Perfect Killer

by Lewis Perdue

  I checked the incoming number and recognized Flowers's cell.

  "Hey, Jeff," I said.

  "Brad, it's bad. Horrible," Flowers said. "All of Camilla's scans and the other exams are fully consistent with locked-in syndrome; there's absolutely no doubt about it. Her fPETs indicate a virtual typhoon of metabolic activity in the areas we associate with consciousness."

  An fPET—functional positron-emission tomography—a new method I had helped pioneer—was a method for real-time observation of the brain's metabolic activity.

  Jasmine gave me a concerned look of curiosity as I spoke with Flowers. "You're sure there's a total disconnect? Not a finger or an eyelid, no connection to the outside world."

  "Nothing. Absolutely nothing," Flowers replied. "I've sent the latest scans up for you, but I think it's pretty clear that Camilla's regained consciousness but she's totally locked in… her mind is in hell, Brad. She's in hell."

  CHAPTER 43

  "She's in hell."

  Flowers's words hit me like a chain-mail fist.

  "Oh, man." I rested my forehead on the steering wheel.

  "I've never seen anything like it," Flowers said.

  I sat up and shouldered my way through the darkness. "We have to do something." "I recommend anesthesia," Flowers said. "A Hameroff thing."

  "Makes sense." Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff and cosmologist Roger Penrose

  theorized that consciousness arose from the quantum mechanisms of microtubules inside the brain's neurons. Other research showed anesthesia terminates consciousness by binding to specific proteins on those microtubules. Did this mean consciousness really terminates under anesthesia, or do our brains just fail to record the memories? If we die under anesthesia, does consciousness rekindle itself?

  "It's a delicate balance," I said finally. "Enough to suppress consciousness without affecting vital functions."

  "I've thought about that."

  An off tone laced Flowers's words, and I wondered if he planned "accidentally" to take her over the edge with the anesthesia. I thought to tell him to be careful, not to take her over the edge.

  The cell connection crackled and faded beneath my silence.

  "Go ahead," I said, and tried not to feel the guilt and relief cutting at me.

  "You're dropping out."

  "I'm going to call my attorney to determine if we can legally terminate life support."

  The connection crackled. I think Flowers understood me because his voice came through strong and clear when he said, "I can't understand a word you're saying."

  Then he hung up.

  I thought about this for a moment, then pressed the "end" button.

  "Camilla," I said. "She's regained consciousness deep in the recesses of her brain." As I explained locked-in-syndrome to her, Jasmine's face passed through confusion, understanding, horror, and finally sorrow.

  "She can't communicate," I reiterated. "Not a finger, not an eyelid. If she's uncomfortable or in pain or afraid, we have no way of knowing. There's no indication anything we say or do can get to her either."

  "That's… like a recurring nightmare I've had all my life," Jasmine said. "I'm walking along and everything is fine, then suddenly I'm flying through a black void where I can't see anything and I can't smell or touch. The void's filled with an evil laughter I don't really hear but feel in my mind, and there's a horrible"—she struggled for a word— "horrible groping. Like an unseen hand reaching inside my body which's no longer there, but the hand rips everything out and squeezes me, hurts my soul." A small shiver animated her shoulders. "It takes the most effort I can muster, but eventually I wake myself up."

  She looked at me and eventually the sorrow settled in her eyes. "Camilla can't wake up, can she?" The terrible realization blossomed in Jasmine's eyes. "Or finally go to sleep."

  "Not without our help."

  "A fate worse than death."

  "There is something I can do." I flipped open my cell phone, hit the speed dial far my attorney. "We've got to get the court to approve ending life support." The receptionist recognized my voice when she answered and connected me immediately.

  "Jesus, Brad! Where the hell are you?"

  "I'm pleased to talk to you too."

  "What have you gotten yourself into? I've got enough subpoenas and search warrants to wallpaper my office. LAPD's got people sifting through your house and your office and your lab. And I just met with a real prick, a tight-asked colonel who tried to muscle me around. And he's in addition to the Feds."

  "Oh, man."

  "Don't freaking 'oh man' me, Brad. What the hell is up? They all want to know where you are and so do I."

