Tampa Bay Noir
- Автор: Аткинс Эйс, Bancroft Colette
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Akashic Books
- ISBN: 978-1-61775-951-2
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Tampa Bay Noir». Краткое содержание книги:
Just as my temper was about to snap, I saw the lights. Blue and red cut the darkness like a disco. Cops. They were camped at the intersection of Riverview Drive and 41. The railroad tracks. On the north side was a wooden shack like an old-time station, an abandoned depot covered in vines and graffiti. It was a circus: three police cruisers, an ambulance, the crime scene van, and two unmarked Grand Marquis.
“Must be the president,” I joked. But I knew better.
Lisa covered her mouth with her hand. “J-Jack...”
“You don’t know that.”
“Pull over.”
I did what she asked, eased the car to the side of the road where a uniformed officer stood directing the nonexistent traffic.
Lisa lowered her window. “What’s going on?”
“Gotta move on,” the officer said, and waved for us to pass.
“Is 41 clear to Tampa?” I asked.
He leaned in. “What do I look like, Bay News 9?”
I inched forward to the tracks and stole a quick glance at the abandoned depot. Detective Morano was standing to the side in a blue plastic poncho, hood pulled back.
I pulled over on the gravel.
Lisa looked at me. “What’re you doing?”
“I know that cop,” I said. “I’ll ask him about Jack.”
“I’m coming with—”
“No!” I placed my hand on her thigh. “No. Let me go. He’ll be more at ease if I go alone.”
She looked down at my hand. I pulled it away and stepped out of the car, made my way around the back of the car and across the tracks to where Murano was standing, tapping the screen of his phone.
“You updating your Facebook status?”
He glanced up and smiled uneasily. “Yo, Riley. What the... Last I heard, you were putting in hours as a bouncer at some hipster bar in Ybor.”
“I’m a PI.”
He put his phone in his pocket and offered his hand. “The hell are you doing here anyway?”
I shook his hand with my left. “Came to give a friend a ride.” I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. “What’s the best way to Tampa?”
“You’re better off finding a shelter.” He nodded to the east. “Collins Elementary on Summerfield. You got maybe half an hour before it starts coming hard.”
“What happened here?”
“Body. Or what’s left of it. Guy was cut up into little pieces a couple days ago.”
A cop poked his head out of the depot. “Detective, we’re ready for you.”
“You got an ID on the stiff?”
Murano shook his head. “Gotta go to work.”
As I made my way back to the car, another feeder band swept in and almost blew me over. The rain pelted me like hail. When I finally got in the car, it was empty. Lisa Moon was gone.
Lisa had a tendency to disappear. She was, as they say, mercurial. We’d have a pleasant date, maybe drinks at a bar or a late-night dinner at the Mermaid Tavern or Esther’s Cafe. You’d think everything was roses. But when I drove her back to her place she wouldn’t invite me up, or she’d insist on taking an Uber home. I wouldn’t see her for weeks after that. Then she’d magically reappear acting as if we’d been hanging together the day before. Until she met Jack.
The wind and rain persisted. There was no sign of Lisa near the abandoned depot or up and down Riverview Drive. I worked my way toward the dense Brazilian pepper bushes and combed the area, but the ground was muddy from the rain and my feet sank deep in the muck. There was no trail or tracks anywhere. All I could think of was that she ran back toward the Fairfax.
I drove back east on Riverview Drive, told myself to forget Lisa Moon, head back to 75, find shelter. There was not a soul on the road. It was just the punishing rain and wind. As I drove past the Fairfax the weather turned like a switch — calm and dry. I stopped the car and backed up into the Fairfax, parked by the trailer. We’d left the door unlocked. But she wasn’t there.
I didn’t get it. She didn’t deserve to live like this, in this mess, in this moldy, dilapidated can. She was better than this. She was better than Jack. I offered her a good life, even risked my own to come here and save her, and she ran away from me. Again.
I turned to the door and threw a punch at the wall. My fist went through the paneling like it was made of paper. I looked at my hand. The thin fresh scar that ran down from the ball of my thumb bled a few drops. I stormed back outside. The air was dead. The night had a dark, translucent quality. Gibsonton didn’t look like Gibsonton. It looked fake, like a Hollywood set — a place made to look like Gibsonton.
I got in my car, started the engine, and tuned the radio to one of those all-news AM stations to get an update on the hurricane.
The monster storm was upon us. The cone was narrow and making landfall just north of Bradenton on a northeasterly direction. It was coming for Gibsonton.
I was out of time.
The wind picked up as I crisscrossed Gibsonton at random looking for Lisa. Road signs trembled, trees and bushes danced back and forth, debris dragged across the road, the rain fell in torrents, washing across the road in waves, then dying down, only to start again.
I passed the Fairfax for the fifth time and pulled up to the VFW building across the street. Certainly not a proper shelter, but it had to be better than staying in my car. I hurried to the front but the door was locked. I went around the back. Locked.
A transformer blew with a big fireball at the end of the block. Then everything went dark. That’s when I saw the kid running across the field and into a small warehouse in the back of the property.
I dashed after him, pulled at the steel door. Three midgets, small people — whatever you call them — an older woman with long gray hair, a man with long pork-chop sideburns, and a younger one, blond, who was busy drying his hair with a towel. They stood around a large wooden crate with a lantern in the center.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I had nowhere else to go. I saw... I saw one of you run in here... and...” Behind them was a mountain of parts for a mechanical ride — flying elephants, cheap Dumbo imitations — and a trailer with a colorful sign for fried Twinkies. The walls were block and mortar, steel roof. “Seems like a safe place. I hope it’s okay.”
“It’ll hold,” the woman said. “You didn’t happen to see Ricky or Jacques out there, did ya?”
I shook my head. The small person with the sideburns rubbed his forehead with the tips of his fingers. “I’m telling you, Gail, they must’ve gone with her.”
“The girl ain’t got no car, Kyle.” The woman moved a small plastic chair up to the crate and sat. “We best just hope they didn’t abscond and done left us here.”
The younger small person with the blond hair nodded. He tossed the towel on the crate and climbed into one of the fiberglass elephant rides.
Kyle fiddled with a small transistor radio. Static. Voices, static. A seventies song. Motown. Then a voice came across loud and clear, rattling off statistics and the cost of previous hurricanes — Harvey, Katrina, Andrew.
“Whatever the storm does,” Gail said, “bet you we don’t see a dime of relief money.”
“It’s all a shell game,” Kyle said.
“Look here.” The woman leaned forward on her chair and squinted at me. “How come I ain’t seen you around Gibsonton?”
“I’m from Tampa,” I said. “I came down to help a friend, but I guess she found another ride.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. “Welcome to the club.”
“They kept sayin’ the storm was headed to Sarasota,” Gail put in. “Then it shifted at the last moment.”