The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  I can’t do this, she thought, and started to hang up when a gruff male voice said, “Homicide, Detective Ames.”

  She tried to even out her breathing, to speak normally. “My name’s Mira Morales. I, uh, have some information about a murder.”

  “What sort of information, Mrs. Morales?”

  Another thing about cops that she didn’t like was that they called all women missus.

  “Psychic information.”

  Silence. She could almost see his derisive smile, the roll of his eyes. Then he said: “What’s the information?”

  “White male. Shot in the chest below the sternum by another male. There was one witness, a boy of maybe four. Later on, I saw a boat, maybe a canoe, gliding through tall grass. I saw it early this morning, but I’m not sure of the real time.”

  Spoken aloud, it sounded foolish, demented. The cop didn’t laugh, but he didn’t sound too impressed, either. He actually sounded somewhat bored. “Was there anything else, ma’am?”

  “No, that was it.”

  “We appreciate the call, Mrs. Morales. If we need to speak to you again, where can we get in touch with you?”

  She knew he’d dismissed her as a flake. Just the same, she gave him her phone number and address.

  “One World Books is where you work, ma’am?”

  “I own the store.” I’m not a complete flake, turkey.

  “Very good, ma’am. Thanks for calling.”

  The line went dead.

  Chapter 2

  The sawgrass scraped against the canoe, a noise like fingernails drawn over a chalkboard. He paddled faster, faster, propelling the canoe through a flowing river of grass with dagger-sharp teeth.

  In junior high school, Hal Bennet had read about this river of grass, the very essence of the Everglades. He had read about the way it whispered to people who listened, that the tiny ridges on its leaves were sharp enough to flay the skin from a man’s hands. Something in the description of such wilderness had captivated his imagination and held it through all the years since.

  The grass ended and he paddled out into Hell’s Bay, an open lake that shimmered like a sheet of aluminum foil. The sun beat down, heating up the top of his head. But it didn’t scoop him raw inside, didn’t suck him dry, didn’t bake his bones. This didn’t even come close to the heat in July or August or even September, when the sun burned white against the sky and mosquitos filled the scorched, breathless air.

  He paddled rapidly, tirelessly, propelled by the fear that had dogged him since he had left Steele’s home. At times, the fear became a vague, protoplasmic thing, a thick mass that lodged in his throat or pounded between his eyes. Other times it molded itself into something quite specific: that he’d overlooked something at the house that would enable the cops to identify him. The fear pierced him now as he crossed the open lake, completely exposed, vulnerable.

  He wished he had used the airboat. He kept it hidden in the mangroves not far from where he lived, his fast ticket to civilization, noisy but efficient, like driving a Porsche versus a golf cart. It would have gotten him across this lake in the blink of an eye.

  The woman lay on the floor of the canoe and had been sighing and weeping much of the time, but now seemed to be slipping into oblivion. Hal had injected her with enough Darvon to catapult her into next week. He hoped she would stay out for a while now; her whimpers and groans and sighs irritated him. He found it easier to paddle and think when she remained silent.

  On the other side of Hell’s Bay, the mangroves sprang up, hiding him again. The trees looked like green umbrellas with long, bushy tassels that nearly brushed the water. The branches sagged so badly they created narrow, eerie tunnels through which he paddled, traveling up and down trails that had been created by the force and power of the water itself.

  Some of these trails, labyrinthine and hidden, didn’t exist on any maps and couldn’t accommodate airboats—not his, not those of the park service. The trail he followed emptied into a lagoon surrounded by dense mangroves. At its deepest, the water went down about six feet.

  Hal had stumbled upon it after he’d maxed out his sentence for fraud nine years ago. No land surrounded it, just the ubiquitous mangroves, their nest of roots thrust deeply into the black, rich soil.

  The mangroves hid the chickee so well you couldn’t see it unless you knew it was there. It looked like a snug wooden box with four skinny legs that lifted it eight feet out of the water. The Seminole Indians had built the first chickees in the Everglades, spare, open-sided habitats that kept them high and dry but little else. In the last fifteen years, the park service had constructed a number of them for campsites. Hal felt sure, though, that his had been the genuine Seminole version.

