The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  “Remember I told you about the guy named Ed who came into the shop for a reading the other night?”

  He turned off the hair dryer, set the tape aside. “Ed who looks like Kojak.” He nodded. “Sure. You think he—?”

  “Yeah, I do.” She gestured at the tape. “Is it dry?”

  “It will be by tomorrow. I just hope there’s something still on it.” He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a soggy notepad, dropped it onto the couch, and proceeded to empty his pockets. “Did Ed have any scars or tattoos?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Would you recognize him from a photograph?”

  “Sure.”

  “Good. I’ll try to track down a mug shot through the Department of Corrections. In the meantime, it’d be a good idea if you and Annie go somewhere for a few days.”

  “Go? You mean, like leave town?”

  He nodded.

  Echoes of Ben’s warning, she thought, and rocked back onto her heels. “C’mon, Shep. I’ve got a business to run and a street fair that starts tomorrow. No, today. I can’t just walk out of my life.”

  “This guy Ed already knows where you work, Mira, and Bennet has called you at home. I can’t tell you how to run your life, but I know if Annie were mine, I’d take her someplace safe until this thing is played out.”

  “You’re frightening me,” she said softly.

  Mira walked away from the couch and stopped in front of the sliding glass doors. She peered out through the Levalors, into the wet darkness, a black hole, a riddle as incomprehensible and terrifying as Hal Bennet. She finally said: “Annie could stay with Tom’s folks or one of his brothers.”

  “Can you do it today?”

  “In the morning.”

  “It is morning.”

  “When the sun comes up, I’ll call Tom’s mother.”

  “Use your cell phone. Your home phone may be bugged. I’m pretty sure my office is. That’s the only way that whoever was following Vic’s car could’ve known where and when we were meeting.”

  The reality of it all seeped into her like some toxic gas. She suddenly felt so tired she could no longer think straight. “I need to get some sleep. You’ll have to sleep on the couch, Shep. With Annie here, I don’t think it’s…”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll get sheets for the couch and some of Tom’s clothes. You’re taller than he was, but there might be something that will fit you.”

  She knew she was babbling, but couldn’t help it. He had succeeded in frightening her and she only wanted to grab enough sleep so she could think straight. She picked up the Cobra and carried it into the bedroom with her. She put it into her purse with a box of ammunition, set her purse by the bed, and gathered up bedding and a towel.

  She kept some of Tom’s things in a bottom drawer of her dresser, clothes and personal items that she still couldn’t bear to part with. She went through them, looking for a shirt and jeans that would fit Sheppard. Everything she touched was connected to a memory that the passage of time hadn’t dimmed, memories that reminded her of the dream a few nights ago. Tom on the hillside, Tom saying that he liked Sheppard. She buried her face in one of Tom’s shirts and a hole a mile deep tore open inside of her.

  She didn’t know how long she stayed like that, on her knees in front of the drawer, her face pressed into the shirt. She didn’t hear Sheppard come into the room, didn’t know he was there until he slipped his arms around her and pulled her against him. She clung to him as though she were drowning, and he just held her tightly, rocking, rocking gently until her sobs subsided.

  Omens and dark visions consumed Sheppard’s dreams, the primal stuff of nightmares. He woke exhausted, light streaming over him, his ribs aching, his neck and back stiff. As he sat up, Suess stepped carefully over the blanket and flopped down in Sheppard’s lap.

  “Just you and me here, huh, big guy?”

  He stroked the cat. The silence in the rooms crowded around him, urging him to get up, to move. His ribs shrieked when he finally stood and kept right on shrieking as he went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee.

  Afterward, he unwound the gauze from his ribs. The skin had turned an ugly purple and looked even worse once he had showered. He nearly passed out when he wrapped fresh gauze around his ribs.

  He didn’t like wearing clothes that had belonged to Mira’s dead husband. It made him feel like an impostor, some asshole who had blown into town and turned the widow’s life inside out like a dirty sock. The shirt fit too snugly and the jeans, four inches too short, looked like pedal pushers and squeezed his balls. He put his jeans and the rest of his clothes in the washer and returned to the kitchen wearing just his briefs and Tom Morales’s shirt.

