by Nick Petrie
Wanda looked at Peter in the rearview mirror. “Are you fucking serious?”
“He’s fourteen or fifteen, Wanda. You never made a mistake?”
“Is that what you call robbing a jewelry store? A mistake? Which he followed up by stealing your truck at gunpoint, by the way.”
“We’ve all done things we’re not proud of.”
Peter had a long list himself. War tended to do that to people.
And Ellison Bell had surely played the hell out of that guitar.
“Let me ask you something, Wanda. How old were you when you started taking pictures?”
He watched her face in the rearview. “Eleven. My uncle’s Polaroid. He’d let me borrow it for the day if I looked after my little cousin.”
“When did you know you wanted to be a photographer?”
She screwed up her mouth. “The first time I looked through the damn viewfinder.”
“And what did you give up to get where you are now?”
That uncomfortable look again. “Just about everything.”
“Anybody help you along the way?”
She sighed. “Okay, but.” The muscles flexed in her jaw. “You remember those other people are trying to kill me, right?”
Peter smiled. “I can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Wanda’s voice got loud. “This is my life here, not some fucking game. Bad men with guns.”
Peter reminded himself that Wanda was tough and experienced, but under major stress. Suffering from some kind of major traumatic event. And she was a civilian, no matter where she’d been.
“I know, Wanda.” His voice was gentle. “But it’s Eli’s life, too. What’s the next turn, Eli? Where are we going?”
“Let me look at my phone.” He showed Peter his hands, then dipped three fingers gently into his front pocket without disturbing the guitar fragments. He pulled out a cheap phone and brought up a map. “Three more blocks, then take a right at the pizza place.”
The turn took them through a sprawling industrial plant that took up both sides of the street. One well-lit storage yard held hundreds of pallets, pink-packaged bundles of what looked to Peter like roofing shingles. Cars and trucks were parked behind a high steel fence, even at this evening hour.
Peter looked around. “Where the hell are you taking us?”
“This place is busy, there’s always cars parked in these lots. I figured the truck would be safe here.”
Ahead, the road thinned down and split into a Y. The roofing plant abruptly ended in sawgrass and high brush, a rough, tangled no-man’s-land behind a four-foot chain-link fence. There were no visible streetlights past the Y. Both narrow roads disappeared into the overgrown darkness.
“I don’t like this,” said Wanda, letting up on the gas.
“Stay to the right,” said Eli. “It’s not far.” He tucked his phone back into his pocket, gathered his broken guitar up in his hands.
Wanda steered to the right, slowing further. Twenty miles an hour, then ten. The fence on both sides of them now. “Peter.”
The road curved away into the night. Behind them, Peter saw nothing but the dimming lights of the roofing plant. Nothing ahead but road and fence and power lines and Tennessee bottomland grown weedy and wild.
He pointed Chester’s gun at Eli again. “Don’t piss me off, here.”
“Hey, Saltine, you want me to trust you? Well, you gotta trust me.” Eli glanced out the window. A long section of fence covered with vines. “Your truck is this way.”
Wanda let the Land Cruiser coast to a fast walking pace. “I really don’t like this.”
Eli pitched the wreckage of the guitar at Peter’s face and jumped out the door, already running when his feet hit the pavement.
“Shit.” Peter untangled himself from the strings and splinters and went after him, Chester’s 1911 in his hand.
33
The skinny kid was fast.
By the time Peter got his feet under him, Eli was down the embankment and into the sawgrass. The vine-covered fence was up to the kid’s chest. It didn’t even slow him down. He bounced over it like his legs were made out of springs.
Peter had been a distance runner since high school. His time in the Marines had made him lean and strong, and he hadn’t let up since, especially not in the last six months, running the loop around June’s little pocket valley. He’d have no problem catching this kid.
He jammed the big pistol into his front pocket to free his hand as he ran down into the grass to the chain-link. He’d lost a good ten seconds untangling himself, and Wanda had coasted forward another twenty or thirty yards, so there were no vines here. It’d be easier to climb.
He put both hands on the fence top and felt the bloody bite of sharp-cut tips. Instead of the usual bent-wire top, this was a security fence. The top rail on the far side set three inches below spikes, nothing decent to grab. This was going to hurt.
Too late now. He ignored the pain, still moving, carried by his own momentum. He reached over the spikes to the crossbar, tearing up his wrists and forearms as he dug his boot-tips into the links and swung himself over the top. He’d get a tetanus shot later, he thought, then felt Chester’s 1911 slip from his pocket.
Landing on both feet, he looked for Eli. The kid had angled away and stretched his lead, up to his waist in the grass running toward the power lines, just another nighttime shadow with his dark skin and black T-shirt, headed for the trees.
He’d lose Eli if he stopped to search for the gun, so he left it behind and pushed himself into a sprint, running blind into dark, unknown territory without a weapon. Horrible tactics. Did Eli have friends in those woods? Some crew of feral street kids?
Peter would find out soon enough.
