Holy Death (8 page)

Fuck it. She’d wait until Loretta was on shift to take it down herself. If she’d given it back to this one, the damned thing might’ve ended up in Mexico. She tucked it under her arm and headed off to get her nightly dose of compliments and innuendo.

*

P
eople tended to overlook delivery men. It didn’t matter if the uniform said UPS or Muscle Max. Didn’t matter how secure the unit was supposed to be. Lafitte was a delivery man with a padded envelope. Another thing about delivery men. Everyone assumed someone else had already cleared them. Otherwise, why would they be in the building at all?

Especially a sweaty, stinking man covered in road dust. Of course someone had let him in. Ah, the working class. The doctor in the elevator with Lafitte, a resident in scrubs, glanced over from his phone for only a couple of seconds, probably looking forward to the day when he felt less like the delivery man and more like his bosses.

It was probably a good thing Lafitte had passed off the envelope to the nurse already. She wouldn’t expect to see him again. He had waited until he saw his ex-mother-in-law leave the building. He had figured out Ginny’s almost-daily routine weeks ago—a few phone calls, a few lies. That was all it took. People wanted to tell you things they shouldn’t. People
loved
to. They really did. They believed any story you told them. And in case someone did, hang up on them, then call back later when someone else was working.

The letters helped, too. Those fucking letters she sent him.

In fact, it was very likely the nurse he had passed the envelope along to was the one who had told him about Ginny’s day-to-day life, mostly so she could have someone to vent about Mrs. Hoeck to. The nurse’s name was probably Tabitha. Or Loretta. One of those.

Billy Lafitte had laughed and told her, whichever one it was, “I know. I’ve met her, too.”

Ginny hadn’t haunted his dreams in a long time. He hadn’t seen a picture of her in, fuck, six, seven years? He hoped she was as mute as they said so she wouldn’t scream. Would she even recognize him?

This was the door, open barely a smidge. Only the dimmest light coming from behind it. He looked left, right, and stepped inside, starting his mental stopwatch. Someone would notice. He didn’t have long. The room was lit only by a nightlight, and the shades kept out most of the sun. Lafitte searched quickly, found the camera, and did his damnedest to keep out of its sight. He pulled out the bottle of spray paint he’d picked up at a store along the interstate, hopped up in front of the plastic square high on the wall, and sprayed once. Another hop, sprayed twice. Enough to block out the camera.

Only then did he dare turn around.

Ginny was sitting in her chair, a slightly pouting sort of look. Her frizzy dark hair was much shorter, peppered with too much gray. Her face was lined and pale and tired. She was sad, sunken, and, in his eyes, beautiful. “Billy Lafitte, you’re very, very late.”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve been waiting, you know.”

He started towards her, some of her letters crumpled in his hand. He fell to his knees and buried his head in her lap, shaking violently to hold back tears. She took off his cap and stroked his hair.

“I’ve been waiting a long time.”

––––––––

T
he tiny bar was in a tiny restaurant in Beaver Bay, Minnesota. It was a two-story prefab building, a vinyl-sided block with three shops. The restaurant had a small sign above the door announcing “Lemon Wolf Café”, flanked with two carved wood sculptures—one bear, one wolf. Across the highway was Lake Superior, right behind a couple of “antique” (junk) shops and the town post office. He liked it here because it was quiet, only three chairs at the bar, no one bothering him, and instead of a bartender, one of the waitresses would stop and refill his shot glass with bourbon, hand him a new bottle of beer, one of those small-craft IPAs that tasted so bad it was hard to get drunk on them.

But Franklin Rome drank it anyway, each bottle tasting better than the last. He’d usually eat the restaurant’s catch of the day—Lake Trout, most of the time—after downing eight, nine, shots, and five, six beers. He got quiet when he was drunk. Not melancholy. No, melancholy was every day. “Quiet” meant “barely functional”.