  I thought of the police, the military, the Patriot Act, and wiretaps, which is when I ended the call.

  "We've gotta move," I said as I released the parking brake and put the truck in reverse.

  "What now?"

  I concentrated on backing the truck out into the narrow space. "If they're searching my home and office, and they have all these subpoenas and warrants, then it's only a matter of not much time before it leads here. I'm in a box and it looks like the only way out is through Talmadge"

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Get my stuff out of the hotel and disappear. I used credit cards for the truck and room. They don't have to look far for me. I know enough about police and military to give us a fighting chance," I paused to think. "Do you have a gun?"

  Jasmine gave me a condescending glare as she pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of her handbag. She unsnapped the hammer strap of a black nylon clip-on holster and produced a Ruger Speed Six .357 magnum revolver with the short, 2 ¾" barrel.

  "That's a serious piece."

  "Look, I'm a black civil—"

  "—rights lawyer in Mississippi," I finished her sentence for her, and we laughed. Then she surprised me by pulling out two speed loaders filled with six rounds each. I whistled softly as I backed the truck out of the stall and made a right-hand turn onto Park. From the corner of my eye, I saw her slide the revolver back into the clip holster, snap the strap, and put it back in her purse.

  "I don't suppose you have another one of those?" I asked as we slowed for the light at Grand Avenue.

  "Lashonna has one exactly like this." Her voice caught for a beat. "I bought it for her; it should be in her purse at the office."

  "Mind if we go get it?"

  "Sure." The light changed and I turned right on Grand, a lush boulevard lined with large expensive mansions elegantly lighted to show off their pricey landscaping and architecture. This was still an all-white part of town.

  We rode past the grandeur in silence as I tried to sort out the thoughts that would keep us alive and discard those that would surely get us killed. Jasmine had obviously tuned in to this process because she sat there, looking straight ahead, absorbed with her own thoughts. An idea came to me as we came off the Keesler bridge where Grand turned into Fulton. I slowed for the red light.

  "Can we use your car?" I asked. "They'll be looking for this truck." "I'm driving Mom's big red Mercedes; that's not much better." "It is for now."

  "It's in the hospital parking lot."

  I turned right on West Washington.

  CHAPTER 44

  Just off Fulton Street and immediately south of the Keesler Bridge, the Leflore County Courthouse is a grand piece of old architecture surrounded by magnolia trees and the ghosts of racial injustice meted out before the shift of power brought by the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

  It still houses the sheriff's department and the jail, which gives the building and parking lot a 24/7 buzz of activity that does little to suppress the drug dealing and companion violence plaguing the mostly black city beyond.

  On this evening, two dark, unmarked federal government sedans sat among the sheriff's cruisers, their engines ticking away the heat of their swift journeys, one from Jackson, the other from Memphis. The highway patrol cars that had accompanied them on their high-speed trips on 1-55 sat near
by next to the personal vehicles of the sheriff himself and the chief of the Greenwood Police Department.

  The occupants of those vehicles and a host of others jammed a third-floor conference room. A tall, lean federal agent with close-cropped, gunmetal-gray hair and a thin, red birthmark slashing into the hairline on the left side of his forehead addressed the group. He wore pinstripes with knife-sharp creases, an immaculately knotted red power tie. He had declined to tell the gathering much at all about his position or precisely whom he worked for, only that he had been sent by Homeland Security.

  John Myers stood in the back of the room next to the sheriff, a fit, linebacker-like man with "high-yellow" skin and deep freckles that took an edge off the menace of his otherwise impressive presence.

  "Check out how the Fibbies and the brass from the Pentagon defer to him," the sheriff whispered to Myers.

  "Doesn't bode well."

  "We should have a tactical unit in place by noon," said the man from Homeland Security. "If any of your personnel make contact with this man, do not—repeat do not— take any action whatsoever. Bradford Stone is a deadly capable man and has shown his ability by killing at least seven people in the past forty-eight hours, six of them highly trained Special Forces members, and one man from his own search-and-rescue team.

  "This is the cover legend you need to remember: Stone was involved in a drugsmuggling operation with a vicious cartel headquartered in Guadalajara. Our personnel attempted to apprehend him and he killed them all. We do not want a general alert. We will not be issuing mug shots, and our operation here should be restricted to the personnel in this room. We will take all the risk."

