South of Hell (Louis Kincaid Mysteries) Read online

  “All right,” she said, “so who is Kyla Brown?”

  “You remember last December when you told me about your rookie year in Michigan?”

  Joe nodded.

  “And I told you then that I had something to tell you, too,” he said. “Something that had been on my mind for a while.”

  “I remember,” she said. “But you never brought it up again.”

  He took a drink of his beer to buy some time, then set the bottle down. “Kyla Brown was a girl I knew in college here,” he said.

  Joe picked up the water and look a long drink. When she set the glass down, her fingers found the napkin beneath, and she began curling its edge. He recognized the gesture as something she did when she was preparing herself for something that might be unpleasant. As a cop, she was never unsure of herself, but he could see a small glimmer of womanly concern in her eyes now.

  “I wasn’t in love with her,” he said. “I was twenty, getting ready to start my senior year, and I had big plans for law school. Kyla was just…”

  He stopped, realizing how shitty this was sounding.

  “Just an easy lay?” Joe asked.

  Louis looked up quickly. There was no judgment in her voice. It was just the way Joe talked, but still it stung.

  “Not really,” he said. “I liked her, but I didn’t love her. I didn’t want to get involved with anyone then. I tried to let her down easy, but she kept calling. By January, it had gotten pretty bad. Finally, I stopped answering the phone.”

  He paused again, a new memory slipping in. It wasn’t real important, but hell, he might as well tell her all of it.

  “I was already seeing someone else.”

  Joe sat back in the booth, her eyes fixed on his. “I think I will have a glass of wine.”

  Louis left the table and walked to the bar. He kept his back to Joe as he waited, staring absently at the line of booze on the shelf but seeing faces in his head. Old faces came easily to him most of the time. Kyla’s was no different.

  Skin the color of almonds. Hair always carefully arranged in a straightened sweep around her full, smooth cheeks. Eyelashes so long he could feel the brush of them against his face when he kissed her. Full lips, always glossy with cherry-red lipstick, something called Scarlet Fever. On anyone else, it would have looked cheap. On her, it was nothing but class.

  The bartender set down a glass of red wine, and Louis took it back to the table. Joe had taken off her leather jacket and was sitting at an angle, her feet propped up on an empty chair. Fingers still working the napkin.

  “House red okay?” he asked, setting the glass in front of her.

  She nodded and took a drink before looking back at him. “So, if she didn’t matter to you then, why does she matter to you now?” she asked.

  Louis let out a long, slow breath. “Somewhere around the end of February, she came up to my dorm room. It was sleeting hard that night, and she was soaked. And she was so mad she was shaking. She was screaming at me for not answering her calls. Guys were coming out of their rooms and watching all this, and I couldn’t calm her down.”

  Louis looked up, making sure he had Joe’s eyes before he went on. “She told me she was pregnant,” he said.

  Joe didn’t move, holding his stare for what seemed liked minutes, her eyes shifting with questions and possibilities.

  Louis took a long swallow of his beer and set the bottle down slowly. It would have been easy to look away from Joe now, but he didn’t.

  “The first thing I thought was, ‘I don’t want to fuck up my life.’” He hesitated. “The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘Get rid of it.’”

  Joe pushed her glass aside, took her feet from the chair, and leaned back, drawing into the farthest corner of the booth. But her eyes never wavered from his face, and he still wasn’t sure what he was seeing there. He finally had to look away. Down at the green glass of the beer bottle. He focused on the little red star in the center of the beer label until it went blurry.

  “She slapped me,” he said. “Then she started hitting me in the chest, so hysterical she could barely stay on her feet. Finally, she just stopped and looked at me and said, ‘Fine, I’ll just get rid of it.’”

  “What did you say?” Joe asked.

  “I said, ‘Go ahead.’”

  Joe lowered her eyes. His found the exit sign over her bowed head and stayed there. The bar was quiet, not a sound, not even the clink of glasses. He wanted to look back at Joe, but he couldn’t. He was afraid if he did, something would different. Something would be gone.

  Then Joe touched his hand, and he looked at her. “You’re a different man now,” she said. Her fingers laced themselves through his. “Which is probably a good thing. I could never fall in love with that other guy.”

  Louis found a wry smile. “Yeah, well, that other guy gets worse,” he said. “A few days later, I borrowed a couple hundred dollars from my roommate and sent it to her to pay for the abortion.”

  “You ever think much about why you reacted the way you did?”

  Louis sat back, withdrawing his hand. “Fear,” he said. “Fear of being trapped, fear of being nothing.”

  “Do you think you should go talk to her?” Joe asked.

  “And say what?”

  “Sometimes ‘I’m sorry’ is enough.”

  Louis shook his head.

  “Her husband must have had an eye on you since you got here,” Joe said. “That tells me she told him about you. Women don’t tell their men about other men in their past unless it was bad. You can apologize. Whether she accepts it or not is up to her.”

  Louis was turning his empty bottle in circles on the scarred table.

  “I have another thought to throw out at you,” Joe said.

