Cry Havoc

'Leave it to say I'm glad I wasn't Eldridge.'

'Let me guess. He left her bank too?'

'No, he was different from the other ones. He didn't have much to start with. Worked the streets some, drove an old Lincoln, but he didn't have much to leave behind.'

'She married him for love?'

'Much as that woman can love, yes, I believe so.'

'So why'd she boot him?'

Helms chuckled again.

'You gotta understand, Eldridge was a player. Crissie couldn't keep that boy chained to her bed too long, see?'

Now it was Frank's turn to shake her head.

'What'd he get busted on?'

'Oh, he wasn't no good, old El. Got caught with five pounds of coke in his trunk. Uncut. Sent him up for dealing the stuff.'

Satisfied with what she already had, Frank gambled, 'And it was probably Crissie's all along.'

'I ain't sayin'.' Helms shrugged.

'Don't have to. Your sister-in-law's record's longer 'an your arm. What about that fortune-telling stuff she does? How long she been doin' that?'

'Oh, a long time. Crissie been doing that since we was kids. Always good at. She has her mama's talent. It runs in the Green women's blood, you know.'

'She read the tea leaves for you?' Frank joked.

'She definitely has a gift for prophecy,' Wardell mused. 'She can see things before they happen. Between you and me,' he confided, 'that business makes me nervous. Jessie does it too, some, and I tell you, I don't like it. Makes me nervous.'

'What about that church of hers? Do you ever go?'

'Lord, no,' he chuckled. 'I ain't much of a religious man and even if I was I don't think I'd be going to that church. Uh-uh.'

'Why's that?'

'Not my cup of tea, Lieutenant.'

'Does your wife go?'

'Not her cup, neither,' he sniffed.

'What exactly goes on there?'

Wardell's head swung from side to side.

'I do not want to know,' he emphasized again. 'But I don't think it's anything good.'

'Why do you say that? I mean, if you've never been?'

'I hear things. They ain't good things.'

Frank could sense Helms entrenching himself so she fed him easier questions.

'Like devil worship? That kinda thing.'

'On a level with that.'

'That's pretty harmless, isn't it?'

The man looked at Frank as if gauging her sanity. Maybe he deemed it questionable because he just sucked at his beer.

'Well, isn't it? I mean, if they're just in there mumbling about the devil and lighting black candles where's the harm in that?'

Wardell remained fixated on his can.

Frank bent her head closer to his.

'That's all she's doing, isn't she?'

'You know, I ain't never been. I really can't say.'

'But you hear stuff.'

'It's talk. That's all.'

'But you believe it.'

'Look. Let's just say my sister-in-law has certain . . . talents. Things happen to her that don't happen to ordinary folks.'

'Give me an example.'

'Just. . . things,' he shrugged.

'Well like what?' Frank grinned good-naturedly. 'Is she sacrificing virgins on an altar?'

Wardell was suddenly and clearly afraid.

'You know,' he said, plunking his beer on the end table, 'I promised my wife I'd get lunch started and I haven't done a thing about that. She comes home and catches me in fronta this ball game, they'll be hell to pay.'

He stood. Frank had to follow suit.

'You don't really believe Crissie's doing anything harmful, do you?'

Exasperated, he puffed his cheeks and blew a load of air.

'Lieutenant, I don't know what that woman does and I don't want to know. Yeah, I hear things but you know what they say; don't believe everything you hear. I know she's a strange woman, a powerful woman. She can make things happen. Things that I sleep better at night not knowing about. You want my advice, I'd leave her alone.'

'You mean things like this?' Frank raised her gauzed hand. 'The dog that bit me was red. Your sister-in-law warned me a couple weeks ago to watch out for a red dog.'

Helms nodded, 'Exactly like that.'

'But you don't believe she made that happen' Frank argued. 'She might have seen it in some weird way, like a premonition, but she couldn't make it happen.'

He shrugged again, 'Maybe. Maybe not.'

'Do you think she could make things happen to her own nephew?'

He stared at Frank.

'I can't say.'

'Can't or won't?'

'Can't, Lieutenant. Now I really best be getting to lunch.'

Frank flipped him a card.

'You seem like a decent man, Mr. Helms. If you think of something I should know, here's my number.'

Frank had let herself out.

Now she twirled her pen around and around on the tabletop, losing herself in the pinwheel effect. The Mother had everyone tiptoeing around her like she was enthroned on eggshells. For Frank's money, Mother Love was just another hustler. An effective one, but a charlatan nonetheless.

The odds were good, Frank had contended all weekend, that at some point she'd come into contact with a dog. If it happened to be a red dog, all the better for the Mother's prediction. If it wasn't, it was still a dog. An easy enough scam. Because Frank had been looking for the thing in rags when the dog bit her, the relic's image was in the forefront of her consciousness. The dog bit her where the beggar had grabbed her a few days ago so her discombobulated brain had made a logical association.

The explanation sounded perfectly viable, and Frank wanted to believe it, but her reptilian brain fought her. Thrashing around just under the waterline of her consciousness, it whispered, too many coincidences. Reluctantly, she listed them.

Being warned about a red dog, and then a red dog biting her. That thing in rags popping up all over town like a target in a shooting gallery, then disappearing from the station. The intense deja vus when she'd been bitten; the one before that when she was in the Mother's office. The freaky dream that had left her jumpy and rattled. And what about Darcy knowing all that voodoo shit and his wife being a mambo?

Separately, there were logical explanations for each incident. Bumping back to back, they made an ugly pattern. It was a pattern Frank didn't want to see, but all her training and instinct told her the line between coincidence and design had broken.