Out of the Blues Read online

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean ‘Who’? Didn’t you set this up? John, the white asshole next to the car over there—the guy who dealt to Mike back then.”

  Salt turned to Dan, her back to the lot. “The guy leaning against the black sedan is the guy, John, who supplied Mike?”

  “How many white dudes do you see in the parking lot? Like I said, I’d know him anywhere. Why is he here if you didn’t set it up?”

  “You and the band are working for him. Man said he owns the place.”

  “Man?”

  “The guy I was just talking to. You’re sure? That’s Tall John?”

  “The last time I saw him was the last time I saw Mike alive. I had blocked a lot of the bad stuff, the drugs, the party. But when you showed me the photos, Mike’s car, I remembered seeing that guy sitting in a car outside Mike’s that last night.”

  Salt reached for Dan, put her arm through his, turning him away from the sedan as it drove past with Man and Tall John in the backseat.

  As they came back inside, Bailey was digging down deep with his raspy voice.

  Hellhound on my trail,

  Hellhound on my trail.

  —

  THEY DEFINITELY didn’t need another guitar in such a small space. Dan and Salt, sitting close together at the bar so they could hear one another over the music and the crowd noise, could hardly see any of the band; between them and the musicians, the audience jumped as one body. Mustafa’s drums called down thunder, conjured a continent, cast a spell of galloping hooves, and slammed on the turnarounds. Streams of condensation from beers and water from melting ice ran together along the counter. People mostly went outside to smoke, but the odor of fried chicken and beer was thick.

  Salt caught another quick glimpse of Lil D in the kitchen, with the usual white towel hanging around his neck, covering most of the dark birthmark.

  “I’m still trying to piece this together,” said Salt, worrying a cup of beer on the bar. “The Tall John you knew to be supplying Mike back then is the same guy that’s still running this joint and from what Man says at least one other club. Then he’s probably the same John who pimped Stone. Damn,” she said.

  Dan leaned closer. “Who is Stone?”

  Goldie blew red and gold lava notes from the deep bell of his horn. The lights on the band turned the audience into one dark, quaking shape.

  “Stone was one of Man’s gang. He’s the one that gave the new information about Mike’s death, but I’ve known him a long time. Man just now told me Tall John owns this place, too.”

  “How is it so many folks here know you?”

  “This area and its big projects were my beat for more than ten years until a couple of weeks ago when I made detective.”

  “Your beat, like in a patrol car, blue lights, siren?”

  “Yep, uniform, gun, the whole costume.”

  “The projects?” Dan repeated it as a question. “Don’t laugh. I only know about detectives from TV.”

  “The Homes across the street.” Salt tilted her head east toward her old beat.

  Pop’s bass thump, poof, and bounce built the groove, tying the rhythm to the harmony. The crowd shouted encouragement, call and response.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Why what?” she asked back.

  “You’re very attractive, obviously smart. You don’t seem like a cop.”

  “You would prefer your cops ugly and dumb?”

  “Come on. That’s not what I mean and you know it. It’s about you. Why?” Dan put his beer down and leaned closer.

  “It just fits me—what I was born to, I guess.” Salt turned to the crowd and the band, her right leg keeping time, foot on a rung of the barstool, knee up and down with the beat.

  Blackbird’s hands danced, beating a honky-tonk pattern on the rhythm floor. Dan leaned back. “I’m not trying to pin you down or make you answer if you don’t want.”

  Salt took another long look over the people and nodded her head toward the band. “I police for some of the same reasons Bailey plays the blues. It’s what I do, what my father did.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yeah. And by the way, he loved the blues. I found some of Mike’s recordings in his collection.”

  “That’s kinda strange, eerie almost.”

  “It’s Atlanta, a city that’s really like a small Southern town in some ways. There’s all kinds of connections that are hard to see sometimes.” Salt looked over the room at many of the people she’d come to know over the past ten years. She thought about her father’s connections, about his blues. “There’s also the dog I’d forgotten.”

  “The dog?”