His hands were blood-slick from the fence-top but his legs were fine. He felt the sweat begin to pop through his skin. His breath came easily, but the ground was uneven, the sawgrass lumpy underfoot. Sprinting headlong was a bad idea. His old combat boots helped keep his ankles steady, but he had to slow his pace or risk a fall.
Ahead of him, the kid was practically invisible in the night, running for the power lines and getting farther ahead with every stride.
How was Eli moving so fast over this rough terrain in his ratty old sneakers?
Maybe Eli hadn’t jumped from the car at random. Maybe he’d picked his spot by the vine-covered fence, where the security spikes were covered by thick vegetation. With those few extra car-lengths Peter had needed to untangle himself from that damn guitar, he’d ended up jumping the fence farther along, where those spikes were exposed.
Had Eli known that might happen?
What else did Eli know that Peter didn’t?
He angled left to find the route the kid had taken.
After less than a minute, he stumbled at a narrow flattened section, then saw a faint line heading away, slightly brighter in the night than the tall grass around it.
A path, or something like it. The lumps beaten down by foot traffic. An old shortcut headed somewhere.
Eli hadn’t just jumped when he saw the chance. Eli had known exactly what he was doing. And where he was going.
Peter’s truck was nowhere near here. And Eli was more than halfway gone.
Hands throbbing, Peter ran faster. His boots felt better underfoot now, his legs strong, his chest and shoulders lubricated with sweat. The power lines were closer. Was that Eli in his black Fender T-shirt running ahead of him, or some tall, dense-leafed shrub blowing in the wind?
Peter passed the shrub.
He pushed harder.
To find his truck, yes, but for Eli, too.
Because the kid had been right, back in the car.
King Robbie’s men were after all of them, now.
Peter wasn’t even going to think about the blue-faced dump-truck driver with the ma
chine gun. One problem at a time.
Under the power lines on their crooked creosoted poles, the path met a gravel utility track for service vehicles. The gravel pointed toward a brighter patch of sky, some well-lit place. The path picked up again on the far side and headed into the trees, and Peter knew it was where Eli had gone. The utility track would lead to a closed gate, a parking lot, a paved road. The trees would be better cover, and the Wolf River was over there somewhere.
A million places to hide, for a while. Until Eli got hungry.
What safe place did he have, then?
Peter could see ahead to where the path slid between overgrown weed trees and into the woods. Maples and oaks and chestnuts. If Peter was laying an ambush, this is where he’d do it. Stand to the side with a tree branch and knock down the chaser as he came in blind.
But Eli was far out in front and in familiar territory. Peter was much stronger and would have the advantage in any direct confrontation. Eli was smart, thinking ahead a half dozen moves or more. He wouldn’t stop running. He had a plan.
If Peter couldn’t catch him, he hoped to hell Eli had a plan.
He felt the white static flare as he approached the dark trees. He raised an arm to keep the branches out of his eyes and ran headlong into the forest.
* * *
• • •
In the sawgrass, there had been some ambient light from the city, and a brighter glow to the east from that lit-up place down the gravel utility track. Under the canopy, it was far darker. He could barely see his hand in front of his face, let alone any trail through the underbrush and years of fallen leaves.
He stopped.
Tried to quiet his panting breath. Listened hard.
He heard the quick, light crunch of running footsteps in the distance. Peter turned his head to one side, then the other, letting his ears find the direction. Waiting for his eyes to adjust.
There it was. The crooked line of the path, but much fainter in the darkness.
He was off again, pushing even faster now, weaving through the trees. As he got deeper inside, they got bigger and far older. Tall, gnarled trunks. In the middle of industrial Memphis, this odd little piece of ancient forest. Running, he imagined Union scouts under cover here, or a band of Confederate raiders planning their next attack. Or a rest stop on the Underground Railroad.
And here was Peter, a white man, chasing this black kid through the woods.
Thinking he knew what was best.
Hoping like hell he was right.
His lungs burned, his hands sticky-slick with blood. He wanted to stop and listen again, but was breathing too hard to hear anything but the pounding of his own heart. So he followed the meager path where it led him, running harder than ever, pushing past his limits. Branches slapped his arms and face. Eli wouldn’t have this problem. Slimmer and smaller, he was a rabbit ahead of the hounds, running for his life.
Then Peter came around a low thicketed rise and the forest was brighter, light shining in through the trees, the path clear before him. Eli out there somewhere.
With a final blast of speed, Peter pushed through the last thick stand of branches and into a field of waist-high grass around a high fenced enclosure topped with a coil of razor wire. A big bright electrical substation with towers and transformers and a windowless brick control building.
No sign of young Eli Bell anywhere.
The path led through the grass to a dead-end asphalt turnaround, then disappeared into the grass again. More trees beyond, and the wild land along the river.
The Land Cruiser stood silent on the road.
Wanda leaned her angular frame against the fender, shaking her head.
Peter came to a stop at the car, chest heaving, legs wobbly, nauseated from the long hard sprint. He bent at the waist and put his bloody hands on his knees. He was fairly certain he wasn’t going to puke.
Eli Bell had beat him like a rented mule.
