by Phil Bowie
Strake turned back and fired and Hardin raised the .45 and fired just as Strake went down but he wasn’t hit, only stumbling and falling flat out onto gravel, then scrambling for some low sparse trees and rolling over onto his side.
Hardin limped over to him, the .45 aimed out stiffly with both hands. Strake was on his side, both hands clamped onto his knee. “It…something in it ripped when I fell…hurts.” He grimaced and rocked onto his back. His gun was on the sand three feet from him.
Hardin lowered the .45 down along his right side and said, “What is that? It looks like a little .25 automatic. That’s really funny.”
Strake’s eyes were glittering black marbles, the hatred radiating from him in the eerie glow from the landing light. He said, “Money. Enough to live the rest of your life.”
“Go ahead and pick your weapon up.”
“No.” His eyes were as hard and depthless as those of a tensed cornered rat.
“All right,” Hardin said, and fired the .45, sand spouting up near Strake’s feet. Strake did not flinch. His eyes became slitted and he hissed. Then he scrambled for the gun, grabbing it up and aiming it. And Hardin fired deliberately and accurately three times.
He went over and looked down at the body, the .45 still aimed at it, the blood roaring in him, nothing in the world but himself and the hot gun and the ruined body.
The voice seemed a long way off but then it clarified.
From behind him. “I said I’ve got a gun on you. Don’t move a damned hair. I can blow out your spine before you get half turned around. Believe it.”
Hardin went still.
“Okay,” the man said. Hardin knew it wasn’t Davis. Had to be the one with the pony tail, the one Davis had called Buster.
“I don’t give a damn about Strake,” the man said. “I never liked the prick, anyway. I’ll assume you’ve got a good reason for all this. If you’re through killing him just let the gun fall out of your hand.”
Hardin said, “No.”
“What?”
“No. If you wanted to shoot me you would have. I’ll keep the gun down by my leg but I won’t shoot unless I have to. I have nothing against you. I’m going to turn around slowly now.”
The man stood with his feet apart, aiming a large revolver at his face with his right hand. The side of his head was blackly wet with blood. He held the shiny metal briefcase in his left hand.
Hardin said, “Is Elaine all right, Buster?”
“Davis is dead. A broken neck, I think. I got the woman calmed down some and told her to get into the head and stay there for at least thirty minutes no matter what she hears outside. She’s not hurt. That damned siren is still going off in there.”
“What do you want?” He used his free hand to take off the remains of the headset.
The man said, “This isn’t Blue Coral Cay, is it?”
“No. It’s called Big Sandy Cay.”
He held the silver briefcase up a little and said, “There’s more than a million in here. Bribe money for somebody Strake was going to meet. I was only along as some extra security. I can break into one of those airplanes over there and hot wire it but I can’t fly it. I’ll pay you two hundred thousand to fly us over to Florida. We just ditch the plane over there someplace and then we each go our own way. Don’t take too long thinking about it. I could still put a hole in you and take my chances on finding a boat. I don’t see any buildings or lights anywhere nearby, but somebody sure as hell must have heard the shooting. We don’t have all night. What’s it going to be?”
The ragged storm front would be rolling in over Florida and Georgia. The rain would mask them, but he would have to find a hole somewhere to let down. Find some little strip that was closed for the night. Then he could walk. Get to a bus station in the morning and buy a ticket north. Elaine would be left alone in the plane, but she wasn’t hurt. She’d be found, and she would have Strake’s fortune left to console her.
Hardin said, “Make it three hundred thousand. You count it out while we’re in the air, and I put it in my pockets. We get rid of the guns. Just drop them out the window. I’ll drop mine first. Then you. If you decide not to do it I’ll just point the plane at the ocean.”
Buster looked at him for long moments. He shrugged. “Okay. Okay. I can’t run a damned boat, anyway. But do you think we could hustle it along here?”
“I have to go back into the King Air to turn off the ELT.” He also needed to get his flight case and the Para-Cushion and wipe his prints from everything he could remember touching.
“Sure. Then you pick up Davis’s gun, put a few holes in me later and take it all.”
“No. I don’t want it all, and I don’t want anything more to do with guns and killing. But come into the plane with me if you don’t believe that.”
Buster thought about it. “Okay. Now, we can start a fire and get out the marshmallows here. Tell scary stories. Look at the stars. Or we can clear out. You want to get moving?”
26
THE OLD MAN WAS SITTING IN HIS ROCKER WATCHING the fire, the flames laced with long-ago memories, some of them sweet and heart-swelling, some sinister and soul-crushing. The phone rang six times before it stirred him and he got up.
