A Clean Kill

by Mike Stewart

  I turned to look out the window. “Somebody knows what they’re doing.”

  Joey grunted. “Yeah. And whoever it is has got a blue-steel hard-on for you, bubba.”

  In the distance, an oil tanker cut a vague, wavering “V” across the harbor. I turned to face Joey. “Have you got some time this afternoon? I need you to help me take care of something that’s been getting on my nerves.”

  Joey leaned forward in his chair. “I don’t know. I guess. What is it?”

  An hour later, when Joey finally walked out of my office, I picked up the phone. I needed to go somewhere and see someone, and I needed to call the state bar association and find out where and who.

  The receptionist at the Alabama State Bar connected me to Member Services, who turned me over to Lawyer Assistance, who put me through to Ethics and the Law, who finally patched me through to a young woman named Beth, whose responsibility was Emerging Issues in Legalmetrics. No shit. That was the name.

  “Beth, this is Tom McInnes in Mobile. How are you today?”

  “Fine.”

  “Can you help me with a jury research issue?”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m looking for someone who can analyze, or at least fill me in on, juror health issues.”

  Silence.

  “You know, like what percentage of jurors leave jury service due to health problems. That sort of thing.”

  Silence.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m looking it up.” More silence. “Here. Try Dr. Kai-Li Cantil at Auburn University.” She spelled the first and last names. “Dr. Cantil is … let’s see, an assistant professor of psychology looking into,” the cadence of her voice grew stilted, the way people talk when they’re reading out loud, “ ‘the effects of jury duty on the emotional and physical health of jurors.’ ” She paused. “Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “Sounds like it. But I’m curious how you knew about her.”

  Beth sighed. “We keep records.” I waited. “We’re one of the funding institutions for her research, and we keep records. If we’re going to give a researcher money, we expect our members to get some benefit from it. So we keep records for people like you who need help.”

  It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn that Beth had unnecessarily emphasized the last three words. I said, “Nice to know our dues are being put to good use. Do you have a number for Dr. Cantil?”

  “You can call Auburn information for that number. Is there anything else?”

  “That’s it. Thank you, Beth.”

  She managed to squeeze out “sure” before hanging up.

  I called Auburn University information. I called the School of Behavioral Sciences. I called the Department of Psychology. Finally, I found someone with Dr. Cantil’s number, which eventually yielded a conversation with the assistant professor’s bored secretary.

  The doctor was out torturing undergraduates with the last final of the semester. But, she said, Dr. Cantil would be happy to see me Monday afternoon for a mere hundred dollars an hour.

  I thought of Sheri Baneberry’s dwindling funds in my trust account. “Wouldn’t I get a break on fees since I’m a member of one of the associations sponsoring her work?”

  “No.”

  I made an appointment for 1:00 P.M. and hung up.

  Time to go play with Joey.

  I sent Kelly home early and locked up the office. Joey was supposed to have already checked out the Land Rover. I climbed in, maneuvered through the concrete deck, and pulled out into light Friday-afternoon traffic. Bobbi and her father were still parked down the street.

  I made the block and pulled up next to their silver BMW from behind. I waved and rolled down the passenger window. “Still waiting on Sheri?”

  Bobbi glared. Jonathan Cort nodded just once without looking at me.

  “Sorry it’s taking so long. She’s still up there going over medical records with my paralegal.” Of course, I didn’t actually have a paralegal, but they didn’t know that.

  Cort said, “Fine.”

  I smiled. “Shouldn’t be more than another hour or so. Have a nice weekend.”

  This time the daughter spoke up. “Fuck you.”

  Cort smiled. He must have been very proud.

  I am easily encouraged. Something kicks in, something like a runner’s high, when the facts of a difficult case start falling into place. Not everything needs to be there. I only need enough to push me in the right direction, to give me the sense that I’m sneaking up on a dragon and not a windmill. And, finally, that’s how I was feeling as I headed south toward Point Clear.

