by Mike Stewart
The shrill of crickets filled the fields and woods, and a bullfrog on one of Susan’s ponds bellowed at whatever they bellow at. I turned down the gravel driveway and found myself trotting then jogging then running full out. I forced myself to stop. With my back pressed against the thick trunk of a pine, I got quiet and tried to listen. Crickets made music. A light wind rustled the pine needles and oak leaves overhead, and my heart thumped like a fist on the inside of my sternum. I breathed deeply, forcing my mind to calm, and started once again down the driveway.
Staying close to cover along the roadside, I walked slowly around the last small curve of gravel and dropped to one knee when the house came into view. Susan’s classic white farmhouse seemed to float above the ground on a soft black cloud of shrubbery. No lights showed through the dark-shuttered windows in front. To the right of the house, the small, whitewashed barn Susan used for a carport seemed empty, but inside the barn was shadowed black, and I knew that a car or even Rus Poultrez himself could be hidden deep inside.
I had a choice to make.
The driveway leading to the farmhouse passes between two ponds. One is higher than the other, and water pours from the higher pond to the lower through large white pipes beneath the roadbed. I could reach the house in less than a minute, maybe thirty seconds, if I stayed on the road and crossed between the ponds. And, if I did that, I would make one hell of a nice target. On the other hand, I could circle one of the ponds, stay in thick cover, and get to the house in ten or fifteen minutes. No question about it. Circling made more sense. But on the other hand, I thought… Screw it. I crept to the pond’s edge, took three deep breaths, and sprinted across the roadbed in full sight of God and possible killers and anyone else who wanted to watch.
Joey’s Walther PPK was in my right hand, and I used it to pump as I raced into the night. Ten seconds of eternity passed as it felt as though my knees were flying up to my chest and my heels brushed the back of my head. Ten seconds, as it turned out, of nothingânothing but running and breathing and terror. The far bank of the lower pond passed by on my left, and I dove off the driveway and landed in a base runner’s slide, tearing down the bank with my right knee tucked under and my left toe pointed. Gravel ripped my pants, and I felt the sharp sting of small stones grinding away at flesh. It was a shallow ditch, and I hit bottom quickly. I tried to hold very still and listen for sounds other than my own heavy breathing.
I clicked off the Walther’s safety and eased back up to the roadbed on my belly. The house was still dark. The carport was dark. Nothing moved. But there was something. In back, just visible through thick azaleas and boxwoods and holly trees, a pale light framed a porch swing hung from the limb of an oak tree. It could have been a security light or the reflection of moonlight off a second-story window. It could have been a lot of things.
I made another quick scan of the house and the carport and the grounds; then I worked my way through the ditch to a row of thick brush lining the fence. Minutes later, I was pressed against the wall of the huge red barn in back of the farmhouse, and I was looking up at the lighted shade of a bedside lamp in one of Susan’s upstairs bedrooms.
Okay. Now what?
I watched. I watched for what seemed a very long time. And nothing happened. But finally I did notice something new. Through one of the back windows on the ground floor, I could just see the top of a doorway that I could have sworn led into Susan’s study. And, I realized, there was no reason on earth that I should have been able to see the outline of an open door inside a dark house. The opening seemed to be lighted by a faint glow from the other side, from inside the study.
I needed a better view. Circling around the back of the barn, I made it to the other side of the yard and paused to pick out a shadowed path to Susan’s wide, wraparound porch. Another quick look around the moonlit yard, and I took off, staying low and silently cringing as each footfall crunched through dried layers of leaves and pine needles that had accumulated while Susan was away.
Next to the back edge of the banistered porch, I had just hooked left to head for the side steps when my left foot struck something that felt like a sack of loose dirt. My front foot faltered and twisted as the other foot slid backward across loose leaves. I lost balance and hit the ground chest first. Something dull and hard gouged the side of my neck. Wind rushed out on impact, and I made an involuntary “Oomph” sound.
