Burning Heat Page 3

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At half past ten in the evening, Jonathan Langston Gardner, Junior, strolled into the Pirate’s Cove with three of his buddies. His father was running for South Carolina Treasurer in the upcoming primary election and had been trying to push the Isle of Palms Town Council to close us down or sell out for the past six months.

  From my perch at a table in the corner, I watched Paige’s eyes taper into slits when she recognized the junior Gardner, nicknamed Jon-Jon by those of us who were less than fond of him. Not any better than his father, the punk wasn’t on our favorite customer list. In fact, I wasn’t sure he was on anybody’s favorite list.

  Jon-Jon and his entourage, all of them twenty-somethings, approached the bar, where Paige and Regina, one of my waitresses, were restocking the shelves. The men had sunburned faces, golf hats rimmed by collar-length shaggy hair, and sunglasses hanging down their backs from straps. And all of them well on their way to drunk.

  Paige helped Regina serve them beers, each woman smiling professionally despite the comments and leers from the group. Seated at a table nearby, I went back to reviewing inventory counts and invoices. The beer vendor was hosing me, and I was determined to find out by how much. As I came across another discrepancy, Jon-Jon pulled out the chair in front of me and sat down.

  I smelled the beer on his breath. “How’s it going, sport?”

  “Great.” He chuckled.

  When I sat back in my chair my eyes met his dilated pupils, and I plastered on my best fake smile, the one I reserved for annoying drunks I was about to escort out.

  Paige came over before I could say another word.

  “Hey, Jon-athan,” she said, careful not to call him by his nickname to his face, “you want a menu?”

  Jon-Jon grinned big. “Naw. We’re just gonna drink. If you bring me a beer, you might get a good tip. I know you single moms need the money.”

  “Come back to the bar,” she said. “Regina’s got a new shot for y’all.”

  Too drunk to take the hint, he turned back to me. “I’ll be there in a minute. I got some business to discuss here.”

  Paige stared at me. I smiled bigger to assure her everything was okay. Her slow return to the bar told me she didn’t buy it.

  To Jon-Jon, I said, “What can I help you with, sport?”

  “Why you calling me sport? I look like a sport to you?”

  Stretching my arms above my head, I tried to ease a growing pain in my neck. “You want me to have the kitchen make you guys something?”

  With a laugh, he said, “Kitchen. Yeah, right. Like I’d eat here.”

  I felt the smile reappear on my face. “Okay.”

  “I was wondering something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How much longer you think you’re going to own this dump?”

  It had taken a lot of personal growth for me to stop overreacting to stupid people. But Jon-Jon was pushing his luck. “Why do you care? I thought you hung out at that transgender bar downtown. What’s it called, The Pacifier? The Stroller? Something like that.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “When I get this place, I’ll let you come back and wash dishes. Maybe get that piece at the bar to give me the same extracurricular activities she gives you. With a kid, she oughta be desperate enough for a job.”

  I wanted to saw Jon-Jon in half, eat his liver with a spoon, and dance around his carcass like a cannibal.

  Before I could lay eyes on the closest utensil, Paige yelled, “Shots up! Jonathan, your friends are waiting.”

  The jerk ignored her. “There’s just one thing I can’t figure out.”

  As I pondered how to handle the baited hook in front of me, a sermon I’d heard Brother Thomas give came to mind. The one that talked about what happened when people succumbed to their anger. An assault and battery charge tonight and both junior and senior Gardners would own me.

  So I stayed quiet.

  Jon-Jon said, “Why you helping out that coon bar downtown? From what I hear, the place needs a bulldozer. Or a good fire.” He tapped the table. “When you lose this place, I might just see about that.”

  His gaze lingered on me in triumph. After a few seconds he stood and walked back to his buddies, who were laughing and having a good time. He raised his shot glass to me from the bar and downed it.

  I took a breath, rubbed my two-day shadow and got up, grabbing my cell phone as if I’d gotten a call. The music was usually loud enough in the bar that everyone stepped outside to talk. On the front deck, I looked down at the street. Below me sat Jon-Jon’s Porsche Cayenne Turbo parked in front of a fire hydrant. I dialed a number.

