by Jude Hardin
“Of course,” Jake said. “Freddie here was just doing his job.”
“I understand.”
Jake gave Fred instructions on how to document the purchase, and five minutes later I was out the door. Jake let me take the revolver for a hundred twenty-five, and he threw in a belt holster and a box of .38 shells to boot. I loaded the gun, dropped a few extra shells into my pocket, and slid the holster onto my belt.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dozens of vintage automobiles crowded Rent-A-Gem’s gravel lot. Gremlins, Vegas, Pintos, Fieros, LeCars. They should have named the place Rent-A-Lemon. They even had a Yugo, a red one with a dented fender.
I parked, got out, and took a stroll.
In the corner, backed up against a six-foot chain-link fence topped with razor ribbon, were four identical Chevy Impala station wagons. I walked around and checked the plates: LTCREAM, SKIM, 2PRCENT, WHOLE.
I looked up and saw a black man coming my way, wearing what looked to be a very expensive tailored suit. Armani or a knockoff. He spoke in a deep baritone.
“You like the Chevy wagons?”
“Tell me about ’em. They for sale?”
Somehow the big man’s voice got even deeper and more resonant than before. “Everything’s for sale,” he said, “at the right price. I picked these up at an estate auction down in Green Cove Springs. You remember Berryman’s Dairy?”
“Sure.”
“Well, a couple years ago John Berryman died, just dropped dead of a heart attack one day. He’d run that dairy since the fifties, and when he died, it died with him. His widow and children couldn’t wait to get rid of the whole shebang. I think someone’s raising thoroughbreds on the property now.” He pulled out a handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and then continued talking. “Anyway, he had this fleet of sixty-three Chevrolet Impala station wagons that I knew were going on the block, and I knew something none of the other bidders knew.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. These cars were used mostly as advertisements for the dairy.” He pointed to the logo on one of the driver’s side doors. “They were hardly ever driven. Old man Berryman would park them at the edge of his farm, where they could be seen by the traffic on State Road Seventeen. These cars have very low actual mileage. And I was able to keep the original plates. Check it out.”
He guided me to view the license tags I’d already seen.
“Mind if I look at this one?” I said.
“Go right ahead. Keys are in the ignition. I’ll be up at the office if you want to deal. Name’s Marcus Sharp.”
I handed him a business card. “Nicholas Colt.”
Sharp walked toward the single-wide trailer that served as an office. I took a few minutes to look the car over, the one with tags that read WHOLE.
I got on my hands and knees and checked underneath. The chassis was well greased, no signs of major corrosion. I rose and inspected the body, found some surface rust along the fender lines. Nothing a good sanding and some primer wouldn’t fix.
I opened the driver’s side door and climbed in. The interior had a baked and dusty smell, understandable for a car that had lived in the Florida sun for forty years. It had been thoroughly wiped down and vacuumed, so I doubted any fingerprints or other evidence remained. The odometer read 24,827. The gas, brake, and clutch pedals didn’t show much wear, so I believed that was the actual mileage.
I put the car in neutral and started it. The gearshift was on the steering column, what they used to call a “three on the tree.” The engine sounded strong. I shut it off, got out, and popped the hood. The fluid levels looked all right, oil on the dipstick honey gold. I wanted to find out who had rented the car last night.
I walked to the trailer, opened the door, and stepped into Marcus Sharp’s office.
Sharp sat behind a large oak desk, flanked by two guys who were both pointing guns at me.
“Hands behind your head,” Sharp said.
Both gunmen were white. The guy on my left held a Sphinx 9-mm. He wasn’t as big as Marcus Sharp, but big enough. He looked like the kind of guy that might flip hot hamburger patties with his bare hands.
The other guy was short and fat and bald, but he had an Uzi.
“What’s this all about?” I said.
“This is all about you, Nicholas Colt,” Sharp said. He rose, walked around the short guy with the Uzi, took a couple of steps toward me. He patted me down, found the .38 on my hip.