I grabbed for the stick that had gouged my neck and pushed. It moved, but in a strange, organic, rolling motion. It was attached to something, and that something was a leg. My hand was wrapped around the dirt-caked toe of a cowboy boot. And I was lying full across someone’s corpse.
Shuddering and rolling, I cleared the lump of flesh and pressed my back against the porch. I held the Walther automatic against my chest and listened. But I looked at nothing but the dead body at my feet. It was a man. Thank God. He lay on his back with one narrow cowboy boot pointing up and the other lying flat. His head was twisted at an unnatural angle that buried his face in grass and leaves. But I knew who he was. I recognized the short, light hair; I recognized the build and even the clothes. I reached down and yanked up his left sleeve and found the tattoo: an ugly blue dagger with R.I.P. over it and R.E.T. underneath. Rudolph Enis Teeter, a.k.a. Sonny, had a bullet hole through his left side and, from the looks of it, a broken neck to boot.
I had just leaned forward to check his neck when I saw the shadow. A shovel with a tombstone-shaped head smashed into my right wrist, and the Walther PPK spun off into the dark. The giant black shadow of Rus Poultrez loomed over me. He didn’t speak. He didn’t laugh. He just raised the shovel back up over his head and aimed the metal spade at the top of my head.
I was crouching. I came up fast, burying my head in his gut, clamping his legs with my forearms, and driving with my legs. Poultrez managed to bring the shovel down in an excruciating blow to my lower back that shot hot waves of pain from my butt to my shoulder, but I had him off balance. The big man went over on his back as I jammed my head and all the weight behind it into his belly. I somersaulted over his chest and landed just over his head. My right hand was numb. I jammed the fingers of my left hand into my hip pocket and came out with the switchblade that Sonny Teeter had donated to Joey in the parking lot of Mother’s Milk.
Poultrez was big, even bigger than Joey, but he didn’t have Joey’s speed. My fingers found the chrome button on the side of the yellow knife handle, and I felt the blade click open as I spun around and slammed my right elbow into the big man’s face. In the same instant, the long thin blade protruding from my left fist found the soft flesh of his neck. And, just as Joey described on Dog Island, I jammed it in up to the hilt and twisted with all my strength. Hot blood gushed over my fist and down my forearm. Rus Poultrez shuddered and fell limp.
In an old cattle trough next to the barn, I washed off Poultrez’s blood in a shallow pool of rainwater. The feeling started to return to my right hand, and with the feeling came searing pain. I could use my thumb and two of my fingers, but my index and middle fingers hung like dead tubes of meat.
I went back to check Poultrez. He was extremely dead.
It took a minute or so to find Joey’s handgun. I picked it up in my left hand and mounted the porch. No one was moving inside the house.
I circled the house, found the front door unlocked, and stepped inside. The only sounds were the ticktock of Susan’s antique grandfather clock and the periodic hum of the refrigerator’s ice maker cycling on. I knew the house, so I left the lights out as I conducted a search of every room on the ground floor. Upstairs, only one person was in residence. And it was my client, Carli Poultrez.
Carli jerked and made a yelping sound when I opened the bedroom door. She said something like, “No.” Her wrists and ankles were bound with shaggy twine and lashed to a four-poster bed. Her slit-up-the-outside shorts were unsnapped and unzipped, but they were still on. Carli’s shirt and bra had been torn or cut open at the front, and the white mounds of her breasts loo
ked soft and vulnerable against the tanned muscles of her stomach and shoulders.
I said, “It’s okay, Carli. It’s me, Tom.”
She lifted head off the bed and stared wildly in my direction. “Get out of here. Run. Run now. Get out of here, Tom. Get out of here.”
“Carli, it’s okay.”
She screamed. “Don’t you understand? He’s here! He’ll kill everybody.”
I glanced down the hallway and closed the door before walking over to the bed. I reached down and pulled a spread over Carli’s exposed breasts. “Who’s here, Carli? Is it just your father?”
She started to cry and spoke between deep, wrenching sobs. “Yes. My father. He’s here.”
