The Further Tales of Tempest Landry Read Online Free PDF Page B

Tempest said then. “This is Mortimer Tencrows Karpis, a lifer and a great guy.”
    I extended a hand and so did he. His grip was powerful and still I could tell that he was holding back.
    “You know Ezzard here?” Karpis asked me.
    “Seems like forever.”
    “You got a nice suit, brother. You work around here?”
    “In that building with the turrets on top,” I said, pointing at a skyscraper beyond the tallest trees of the park.
    “That must be real nice,” the old man said. As he spoke he picked up the coffee cup with the name Pinky written on it, that and a buttermilk doughnut.
    “You took Pinky’s place?” I asked the elder con.
    The old man caught my gaze. His eyes were an icy gray with little yellow blobs here and there. There was disease and acres of experience in those orbs. I was a million years older than he but those eyes had seen, and felt, infinitely more.
    “I been up in prison forty-two years,” he said as if my gaze were a question. “I’m seventy-seven and I never regretted a day behind bars.”
    I didn’t understand the statement. He seemed defiant and I refrained from asking what he meant out of simple decorum.
    “Old Karpis here murdered a man named Lathan,” Tempest said. “Shot him nine times with a .45. Had to reload.”
    “I see,” I said.
    “No you don’t,” Karpis corrected. “Lillian had nine bruises on her body, ugly bruises. She had been raped and beaten and raped again. But the Lathans had got the governor elected and the defense had a story that the judge liked. He got eighteen months, six days, and nine bullets from me.”
    “Lillian was your wife?” I asked.
    “My daughter. She used to run to me when there was a thunderstorm and I’d hold her in my arms and tell her that I wouldn’t even let lightning hurt my little girl.”
    I felt an affinity with Karpis. Not with his rage but with his sense of time. No time had passed for him since the death of his daughter. He still felt the wrath from decades before, was trapped in the moment of sin to sin, like a pair of footprints from some ancient dinosaur hardened in the mud eons before.
    “I pray for your forgiveness.” The words came to my lips unbidden, in a celestial voice that I had not been able to call up for many weeks.
    Karpis dropped the coffee cup and turned away. He staggered back into the stand of pine and disappeared from our sight.
    “Dog, Angel,” Tempest said. “I didn’t think you could make that sound no more.”
    I looked at the place where Mortimer Tencrows Karpis had stood.
    “He brought it out in me,” I said.
    “You just full’a surprises, huh?”
    “Why did you bring me here, Tempest?”
    “Man, I didn’t bring you nowhere. And stop with that Barry White voice, huh. You know it don’t command me but it hurt like a sledgehammer in my head.”
    My intersection with Tencrows Karpis had rekindled the celestial voice that resided in every angel. It was as if just the memory of the murderer had transformed the world around him into a heavenly space. I was flummoxed by this transition.
    I swooned and Tempest caught me under my arms, dragged me to the bench that was set a few feet away from a paved walkway.
    “What’s wrong over there?” Andrew Welch called.
    He came running over.
    “I don’t know, Officer Welch,” Tempest said in true words that somehow sounded like a lie. “I think he got lightheaded or sumpin’. I just helped him sit down.”
    “Where’s Karpis?” the guard asked then.
    “He went off that way,” Tempest said, waving at the stunted trees. “You know he don’t mind pickin’ up the dog shit in the bushes.”
    “But his bucket and broom are right there,” Welch said, pointing toward the trees.
    “I don’t know, man,” Tempest said. “He old. You know he can’t get far.”
    Welch left us there and gathered the rest of his crew to go looking for the septuagenarian convict. After they were gone, and my dizziness passed, I took a deep breath and said,