I stood in the diamond-bright sun and pondered my choices. I might tour the Hemingway house, but I’d done so twice before and exited discouraged. Though the home had been the residence of one of the most influential writers in American history, it seemed the bulk of the visitors were mostly interested in the six-toed cats.
The raucous Duval Street was a few blocks distant and I might grab a beer in one of the bars, but this time of day Duval would be dense with milling clots of tourists released from the cruise ships like camera-strung cattle. I turned to study the imposing home, noting its address on the brass mailbox: three numbers and a street name.
They were all I needed to discover what name Jeremy was using.
I drove to the police station, hoping Lieutenant King Barlow was working. It turned out that King was not only on duty, he was in the station house, all six-nine, one-hundred-eighty pounds of him.
He brought me to his office, a small room beside the squad room, and I stood while he sat and towered over his desk. After a couple minutes of small talk, I got to the point.
“Are the recent real-estate transactions easily accessible, King?”
He held his index finger above his keyboard. “Tap tap. You want me to check something for you?”
I made a deal of looking outside the door, then closing it. “It’s, uh, one of these things that’s still in the early phases, King, if you get my drift. Hush-hush.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Drugs? Or more human trafficking?”
“Can’t say yet. If anything comes of it, you guys will get a piece.”
He grinned. “Hey … we’re still wearing laurels from last year.”
Ten months back I’d handled a human-trafficking case that ended up in Key West. Though King and his people had a small walk-on near the finale, at press conferences Roy McDermott insinuated a supporting role. Many law enforcement entities seized any opportunity to grab headlines, often at the expense of other agencies, but Roy spread the accolades around, thinking it bread on the waters, returned multifold.
Like right now. King pecked at the keys, stood, offered me his chair. “I’ll grab a coffee. Take it away, my man, and happy hunting.”
I entered the address of Jeremy’s home. It would provide the name my brother had used to purchase the property, assuming it wasn’t one of his corporations, dummy and otherwise, like C&A Associates, the one holding the mortgage on my home.
A screen came up with the addresses in sequence. I ran my finger down the list until coming to Jeremy’s house number. He hadn’t used a corporation to buy the house; it was a private transaction.
He had used his new name.
I stared in disbelief. My mouth was probably drooping open.
This was the way it was meant to be …
Debro withdrew from the body beneath him, his breath ragged with exertion and climax, sweat dripping from his brow on to the suck bruises on Billy Prestwick’s neck.
Just me and him. One of them at a time … It was the way.
This way was more intimate. More care could be given to their punishment. He still held their words, looks, dirty smiles in his memory – in his very heart – after all these years. But here he’d been putting them back into their lives unscathed. He’d allowed the kindness of his nature to deprive himself of his true due. This, finally, was the real deal: Justice. It was a pity he’d not realized it when he had the simpering, nasty Brianna or pretty-boy Kemp. Brianna liked to banter with the audience, then turn it into mean barbs. He should have driven sharpened pencils into her ears.
Try to hear what we’re saying now, bitch.
And Kemp? The blond slut sold something to doctors. After finding him – not hard, he remembered his name and it was in the directory – he’d followed Kemp locally for several days, watching him park his shiny silver Camry outside physicians’ offices and medical clinics, pull a big rolling bag from the trunk, and scamper inside for an average of fifty-three minutes. What was a salesman but a talking machine?
It should have meant another tongue gone … just like that.
Debro toweled sweat from his face and chest and went into the anteroom. Locking the door, he studied Billy Prestwick through the window: naked, his small hard buttocks gleaming with lubricant and semen. His eyes were wide open and his mouth opened and closed slowly, a line of spittle running from his chin to the floor. Even in his sloppiness, he was beautiful.
Prestwick’s skin was like fine china, Debro thought, almost glowing. His silver hair was a glorious mop. His slender back was red and chafed from Debro’s half-hour ride, but otherwise unmarked. It would remain so … the Gemini Project officially abandoned. Gary was no longer allowed to share. But Donnie had done his part.
Which meant Debro was alone. Or soon to be.
The way it was meant to happen.
I walked the area around the cop house for twenty minutes, trying to make sense of my finding. To purchase the house, Jeremy would have had to create the kind of identity echoed in a multitude of government offices, meaning that cross-checking would create confirmation and not questions.
It was a monumental undertaking, much riskier now than two decades back, when I’d crossed from one life into another, though Jeremy’s money might make it less reliant on paperwork trickery and more on well-placed bribes.
Still … why that name?