“It’s done,” the voice said.
The old man was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Good. Her spirit will rest. And is your bear chained and not a threat to anyone else or to you?”
“Yes. Thank you for all you did.”
“We will not speak of it again. Come to see me some time.”
“I will. You take care.”
The day was warm and rich with clean earthy scents. New-mown hay and sun-heated pine. It was a modest white clapboarded cottage with a front porch, by a narrow dusty road on the side of a hill near the mountain-ringed town of Maggie Valley, surrounded by patches of forest and windrippled meadows fenced with split rails and fieldstones and decorated with nodding, incredibly delicate spring wildflowers.
He parked the six-year-old Jeep Wrangler that he had bought a week ago in the driveway and nervously wondered what to do next. He had shaved off the beard and his hair was dyed its natural black. The contact lenses were back home in the medicine cabinet. He was dressed in a new red shirt, jeans, and new goatskin ropers. He gathered his courage and got out and walked halfway to the cottage. He stopped, his heart hammering. Took a deep breath. He went up the steps onto the porch and pushed the old bell button.
Combed his hair back with his fingers.
Nothing happened for long seconds and then the door opened behind the screen door and Josh stood there looking up at him through the screen with a face devoid of boyish innocence. Utterly empty of the strong joyful current that should be flowing in him at his age.
“Hi, Curly. It’s good to see you, boy.”
Josh frowned and then his face lit up and he whispered, “Sam?”
There was some awkward confusion for both of them, getting the screen door out of the way, and then he went down onto his knees and Josh flung himself at him and he fell sideways onto the porch and they were both laughing and crying.
“My goodness, Joshua, what—” A middle-aged Indian woman appeared in the doorway and froze at sight of the spectacle on the porch. She watched for a few seconds and then smiled widely and wiped at her eyes with her fingers.
Sam propped himself up on one hand and then stood up. Josh was adhered to him, thin arms and legs wrapped around him, laughing and crying against his shirt collar.
“I’m…I’m sorry, ma’am. Josh and I…old friends. Sorry…barge in like this. I just…just had to see him. I…I should have call—” But he couldn’t speak any more, wiping at his own eyes with his shirt cuff, his other arm supporting Josh.
“No. Don’t be sorry, mister.” She smiled broadly, tears bright on her dark weathered cheeks. “Don’t you be sorry. That boy’s soul was withering away no matter what we did. Dying. Now he’s alive again. Just that quick. You come see him any time you want to. Thank God.” She held
the screen door wide. “Come in. Please come in. I’ll have lunch set out in a few minutes and my husband is coming in from the garden and I guess you’ll just have to stay because I don’t see how we can pry this boy loose of you, anyway. Oh, thank God.”
He parked the Jeep in a far corner of the lot in the early evening. He was wearing the contact lenses and a blond shaggy wig under a dirty backward-aimed ball cap, a frayed jean jacket, and worn sneakers.
The matronly white-uniformed woman at the reception desk gave him what she probably assumed was a smile and asked him to sign the register. After he filled in the information line with block printing, she looked at it, frowned even more, and said, “Roy Gaskill. So you must be here to see Hank and Hattie. I don’t believe I’ve seen you here before.”
“I’ve been away for some time.”
“Well, I’m sure they’ll be happy to see you. I don’t remember when they’ve had a visitor who’s a family member. They’re in Villa Fifteen.” She pointed at a layout of the Shady Grove facility on the wall. “As you can see the hallways form a pentagon, with all of the villas on the inside. You go down this hallway, then take your first left, and left again at the end of that hallway. Then Villa Fifteen is just down a little way on the left. Do you need someone to show you the way?”
“No, thanks. I’ll find them. I want it to be a surprise, anyhow.”
“All right, then. You can go through that glass door over there into the hallway but you’ll need one of the attendants to let you back out. Just push the buzzer. That keeps some of our residents from wandering off. If you have any questions there are attendants at each of the four intersections near the emergency exits. You’ll have to come back here to the entrance to sign out. You can go through the villa out into the interior courtyard, if you’d like to take a little walk with the Gaskills. There are benches and shuffleboard courts. It’s really quite pleasant. Visiting time ends at eight o’clock.”
There were a few residents shuffling along the hallway dejectedly, most in pajamas and robes, all their attention focused inward. He walked the full length of the perimeter hallway, then came back to the intersection the receptionist had pointed out on the layout. There was a white-uniformed young freckled woman with short-cropped hair at the attendant’s desk behind a glass partition that had a speaking hole in it.
