Six John Jordan Mysteries

by Michael Lister

  I thought about it. I guessed it was possible, and whether it was or not, the fact still remained that Mike and Justin wound up in the same PM quad in the same prison.

  “Justin didn’t touch Kevin’s kids. He put him at PCI so he could kill Justin Menge if it came to that, and soon he’ll be out, coming back to us, to me, to my bed.”

  “Why not just kill him when he was in custody here?” I asked.

  “They couldn’t without drawing a lot of attention from the outside world. He was getting too famous.”

  “So you’re saying they actually sent Mike to PCI so he could kill Justin?”

  She nodded. “If he had to. They were pretty sure he wasn’t going to do anything, but they wanted to make sure.”

  “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”

  “Not to extremists. Remember, they don’t think like you and me.”

  “Why wait until now? He’s been in there with him for a while. Why the delay?”

  “He was scared. Told his dad someone threatened him—someone he was truly afraid of.”

  “Any idea who?” I asked.

  She looked up and pursed her lips as she thought about it. Finally, she shook her head. “I’m not positive, but something like Charles or chuck or—”

  “Chris? Was it Chris Sobel?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that was his name. Who is he?”

  “The victim’s boyfriend.”

  Her eyebrows arched and she cut her eyes over toward me. “They were in prison together?”

  “They met there.”

  We were quiet a moment, the flat, straight road stretching out before us, its yellow lines seeming to race to meet the beam of my headlights.

  “You willing to testify to all this?” I asked.

  “I won’t live long enough to testify to that or anything else, but I’m willing. I’d love to see Howard’s kingdom crumble.”

  “We just might be able to make a case after all.”

  “Make a case?” she asked in shock. “Haven’t you been listening? We’re not going to make it through the night.”

  40

  Sharon Hawkins had large, natural breasts. They sagged down against her rib cage, flattening out on top as they did.

  I knew this because she had them out showing her brother in-law when I snuck up behind him and slipped a snub-nosed .38 behind his ear.

  “Now you’ve been fucked,” Sharon said with a smile. “How does it feel?”

  “What?” he said. He turned around toward me slowly. “What the fuck?”

  “You’re about to find out,” I said. “Take me to the dungeon.”

  “Dungeon? What? What dungeon? What the hell’re you talkin’ about? Dungeon.”

  As Sharon put on her bra and shirt in no particular hurry, I reached down and removed Kevin’s gun from its holster. He didn’t move to stop me, but I could see in his eyes he thought about it. When I had taken his gun, I slipped it and mine into my coat pockets.

  His eyes widened.

  “One more time,” I said. “And I mean only one more time. Take me to the dungeon.”

  He laughed. “What dungeon? You been listening to this crazy whore?”

  I thought about what Martinez had done to Sarah, what the Hawkins men had done to Sharon, and of all the violence men commit against women all the time, and it made me so angry, so full of rage, so fearful for Susan and Anna I didn’t know what to do.

  I snapped out a hard right jab that popped him right on the nose, and his head jerked back. He yelped and covered his face with his hands, tears filling his eyes.

  “You’re a fuckin’ preacher for God’s sake,” he said, his voice wet and nasally.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes I’m just a guy looking for his friend.”

  “You better tell him, Kevin,” Sharon said.

  “Shut up, bitch.”

  I popped him again. This time an uppercut that tagged the bottom of his chin. His head snapped back like before, but this time there was choking.

  My hand and wrist hurt, and I could feel my knuckles beginning to swell.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll show you the damn dungeon, but there’s nobody down there. You’re making the biggest mistake of your life. Both of you.” He glared at Sharon. “Your life is so over, bitch.”

  I slapped Kevin hard across the face with my open hand. He grabbed his cheek and stared at me in shock.

  “I’m not crazy about that word,” I said.

  Sharon laughed, this time with real delight. “So he bitch slapped you. Get it?”