  When he’d found the place, it had resembled a lean-to with a leaky roof and a rotting platform. Over many months, he had hauled in supplies by canoe, enlarged the platform, built walls, put on a tin roof and covered it with branches and leaves for camouflage. Then he proceeded to make it not only habitable, but comfortable.

  He had added two rooms—a kitchen with a waterproof storage closet and a family room. The kitchen had most of the modem amenities—a gas stove, a small fridge that ran off a generator, a sink with running water that he pumped from the lagoon, even a small microwave. He had sanded down the wooden floor, filled in the spaces between the beams, and sealed it in polyurethane.

  The family room impressed him; sometimes he wondered how the hell he’d constructed it. The shelves against one wall housed his extensive collection of videotapes, a small color TV, a CD boom box with a stack of CDs, a laptop computer, and a cellular phone. Hal enjoyed his creature comforts and had gone to great lengths to make the chickee not just a refuge, but a home.

  From the beginning, the chickee’s bathroom had been a problem. It had lacked plumbing and he couldn’t bring himself to pollute the lagoon by flushing waste into it. So he’d stolen parts from various Jiffy Johns at the campsites and had made a smaller, more compact unit. Whenever it filled, he pumped the contents into a fifty-five-gallon drum, hauled it to the nearest campsite, then emptied it into another Jiffy John.

  The park service probably had blamed the missing parts on vandals; he felt sure he had nothing to worry about in that department. But now, with one more person here, he would have to empty it more often.

  He considered the shower his best invention. A wooden stall outdoors, it used water hand-pumped from the lagoon or from the small cistern on the roof.

  Hal paddled to the ladder at the back of the chickee. In the shadows by the mangroves, he saw Big Guy, the ten-foot gator that had been a fixture here for the last four years. He fed the gator often enough to keep him around because nothing would discourage an intruder faster than a gator with an appetite for fresh meat. His small reptilian eyes peered just above the surface of the water, watching Hal, waiting for the canoe to tip or for Hal to slip on his way up the ladder.

  “Not a chance, fucker.” He slapped the water with the paddle.

  Big Guy sank out of sight.

  Hal tied the canoe to the ladder and began unloading his supplies. Since he had started living out here about six years ago, he never wasted a trip into town. Prison had taught him the importance of being prepared and Andrew Steele had taught him, among other things, to trust no one.

  On the rare occasions when he got lonely, he went into town for dinner or a movie. Or he reached, his consciousness soaring across the distance that separated him from other men until it found the perfect host. During his isolation here, he had gotten good at reaching, much better than even Steele had ever imagined.

  In the early days, he occasionally picked up some sweet young thing from one of the bars on Lauderdale beach. But the last time, the whole thing had ended in disaster.

  The woman, a college student looker from Maine, was so drunk she didn’t remember him in the morning. She refused to have sex with him, refused even though she’d loved it during the night when she
was bombed. He told her she could swim back to Lauderdale. She took it literally and leaped into the lagoon.

  Hal, locked in horror at the edge of the platform, had watched Big Guy attack her. For weeks afterward, he had remained out here, too terrified to venture into town. Every night he’d dreamed of prison and every morning he’d awakened with his throat tight and dry, his heart racing.

  When he couldn’t stand it any longer, when his need to know overpowered his fear, he had ventured into the library in Florida City and looked through the back issues of the local papers. The only reference he found was a short piece in the local section— “Mystery of Missing College Student Remains Unsolved.” He had never brought a woman out here again, until now, and this woman wasn’t just any woman.

  Once he’d piled the supplies on the platform, he climbed back into the canoe and knelt beside her. Zipped inside the sleeping bag, she was completely out of it now. Her mouth had opened slightly, her dark hair curled like punctuation marks against her forehead and cheeks.

