Dead South (A Bryson Wilde Thriller / Read in Any Order)

DEAD SOUTH

R.J. Jagger

1

Day One

August 3, 1952

Saturday Night

The Bokoray on this Saturday night, like every Saturday night, was filled with sex and smoke and perfume and gyrating bodies and drunken minds and laughter and secrets and deep dark lust bubbling to the evil surface. On the stage behind the drums, with a beat in his sticks and a rhythm in his body, Bryson Wilde had the best view in the whole crazy place.

At six-two with a fit body, a Fedora dipped over his left eye, an easy smile and a face that turned heads—not to mention being a member of the band—he was well equipped to take advantage of every little thing the place had to offer.

Liquor was in his gut.

A smoke dangled from his lips.

Ashes dropped onto the snare and then sprang wildly off when the stick came down.

His hair was blond, longer than most and combed straight back. Green eyes played well against a Colorado tan.

Directly in front of him at the microphone, Destiny Smith was busy seducing the crowd with her lamenting voice, her curvy squeeze-me body and her only-for-you eyes.

Wilde appreciated her as part of the band but otherwise didn’t concentrate on her, not tonight.

He’d been there before.

She was nice; Wilde had no complaints but tonight his eyes were on the crowd. Somewhere out there was a little beauty he’d never met, an island he’d never been to, a sunrise he’d never seen.

The dance floor was packed.

The bar areas were packed.

The tables were packed.

The night was on.

A woman leaning against the wall caught his eye.

She was by herself.

She was sipping a drink.

She was throwing an occasional glance his way.

She was different. Her skin was tanner and her cheekbones were higher. Her hair was straight instead of curled, raven-black, and long—very long—halfway down her back. She wore a sultry white dress and matching heels. The next time she looked at him, he looked right back.

She didn’t turn away.

Wilde tossed her a smile and then concentrated on the song; a good thing, too, because they were in the final eight bars and bringing it to a stop.

As soon as the break came, he went over.

She was waiting for him.

“Normally I’m a nice guy,” he said. “Tonight I’m a bit of a jerk, so you’ll have to excuse me in advance.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, tapped two out and offered one to her. She took it and he lit her up. “I’ve never seen you around town. You got a name?”

“Sudden.”

“Sudden?”

“Sudden Dance,” she said. “I’m part Navajo. Is that a problem?”

He shook his head.

“Not for me.”

“Good because it is for some.”

“Their loss.”

The woman had liquor in her gut and it showed when she talked.

“Tonight you’re feeding the wolf,” she said. “I don’t mind. I do it too; too much for my own good, if the truth be known.”

Wilde wrinkled his brow.

“I’m not following—”

She took his hand and examined it, then looked into his eyes. “In each of us there’s a wolf and an eagle,” she said. “They’re constantly at battle with each other. The wolf tries to drag you down. The eagle tries to make you soar. In the end only one of them can survive. Do you know which one wins?”

He shook his head.

“The one you feed,” she said.

Wilde smiled.

“I like that,” he said. “The drums, they’re not my fulltime thing. I only do it on a fill-in basis. Nine to five I’m a private investigator. Or to put it a different way, nine to five the eagle is winning. I have a lot of eagle in me, is what I’m saying.”

She wrinkled her brow and studied him in a new light.

“A private investigator?”

“Yes.”

“Are you any good?”

He took a deep drag.

“Why?”

She diverted her eyes.

Wilde put a hand on hers and said, “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get drunk.”

Wilde nodded.

“Sounds reasonable.”

He was addicted.

The woman was nice.

She was better than nice.

At the end of the evening after the final song, the last sips of alcohol slid down drunken mouths and the bodies began to stagger out. In another five minutes the house lights would come on. “I have to help the band break down,” Wilde said. “It’s going to take fifteen or twenty minutes. Will you wait for me?”

“Do you have a car?”

“Yes.”

“Can I sit in it? I need to close my eyes so much—”

“Sure.”

He gave her the key.

“It’s a small green MG with a tan top parked back in the alley. It’s English so the steering wheel’s on the wrong side. Her name’s Blondie.”

She gave him a long, deep kiss and rubbed her stomach on his.

“Don’t be long.”

“I won’t.”

When he came out fifteen minutes later, the car wasn’t there; neither was Sudden Dance. Both were extremely, absolutely gone.

He paced in front of the club, drawing deep on smokes and churning the possibilities.