  Kevin shook his head at her. “You’re a dead woman.”

  “You think that scares me anymore? You stupid little bastard, you don’t get it, do you? My life was over the moment I became a Hawkins.”

  “I’m gonna fuck you one last time before I kill you, and it’s gonna hurt.”

  I slapped him hard across the face with my open hand again, and he whipped his head around toward me, eyes blazing with anger.

  “Nobody’s talking to me. I feel left out. Don’t ever threaten her again.”

  “He couldn’t hurt me,” Sharon said, looking at Kevin. “His dick’s too little.”

  “It’s probably hard to tell tonight,” I said, “but I’m basically committed to nonviolence, but if you’d like to slap him, I’d love to let you.”

  She smiled, took a step toward him, and reared back and slapped him so hard his head whipped to the side.

  He made a move toward her and I stepped between them.

  “You don’t even have your gun out,” he said.

  “Then now’d be the time to try something.”

  I could see the flicker of thought in his moist eyes, but it quickly died. “The time’ll come. We’ll—”

  “You should take some initiative. Do something on your own. Like you said, I don’t have the gun out.”

  “Yeah,” he said like a sullen child, “but you’ve got it where you can get it.”

  “Take me to Merrill.”

  “All this over a nigger,” he said, shaking his head.

  I drove a hard body punch to his lower abdomen. He fell to his knees, doubling over as he did. On the ground, he attempted to find some air, but there was none to be had.

  “I really don’t like that word.”

  When he could take a breath, he threw up, his body lurching forward in violent heaves. Eventually, he led us to the back of the jail, through a door, into a storage closet, through another door, and down a rusting spiral staircase.

  The dungeon lived up to its name. It was dark and smelled of human suffering. From an unseen corner hidden in the shadows I could hear the constant, mind-numbing sound of water dripping from an open pipe.

  Emerging from ancient and jagged concrete, black and rusted bars formed a small cell along the back wall. Inside, Merrill was standing, his large hands gripping the bars. His face was swollen and disfigured. His upper lip was bloody and busted, his right eye swollen shut.

  So much violence. I’m sick of it, of being around it, of being part of it, of being it.

  “I’s just thinkin’ this jail needed a chaplain,” Merrill said with a smile, which with the condition of his face looked like a fun house mirror reflection.

  “Not to perform Last Rites I hope?”

  “Well, hell, yeah, soon as I get my hands on that rat motherfucker in front of you.”

  “Unlock the cell.”

  He took out his keys, his hands jittering so badly they jingled, then took a step toward the cell door before stopping and shaking his head. “I can’t.”

  “Open the door, bitch,” Merrill yelled at him. “Don’t make me more pissed than I already am.”

  Kevin Hawkins bowed his head and handed the keys to me. When I had unlocked the cell door, Merrill limped over to him, and in a voice so low I had to strain to hear it, said, “Live with the certain knowledge that your days are numbered.”

  The entire time Merrill talked, Hawkins never lifted his head.r />
  Sharon laughed, but it was free of the futility it previously held. Instead, it was filled with a very real hope.

  “Told you we’d take care of you,” I said.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have,” Howard Hawkins’s voice boomed from behind us.

  I reached for the .38 in my jacket pocket, but he jammed a shell in the chamber of his shotgun before I could even touch the handle.

  41

  “Well, now,” Hawkins said. “I’s afraid of this.”

  “Let’s do them tonight, Daddy,” Kevin said as he dug the guns out of my jacket pockets. “Have that big nigger in the ground by mornin’.”

  “Sounds like Junior’s scared,” Merrill said.

  “Not without reason,” I said.

  “True.”

  “By God but I hate a sassy nigger,” Kevin said.

  “He really just say that?” I asked.

  “You thinkin’ what I’m thinking?” Merrill asked.

  “That he’s inbred or suicidal?”

  “Both,” he said, spinning around.

