by George Wier
“Wait a minute,” I said. “K and Q?”
“Right,” Todd said.
“King and Queen. That’s where chess comes into this.”
“I’ll be damned,” Holt said from across the room. He sat there, regarding us, but there was dawning recognition on his face. There could have been a glowing light bulb suspended in the air over his head.
“I... didn’t remember until now.”
“Tell us, Holt,” I said. “Tell us what happened that night.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INTERLUDE: 1960
By the time the young man and the girl make it to the island the sky is a black void but for a scattering of stars seen through an even blacker branch work.
The smell of fuel is over-powering. Their eyes water and their breath comes in shallow pulls.
He kills the motor. The risk of a spark from the small outboard setting off the fuel is too great. Even in his confusion he knows this much.
“Would you please shut up,” he says to the girl.
She does, just as the bow scrapes between cypress knees at the islands edge.
“Be useful and hold the flashlight,” he says.
She responds, though slowly. “What―what?”
“Shine it around,” he says, and hops off into the water.
There is a rustle close by, like a mad scramble. Twigs snap, tall grasses move. There is a loud splash. Elsewhere, not far away now, there are similar motions and disturbed water.
“Alligators,” he says. “They’re fleeing. It’s scared them. Nothing to worry about.”
“I’m scared, Holt.”
“Stop whining,” he says. There is a sharpness to his own voice he’s never heard before. “Here. Step out of the boat. I’ll catch you.”
“No,” she says. “I’m staying right here.”
“Fine by me,” he tells her. “I’ll be back.”
“NO! You can’t leave me here.”
“Come on then, dammit.”
She steps to the edge of the boat and it almost goes over. Her arms flail, the flashlight beam pinwheels through the canopy overhead. He catches her, takes two splashing steps in the knee-deep water and deposits her on the soggy grass of the island.
They both hear it: a scream―a human throat voicing pain and terror.
“Oh my God!” Molly Sue cries out, and her voice breaks.
“Shut up,” he says. “Come on.”
He hops onto the island, takes her hand and runs, pulling her behind him. She trips and he loses her, the flashlight skips across a tuft of weeds and lands with a wet smack. He finds her by her labored breathing. She is crying now, like a lost child.
“Will you please shut the hell up!” He pulls her to her feet.
A voice cuts through the night. A man’s voice barking a sharp command.
“Get back in there, you bastard!”
“Who was that?” she asks.
“It’s from up ahead,” he tells her. “Ask me if I know. Do I look like God?”
“No,” she says. “The Devil, maybe.”
The voice again: “Stay there!”
Another scream, cut off abruptly and accompanied by a wet smacking sound.
“Damn,” Holt says, and increases his pace. “Shut the light off,” he spits at her through clenched teeth.
They plunge into darkness.
He pauses, waiting.
He tastes something coppery in his mouth and feels a numbness around his lower jaw.
Blood! He is biting his lower lips. He’s broken the skin.
“Alright now,” he whispers to her. “We’re close now. We wait.”
The fumes are more concentrated here. It clogs the sinuses, brings tears to their eyes. The girl is sobbing, softly.
The very air is saturated with fuel. It’s difficult to draw a breath and every breath sears the lungs. His eyes water.
They see it at the same instant. Another light ahead of them; a flashlight beam, much like their own. It moves through the trees erratically, then back again.
There is a scream from what is left of the airplane.
A man emerges from the fuselage, then another. In the first man's flashlight beam Holt and Molly Sue watch as the other two men begin clawing at themselves, at the skin of their faces.
“Back I say!” barks the man holding the flashlight. The man holds a gun, aimed at the other two.
But the two men are not listening to him. They have lost all their wits. They scream and scratch and claw at their bodies and tear away their flesh in rivulets.
The gun barks in the flashlight bearer’s hands. And from that the very air is ignited.
Holt and Molly Sue are thrown back several feet by the blast. A fireball erupts into the air over their heads and ascends into the sky.
The figures coming from the plane multiply, but they are all on fire. They run amok, screaming and scrambling as they die, one by one.
One lone figure stands there. His face is very nearly a twisted ruin, and his actions are insane.
“The King!?” He cries to the burning men and women running about. “The Queen!? Where are they?” When one of the burning women doesn’t answer him, he shoots them down in cold blood.
Holt watches, helpless to rise and do something. His legs aren’t working properly. His vision blurs and his face blisters. He covers Molly Sue with his own body as if to protect her. But she is unconscious.
The darkness of unconsciousness likewise descends upon Holt.
And when he awakens the following morning to a scene of devastation and ruin, Molly Sue is already awake. She gibbers like a madwoman.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Thanks, Holt,” I said. “I know it wasn’t easy telling that. How do you feel?”
“Better. Better for telling it.”
“Maybe,” I said, “you won’t have as many nightmares now.”
Holt smiled a thin smile. “Yeah. I hope not.”