It was possible that the whole night was nothing more than an elaborate charade to get his keys and steal his car. While theoretically possible, the prospect didn’t resonate down in his gut. It didn’t fit. The more likely scenario was that she decided to head out for cigarettes or something like that and then got disoriented. Or maybe she got in a wreck and then was so scared at what she’d done that she took off. Either that or the trouble she referred to so cryptically earlier in the evening had shown up to get her.

In thirty minutes she still hadn’t returned.

No one was around.

The band was gone.

Everyone from inside the club was gone.

It was two in the morning.

The city was dead.

Wilde’s brain was dead.

His body was lead.

Solitary headlights came up the street.

Wilde walked to the curb and stuck his thumb out.

The headlights slowed and then pulled to a stop.

2

Day Three

August 5, 1952

Monday Morning

Monday morning Wilde took the bus to work and didn’t like a second of it. There he paced in front of the windows with coffee in one hand and a smoke in the other, no longer giving a crap about the car.

Sudden Dance, on the other hand, was a different story.

When he closed his eyes he could smell her neck.

He could feel the smoothness of her skin on his fingertips.

He could feel the anticipation of what was on the verge of happening before it got derailed.

On his desk were several pictures of the woman.

They didn’t come easy.

They came from Bob, The Big Kahuna in Denver who usually developed film for camera clubs, which were hordes of sleazy men who collectively hired a hooker or similar spirit and took naked pictures of her. Saturday night Bob was on assignment at the Bokoray taking promo photos of the band and the establishment. Wilde spent most of the day tracking him down and then hanging out in the man’s tight little darkroom as he developed the prints. There were two rolls total. Sudden Dance showed up in five shots. If trouble had been following her it might have entered the club, so Wilde took a print of every shot, at 10-cents each.

If trouble was there it wasn’t obvious.

He tossed the butt out the window and lit another one.

His office was in the 1500 block of Larimer Street, on the second floor above the Ginn Mill and two doors down from the Gold Nugget Tap Room. Directly outside his building was a water fountain sculpture with cherubs, a throwback to the area’s better days.

The water didn’t run anymore.

Now the bowl collected cigarette wrappers and RC bottles.

Once the retail heart of Denver, now Larimer Street and its backdoor cousin, Market Street, were an unhealthy mixture of liquor stores, bars, gambling houses, brothels and flophouses, occasionally punctuated with the sound of gunfire. If this section of Denver were a smoke it wouldn’t be a Camel or a Marlboro, it would be a cigar—not the worst cigar in the world, not the one that creeps into everything it touches and dies an immediate stinky death, but a cigar nevertheless.

Wilde didn’t care.

He could afford better but liked it there and made no apologies.

His watch said 8:15.

Alabama would be here in 15 minutes.

Suddenly his phone rang. The voice was one he recognized but hadn’t heard in some time. It belonged to a bomber buddy named Crazy Randy, who rode the navigation chair on missions where Wilde worked the guns.

“Do you still own that stupid green car with the steering wheel on the wrong side?”

“Yes.”

“Then how drunk are you getting yourself these days?”

The question related to the fact that the man spotted Blondie on the side of the road twenty miles south of the city. That wasn’t the issue. The car had a flat tire. That wasn’t the issue either. The issue was that the doors were unlocked and the key was in the ignition.

Two minutes later Wilde was in a cab heading south.

Blondie was smack in the middle of nowhere, on a two lane road flanked by telephone wires, awash in an endless expanse of rolling terrain that was choked with high prairie grasses, yucca, rabbit brush, moss rock and scraggly pinions. Ten miles to the west the ground rose into foothills, and beyond that the foothills escalated into mountains. To the east the geography rose and fell like ocean swells all the way to Kansas.

Wilde made sure the spare tire had air in it, and that all the parts for the jack were there and functional, before cutting the cab driver loose.

The air was silent.

High above a hawk circled.

Wilde checked the interior.

At first everything seemed normal. A closer look at the passenger seat showed there had been blood there, lots of blood, since wiped off with a cloth or something but not to the point of perfection. Dried blood was also on the side of the seat, not wiped off—missed. The black floor mats were the most telling of all, filled with pools of liquid now dried to a rusty-brown color.

Wilde’s heart pounded.

He called out, “Sudden Dance!”

No one answered.

He headed into the terrain, hoping beyond hope to not find a body. Thirty steps off the road he found the white dress Sudden Dance had been wearing. It was soaked with blood, now dried but horrific in the sheer volume of it all. Three cuts showed in the stomach area and two more near the heart, the kind you’d expect from a knife.