  “The day my dad died—I was just a kid—I was playing, pretending, like kids do, with my imaginary friend, a dog.” She shrugged. “It’s what a lot of kids do. But I’d forgotten until your dog came along.”

  The band began a slow blues. Bailey gargled some lyrics and barked out words wrapped in cotton.

  Dan pulled Salt onto the dance floor where at first they swayed to the blues until the people pushed them together into a kind of dance. Her hand was slender in his long guitar-playing paw.

  Bailey sang.

  This old night life, this old sportin’ life

  Is killing me.

  “I had a dream about your dog,” Salt told Dan. He smelled like a nice combination of smoke and clean fur.

  “Ranger,” said Dan, inhaling her green fragrance.

  “The dog’s name is Ranger?”

  Most of my friends are dead and gone.

  Salt pulled back to look eye to eye with Dan. “Ranger?”

  “Yes,” Dan pulled her close as Mustafa hit the kick drum. On the front end of two pistol blasts, somebody yelled, “Gun.”

  Dan thumped into Salt like he’d been kicked in the back. His blue eyes opened in surprise, then folded as he dropped against Salt, heavy, his arms losing hold of her shoulders, sliding down her sides as he crumpled to the floor. Salt reached for the weapon at her waist, scanning the room, kneeling over Dan. She was bumped by people running, pushing toward the door. She didn’t see anyone with a gun. Then Bailey was there, on the floor, shielding them. She holstered and turned Dan onto his back. Mustafa, kneeling, punched at his mobile phone. Dan shuddered, made a small yelping sound, and stopped breathing. Salt tipped his head. Blood was pooling on the floor under Dan’s back. She covered his mouth with hers, breathed twice, then checked his pulse with two fingers to his wrist and couldn’t find one. She pushed back a howl coming up in her throat.

  Mustafa was saying into the phone, “He’s shot. Somebody shot him. I didn’t see.”

  Salt pressed the heel of her hand in the middle of Dan’s chest and started compressions, lost count, then estimated and went back to Dan’s mouth. His breath tasted metallic. Back to his chest. “Tell 911 to start Fire Rescue and Homicide and that a detective needs assistance.” Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Two more breaths. “Does anyone else know CPR?” she asked, starting back on the compressions. “Three, four, five, six.” Bailey was down on his knees beside her. Pops, Goldie, and Bird stood over them. Mustafa was still on the phone. “A detective, Alt. She’s not injured, she’s doing CPR.”

  “Twenty-one, twenty-two,” she counted again to thirty. “Breathe, breathe, breathe.” Her arms were getting tired, and her ears longed for the sound of sirens. They came, faintly, then louder. Bird ran for the door. “A fire truck is here.”

  Salt breathed twice again into Dan’s mouth as a firefighter medic came in, knelt down beside her, and took over the chest compressions while other fire rescue guys broke open medical gear: oxygen, breathing bags, defibrillators. Salt moved back and pushed away, still on her knees, shaky, covered with Dan’s blood. The door filled with uniforms. She stood up, found one of the wh
ite plastic chairs, and sat down, her body buzzing like electricity was running through her veins. Her hand smeared blood on one of the armrests as the Blue Room evaporated, replaced by a dream-like image of the upstairs bedroom at home, her father’s head in her lap, so heavy, his blood thickening. “Breathe on me, breath of God,” she repeated the right words to the old hymn. “Breathe.”

  Then Sergeant Huff and two of her new colleagues were there. Dan was shifted from the floor to a gurney and wheeled out. Focusing, she asked Huff, “What do they say?”

  “He’s low,” he answered.

  —

  DAN’S CHEST rose and fell with the rhythm of the air as it was forced into his lungs—whoosh, whomp, whoosh, whomp. He tried to open his eyes, to move his hands but couldn’t. Then he was sitting at a table on which there was a green bowl with oatmeal and a silver spoon. A whirlwind began to blow the room from around him, board by board. Log drums beaten with sticks echoed through his body—whomp, whoosh, whomp, whoosh. He opened his eyes to a vast plain on which a dog appeared, then unfolded, falling from its own mouth, a paw, leg, flank, disappearing. The view was as if through a blue lens overlaid with dust whipped by the wind. He felt the sticks beating the drum of his own body.