I dropped the Walther in my hip pocket and started picking at the knots on her left wrist. I could have cut themâif only my knife hadn’t still been buried in her father’s neck. “Is anyone else here? Anyone else who wants to hurt you?”
“No. Just him.” She looked at what I was doing and seemed to find herself a little. “Hurry. He’ll be back. You need to hurry. We gotta find Susan.”
I had one wrist free now, and Carli reached across to claw at the twine binding her other arm while I moved down to untie her ankles. “It’s okay, Carli. Your father’s dead. He tried to bash my head in with a shovel, and I had to kill him. I’m sorry.”
Her wrists were free now. Carli sat up and looked at me. “He’s dead? You sure? He’s really dead?”
“Yes, Carli. He’s really dead.”
She squeezed shut her eyes and began to cry again. The spread had fallen away when she sat up, and each sob made her young breasts tremble. All she said was, “Good.”
I was untying the last piece of twine. She looked down and pulled the covers up to her neck. I said, “Do you have any other clothes here?”
She seemed to be coming into the present. “Yeah. In my bag. It’s over in the closet there.” I walked over and opened the closet. As I bent over to pick up her backpack, she said, “I put it in there yesterday when I first got here. You know, before I knew Susan and my … before I knew he was here.”
I dropped the backpack on the bed. “Susan’s here?”
Carli came a little unfocused, then said, “She was here. He couldn’t handle her and me at the same time. He said … he said he was gonna shut her up and save her for later. He said she was gonna be dessert.” She started to cry again.
“Is she okay?”
“I don’t know. I guess.”
“Carli. Was Susan hurt? We found a lot of blood in the room where they kidnapped her.”
The girl’s eyes focused. “No. Susan wasn’t hurt when I got here. Unless, since then…”
“Did he leave the farm with her?”
Carli stopped to think. “No. I don’t think so. He wasn’t gone long enough. At least, I don’t think he was.” She gazed off at the wall. “He tied me up before they left. He was gone awhile, and I heard him downstairs. Banging around the kitchen, fooling with the TV and stuff. Some time went by. I heard him come up the steps and open the door. That’s when he tore up my clothes and got his hands in my pants.”
“Carli, don’t.”
She shrugged and reached for her bag, but it was feigned callousness. “He’s done worse.”
“I know he has, Carli. But he won’t anymore. I promise, nobody’s ever going to hurt you like that again.” I patted her calf. “Get dressed. Take a shower if you need to. I’ve got to find Susan.”
As I turned to leave, Carli said my name. “Tom? The first time we met you told me it’d be easier to just walk away and forget about the murder on St. George. You know, not go to the police.” She looked down at the bedspread. “When it came to it, though, you didn’t walk away.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I was opening the door when she said, “I knew you’d come help me.”
And I left my young client sitting on the bed, staring at the little collection of possessions in her backpack.
I trotted downstairs and walked quickly through each room, flipping on lights and checking closets as I went. Susan was not in the house.
Like most Americans, Susan had a flashlight in a drawer in the kitchen. I found it rolling around among batteries and matches and scissors and tape. I clicked it on and left through the back door. No one had disturbed the barn that had been Bird Fitzsimmons’ studio, and the carport was empty. I could think of only one other place to lock someone up. At the rear of the house, I found four fifty-pound bags of fertilizer stacked on top of the door to Susan’s bomb shelter. Susan had shown it to me six months before when I needed a place to store my dead brother’s stolen money. Some prior owner had built it during the 1950s atomic-bomb scare. Susan had used it as a root cellar.
I tossed the bags aside and yanked open the door. “Susan!”
“Tom?” She walked forward into the flashlight’s beam.
“Are you okay?”
Susan squinted into the light. “Poultrez is here.”
“Not anymore.”
Susan is tough, and she seemed unhurt. I told her Carli was inside the house, getting cleaned up and changing clothes.
“What did he do to her, Tom?”
“Maybe she should tell you about that.” Susan looked scared, so I added, “He didn’t rape her. Just, you know, ripped her clothes and touched her, I think.”