  “What?”

  “Why do you think Channing even bothered to stop us and tell us who he was?”

  “He didn’t want me anywhere near Kyla.”

  “She hates you. You’re no threat to his marriage.”

  “What are you getting at?” Louis asked.

  “Maybe it’s not Kyla he wants you to stay away from.”

  He knew exactly what Joe was suggesting, and the thought settled over his skin with an eerie tingle. Still, it took him a second to reshape it into any kind of real possibility.

  “What if she didn’t have the abortion, Louis?” Joe asked.

  But the question was in his head before Joe had even said it. And with it came the realization that the question had always been there inside him.

  Chapter Nine

  Some people spend the present doing nothing but revisiting the past. Louis thought his foster parents were often like that, always talking about past Christmases or trips up north. His friend Dodie was like that, too. Beer bottle in hand and a setting Florida sun behind him, his favorite opening to a conversation was, “When I was young…”

  Louis had never seen the point. Good or bad, whatever it was, it was over. Why keep reliving something you couldn’t change? Or get back?

  He wasn’t sure he felt that way anymore. Maybe it was because now he was making memories worth remembering. It had been different before. He had been different before. Before he had started spending time with twelve-year-old Ben Outlaw, who was teaching him the fine art of how much glue to put on a model spaceship. And before Joe, who was teaching him just how little glue it took to hold two people together.

  He blew out a breath and stared at the house.

  It was a two-story frame house on Catherine Street, painted a pale blue, with old-fashioned white shutters. A thicket of dormant rose bushes buffered the small porch. The blooms were probably beautiful in the summer. Colorful, like her.

  He had found the address in a phone book. Not under Eric Channing, which was to be expected. He didn’t know any cop who listed a phone or address. Then he looked under Kyla and K. Channing but found nothing there, either. It was only when he was closing the book and feeling a guilty pang of relief that he decided to try once more and look und
er Brown.

  There had been two K. Browns listed, one out near Ypsi and one here in Ann Arbor. He figured the Ann Arbor cops still had to live in the city, so this was where he had come first.

  His heart was kicking up, and he looked around, trying to relax, hoping to spot something that would tell him if this was her home.

  There was a newspaper lying on the narrow walk and a pair of rain boots sitting on the top step. Next to them was a cardboard box with halo hats stamped on the side in big black letters and a UPS invoice taped on top. There was no mailbox on the curb and no car in the drive.

  And no toys anywhere.

  He walked to the porch and drew a breath as he lifted his hand to rap on the screen door. Before he could, the door swung open.

  Kyla.

  She wore a cream-colored suit with eyelets around the collar. The eye shadow and red lipstick were there but tempered with age and sophistication, the red more burgundy, the silver more charcoal. She had stopped straightening her hair, and it formed a short black cap of soft curls around her round face.

  Her eyes fired with contempt. “Go away,” she said.

  “Please,” Louis said. “I just want five minutes.”

  She started to close the door, but to his surprise, she paused. “That’s all I wanted from you ten years ago,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She dropped her hand from the door and waited, again surprising him with her decision to stand there and hear him out. He had no idea where to begin, so he started with the simplest of thoughts.

  “I’m sorry, Kyla.”

  She said nothing. Nothing from her but that stare.

  “I was a selfish sonofabitch,” he said. “I said some terrible things. You deserved better from me.”

  Still nothing but that steely stare.

  “I was stupid,” he said. “All I could see was my future going down the drain, and I panicked.”

  Her eyes dipped to his jeans and sneakers. “That law degree you wanted so much,” she said. “Did you ever get it?”

  “No.”

  “What did you become?”

  The fact that she didn’t know told him Channing hadn’t shared his traffic stop with her or any of the background information he had gathered. Made sense. It had been Channing’s intent to bully Louis into keeping his distance.

  “I became a cop when I got out of school,” he said. “Now I’m a private investigator.”

  Her expression went from surprise when he said “cop” to scorn at “private investigator.” She ran a red-manicured finger through her hair, her anger waning to annoyance.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. “Are you in some kind of twelve-step program and on the part where you’re supposed to say you’re sorry?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m in town on business, and…it’s hard being back here without remembering. I know there’s nothing I can do to change a thing, but I wanted to tell you that I know how much I hurt you.”

  “You expect my forgiveness?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t expect a thing,” he said. “I just needed to say it.”

  Kyla looked away, blinking back a glimmer of tears. Her hatred for him was still radiating off her in waves, but there was something else going on inside her, too. Something that was softening everything else.

  “You’ve said what you needed to,” she said. “And I’ve given you more time than you gave me. Now, please go away, and don’t come back.”

  She started to close the door again. He put a hand to the screen.

  “Kyla, wait, please,” he said. “I need to ask you something else.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Did you have the abortion?”

  Without so much as a blink, she answered him. “Yes.”

  The door closed.

  Joe let the curtain fall and turned to face the dingy room. The clock on the nightstand told her it was only nine-thirty, but it felt later.

  Where the hell was he?