  The detective, naked, her breasts iconic, conical, grew up out of the earth, her hair in black twists. She was covered with dried red mud and white tribal markings. Beside her, Ranger lifted his snout to the sky and howled.

  Lights filtered through his slit lids, but then the drums rumbled into thunder and there was lightning, a laser of gold, filling the dusty air. Black beetles swarmed the table but left an ace of spades turned up in a scattering of red-and-white playing cards. Dan picked up the ace, knowing he would need it later as a ticket for a ride. He lost sight of Salt and Ranger among the rust-colored rocky hills. He listened carefully for the dog’s long yowl and kept watching for the black twists of Salt’s hair—a hound and a woman he somehow now realized he’d been searching for.

  —

  “BREATHE,” SALT SAID to herself as she stood against the wall of the Homicide conference room while a police photographer took distance and close-up shots of her and her clothes. She was still wearing the white blood-smeared blouse. Her mouth still tasted of Dan. Sergeant Huff, Wills, and several other detectives sat at the polished table waiting for the photographer to finish.

  When she sat down, from across the table Wills handed her a bottled water. He kept his eyes on hers with no hint of expression. As she twisted the top, the thin plastic bottle crackled in her grip. “How is he?” she asked, gulping from the bottle.

  “In surgery. They aren’t saying one way or the other. Critical.” Wills had just come from the hospital.

  Sergeant Huff, seated at the head of the table, had a yellow pad and pen in front of him, as did Wills and the others. Salt took another swig of the water. As she took the bottle from her lips, a rusty red residue filtered down through the water in a swirl.

  “Now, Alt, what is it everyone calls you?—Salt?” Huff leaned forward. “I’m gonna try to be sensitive to what all you’ve just been through, but still, you’re a cop and a witness to a possible homicide, and I’ll be goddamned if I can figure out how in the hell you have managed to get from working an old, cold, suspicious death case to now being mixed up with the Solquist case and with a man who is shot while you are dancing with him—in the Blue Room, of all places. Were you the intended target?”

  “What? What does this have to do with Solquist?” She sat up, focusing on Wills.

  “Solquist’s alibi—John Spangler, the guy he was with on the fishing trip?”

  Salt looked at Wills. “Wait. Tall John, John Spangler?”

  Wills nodded. “He owns the Blue Room, Toy Dolls, and has some kind of interest in both Magic Girls and the Gold String.”

  “All I had was a first name, ‘John.’ Wills had mentioned the name ‘Spangler’ to me in connection with the Solquist case but didn’t say his first name, and even if he had, I couldn’t have connected John Spangler to the John I was trying to identify.” Salt took another gulp of the water.

  “What does Spangler have to do with your case?” Wills uncapped his pen and wrote something without looking at her.

  She felt the muscles across her chest tightening. “Both Dan Pyne and Curtis Stone told me that a man they only knew as ‘John’ was Mike Anderson’s supplier. Neither of them remembered or knew his last name. Stone said John owned and ran drugs and prostitutes out of Sam’s and the Toy Dolls Club.”

  “Wait,” Huff said. “I know who Stone is. I read his statement about Anderson’s death, but how is the guy that was shot—what’s his name? Dan?—how is he connected and how did it happen that you were dancing with him?” Huff pronounced dancing like an accusation and a statement of incredulity. “I’ll ask you again—was the shooter aiming at you?”

  Salt licked her lips. “Are you interrogating me? I don’t know if Dan Pyne took a bullet meant for me. I don’t know.”

  Wills began making slashing marks with his pen on the yellow lined paper.

  —

  DAN CRAWLED UP a red, crumbling, flaking hill, climbing until his hands were abraded. The thunder had ceased, never having produced rain. The wind seemed to have settled in a steady whoosh. The harder he tried, the more his legs and arms turned to sludge. He lifted his head again to search for Salt and to listen for Ranger’s call. All he saw was blowing dust. All he heard was whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

  REPERCUSSIONS

  One of the little dams was penned against the fence, held there by Wonder’s stare and Salt’s knee. Salt bore down with the clippers, snipping at a bit of hoof.

