The Last Child

by John Hart

  But the print …

  He shook his head.

  The print was tough.

  Hunt sliced through traffic, hung a left on the four-lane that led across town. Yoakum’s neighborhood was an old one, thick with bungalows that sat on elevated yards above concrete sidewalks buckled by tree roots the size of a man’s leg. The neighborhood was transitional but well-kept, shaded and quiet.

  Hunt decided on the pry bar.

  He made a quick right and, three blocks later, a left. Yoakum’s house was one-story with a peaked roof and cedar shingles aged to dull silver. Bright color shone in the flower beds. The shrubbery was cut back, trees tended.

  A blue panel truck sat in the driveway. White letters stood out against the paint.

  SBI.

  Hunt eased the car to the curb, still a half block away. Neighbors were in their yards: faded women in bright robes, old men, a few long-haired kids who should be doing better things. Their faces all showed the same thing: surprise, concern. At Yoakum’s house, men in windbreakers with stenciled letters moved in and out of the front door. Hunt saw neither Oliver nor Barfield, but that didn’t matter.

  The SBI was in Yoakum’s house.

  They had a warrant.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  “He tried to kill me,” Jack said. “You saw it. Jesus. That big motherfucker tried to kill me dead.”

  “If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” Johnny knelt beside Freemantle. “Don’t be such a girl.”

  “Don’t touch him, Johnny. What are you doing?”

  “I’m not touching him. Chill.” Johnny leaned closer to Freemantle. “He’s just sick.” Freemantle’s lips were moving, and there were words there, Johnny thought. He leaned closer.

  “… house is on fire … Momma’s on fire …”

  Johnny heard it.

  “… house is on fire … Momma’s on fire …”

  The words slipped away. Johnny looked up. “Did you hear that?”

  “No.”

  “Come help me.”

  “Screw that.”

  “He needs medicine or a hospital.”

  “Fine,” Jack said. “We’ll go home and call the ambulance. Let them worry about it.”

  “If we call an ambulance, they’ll call the cops and I won’t find out what he knows.”

  “Let the cops ask him. That’s their job.”

  “The cops want him for murder. They think Alyssa is dead. They won’t ask him anything. Not fast enough anyway.” Johnny pushed on Freemantle’s shoulder but the man didn’t stir.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know, man. Alright? I’m making this up as I go. I just need one more chance. Some time, that’s all. God damn it, Jack, just help me.”

  “Fine. What do you want me to do?”

  “Watch him. I’m going to get the truck.”

  “That’s twenty minutes.”

  But Johnny was already gone. Jack looked down at Freemantle’s cracked lips, eyes that rolled behind paper lids. “This sucks,” he said, then picked up the pistol. He pointed it at Levi Freemantle, then sat on the dirt.

  —

  Levi burned in a black fire. He knew it was fire because he’d been on fire before. He’d been on fire in a burning house, his momma in his arms, her hair gone up like a torch. He didn’t know why the house was burning or why he was in it now. Seemed like that had happened a long time ago.

  But he was burning.

  Pain so bad it was under his skin.

  He heard voices, far away; and he tried to tell them.

  … house is on fire … Momma’s on fire …

  But they couldn’t hear him. And nobody came to help.

  Nobody came.

  Skin so hot.

  Burning …

  —

  Johnny ran all the way, and was sucking wind when he made it to the truck. He climbed in, closed the door. The key was slick between his fingers, but the engine turned over. Blue smoke rolled in the still air. Gospel on the radio. Johnny drove for the barn and left the motor running. Jack stood in the door and looked miserable.

  “How are you going to get him up?”

  Johnny didn’t answer. He hopped out of the truck, went into the barn, and knelt by Freemantle. He called his name, then touched his arm and looked up. “This guy’s on fire.”

  “Duh.”

  “No. It’s gotten worse. He’s burning up.”

  “… Momma’s on fire … house is on fire …”

  “What the hell?” Jack leaned closer. “Did you hear that?”