  It thrilled him to see her up close like this. All the waiting and the planning had paid off. Hal particularly liked her mouth, full and sultry, a Kim Basinger mouth. Her skin, as creamy and smooth as whipped butter, spoke of eternal youth. Her thick lashes left shadows on her cheeks. He could love a woman like this, had loved her at one time, maybe loved her still.

  But considering how wrong things had gone at her house, maybe he should’ve killed her back there. Maybe he should do it now. One silenced shot between the eyes, then let Big Guy get rid of the evidence.

  The idea tempted him. If he killed her, he wouldn’t have to deal with the possibility that his plans might fail, that she might not grow to love him, that she, in fact, might discover he had killed her husband. But hell, he’d brought her this far, risking his ass, so he picked her up, sleeping bag and all, draped her over his shoulder like a load of dirty laundry, and climbed the ladder.

  Hal carried her into the big room in the chickee, set her on the futon cushion, flung open the four shutters to admit air and light. It got awfully hot when the place was closed up, but the shutters cut down on roaches, rats, and other undesirables.

  He glanced slowly around, wondering how she would react to it. Even though the room didn’t begin to compare to her luxury with Steele, it possessed a certain uniqueness. In his considerable spare time, he had made most of the furniture—the pair of swinging chairs that hung from the center ceiling beam, the frame for the futon, the coffee table, the bookshelves, even the shutters.

  Drawings and sketches covered the walls, charcoals and pencil sketches he’d drawn of her during the months he’d been watching her. Rae on the street, her hair blowing out behind her. Rae getting into her snappy Mercedes. Rae on the beach. Rae on a playground with her son. The sketches hardly qualified as great art, but he didn’t think they were half bad, either.

  He knelt beside her, brushed her hair away from her forehead and face. She got prettier every time he looked at her. He pressed his face into her blonde hair, breathing in the scent of sweat and grime and the faint fragrance behind it, some expensive shampoo. He ran his fingertip down the bridge of her nose, across a cheek. Christ, skin this soft should be against the law.

  He unzipped the sleeping bag, peeled it open, and looked at her, taking her in. Bare feet with polished toenails. Gray leggings that covered long legs, muscular, shapely thighs. A long rose-colored T-shirt with “Nassau” written across the front in pink letters. She and Steele used to fly to Nassau just to shop.

  Hal raised her T-shirt bit by bit. Nice. Very nice. Hips like blades, not an ounce of fat at her waist. He raised the T-shirt higher. She wasn’t wearing a bra. He stared at her breasts, pale as moons, not too large, not too small. Beautiful, just beautiful.

  A mole stood alone under her right breast, a dark, mysterious eye that stared back at him.

  Sooner or later he would have to sketch that breast, that mole, and add it to his collection. But not now. Now he would indulge himself in a private celebration for a job well done.

  Hal sat beside her, legs crossed Indian-style. He rested one hand lightly against her forehead, the other clasped his knee. He shut his eyes, focused on Rae, and reached. With her conscious mind numbed by the Darvon, his energy coursed into her swiftly, unimpeded. In seconds, he found the dark, shuttered room that held her primal fears, a Pandora’s box that he would open for his own dangerous pleasures and then use to control her.

  Her husband, after all, had been his best teacher.

  When Hal surfaced awhile later, sweat soaked his clothes. He tugged off his T-shirt, went into the kitchen for the foot ladder, and carried it back into the room. He set it in the corner, climbed onto it. He reached into a space between the tin roof and the wall, a nook, a cranny, a hole in space and time, and let his fingers trail over the three aluminum tins hidden there.

  Two of the tins held about thirty grand, a fraction of the money from the scam that had sent him to prison. The third tin, the one he selected, contained a .38 and two boxes of bullets, several pairs of handcuffs and their keys, and a wallet he hadn’t touched in more than four years. He plucked out a pair of handcuffs, put the lid back into place, returned the tin to its hiding place. Then he returned to the woman. To Rae.

  Hal snapped one cuff around her wrist and locked the other around a vertical strut on the rocking chair. He had bought the cuffs at one of the sex shops in Lauderdale, heavy-duty suckers that even Houdini couldn’t wiggle out of.

