Psycho Save Us (35 page)

“Where to?”

“Groomes
Street.  You know it?”

“Yeah.  What’s
there?”

“Pelletier’s phone. 
C’mon, hop in.  They don’t have an exact location on that street, but it
wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and get on our way.  Stone!  Mortimer!  Let’s head
out!”  Mortimer broke quickly from their chat with Gracen and went for the
driver’s seat, and Stone was right behind him.  Agent Porter stepped over to
Grace and said, “Really quickly, Mr. Gracen.  Did you know where the
vory
might have stations or digs in the city?  Any rumors at all?”

Gracen shook his
head.  “Naw, man.  They be around, but not ’zactly all that social, ya feel
me?”

Porter nodded
and said, “Thanks for your time.  Sorry to drag you out here like this for so
little.”

“S’cool, man. 
Peace.”

Porter turned to
the SUV.

Leon gave one
last glance to Gracen, who stood there for a moment, looking the question at
him.  Leon nodded curtly, telling him he’d done well enough, and waved goodbye,
then hopped in the back seat and left Cee-gray alone in Chernobyl.

10

He
used the money he’d taken from the dead thug to buy the bus ticket.  He sat in the
very back near the emergency exit, slumped in his seat so that only his eyes
were visible above the window.

Two seats in
front of him sat a fat black woman in a blue coat, red scarf and red fluffy hat. 
She had a newspaper in her hand.  Three rows up from her and across the aisle,
an elderly black man sat asleep in his seat, pitching forward every so often
and catching himself an instant before he fell to the floor.

Spencer watched
the street signs slide by silently, and knew that his stop was coming up here
pretty soon.  Out his window, he spied a Waffle House.  He was hungry, and
those were always open 24/7.  The bus was now outside of the official
terminator line between the Bluff and places that mattered.  The change was
gradual.  There were still a few stop signs with spray paint on them, but also a
few Laundromats that dared to stay open all night, and less homeless crack
addicts wandering about aimlessly.  A march towards progress and civilization.

For no reason,
Pat and his order for a 2013 Dodge Dart popped to the forefront of Spencer’s
mind.  He’d all but forgotten about the job he was meant to do for his old
friend, and wondered that if he were to finish the task tonight, would Pat
still be friend enough to pay him for it?

When the bus
driver hollered out, “Clover Street!” he got up slowly and waved his hand. 
“That’s me,” Spencer said, yawning and stretching out.  His stomach grumbled. 
He was thinking about that Waffle House back there.

He moved towards
the front of the bus, glancing at the headline of the newspaper the woman was
reading (
Disasters
Continue to Strain FEMA’s Resources
) and
nodded affably to the old man.  When Spencer got to the door, though, he
stopped.  Coming up the steps were two black girls…and for a moment he was
befuddled, because he swore it was the two nigglets from earlier tonight.  “How
did you…?” 
How did you get away?
was what he was going to say, but then
he blinked and the two black girls turned into two
other
black girls,
slightly older than the ones he’d seen abducted and neither one of them dressed
in the blue Jimmy Hendrix shirt.  “How do you do?” he said, recovering and
stepping off.  The girls looked at him queerly, and said nothing.

The street he
was on was quiet, but not quite as empty as those in the Bluff had been.  Instead
of scuttling crackheads on the prowl, there were a few honest citizens out. 
Two women walked side-by-side, and though they weren’t dressed in the nicest of
clothes it was obvious by their gait they weren’t layabout whores who were so
accustomed to street violence that they wished to linger for too long in any
one place.  No, they were girls who knew to get their asses home and to trust
no one and nobody on the way because it might be someone who had escaped from
the Bluff. 

Bluff people
knew each other too well, got too complacent with all the violence going on. 
These women moved with purpose.  They had hopes and dreams, maybe even went to
a community college and held high their aspirations to get even further away
from the Bluff than they already were.