  Three cups of strong coffee and a note from Mira tacked to the fridge ushered him back into the human race. If you need a ride to your car, call Nadine, she’s willing. I’ll be back sometime this afternoon. Annie wanted to wake you and talk about those pink dolphins. I left the cell phone for you to use. M

  He smiled at the part about the pink dolphins, started to fold the note to keep it, then tore it into shreds and flushed it down the toilet. He called Gerry Young first and reached him at home.

  “Young here.”

  “It’s Shep.”

  “Christ almighty. I’ve left fourteen million messages on your goddamn answering machine. Where the hell are you?”

  Sheppard told him briefly what had happened last night. Young reacted with silence, not a good sign.

  “Fuck,” he said finally.

  “I can think of more appropriate adjectives, Gerry.”

  “Fuck,” he said again. “I’ll check with the sheriff’s department up in Palm Beach County. In the meantime, let’s fly out to Florida Bay to poke around at this pub. Get the directions, Shep.”

  “Right. And I need to access the DOC computers.”

  Young reeled off several numbers and codes. When they hung up, Sheppard went into Mira’s den to use her computer. A Pentium, equipped to the hilt—CD drive, scanner, an oversized monitor screen. He figured she wasn’t in debt, that she hadn’t gone into debt to buy this computer, her car, or anything else. He was damn sure, in fact, that Mira’ s books balanced and that she would be appalled to know the truth about his financial condition.

  But since she was psychic, maybe she already knew the truth about his finances.

  He connected his cell phone to the computer, then called one of the numbers Young had given him. It gave him access to the DOC computer in Tallahassee and the code took him into the heart of the system.

  Of the fifty states, only New York, California, and Texas presently had more people in jail than Florida did. But that had not been true in the eighties, when Florida had bounced back and forth between the second and third slots, thanks in large part to the drug trade and the influx of Cubans from the Marie! boatlift. He had a shitload of names to check.

  He didn’t know whether Bennet’s name had double Ns and double Ts or singles of one or both, so he conducted a global search for the various spellings. He narrowed the time frame to ten years-1979 to 1989—and found nearly a hundred Bennets under the different spellings, but no one with a first name of Hal. He requested a list of Bennets who had done time during those years at Manatee Correctional and that narrowed the list to six.

  Sheppard had no idea what Bennet had done time for or how long a sentence he’d gotten. Short of going into each file, there didn’t seem to be any way to narrow the list even further. So he started with the first of the six names, opened the file, began to read.

  It was immediately obvious that he wouldn’t have to wade through mountains of notes to eliminate a name. This Bennet, for instance, had been only fourteen when he entered the system, which would make him less than thirty now. Sheppard had gotten the impression from Vic that Hal was closer to Vic’s own age, older than forty.

  Twenty minutes later, he had one possibility simply
because the guy fell in the right age group. As soon as he opened the file, he knew he’d found his man. Richard Halbert Bennet had gotten seven years for psychic fraud.

  Sheppard downloaded the entire file and requested a mug shot. The face that came up astonished him. At some level he had formulated an idea of how he thought Hal Bennet would look and this didn’t fit. This guy could pass for a stockbroker, an attorney, a physician. He looked blessed with the proverbial silver spoon. His face seemed vaguely familiar, but Sheppard couldn’t say why.

  As he downloaded the mug shot into Mira’s computer to print it, he suddenly remembered where he’d seen Bennet’s face. He’d been in that group shot taken years ago at Manatee, one of a handful of inmates standing around Rae Steele. A photo from her album.

  He printed out the mug shot and studied it as if it might tell him where Bennet had taken Rae. But the photo mocked him, reminded him that Rae Steele had a private life every bit as secretive as her husband’s. While Andrew Steele had been consorting with the psi boys, his wife had been holed up periodically in her cabin, screwing her brains out with some other guy.