  Myers raised his hand. "Sir?"

  The man from Homeland Security frowned at the interruption. "Yes?"

  "As you know, I talked to this man not two hours ago. He'd just saved the life of a gunshot victim and appeared pretty normal."

  The man from Homeland Security smiled indulgently "Yes, Stone can seem normal. But we believe he's cracked after six years of dealing with his wife's injury and coma. He's like a serial killer, only he's a serial thriller. The rush from the danger associated with the drug running gives him a release allowing him to lead a normal life. Until it builds up."

  He looked around the room, tried to meet every set of eyes, then focused on Myers.

  "Does that make better sense, Sergeant?"

  Myers glanced at the sheriff, who raised a skeptical eyebrow only his subordinate could see. Myers put on the "Yassuh, Mr. White Man" mask he had perfected as a young child, looked at the man from Homeland Security, and lied.

  "Yes."

  CHAPTER 45

  Cedric Valentine eased his bronze Monte Carlo to an industrial-park turnout along southbound Highway 49 north of the Rising Sun crossroads and cranked up the volume on Dr. Dre's "Some L.A. Niggas" and sang along with lyrics he knew by heart.

  L.A. niggaz rule the world nigga!… He'd been to Compton once, a visit with his uncle two summers before, and hung with some Bloods. They'd sold him a Glock 9 one of them said he'd taken right out of the dying hand of a pig he'd shot while the sucker sat in his black-and-white on Slauson.

  He remembered driving through South Central and using the Glock packed with hollow-points to peel the cap off a Rolling 60s rickey. The rush still stirred him when he remembered how the Crip's brains came out the holes in a reddish gray splatter all over the concrete wall behind him. "Yeah!" he yelled to the world. "We L.A. niggaz rule! Fuck all the fuckin' muth'fuckers!"

  They called him Dr. Glock after that. He made damn sho' the pissant niggas in Snowden-Jones called him Dr. Glock and not some small-town country-nigga name like Cedric.

  He felt a passing flash of guilt when he remembered how it hurt his mama to dump the name she'd given him and how she was always on the rag about him being a player. Always after him to go to bed at nine, get one of those minimum-wage jobs working for some cracker go to church, listen to her damned gospel music. She wanted him to rot out from the inside like a fucking Tom, like his uncle—her brother—who lived in Long Beach and spent his life sweating all week for less than an average day's worth of dealing crystal.

  "Yassuh! Nosuh! I be fetchin' fo' Mr. Charlie—fuck that!" he said loudly. "Not this nigga!" Cedric shook off the guilt and thumbed the electric controls on his seat. He manipulated himself upright, readjusted the rearview minor, rolled up the windows, and hit the toggles that adjusted the suspension lifters, raising the chassis now into what he called "country nigrah" mode. It was better for the rougher roads and made him less of a target for the country Jakes and Penelopes. Tonight, he needed to be invisible. First the TEC-9. Then the money. Then the bitch.

  He'd bought the TEC-9 off the street in Memphis for the occasion, right after he'd sealed the deal with the bitch with the bucks.

  I seal da deal, wid the bitch wid the bucks, you respect this niggah or you shit outta luck

  Cedric tapped on the steering wheel as he rapped.

  This playah gonna take what rightfully mine, When I start kissin' you wid my Glock and da Nine He had to remember that because bitches liked gangstas who could rap. He ejected the Dr. Dre CD and slipped in Snoop Dogg. While the CD player searched for the first track, Cedric put the Monte Carlo into drive and pulled carefully into traffic. He didn't need no Jakes pulling him over for some traffic violation. Not far south of Rising Sun, he turned west toward Quito, across the Yazoo River bridge, and left on a gravel road. He didn't like the dust and the stones chipping his paint, but work was work, and when your work was killin', you needed to do things right and that meant no witnesses.

  The "Down 4 My Niggas" cut on the Snoop Dogg CD started. This was the one with C-Murder rappin' wid the Dogg.