“A couple more things, General,” I said. “Someone is trying to get to my wife. It’s Pierce Gatlin and the fellow with the dark sunglasses. Dunross.”
The General sighed. “No. Dunross has no interest in Mr. Gatlin’s money. It’s something else he’s after.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I think I do,” Willett said.
I turned to Willett. There was a look on his face I had never seen before. The closest I could describe it was embarrassment.
“Willett?” I said.
“Remember I told you not to go on the island?” he said.
“Yeah. I do. You gave Jessica and me a good scare.”
“Well... it wasn’t to protect you from Caddo Cold.”
“Then why?” I asked.
“It didn’t want you finding... anything.”
“The canisters?” I asked. “The King and Queen?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Only the King, as you call it, was punctured by the original crash.”
“The Queen, then,” Todd said.
“Yeah,” Willett said. “I found it and buried it. I marked the spot with an oar.”
“Now it makes sense,” I said. “You knew exactly where the wing of the plane was in the water. You couldn’t have done that unless you gotten in the water at some point, looking for it.”
“Yeah,” Willett admitted. “I combed every square inch of that island. I swam around it a few times as well. I didn’t care if I caught some bug and got sick and died. I wanted whatever it was to go away forever.”
“That was awfully brave,” General Todd said. “I wonder. How long did you wait to see if you were going to die?”
“A day,” Willett said.
“When?” I asked. “When did you do this?”
“Two days after Holt fell. That next morning, I just had time to get home, cleaned up and back to the hospital. That’s when you showed up, Bill.”
“I’ve heard all I need to hear for the time-being,” Dane said. “I’m
going to step outside and check on those fellows that Willett knocked out.”
“Thank you,” Todd said. “If you can get them up and bring them in here, I would appreciate it.”
“It wouldn’t do for them to be eaten by alligators, now would it?” Dane asked, and chuckled.
“Holt,” I said, when Dane had gone. “What happened that day you fell?”
*****
When Holt Gatlin fell, he fell hard.
Apparently, though, he didn’t fall as hard as everybody, including Holt himself, was led to believe.
“I was on the roof the day I fell, as you know,” Holt said. “I’d sent Willett to get our lunch at Bargers down near Marshall. Bargers makes some of the best barbecue in these parts. Willett didn’t know I was going to be up on the roof. He never would’ve let me go up by myself, which was why I sent him off, actually. I wanted a look at the job he was doing without telling him so―sorry Willett. Also, I wanted the chance to get a look at the town I had known from childhood. You know, from a good vantage point.
“I reckon I told you about a piece of slate giving way underneath me, Willett. I probably told you the same thing, Bill. There was a piece of slate. I get sort of a blurred picture of it in my head, but now that I think about it, it seems as though it didn’t as much loosen and slip as it did sort of shatter. Also, it seems like I heard something on the way down.
“You know, a lot goes through a fellow’s head when he’s falling from a height. It was sort of like slow-falling, if you get me. It’s about as short a space of time as it takes to sneeze, which, come to think of it, I did hear something like a sneeze before I left the roof and saw the ground coming up. But at the time I was actually thinking about you, Bill. I was thinking what you were gonna have to go through settling up my retirement money because I would be dead. Funny thing to think of at a time like that, but that’s what went through my head. I thought I was dead, in about the next half a breath. But then I heard this sneeze. I tried to look, you know. I tried to turn my head so I could see where it was coming from even while I was falling. Maybe that’s why I didn’t crack my head open nor break my neck when I hit. I had my chin almost to my chest. I never did see who sneezed. There was this great black hole that opened up. A hole of pain, you know, and I was in it before I could think twice. But still, the whole time, I was wondering about that sneeze.
“I guess my head hit the thick grass there beside the theater. You know, the town had been ragging on me to keep it cut, seeing as how it’s on Main Street. Thank God I never did cut it. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be alive today.”
“Holt,” I said. “Did you ever see one of those old TV shows like Magnum P.I. or Knight Rider?”
“I’ve seen a few.”
“Did you ever hear a gun with a silencer go off on one of those shows?”
“Yeah. It sounds sort of like fshhew.”
“Right,” I said. “But that’s on TV. In real life a good silencer sounds like a sharp, very loud sneeze.”
He stood there, regarding me for a moment. Recognition dawned on his face.
“I’ll be a sonuvabitch,” he said. “Somebody was shooting at me.”
“I’ve no doubt,” I said. “What happened when you woke up?”
“I was in the hospital. Willett was there.”
“You don’t know what happened in between?” Willett asked.
“No. Should I?” Holt asked.
*****
It was Willett’s turn.
“When I came back from Bargers, you were already at the hospital, Holt. Later, when I asked who had found you, nobody―I mean but nobody―had an answer.”
“Probably the shooter,” I said. “Sorry, Willett. Continue.”
“You were in the Emergency Room and they wouldn’t let me in there. Said I wasn’t next-of-kin. That kind of bullshit. But then Pierce, your nephew, came out of there, walked right past me and left.