“You’re not very good at this, Peter.” Wanda’s short dreadlocks bounced with her laughter. “You can’t even keep hold of one baby gangster.”
When Peter could breathe again, he said, “Why does he call me Saltine?”
“Baby, don’t you know what a saltine is?” Her smile was luminous in the floodlights. “It’s a white cracker.”
She dissolved into hysteria and fell giggling into the high rough grass.
Peter dropped beside her. She looked over at him, eyes half-closed again.
“I finished my drink,” she said sleepily. “And took another pill. Maybe you’d drive?”
34
Peter stopped to collect Chester’s 1911 on their way back to the Peabody.
He found the remains of the guitar on the road to mark the place he’d run from the car, then used the flashlight on Wanda’s phone to follow his own trampled path. The pistol lay beneath a clump of sawgrass not far from where he’d gone over the fence.
The tubular crossbar was stained with his blood.
The thighs of his pants were imprinted in red with the shape of his hands.
He used the melted ice from Wanda’s drink to rinse his hands, then wiped them on his pants to blur the marks. He’d hoped it would make him appear less like an ax murderer. Now he just looked as though he’d been splashed by thinned red paint.
He’d done this whole thing very badly.
Eli and Wanda might well pay the price.
* * *
• • •
In the hotel’s parking circle, Peter touched Wanda’s shoulder to wake her, then offered to help her up to the suite. She shook her head without a word and assembled herself in the seat of the Toyota. With a tight grip on her camera bag, she walked through the entrance with her head held high.
After a moment, he followed her inside, checking to see that she got on the elevator.
In the high-ceilinged lobby, with its elegant fountain and dark-stained woodwork and grand player piano tinkling out “Don’t Be Cruel,” he was acutely aware of himself. He stank of the sweat from his confrontation with King Robbie and Brody and his sprint through the woods. His pants were filthy, but without his truck, they were his only pair.
The young clerk at the front desk eyed him nervously, her hand on the phone, even after he showed her his key card. “Just making sure my friend made it upstairs,” he said. “We had a little too much fun on Beale Street.” Hoping that might explain how he looked.
He asked for an envelope, put his key card inside, wrote June’s name on the front, then handed it to the clerk. “She’ll pick it up tomorrow afternoon,” he said. Then asked for directions to the bathroom off the lobby.
Avoiding his own face in the mirror, he scrubbed his hands and arms with soap and hot water.
It would be easy to think Wanda was just a woman having a little too much fun.
Her collection of pills told a different story.
Something terrible had happened, and she was trying to push it down deep. But it wouldn’t stay down, not forever. Not even with all the booze and pills in the world.
Peter had some experience with that.
He’d help her with the hidden part of her life if he could. If she’d let him.
It wasn’t exactly his area of expertise.
Between the white static and Peter’s restless need for motion, his own mental health wasn’t exactly stellar. To deal with it, Peter’s default was to go kinetic. It was fun.
Of course, most people would run screaming from the things Peter found fun. The kind of action that damped down his own static, or put it to use.
Peter wasn’t most people.
And he was pretty sure he had at least one more thing to do that night.
He smiled wolfishly as he hit the gas, steering the Toyota out of the parking lot and into the street.
* * *
• • •
&nbs
p; Driving from The Peabody toward Wanda’s house, he kept his eyes on the rearview mirrors. The hour was late and the roads were mostly empty. If someone was following him, they were very good.
He was fairly certain there was no tracking device on Wanda’s car. He’d checked the underside after collecting Chester’s gun, not that it was any kind of guarantee. The technology was getting better and cheaper all the time.
If anyone was tracking the car remotely, they could have moved on Peter and Wanda many times in the last few hours.
King Robbie’s operation probably had that level of sophistication, but what they lacked was the opportunity. This whole thing was unfolding too quickly. King Robbie and Brody and Charlene had only gotten involved that morning, after Peter’s truck was stolen.
The guys with the machine gun had been harassing Wanda for weeks, but they hadn’t crashed the dump truck into her house until early yesterday. Peter couldn’t discern much of a plan there besides reducing the house to rubble.
It would help if he knew what they wanted. He wondered if they knew themselves. Maybe they just wanted to ruin something.
He drove a slow, lights-out surveillance route around Wanda’s house at a four-block radius, saw nothing, and didn’t attract any followers. He drove another circuit, three blocks out. Still nothing. He left the Toyota tucked behind an elementary school and crossed Vollintine on foot.
Just another saltine out for a walk on a warm May night in North Memphis.
With Chester’s 1911 tucked into the back of his bloody pants.
If the cops picked him up, he’d be in serious trouble.
Now two blocks out from Wanda’s.
Some streets had homes with fresh paint and tidy yards. Others had more vacant lots than houses. He walked on the sidewalk or into the vacant lots, trying to stay invisible. Most houses had security lights outside, but the interiors were dimly lit or dark. He could hear the murmur of televisions through open windows, and the occasional hum of air conditioners. There was no traffic. Most newer cars were parked in driveways, behind gates. The cars on the street were usually old beaters.