  Did it have any bearing on the investigation? Would it provide any leads to where Bennet had taken her? Sheppard didn’t know and because he was sick to death of questions he couldn’t answer, he turned his attention to Vic and Ed.

  Without their last names, Sheppard knew he would have a tough time tracking them down. Even with the ten-year parameter, he ended up with nearly three hundred names, permutations of Edward and Victor. It would take him days to go through that many files. He left them alone for now and disconnected from the modem. He made three backups of the files, put two of them in separate envelopes and addressed one to his home address and one to Young’s house.

  He called information in Flamingo, a town in Florida Bay, a punctuation point at the end of the only road that angled through the Everglades National Park. Through a series of electronic menus, he got directions to the pub via channels and waterways that placed it about twelve miles east of Flamingo.

  He called Nadine last, to tell her he didn’t need a ride, to thank her for offering. He intended for the conversation to be short and sweet, but Nadine had a few things to say.

  “I want you to know I blame you for Annie’s absence.”

  “I’m trying to prevent a problem, Nadine.”

  “If that were true, you wouldn’t be involving Mira any further in your investigation.”

  She hung up before he could say another word. Sheppard felt an overpowering need to defend himself and started to call her back. But the bottom line, he thought, was that she was right. He had not tried to keep Mira out of this. If anything, he had drawn her into it more deeply every step of the way. He practically had bullied her into reading Steele’s home, had asked her to read Rae’s secret cabin, and had come to her last night when he should have gone to Young’s place or home.

  He used the hair dryer on the tape again, popped it into the mini recorder on Mira’s desk, and hit PLAY. The voices sounded like they had laryngitis, but they were clear enough. He listened to the tape as he waited for the captain to arrive, his eyes fixed on the printout of Hal Bennet’s mug shot.

  Fletcher spotted Hood’s white van, parked just outside of Sheppard’s complex, in the shade of a tremendous banyan tree. Fletcher pulled alongside and Hood stuck his head out the window. Bits of the gooey pastry he held in one hand clung to the corners of his mouth. Fletcher hoped that Sheppard had a comparable fatso in his life.

  “No sign of him yet,” Hood said. “And I’ve been here since four this morning. His car’s not there, either.”

  “I’m going in. If you see his car, use the radio. I’ll have mine on.”

  He nodded, popped the rest of the pastry in his mouth, and raised his window again.

  An eight-foot wall surrounded the complex like a little Jericho. The security guard in the guardhouse looked so far past his prime he probably couldn’t remember his prime.

  She stopped at the gate and lowered her window as the old guy stepped up to the car. “Morning,” she said.

  “Morning, ma’am. Who’re you visiting?”

  “Actually, I’m not visiting anyone.” She flashed her badge, echoes of last night on the bridge. “I’ll be talking to some people here in the complex. I’d appreciate it if you would keep this to yourself.”

  His eyes lit up as if this was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in fifty years. “Sure thing, ma’am. You go on through.”

  He raised the guardrail and she drove into the complex. She parked on the far side of the pool and clubhouse, where her car wouldn’t be visible to the guard. She slipped her radio out of her purse, tuned it to the channel she and Hood used, and said, “Testing, Jim. You read?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  She reached into the glove compartment for a small tool pouch and a pair of latex gloves, put them in her purse. If Sheppard wanted to play with the big boys, she thought, he would have to pay the price.

  The empty parking spaces in front of his building told her that her timing couldn’t be better. Just about everyone had left for work. The courtyard in the center of the four-story building exploded with tropical plants. The foliage shielded her from the windows on the opposite side of the courtyard, but not from the apartments in the connecting corridor. That could be a problem.

  She walked around to the side of the building, where each of the apartments had a small-balcony. Thick ficus hedges separated the apartments from each other and provided ample privacy on either side. Several porches, including Sheppard’s, boasted tall hedges at the front. She would be virtually invisible behind that wall of green.

