Читать книгу Blackbird - Tom Wright - Страница 14

SIX

I took Border Avenue south, with Arkansas and its liquor stores on my left, Texas with its car dealerships and Baptist bookstores to the right, and a mile ahead, the Louisiana Quarter, which some said existed only to show the world just how much political corruption and fine cooking it was possible to cram into one medium-sized town.

Catching the light, I downshifted the F-250 around the corner onto Eastern and listened to the exhaust grumble and roar, a sound Jana called the ‘Serengeti baritone’. It was probably more of an indication of my thinking than I understood at the time, but a few years ago when Jana and the girls were still with me, I realised I was tired of our number-two car, the Acura I’d been driving to work for the last six years. The first vehicle I’d ever been able to call my own had been a pickup, and after my time on the Flying S working for Dusty, nothing felt as natural under my feet as a truck. Which is probably why this one, parked under a huge oak beside the highway with a For Sale sign wedged behind one windshield wiper, had caught my eye. After a ten-minute test drive I bought it from the alcoholic mechanic who’d reworked it, a committed Jehovah’s Witness until he came down with depression, started mixing his medications with vodka and fell from grace. He wasn’t definite about exactly how it happened, but I got the impression it involved several counts of interrupting services at the Kingdom Hall to offer his opinions in favour of wholegrains and anal intercourse. Losing business, he decided to cash in some of his assets, starting with the big four-wheel-drive Ford. It had a heavy brush-buster and winch, oversized knobby tyres and a ceramic eyeball the size of a peach for a shift knob.

‘Throw a hook down the well, you could turn the world inside out with this hoss,’ the Witness said, his breath a weapon of mass destruction as he patted the brush-buster affectionately.

My daughter Casey’s judgement had been, ‘It suits you, Dad.’ Later she had decided for some reason that the truck ought to be called Buford, and painted the name neatly in purple fingernail polish on the left fender just back of the wheel well.

Her sister Jordan had said, ‘Mom keeps the van, right?’

‘What does this thing eat?’ had been Jana’s first question as she did a walkaround of the vehicle.

‘Scornful wives.’

‘Knock yourself out, Thunderfoot,’ she’d said, giving me a quick kiss and going back to her flowerbeds.

I found Jonas at a window table in John Boy’s, staring at the screen of his laptop. He was dressed in faded jeans, sneakers and a red Centenary sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up, and had a bottle of Corona at his elbow, but still somehow looking monkish with his prematurely white, close-cut hair and beard, and lean frame. I hung my jacket on the back of the chair and sat across from him, which gave me a view up into the split-level bar where most of the drunks and coloured neon were.

‘Nachos coming,’ he said, picking up the beer and taking a sip.

‘What’re you working on?’

‘Exam for tomorrow. What’s on your mind, JB?’

‘Crucifixion.’

He cocked an eye at me and said, ‘You trying out for Messiah?’

The waitress brought a plate of nachos piled high with cheese, refritos, chopped tomatoes, fajita strips, guacamole and pico de gallo, set a bottle of Corona with a slice of lime in front of me then disappeared back into the kitchen. I passed the lime around the mouth of the bottle a couple of times, shook some salt onto the rim and took a sip. ‘This is about a case,’ I said. ‘I want to get your thoughts.’

He nodded. ‘Always been your method: send you out for a bagel, you’re not coming back until you find out who invented wheat. And why. But what are you doing investigating cases – aren’t you supposed to be some kind of boss now?’ He paused to sip from his own beer then studied my face for a moment. ‘Wait a minute, I know that look,’ he said. ‘Like the time that little girl got kidnapped. You’re on something big.’

He was talking about Joy Dawn Therone, the Girl Scout whose body had been found behind an old warehouse ten years ago. She had been raped both before and after her throat was slashed to the spine. I hadn’t been one of the lead investigators, only one of the guys volunteering time, but I couldn’t help thinking about the case, and had never believed it was a regular serial killing. I wasn’t sure why, but I thought the murder more likely came under the heading of what the guy who kept the department statistics called HAMs – homicides of ‘happenstance and misadventure’. Nobody knew one way or the other, though, because no suspect was ever identified and no arrest ever made, but everybody at Three had kicked in to help pay for the giant angel she was buried under at Sylvan Memorial Park. Counting the marble plinth, it was over ten feet tall – big, but not nearly big enough to make up for us failing to protect her, or at least make the killer pay for what he’d done.

‘Yeah, I’m on something,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how big yet.’

Catching my tone, he said, ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake up any ghosts. What can I do for you?’

‘You can start by telling me about crucifixion,’ I said. ‘Not the religious stuff. I mean who did it to who, and how it was done.’

‘Interesting you should put it that way,’ he said, wiping a little edge of foam from his upper lip with the knuckle of his left thumb. ‘Because the actual procedure probably didn’t look much like what you see in the stained glass at church. But it was nasty enough. The Romans got famous for crucifying people because of all the press Jesus got, but it had about a thousand-year run as a common form of capital punishment, probably starting with the Persians around the sixth century BCE, then the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Seleucids, even the Jews themselves. But a lot of them, including the Romans, tended not to do it to each other. Saved it for slaves and conquered peoples. Odd thing, though: the idea that Jesus was crucified – I mean on a cross – didn’t crop up in any texts of known authenticity until a century or two after the fact.’

‘So what did happen?’

‘Oh, I’m sure they didn’t let him walk,’ Jonas said. ‘But what they actually did to him is anybody’s guess.’ He crunched a nacho and drank from his own Corona. ‘Anyway, Constantine outlawed crucifixion in the Roman Empire in 330-something.’

‘How’d it kill the victim?’

‘Open question,’ Jonas said. ‘The leading candidates are things like exhaustion, shock, heat stroke, heart failure. On the other hand, I read a paper a few years ago to the effect that it was most likely asphyxia.’

‘How would that work?’

‘When they used a crossbeam, the arms were fixed to it, usually before it was put up on the stanchion, which more often than not was a tree, by the way, but probably never by just nailing through the hands. Then, whether it was a post or crossbeam, the weight of the body pulling down on the arms and restricting chest movement prevented proper respiration. The victim suffered progressive hypoxia leading to eventual death by asphyxiation.’

‘What’s the story on using trees?’ I asked.

Jonas shrugged. ‘Convenience, probably. Who’s gonna hunt up a beam the size you’d need for a stanchion, drag it out there, dig a two- or three-foot hole for it in that rocky soil and plant it just to kill one troublesome Jew, when there’s an olive tree or whatever right there?’

‘Why not nail the hands?’