Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  “Oh. What was your friend’s name?”

  Her smile disappeared. She shook her head slightly and didn’t say anything.

  I filled our mugs, mine with coffee and hers with coffee-flavored milk. Brittney drank it and ate the wheat toast without further complaint.

  It was strange having a teenager around. Strange in a good way. I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if my baby had survived. Sitting at the table with Brittney made me think about what Harmony might have been like at fifteen. It made me sad.

  After breakfast, we went outside and had another cigarette and some more coffee.

  “Can’t I at least see your house?” she said.

  “You like to fish?”

  “Sure. Love to. Marlin is my fave.”

  “You’ve never been, have you? Maybe you’ve read Old Man and the Sea, but I bet you’ve never been fishing.” I winked at her.

  “It doesn’t mean I’m stupid. I live in a different world than you do, Mr. Colt.”

  “Call me Nicholas. Since I taught you how to cook eggs, maybe I could teach you how to catch a bass.”

  “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you? You’re afraid if I stay at your place, I’ll say you tried to rape me or something, huh?”

  That caught me off guard. “I’m going to be straight-up with you. I’m afraid of a lot of things. I’m afraid the human race is going to fall flat on its ass any day now. I’ve dealt with a lot of teenage runaways, most with lives harder than yours. I’ve seen twelve-year-old mothers with crack babies. I’ve seen girls your age with two kids already and trying to have a third so they can get more money from the government. I’ve seen boys lying in the gutter with white shit coming out their mouths, so strung out they can’t remember their last meal. That’s where you’re headed, Brittney. Don’t think California is the land of milk and honey, either. I went all the way to Hollywood one time chasing a sixteen-year-old boy who thought he was going to be the next Tom Cruise. I found him in a motel room—”

  “All right,” she said. “Jesus.”

  I took a sip of coffee. It was lukewarm and bitter now, and I thought about going inside and topping it off with some of the Kentucky whiskey. “You hear what I’m saying, though? Running away from home is not the answer.”

  “It is if someone’s trying to kill you.”

  “Ah. Now there’s a good subject. Why don’t you tell me all about that.”

  “Maybe. If you take me fishing.”

  “Tell me first.”

  “Take me fishing first.”

  “Do you know the meaning of the word extortion?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Figures,” I said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I tiptoed into Juliet’s bedroom and got a pair of shorts and a T-shirt with Jacksonville Jaguars pictures on it for Brittney. I had nearly completed Operation Clandestine when the cell phone in my pocket trilled. Before I had a chance to answer the call, Juliet squinted my way and said, “Where the hell you going with my clothes?”

  “Brittney needed something,” I said. “I think you guys are about the same size.”

  “You could have asked first.”

  “Didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Well, guess what? I’m awake now.”

  “Okay. May I please borrow this shirt and this pair of shorts for my poor runaway who doesn’t have anything to wear?”

  “Of course. But put that shirt back. It’s a sleep shirt, three sizes too big. She’ll look like a bag lady. Get that cute peach-colored top. It will match the white shorts.”

  I did as instructed, then walked to the bed and gave Juliet a kiss. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

  There was a message on my phone from Leitha. I called her from the kitchen.

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “The thing is, she doesn’t want to come back to your house. She thinks someone is trying to kill her.”

  “That’s crazy. Let me talk to her.”

  “She’s in the shower right now.”

  “So who does she think is trying to kill her?”

  “She won’t tell. Maybe if I can spend some time with her, I can get to the bottom of it.”

  “I want her home with me.” Leitha said.

  “I understand that. And I’ll bring her right now if you insist. But she’ll probably just run away again. I’d like to get to the root cause of why she ran away in the first place.”

  Leitha’s voice quivered. “When do you think you’ll bring her home?”

  “As soon as I can. I’m going to take her fishing in a little while. Maybe she’ll open up.”

  “Will you have her call me as soon as she gets out of the shower?”

  “Sure.”

  We said goodbye. Juliet came into the kitchen wrapped in a fuzzy pink bathrobe and matching slippers. She didn’t say anything and poured herself a cup of coffee. Her hair was a mess from sleeping on it wet.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  She ignored me, took her coffee out to the back porch. I poured myself a cup. The bourbon was getting low, so I added half a shot of tequila and followed Juliet outside.

  “Sorry if we woke you,” I said.

  “Oh, no problem. I can make it on one fucking hour of sleep. I’m goddamn bionic, remember?”

  “I just love it when your Irish half shines through,” I said. “We’ll be leaving soon, so you can go back to bed. You have to work tonight?”

  “Think, Nicholas. Have you ever tried that? Just thinking for once? I took off tonight because you invited me to come along with you and Joe to your Thursday night pool game at Kelly’s. He’s bringing his wife, and we’re going to make a night of it. Any of that ring a bell?”

  “Crap. I did forget this is Thursday.” I lit a cigarette.

  “Yeah. So now you have that girl to worry about. I suppose that means the date is off?”