  The rain had cleared, and it was going to be a bright, cold weekend. I cracked a window to let in some fresh air. Soon, I passed straight through Point Clear and continued south for thirty more miles, where a small shrimping village cluttered the roadsides. The place didn’t really have a name. It wasn’t incorporated or anything. It just had docks and shrimp-processing plants, two cafés and a bar—things shrimpers need.

  I checked the rearview mirror and wheeled the Land Rover off the road. The mud grips dug into sand and trash as I slid to a stop behind a maroon Dumpster. And still, I seemed to be alone.

  After making sure my wildebeest-chasing safari vehicle was visible from the road, but not too visible, I sprinted around the rusted remnants of a chain-link fence and ducked inside a diner that was, as nearly as I could tell from the sign outside, named “Diner.” A counter covered in swirls of green linoleum stretched in front of a row of those chrome soda-fountain stools that are bolted to the floor and swivel when you sit on them. There was a wall clock behind the counter. Barber’s Milk was printed in red on its face, and someone had duct-taped the cord to the wall between the clock and the painted and soiled electrical outlet in the baseboard. It was just after 4:30. I climbed onto a stool and ordered a burger and a Coke from an old woman with coal-black hair and grocery-sack cleavage. As she passed through a swinging door into the kitchen, a gush of hot air escaped bringing with it the homey aroma of beef tallow flavored with day-old fish.

  The cook wasn’t in a hurry. Neither was I. Twenty minutes passed before I dropped a ten on the counter and left through a screen door next to the restrooms in back. The alley smelled like the diner, times ten. Cardboard boxes and giant, commerical-sized vegetable cans cluttered the sides of a narrow service drive that stretched from their Dumpster, on the right, to a short wooden fence on the left.

  I sprinted to the fence, put one hand on top, and jumped up to balance on top for a second before springing hard to the other side. After stopping to look over my shoulder, I ducked into the back of a tavern. And that’s where I waited. Frozen just inside the back door of a bar that never closed, I waited and listened.

  A cracking sound, followed immediately by a thick splash, was my signal. I stepped into the alley just in time to hear a quiet voice say something that sounded like, “Fuggin merde.” And there was the dark, hollow-cheeked stranger from the Mandrake Club, sitting up to his waist in a pit of black water swarming with fish guts and shrimp heads. Joey was standing next to the ancient barbeque pit with a .45 automatic pointed at the man’s head.

  Joey smiled. “Hello, asshole.”

  The man sprang up onto his haunches in the muck, and he did it much too quickly and effortlessly to make me happy.

  Joey cocked the hammer on his .45. “Unh, unh, unh. Calm your ass down. You don’t wanna get shot, and I don’t wanna shoot you.” He smiled very becomingly at the man. “Well, maybe I do, but I’m not going to unless you make me.”

  The man nodded his head. “Put de fuggin gun down. We can talk ’bout dis.” There was that strange accent again.

  Joey shook his head and motioned at a Styrofoam cooler next to the back fence. “Tom, it’s in the cooler.”

  I crossed over and pulled off the lightweight cover. Inside was Joey’s Nikon autofocus thirty-five-millimeter with a short-focus zoom lens and a padded strap. I didn’t know what would hap
pen when I turned around to play photographer, so I checked to make sure the thing was on and the lens cap off before I lifted it out of the cooler.

  Fortunately, the stranger who was marinating in Joey’s homemade gumbo had his eyes trained on the .45 automatic as I stood and pointed the lens at him. Unfortunately, when I pressed the shutter release, the quick-fire, metallic chirping of the motor drive caused Joey to glance my way.

  Through the lens, I saw the stranger put one hand on the side of the pit and pivot his legs parallel to the ground like a break-dancer. I dropped the camera from my eye and yelled as the man executed a ballet-like scissor kick between Joey’s knees and put my giant friend flat on his back.

  I tossed the camera back into the cooler and rushed forward. The stranger was on his feet now and moving fast. As quickly as he had started, the man stopped and spun in midair, aiming a roundhouse kick at my temple. I stepped inside the kick, speared his thigh with my elbow, and aimed a straight right at a head that was no longer there.

