Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

“What sort of work do you do?” Rein asked.

  “I have a little restaurant in Springfield, Missouri,” Astra trilled, stubbing out a cigarette and lighting another. “And opening a second one in Branson. I’m lucky to have an absolutely inspired chef as a partner – Londell, a TG who cooks the best barbecue you ever –”

  “Teegee?”

  “Transgendered, dear. A sheep in wolf’s clothing, so to speak. He’s crossing the line a step at a time. It’s so expensive.”

  Rein wondered if her protector was of similar persuasion, but decided against asking, judging the garrulous Astra to be an intelligent if loosely collected human being of a Bohemian nature. Feeling secure, Rein had allowed herself needed sleep, dozing when she felt the van veer sharply, opening her eyes to find the vehicle swooping up an off-ramp into farmland.

  “We’re almost there,” Astra said. “I expect you’ll enjoy having a companion to talk to.”

  “Companion?”

  Astra sucked a drag off the cigarette and side-lipped a plume of smoke out the window. “I didn’t tell you? You’re going to be sharing a safe house with another runner. I picked her up last night, which is why I’m kinda frazzled.” Astra grinned and shook her curly mane of unkempt locks. “I didn’t even have time to do my hair.”

  “Is this unusual?” Rein asked. “Two women at once?”

  “Safe houses are kinda at a premium out here on the range. If two of you poor girls can take a section of the railroad together, it’ll save time. I’m making arrangements to get the next step made, so I expect you’ll both be moving toward destinations in a day or two. In the meantime, Londell and me need an espresso machine – very expensive. I’m trying to pick up a used one from a defunct coffeehouse in Branson. So much to do, so little time.” Astra winked. “Relax, girlfriend, you’re in good hands.”

  Rein didn’t relax, but pretended to drowse, head lolling toward the window every few minutes, collecting data: highway signs, locations on billboards, local attractions. She was still stinging from her mistake at Rick’s, walking a dozen feet with her back open to a man one step behind and carrying a length of pipe.

  Luckily, Rick had turned out to be a gentle man who detested violence against women after growing up with a father who abused his mother. Rick had lived in three disparate places since graduating from Indiana University with a degree in photography and among the first things he did at each place was make himself a part of the underground railroad.

  The chrome pipe turned out to be a counterweight for the umbrella he’d mentioned, a white fabric reflector. Rick was serious about his work and had taken some lovely photos, showing her each one after snapping the shutter, assuring her it was just her eyes.

  And then it had been time to go, Rick saying someone down the line had called and was heading to a transfer point, a woman. He had held her tight, told her to be strong, and dropped Rein off at a small park. Five minutes later Janis/Astra had arrived.

  “Do you know when we’ll leave the safe house?” Rein asked. “And will the other woman be leaving with me?”

  “It’s always a fluid situation. Right now it seems you’ll share the next phase of the journey together.”

  Astra rounded a bend and pointed to a blue two-story farmhouse on a flat carpet of green lawn surrounded by fields. “Here’s your latest bed and breakfast, Marla. A perfect little jewel in the middle of nowhere.”

  “You’re sure it’s safe?”

  “The place is owned by Katka, a local hero in the women’s movement. Normally Katka would have stepped in, but she’s on vacation – Brazil.” Astra switched to a Brit accent à la Monty Python. “Frightful bother, this lack of qualified help.”

  They pulled up the drive, stopped, the engine running. “What do I do?” Rein asked as she slid from the van.

  “The door should be open. Eat, drink, or use anything you find. See you later, girlfriend.”

  “Wait … I, uh …”

  But Astra was heading down the road. Rein noted the license tag on the van and the address on the mailbox, taking a few seconds to log them in memory. She turned to the house, a light on in a back room. She wondered if she was being watched, saw no silhouette at the window. Rein paused. Things seemed a bit out of pattern, but Astra appeared to be the real deal, a hoot actually. And her backup was somewhere nearby. There was a small motel a few miles back, Carson and Cruz probably there right now, waiting for night to make a drive by. Astra wasn’t going to be around for several hours …

  Rein could finally get the small GPS locator, at least. And her gun.