A trio of old
men were stepping out of a car parked along the sidewalk.  The
beep-beep
of the car alarm being switched on wasn’t something you would hear in the
’hood, and neither would you hear their friendly, jocular conversation.  No,
old men in the ’hood spoke quietly, wearily.  These men seemed quite
comfortable here.

Clayton Road was
less than a quarter of a mile up from where he now stood.  A swift jog ought to
get him there in no time.

Spencer moved
out of sight first, lest he be spotted by a random patrol car.  He stepped into
the shadows between a closed gas station and a closed pawn shop.  He hopped a
tall wooden fence and hustled across the back yards of a few duplexes and then
finally came upon Clayton Road, which went downhill for a piece, then
dead-ended at a cul-de-sac.  House number 42 was second from the end on the
left.  It was a white, two-storey home that looked well kept.  Pink flamingoes
in the front yard indicated someone cared enough about the place.  There were
still Christmas lights wrapped around wooden pillars at the front door.  A pair
of wicker rocking chairs and a rustic-looking swing were on the porch.  A
single car was parked in the driveway, a gray 2003 Buick Rendezvous.

There were no
lights on.

Spencer wasted
no time at all.  He walked directly up the porch without stealth.  There was a
doorbell, but ringing it didn’t seem to produce a sound inside so he knocked. 
A few seconds went by.  Nothing.  He knocked again.  Still nothing.  He started
hammering the door with his fist.

A light came on in
a window to his right and someone pushed a curtain to one side.  Spencer held up
the wallet of the unsuspecting well-to-do-looking man in Roswell he’d beaten
down on his drive across the South.  He held it up in an officious, bored
manner, evocative of an officer out responding to something he didn’t wish to
respond to.

The curtain flapped
back, and a second later someone was fumbling with a lock.  The door cracked
open, but what separated him from Tidov was a pair of chains from the door to
the doorframe.  An eye of pale ice stared out at him indifferently.  That’s how
Spencer knew this guy could easily become violent.  Only predators were so
confident that they could be calm when some stranger hammered on their door in
the middle of the night.  “Evans sent me,” he said.

Tidov’s icy eye
looked at him dubiously.  “Evans?” he said, his voice coming from a mouthful of
gravel.

“He’s been
tryin’ to call you.  What’ve you been doing?”

“Sleeping.  You
talking about Eugene?”  He spoke in a Russian accent.  Spencer’s man, no doubt.

“Eugene Evans. 
Yeah.  You know another one?”

Tidov was
unmoved, unintimidated.  “What’s he want?”

“To check up on
you.”

“Why doesn’t he
come himself?”

“You know he’s
got fibromyalgia.  It’s hard for him to get around.  Try an’ be a little more
understanding, okay, Mr. Tidov?”  There passed a few seconds of just two monsters
staring across at one another. 
Come into my parlor
, he thought. 
’Tis
the prettiest little parlor that you ever did spy
.  Only this time, the
spider convinced the fly to invite him into his home.

“What’s your
name?” Tidov asked suspiciously.

“Blake Madison,”
he said.  “Parole Commission, Valdosta branch.”

A moment.  Then,
Tidov slowly shut the door.  A second later he removed the chain, and opened
wide for him, standing to one side.  “His fibromyalgia, huh?  Told his dumb ass
to try that tramadol stuff, but he wouldn’t listen to me.”  Spencer stepped
inside, as confidently as he would if he’d performed random house inspections
like any other parole officer.  He was mimicking the same air as the guards in
cellhouse A had carried themselves with when they performed their random
inspections on his and Martin’s bunk.  “But Evans is into that holistic shit.”

Spencer knew
when he was being tested.  Even if he wasn’t, he wasn’t about to walk blindly
into a verbal trap.  “I wouldn’t know,” he said.  “I barely know the old fuck. 
I just got assigned to help take over his cases when he had to go to the
hospital.  He was ranting and raving over the phone, talkin’ about how modern
medicine still won’t consider it a genuine disorder.  They think it’s all in
people’s heads.”  Spencer recalled that much from an article in
Time
magazine that he’d read back in prison.  Funny what the brain conjured up when
under stress.  He’d learned to accept these little details and add them to his
vocabulary and discussions; peppering them throughout his everyday speech made
many people think he was smarter than he actually was, and afforded him all sorts
of unearned respect.