  “First time I came here you were armed with those.” Wills stood at the paddock gate, holding a cup of coffee. He nodded at the clippers in her hand.

  “You brought me tiger lilies.” She let go of the sheep’s spindly leg and called the dog off. The spring afternoon sky was beginning to darken, and the wind had the new green leaves of the trees twirling, loose petals from the dogwoods scattering over the paddock and orchard. She shoved the clippers in a back pocket of her jeans and picked up her cup from the fence post. “Maybe we ought to have breakfast. Looks like we’re in for some rain.”

  As they walked to the house, Wills said, “I called Gardner. Pyne is still critical, on life support. He has spinal cord damage. They still don’t know if he’ll survive.”

  Salt sat down on the back porch steps. After a pause she began to loosen the laces of her boots. “We have a lot of work, a lot of follow-up from last night.” She jerked at the laces.

  “You’re off today and tomorrow, your regular off days, remember?”

  “I can’t just take off now.” She tugged at the boots. “I made a mess. Dan Pyne might die.”

  Wills bent down, lifted her foot by the heel, and grabbed the boot. “Who made you the center of the universe? You think you’re the only one who makes shit happen or who can solve these cases? One piece of advice I will give you about working murders,” he said as he pulled one boot off and then the other. “You can get to a point where your personal life seems less important than the cases. But if you have no life other than murders, you’ll find yourself wrapped around an axle.” Wills lifted her with one hand and gave her shoes with the other. “Come on, I’ll fix us breakfast. We need to sort through this.”

  —

  SALT WAS at the old sink washing the dishes and looking out at the rain. Wills sat at the kitchen table feeding Wonder little pieces from his last strip of bacon. “We’ve just gotten the background on Spangler. He was raised by his grandparents, who lived over on Adair Avenue when the area was mostly working-class whites. Their only heir, he inherited the buildings and properties now occupied by the Shack and Toy Dolls. The actual businesses are licensed as LLCs with generic names: ‘Freedom First,’ I think is one of the names; the other is similar. We also think Spangler
’s branched out and probably has investments in Magic Girls and the Gold String. The feds are helping us with the paper trail to Solquist.”

  Salt turned and grabbed a dish towel. “I wish the feds had been as helpful when Stone gave them the information he had on John Spangler. Maybe Dan Pyne wouldn’t have taken that bullet. But I guess some victims get more justice than others.”

  “A part of me understands how you, you being who you are, could come to be dancing with a—I’m not sure what Dan Pyne is. A witness? A suspect? Victim?”

  Salt dried her hands and sat down across from him. “And the other part?”

  “I worry that you’ve gotten enmeshed again—that a combination of the newness of being a detective, the mystery and romance of the blues, your father, and the Michael Anderson case has you entranced. You’ve always worked, in my opinion, way too close. You were too close to the gang on your old beat. It scares me because it’s dangerous, both to you and maybe to us.”

  “I don’t see it that way. I don’t think of it like that.”

  “How do you think about Dan Pyne?”

  The chair scraped as Salt pushed back from the table and went back to the window. “Wills, I’m working this case the way I do. Dan is part of the case. There was this dream I had. I can’t ignore the connections.”

  “My God. Do you know how crazy that sounds?”

  She jerked open a drawer, pulled out a tablet and pen, slapped them on the table in front of Wills, and sat back down. “Just the facts, ma’am. Ask me your fucking questions now, Detective.”

  “You’re not right,” he said.

  “One, Dan Pyne knew and was close to Mike Anderson in the months, weeks, and days before he died. Two, Dan Pyne manages and plays with musicians who knew the scene back then, who played with Mike and knew the business and, therefore, maybe John Spangler. Three, he saw Mike with John Spangler the night before Mike was found dead. Four, Dan’s current live-in girlfriend was Mike’s girlfriend at the time he died.” She pushed the pad toward Wills. “You’re not writing, Detective.”