  Grabbing Kevin’s gun, he pointed it at his head, and used his body for a shield.

  “Unless you want to see how small your boy’s brain really is,” he said to Hawkins, “drop it.”

  Without protest, Hawkins eased the shotgun down onto the wet cement floor. When he was upright again, he held up his hands.

  “We won’t give you any trouble. Go ahead and leave. Just do two things. Leave the girl and don’t ever come back to Pine County.”

  A wide, distorted smile spread over Merrill’s face. “If she wants to, hell, even if she don’t, Mrs. Hawkins is comin’ with us. And as for Pine County, hell, I been thinkin’ about buyin’ a place next to yours.”

  “You’re—” Hawkins began.

  “Holdin’ all the cards,” Merrill said. “So shut the fuck up. And just pray that cancer kills your ass before I do.”

  “Cancer?” Sharon asked in shock.

  “You can’t believe what all these dumb motherfuckers say in front of a dead man. Only I ain’t dead. I like Lazarus come back from the grave. Shouldn’t count a nigga out before you kill his ass. You and Junior in the cell. Now. I ain’t got all damn day. I’ve got to get home and get some rest and think about how many different ways I’m gonna fuck with y’all.”

  They quickly moved into the cell.

  “Don’t kill them,” Tom Daniels said, descending the stairs. “Let’s wait until we can arrest them and get them inside one of our prisons.”

  “Welcome to the party,” Merrill said to him. “You a little late.”

  “Well, my son here gave me my invitation a little late.”

  Just before Sharon and I had walked in, I’d left a message on his voicemail letting him know where we were and what we were doing—just in case it didn’t go according to plan.

  “It’s a good thing I came” Daniels continued. “I’ve got two other deputies cuffed to each other inside a cell upstairs.”

  Merrill shrugged. “All you did was save their lives. Whatta you want, a cookie?”

  “No need to thank me. But my daughter’d never forgive me if I let something happen to her new husband. By the way, she thinks you’re helping them move this weekend.” He looked over at me. “I figured out how Hawkins did it. Potter helped him. I think we’ve got a solid case.” He nodded over toward the cell. “Now it looks like we’ll have the whole family inside.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “They don’t like to be separated. Now they can recreate their little city set on a hill experiment inside. See if it really works.”

  Merrill looked over at me, his swollen face a lopsided question mark.

  “You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Good thing I learns fast for a sassy nigger.”

  42

  The morning sunlight dancing on the gentle ripples of the Apalachicola River refracted into sparkles so intense they could only be looked at a moment at a time. Merrill and I were seated by the river’s edge in a couple of wobbly, uncomfortable wooden chairs. Merrill didn’t seem to mind—not about the chairs or the blinding reflection or much of anything. He just seemed happy to see daylight, happy, like his ancestors before him, to be a free man of color.

  “They say when they first came to Africa to get slaves they got African tribes known for their docility,” he said, as if giving voice to a stray thought. “Said they’d make good slaves and not cause any trouble.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I ain’t from that tribe.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m from the give-me-freedom-or-give-me-death-motherfucker tribe.”

  A large limb with three turtles floated by on the other side of the river. When it bumped the base of a cypress tree, two of the turtles fell into the water. The day was so quiet, the water so calm. I heard the two small ker-plunks from where I sat.

  “Those motherfuckers beat hell out of me,” he said. “They’d wake me up in the middle of the night—hell, it may’ve been the middle of the day, I couldn’t tell—just to take turns punching me. I ain’t as pretty as I used to be. And they did things to me. Not sexual things, but belittling shit.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m gonna kill them.”

  I didn’t say anything. I understood how he felt, and his need to give voice to it, but I hoped that eventually, after he had healed, he’d reconsider his wish for retribution. The line between vengeance and justice is often a fine one, but there is a line. Merrill would have to figure out his own lines for himself. All I could do was be his friend, help him however I could.

