I had long known Ballard was of poor character, disgusting, corrupt, and greedy. But standing there, I mean right there, three feet away, I instantly and fervently knew that it went deeper, much deeper. This man was bad, a man without a heart, a man with a black soul. Evil.
“Talk to my lawyer.” I slid one of Lucas Benton’s cards across the counter.
I could hear him sucking air through his nose as he stood there staring. His eyes narrowed slightly and one side of his mouth turned up in a sneering, crooked little half-smile, as if he found it amusing that someone dared to rebuff him. “You’d do well not to piss on me, Bolton.”
“And you’d do well to get off my property, Mr. Ballard,” I said without a blink.
“That’s Sheriff Ballard.”
I stared at him without answering. He stared back, his mouth drawing up into an angry pucker. This went on for thirty seconds, after which I said, “Get out. Now.”
He turned and walked away, but just as he reached the door, he turned around, arranged his hand into a mock gun, index finger pointing, thumb serving as the hammer. He aimed his “hand gun,” cocked it, fired, then pulled it down and blew the smoke away from its muzzle. “Be seeing you again.” He winked and stepped through the door.
Penny gave a low whistle. “This mess is rotten and the stench is growing, Gray. It might not be a bad idea for you to get out of sight yourself. If they manage to trump up another arrest warrant, I doubt the judge will go along with bail.”
“I won’t run.”
“Well gee, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?”
“It’s not the same thing, Penny.”
“Yes, Gray. It’s exactly the same thing. You’re letting the stubborn gene cloud your thinking.”
“Hold on, Missy. I am not like my father.”
She shot me a look fit to kill, and I figured the “missy” had touched some feminist nerve, and then she burst out laughing. Laughed so hard that tears rolled.
“You want to share the joke?”
She finally caught her breath, wiped her eyes. “You. You’re like a clone of your father, and here you are, ‘I’m not like him.’” She did the last part in her version of a deep booming voice.
I didn’t see the humor.
“And Gray, I don’t think being like him is a bad thing. He seems like a good man. You’re a good man. You’re a good father. I bet he was, too.”
“He was a dictator, a merciless tyrant, King Grayson the First.”
“Oh really? Give me an example.”
“How about, when I was in high school, I had to be home by eleven o’clock on weekends.”
“Ha! I had to be home at ten and could only go somewhere one night per week. Try again.”
That blew me away. I was sure I’d had the earliest curfew known to mankind. “I got a speeding ticket and he grounded me from my car for three months.”
“You had a car?”
This tit for tat went on for another five minutes before I gave up. Maybe I had carried a few misconceptions for a while. “Okay, maybe I’ve had some misconceptions.”
“I’d say. Now, back to the point.”
I let out a big sigh. “Where do you suggest I go, Penny?”
“Get a room in Tupelo. We can work from there, quietly.”
“We?”
“You don’t want me to go?”
“Of course I do.”
Chapter 55
After finding a helper for LungFao so the shop could stay open, to Tupelo we went. On the way, I called Teddy and asked him to check in on the shop as he could while I was gone.
“You got it,” he said. “Where are you going?”
The less he knew, the better off he’d be. “Don’t know yet,” I said.
“Okay, holler if you need me.”
I thanked him and ended the call.
In Tupelo, we stopped at three brand-name hotels, each of which required ID for registration. The Patriot Inn, sprawled beneath an American flag the size of a small country, did not. Oh say, can you see.
I paid cash for a pair of adjoining rooms, ground level, rear. Penny went to her room, and I unpacked and showered. My first look around revealed a clean, fairly spacious room that hadn’t been redecorated since sometime between Prohibition and the Beatles. I lay down to rest a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes, it was dark outside and the clock radio read 10:12 P.M. I knocked on the door between the rooms.
“Come in,” I heard from the other side. Penny was propped up against the headboard, reading. “Feel better?”
“As soon as my head clears, yeah. You hungry?”
She smiled. “I was hungry hours ago.”
* * *
Outside, the night was cool and clear as we walked down Main Street toward a little all-night diner we’d spotted on the way in. It was called, creatively, All Nite Diner. We walked in and seated ourselves in a booth toward the back.
Except for us and a couple in the far back corner, the diner was empty of customers. The smell of grease hung in the air. A heavyset lady in a white uniform ambled over to the table. “Help you?” Hep you, a gravelly voice that sounded like her vocal cords had been sandblasted. Her name tag said Mama Jones.
“Hey, Mama!” I said. Penny kicked my shin.
“Help you?” Mama said again. No smile.
“Go ahead,” Penny said, still looking at the menu.
“I’ll have a cheeseburger, biggest one you have, cheese and mustard only,” I said. “Be sure there’s nothing else on it.”
“Everything’s on the side. You dress it yourself.”
“Thanks, Mom.” Another kick. This one hurt.
“You?” Mama grunted to Penny.
“I’ll try a cheeseburger too, but I want mine loaded up.”
“Everything’s on the side. You—”
“Dress it yourself,” I finished for Mama, to Penny. I was just in a mood, couldn’t seem to help myself.