“This’ll come in handy,” he said.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Why me?”
Sharp hit me squarely on the jaw with a left hook. My knees buckled. Multicolored dots danced in front of my eyes.
I saw the bottom of Marcus Sharp’s shoe as an extreme close-up and, boom boom, out went the lights.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I was five years old. I wore a cowboy hat on my head and a six-shooter on my hip. I wandered the interior of a Learjet and saw myself grown and drinking a glass of Champagne and talking to a drummer named Bill Wilder. I saw my wife Susan nursing our baby daughter, Harmony. Sam the bass player and some other guys were playing cards. Through a curtain separating the cabin and the cockpit I heard a deep voice: Negative. Requesting clearance to land now.
A monster emerged from behind the curtain. I drew my six-shooter and squeezed off three rounds, but the monster kept coming.
I woke in a cold sweat. My hands and feet were tied, and a rag or something had been stuffed into my mouth and sealed with tape. The rag tasted terrible, like Armor All or something. The purple light of dusk filtered through a shaded window, and for a moment I wondered if I was awake or still dreaming. My head felt like a basketball inflated with too much air. It throbbed with every pulse.
I heard voices in another room. The plan was to make it look like suicide. That’s why they hadn’t killed me already.
I overheard some other things, making it clear why all this was happening.
Tony, how many times I got to tell you, if the fucking VIN numbers don’t match, we don’t ship the fucking car. I got a buyer in France about to have a goddamn heart attack, and whose ass you think gonna to get burnt if he can’t fix that shit...
It seemed Marcus Sharp and crew were car thieves, and the rental business was just a front.
I tried to wriggle free, but it was useless. They had me wrapped good and tight.
After a while, when the window went completely black, Sharp’s thugs came in and carried me outside and folded me into the trunk of a Cadillac.
I wasn’t ready to die. I had too much work to do, too many wrongs to try and make right.
Now it was over for me.
The trunk was hot, the air greasy. I was probably near dehydration. They really didn’t need to shoot me. They could just park the car somewhere and I’d be dead soon enough. But they wanted it to look like a suicide. I wondered if there would be a note.
The car turned onto a bumpy road and soon came to a stop.
The trunk opened, and I sucked a deep breath of late summer air. A mosquito bit me on the neck.
I saw Marcus Sharp’s huge hand coming toward my face. He gently pulled the tape from my mouth and yanked out the rag.
Sharp and his two cronies lifted me out of the trunk. They were handling me carefully, so there wouldn’t be any bruises. Maybe they didn’t know that residue from the duct tape would be found during an autopsy. My death wouldn’t be classified as a suicide, but that fact gave me little consolation at the moment.
Sharp laughed. “You look pretty good, ’cept for that knot on your forehead where I kicked you. That’s okay, that’ll be a good spot to put the bullet.”
I didn’t want to die, but I wasn’t about to give these punks the satisfaction of seeing me show any fear. I wasn’t going to beg these scumbags for my life.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Sharp and the boys chuckled.
My Jimmy was parked next to the Cadillac. They carried me and stuffed me into the dr
iver’s seat. Sharp had on leather gloves, and he held the little .38 I had bought at the pawn shop earlier. He wrapped my fingers around the grip, making sure my prints were all over it and that some gunshot residue would end up on my hand. He pressed the barrel against the sore spot on my forehead. There was no hope for me, but I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. I ducked and swiveled and managed a kick to the groin with both feet. The .38 discharged, the bullet taking a small chunk of my right bicep on its way out the passenger-side door. The tall punk with the Sphinx had been standing there, and I saw him frantically trying to stop the blood squirting from his leg. Mr. Sphinx’s face turned the color of raw biscuit dough and he fell to the ground, shouting for help from Jesus.
I heard a distant report, and saw the left side of Marcus Sharp’s skull peel away in slow motion. His ruined head fell in my lap. The short chubby guy with the Uzi ran to the Cadillac and sped off.