  A female voice answered. “Dispatch.”

  “Hey, Marlene. This is—”

  “Hey, sexy. You finally calling to make an honest woman out of me?”

  All of the bar owners on the Isle of Palms knew Marlene, the graveyard shift dispatcher at the police station on the island. I said, “If Fred didn’t when he married you, I’m not sure I’d be much help.”

  “Shh!” she said. “Not so loud. I haven’t told him the kids aren’t his.”

  “You adopted them from China,” I said. “I think he probably already knows.”

  “Oh, all right. Be that way, Brack. I suppose you got another fight brewing or something important like that.”

  “Not yet, but it’s early. What I do have is a Porsche SUV in front of a hydrant. I know how you guys like to tow cars parked in red zones and then fleece the owner to get his car back. I figured I’d do my good citizen deed for the day.”

  She said, “Earl does love impound duty.”

  “Tell him to bring the flatbed. Don’t want you guys to tear anything up and then have to pay for it.”

  “Hold on.” In the background, I heard her page Earl on the radio and notify him of the tow. After she finished with Earl, she said, “Next time, Mr. Pelton, call me with a legitimate proposal. I’ll have your babies any day.”

  “Marlene,” I said, “your husband would shove my head in a blender and drink it for his morning protein shake. I think next time you’ll be hearing from Paige.”

  “Typical,” she said. “Send in a woman to do a man’s job.”

  Marlene liked getting the last word so I laughed and hung up. Her husband, my personal trainer, was an ex-University of South Carolina linebacker. At sixty-three, Fred benched four hundred pounds.

  I returned to the bar, went into the kitchen, and had the cooks make a large plate of loaded nachos. Using a hot pad, I carried the plate to the pool table where Jon-Jon and his friends were having a game.

  Setting the plate and hot pad on a nearby table, I said, “Here you go, guys. On the house. Thanks for coming in.”

  “All right!” one of them said.

  “Thanks!” said another.

  Jon-Jon smirked at me as he chalked his cue.

  I nodded and went to the bar, slapping the polished oak surface. “I’m gonna take off, Paige. Call if you need anything.”

  With the two twenty-five-year-old male cooks in the kitchen, and Paige’s black belt in karate, I wasn’t too concerned about leaving the women with Jon-Jon and his buddies.

  Paige smiled and I saw relief in her face, and I think a little respect, as if I had actually done something noble. Pulling out of the parking lot and feeling all noble, I waved at Earl as he hooked chains to Jon-Jon’s Cayenne. Earl waved back. Brother Thomas was right—sometimes taking the high road was better.

  I picked up Shelby at my cottage and we headed to my home away from home. Six months ago and flush with some extra inheritance cash, I bought an old vacant factory twenty minutes from the Pirate’s Cove in Mount Pleasant. Its big roll-up door, hidden from the street at the rear of the building, led to a large open area. I pulled to a stop beside a post that concealed a keypad, and entered a code into the security system. The door raised automatically and the interior lights came on. I drove in and parked. Shelby dashed out and watered the bushes lining the outside of the
building. Once he’d finished and trotted back inside, I closed the door using a button on the wall.

  In the open space and sitting on jacks was Uncle Reggie’s ’76 Eldorado convertible. Its overhauled five-hundred-cubic-inch V-8 was mounted on a stand and gleaming in fresh blue paint. Once back together, the Caddy would serve as my next promotional tool for the bar. Under a cover in the corner of the shop was my uncle’s other car, a recently restored ’68 Shelby GT500 Mustang convertible. Because salt spray from the ocean was not a preservative for vintage steel, I had to wash it every time I drove it. And thanks to all the televised car auctions, it was now worth six figures.

  My dog, named after the man whose name was on the car, circled his mat several times, came to a just-right position, and plopped down. I turned on the Wurlitzer jukebox pirated from the Cove and listened to Tom Petty sing about American girls.

  Using an overhead hoist, I lifted the Eldorado’s rebuilt transmission from the bed of my truck. I’d picked it up before going into work at the bar earlier today. My phone vibrated in my pocket and I checked the number and answered. “Hey Darcy.”

