left for MD-Gen before six a.m. and I awoke at eight twenty with the vague recollection of a fleeting kiss. Breakfast was leftover frijoles refritos and chips and I was ready to attack the Sandoval case when my phone rang: JEREMY.
“There’s a huge commotion down the street, Carson,” my brother said before I could speak. “What is it?”
I suppressed a moan: My brother always wanted something.
“A commotion?”
“An ambulance, a quartet of cop cars. A news van. There’s a goddamn circus out there. What the hell is going on, Carson?”
“Why should I know that?”
“You’re a big-league detective, right? Find out.”
“Jeremy, I’m—”
“It’s a distraction. I can’t concentrate on my work.”
I figured Jeremy had been up at daybreak studying the morning’s financial indicators from Asia, preparing for the day’s buys and sells. I’d seen what a trading floor looked like and assumed part of Jeremy’s success in the market came from years in an institution for the criminally insane.
“What do you want me to do?” I said. “Drive out and shoot them?”
“How much do you pay in rent, Carson?” He hung up.
Through a Byzantine set of manipulations, my brother was my landlord and I paid a hundred bucks a month to live in a home that should have cost three grand. I stared at the phone, sighed, and made a call to King Barlow, an investigator with the Key West PD.
“I got a weird call, King. From a friend, sorta, that lives out there. He says there’s a commotion down the block. He’s kind of a crank, and thought I could assure him it’s not an alien invasion or whatever.” I gave King the block number and he blew out a breath.
“You’ll find out soon enough, Carson. Gonna be on the news any minute, I expect.”
“What is it, King?”
“Amos Schrum has come home to die.”
A picture immediately came to mind: a man of towering height with his face looking hewn from flint, all angles and hollows. His eyes were squinty small and peered from the cave of his brow, and his curling, snow-white hair flowed back from his high forehead like a foaming wave. Schrum’s stentorian voice had once been compared to “a trumpet calling the righteous to battle”.
The Reverend Amos Schrum had been a fixture on the religious scene since I was a kid, my mother dragging me to one of his tent revivals thirty-something years back. Schrum would have been in his late forties at the time, and though I recalled not a word of his message, my child’s eyes were riveted to the figure on the distant stage: diamond-bright in cones of light that seemed aimed from the heavens. People were Amen-ing and Hallelujah-ing. Some wept openly. A black woman beside me began babbling nonsense. A white man fell to his hands and knees and started barking like a dog. Throngs rushed the stage to be saved.
If there were more than a few people who conflated Amos Schrum with God Almighty, I could almost understand.
“Schrum’s from Key West?” I asked.
“Lived here until he went to bible school. He felt close to the place – family home and all – and kept the house. He’s had a caretaker living there, though Schrum hasn’t visited in years.”
“What’s wrong with the guy?”
“Supposedly the old ticker might blow at any second. His people told us Schrum was arriving today around daybreak, and when the news got out we’d need crowd control.”
“Schrum’s that big a deal?”
“The guy’s network broadcasts into over seven million homes a week. He carries a big stick in conservative and evangelistic religious circles.”
“So I should tell my br— … friend that his neighborhood’s gonna be chaotic for a while?”
“There’ll be church buses hauling in the faithful to pay respects, prayer vigils, TV vans, that kind of thing. At least until the bucket gets kicked.”
“Thanks, King. I’ll pass it on.”
I channel-surfed news outlets, stopping on a woman backgrounded by a photograph of Schrum and I upped the volume.
“… seventy-six-year-old evangelist and creator of the Crown of Glory television empire, is reportedly gravely ill and has moved from his home in Jacksonville, Florida, to the house in Key West where the influential pastor spent his early years … wife of thirty years died five years ago from ovarian cancer … no details on his illness are available, though a history of heart problems … pacemaker implanted in March …”
I called Jeremy and told him to get used to crowd scenes.
“It’s already started,” he moaned. “Four more news vans and two dozen halfwits weeping in the street. One lunatic is dressed in sackcloth and dragging a wooden cross. Maybe I’ll saunter over in a devil mask and tap the window. Give Schrum a heart attack so I can get some peace.”
“Stay away, Jeremy. Crowds are potentially dangerous.”
“You said my visage no longer graced the halls of police departments. I’m a free man.”
A year after being identified as dead and removed from Wanted listings, I was less fearful of my brother being identified with old photos than of his need to meddle and manipulate. Despite his claimed need for peace, a crowd of emotionally distraught mourners would fascinate my brother.
“Stay inside and let it blow over,” I said. “Promise me you’ll ignore the commotion.”
“Can you believe this,” he said – and I knew he’d been looking out his window – “a guy with a bullhorn has started ranting about homosexuals. Interesting.”
“Stay inside,” I told him. “Promise me.”
“Yes, yes, of course …” he said, hanging up the phone, suddenly distracted.
Frisco Dredd sat naked save for a T-shirt and briefs in the tiny room on the southern edge of Little Havana, watching the traffic crawl down Highway 90 through a dirt-hazed window. The bathroom was a filthy toilet and a dripping sink, the shower a two-by-two recess in the wall, the plastic curtain half hanging on the broken-tile floor.
The rooms rented by the week, mainly to the desperate, downtrodden and addicted. But the hotel-apartment was anonymous, the other dwellers transient and acknowledging Dredd with a fast nod and averted eyes, if at all.
I live amidst the wicked until my tasks are finished … Dredd thought. He closed his eyes and recalled a passage from Malachi: “And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet …”
The