I saw a silhouette coming toward me, heard the sound of boots crunching on the gravel lot. When he got close enough I recognized the scars on Roy Massengill’s neck. Massengill had a rifle with a night-vision scope. He looked puzzled. His eyes darted back and forth from me to Mr. Sphinx, as though he were trying to figure out exactly what had happened. He turned and watched the Cadillac’s taillights fade into the distance.
My crotch was wet and warm. I wasn’t sure if it was from Sharp’s blood, or if I’d pissed myself. “Goddamn! Get this fucker’s head off my lap.”
Massengill dragged Sharp’s body off of me and then untied my hands and legs. A million fire ants marched through my nervous system. I looked for a cigarette in the glove compartment but couldn’t find one and had to settle for a toothpick.
Massengill led me to the tennis courts across the street where his truck was parked. He wrapped a pressure dressing on my gunshot wound. He radioed dispatch and gave them a description of the Cadillac and its driver, and he requested an ambulance for Marcus Sharp and Mr. Sphinx. Not that it would do them any good. They were both dead as conch fritters.
“I take it you’ve been following me,” I said.
“Aren’t you glad?”
“What can I say? Thanks for saving my life. Cut it kind of close there, though, didn’t you? I mean, the guy was this close to blowing my brains out.”
“Had to wait for a clear shot. You want to go to the hospital?”
“I’ll be all right. I have some Percocets at home. Fleming’s idea for you to follow me?”
“Yeah. Like I said, you’re on his shit list.”
“I know who shot at my camper Friday morning. Guy who bled to death by my Jimmy over there.”
“Motive?”
“Marcus Sharp, the big black guy whose head you blew to smithereens, said someone hired them to shoot my place up. Whoever hired them must have been waiting around. When I chased the shooters, they came in and got Brittney.”
“Why was Marcus Sharp going to kill you just now?”
“He knew I was investigating the Chevy station wagon, and he figured I’d eventually find out that Rent-A-Gem was a front for a car theft ring.”
“No shit? A car theft ring?”
“Yep.”
“We need to talk to Roly-Poly who took off in the Caddy,” Roy said.
“Yep.”
“No,” Roy said. “I meant we as in we the cops. You’re gonna have to leave this one alone, my friend.”
“If it was you, would you leave it alone?”
“Beside the point. You know your Jimmy’s going to be impounded as evidence, right?”
“Shit.”
Fifteen minutes later, three cruisers and two meat wagons showed up, along with Barry Fleming’s unmarked Lumina. I stayed in the truck while Massengill walked across the street and took care of business.
Now I was homeless and carless. No girlfriend. No gun. I reached into my pockets. No cell phone, no money. Luckily, I had stashed two hundred dollars back at The Parkside.
When Massengill got back to the truck, I asked him for a ride to the motel.
“You have to talk with Fleming first,” he said. “You can do it here, or we can meet him in Green Cove. Your choice. I’m going to be up all night anyway, filing reports and getting grilled by Internal Affairs.”
“I’ll talk to him here,” I said.
I got out and walked back to the scene. I told Fleming everything I knew, and he reminded me that I was a witness and subject to subpoena. He tried to make me go to the hospital, but I refused.
Massengill and I headed north on SR 21. He questioned me for his report to Fleming, and then we didn’t say anything for a while.
I finally spoke up. “You all right?”
“You ever kill anyone, Nicholas?” His voice was steady and his eyes stared straight ahead, but I figured he felt it somewhere deep. I figured Massengill would need a few drinks before the night was over.
“I’ve carried a weapon every day since I got my PI license,” I said. “Never had to use it. Lucky, I guess.”
“Think you could do it if you had to?”
“If it was me or him, sure. I don’t think I’d have a problem with it.”
“That’s the thing. I’m a sniper. It’s never a matter of me or him. My life is never the one in immediate danger. I’m far away, looking through a scope, and it’s almost like I become the hand of God. I get to decide if this person lives or dies.”
“Marcus Sharp was a bad man,” I said. “My brain would be all over the Jimmy’s header right now if you hadn’t taken him out. You did what you had to do.”
