Suitcase City (15 page)

Dean watched him. Everything was different. This was no little girl. There was plenty left for Teach to protect and guide, but there was something else now. Something wise and, yes, by God, a little cunning.

She said, “You’re going out there, aren’t you, Daddy.” It wasn’t a question.

“Oh yes,” said Teach, “I’m going out there.”

She got up a little wearily, lifted herself from the sofa like a grown woman finishing a long, hard day. She walked over to the credenza where she had stood moments ago looking at her father’s mementos. She knelt and opened the cabinet, reached into it, and took out a bourbon bottle. She held it up by the neck with two fingers like it was a decomposing fish, turned to him, and shook her head. She reached into the cabinet again, rising with Teach’s Minolta in her hand. She walked over and put the camera on the desk in front of him. “Take this with you.”

Teach looked at the camera, then at his daughter, a grin shaping his lips. “You mean tonight? They’ll be there tonight?”

“That’s what Tawnya said.”

“Come here, baby.”

Dean stepped into his arms and he held her like some Crusoe coming in to land.

SEVENTEEN

Twice, Teach had driven past the group of teenagers gathered around a circle of cars on the Gandy Causeway. There was no bonfire tonight, just the light from the poles along the four-lane, the headlights of passing cars, not so many this late at night, and a glow in the west from the grandstand of the Derby Lane greyhound racetrack. Overhead, a half-moon dodged the storm clouds riding a fresh wind up the bay. On his third pass, Teach saw the spot, behind an abandoned radio station, where he would park the Buick.

Wearing Levi’s and a black shirt, he got out of the car with the Minolta and stood at the water’s edge, looking north toward the lights on the Courtney Campbell Causeway, torturing himself with possibilities. What if a cruising cop saw the Buick, the guy thinking Teach was breaking into the abandoned radio station or dumping a body in Tampa Bay (a thing done with depressing regularity lately)? What if one of the kids two hundred yards back up the road recognized him? Was he risking more by doing this than he stood to gain?

Shit
, he thought,
stop it. You’ve got to do this.

He started back up the causeway, slipping between the mangroves and the surf. It was slow going in the muck, and there were stretches where Teach sank ankle-deep, releasing a reeking marsh gas. He had walked for ten minutes when he heard the murmur of voices and music rising and fading on the night wind. He saw a pathway through the clotted roots of the mangroves and started up the gentle slope, feeling the sand grow firm under his feet.

Sweating, he had stopped to free the camera strap from a branch when he heard, close by, “What’s that?” The whisper was young and female, frightened and urgent. Teach sank to his knees, making his profile small against the lights on the Courtney Campbell five miles north.

A second voice, a boy’s, said, “I don’t know. Maybe a raccoon. They got a lot of ’em out here, but hey . . . they’re harmless.”

A rustling sound, then the boy pleading, “Hey, come on. Don’t put those back on.”

The girl: “I don’t like this. There’s something out there. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here anyway.”

“Well, if
that’s
the way you feel about it.”

The two rose only thirty feet in front of Teach, slim, pale shapes against a dark background. The girl slid her pants up her bare legs, disappearing from the waist down. She put on a shirt and was completely gone.

The boy stood naked in front of her, pale legs and a torso. “Come on, Jenny,” he pleaded. “It wasn’t nothing. Don’t be like that.”

The girl’s voice was hoarse with fear: “I heard something, Earl. Stay if you want, but I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

Teach knelt, rigid, his breathing measured. The boy flung his white arms in a violent shrug, grunting as he put on his clothes. Then he lifted a blanket from the sand and followed the girl.

Lord,
Teach thought,
it takes a powerful, skinny need to make love in the mangroves at night. Such is youth.

He followed the lovers’ footprints up a winding path to a spot where he could watch the midnight gathering of outlaw teenagers.

There were about twenty of them, and about half as many cars. The cars were mostly new, and many were upmarket rides. He counted two BMWs, a Benz, and a big Range Rover. In groups, the kids drank beer and talked. Couples embraced leaning against cars, or in backseats. Radios and tape decks played what was to Teach’s ears a hellish mixture of noise and garble. The words were a philosophy of loneliness, breaking things, and
want you, baby, baby, baby.

Though a three-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens, Teach found Tyrone Battles surrounded by friends, white and black, most of them half his size. Teach would have to get closer. He would have to sprint from the mangroves to the nearest vacant car. It would take luck to cross thirty yards of open sand without being seen. He was about to try it when the white Bronco arrived.