  Chapter 44

  Reinetta pushed the door open, said, “Hello?”

  Nothing. She stepped inside, scanning every detail: frayed Oriental rug, solid comfortable-looking furniture, several old sepia-toned photos on the cream-and-red wallpaper. For a split second she detected an off smell, like something had gone bad in a far corner of a refrigerator.

  “Hello?” Rein repeated.

  An eye peeked around a corner, the kitchen to the rear, a questioning female eye under dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. The accompanying eye appeared, making two green eyes in a round and pretty face. The face was above a petite body in a simple red blouse, faded jeans, and blue running shoes.

  “Is this the Oklahoma station on the hot chick railroad?” Rein said.

  The woman stepped out, the tentative look on her face replaced by a smile. “I heard I was getting some company,” the woman said, crossing the room and holding out her hand. “My name’s, uh, Darleen.”

  “And I’m Marla,” Rein said. “Sorta.”

  The woman smiled even more broadly. “I’m kinda Darleen. Astra split?”

  “Branson.”

  “The restaurant with Lindell or whatever. I swear it’s half what she talks about – and does she talk.”

  The woman laughed with genuine humor and Rein’s alarm system backed down a notch. “I take it you’ve been here a bit, Darleen?”

  “Since last night. Astra dropped me here, ran off to get you. She’s weird, but she’s a whirlwind.”

  Rein went to a photo on the wall, a stern-faced man and woman in fifties garb before a brick home, between them a smiling little girl of eight or so. Penciled across the bottom of the shot was Daddy, Mommy, and Katka, Erie, 1958.

  “The owner of the place is named Katka,” Darleen said. “She and a friend are on a trip. There are pictures of them in the kitchen. Speaking of that, are you hungry, Marla?”

  “Starved.”

  “There’s meat and cheese in the fridge, bread on the table. Let’s eat.”

  Cruz and I were still at Salazano’s home. He’d been kind enough to fix us a pitcher of iced tea and set out cheeses and crackers. He was a seven-year veteran of the underground railroad, thus I was worried by his worry, his sense that two women passing through his care in four days was anomalous.

  My phone rang. Harry.

  “Nothin’ on Rein. Right?”

  “Not yet. You know I’ll call you as soon as –”

  “Listen, Carson, I just talked to Detective Honus Clayton, Pensacola Homicide. They’re sure they’ve got Rhonda Doakes’s killer, Gail’s killer.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember James, the boyfriend?”

  I heard Gail’s hushed words as she’d described James to Doc Kavanaugh.

  Knocked out two of my teeth … did I believe a piece of paper could stop a knife from slicing my throat?… driving past my apartment and screaming, calling my phone every two minutes.

  “I remember James,” I said, my voice tight.

  “Clayton found the place where Doakes was killed, a fishing shanty up the Pensacola River. Forensics lifted prints belonging to James Peyton. They were on the system courtesy of a restraining order taken out against him some months back.”

  “By Rhonda Doakes.” I nodded. “Where’s Peyton now?”

  “In the Boise lockup. Boise was where Doakes began her journey, Carson.”

  I closed my eye
s and saw a map. Rhonda Doakes had ridden the railroad from Boise to the Alabama coast, finally thinking she was safe. Finally letting out a breath held for years.

  “I remember.”

  “Detective Clayton flew up to Boise yesterday. James Peyton is talking, Carson.”

  “How’d Peyton find out where Doakes was living?”

  “Get this: Peyton was sitting around his crib one day when the phone rings. Caller asks Peyton what he’d do to Rhonda if she was standing in front of him right then. Peyton says, ‘Kick her fuckin’ brains in.’ Caller says, ‘Got a pencil to write an address?’”

  “Peyton got the address where Doakes was living?”

  “No, Carson. He didn’t.”

  Puzzlement. “What did he get?”

  “Directions to the fishing shack.”

  My puzzlement turned to head-spinning confusion. “Peyton didn’t take her there?”

  “Peyton swears his caller gave him directions to the shack. He drove straight through, found Rhonda bound with tape, wrapped in a tarp on the floor. Detective Clayton doesn’t think the guy’s lying.”