  He had dropped her off at the motel and sped off in the Bronco. He had asked her first, asked her if she minded. She had said no, she didn’t. But she did. As much as she knew he needed to go see Kyla, as sure as she was of his love, she had felt something shift. Maybe it was his eyes when he had looked at her over the table in the bar earlier. Maybe it was his voice when he said he was going to see Kyla. Whatever it was, it told her that things were never going to be the same between them again.

  She kicked off her shoes, went to the bed, and sat down, cross-legged, her back against the flimsy wood headboard. She picked up the remote, clicked the TV on, and then clicked it off again. Her eyes went to the small plastic coffee maker on the dresser and then to the empty spot below where a mini-bar should have been.

  Damn, she wanted a drink. But she didn’t want to chance going out and missing his call.

  Why the hell hadn’t he called? He had been gone four hours.

  She switched on the TV again, punching the button and half watching the images flip by. A cop harassing a gang member on Knightwatch. Dan Rather looking dour on 48 Hours.

  She stopped clicking. Clair Huxtable in a turquoise power suit and perfect hair, sitting in her pretty living room with her button-cute daughter Rudy in the crook of her arm.

  Joe watched the show until a commercial jarred her back to the motel room. She sat there, the remote in her lap, staring blankly at the TV.

  She was pretty. Had to be.

  She was younger. Younger than he was, probably.

  She was black. No matter what he said, it had to matter.

  And a child…

  Maybe they had a child together.

  Joe shut her eyes.

  Where the hell was he?

  The phone rang. She pounced on it. “Louis?”

  “Hello, Joe.”

  It wasn’t him; the voice was too deep. It took a moment for it to register. She turned off the TV. “Mel?”

  “I wasn’t going to give you a third guess. It would have been insulting.”

  She smiled. “I’m sorry, I was just waiting for Louis to call. He’s been out all night.”

  “On the case?”

  “No. It’s a personal thing he had to take care of.”

  “An old college friend?”

  “You could say that.”

  Mel was quiet for a long time. “He went and saw Kyla, didn’t he?”

  “You know about her?”

  “Yeah.”

  Joe let out a big sigh.

  “What was that for?” Mel asked.

  “He told you about her, but somehow he just couldn’t quite bring himself to tell me until today.”

  “He’s like that. You know that.”

  She was quiet.

  “Why are you worried about this, Joe?”

  “I didn’t say I was.”

  “I know you too well. Don’t lie to me.”

  She shifted the receiver to her other ear and leaned her head back against the headboard. Mel did know her, maybe better than anyone—except her mother. Mel had been there for her right from the start. The day she walked into the Miami Police Department wearing the new uniform, he had been the only man to say welcome. They had started seeing each other two years later, on the quiet because he was a detective and she was just a patrolman. She had been only twenty-five. He was ten years older. She was in love with him. But three years in, he broke it off. She could still remember the night—sitting in the dark of his car in the lighthouse park on the tip of Key Biscayne. Him telling her he was slowly going blind.

  I’m not going to let you be stuck taking care of an old asshole like me, Joe.

  Neither of them had ever mentioned marriage, but he had somehow sensed she was expecting it. She was so angry at him. It took her years to see that it was for her own good. He knew that the only thing she really loved was her work.

  Four years later, she made detective. They were put on a case together. He was at the end of his career. She was just getting to the best part. They
became partners, and she helped him keep his blindness a secret as long as he could. Even after Mel moved to Fort Myers, they stayed in touch. They had a history together, after all.

  Joe heard the click of a lighter as Mel fired up a cigarette.

  “It was a long time ago, Joe. He doesn’t love her,” Mel said.

  “It’s not her I’m worried about,” she said.

  “The man loves you, Joe.”

  She shut her eyes. “I’m worried about what will happen to us if there is a child. Because I know Louis well enough to know that this will change him. And I don’t know if I want him to change.”

  A pause on the other end of the line. Joe could almost see Mel sitting in the dark of his apartment. “Have you told him this?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You should.”

  She was quiet.

  “Well, maybe you’re worrying for nothing,” he said. “Maybe there’s no kid.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she said softly. She pushed her hair back from her face. “I have to go, Mel,” she said.

  Another pause. “You’re trying to get rid of me.”

  “No, no, I just don’t want to talk right now.”

  “Okay. I’ll back off. But you know where to find me when you do.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Night, Joe.”

  “Mel?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “What are friends for?”

  She hung up and sat back in the bed, staring at the TV. Perfect Strangers was on now. She hit the off button, tossed the remote aside, and swung her legs off the bed. Shrugging out of her clothes, she went into the bathroom to take a shower.

  She was just wrapping a towel around her wet hair when she heard the door. She hurried out to the bedroom and drew up short.

  Louis was standing there. No, not standing. Wavering.

  His eyes took a long time to find her, and when they finally did, they were glazed. She could smell the alcohol from six feet away.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Stopped for a drink.” He moved away, peeling off his jacket and throwing it to a chair. It missed and fell to the floor. He ignored it.