“Drink?”
“Coke for me,” I said.
“Same,” Penny said, and Mama lumbered slowly back toward the counter, tearing off the order slip. When she got there, she slipped it under a spring-clip on a wagon wheel apparatus and spun it around to face the cook.
“Have you forgotten that we’re up here to lie low?” Penny said. “You know, be invisible, not memorable?”
“Oh please, I...” Mama was wiping off a booth across the room but something in her manner tripped a flag in my peripheral vision. I looked her way and saw that she kept glancing toward the windows at the front of the restaurant. I looked that way myself. Parallel parked on the opposite side of the street was a car. The driver was looking through binoculars and they looked to be aimed straight at us.
“Very carefully,” I said, “check out the guy across the street.”
A few seconds later, her eyes casually moved that way, then back to me. “Not good,” she said.
“If he’s here for us, I want to know, right now.” I looked straight at him and gave him the finger.
Penny flinched. “What th—”
“No reaction,” I said. I watched for about ten seconds, but the binoculars stayed exactly where they had been. Then the guy rotated them ever so slightly to the right, just as the woman in the back booth got up and walked toward the restroom. We weren’t the target.
“I’m guessing that’s not her husband in the booth,” Penny said.
“All the same, let’s get our order to go.”
Chapter 56
I woke the next morning to the sound of rain against the motel window. I put my ear to the adjoining door and heard a hair dryer. After brewing a thimble-sized pot of coffee, I sipped and waited. A few minutes later, Penny knocked on the door.
“Come forth,” I said. She stepped in, looking really good in a pair of white pants and a pale blue sleeveless shirt. “Wow, look at you,” I said.
“What?” She looked down at herself, looking for something askew.
“You look really n
ice.”
“Thanks, Gray.”
I nodded and left it at that. “We need to get to work,” I said.
“Where do you suggest we start?”
“Can you get online from here, safely, where they can’t trace it back to here?”
“Yup, come on.” She went to her room. I followed, and watched while she got her laptop fired up and online.
“Where to?” she said, fingers hovering over the keys.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bobby Knight and Tommy Mitchell got dead, do you?”
“Doubtful.”
“Do you have access to a good investigation database?”
“Such as?”
“I’d like to see their credit history.”
Two minutes later, Bobby Knight’s TransUnion credit report was on screen. I scanned the entries. “Scroll down,” I said, still looking. “Again... again... again.”
His file was unremarkable; a boring guy who paid his bills. “Bring up Mitchell,” I said.
She worked the keys some more. “Coming online now...”
Mitchell’s file was juicy reading. “How many cops you know with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar credit card?” I said.
“Oof.”
“Yeah, oof. And he used it, a lot. Spent more money in a month than he should’ve made in a year. And was stupid enough to deposit a ton of it in order to pay these bills. Now, to find out where it came from.”
“I know someone who may be able to help,” Penny said.
Chapter 57
After an hour of research, we figured out that Mitchell’s good fortune seemed to have started about a year ago. If Bobby Knight was involved—I still thought he was—he was either newer in the operation, way smarter, or maybe just low level. We went out into the gray, wet day long enough to buy a prepaid cell phone with plenty of minutes so we couldn’t be traced, and Penny started making calls.
A half-hour into her cell phone session, she found the friend she was looking for, gave him the information, and he said he’d go to work and get back to us. “Two grand for Mitchell. Two grand for Knight,” she said to me.
I was looking more and more like a poor man at the end of this affair, but I’ll choose living free and poor over dead or imprisoned every time the choice arises. I nodded.
Wondering how Abby—right here in the same town—was, wondering what Dad and the girls were doing at that moment, I stared out the window as rain continued to fall from a colorless sky.
“Hey,” Penny said, “just got the information on our boys.”
“And?”
“You better sit down, Gray.”
Chapter 58
I stared at the screen on Penny’s laptop, unable, or perhaps unwilling, to believe what I was seeing. “Where did he get this?” I said.
“Straight from Bobby Knight’s computer.”
On the screen was a video that was obviously shot inside a motel room. On the bed were Abby, Bobby Knight, and John Patrick Homestead.
Abby was naked, her body writhing as she lay on her back with Bobby Knight pumping her like an animal in heat. They were near the edge of the bed and her head was turned to the side. She had Homestead in her mouth. An unseen camera operator was moving around, working the angles, zooming in and out, shooting from the floor, then standing in a chair and shooting from above, occasionally catching glimpses of his own feet in the field of view. In between the noises coming from the “performers,” I could hear occasional bursts of the cameraman’s own sick panting as he followed the action.
I felt detached from my body, a visitor in some strange space. I shook my head as the show went on. How could she betray me like this?
“I’m so sorry, Gray,” Penny kept saying. “I didn’t show you this to hurt you.”
“Not your fault,” I said, but the more I thought about it, the more it did piss me off. “Why did you show this to me, Penny? I knew she was fucking around, but I could’ve gone my whole life without seeing this shit.” I paced the room.
