"A Visible Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (King Jonathon)

13

The light woke me. A midday sun left bright and clean by a high pressure system that had swept the sky clear of cloud. I was not used to sleeping in daylight.

"The evils of city nightlife," I said aloud, with no one to share the joke. I got up and set the coffeepot going and rummaged through the rough pantry shelves for canned fruit and a sealed loaf of bread. As I ate I could hear the hard "keowk" of a tri-colored heron outside, working the tide pools on the western bank of the river. I looked for a book in my sloppy stack on the top bunk and picked a collection of stories about the Dakotas by Jonathan Raban. I took it outside and sat on the top step, propping my back against the south wall. I was deep into the fourth story when the cell phone started chirping.

"Yeah, Billy?" I said instinctively into the handset.

"Ya'll wait till I say hello an' you wouldn't make that mistake," McCane said from the other side of the connection.

"McCane?" I said. "Who gave you this number?"

"Well, that'd be your pal Manchester. He doesn't seem too eager to deal with me one-on-one, if you know what I mean."

I could hear a tinkling of glassware and the strains of a Patsy Cline song in the background.

"What do you need?" I said.

"I need to get with you on this little purchase group I've been sniffin' out, Freeman. Why don't you come join me? We'll sit down and have a drink and sift through it a bit."

"Why don't you sift through it over the phone? I'm afraid I can't make it back in today," I said. It was early afternoon and I could hear the softening of the hard vowels and drawn out s sounds in McCane's speech, telltale patterns I'd heard too many times in my youth. He wouldn't be sober by suppertime.

"Okay. Have it your way, bud," he started. "We got a bit of a trail working here. But it's not exactly clear where it's leadin'. Through our company I pulled some private documentation and laid out the purchases on our insured. Then I got some friends with the other companies to do the same."

He was clicking back into business mode and I had to admire the transition.

"Now, these investment boys pull these life policies in from a lot of places. The so-called gay community was a choice target when that AIDS thing was knockin' 'em off a few years back. And there wasn't too much illegal goin' on, since these boys figured they had a death sentence anyway so let's get the money and party. Hell, the investors bought 'em up for twenty cents on the dollar. The boys spent the money while they shriveled up, and when they died, the investors cashed out."

Even with a few drinks in him, McCane still only bordered on displaying the homophobia in his voice. Nothing that an e-mail or printed deposition would ever show.

"But the money guys needed a go-between," he continued. "They sure as hell weren't gonna go hang out in the boy bars themselves recruitin' business."

"So you're saying there's a go-between here also?"

"There's always a go-between Freeman. You know that. The money men, especially the white-collar money men, never get their hands dirty."

McCane sounded more bitter than he had a right to, considering he worked for the white-collar insurance world. But he was right. No different than the drug trade or Internet scams. The guys with the investment capital never saw the streets. They sat high above, just doing business.

"So you have a line on any of these middlemen?"

"I've got an eye out, Freeman. And you ought to, too. Your boy Manchester is pretty good at trackin' the financials on whatever names I give him. I'll just follow the money trail."

McCane took a long pause. I could almost hear the whiskey sliding down his throat.

"How much money do you pay a man to kill old ladies in their beds?" I finally said.

"Depends on the man, Freeman. Depends on the man," he said. "So what have you got for me, Freeman? I assume you ain't leavin' this all to me."

I told him about my tour of the neighborhood, my meeting with a local detective I knew and the suspicion that they had a serial rapist who had progressed to choking his victims to death. Whether it had any connection with our case, I wasn't sure. Hell, I wasn't even sure we had a case. But if I believed what McCane was telling me, he wasn't just dismissing it.

"So you're with me on this?" he repeated.

"You stay on the middlemen, McCane. Leave the locals to me," I said.

I hung up and sat on the top step of my porch and watched a heron fishing in the shallow waters under a stand of pond apple trees. The bird's roving eye seemed to be everywhere at once, but I knew it was focused on a target. The tapered beak was always poised. I sipped from my cup and watched the filtered sunlight dance around him and then, with a flick, the beak struck and came up with a small pilchard fish pinched at the head, its tail flapping furiously. Nice lunch, I thought. But instead of flying away with its catch, the heron stood frozen, its eye still worrying. I looked up into the canopy, scanning the top foliage, then twisted around and saw him. The big osprey was perched in the top of one of the twin cypress trees that marked the entrance to my shack. He was looking down at the heron, or perhaps at me as if to say, "Now that's how to catch a fish."

After a minute the standoff ended. The heron finally bent its legs, unfolded its wings and took flight. The osprey didn't move. He sat there, as if waiting for me to decide on a course to take. I stared at him for a few minutes, then got up and went inside, closing the door softly behind me.