  Johnny pointed toward the burned house. “I think his mother died in that fire.” Johnny pushed on the man’s shoulder one last time, shook him hard. He rocked back on his knees. “We can’t get him in the truck by ourselves.”

  “He came around once.”

  “We should throw water on his face.”

  “That only works in the movies.”

  “Shit,” Johnny said.

  “I say we leave him here and get the hell out.”

  Johnny shook his head. “We wait.”

  “Enough’s enough, Johnny.”

  “I stole the truck. I make the call.”

  So they waited, blue smoke in the air, gospel on the radio.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Hunt drove twice through Yoakum’s neighborhood, but each time he passed Yoakum’s street, the SBI van still sat in the drive, so he let it go. He called Cross to check on the situation at the Jarvis site. He got him after four rings. “Yeah. The medical examiner is here. First body should be up within the hour. He thinks we’ll get them all out today. Midafternoon, maybe. By sundown, for sure.”

  “How about media?”

  “About what you’d expect. You coming out?”

  “Anything to see?”

  Cross paused. Voices were muffled in the background. “Not yet.”

  “Call me when there is.”

  Hunt clicked off. He was at an intersection on the poorest side of town. The houses were old, with cracks in the clapboards. Gray undershirts hung on clotheslines. He saw rusted oil tanks, granite block foundations that raised the floor joists off the damp earth. Years of debris settled beneath the nearest house, and Hunt saw a smooth spot in the dirt where dogs slid in and out. A hundred years of failed sharecroppers had settled on this side of town, and it showed. Hunt was a mile from the freed slave cemetery, surrounded by poverty and hopelessness, the lingering shadow of past injustice.

  The light turned green.

  Hunt did not move.

  Something shifted in the back of his mind. A car honked behind him, so he drove through the intersection and pulled to the curb as the driver behind him gunned his engine and blew past. Hunt saw neon under the chassis, spinners on the hubs, and gang colors hanging from the rearview. Trustless eyes stared out of a guarded face, bass-heavy music thumped from the speakers, but Hunt forced the image out. His mind had been in the past.

  Sharecroppers. Wet clothes.

  The pink tongue of a mongrel in the shade …

  He replayed the last minute.

  And then he thought he had it.

  He reached for the phone to call Yoakum, and then he remembered that Yoakum was in the backseat of a state cruiser halfway to Raleigh. He dialed Katherine Merrimon instead. She answered, hopeful but sounding tired. “I needed to see if you were home,” Hunt said.

  Sudden life. “Johnny?”

  “Not yet. I’m coming over.”

  It took twenty-three minutes with traffic. She wore faded jeans, cut short, sandals, and a wrinkled shirt that hung from the bones of her shoulders. “You look tired,” Hunt told her. And she did. Her eyes had retreated into their sockets. She had less color than usual.

  “Ken showed up at three in the morning. I couldn’t get back to sleep.”

  “Here? He came here?”

  “I didn’t let him in or anything. He beat on the door, made some more ugly comments. He was drunk. He just needed to bark.”<
br />
  An angry stillness settled behind Hunt’s eyes. He knew the look of an abused woman lying to herself. “Don’t you dare make excuses for him.”

  “I can handle Ken.”

  Hunt forced himself to calm down. She was getting defensive, and there were better ways to handle the problem. “I need to go in Johnny’s room.”

  “Okay.” Inside, she led him down the dim corridor to Johnny’s room. Hunt flipped on the light and looked at Johnny’s bed. When he did not see what he wanted, he moved to the row of books on Johnny’s dresser. He scanned the spines. “It’s not here.”

  “What’s not?”

  “Johnny had a history book about Raven County. Like this.” He made a shape with his hands, indicating its size. “It was on his bed a few days ago. You know anything about it?”

  “No. Nothing. Is it important?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He started walking.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I’ll stay in touch.”