  The line in my own life, the one I seemed to be tripping over so often lately, was between compassion and justice, and like Merrill, I had to figure a few things out.

  “I wanna hunt ‘em down and take ‘em out,” he said, still staring at the river.

  “Won’t have to. Eventually, they’ll come after Sharon.”

  “Maybe.”

  “They will.”

  “They come after us and we take them out, it’s self-defense,” he said. “We go after them it’s . . .”

  “Something else,” I said. “It’s a fine line, but . . .”

  “Situation like this it’s all somebody like you got.”

  “And you,” I said.

  He looked at me again, and I could tell he was considering what I had said.

  “I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “But first I’ve got to tell you something else.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m a better man because of you.”

  My eyes stung, and I had to blink several times. He had never said anything like that before, and, though I doubted it were true, and thought it much more likely just the opposite was the case, it meant more to me than he would ever know.

  “You like nobody I’ve ever known—or known about,” he said.

  “Thanks. And ditto.”

  “You got all these lines and codes—like the shit we was just talking about,” he said. “You got faith—and not just in God, but in yourself and me, and fuck all if I understand it, but in humanity. You got this way of making people want to be better, but you never seem to judge us when we’re not.”

  “You must’ve really thought you were going to die in that dungeon.”

  “Don’t laugh this off,” he said. “Hear what I’ve got to say.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was—”

  “You do this balancing act thing between like mercy and righteousness,” he continued, “and you’re always thinking, always examining, always questioning—yourself and everything else. Thing is, that’s who you are. You slip too far to one side or the other then you’re not you.”

  I nodded again. He didn’t have to say anything else. He had noticed the change in me, too, the hardness, the anger and violence that were much closer to the surface now, the rage that more quickly rushed out.

  “I know you can handle yourse
lf. You plenty tough. But to be tough—when you have to—and still have compassion, that’s an art. That’s your art.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “I’m struggling,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “You’ll figure it out. This is temporary. Just don’t forget who you are.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  We were quiet again, this time for a while.

  “Maybe they got sense enough to stay in Pine County, and this won’t involve you. They realize there’s no way for them to win out here, that even if they get us, your dad or Daniels would square it, then none of this need involve you.”

  “I’m involved, and I’m gonna stay involved. No matter what. Besides, I don’t think they think like that. Being in touch with reality don’t seem to be hallmarks of the Hawkins’. Normal rules don’t apply.”

  “Normal laws of nature do. If I cut they ass, do they not bleed?”

  “Literate bastard, aren’t you?”

  “Some kind of bastard,” he said with a lopsided smile. “Sharon says Hawkins really think he’s untouchable, invulnerable. Whole life’s taught him to think that way.”

  I nodded.

  We were quiet a long moment, and I knew healing was beginning to take place in both of us.

  “I know what it’s like to be an inmate now,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything, just thought about the paradigm shift he must be experiencing—like the doctor who’s diagnosed with the type of disease he specializes in.

  “I’ll be a different CO now,” he said.

  I nodded.

  A few minutes later, Tom Daniels arrived with what looked to be breakfast. He handed us each a paper cup of coffee and began to pass out glazed doughnuts. When I took the lid off my coffee, the steam rising from the cup warmed my nose, and I realized how cool the morning was. October in Florida is usually like the end of summer in most places, but not this year.

  “So how we gonna take down the Hawkins clan?” Daniels asked.

  He had not called FDLE or taken any other action against them last night, feeling it best to complete our investigation first, knowing he would no longer be in charge—maybe not even involved. All we had on them at the moment was what they had done to Merrill, and they could fabricate evidence and an arrest report too easily, explain his wounds away by saying he had resisted arrest, even charge me and Daniels with breaking him out of jail. That would all get very complicated very fast. We didn’t just want them on false arrest and imprisonment, which would be difficult to prove anyway, so we hadn’t notified any authorities—and if they were as corrupt as we thought them to be, they wouldn’t either.