  “This is my work, Jules. If it interferes with my social calendar—”

  “This coffee is horrible.” She got up and walked to the railing, dumped the contents of her cup into the sand below. “You were hired to find her, not babysit or try to straighten out her life. How much are you charging for all that?”

  “Doing it because I want to. If I have an opportunity to actually help a kid in trouble—”

  “Just leave, okay? I’m really not very happy at the moment. I’m starting to think that I need more than you’re capable of giving, Nicholas.”

  “What are you saying?”

  She leaned, elbows on knees, hands over face, voice an octave higher. “I’m saying maybe we need a break.”

  “You’re dumping me?”

  “Don’t say it like that.”

  “How else am I supposed to say it?” I drained the last of my tequila-spiked coffee. “Consider me gone, babe.”

  I wasn’t too worried. Jules and I break up every couple months. We always end up back together.

  My place on Lake Barkley is only seven miles from Juliet’s house. When we crossed the Shands Bridge, Brittney said, “Did you know the St. John’s is one of the only rivers in the United States that flows north?”

  “Geography was never my best subject,” I said.

  “What was your best subject?”

  “Music. And nap time.”

  We pulled into my drive around eleven. The cloud cover had dissipated, the sun high and hot now. I unlocked the door to my camper and we climbed inside. I switched on the air conditioner.

  “This place is cool,” Brittney said. “It’s like living in a spaceship or a submarine or something.”

  “Never thought about it that way,” I said. “Serves the purpose for now, I guess.”

  “Will you play for me?” She pointed toward the guitar case propped against a bulkhead.

  “I don’t play anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  She scrunched her lips. “Okay. Can I get on your computer?”

&nb
sp; She goofed around on the web while I rigged a couple of fishing rods. It wasn’t the best time of day for catching fish, but I figured I could teach her some things and then go out again in the evening when it got cooler. After I had everything ready, I dragged her away from the computer and we went outside.

  “I’m going to teach you to cast from the bank first,” I said. “Then we’ll go out in the boat.”

  “You have a boat?”

  “It’s one of my landlord’s rentals. He lets me borrow it. In exchange, I provide some security around the campsites here. And I get a reduced rate on my lot. My landlord happens to be my best friend.”

  “I think he should give you the lot for free.”

  “I think you’re right. Maybe I’ll bring that up.”

  We walked down the hill to the lake. I carried the rods, and Brittney toted my tackle box. I’d given her a cap to wear so her face wouldn’t get sunburned. She had her hair in a ponytail and looked cute as a girl going fishing for the first time possibly could.

  “I don’t have to touch a worm or anything, do I?”

  “Just a plastic one,” I said. “We’ll save the live bait lessons for another day.”

  I took the rod with the spincast reel and demonstrated how to use it. Brittney tried, fumbled a few times, finally got the hang of it.

  “Your thingy’s different than mine,” she said.

  “This is called a baitcaster reel. It’s a little tricky. Once you get good enough with that one, I’ll teach you. Deal?”

  “Okay.”

  We’d been fishing for about an hour, with no luck, when Brittney said, “This is quite conducive to somnolence.”

  “What?”

  “It means I’m getting sleepy.”

  “You always go around talking like the Professor on Gilligan’s Island?” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Tell me something. Did your tennis coach ever make a pass at you?”

  “Kent?”

  “Yeah. Kent Clark.”

  “Oh! I think I got one.” Her rod bent, and she started reeling feverishly.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  She didn’t have a fish. She had snagged onto a log or something. I took her rod and gave the line some slack, hoping to free the hook. No dice. I had to break the line.

  “Now what?” Brittney said.

  “Now I teach you how to tie a new hook on the end of the line.”

  “This is hard.”

  “No it’s not. It’s fun. See that tackle box? That’s called being prepared. If we came out here with just one hook, we’d be screwed now, huh? What about Kent Clark? He ever try anything?”

  “Oh, hell no. He’s old. Like forty-something, I think. Plus, he’s married.”

  “That doesn’t stop some people.”

  “He was always a perfect gentleman.”

  “All right. Ready to go out on the boat?” I said.

  We walked to the dock and shoved off. Brittney insisted she was a good swimmer, but I made her wear a life jacket anyway. I started the engine and motored toward the east side of the lake, to some breaklines where I’d had some luck previously. The water was calm and glassy.

  Thursday, or any weekday, was a good day to fish. On weekends, the ski boats and Jet Skis and party barges pretty much ruined any angling action. If I were King of the World, I would do away with all gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, anything that ran on fossil fuels. We would have sailboats, rowboats, and bicycles. Anything that made more noise than an acoustic guitar would be outlawed. Rule #12 from Nicholas Colt’s Philosophy of Life: you’re never going to be King of the World, so just deal with the bullshit best you can.

  Brittney faced the bow, her long blonde ponytail blowing in the wind. I slowed down, cut the engine, dropped a concrete anchor from the stern, and instructed Brittney to do the same on her end. The boat didn’t have a live well, but I had a good-sized basket on board in case we caught a few.

  “Cast toward the shore,” I said. “Then reel it in slowly.”

