Fallen (Will Trent 5)

“Filled with heroin.”

“Filled with heroin.”

Will rubbed his jaw, thinking about what had happened to the young man.

“Someone beat the hell out of him. He was full of balloons. Maybe he couldn’t pass them.”

“That would be a question for the ME.”

Will had assumed that she’d gotten all of this information from the medical examiner’s office. “You didn’t ask him?”

“They’ve kindly promised me their full report by end of business this evening. Why do you think I asked you to have Sara reach out?” She added, “How’s that going, by the way? I’m assuming from your good night’s sleep that there’s not a lot of progress.”

They were coming up on the Buford Highway exit. U.S. Route 23 ran from Jacksonville, Florida, to Mackinaw City, Michigan. The Georgia stretch was around four hundred miles, and the part that went through Chamblee, Norcross, and Doraville was one of the most racially diverse in the area, if not the country. It wasn’t exactly a neighborhood—more like a series of desolate strip malls, flimsy apartment buildings, and gas stations that offered expensive rims and quick title loans. What it lacked in community it made up for in raw commerce.

Will was fairly certain Chambodia was a pejorative term, but the name for the area had stuck, despite DeKalb County’s push to call it the International Corridor. There were all kinds of ethnic subsets, from Portuguese to Hmong. Unlike most urban areas, there didn’t seem to be a clear line of segregation between any of the communities. Subsequently, you could find a Mexican restaurant beside a sushi place, and the farmer’s market was the sort of melting pot that people thought of when they pictured the United States.

The strip was much closer to the land of opportunity than the amber waves of grain in the heartland. People could come here with little more than a work ethic and build a solidly middle-class life. For as long as Will could remember, the demographics were in constant flux. The whites complained when the blacks moved in. The blacks complained when the Hispanics moved in. The Hispanics complained when the Asians moved in. One day they would all be grumbling about the influx of whites. The gerbil wheel of the American dream.

Amanda pulled into the middle strip that served as the turning lane for both sides of the highway. Will saw a bunch of signs stacked one on top of the other like a Jenga game. Some of the characters were unrecognizable, more like pieces of art than letters.

“I’ve had a car sitting on Ling-Ling’s shop all morning. She hasn’t had any visitors.” Amanda floored the gas, narrowly missing a minivan as she made the turn. Horns blared, but she talked over them. “I made some phone calls last night. Roger was transferred to Coastal three months ago. They had him at Augusta for six months prior, but he evened out on his meds, so they sent him back into the cattle shoot.” Augusta Medical Hospital provided Level 4 mental health services to inmates on a transient basis. “Roger’s first day at Coastal ended with a nasty incident involving a bar of soap wrapped in a tube sock. Apparently, he’s not happy with his new accommodations.”

“You’re going to offer to transfer him?”

“If it comes to that.”

“Are you going to use Boyd’s name?”

“That might not be a wise idea.”

“What do you think Roger’s going to give us?” Will did a mental head slap. “You think he’s behind Evelyn’s kidnapping.”

“He may be clinically insane, but he’d never be stupid enough to do something like that.” She gave Will a meaningful look. “Roger’s extremely intelligent. Think chess, not checkers. There’s no gain for him in taking Evelyn. His whole organization would be disrupted.”

“Okay, so, you think Roger knows who’s involved?”

“If you want to know about a crime, ask a criminal.” Her cell phone started to ring. She checked the number. Will felt the car slow. Amanda pulled to the side of the road. She answered the phone, listened, then hit the unlock button on the door. “A little privacy, please?”

Will got out of the SUV. The weather had been spectacular the day before, but now it was cloudy and warm. He walked toward the edge of the strip mall. There was a shack of a restaurant near the street entrance. He guessed from the rocking chair painted on the sign that it was some kind of country-cooking establishment. Strangely, Will didn’t feel his stomach rumble at the thought of food. The last thing he’d had to eat was a bowl of instant grits that he’d forced down this morning. His appetite was gone, which was something he’d only experienced once before in his life—the last time he’d been around Sara Linton.

Will sat down on the curb. Cars whirred by behind him. Fragments of beats bounced from their radios. A glance toward Amanda told him she was going to be a while. She was gesturing with her hands, never a good thing.

He took out his phone and scrolled through the numbers. He should call Faith, but he didn’t have anything he could report and their conversation last night hadn’t ended well. Whatever happened with Evelyn wasn’t going to make things better. No matter what tricky verbal maneuvering Amanda was doing, there were still some hard facts she couldn’t talk around. If the Asians were really making a play for the Texicanos drug market, then Evelyn Mitchell had to be at the center of it. Hector might’ve called himself a car salesman, but he still had the tattoo that connected him to the gang. He still had a cousin in prison running that same gang. His nephew had been shot dead at Evelyn’s house, and Hector himself was dead in Evelyn’s trunk. There was no reason for a cop, especially a retired one, to be mixed up with these kind of bad guys unless there was something dirty going on.

Will looked down at his phone. Thirteen hundred hours. He should go into the setup menu and try to figure out how to switch it back to the normal time display, but Will didn’t have the patience right now. Instead, he scrolled to Sara’s cell phone number, which had three eights in it. He had stared at it so many times over the last few months that he was surprised the numbers weren’t burned into his retinas.

Unless you counted the unfortunate misunderstanding with the lesbian who lived across the street, Will had never been on a real date before. He’d been with Angie since he was eight years old. There had been passion at one time, and for a short while, something that felt close to love, but he could not ever recall a point in his life when he felt happy to be with her. He lived in dread of her showing up on his doorstep. He felt enormous relief when she was gone. Where she got him was the in-between, those rare moments of peace when he got a glimpse of what a settled life could be. They would have meals together and go to the grocery store and work in the yard—or Will would work and Angie would watch—and then at night they’d go to bed and he would find himself lying there with a smile on his face because this was what life was like for the rest of the world.

And then he would wake up in the morning and she’d be gone.

They were too close. That was the problem. They had lived through too much, seen too many horrors, shared too much fear and loathing and pity, to look at each other as something other than victims. Will’s body was like a monument to that misery: the burn marks, the scars, the various slings and arrows he had suffered. For years, he had wanted more from Angie, but Will had recently come to the hard realization that there was nothing more that she could give.