Killer Nashville Noir

by Clay Stafford

  Bayard jerked his head toward the floor. “On the ground. All of you. You too, Doc. And you…” He fixed a cool gaze on the receptionist. “Get your hand off that phone and lie down over here.”

  He waited until the five of them were laid out in a line like railroad ties, then touched the knife to Adrienne’s neck again. Her heartbeat pulsed against the steel.

  His breath was hot against her ear. “Now, Miss Cooper. You’re going to hand me that man’s gun. Nice and easy. Nobody try to be a hero.”

  There were no heroics, for which Adrienne was deeply grateful. She used two fingers to slide the guard’s gun out of his holster, then held it out toward Bayard’s free hand. The knife lowered, and for a moment, the span of a breath, he was vulnerable.

  Then she heard the rack of the slide, and the moment was gone.

  “Waylon,” she said. Her voice sounded small, so she tried again. “Waylon, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Don’t tell me what I have to do,” he said. “See those manacles and those handcuffs they’re wearing? You’re going to use those to cuff these nice folks together. That’s right. And get me the rest of those guns. Doc, you got any duct tape?”

  The doctor gulped in a breath. “In the janitor’s closet. Just down the hall.”

  He sent her to retrieve it—no funny business or I’ll kill every last one of them—then told her how to bind and gag the captives. Her hands only trembled a little, and she felt a ridiculous sense of pride when, after giving the bindings a quick tug, he nodded his satisfaction. “Nobody move and nobody gets hurt. I reckon somebody’ll find you in a few hours. In the meantime, I’m taking my lawyer with me.”

  She tried again. “Waylon, please.”

  He laughed. “Hey, you said you were gonna get me out. Well, now you are. Just maybe not the way you planned.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Sshhhhh.” He pressed a finger to her lips. “Baby, you’re my insurance policy.”

  • • •

  She was cool under pressure, he had to give her that. Under his watchful eye, she turned off the lights, cut the phone cords, and locked all the office doors. Might buy him a little more time, a few more miles between him and here.

  He gave her an admiring look. She was everything he liked in a woman. Blonde. Beautiful. Cool as a cucumber, but with just a little fire in her eyes.

  He shepherded her out to the van, his fingers pressed against the small of her back. She smelled like lavender and musk, like all the women he’d imagined for the last, long fifteen years, and suddenly he couldn’t wait. He caught her hands and bent her back across the hood of the van until she arched into him, head tipped back and throat exposed. His tongue flicked across the nick he’d made. “Sorry about that, baby. Had to make it convincing.”

  “You were convincing.”

  “God, I could take you right now. You know how long it’s been?”

  “Too long.” She wrapped her legs around his waist. Her mouth found his.

  Too long.

  Afterward, driving down the winding two-lane road toward the highway, he felt like he could breathe for the first time in more than a decade. It felt good to be behind the wheel of the van, the woman beside him, the smell of her still on his hands.

  She shifted in the passenger seat, doing woman things. Freshening her makeup, checking her teeth for lipstick in the visor mirror, fluffing her hair with her fingers. He liked watching her, the simple elegance of her movements, the delicate shape of her hands. He wanted to drink her up.

  They passed through the little town where the prisoners’ families and lawyers sometimes stayed. Three restaurants, a couple of motels, a barbershop, and a gas station. Not much more than a wide spot in the road. Six miles past the town, she pointed to her left. “Turn here.”

  A few more turns, and they were in a subdivision where the streets had names like Larch and Elm and Sugar Maple. As they passed a dingy white brick ranch house with a swing on the front porch, she pointed again and said, “This one. Around back.”

  The driveway curved around to a back door and a two-car garage. She rummaged through her purse, fished out a remote, and pointed it at the garage door. It grumbled open, and he rolled the prison van in beside a faded Chevy pickup.

  He felt a little safer when the door rolled down behind them.

  She slid out of the car and bent down beside the pickup. The keys were underneath the chassis in a magnetic box. She dropped them into his palm with a flourish.

  “Your chariot,” she said.

  “Whose place is this? You trust them?”

  “Ed and Sue Gillespie. I don’t have to trust them. They’re in Oklahoma, visiting their grandkids. Won’t be home for another two weeks.”

  “And they just handed you their keys?”

  “We met in town. I’ve been eating at the same diner for six years, every time I come up here to work your case. Got to know the locals, made a few connections. So when Ed and Sue said they were going out West, I offered to drop by and take care of their plants.” She gave him a wry smile. “They think I’m a sweet girl.”

  He leaned in, drawing in the scent of her. “You are a sweet girl.”

  And a smart one. She’d thought of everything. The house, the car, the psych review where security was lighter than at the prison. And bribes for two of the guards, the ones he’d told her had a certain reputation. He’d always liked smart women. As she peeled him out of the orange jumpsuit, her fingers lingering in all the right places, he felt a tingle of anticipation. She was perfect.

  A perfect Angel. Number 15.

  The thought thrummed through him, a familiar buzz, a pleasant pressure in his groin. He held on to the feeling, hoping he could make it last.

