Knock Off Rembrandt - Chapter One

KNOCK OFF REMBRANDT

“I need your help.”

Deonte’s voice on the phone in the dark of the trailer. Jake sat up too fast and came close to banging his head on the curved surface of the wood panels.

His second home while he worked on a third, parked in the backyard of a historic home.

“Where?” Jake mumbled.

His voice was thick with whiskey, the after affects of it at least. He had closed down the honky tonk, as was his habit and knocked off the best part of a half gallon of Kentucky’s finest all by himself.

A liter of water before passing out on the memory foam mattress pressed against his bladder.

He hitched up and stumbled to the bathroom the size of a small closet, held the phone against his ear with one hand, and managed to aim with the other.

“Got a problem down the jail,” Deonte said.

“You?”

That’s how they met.

Jake in jail on a trumped up murder charge, and his big black friend in on something else.

Both out a few hours later and a few drinks into a brand new friendship after the man kept him from a jailhouse murder.

No way he was going to deny him.

Deonte was one of the few friends he had left in the world.

“Not me,” Deonte answered, his voice calm and smooth.

It helped Jake wake up, helped him keep his head and get it straight.

Calm and smooth was the way to be. It made things move faster, allowed the neurons to fire and figure out solutions.

Panic put the body in fight or flight mode, and it was hard to think of other options when every instinct screamed run or destroy.

“Unc,” Deonte continued. “You don’t know him. Big old brother of my momma. He good people.”

Just like that.

Good people was a ringing endorsement in the tight knit community.

Didn’t mean he was on the wrong side of the law, just meant he didn’t hurt women, children or innocent people.

It qualified him for Jake’s help.

He didn’t bother to ask what he did. Every one he worked with was innocent and picked up by a corrupt police force, no matter what.

He could discover the particulars later.

“Let me get dressed,” Jake was saying.

“I’m down front.”

Jake shuffled to the blinds by the round porthole in the metal door and peeked through.

Down front was relative.

The Knox House had three stories in the historic structure he was rehabilitating, but Jake’s trailer was parked on a concrete slab added in the seventies where a shed had stood.

Deonte beeped the horn of a Caprice Classic, propped up on extra large rims, with glowing lights that ran the length of the car.

“Give me a minute.”

Jake swiped the phone off and shuffled into pants and a coat. He ran a toothbrush over his teeth and swished with mouthwash to get that fuzzy coat off his tongue, and debated washing it all off with a couple of slugs of Jack Daniels just sitting in a bottle on the counter.

He decided against it.

If he showed up at the station with bourbon on his breath, the cops might try to throw him in with Deonte’s uncle.

“Unc,” he said after he locked up and slid into the velvet covered seat cover next to his tall friend.

Deonte wore a cowboy hat tilted back on his head.

He called it a homage to Burbank’s propensity to drink in a honky tonk off Main Street, and he wore it to fit in.

Jake never asked why he wore it so much away from the bar. It didn’t make him fit in out in the hood, or the barrios around Pine Bluff.

Too easy to recognize.

“They got him up on a murder charge,” Deonte explained. “Said he shot his neighbor.”

“Did he?”

“Not that I think of,” he said. “The man was with me when his neighbor took two to the head, one to the chest.”

“I’m not questioning your credibility,” Jake said.

“Yeah, yeah, we got other witnesses. We was out PJ’s. They had a seventies theme night, you know it?”

Jake shook his head.

“Play all that good shit we had when we was kids and had that Saturday Night Fever. You remember Dance Fever?”

“Watched it with my grandparents,” Jake said.

“Yeah, that Danny Canada on channel eleven. Came on after the news. Me and mine would line up and dance, momma watching and clapping.”

“I didn’t do much dancing.”

“Yeah, well, you got the white man’s burden, so I don’t blame you none.”

“I’ve got rhythm,” Jake defended.

“Sure you do, Lawyer Man. I believe it.”

“PJ’s?” Jake turned him back to the story.

“Yeah, must have been bout a hundred people seen us. So this ain’t gonna stick. Still, they picked him up about thirty minutes ago.”

“He call you?”

“Nah,” Deonte shook his head. “Neighbor’s wife.”

“The man that got shot?”

“Same.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah, cops gonna think so?”

“Yeah. But someone told them something. Why else are they gonna pin it on him?”

“They had beef.”

“What kind?” Jake opened the door as they pulled into the station parking lot.

Deonte shrugged.

“Unc didn’t say much. You know how it is, these two been side by side going on twenty years. Could have been the fence, could have been the pecan tree dropping limbs. Thing is, they had words is all I know and they weren’t talking.”

“How long?”

“Words or talking?”

“They’re related,” said Jake.

The two men stopped in front of the glass double doors that led into the basement of the police department on the lower level of the Civic Center.

Jake could see their reflection in the heavy mirror tint.

Deonte in a pressed black suit, purple shirt open at the color, straw cowboy hat looking like it was part of a fashion ensemble, the man wearing it as good as any fashion model.

The lawyer next to him, thin, too skinny from too many liquid dinners, more worn.  Jake had a lot of miles, and they were starting to show.

“Three months,” Deonte calculated.

Jake opened the door.

“Let’s go see what we can find out.”

CHAPTER TWO