The door shut
behind him.  Spencer kept his hands in his pockets and turned to face Yevgeny
Tidov.  He was tall and built.  Doubtless he went to the gym.  He had a scar
like a rope burn across his neck.  He wore no shirt, and up and down his body
was an array of tattoos, intricately woven together.  A sunburst at the center
of his chest was the nucleus of it all, and from it rose wild animals charging
toward the viewer.  Spencer checked his right arm.  There it was.  The crimson
bear.  Only this wasn’t the same man he’d seen earlier, not the one staring out
at him from the Expedition challengingly. 
I’ll bet he knows where to find
him, though
.

“Anybody else
home?” Spencer asked.

“My sister and
her boyfriend are upstairs,” said Tidov.

A lie
.  Spencer
didn’t know how he knew these things, but he did.  The eyes flitted in certain
directions, there was a pause that was just too long before his answer, a skip
in the beat of conversation that didn’t keep the natural flow.  It had been
conjured up out of nowhere and fast.  But Tidov knew on some level that this
was a dance.  He knew something wasn’t right, he just didn’t know what. 
We’re
the same
. 
I’ve just been at it longer, I’m more aware of what I am
. 
What we are
.

“You want a
fucking drink while you look around?” Tidov said, moving past him. 

Spencer touched
the Glock Pocket 10 in his hoodie pocket, squeezed the grip, and said, “I’m not
supposed to drink while on the job.”

“Not even
coffee?”

“Oh, well,
now
you’re talkin’,” he chuckled, and followed Tidov into the kitchen.  While the
Russian pulled out the coffee grinds, Spencer opened a couple of drawers, pretended
to look over them.  He went to a sliding glass door, which looked out onto a
back yard with two hammocks strung up between a few pines.  “Mind if I check
upstairs?” Spencer said.  “Tell me which room your sister and her boyfriend are
in, so I can avoid waking them.”

Tidov glanced
over his shoulder.  He opened a few cabinets, looking for the coffee cups.  “Well,
you probably already woke them,” he said, still playing the game.  “But it’s
the first door on the right.  Please don’t disturb them.”

“Not to worry. 
Just gotta check the usual places.  Bathrooms, showers, toilets, under the
sink, shit like that.”

“Evans never
does this.”  Tidov took out an old filter from his coffeemaker and installed a
new one.  “I’ve kept very clean.  I didn’t go to prison for drugs or for hiding
any drug money, so he leaves my house alone.”

“Every parole
officer is different, you know,” he said, shrugging and stepping out of the
kitchen.  “There are tender-asses and there are hard-asses.  Guess which one I
am.”  He smirked and walked upstairs, leaving Tidov to his umbrage and coffeemaker.

At the top of
the stairs was a pile of clothes stacked beside a hamper, which was
overflowing.  He parted two wooden sliding doors and surveyed the washing
nook.  The washer and dryer were both relatively new.  He opened each one, both
full, one of whites the other of colors.  He passed the first door on the
right.  As he went by, though, he knocked, and got no answer.  He briefly
tested the doorknob.  Locked.

Farther down the
hall was a closet, used for nothing but cardboard box storage.  There were old
Ajax boxes and Sears boxes.  Spencer pulled one out, opened it, and found
several unopened rolls of duct table.  Another box contained rubber tubing. 
Another one had pieces to an old Dark Angel paintball gun.

He put the boxes
back and walked to the end of the hall, to the bedroom he presumed to be where
he’d woken the Russian from his sleep.  A small lamp was on, suffusing the
walls in a dim orange light.  A tangle of sheets was half on the bed, half on
the floor; the cocoon he’d shed on his way downstairs.

“You like yours
strong, Mr. Madison?” Tidov called from the kitchen.