  Brittney got a hit on her second cast. She shrieked. A good-sized largemouth surfaced and jumped about ten feet from the boat.

  “Let him run with it a little,” I said. “Use your drag like I showed you.”

  A few minutes later she had him reeled in close to the boat and I reached out and snagged him with a long-handled net.

  “Wow. That’s a beautiful fish,” I said. I hung him on a scale from my tackle box. He weighed nearly five pounds.

  “You’re right,” Brittney said. “This is fun.”

  “You want to take him off the hook?”

  “Maybe you better.”

  “You need to learn how.”

  “I’ll watch. Next time, I’ll do it myself.”

  I gently brushed back the dorsal fin, wrestled the hook from his bottom lip.

  “Should we keep him, or throw him back?” I said.

  “Why would we want to keep him?”

  “To eat, silly.”

  “Oh, no. I don’t want to kill him. He’s so powerful. And beautiful.”

  I lowered him back to the water. He flopped, swam away.

  We fished for about two more hours, until it started to get dark. Brittney caught one more, and I didn’t catch any. Beginner’s luck. She released the second fish all by herself.

  When we got back to my camper, Brittney asked me what was for supper.

  “We could have had those two big fish you caught,” I said.

  “Is that what you do? Eat the ones you catch?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Don’t you think that’s cruel?”

  I thought about that for a minute. “I would never kill anything just for the sake of killing it,” I said. “But survival depends on death. Where do you think those strips of bacon you ate this morning came from?”

  “I’m thinking seriously about becoming a vegetarian. How do you feel about stem cell research?” Brittney said.

  “What?” I couldn’t figure how her mind worked sometimes.

  “You said survival depends on death. Isn’t that the same thing? They use tissue from potentially viable embryos and fetuses, thinking they might be able to cure certain diseases someday.”

  “I don’t know much about it,” I said. “I guess I would say the life of a human is inherently more valuable than the life of an animal.”

  “That’s egotistical. Let’s forget about animals for a minute. Do you believe in the concept of sacrificing one for the good of many?”

  “Depends on if I’m the one being sacrificed, I guess. There you go talking like The Professor again. What are you, a budding young philosopher or something? I’m going to grill some hot dogs for dinner. I guess you can just have a bun.”

  Brittney bit her lip. “Hot dogs sound good.”

  We ate outside on the picnic table with a citronella candle a few feet away to ward off mosquitoes. I had a Dos Equis and Brittney had a Coke. We smoked cigarettes afterward and I had another beer.

  “Why is there a picture of your wife hanging on the wall?” Brittney asked.

  “Obviously because I loved her and I miss her,” I said.

  “But doesn’t it make your girlfriend sad when she sees it?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it like that.”

  “Sometimes you have to let go of the past and cling to the love you have now.”

  “And sometimes, young lady, you have to mind your own business.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Make you a deal,” I said. “I’ll quit smoking if you quit.”

  “I can quit any time I want to. I go days at a time without smoking sometimes. It’s no big deal for me.”

  “That means you’re not hooked yet. You should quit now, before it becomes an addiction.”

  “Okay. So I’ll quit now.” She dropped her cigarette and smashed it into the sand with her sneaker. She grabbed the Marlboro pack from the picnic table, twisted it, rolled it i
nto a ball, threw it over her shoulder. “There. Now we quit.”

  “I didn’t mean right this second,” I said. “Damn, girl. You do have a flare for the dramatic. I’m sure you’ll be a great actress some day.”

  “I have a present for you,” she said.

  She climbed inside the camper, came back out with her backpack. She unzipped it, reached in, and pulled out a paperback book. I lit my Zippo and read the cover. It was a pocket-sized dictionary and thesaurus.

  “So you can improve your vocabulary,” Brittney said.

  “Gee, thanks. You think I’m a dummy or something?”

  “You didn’t know what ‘conducive to somnolence’ meant.”

  “I knew what it meant. It just sounded strange coming from a fifteen-year-old. I have a damn good vocabulary. But thanks anyway for the book. What else do you have in that backpack?”

  “Just some things for school. Check this out.” She opened the front pocket and pulled out a silver cylinder about the size of a firecracker. She aimed it, and a tiny red dot appeared on Joe Crawford’s house half a mile across the lagoon. “It’s a laser pointer. Cool, huh?”

  “Awesome. Why do you need that for school?”

  “It was on the list of supplies for my speech class.” She put the pointer in her pants pocket, reached in the backpack, and pulled out a calculator. She handed it to me. “I have a super power.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “I can tell you the square root of any number. You know, as long as it’s a number with a true square root.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “Try me.”

  I multiplied forty-three times forty-three on the calculator. “Okay,” I said, “what’s the square root of one thousand forty-nine?”

  “Forty-three,” Brittney said.

  “How did you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been able to do it since third grade. It’s like a talent some autistic savants have. It can’t be explained. I’m not autistic. I guess my brain’s just wired funny.”

  “Amazing. Okay, now that I taught you how to fish, you have to tell me why you think someone is trying to kill you.”

  “First, you have to tell me why you don’t play the guitar anymore,” she said.