  “Is Peyton our killer? The perp in the system?”

  “Clayton says Peyton’s not smart enough to light a fart. Clayton went to the Pensacola version of the women’s help center, where Doakes came out. Except she almost wasn’t Rhonda Doakes any more, she was about to be Randi Doyle.”

  “Right … the new name.” I’d forgotten that women’s centers helped women get new names, chopping off the pasts forever.

  “Yep. Rhonda was becoming Randi. Just a couple weeks from having the new name legalized, Carson. Then James showed up.”

  “Doc Kavanaugh was right,” I said. “The same perp murdered Lainie Krebbs, butterfly Lady and Herdez, but it was Peyton who killed Rhonda Doakes, aka Gail. But who the hell kidnapped Doakes and left her in the shack? The system killer?”

  “Probably. He had to be in the Mobile area to put butterfly Lady in the city dump. Unless there’s another person out there … an accomplice.” Harry paused to consider that aspect. “Jesus, it keeps getting worse. Am I on speaker?”

  “Yes,” Cruz said.

  “Nothing against you, Miz Cruz, but I’d like to talk to my partner alone.”

  “You won’t be dissing me, will you?”

  “No. I owe you an apology.”

  Cruz winked at me. “I don’t want to hear it. Shut the damn phone off, Ryder.”

  I took the device off speaker, went outside to the porch and stood in the shade, the summer sun beating down on the fields like a hammer.

  “Listen, Carson, I uh … spent last evening with Detective Hargreaves.”

  “By ‘evening’ do you mean …?”

  “I mean what I just said. I spilled the news about Rein, about how I’d nearly fucked up the case by … by that damned alarm in my head. Sally had some time alone with Rein before she went off on the assignment, time for girl talk – dammit, I mean women talk. I told her how I could never get the pictures of Rein out of my head, her dressed up as Harriet Nautilus, playing a game. Sally told me Reinetta’s a grown-up woman. She knows what she’s up against, and she knows what she’s doing. Probably a lot better than you or I ever did at that age. I guess what I’m trying to say is … I’m no less scared for her, but I’m more sure that she can handle what comes her way. Does that make sense?”

  Thank you, Sally, I thought.

  “Yes.”

  “You tried to tell me all that, I think. But Sally knew how to say it so I could understand it better.”

  “She’s like that, bro.”

  “I’ve boxed up my scared and Sally’s boxed up her scared and we’re tearing things apart down here, re-analyzing this madness from every side. You’re kind of isolated up there, Carson, hard on the trail of Rein and … can we turn the speaker back on now? There’s something I want you and Detective Cruz to think about.”

  “Hang on.”

  I jogged back inside, waved Cruz over, turned the speaker back on. “You there, Detective Cruz?” Harry asked.

  “And as stunning as ever.”

  “I’m staring at a map with a pin in Mobile and a pin in Boulder, each for a battered body set in a tableau. I’ve got another pin in east Utah. Then I study the space between the pins. That’s a helluva lot of territory to cover, folks.”

  “True,” Cruz said. “Your point?”

  “Carson said the women’s underground railroad was the worst thing a misogynist could ever imagine, women stealing women from men.”

  Cruz nodded. “I’d think it would be the face-slap of all face-slaps.”

  “What if Krebbs and Peyton aren’t isolated cases but part of a group of women-haters?”

  “What?” I said.

  “I admit it’s weird, but it does fit in with your idea, Carson: What if there’s a men’s version of the underground network, dedicated to shutting the women’s system off – an anti-system system?”

  I looked at Cruz. She mouthed Anti-system system?

  Chapter 45

  During their meal at the kitchen table, Rein started crossing Darleen off any threat index. The woman was too open and genuine. Her intelligence was tinged with self-conscious naïveté, saying she’d never gone past high school. Still, Darleen looked through the window into the back yard, naming the trees and plant varieties.

  “That’s a pretty flower over there,” Rein had said, nodding out the window. “The blue one.”

  “That’s an American Bellflower,” Darleen said. “Campanula americana.” When she heard herself, she reddened. “I don’t know why I knew that last part,” she apologized. “I wasn’t showing off.”