“Yeah. But it’s never easy. The after part is never easy. You think you could kill somebody like I killed Sharp? You know, with no immediate threat to yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what a kill switch is?”
“Sure,” I said. “Like on a train or a speed boat. It shuts everything down in case of emergency.”
“That’s what I have to do when I have someone in my sights. I have to hit the kill switch on my own humanity. Shut everything down. No feeling, no emotion. I become a machine. A life-taking fucking machine. There’s no way to explain that moment unless you’ve been there.”
We were quiet for a while. I thought about how much Massengill had changed since the days he drove an equipment bus for my band. He’d been as much of a wildass as the rest of us back then, smoking weed and snorting powder and bedding a different groupie every night. Things had changed for me when I married Susan, and I noticed a change in Massengill during that time as well. Maybe we just grew up.
A trooper car with its lights flashing raced by in the opposite direction.
“Tell me something,” I said, “when you saw us leaving Rent-A-Gem, why didn’t you call for backup?”
“All I saw was your Jimmy and a Cadillac leaving the lot. I didn’t know you were in the Caddy’s trunk.”
“So you thought I was doing business with those scumbags?”
“What can I say? You went inside, and you were in there for a long time, and then I saw your Jimmy leaving the lot with the Cadillac. I was just doing my job. Count your blessings.”
Over the radio we heard that a Sheriff’s deputy, unit twenty-seven, was in pursuit of the fugitive Cadillac. A call went out to all units in the area. Massengill put the light on the roof and floored the gas pedal.
We saw the Caddy in Winn-Dixie’s parking lot, surrounded by three cruisers with lights flashing. The short, fat guy had his hands against his car and was being frisked. An ambulance and a fire truck had shown up, and a crowd of onlookers with grocery carts formed a semicircle near the front of the store.
We got out and walked toward the scene, Massengill with his badge raised high. He talked to one of the deputies. The short, fat guy’s name was Tony Beeler. Massengill climbed into the back of the cruiser, sat beside Beeler, and closed the door. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I stood there holding my sore arm. I was learning what it felt like to be a victim of a violent crime. Nobody was
paying any attention to me.
A few minutes later, another deputy knocked on the window and motioned for Massengill to come out. Together they walked to the ambulance where a cluster of officers stood talking. I quietly opened the door and slid in beside the suspect.
“Who hired you guys to shoot at my camper?”
“Fuck you,” Beeler said.
“I’m trying to be civil here. I’m going to ask you nicely one more time. Who hired you guys to shoot at my place?”
“Allow me to rephrase,” Beeler said. “Fuck you.”
I unwrapped the bloody bandage on my arm and tried to stuff it into Beeler’s mouth. He clenched his teeth, so I reached down and squeezed his balls until he didn’t resist anymore. I broke the toothpick I’d been chewing on, peeled off a splinter and jammed it under his left thumbnail. The bandage muted his scream.
“You talk, I pull it out. Your call.”
Beeler’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he nodded frantically. I pulled the bandage out of his mouth.
“You motherfucker,” Beeler said. “I have rights. I’m going to sue your goddamn—”
The gauze went back in the mouth. I shoved a splinter under the fingernail of his pinky this time. Beeler’s ears turned red and then purple. He started nodding again. I pulled the gauze.
“Listen,” I said. “I’m not a cop, so don’t try any of that ‘my rights are being violated’ shit with me. I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of my lousy personal possessions, so go ahead and sue me if you want to. I’m going to ask you nicely once again. Who hired you guys?”
He spat in my face. “You should have died a long time ago, bitch. You should have died with the rest of those motherfuckers on that airplane.”
“What the fuck you talking about?”
His eyes bulged and his lips snarled and he whispered hoarsely. “Pocket forty-seven.”
I grabbed him by the throat. “What the fuck are you talking about, you slimeball piece of shit?”
Massengill yanked the door open. He and two uniformed officers pulled me away from Beeler.