  “I’m pulling up to the door,” she said. “Hit the button.”

  Last year, Channel Nine News reporter and Palmetto Pulse columnist Darcy Wells helped me find who killed my uncle. My aunt, Patricia Voyels, owned the local news empire that employed Darcy and had sent her best and brightest correspondent on the trail.

  I didn’t bother to ask Darcy how she knew I was in my secret garage and not at the bar or my house, merely pressed the button to open the roll-up door. When it rose far enough, she drove in and I pressed the button to close it back. As she got out of her convertible Infiniti, Shelby ran up to her. Stooping to scratch his back, she looked at the Caddy on jacks. “You were serious about fixing that thing?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I thought you were joking.” In addition to being relentless, Darcy was beautiful, with blue-green eyes identical to my late wife’s and perfect blond curls. She also had something not many twenty-seven-year-old women had—scars from a gunshot wound. Plastic surgeons had done miracles in making the entry and exit holes in her shoulder from the bullet of a nine millimeter Sig all but disappear, not that I could see them now. I knew they were there because I was with her when she got shot.

  I said, “You come here to laugh at my project or what?”

  “Touchy, touchy,” she said. “I just heard Jon-Jon had his car towed. From in front of your bar, no less.”

  “It’s not my fault he parked in front of the hydrant like he always does. I was only being a good citizen. Probably did the brat a favor. He was a DUI in the making.”

  “His daddy would have gotten him out.”

  “He ought to be thankful it wasn’t his Ferrari. Earl would have pulled the front end right off it.” I grabbed metal shears from a nearby workbench and knelt down over the skid. “So, to what do I owe this visit? Or are you just being neighborly?”

  “How about you and me and Mr. Shelby here go for a boat ride tomorrow?”

  “Maybe. Tell me what’s going on.”

  She smiled, brushed off imaginary dust from a stool, and sat, khaki shorts showing off nicely tanned legs. An aqua V-neck shirt hid the bullet wound. “I can’t get near the crime scene where they found that burned body. We may be able to by water.”

  “In other words, your cop sources aren’t giving you enough mouth to mouth.”

  “Disgusting analogy,” she said, “but yes. All I got was that the victim was a man about five-foot-four, of Latin descent, as they put it. Probably an illegal.”

  “Rules out Willa Mae,” I said, testing to see if she knew about it.

  “The woman the cops couldn’t find?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The police don’t trust you, you know.”

  “I know.”

  The next day, Monday, when the clock hit nine A.M., I drove downtown in Mrs. Jasper’s nephew’s car, an old Chevy Caprice that smoked, and met Brother Thomas at the Church of Redemption. The gleam from the white steeple stood majestically above the decay of the surrounding homes.

  Brother Thomas greeted me when I walked in the unlocked front doors.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I did as he asked and sat at the end of one of the rows of chairs. The usual smell of strong soap permeated the air. Someone took great care in cleaning the place. Bibles were lined up, evenly spaced along each chair. A grand piano that Darcy and I had found at an estate sale for a thousand bucks looked as if its regal wooden surfaces had been given a fresh coat of wax.

  Hard-soled shoes echoed on the worn but polished linoleum floor. I watched a skinny girl walk toward me with Brother Thomas.

  “Brother Brack, this is Mary Ellen. She a friend of Willa Mae and a sister with us in Christ.”

  Mary Ellen had dark skin and her eyes held a vacant look. Her ripped jeans and Carolina Panthers hoodie were several sizes too big. I guessed she might be early twenties, but her empty stare suggested to me a hard life.

  “Please call me Brack.”

  She grasped my hand lightly and then backed away.

  “Mary Ellen,” Brother said, “why don’t we sit down.”

  She took a seat across the aisle. I moved close to the poor girl, but not so near as to make her uncomfortable. Brother Thomas put an arm around her shoulder. Her bottom lip quivered.

  I asked, “Do you mind if I take some notes, Mary?”

  She shrugged. I pulled out a small notebook and pen.

  Brother Thomas said, “If you’re up for it, Mary El’, you wanna tell Brother Brack what you told me?”

  Mary Ellen fixed her eyes on a spot on the floor. “Um, Willa Mae gone.”

