Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“What about your father? Didn’t he want to come in and tell us all about his work?”
“He’s retired.”
“Well, he could come into the class and tell us about the work he retired from. What did your daddy used to do?”
“Do you really need to know that?” Mary said casually, without malice or discourtesy.
“I suppose not,” Mrs. Balfour said, taken back by the little girl’s level gaze. She was relieved to see the principal gesturing her over to speak to a clutch of parents on the other side of the gym.
Dr. Jordan Roth, former master neurosurgeon of Huntsville, Alabama, was now Dr. Julian Hernandez running a pill mill in Plantation, Florida.
His identity, license and practice were all legitimate on paper. By all appearances he ran a clinic at the back end of a professional park that had seen better days. The park contained weight loss places and cosmetic dentists for the most part. His new practice catered to Hispanics, mostly Cuban. It was all bilingual and the doctor had become quite fluent himself.
But Cubans do not like to visit doctors and resist taking any drugs prescribed to them. Consequently, Cubans tend to live longer.
The doctor’s main clientele were shills sent to him with complaints of constant aches and chronic pains that required Schedule Three narcotics for relief. Jordan no longer exercised the invisible organ of his mind these days. Only his writing hand saw any action. The talented hand that once probed and repaired diseased and damaged brains now wrote prescriptions for a parade of deadbeats. These human debris resold these legal drugs for money to be used for the purchase of cheaper street drugs.
The outfit that kept Dr. Roth in his practice bought these drugs back from his patients. The outfit, some Jamaicans out of Miami, then retailed the prescription grade drugs at many times their value to users who liked their dope pure.
Just as these primo drugs were sold on, so was Jordan sold by the two men who held him. The two Russians from Tampa, the brute and the pop star, exchanged Dr. Roth for a truckload of stolen laptops. The Jamaican posse set him up here in the clinic. They owned him now. And they did indeed own him in every sense of the word.
The doctor was suspect number one in the murder of Marcia Roth. The case was a head scratcher for the Alabama state CID who took over the case. Mrs. Roth was found dead in the basement of their torched home with gunshot wounds to the head. The home was set ablaze, they theorized, to hide evidence of the crime. Following that, her husband, a renowned surgeon and local celebrity among the Huntsville elite, had disappeared from the face of the earth.
A further mystery was the whereabouts of the doctor’s granddaughter who had been living with them at the time of the murder and fire. The little girl’s father had also disappeared but was cleared of the arson and murder charges. Isaac Kane was seen on security video from a Wendy’s drive-through in Muscle Shoals, an hour’s drive west, at the time of Marcia Roth’s death.
A pet theory among the detectives was that Kane abducted his daughter and took off for parts unknown. He and the Roths had been in a bitter custody battle for months. The educated guess was that Kane picked his kid up at school and headed west with her.
Extrapolating on that, maybe the good doctor lost his shit over his son-in-law’s actions. The book on Roth was that he could be a real stiff prick if he didn’t get his way. One OR nurse had summed it up.
“Surgeons.” Accompanied by an epic eye roll.
So, the doc and his wife got in a fight over it and the doc blew her brains out.
As a motive it stunk up the place. It was all they had. The doctor had not touched their bank accounts or retirement portfolios. He didn’t even take the family car. Just shot the missus, set the house on fire, and walked away into the ether. Maybe he wandered into the woods and blew his own brains out. Maybe some hunters or hikers would find his bones one fine day.
These theories were all nonsense, of course. But Jordan Roth could never prove that. Who would believe a crazy story about Russian hitmen who killed his wife but let him live? Certainly not a bunch of cops looking to hang a murder around the neck of a famous surgeon.
He really thought he’d sold himself into a life of criminal adventure with Karp and Nestor. It was only another chapter for his life. A dull one at that.
Now he wrote scrips four days a week and read mystery novels on the beach the rest of the days. He had a condo in Pompano and a girlfriend who was a waitress at the Ebb Tide. He drank more than he should. He was having frequent headaches. He didn’t sleep nights. Not well anyway.