Most of the time, he was the only black person around for at least a good square mile, he thought. Sometimes the only person of color, period, including Indians. He’d been up here on the North Shore since after the jailbreak, after Colleen had fucked up so bad at the prison. She had been good to her word, though, and left him out of it. Some agents had come to talk with him in Minneapolis, and he had lied his ass off about the price on Lafitte’s head, Colleen’s part in all this, and the eighteen grand up for bounty. As soon as he’d heard about the jailbreak, he got online and scattered the money all over, ten times over. Stock trades and PayPal and offshore internet gambling accounts and more. Shit, the original account wasn’t even in his name. He’d found it going through his wife’s papers, a small savings account in her maiden name she must’ve opened as a child or teenager, but which had been forgotten along the way. Happened all the time. Grandparents put a hundred bucks into it and then ten years later, everyone has moved on. Out of sight, out of mind.

So he scattered the money, lied to the Feds, and quietly retired—although he’d pretty much been out of service for three years already, acting as a “paid consultant”. In the end, he had to leave Colleen twisting in the wind. He’d told her if it all went bad, he would do what he could for her. But in the end, it came down to nothing. He had no pull, no weight, and honestly, he didn’t give enough of a shit about what happened to her to even try.

Eight years in prison. She had a chance at parole in a few. If she got it, Rome would be ready for her. Plenty of guns in his cabin. Maybe the HIV she’d caught from the gangsta would kill her first.

The white ladies who ran Lemon Wolf were polite enough to Rome. He’d been coming here for about four months. They had never gotten past small talk with him, though. In fact, he was pretty sure they didn’t know his name. He wasn’t sure he’d ever told them. It was a place to drink that wasn’t his cabin. Some food that wasn’t from a microwave. It wasn’t the sports bar up the hill from his cabin, a bar full of “bros”, white ones, and their bitches and a bunch of noise. Occasionally, retired white people staying at the lodge next door would wander into the sports bar, too, and listening to their conversations drove Rome up the wall—boring talk about boring things from boring people. None of them were ever rude to him, not directly, but no one ever tried to really talk to him.

He didn’t blame them.

*

W
hen the Lemon Wolf was ready to shut down for the evening, he stood from his seat at the bar and waited for the world to stop spinning. It took a couple minutes, always did. The ladies always told him “Good night.” They never asked if they could call him a cab—if there even were cabs in Beaver Bay—or get him a ride, even though he was obviously extremely inebriated. Perhaps they wished he would glide gracefully off Highway 61 into the depths of Superior, never to be heard from again. Not one worry in the world about the money they would lose—he was drinking a bottle of their bourbon per week alongside countless craft beers at a steep mark-up, especially in the off-season—as long as the lonely black gentleman no longer haunted their small café night after night.

Once he felt up to walking, hands still braced on the short wood bar that looked as if it was made by one of the lady’s husbands in a garage, he fought down a burp and, as usual, gave the place one last look. In between tables were wooden dividers, each hung with local art for sale. None of it was much good. Lots of owls and bears and shit. But he liked the colors. He liked that someone was
trying
, for fuck’s sake.

Out the door, a little stumble here, there, until his hands were on the hood of his Jeep Grand Cherokee. A lease. He kept hoping to hit a deer with it, but he hadn’t been so lucky yet. The next burp, he lost the fight. It came up loud and full of acid and he hated himself. This was his life now. His wife, Desiree, dead by Lafitte’s gun. His attempt at revenge, all fucked to hell and back. He had now made a new enemy in Colleen, who had been his closest ally in hating Lafitte. Whatever power he had as an FBI agent had evaporated, all favors revoked. No friends left, almost. The few who remained, he’d pushed away. No one had his new cell phone number. No one knew where his cabin was. No one.

Or so he had thought, because as he somehow made it the couple miles back to his cabin, easing down the hill, ready to accelerate if a goddamned buck wanted to step up to the challenge, he found a car parked out front. A Chevy Malibu. Sitting on the trunk, an old friend. Wyatt had risen higher in the ranks of the State Police to Captain, but tonight he was just an older man in jeans and a plaid short-sleeved button-up. Rome didn’t want to see him, since, you know, he couldn’t think of Wyatt without thinking of what happened to Desiree in that hotel stairwell.

Rome parked beside the Chevy, got out, shook Wyatt’s hand, hugged him. “You found me.”

“You made it easy.”

“I didn’t mean to. Come on in.”

They went inside the cabin, which was pretty ritzy by cabin-standards. Seriously, Rome had sold almost everything that was worth anything to make sure he had enough for this place—three hundred thousand and change—and a modest retirement account for booze and microwave dinners, newspapers and wi-fi, a lease on a Jeep Grand Cherokee he hoped might one day be the end of him.