  Fuck them other niggas, I ride for my niggas, what I die for my niggas, fuck them other niggas, what Cedric rapped with the lyrics as he drove roughly southwest toward a tall fucking bridge in the middle of nofuckingwhere where he could ditch the Nine.

  "Tha's me, motherfuckuhs," he said. "I'm a nigga with the big balls. I'ma put my fucking name on the wall wid my Dogg! I'ma pound those bitches till they can't even crawl!"

  When he crested the top of the bridge northwest of Tchula, he knew he had the right spot. Snoop Dogg was singing about niggas who run but they couldn't hide.

  When Cedric slowed to a stop at the top of the bridge, he pulled on a latex glove, reached under the seat for the TEC-9, Not a headlight in sight. He opened the window and let in a stiff, cool wind smelling of approaching rain, maybe hail and a tornado. He tossed the gun over the railing, then drove on into Tchula and back up 49, where he stopped short of the 82 overpass to adjust his seat and lower the suspension. He got out, squinting against the wind as he walked around the Monte Carlo with a flashlight. Satisfied no damage had been done by the gravel, he opened the trunk and grabbed the shoe box his Clarks had come in. He opened the lid and smiled at the stack of hundred-dollar bills rubber-banded together in the trunk. Half a stack, actually. The bitch had cut ten g's worth of C-notes, an even hundred of them, right in half. Federal-fucking-Expressed them to him in a box that arrived at his crib a week to the day after he'd made bail over the drive-by on West Gibbs Street. Wrapped around the money had been a printout of the article about his arrest printed off the Greenwood Commonwealth's Web site.

  Cedric smiled now and enjoyed the glow in his belly. He was a true gangsta, famous enough that some woman he had never seen had sent him money to kill for her. She'd called his cell exactly one time to make sure he had the money and understood what to do and when. She told him he'd get the other half of the stack of bills when the two Oreo bitch shysters were in the ground. He'd peeled the cap off one of the bitches so he figured he'd get half the bills tonight and the other half when he took care of the unfinished business. He nodded as he reached under the spare tire and pulled out the Glock.

  Back behind the wheel, he looked at the Rolex on his wrist.

  "Time to get yo swerve on, Dr. Glock," he said to himself as he went
down his checklist: Roly-O, Clarks, bling-bling, and the iced Crissy in back for the bitch. He'd never seen her, but her voice on the phone call gave him some serious bone and he wanted skully from the bitch.

  "My dick be stuck up in yo' windpipe," he said. "I be stickin' it up in yo' pie too, bitch."

  He merged onto east 82. Just outside of town, he spotted the turnoff they'd agreed on. Cedric pulled to a stop on the road shoulder, waited until there were no headlights from either direction, then made the turn. A hundred yards down, he stopped the Monte Carlo, killed the ignition and stereo, grabbed the Glock, and waited.

  Lightning snapped around him and reminded him of the Jakes' helicopter lights. He hoped the bitch would show up before the fucking rain turned the road into fucking gumbo. Cedric thought about pumping the bitch. She was a white bitch, no doubt from her voice, and she sounded snotty and highfalutin. She needed to be fucked within an inch of her life, and he'd be the man to do it. He rubbed at the growing stiffness in his crotch.

  Cedric went limp a second later when the cold steel of a gun muzzle pressed behind his left ear.

  "Don't move." The woman's voice carried an edge that made him want to wet his pants. Bitch. Cedric struggled to control his bladder.

  "You disappointed me. Jasmine Thompson doesn't have a scratch on her and the other one could live."

  Lightning flashed again; thunder came almost immediately.

  Warm urine spread across his lap. He'd get the bitch for this.

  "You had promise," the woman said. "I could have used you for a long time, paid you big money" She paused. "But no."

  He opened his mouth to plead for another chance, then an intense, bright pain filled his head like the flash-bang grenades the cops used. In an instant he knew it was more than mere lightning and thunder.

  The thug known as Dr. Glock managed a single last thought and a single last word: "Mama."

  Giant balls of rain the size of marbles filled the night as the man-boy who called himself Dr. Glock slumped across the seat. Jael St. Clair emptied the magazine into his head, then made her way to the Monte Carlo's trunk, grabbed Cedric's half of the hundreddollar bills, and got back in her SUV.