He swallowed.

“Sudden Dance!”

Something was on the ground next to the dress, something shinny. It was an earring. Wilde recognized it as the one Sudden Dance had been wearing.

“Sudden Dance!”

No one answered.

The body wasn’t in sight.

He walked deeper into the brush, intent on finding it. It didn’t show up, not in five minutes, not in ten, not in fifteen. He searched the other side of the road. It wasn’t there either.

It wasn’t anywhere.

He double-checked, searched a wider area and then triple-checked.

The body wasn’t there.

3

Day Three

August 5, 1952

Monday Afternoon

Back in Denver, Wilde made a report with homicide detective Johnnie Fingers, who listened carefully to everything, tapped a pencil and took no notes. At the end he said, “She was an Indian?”

“Part Indian,” Wilde said. “I don’t know how much.” He slid one of Bob’s pictures across the desk, tapped on the woman’s face and said, “That’s her right there.”

Fingers studied it.

“She looks drunk.”

“Yeah, she was drinking.”

“Did you buy them?”

“The drinks?”

Fingers nodded.

Wilde said, “Some of them.”

Fingers leaned forward. “So what did you think was going to happen, sending a drunk Indian girl into an alley in the middle of the night?”

Wilde stood up.

“See you around.”

“Right,” Fingers said. “See me around. Come back if you ever find a body. Until then we don’t have a homicide.”

Wilde paused at the door.

“He dumped it,” he said.

Fingers showed his impatience.

“You said you looked around.”

“I did,” Wilde said. “Put yourself in his shoes. You got a dead woman in the car and then the car gets a flat. It’s the middle of the night. It’s pitch black out. So what do you do? You drag the body out into the brush in case some good Samaritan comes along to see if he can help. You don’t want him spotting a body and calling the cops.”

“You said you checked.”

“Think about it,” Wilde said. “You come back later and get the body. Then you dump it somewhere else, somewhere it will never be found. With no body there’s no homicide. With no homicide there are no detectives chasing your ass.”

Fingers narrowed his eyes.

He leaned forward.

“You sure got this all figured out,” he said. “Here’s how it looks from my angle. You’re with a woman in a club, buying her drinks and getting all excited about bringing her home and spreading her legs. Is that much true?”

“That’s a crude way to put it.”

“Pa-tay-toe, pa-tah-toe,” Fingers said. “Then the woman’s blood ends up all over inside your car.”

“Right.”

“Obviously something happened.”

“Yeah, someone murdered her.”

“Assume that’s true,” Fingers said. “So far, I don’t see anyone in this picture except you and her.”

Wilde shook his head at the absurdity of the accusation.

“If I did it, why would I be here talking to you?”

Fingers hardened his face.

“It’s called a pre-emptive strike,” he said. “It happens all the time.” A beat then, “Maybe she changed her mind out there in the alley about going home with you. Maybe you two had an argument. Maybe it escalated more than you thought it would. I want to get some pictures of your car. I want the dress and the earring, too.”

“Sure.”

Back at the office Alabama was sitting in Wilde’s chair with her feet propped up, eyeballing a magazine. Wilde tossed his hat at the rack and missed by three feet. Alabama picked it up, walked over to where Wilde was and tossed a ringer.

“Tilt it to the right,” she said. “We’ve been over this.”

He set a book of matches on fire, lit a smoke and then tossed the flames in an ashtray.

Then he told Alabama everything that happened.

“Once I said the word
Indian
it was all over. I may as well have been talking about a mosquito from that point on. Fingers could have cared less about the whole thing until he started to come up with some stupid theory that I was the killer. Then he brightened up.”

Alabama sat on the desk and dangled her feet.

“I don’t get your obsession with this woman,” she said. “It’s pretty obvious she did something to bring all this on. It all came down the night you met her. It was just an hour of bad timing on your part. Move on, that’s my advice. If you’re right and she’s dead, you can’t bring her back anyway.” She tapped a file next to her thigh. “You have paying cases right here. You also have a gorgeous little assistant who needs to be paid and pampered.”

He took a deep drag, blew smoke and gave her one of the photos from the club.

“That’s her,” he said. “She’s from out of town, meaning she was either staying at a hotel or with a friend, and since she was alone, my guess is the former. Find out which one. Get her last name. Find out where she was from. Get everything you can on her.”

“Does this mean you’re not taking my advice?”

He blew her a kiss.

“I’ll take your advice when your advice starts to be that I should drink more.”