  Darleen had a habit of walking from room to room and looking out every window, as though seeing the world anew, or maybe for the first time. Rein got the impression of a woman who’d never expected to be in a safe house with nowhere to go but forward, and was liking her prospects for the future.

  Rein wrapped the food and put it back in the fridge. The scent she’d noted earlier had come and gone a couple times and she found a tub of what appeared to be forgotten baked beans, mold across the top. She scraped them into the garbage disposal and washed the tub and lid, problem solved. A wall phone hung in the kitchen and Rein listened to the receiver.

  “No dial tone,” Rein said, puzzlement in her eyes. “The phone’s shut off.”

  Darleen was sitting at the table nibbling from a pack of Oreos. “I guess you can turn off them types of phones when you go on a long fancy vacation, but I wouldn’t know. We never had a phone outside of cell phones and Tommy’s idea of a vacation was renting a rotting shack in the Rockies, shooting a deer, then spending the rest of the time drunk while I tried to figure out how to cut the thing into pieces and –” Darleen clamped her hand over her mouth, but her eyes glittered with a sly delight. “Whoops! We ain’t supposed to talk about real stuff, are we?”

  Rein took a chance that the modest intimacy of the moment held promise of a bond. “Wanna tell real names, Darleen? Just between us?”

  “We’re not supposed to tell anything about us, Marla. They kept saying that and saying that. I swear I hear it in my sleep.”

  “We’re not supposed to tell them. We’re the us. Names can’t hurt, can they?”

  “OK, but just first names. I still feel like I’m cheating, but …

  “I’ll go first,” Rein said, not seeing harm in using her real name. “I’m Reinetta.”

  “That’s a pretty name. I’ve never heard it before. Is it like –?”

  Rein shook her head, having heard the question innumerable times. “Not like the weather. It’s a form of the name Regina and means queen.” She smiled. “My parents were hopeful, I guess. But friends call me Rein.”

  “I’m Treeka.”

  The women shook hands under the bond of truth. “How long you been gone from, uh, your start place?” Rein asked.

  “Ten days,” Treeka said. “You?”

  “Today’s my five-day anniversar
y.”

  “Anniversary?” Treeka clapped her hands. “We’ve got to celebrate.” She produced a half-bottle of chardonnay from the fridge. “We got permission, right?”

  “Pour on, sista,” Rein said.

  They poured wine and sat in the living room.

  “Have you been scared?” Rein asked.

  “Until the third night. Then I started to believe that somehow, God willing, I’m gonna get a second chance. Once I began thinking like that, I fell in love with my escape, like it’s a movie called Treeka’s Big Adventure.”

  “It’s great you can think like that.”

  “After two years of my husband thumping my head I’m amazed I still have enough brains to think.”

  Rein took a sip of wine and shifted gears. “Speaking of the journey, did you ever feel there was anything off? Like someone had an interest in you? A man, maybe?”

  Treeka’s glass paused in front of her lips. “That’s a weird question.”

  Rein waved it away. “I’m paranoid by nature. An over-reactor.”

  Treeka stood and paced the floor, finger tracing the rim of her glass. “There was only one man along the way – Rick. I think he was gay. Tommy hates gay people, especially lesbians. But Rick was super nice.”

  “I stayed with Rick for a night. I agree.”

  The women compared notes on their time in the railroad system and clicked glasses again. Best keep things tight, Rein thought, setting aside the wine. And best zoom this news to Carson and Cruz. They may have known where she was, but they sure wouldn’t know anything about Treeka.

  Rein went to the bathroom, pulled her cell. The charge was almost past tense. With Astra gone Rein could get Carson to drop the new phone and her weapon – where? She went to the window – out under the roses beside the driveway? He could do it tonight and she’d be resupplied.

  Bingo.

  Rein tapped out a message, considering what to include. Harry always said communicate everything when you get the chance, even if you think we got it all, cuz we make mistakes. Of course, that was with a full charge on the battery. Still, Rein dutifully added the license tags and what she knew of location, finally having time to do more than jab at the keys and jam the damned phone back into her underpants.