  Fletcher darted to Sheppard’s gate, unlatched it, slipped inside. Sliding glass door, a window on either side. The door would be her best bet. The locks on these suckers usually turned out to be substandard, one of the ways developers cut costs. She worked the gloves over her fingers, got out the tool pouch, selected a nifty little pick that a locksmith in Virginia had made for her.

  If you’re caught, Lenora, you’ll be in very deep shit.

  And if Sheppard got to Hal first, she would be in even deeper shit.

  How much did Indrio tell you, Sheppard?

  Christ oh Christ.

  It took her fifteen seconds to spring the lock and another thirty seconds to knock loose the steel peg at the top of the door. Then she slipped inside.

  The light on the answering machine blinked steadily, the digital counter read 13. If nothing else, she would get some idea of when Sheppard had last been home. She punched the PLAY button. An electronic voice announced the date and the time of each call. The first four, hang-ups, had come through between seven and midnight last night. After that it got more interesting.

  At 12:37 A.M., Captain Young had left a brief, cryptic message: “Waiting to hear from you, Shep. Call me as soon as you get in. He’d called again at two, three, five, and at six-thirty this morning. If Sheppard hadn’t been here when the first hang-up had come through, it meant he’d been gone since at least seven last night.

  Fletcher turned up the volume on the machine so she would be able to hear it as she searched the place. Shelves lined the hallway, all of them crammed with miniature figurines made of clay and ceramics. They looked old, fragile, authentic, pre-Columbian artifacts from a lost time. Sheppard’s treasures, she thought, and slammed her fist against the underside of the top shelf, tilting it. The figurines tumbled to the floor, shattering on impact.

  Oops, too bad.

  She upended another shelf. Then another. Pretty soon, all the lovely icons lay in a shattered heap on the floor. Tough shit, Sheppard.

  She grabbed a broom from the pantry and continued into the bedroom. Computer first. She didn’t find a file on Steele, but that didn’t surprise her. Sheppard had impressed her as the kind of man who either kept the facts in his head or scribbled them in notebooks.

  She checked his e-mail: zip
. Had he downloaded any files? She went into the directory and perused the space each of the files had taken up. ASCII files generally consumed a lot of space, but nothing stood out. It pissed her off. She hated stupid, local cops.

  Clutching the broom near the bottom of the handle, she stepped away from the desk, and swung it at the monitor with the zeal of a kid going after a piñata. The glass exploded and tinkled like wind chimes when it hit the floor, a sweet, satisfying sound. It made her feel so good she whipped through the room, smashing whatever the broom handle struck.

  She fell into a mesmerizing rhythm—swing, hit, smash, over and over again. Each swing took her back to the day Hal had left, when he’d walked out of the house and out of her life, gone wherever. She had taken a knife to his things that day, the knife her father had given her on her twelfth birthday. She’d shredded his clothes, his drawings, his paintings, her arm rising and falling, her spirit locked into the rhythm of annihilation.

  Cut, slice, kill. Her fever swept her up, lifting her higher and higher until she soared. The room began to bleed. The blood leaked from the corners up near the ceiling, seeped from the baseboards, beaded like sweat on the walls. She could smell it and the odor fueled her fever. Cut. Slice. Kill. More, again, yes—

  The phone rang and she whipped the knife upward, severing the line. Then her arm froze where it was, raised straight up like the arm of a clock stuck at midnight. She couldn’t remember what she’d been doing, why her arm was raised. Confused, she looked slowly around. This was the house where she lived with Hal. And Hal was gone. He’d walked out on her. That was it, wasn’t it?

  She had the note right here in her hand. Can’t handle it, babe. Adios. But when she looked at her hand, her fingers clutched the handle of a knife. Her knife. But I had a broom…She dropped her arm to her side, not wanting to look at the knife. A tidal wave of panic slammed into her and she spun and charged down the hall, through the ruin, to find her purse.

  In the bedroom, she dug through the ruin like a dog through garbage and finally pulled her purse out of the mess. She shoved the knife down inside the bag, leaped off the bed, ran for the door.