?”

“The voice says, ‘Details, details, details.’”

Ryder frowned. “Details?”

“I feel the voice more than hear it, like it’s coming from inside my head. Does that make sense?”

“If the guy was crouched over you, whispering into your ear, maybe.”

Nautilus stared out the window, teeth gritting as he fought to clear the wisps. He turned to Ryder, puzzlement on his face. “Another thing about the voice. The tone is angry. Or scared. Or both. There’s more, but it’s a jumble.”

“Try.”

“It sounds like the voice is saying, ‘Why…” Nautilus closed his eyes and Ryder leaned forward, watching his partner strain for the memory. “’Why…can’t you people leave…all this shit alone?’”

Nautilus opened his eyes. His head fell back to the pillow.

“Details, details, details,” Ryder repeated. “Why can’t you people leave all this shit alone?”

Nautilus shrugged. “Or maybe my dented head’s making it all up.”

The last grain tumbled through the neck of the timer. Ryder started to ask another question but Sophie appeared at the door in full glare.

“Your egg’s cooked,” she said.