  At the door, she laid a hand on his arm. “Listen. About Ken. I appreciate that you’re being protective. If he becomes aggressive or makes threats or anything like that, I’ll call you. Okay?” She squeezed his arm lightly. “I’ll call.”

  “You do that,” he said, but gears were already grinding in his mind. She stayed in the open door as he walked away, and did not go inside until his car was in the street. Her house still hung in the rearview mirror when Hunt got Officer Taylor on the phone. “I’m at Katherine Merrimon’s house,” he said.

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “You’re running out of markers.”

  “It’s Ken Holloway. Check his office. Check his house. I want you to find him, and I want you to arrest him.”

  A silence followed. Hunt knew that she was replaying the last time, thinking about the lawsuit and how she’d like to keep her name off the next piece of paper filed in the Clerk’s Office. “And the reason?”

  “Obstruction. He tipped Meechum that we were coming to question him. I’ll do the paperwork this afternoon, but I want him locked up now, as in right now. Any heat, I’ll take it; but I want the bastard locked up.”

  “Is this arrest legitimate?”

  “A week ago, you’d have never asked me that.”

  “A week ago, I would not have felt the need to.”

  “Just do it.”

  Hunt clicked off, then called information and asked for the number of the Raven County Public Library. The operator gave him the number, and then connected him. “Circulation desk.” The voice belonged to a man. Hunt told him what he wanted and heard keys rattling on a keyboard. “That book is checked out.”

  “I know it is. Do you have more than one copy?”

  “Checking. Yes, we do have another copy.”

  “Hold it for me,” Hunt said. “And give me your name.”

  Hunt hung up the phone and steered for the library. Yoakum was out of his hands. The Jarvis site was under control. That left Johnny. A messed-up kid. A runaway with a stolen gun.

  Freed slaves.

  Freemantle.

  Hunt knew the name because he’d seen it in Johnny’s book. It had been just a glance, but he remembered the sense of it now: “John Pendleton Merrimon, Surgeon and Abolitionist.” There had been another photograph on the next page. He’d barely noticed it at the time, but he had it now.

  Isaac Freemantle.

  And there had been a map.

  Hunt accelerated, his back pressing into hot seat leather. Johnny knew where to find Freemantle, and Freemantle was an escaped convict, a killer.

  Hunt reached for the lights. He blew down Main Street doing seventy-five, pulled into the lot, and left the engine running. Two minutes later, he was back with the book. He thumbed pages until he found the right one. He studied the photograph of John Pendleton Merrimon: the broad forehead, the heavy, masculine features. He wore a severe black suit and looked nothing like Johnny, except for the eyes, maybe. He had dark eyes.

  Hunt read of Isaac, who chose the name Freemantle to signify his new freedom. And there was a picture of him, too, a large man in rough clothes and a slouch hat. He had massive hands and a patchy beard shot with white. Johnny had told Hunt that Freemantle was a mustee name, and Hunt thought that he could see the trace of Indian in Isaac Freemantle’s features. Something in the eyes, perhaps. Or in the planes of his cheeks.

  The map filled the opposite page. There was the river, the swamp, a long jut of land with water on three sides.

  Hush Arbor.

  Hunt compared the map in the book with the road map in his glove compartment. Hush Arbor, whatever it was, lay in the most deserted part of the county. Nothing there but woods and swamp and river. There was no record of Freemantles having a phone or utilities in Raven County, so the information could be meaningless, dated by a century and a half, but Hunt needed the kid. For a dozen reasons, he needed the kid.

  Hunt put the car in gear.

  Hush Arbor was north and west.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Officer Taylor went to Ken Holloway’s office first. She drove downtown and pulled into the big parking lot that framed Holloway’s building on two sides. She moved slowly, looking for a white Escalade with gold letters. Didn’t find it. Leaving her cruiser in front of the building, Taylor checked her belt, then walked to the big glass doors. She liked the way the belt rode on her hips. Serious metal. Heavy-duty gear. Taylor loved being a cop. The authority that came with the badge. The blue uniform that never wrinkled. She liked to drive fast. She liked to arrest bad people.