Penny sat down at the laptop and made a few clicks. “Here’s why,” she said as she pointed to the screen, on which she had frozen the video and zoomed into an extreme close-up of my wife’s face.
I was seething with fury toward Abby. Toward Bobby Knight, too, and I was glad he was dead. As for Homestead, I was now proud of my kill-shot.
“What now?” I said. “You trying to show me how photogenic the bitch is?”
“Get yourself under control long enough to take a good look. Can’t you see it?”
I took a deep breath and looked. On the screen, Abby was having a screaming orgasm. No, it was more like the mother of all orgasms. My anger grew. “I see a sickening whore,” I said.
“Her eyes, Gray. Look at Abby’s eyes!”
Chapter 59
Penny was right. Abby’s eyes were all screwed up, glazed over.
“She’s high on something,” Penny said.
“Great, she’s a whore and a junkie. Helps a lot. Thanks, Pen.”
“Damn it, Gray! I know you’re pissed, but you don’t have to take it out on me. You need to chill.”
“Screw you, Penny.” I got up and walked out, slamming the door behind me. Then I walked. And walked. And kept on walking down Main Street, right through the warm rain, not giving a damn about the people who looked at me from their cars as if I were a lunatic. All the years. Our kids. All of it apparently meant nothing to her. Or at least the opportunity for a good gang-bang meant more.
After several blocks, I turned around and headed back toward the motel. Halfway there, I saw Penny’s little Lexus coming toward me. She pulled to the curb, rolled down the window. “Better now?” she said.
I nodded and got in.
* * *
After a hot shower and dry clothes, I went back to Penny’s room. “Sorry about earlier.”
“No problem,” she said. “You’re due some attitude.”
I gave my best shot at a smile. “What else you got?”
“Sure you’re ready? We can do this later.”
“I’m good. Let’s go.”
She tapped a key and the screen saver cleared back to the freeze-frame from hell. “Okay, now look really closely at her eyes. You see it?”
“Good grief, what the hell is that?”
“I’m somewhat familiar with the different manifestations of drug use. Firsthand. But I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Abby’s eyes, in addition to having a glazed, spaced-out look, had another freakish element: the irises, light blue and always stunning, had a ring right around the edge that was an orange-red color. It looked like fire.
We backed the video up and watched it from the beginning, and managed to get a good look at Bobby Knight’s eyes, and a fair view of Homestead’s. They all showed the same phenomenon, though none as strongly as Abby’s.
“What could do that to somebody’s eyes?” Penny said.
“I have a hunch it’s the same thing that could cook a brain.”
Penny’s cell phone rang. “Hello...who is this?...how did you get this number?...hello...hello?” She punched off the call and began gathering and stuffing things in her duffle bag. “We have to go,” she said.
“How could anybody know we’re here?”
“Now, Gray. We have to go right now.”
Chapter 60
ISOLATION ROOM THREE
BEHAVIORAL HEALTH CENTER
NORTHEAST MISSISSIPPI HEALTH CENTER
TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI
Ian Wainwright circled Abby’s bed slowly, patiently, crepe soles making no more than a faint squeak on the white tile floor. He had looked out of place at Bobby Knight’s funeral, but here among the psychotic, he thought he blended quite well. The surgical scrubs didn’t hurt.
“Mrs. Bolton,” he said, his voice soft, sweet, “it is indeed a shame to see a nice lady like you in these...circumstances. I should really like to help you.” He stopped at the head of the bed and brushed his fingers across her hai
r. God, she was beautiful.
With nylon straps binding her ankles, thighs, wrists, and upper arms, she could only move her head and she tilted it back, trying to see him. “I told you I don’t have any more.” Her speech was slow, slurry from all the sedatives.
“Yes, I know you did, but you see, that doesn’t tally with the remainder of our information, Mrs. Bolton. We found the one at your house, but—”
Abby’s eyes widened in terror. “My house...you went...my house?”
He ignored her question. “We found the empty one, but you took another one from Homestead that night at the hotel, didn’t you?”
“No, no...no other.”
“I don’t believe you, Mrs. Bolton.”
“Truth. It’s...the...truth.”
“The chap Homestead figured out that you had it, you see. That’s why he went to the pawn shop. He was looking for you, making a valiant attempt to negate the error. Alas, the good Mr. Homestead encountered something of a problem with your spouse.”
Abby shook her head slowly, tears flooding her eyes and spilling down her cheeks.
“They can’t go unaccounted for, you understand. That would be far too dangerous at this stage of the game, so I’ve been tasked with locating them, by whatever means necessary.”
“No,” Abby said, over and over. “No...no...no...”
The man walked to the other side of the bed and picked up the IV valve, then pulled a syringe from his pocket. “Let’s just give you a little special medicine. Actually, rather a lot.”
“No...please.”
“I prefer a gradual approach, you understand, but what with my being in a bit of a hurry...”
He stabbed the needle into the IV’s drug port, then drove the plunger home. Within seconds, her body slackened and her eyelids wilted to watery slits. “Where is it, Mrs. Bolton?”
Pawnbroker: A Thriller Page 12