  He was by me. I spun in time to see him grab the Styrofoam cooler in one fist and dump the camera into his open hand. The pictures. I charged, and he swung the camera at my head by the leather strap. Instead of ducking, I clamped both arms around the camera and took the blow on my shoulder. Bending double and twisting, I felt the strap break, and I was somersaulting toward Joey. The stranger rushed again, and, lying on my back like a downed kid in a playground fight, I nailed him in the chest with my right heel just as Joey swung his .45 at the man’s head.

  And he just disappeared.

  I popped up in time to see my nightly tormentor swinging his legs to the side to clear a six-foot fence like a gymnast on parallel bars. Two seconds later, he appeared again as he topped a second, taller fence at the end of the alley.

  The dark stranger glanced back just as Joey raised his gun to fire.

  I shouted, “No!” and clamped my hand over Joey’s wrist to lower the gun.

  Joey cussed.

  The stranger met my eyes, just for a fraction of a second. His eyes narrowed, and I could have sworn he looked confused. Then he dropped to the other side of the plank fence and was gone. Joey charged through the bar to try to catch the man out by the road. But I knew he wasn’t going to catch him—not somebody with that kind of head start, not somebody who moved like that.

  I didn’t wait for Joey. It was my job to disappear. I picked up the broken camera strap and located Joey’s blue Expedition parked on the other side of the alley. His keys were in the ignition. A nylon sports bag full of my clothes lay on the passenger seat. I could get the pictures developed in Auburn. I’d have to call Joey about who I could get to check the strap for fingerprints.

  I left heading north, speeding away from a lightning quick, demonically creative stranger who I hoped was too consumed with running away from a white-haired giant to worry about where I had gone.

  Ten

  Dusk had settled by the time I hit I-10 and turned west toward Mobile. Most of the heavy traffic was meeting me—people headed home at the end of the workweek, people who were worn out and hungry and looking forward to their weekends. I mostly shared the westbound lanes into the city with truckers and a few road-soiled cars with out-of-state plates.

  The interstate twisted through urban jumble. I turned north on I-65, humped over a couple of suspension bridges, and struck out through the night toward Montgomery. I set the cruise control on seventy-five and hit the SCAN button on Joey’s radio. Jarring bits of talk radio and country blues, classic rock and white-boy hip-hop crackled through the speakers, sounding like a Rod Serling journey through the space/time continuum.

  I caught a snippet of familiar notes and pressed the button again to lock onto the signal. Some small-town station along the roadside was playing one of my favorite Christmas songs, “Clyde the Camel.” It’s about a camel who saves Christmas à la Rudolph. And it’s awful. Terrible. Embarrassing. But it reminded me of Christmas when I was ten years old, and that makes up for just about anything. So I sat there in Joey’s huge four-wheel-drive, cruising over an ever-vanishing, never-ending ribbon of gray interstate and singing what little bit of the song I could remember.

  The song ended. I clicked off the radio and realized I was high with relief at having slipped away from the stalker from Louisiana.

  Oh.

  It had been in the back of my mind. I just needed space or relief or maybe Clyde the Camel to pull it out. The accent—French-Canadian with a Brooklyn brogue—was classic South Louisiana Cajun, what people who are looking for an ass-whipping call coonass in that part of the world.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket and flipped it open. Joey answered.

  I asked, “Did you catch him?”

  “Hell, no. Sonofabitch runs like a rabbit with fire up its butt.”

  “Didn’t much think you would. Gave me time to get away, though. Thanks.”

  Joey didn’t respond.

  “Anyway, listen. It just came to me. The guy’s either a Cajun or somebody who grew up around Cajuns. The first time I heard his voice at the Mandrake Club, I wasn’t really paying attention because I didn’t know he was anybody I needed to remember. But it just came to me after hearing him talk behind the diner.”

  Joey said, “Okay.” I don’t think he was impressed. “You got the camera?”

  “Yeah. And the strap he grabbed. I thought maybe we’d get some prints.”

  “Maybe. I doubt it. It ain’t like on television. There’s a helluva lot of stuff that won’t hold a fingerprint.”