  They made love in the Gillespie’s bed, then again in the shower. Making up for lost time. Later, zipping up the new Levis she’d brought for him, he said, “They’ll be looking for us. Roadblocks. Every cop in the state will have our pictures.”

  “They’ll be looking for a clean-shaven man and a blonde woman in a stolen prison van. This car isn’t stolen. It won’t be reported for two weeks. As for the rest…these are for you.” She showed him a fake belly and a makeup kit with spirit gum, a short blond wig, and a matching beard and moustache. Then she tugged at her blonde locks. “I’m going red.”

  “I like you blonde,” he said.

  “I know you do.” She gave him an appraising look, as if she knew what he’d been thinking, then showed him the label on the box. “Don’t worry. See? It washes out.”

  • • •

  Night fell like a velvet cloak, the lights of a thousand headlights dimming the stars.

  They’d taken back roads, invisible in the Gillespie’s faded truck, until they crossed the Alabama line, then rolled down I-65, rock music rattling the windows of the pickup. She leaned over, peered across at the speedometer, where the needle hovered right at sixty-five. He looked relaxed, head and shoulders pulsing in time to the music, but when she touched his arm, his muscles were coiled tension. She ran her palm across his thigh and felt him wanting to press harder on the accelerator, to rocket them and the Gillespie’s truck as far and fast as it would go.

  She touched her throat, ran her finger over the tender place where he’d cut her. It had scabbed over, a thin line that felt like thread.

  He’d said he had to make it seem convincing, and that was true. But she’d known by the pressure of his crotch against her thigh that he’d enjoyed it.

  He was thinking about it now, she could tell. Had been thinking about it since he’d first touched the blade to her skin.

  She reached over and turned off the music. “What was it like?” she said. “The killing?”

  He gave her a sardonic smile. “Aw, now, baby, you know I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “That’s for the courtroom,” she said. “This is just you and me. I want to know what it was like.”

  When he hesitated, she pulled up her shirt and ran her hands across her b
reasts. “You think I’m wearing a wire? I’ll let you search me.”

  That brought a grin. “I already searched you.”

  “You can search me again. Later, when we get there.”

  He grunted, liking the idea. Her stomach fluttered.

  “The first time you did it, what did it feel like?”

  He drew in a long breath, eyes fixed on the road, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then his expression softened. “I was twenty-two. I’d been thinking about it for a while by then. Seems like since I was old enough to think about such things. I’d have a woman, and I wouldn’t hurt her, but the thought was in my mind. It made it sweeter somehow, more intense. And then, just thinking wasn’t enough. I had to hurt her. Not bad, just a little. And the hurting brought the sweetness back.”

  “But then a little wasn’t enough.”

  “I picked up this college girl. She was hitching a ride, wearing these tight jeans and a little cotton top with no bra. Silky blonde hair and a cocky little grin. She looked like an angel, but she had just enough devil in her, if you know what I mean.”

  “Did you know? When you picked her up, did you know she was the one?”

  “I didn’t know until we were right in the thick of things. And then I pinched her, and she gave a little gasp. She said, ‘You want to tie me up?’ And I thought, I could just do it, you know? All the things I’d thought about for all that time.”

  She pressed her palms against her knees and looked out the front windshield, where the highway twisted like an eel until it faded black into the sky. That’s what he wants for me, she thought. Her stomach felt strangely hollow.

  “I felt bad for her,” he said. “It didn’t seem fair, how much she had to suffer just so I could have what I wanted. But I couldn’t stop. I liked it too much.”

  She found her voice. “What was her name?”

  “I don’t remember her name,” he said. “I just remember how she screamed.”

  She rolled the window down and let the wind whip through her new copper-penny hair. The air smelled of diesel fuel with undertones of pine and honeysuckle. It brought back memories of being twelve and riding with her sister in the new Mustang convertible Dad and Mom had bought for Talia’s birthday. Top down, music blaring, neither of them knowing what a gulf would one day come between them, or that twenty years later Adrienne would be on that self-same highway with a killer’s semen drying on her thighs. What would her parents think of that?

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said over the roar of the wind. “But you don’t have to do it.”

  “Aw, baby, you know I love you,” he said. But he didn’t tell her she was wrong.

  She caught his gaze in the rearview mirror. “You don’t have to do it anymore at all,” she said. “I’m going to help you stop.”

  • • •

  You don’t have to do it anymore, she’d said, but it was all he could think about.

  He didn’t like the red hair, but that was okay. He’d get her in the shower, wash the copper out himself, just like the label said. He imagined her body, slick and soft beneath his hands, the silky wheat-gold of her hair emerging as he massaged her scalp. He imagined the things he would do to her and how the fire in her eyes would dim once he’d had his fun.

  But not yet. He needed her. And besides, the anticipation of it all still made him hard. His back stung where she’d raked him with her nails, and that excited him too. It was enough for now, but, much as he might wish it, enough never lasted long. Sooner or later, he always wanted more.

  He wondered how long this one could keep his attention.

  She poked him in the bicep. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I heard you. You said you were going to help me stop.”

  “You don’t think I can.”

  “What makes you think I want to?”