When ninety minutes had elapsed I returned to Jeremy’s house, surprised to find a large orange van out front, the lettering saying Island Electronics. In front of the van were two green pickup trucks with covered beds, the logo stating Fioptics Ltd. Across the street was a panel van from Harrow & Son, General Contractors. A short man in a blue uniform closed the back door of the orange van and strode toward the house with a coil of wire over his shoulder and a toolbox in his hand.
I heard hammering from inside, took the front steps three at a time and entered without knocking. The sound of sawing was added to the hammering and I saw two men cutting a section of wall from Jeremy’s kitchen. He was standing behind them, talking to a third man.
I pointed upstairs. “Can we go up to your office and talk?”
“We can go to my office.”
Climbing the steps I saw a woman in the rear room assembling an electronic console. The home held the sudden industry of a beehive. We entered my brother’s office and I saw the man who had carried the wire from the van. He was drilling a hole in the floor near the wall as a young woman wearing protective glasses looked on. Both wore Island Electronics uniforms.
“We need to talk,” I whispered to my brother.
“By all means, Carson, talk.”
“Not here, dammit. The bedroom.”
He shrugged and we backed into the hall and stepped into the empty bedroom. Or almost empty, another of the electronics crew pulling away floorboard with a pry-bar.
“I’m updating the security system,” Jeremy said. “And adding high-speed fiber optics. Putting new arteries in an old body, so to speak. Plus upgrading the smoke and carbon monoxide alarms. I want it all completed soon … my girlfriend has furniture deliveries scheduled.”
“Where can we go to speak?” I said, feeling my jaw clenching.
“About the cases?” He sighed. “With all this clamor I haven’t been able to get to it today, Carson. I’ll call in a day or two.”
I willed my hands from his neck. All of this work had been scheduled and from the git-go my brother had no intention of reviewing the cases today. I could have e-mailed the materials. But that wouldn’t have let him jerk me around in person.
“Screw the cases, Jeremy,” I hissed. “I need to talk about something else.”
“I’ve really got to stay here, Carson. I want to make sure everything’s done to a T.”
The bathroom was across the hall and when the workers looked away I yanked him across the hall and into the bathroom, closing the door behind us.
“You can’t use the facilities on your own, Carson?” he grinned. “Is it ageing? Your prostate?”
“I know you know I know your name,” I said. “You know I know that, right?”
My brother held the grin, not needing to unravel all the knows. “You’re so predictable, Carson. How are things at police headquart—”
“Tell me your name,” I interrupted. “I want to hear you say it aloud. Just so I know I’m not dreaming.”
He paused, eyes sparkling, savoring the moment.
“Jeremy Ryder.”
“Why that name?” I said. “WHY?”
“Shhhh,” he said, lowering the lid on the toilet. “Have a seat, Carson.”
My legs were wobbly with everything that had unfolded in the past two hours: his magnificent house, his artwork, his original given name combined with my concocted surname. I sat. Jeremy leaned against the wall beside the long vanity and crossed his arms, a picture of elegance.
“Your brother is returning to you, Carson. You can call me by my given name in public. I, in turn, intend to start calling you Alphonse, just to see how it feels to always have to think before addressing one’s beloved brother.”
“The idea is crazy. You’ve truly created the identity?”
“Day by day I add to Jerome Alan Ryder … a peripatetic financier type who moved from Alabama as a teenager and has since resided in various cities abroad. Have you checked your invented past lately?”
“Why?”
“Jerome A. Ryder’s past seems intertwined with yours, as if our fictional selves went separate ways years ago and recently reunited.”
I stared. My brother was beyond belief. “You mean …?”
“A few places in your invented background mentioned only child. You’ll now see a brother is casually noted.”
“You’ve combined our false backgrounds?”
“Our real ones are inexorably linked, Brother. It seems so right.”
I shook my head. There were no words for what he was attempting. Chutzpah, balls, brass … all woefully insufficient.
There was but one fatal flaw.
“You’re still a wanted man, Jeremy,” I pointed out. “Every law-enforcement agency in the country has you in their database. Thousands of cops go to work daily with your photo on their bulletin boards and computer screens. There’s nothing you can do to live a normal life. You think you can alter the past? What’s your alteration for that?”
“You’re a man of moving water, Carson,” he said. “You need it nearby to make you flourish, right?”
I had been surrounded by water in Mobile, surrounded by water on Matecumbe Key. Flowing water seemed to soothe my soul and I could no more live in a desert region than on the moon. I stared as my brother opened the huge shower stall and turned a handle. Torrents of water poured from every direction, splashing, mingling, the floor speckling with overspray.
“Yes, I like moving water,” I said, perplexed. “So what?”
He turned off the water, put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the door.
“Then always trust a river, Carson.”