The night warriors turned to watch the Bronco roll to a stop near the group where Tyrone Battles held sway. The football player separated from his fans and sauntered over, leaning into the window. Teach aimed the Minolta and fired. He did not know what he could get at this distance, in this light, but something told him he’d need coverage, a complete picture.

He ran to the closest empty car and crouched behind it. The Bronco pulled away, heading back up the causeway toward Tampa. Teach dodged to another car and then to another only twenty-five yards from where Tyrone Battles stood surrounded by young people. The kids wore slashed jeans and Doc Martens and T-shirts emblazoned with logos of bands. Beers or wine coolers hung from their fingers. They were all well on their way to falling-down drunk.

As Teach watched through the lens, Tyrone Battles produced an object from his pocket and moved it to his lips. He raised his other hand and Teach saw the sudden flame of a lighter sucked into the bowl of a glass crack pipe, saw Tyrone’s cheeks swell, his face go rigid as he held the hot smoke in for all of its power. Then he lowered the pipe and blew a long gray stream into the night air, following it with a sigh and a shout. “Man, what a brainfuck!” He surveyed the group. “Who’s next, man? Step right up here.”

Two of the kids staggered away from the group. One knelt to vomit not far from Teach. A girl—by her voice, Teach thought she might be the one whose tryst he had spoiled in the mangroves—said, “Not me, dude. That shit’ll kill you.”

Tyrone laughed. “Chickenshit white bitch. It ain’t killing me.”

A skinny, bare-chested white boy with long, matted dreadlocks stepped forward, scratching his upper arm. “Lemme try a hit, man.”

Tyrone shoved his hand into his pocket, lurching from the power of the drug, and pulled out another rock. He unwrapped it, tinfoil glinting. He held the pipe to the boy’s lips and lit the rock. The butane flame danced as the boy dragged on the pipe. Teach clicked the Minolta’s shutter. Tyrone turned away from the boy and looked with deadened eyes at the spot where Teach crouched, then wandered off toward the mangroves. “Pay me later, man,” he said. “Right now, I got to enjoy my ride.”

Teach kept firing the shutter until the tall football star was gone, staggering among the branches. Then he moved away from the Tyrone circle and shot the other groups, shot all the cars, shot their license tags.

Ten minutes later, sweating and filthy, Teach retraced his steps up the muddy shoreline to his car.

EIGHTEEN

Teach stood in the vestibule of Thurman Battles’s office for the second time in as many days. When he told the pretty woman with the long red fingernails he wanted to see Mr. Battles, her mask of cool professionalism slipped. What was the crazy white man doing back here? Hadn’t the first visit hurt him enough?

She told Teach that Mr. Battles had a full morning calendar. She doubted that she could work him in, but she would speak with his secretary. He could have a seat.

Teach kept standing. “I have to see Mr. Battles right away.” The woman gave him a look of suspicion (would he slip the paperweight from her desk into his pocket while she was gone?) and walked through the door to deliver his message. Teach moved to the wall of Battles’s framed accomplishments and opened the manila envelope.

In the little dark room he had built for himself at the back of the garage, he had developed the photos the same night he’d taken them. They had turned out well. The best one, and Teach’s best hope for a return to the life he had lived before meeting Tyrone Battles in a men’s room, showed the football player sucking flame into the bowl of the crack pipe.

By lucky accident, the boy’s head was framed in a corona of light from a streetlamp a hundred yards away. The look on Tyrone’s face was priceless. His eyes were closed, his cheeks were hollowed as he sucked the smoke, and his head was thrown back in chemical beatification. His religion was rock cocaine, and its message turned a web of nerves into an incandescent lamp. It was, apparently, a rush more powerful than anything a boy could get toting a pigskin into the end zone.

Teach put the photo back into the envelope with the others he had chosen—Tyrone holding the pipe to the lips of the skinny, bare-chested white boy, lighting it, holding the flame to the rock.

The young woman returned with a disappointed expression on her face. The door opened behind her. Thurman Battles’s secretary stood in the doorway. She was a woman of bearing and dignity who, in a better world, Teach thought, would have been a lawyer herself. She said, “Mr. Teach,” and stepped aside, holding the door open for him.