When he did sleep he had a dream. It was of the weekend he drove Arlene to college for her freshman year. In the dream he is driving along a scenic road lined with green under blue skies. Arlene is as young in the dream as she was on that day. But in the dream she wears a stained print hospital gown as she had the last time he saw her alive. She looks out the window and does not speak.
He tries to talk to her but she does not turn her head. He can never remember what he says to her, only that he feels increasingly frustrated. Finally he is shouting at her. She turns from the window to look at him without expression, without recognition. Arlene opens her mouth as if to say something. She reaches out to turn up the volume on the radio.
The music fills the car and drowns out his pleas for her to forgive him.
She turns away and looks out the window at the trees and clouds going by.
***End of Part 1***
The washof rainwater on the windshield transformed the motel front into a sprawling palace of lights against the gloom of night. The neon that spelled out Cedar Creek Motor Lodge turned the wet parking lot into a galaxy of primary colors; constellations appeared and disappeared when the letters winked on and off.
Lex Krogstad gripped the wheel of his Sonata and blinked through the frigid spray coming in through his open window. He found Room Eleven easily enough. It was the only one with a vehicle parked in front of it. A pickup truck gleamed beetle-slick in the steady downpour. The truck was backed into the spot before number eleven. Lex spun the wheel to guide his car into the spot next to the truck with his rear bumper facing the building to conceal his license plate.
The door was answered by a man a good head taller than Lex, a broad-shouldered bastard in a work shirt and jeans, a leather pouch for a clasp knife on his tooled belt. Lex looked down to see this guy wore yellow leather work boots. Some kind of redneck.
“You Tilitser?” The man’s smile did not reach as far as his eyes.
The drawl made Lex change his mind. Not a redneck. A hillbilly.
“That makes you Whistler seven three,” Lex said.
“Come on in,” the big man said and stepped back into the room. A double with two full-size beds, still made up except for the indent where the man had been lying, watching the room’s ancient analog television. The walls were covered in ersatz paneling with a fading print of imitation wood grain. A sofa painting hung over each bed. One was of sunflowers, and the other featured a thatch-roofed hovel in an idyllic glen.
“Where’s our friend?” Lex asked as he closed the door behind him.
“In the shower,” the big man said, slouching back on pillows stacked against the headboard. One foot up on the bed, the other resting on the floor.
“Oh, yeah?” The door to the bathroom was closed. He could hear the running water over the downpour drumming on the roof and windows.
“He’s a little nervous. Wants to make sure he’s all cleaned up for you.”
“Okay.”
Lex looked at the TV, which was playing at low volume. Some old black and white show with a pair of lawyers arguing in a courtroom. His mom used to love those kinds of shows.
“You brought the money, right?” the big man said.
“Yes. Yes.” Lex dug into the interior pocket of his damp windbreaker and pulled out an envelope sealed with tape.
The big man made a gimme gesture and Lex tossed him the packet. The man tore it open, plucked out the contents, and quickly riffled the bills. It was the amount they had agreed on. The man nodded and hiked a hip off the bed to jam the folded stack of fifties into the front pocket of his jeans. Lex took a seat on the edge of a chair next to the room’s pressed-wood dresser.
The meet had been set up on a website that Lex visited frequently: quellefromage.net. He posted there as Tillister, while the man on the bed used the screen name Whistler73. It was an old-school chat room that, to the eye of anyone casually stumbling upon it, appeared to deal with the subject of gourmet cheese. Any actual cheese fanciers attempting to make sense of it would find the posts confusing. There were many postings about ages, weights, and imports of certain cheeses but few specifics about texture, flavor, or sharpness.
Any sincere posts about cheese were simply ignored in favor of longer threads that seemed to represent the negotiations for private sales. Most of those offerings were for quite unusual amounts of cheese at often steep prices. Even the most ardent foodie was not about to pay one thousand dollars for thirty-two pounds of five-year-old Dorblu.
“Um, I didn’t ask on the site,” Lex said, breaking the awkward silence. “But what sort of boy is he?”