  I had a thought. “What about the cooler? The Styrofoam’s got a hard finish, and he picked it up.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I was just about home.” He cussed again. “I’m turning around.”

  “You left it in the alley?”

  “Hell yeah, I left it in the alley. I had other things on my mind, and it was a fuckin’ two-dollar cooler. Don’t worry. I’ll get it.”

  I looked down at the Expedition’s gas gauge. “What kind of mileage does this bus of yours get?”

  “About the same as a bulldozer.”

  “Okay. I’m going to pull over here and get some gas. I’m at the …”

  “Don’t say where you are. That’s a smart little bastard you got after you. While you’re, uh, out of town, stick with the cell phone and don’t say anything about where you are. I’ll talk to Kelly about it.”

  “That seems a little over the top, but okay.” I clicked on the turn signal and pointed the headlights at the first Greenville exit. “Before you hang up, I wanted to ask you something. When we were in my office this afternoon trying to figure out where to trap this Cajun guy, you told me about the fenced-off alley behind the diner. And you told me about the old barbecue pit where, if we did things right, we could trip him up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, where did that slop—the rotten shrimp heads and fish guts and stuff—where did that come from? Did you put it in, or had somebody been back there cleaning fish?”

  Joey laughed. “The pit already had rainwater in it. And it was already black and nasty-looking where the water had soaked up some old ashes and stuff. That’s what gave me the idea. I just looked around the alley and found a ten-gallon lard can full of stuff somebody was probably saving to chum for sharks and dumped it in.”

  “Why?”

  “You know. Just for fun.”

  I hit Montgomery that night a few minutes before ten and found a room at the Riverfront Ramada, the one near the restored Victorian train station. Dinner was soggy room service. Sleep was fitful. I rolled out of bed at seven Saturday morning, showered and shaved, dressed, and packed. I had planned to stay in the capital for the weekend—resting, convalescing, whatever. I couldn’t sit still. I paid my bill with cash, drove to a little café in Old Cloverdale for breakfast, and headed out toward Auburn.

  After an hour buzzing east along I-85, a set of huge orange tiger-paw prints led me up an o
ff-ramp and across the overpass. Five miles later, College Street wound past the old brick-and-steeple campus—the one where my father had taken classes forty years ago—and into a downtown of bicycle shops, pizza joints, and collegial bars.

  Auburn is a pure college town. It exists for no other purpose than to surround and support the university, and every business on the street was designed to satisfy some particular want, or imagined need, of a twenty-year-old undergraduate. But now fall semester was over. Most of the student body—and therefore most of the city’s inhabitants—had departed for Christmas break with the folks. The little town seemed to be resting.

  After pulling into a metered spot just past Toomer’s Corner, I stepped out of Joey’s Expedition and up onto the sidewalk. Waves of frigid air rolled down the street, ruffling the hair and clothes of a few lonely souls out running errands among the storefronts. I zipped my coat and started walking. I didn’t really know why I had pulled over to window shop instead of searching out Dr. Kai-Li Cantil. But I’ve learned that if some weight starts tugging at my subconscious, it’s usually a good idea to listen. Homo sapiens has survived for thousands of years, in no small part, by listening to primitive alarms, by listening to an instinctual intelligence that tells us to run or fight or hide. I didn’t see any reason to start ignoring it now.

  I stopped at a jewelry store window full of fraternity and sorority pins scattered across rumpled black velvet. Next door was a plate-glass window decorated with snowmen and snowflakes. In one corner, the artist had painted a green Christmas tree surrounded with colored squares that were meant to be presents.

  It was a sub and pizza joint. I walked inside. “Nice window.”

  Three girls in Colorado skiwear worked behind the food counter. The nearest one—a copper-tone redhead with tiny freckles scattered across her nose and cheekbones—said, “Thanks. Take a seat anywhere. We’re just opening.”

  I took a table against the wall and watched. The redhead rang open the cash register and broke rolls of quarters, dimes, and nickels into divided trays. One of the other girls wiped down the counter. The third girl, a vacant brunette, opened a sliding window behind the counter to reveal a middle-aged black woman in the kitchen.