  “Yes,” Brother said.

  “She tol’ me she pregnant. Say she gonna talk to the man done it. Ax him fo’ some money.”

  “Do you know who the father was?” I kept my voice as gentle as I could.

  “She didn’t say, ’cept that he white. And rich.”

  I wrote that down. “Anything else? Tall? Skinny? Fat?”

  She shook her head.

  “Old? Young?”

  The poor girl’s head half-disappeared into her sweatshirt like a turtle’s. “She din’t say.”

  “She say how he dressed?”

  “Just dat he was good lookin’.”

  Brother Thomas asked, “How’d they meet, Mary?”

  “At the club. She was there dancin’ and havin’ a good time.”

  I asked, “Which club?”

  “The Cradle.”

  That was the name of the club I couldn’t remember last night when I challenged Jon-Jon. I’d called it the Pacifier.

  Brother Thomas stared at me. I knew someone rich who hung out at the Cradle. Someone I’d love to get busted for this. Except Jon-Jon was a different douche-bag from the one who shot Willa Mae, and his father had powerful friends. And there were probably a lot of other rich guys that hung out there.

  Brother Thomas said, “Thanks, Mary. Brack here will do his best to find out what happened. Why don’t you go into the kitchen? Sister Paula is back there cooking something that smell real good.”

  Mary nodded, stood, and left the sanctuary.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Twenty-one,” he said. “She grow up fast, mm-hmm. What you think about what she said?”

  “I’m going to need more to go on.”

  “The next person I want you to talk to is Willa’s aunt,” Brother Thomas said. “She lives in Orangeburg. I’ll set it up.”

  He gave me a ride home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My motorboat really liked the choppy harbor water and was one of the smoothest rides around, thanks to its twin-hull structure. With Darcy at the helm, I leaned forward and switched on the radio to the classic rock station. Credence Clearwater Revival’s Green River belted from the speakers. Shelby licked my face as I fed him ice cubes. Darcy took us down the Intracoasta
l Waterway, past Sullivan’s Island and million-dollar homes, and then up a cove toward Mt. Pleasant, dipping into the hundred-and-fifteen-horse Suzuki. High tide meant we got deep into the marshland. She cut the motor and reached for her bag.

  I lifted the prop out of the water. “What are we doing here? You aren’t going to take advantage of me, are you?”

  “Like I’m that desperate.”

  The mosquitoes homed in on us and I dug through the boat’s compartments for the repellant I kept there. “Well, I still haven’t met your fiancé so I figured—”

  “Figured what?” she asked, a little sharper than usual.

  “Um—”

  “Let’s just keep our opinions to ourselves, ’kay?” She finished me off with a smirk.

  Wrapping up a master’s on top of a law degree at Emory University in Atlanta, Darcy’s fiancé had professional student written all over him. The peckerwood never came to see her in the hospital when she got shot. Yet she had committed to moving in with him in Atlanta at the end of summer in an attempt to become a big-city reporter. Something told me she didn’t want it anymore. Part of me hoped that was the case. I didn’t want to think about her leaving. Or marrying the peckerwood.

  I drenched myself with the repellant. “You want any of this?”

  “Some of us plan ahead.”

  Ignoring her sarcasm, I asked, “So what are we supposed to be looking at?”

  From inside a bag she pulled out a pair of binoculars. Like her credit cards, she never left home without them. “Fiddler’s Marsh.”

  The area of interest was located a couple hundred yards away. It was named for its fiddler crabs, the male of which possessed one greatly enlarged anterior claw that made the crab look as if he carried the musical instrument. The land that met the marsh had been subdivided into lots, and houses were being constructed.

  “What’s all that yellow tape … ?” My voice trailed off. I knew exactly what all that yellow tape roping off the area was—crime-scene tape. I’d seen enough of it.

  Darcy pulled the caps off her binoculars and scanned the area. “That’s where the burned body was found. The police shut down the whole site and won’t let me or anyone else, including the building crew, come anywhere near it. Right now, this is the closest we can get.” She handed me the binoculars, got out a camera with a big zoom, and snapped pictures. “My source tells me the police don’t have a clue what’s going on.”