  “Fifteen years ‘Inside’,” she said. “And…there’s something in you. I know. Something good, deep down. So bright and beautiful that even all those things you did can’t dim it.”

  He liked the sound of that.

  She said, “You never wondered why all those women went with you so easily? They could see it too.”

  She had him there. No matter what the prosecutor said, they’d all climbed happily into his bed, although they hadn’t left it that way. He said, “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right. How would I stop?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Since that first day I saw you shackled to that chair across the table from me. I figure it’s a lot like smoking. You know? How most people can’t just quit cold turkey? They cut back, or maybe they use the patch.”

  “The patch?”

  “But first you taper off. Go a little longer in between each one, and finally you realize you don’t need it anymore.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Dead serious. I believe in redemption. You need saving, Waylon Bayard, and I’m going to save you.” She nodded toward the next exit. “Get off here.”

  She guided him down an empty highway, up a winding, wooded road that turned to gravel, then to dirt, and finally to a rutted path that led to a cabin in an open patch of moonlight.

  He pulled up to the front and turned off the ignition. “These folks on vacation too?”

  “These folks come here two weeks in September. We can lay up here for three, four months.”

  “It can’t be tied to you?”

  “Not by a thread. This is the last place anyone would think to look. I’ve spent the last few months stocking it up. There’re clean sheets, soda, wine, and food enough for weeks. I bought you a case of Jack Daniels and another of that bourbon you told me you liked. All your favorites. And I brought you a surprise.”

  She flung open the door revealing a cozy room with raw-log walls and a wide fireplace with cords of firewood stacked to either side. Leather couch, matching recliners, and in the center of the room, a sturdy wooden chair. In the chair was a young woman, eyes wild, mouth taped shut and blonde hair limp with sweat.

  This one, he thought. Adrienne. She was going to keep his attention for a good, long time.

  • • •

  She could tell he liked the girl. It was in the way his breath caught in his throat, the way his pupils dilated as he looked at the tools she’d laid out on the coffee table. She’d looked at the police reports, seen even those details they’d held back from the media in hopes of catching the killer with guilty knowledge. She’d replicated his death kit to a T, right down to the scalpels and the strawberry lip gloss all his Angels had worn to their graves.

  “I know you like to get to know your girls,” she said. “Your Angels. But I thought just this once, because it’s been so long…”

  He made an animal sound, low in his throat.

  “You’ll want to take your time,” she said. “To think about it for a while. I know you like to think. Sit down. Let me get you a drink.”

  She poured three fingers from the bottle on the counter. He gulped it down and handed it back for more, his greedy gaze riveted on the girl bound to the chair.

  The girl whimpered, mumbled something through the tape over her mouth.

  In two steps, Adrienne had closed the gap and slapped the girl so hard her palm stung. “Shut up. You see that man? You only speak when he gives you permission to. From now on, that man is God.”

  She glanced at Bayard, saw approval and excitement in his eyes. As she watched, a dreamy expression crossed his face. The bourbon was doing its work. He’d been dry for a long time, and the drink was hitting him hard.

  She guided him to the couch and sat him down. Safe, she thought. She was safe.

  For now.

  • • •

  They found him in October—or what was left of him—when the family’s Labradoodle, on the first day of vacation, gifted her horrified owners with a human jawbone. Adrienne, just leaving the office in her new cherry convertible, heard the news on the radio with jus
t the slightest tremble of her lips.

  “Talia,” she’d whispered as he came to, eyes bleary and unfocused. “Your first kill. My sister. Talia was her name.”

  Like the deaths of a thousand vanished girls, his murder would never be solved. Adrienne had claimed to escape, and no one would ever doubt it, but she knew, as the girl in the chair knew, there was no escape. That girl once had a sister too, Angel Number 7.

  They’d driven back to the city in silence, and in all the weeks and months that followed, neither spoke of that night. They would never speak to each other again.

  Hearing the news, she thought again of hurtling down the Interstate in Talia’s new Mustang. Top down, music blaring, neither of them knowing what a gulf would one day come between them. A gulf as wide as forever. A gulf as wide as a grave.

  She could still hear Waylon Bayard’s screams, but the memory, sweet as it was, couldn’t fill the void inside. If only she could kill him again, she thought. Again, and again, and again.

  But death comes only once. Peace, sometimes, even less.

  A MATTER OF HONOR

  by Robert Dugoni & Paula Gail Benson

  Sara Ainsley Sims awoke to darkness. She lay face down, cheek pressed against the cool concrete. She lifted her head. On the wall, half-moons of light came into focus, then blurred. Disoriented, she fought the urge to throw up. She struggled to sit, but the plastic ribs of her corset jabbed her sides, and the stiff netting of the crinoline petticoat entangled her legs. Head pounding, she realized she still wore her vintage re-enactor gown.

  The night filtered back to her. She’d been at the commemoration to celebrate the Grand Bazaar in the Statehouse, the event in history that marked the last-ditch effort by each state in the Confederacy to raise funds to bolster the cause. Unfortunately, South Carolina’s Grand Bazaar came just weeks before Sherman’s troops exacted their fiery revenge on Columbia.