Teach walked into the hallway lined with charcoal sketches of racehorses. He was moving toward Battles’s office when the woman put a hand gently on his arm. “Mr. Battles asked me to tell you he can’t see you. He said to remind you of his advice.” She smiled sadly and looked a question at him.

Teach said, “I remember his advice.” He was touched by this. She had taken him inside. She had chosen not to banish him in front of her younger colleague. Teach handed her the envelope. “Please give this to Mr. Battles . . . and tell him I’m waiting.”

The woman took the envelope and examined his face with confused, careful eyes. Was she dealing with some kind of lunatic? Was this a letter bomb? Was it a bribe, some pathetic flailing by a man about to sink into a maelstrom of legal catastrophe? She said, finally, “All right, Mr. Teach. I’ll give it to him, but . . . as I told you, he’s very busy.”

Teach waited until she turned and took a step before he said, “Should I wait here or return to the outer room?”

The woman stopped, turned back, smiled. “Please wait here, Mr. Teach. I’m sure this won’t take long.”

He had examined two of the charcoal studies, a mare grazing under a willow tree with her foal, and a stallion extending his head across a fence toward a woman standing beside an open roadster, when Battles’s secretary returned. “Please follow me,” was all she said. Her face gave nothing away. Teach guessed she knew only that something unusual was afoot. Good. The next few minutes had to be handled with the greatest care, and the fewer people who knew about it, the better.

When Teach entered and quietly closed the door, Battles was seated, his head bowed over the photos spread across the desk. His elbows rested on the blotter and his slender hands were clasped in front of him. Teach took the chair in front of the desk. The curtains were closed; today there would be no vista of Tampa Bay. This was a dark room meeting. When Battles looked up, he made no attempt to hide his disgust. “So, Mr. Teach, you turn out to be a blackmailer.”

Teach had anticipated this, had thought long and carefully about what to say. “No, Mr. Battles, I am not. I’m a man who wants you to know that your nephew, a boy you seem to care a great deal about, is in a lot of trouble. He’s a boy with enormous potential. You yourself pointed that out to me. He’s throwing his life away on crack cocaine.” Teach stopped for a breath, aware that his words sounded memorized. They were. He wouldn’t apologize for that. Yesterday, he had sat here in silent, terrified humility while Thurman Battles had delivered his own speech.

Teach went on: “I see myself as a man who is offering you an opportunity that I, as a father, would want for my daughter if she were in such a situation. I’m offering you a chance to intervene in this boy’s life before it’s too late. To handle this quietly before it breaks into the open. A chance to get him back on the path that people who know him, except of course the kids he does drugs with, believe he’s on. I think I’m offering you the boy’s life, his future, Mr. Battles. I think I’m making amends for what I did to the boy. I hurt him, I split open his cheek and gave him a scar he’ll have for the rest of his life, and I’m sorry for that. But now I’m giving the boy and you something much bigger than that, a chance to heal this wound of drugs. You and I both know it’s a wound that can kill.

“You wanted me to be a symbol of white racism, and you wanted to punish that symbol. You wanted to use Tyrone as a symbol of—to use your phrase—
the young black man crying out for justice.
Well, neither of us is a symbol. I’m a man, and Tyrone is a boy, and we’ve both made mistakes. I thought he had a knife, and he didn’t. He’s a good football player and a good student and he’s using crack. I think you should put your love for a boy above your need for a symbol and get on with the business of saving his life. You’ve got the money to put him in treatment if that’s what he needs. Spend your money and your time on that rather than on ruining me.”

Teach considered saying that this was his advice to Battles, remembering how ready the man had been to give advice to him, but he kept this inside. Let him draw the inference if he would.

Battles started to speak but Teach allowed himself the same gesture Battles had used in this office the day before. He held up his hand and stopped the man’s words. “You’re about to ask me what I want in return. Well, I’ve already told you I’m making amends for what I did. That’s something I want. You can believe me or not about that, Mr. Battles. I suspect you’ll think my talking about making amends is a load of crap. You’re entitled to your opinion. But I want this on the record. I want to be a good man, just like you do, and I want to live in a good world, and I think what I’m doing here can make good things happen. It can make my daughter able to continue living without all the hell you planned to bring down on our heads. It can make Tyrone a better boy and maybe someday a better man. All you have to do for me is drop this lawsuit. And I think you can find a way to do it without hurting anyone.”