Cozy, faux-wood cabin styling, one big living area, a bar separating it from the kitchenette, a loft for his bed, and a Jacuzzi tub in the far corner. Windows all around, a to-die-for view of the lake. The lake was Plan B if he never hit a buck. He hadn’t quite decided between drowning out there sometime this coming fall, right before it turned to ice, or simply drifting off to eternal sleep after a handful of pills, a bottle of Four Roses, and a recording of Desiree’s voice playing in the background, those voicemails he kept and listened to in the late hours almost every night.

Rome offered Wyatt a beer, but the trooper turned it down, said, “A bottle of water?”

“I don’t do bottles of water. Tap?”

“That’s okay.”

Rome sighed, filled a glass with water, no ice, and brought it over. He led the way to the leather couch and armchair, flicked on the lamp, very soft light. He took the chair, and Wyatt eased onto the couch.

“Nice place.”

“The last one I’ll ever own.”

“You’re too young to think like this, you know. Hell, even I’m too young to think that way.”

Rome grinned. “You know what I mean.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

“You here for an intervention? You by yourself?”

Wyatt took a sip of water, looked around for a coaster. Since there weren’t any, he held his glass on his knee. “I probably shouldn’t have come. I mean—”

“But now you’ve come, so get on with it. I promise, I’ll listen politely.”

“You don’t get it. I come bearing gifts.”

“Of gab?”

Wyatt leaned forward, reached for his back pocket and pulled out a block of folded papers, tossed them on the end table on top of all the water rings from Rome’s whiskey glasses. Son of a bitch could’ve set down his glass at any time if he’d been paying attention. Bugged the shit out of Rome. But he kept his tongue still and picked up the papers, unfolded them. They were printouts of digital photos, terrible quality. But they didn’t need to be great to capture the images of a bathroom wall, three-foot tall letters smeared onto it, shouting WELCOME HOME LAFITTE.

“Well, fuck me. Is that shit?”

“Yessir. Written in shit. Yes indeed. This one was going around Instagram last night, and it got flagged by my Google search for Lafitte. Hattiesburg, Mississippi truck-stop. Some truckers took pics on their phones and posted them. But keep going.”

A photo of Lafitte in a delivery truck. Sure as shit it was him.

Next one, Lafitte delivering boxes marked MUSCLE MAX to a strip-mall store.

Another. Another.

The alcohol in Rome’s blood swirled down an imaginary drain. “What the goddamn—”

“That’s him, ain’t it?”

“That’s him.” Rome flipped back to the first one, the shit letter. “Someone thinks they’ve got a line on him, someone from his past, or they wouldn’t be bothering.”

Wyatt nodded. “I’ve heard some stories this past week, some sightings. This last one, the shit-writing, was a surprise.”

Rome sat back in the chair. Tension, released. He took a deep breath.

Wyatt said, “You’re dying to know.”

“I am.”

“No, they haven’t got him yet.”

Rome rubbed his hand across his mouth, his stubble, his chin. “But he’s there. Holy shit, he’s there. Motherfucker.”

“So, should we call? Give the police a heads up?”

Rome cut his eyes at Wyatt. “Shit.”

“I’m just saying, we’re kind of far away, you know.”

Rome looked at his watch. “When’s the next flight to Mobile?”

“I thought you might want to know. Out of Minneapolis, six in the morning.”

Rome rolled his head on the back of the chair. “I wish I could still fly whenever I wanted.”

“So, what did you think of my intervention?”

“You’re coming with me, right?”

A nod. “Told my wife I need about five days. Fishing trip. But the moment it starts to look dangerous, we call for back-up. Agreed?”

“Goddamn. I mean,
goddamn
.” Rome started laughing. “Nobody ever said he was smart. Lucky, but never smart.”

“Let’s get moving. Two hours back to the Cities, some time to get you coffeed up, couple of tacos in you. Not sure what we’ll do for sidearms yet, but I’ll make some calls.”

It sounded too good to be true. Convenient, too. Now? As Rome had settled on fading away? As soon as he had decided to let down the guard in his head? The one chanting,
Avoid drinking and driving. Avoid solo walks along the shore. Avoid hitting deer with your car.