  Her shoes made small, rubbery sounds on the waxed marble floor.

  A woman sat behind a large reception counter, and Taylor felt her eyes all the way across the vaulted space. The woman was crisp and richly dressed, her gaze judgmental, her voice superior. “Yes?” she said, and Taylor disliked her at once.

  “I’m here to speak with Ken Holloway.” She used her cop voice, the one that said, Don’t make me repeat myself.

  The receptionist arched an eyebrow. Her lips barely moved. “To what is this pertaining?”

  “It’s pertaining to my wanting to see him.”

  “I see.” She pursed thin lips. “Mr. Holloway is not in today.”

  Taylor pulled out a pad and pen. “And your name?” People hated the pad and pen. They disliked being on record with a cop. The receptionist reluctantly gave her name and Taylor wrote it down. “And you say Mr. Holloway is not in?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. He is not in.”

  The receptionist had paled into submission, but Taylor never smiled when she used her authority. She used minimal language and kept her face neutral. “When was the last time you saw or spoke with Mr. Holloway?”

  “He’s not been in since sometime yesterday.”

  “And others in this building would be willing to confirm that?”

  “I believe so.”

  Taylor made a slow perusal of the room: the art on the walls, the directory, the elevators. She placed a card on the counter. “Please have Mr. Holloway call that number when he comes in.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Taylor held eye contact, then left the way she entered, slow and steady, one hand on the wide, vinyl belt. Back in the car, she keyed up the laptop and checked DMV records for all vehicles owned by Ken Holloway. In addition to the Escalade, he owned a Porsche 911, a Land Rover, and a Harley-Davidson. Taylor made one more sweep of the parking lot, but saw none of those vehicles. A note went in the pad, next to the receptionist’s name: probably telling the truth.

  Holloway’s house was on one of the big golf courses on the rich side of town. The course was private, built around a palatial clubhouse of stone and ivy. No house on his street cost less than two million dollars, and Holloway’s was the biggest, a white monolith on four acres of manicured lawn. Halfway up the drive, Taylor passed a statue of a black liveryman holding a lantern and smiling broadly.

  Taylor got out o
f the car and mounted broad steps to the long verandah. The front door stood open above a floor of lacquered slate. At first, there was only silence, the call of a bird; then Officer Taylor heard someone crying.

  A woman.

  Inside.

  Taylor’s hand dropped to the butt of her weapon. She thumbed off the leather strap, stepped to the open door. She saw an ax on the floor by what remained of the piano. The top of it was splintered. Blows had shattered the keyboard and ivory teeth were strewn across the carpet. Everything else looked perfect.

  Taylor keyed her radio, got dispatch. She gave her location and requested backup; then she drew her weapon, announced herself, and stepped over the threshold. She smelled liquor and saw open bottles on a coffee table. One of them was empty, the other halfway.

  The crying came from someplace deeper in the house. Kitchen, maybe. Or a bedroom. Taylor stepped through the arched entry into the living room. Looking right, she saw a mirror on the sofa, rails of what looked like cocaine cut out in neat rows.

  Wires were torn from the guts of the piano.

  “Police,” she called again. “I’m armed.”

  She found the woman in a short hall beyond the living room. She was young, maybe nineteen, with dark roots, bleached hair, and flawless skin. Her teeth were crooked but white, her hands rough and red. She sat on the floor, crying, and Taylor saw that her eyes were very blue. “He didn’t do nothing. I’m okay.” Her accent was from down east. Taylor had grown up poor in the sand hills and had known a dozen girls just like her, uneducated and pretty, desperate to find some better place.

  “Can you stand?” Taylor held out a hand. The girl wore a maid’s uniform, shoulder torn on the right side, buttons burst on the blouse. One cheek glowed with a red heat, and she had angry finger marks on the soft part of her arm. “Are you alone?”