We were up on the porch now. Susan reached over and rubbed her hand over my back and said, “Thanks.” I cringed. She had managed to rub over the imprint of the business end of Poultrez’s shovel on my lower back. She stopped and faced me. “What’d he do to you?”
I smiled. “Hit me with a shovel.”
“God. Is that why you’re holding your hand funny?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it broken?”
“Well… yeah.”
Susan pushed open the door. “Go in the kitchen and put some ice on that. I’ve got to go check on Carli. I’ll come tend to you when I’m done.” She looked at me. “Go!”
So I went. And, as I went, I was all but certain I heard mumbled words, containing, among other things, the words “ridiculous” and “macho,” coming from Susan’s direction.
In the kitchen, I found a family-size bag of Green Giant LeSeur Early Peas in the freezer, bopped it on the counter to break up the frozen peas a little, and draped the bag over my broken hand. Then I walked over to the little built-in, kitchen desk, picked up the phone, and punched in 911. I relayed my predicament to a bored municipal employee and hung up.
Not five minutes later, I heard a loud knock on the front door.
Susan was still upstairs with Carli. I wandered through the house to the entry hall, pulled open the door, and found myself face-to-face with Deputy Mickey Burns of the Apalachicola Sheriff’s Department.
chapter thirty-seven
“You get a transfer?”
Deputy Mickey smiled. But then, he pretty much always did. “I heard the call go out about the murders on the way in. I was already headed up here to get you.” He stepped forward with the obvious expectation that I would react normally and step aside. I didn’t. He stopped and said, “May I come in?”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
Deputy Mickey actually stopped smiling. “I’m here to take you back to Apalachicola for questioning in the murder of Willie Teeter.”
This was not good. Either Captain Billy had changed his mind or the two boys who Billy and Peety Boy had plugged in their respective legs had started talking. I decided to do innocent. “What are you talking about?”
I should have been paying closer attention to his hands. I knew he had stepped back. I just hadn’t noticed the service revolver in his meaty, freckled paw. “Turn around and put your hands against the door.” I hesitated, and he raised his revolver level with my chest and brought up his left hand to steady the gun in firing position. “Do it!”
So I did. At least, I leaned with my left hand and kind of propped against the door with my rig
ht elbow.
“Get your feet back.”
I managed to put one foot back a little and say, “My hand’s broken.” I listened for Susan and Carli, hoping they were locked in a bathroom upstairs taking care of each other. Just stay upstairs. The sheriff’s coming. An ambulance is coming.
The deputy patted me down, lifted Joey’s Walther PPK out of my pocket, and said, “Oh. Okay, turn around. I’ll cuff you in front.”
I pushed away from the door and turned to face him. “Cuff me? What the hell for? Am I a suspect or something?”
His only answer was to slap cuffs on my wrists in that quick, clip-on way cops have of doing it. It hurt, and I wondered how much time he’d spent practicing that cute move on his bedpost or maybe a girlfriend.
I let the bag of frozen peas drop and said, “Can you hand me that? It’s the only thing that’s helping the pain.”
My plan was, first, for him to bend over to pick up the peas and, second, for me to kick him as hard as I could in his friendly freckled face. But apparently he’d heard of that plan because, before he bent over to get the frozen veggies, Deputy Mickey jammed the barrel of his revolver into my stomach and kept it there until he had placed the bag back over my wrist and stepped away.
He said, “Move,” and I thought I could see panic creeping into his eyes.
I had a new plan: kill time. “Look, you and I both know you don’t even have jurisdiction here, and the local cops are on the way. Let’s just sort this out when they get here. I grew up in this town. You probably don’t know that but…”
He was panicked, and the veneer of polite professionalism disappeared. Deputy Mickey Burns reached out and clamped his gun-free hand over my broken hand and gave it a sharp squeeze and a yank. I yelped a little, which wasn’t particularly dignified, and he said, “I told you to move. Now.”