“I knew something was up. I didn’t know what. That sonuvabitch―sorry to talk that way about your kin, Holt―that is one fellow I don’t trust. I never have. He’s a slick talker. Also, when he found out you were back in town he showed up on our work site. He treated you like dirt and he ignored me completely. And you put up with it. All he had was questions. Kept asking things that were none of his damned business.”
“Go on,” Holt said.
“Anyway, when he walked out of that Emergency Room in Marshall, I had a not-so-very-nice feeling in my stomach. The look on his face wasn’t exactly stern and solemn, you know, the way you’d expect to see somebody that has just visited his uncle in the hospital. Instead he had what I’d call a smirk painted there.
“I didn’t bother to follow him―then. But when you came out of surgery I saw Dr. Carr attending you. The same fellow who had me dosed up kept sticking needles in my arm when I was a kid. I can still see his face through that clear plastic he wore. But I didn’t throttle him. I held myself―what do you call it in chess? I held myself in check, you know. Which ain’t exactly easy, me being me.
“After that, I decided to go back to your island. I wanted to put an end to all of it.
“Anyway, that's about it.”
“Alright,” I said. “Thanks, Willett. I think we're about done here.”
“Dane sure is taking his time,” Willett said. “I’d better go check on him.”
Willett stepped outside.
He came back within two minutes.
“I’ll be damned,” Willett said.
“Are my men alright?” Todd asked.
“Yeah. They seem to be fine. I left them on the ground outside the door.”
“What, then?” I asked.
“Dane’s gone.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Willett and I ran to where we had left the boat.
It was gone. There was only the distant sound of the motor, growing more faint by the moment.
“This is not good,” Willett said.
*****
I flipped open my cell phone and called home. While doing so I saw that I had maybe one bar of power left in the damned thing. Maybe I had one more call, if I was lucky.
“Bill?” It was Julie.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve sent Jessica home with a nurse named Linda Wilkinson. She seems to be okay.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been on the phone with her. Is everything alright there?”
“Not really,” I said. “Is Patrick Kinsey there where I can speak with him?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Bill, it’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”
“Damn,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“That’s okay. Hold on.”
I waited for a moment, then Patrick’s voice came over the line.
“What did you do this time?” he asked.
“I was minding my own business,” I said. “Say, I want you to look up something for me. Can you do that?”
“What is it?” Patrick asked.
“Got a pen?”
“Just a sec.”
I waited and watched the night sky. There was a line of thunder clouds coming over from Louisiana. The stars above me were clear and bright, but there was nothing but pitch blackness to the south and east.
“Okay,” Patrick said.
“If you can get quick access to the National Crime Information Computer, I’d like you to run a name.”
“Go ahead. My pen is poised.”
“Good. And then tell me if he’s ever lived in Mississippi, ever worked as a barge captain. If Hank is there with you, maybe he can do that part.”
“He’s here. He just got back from handing that nanotechnology fellow over to the U.S. Magistrate. Go ahead and give me the name.”
“Fitzbrough,” I said. “First name is ’Dane.’” I spelled out the first and last name for Patrick.
“I’ll get right on it.”
“Thanks, Patrick. Give my best to Hank.”
“Will do. Give me five minutes.”
/> We hung up.
I waited no more than four minutes. In that small space of time it began to rain, a fine mist that carried the promise of far more to come. Willett walked about in small, frustrated circles, his footsteps making wet smacking sounds in the muck. Then my cell phone rang.
“Bill,” Patrick said. “Got the information on Dane Fitzbrough.”
“Give it to me.”
“The name is an assumed name connected with someone named Charles Renny. Renny is wanted by the FBI.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “That’s who Chuck is. Look, Patrick, I know it’s probably too early, but does Hank have anything yet on this guy?”
“Hold on, I think it’s coming in now. I’m handing you off to Hank.”
I waited for Hank’s voice. While I did, Willett said “Dane equals Chuck, right?”
I nodded.
“Bill,” Hank Sterling said. “Where are you?”
“You don’t want to know,” I replied.
My phone beeped in my ear―the warning that it was going to die soon.
“That sounds about right,” Hank replied. “Look, something tells me you may want to know in a hurry, so here goes. There is nothing to indicate that either Dane Fitzbrough or Charles Renny ever lived or worked in Mississippi.”
“Alright. He claimed to be a riverboat captain,” I said.
“People claim all kinds of things,” Hank replied. “Look, Bill. Patrick didn’t say anything before, but Pierce Gatlin was just, uh, apprehended... while trying to break into your office downtown.”
“Good,” I said.
“According to Patrick, he’s cooling his heels at the Travis County Sheriff’s Office, formal charges for attempted burglary pending.”
“Tell him to push the limit on that,” I said.
“There’s more on Fitzbrough-slash-Renny.”
“Better talk quick,” I said.
“It’s coming through on my laptop as we speak. Charles Renny did a stint in the Army.”