  He sat back on his heels, staring at her, tempted to reach inside of her again, to do it just for fun this time, like he used to do when he lived in Miami. He called himself Reverend Hal back then, counselor to the numerous suckers willing to pay him a bundle to clean their lives of negative vibrations, remove curses, protect them from psychic attack. He’d lived like a king.

  Then some of the Cuban santeros, pissed off because they lost their clients to him, had blown the whistle. He was arrested for fraud, his attorney advised him to plead not guilty, and he’d gotten seven fucking years.

  Now, though, he was wiser and in full command. Steele had always cautioned him to pace himself between reaches so that he could maintain control. Restraint, Hal now knew, proved vital to the process. So he left her alone. Besides, he had already filled her with the image that would prey on her darkest fears, that would discourage her from doing what the coed had done.

  Rae Steele, ex-beauty queen, ex-prison teacher, widow of a multimillionaire, didn’t know how to swim. Water terrified her. And that, Hal thought, would be the pivotal point of his control over her.

  Unless she discovered that he’d killed her husband. Then she would do everything she could to get out of here.

  It scared him to think about the things that might go wrong. Even if she didn’t find out about Steele, she might never come to love him, and then where the hell would he be? Or, even worse, suppose the cops found him and pinned the murder on him? He wouldn’t just go back to prison; he would end up at The Rock, the worst prison in Florida. And he wouldn’t be in just any cell, he would be on Death Row, getting set for Sparky, Florida’s electric chair.

  Hal had read about electrocution, how your skin burned and sizzled and smelled like bacon, how your organs turned liquid, how your brain fried. When he was younger, he had always thought it couldn’t happen to him. Now he knew better. It could happen to anyone.

  A slow, piercing chill moved through him. He squeezed his eyes shut, clasped his arms at his waist, and rocked back and forth, again and again, until the cold, crippling fear had passed.

  Chapter 3

  On Friday morning, October 24, the budget cuts in the Broward County Sheriff’s Department hit Wayne Sheppard where it really hurt. Due to his low seniority—five years—he would no longer have a cruiser at his disposal except for emergencies. A homicide investigation didn’t qualify as an emergency, which was why he was driving his aging Camaro up a winding driveway to a crime scene.


  You’ll get mileage, Shep, Captain Young had assured him.

  Like twenty cents a mile would buy him a new car when the Camaro died. It now sputtered and coughed its way toward ninety thousand miles, at least thirty past its natural life. He expected that before the end of today, he would have to drop it at the garage for yet another repair in a string of repairs that had been eating him alive. The front axle, the alternator, the AC, an oil leak. The ravages of entropy.

  And now, without the cruiser to fall back on, it would be a matter of weeks before he was forced to sink more deeply into debt for a new car.

  Debt obviously didn’t concern the family who lived at the end of this driveway. Sheppard drove through a virtual forest of seagrape trees and Florida pines and passed beds of wildflowers that exploded with color. The air smelled fragrant with gardenias, pine, ocean. A faint breeze rustled the leaves as he passed. He guessed the estate covered five acres or so, not much for someplace like Montana or Texas. But here in South Florida, a beachfront spread this size qualified as a kingdom.

  The trees ended just short of the mansion, a sprawling split-level made of cedar, pine, and glass. The house seemed to blend into the land, as though it had grown from the soil itself.

  The Camaro rattled and spewed black smoke as he turned off the engine. Christ, what now? The muffler? -The alternator? Something altogether new? Cancer instead of just arthritis, he thought.

  If Gabby couldn’t patch whatever was wrong and he had to leave the car overnight, he would have to beg for the use of a cruiser. Or rent a car, which he couldn’t afford. He had bought a town house not long ago and with the mortgage, taxes, the repairs, and furniture purchases, not to mention his mounting credit card debt, he was in hock up to his eyeballs.

  He headed up the sidewalk, past the forensics’ van and the paramedic trucks, to the open front door. He cracked his knuckles and counted silently backward from a hundred, the best way he’d found to detach himself at a crime scene.