He said, “Excuse me, ma’am.”
“Yes. What is it?”
“Well, I was walkin’ by Villa Sixteen down there and I overheard this woman—I think her sign said Miz Toomey—hollering about real bad indigestion or something. She sounded pretty bad off.”
“Oh, dear. I’ll go and check in on her right away. Thank you.”
He walked a few steps to a vending machine and bought a Coke as the young woman hurried off down the hallway and entered Villa Sixteen.
He stepped quickly into her cubicle, opened the top drawer in her desk, and found a small cabinet key in the pencil tray. It opened the cabinet behind her desk and inside he found a neatly labeled key rack. One said EMERG. EXIT #2. He took that one, re-locked the cabinet, and put the small key back into the desk. He was walking along the hallway when the young woman came out of Sixteen and said, “She seems to be resting comfortably now.”
“Hey, good. The lady had me worried there.”
He waited until she was back in her cubicle with her back turned and then knocked on the door to Villa Fifteen.
Hank opened it two inches and said, “Yeah, what is it?”
“Let me in quick, Hank.”
“You a friend of Bo’s?” Hank let the door swing open.
He closed the door behind him, ducked to pop out the contact lenses and drop them into his shirt pocket, and took off the cap and wig. They were in the small kitchen/dining room.
“Well, I’ll pure be danged,” Hank said, smiling. “Wait a minute. Let me go get my bottom teeth. Mother? Look who’s here.” He ducked into the bathroom and came out adjusting his dentures. “In here,” he said. “She’s in here, and he grabbed his arm and led him into the tiny living area. Hattie was seated in a stuffed chair, half dozing. She looked old and defeated. There was no interest in her faded blue eyes when she glanced up at him. He went down onto one knee and took her withered hand. “Hello, Flutter,” he said. “Aren’t you glad to see me?”
She focused and smiled and said, “Roy? Oh, it’s you, isn’t it?” And she reached out and enveloped him in a pleasantly musty hug.
“Roy, I didn’t think you’d ever get back to visit us. My land, I’ll have to fix you something to eat. Hank? Go put the kettle on.”
“Mother,” Hank said with a grin, “that’s the best smile I seen on you since that quack took you off those half-dozen medicines. Son, your friend Bo sure helped us out a lot after you left, but one day a ranger come along and that was the end of it. Bo’s been to see us three times since.”
“I know. I talked to him a week ago.”
“Did you finish that job you had to do?” Hattie asked.
“I did. And I made a little money. I put a good down payment on a place up in the mountains. Just outside a small town called Maggie Valley. It’s not fancy. It’s a three-bedroom log house about sixty years old, up high at the end of a gravel road, on ten acres of land with a lot of woods. It needs a little work. Well, okay, a lot of work. There’s a screened porch and a good view off over the hills. You can see maybe thirty miles. There’s mist in the valleys at sunrise. The hawks ride the updrafts all day long. You can hear the mockingbirds and the whippoorwills and the wind in the trees at night. The nearest neighbor is a quarter mile away. A person could hide away up there and nobody would know. A man could sit out on that porch and play music and sing all afternoon and nobody would even care. I’ve got a guitar and I’m going to take lessons. The thing is, three bedrooms are way more than I really need.”
“Oh, it sounds so beautiful there,” Hattie said.
“Don’t you get it, Mother?” Hank said, smiling. “Roy’s here to break us out, ain’t you, Roy?”
“There’s a small church you might like in the valley. A great country restaurant. And there’s a really good clinic there.” He held up the key and smiled. “This fits Exit Two.”
Hank took on a sly expression. “Mother, we need to start packing. They’ll do a Villa check at eight but you can hide in the closet, Roy. The Guard Witch takes a cigarette break in the staff head about once an hour, so Exit Two will be clear for about ten minutes then. Plenty of time for us. Dang, Mother, we can be long gone by nine tonight and they won’t even know it before breakfast.”
He said, “Meanwhile, Flutter, I could sure use a cup of tea.”
“Hank,” she scolded. “Didn’t I tell you to put the kettle on?” She got up smiling and busied herself in the kitchen.
“We can earn our way, son,” Hank said. “You know Hattie can sure cook, and I can be handy around a place. We won’t be no trouble.”
“Hank, you and Hattie saved my life. I’ve been missing that fiddle of yours, and Hattie’s skillet corn bread. You’ll be welcome to stay for as long as you want. And there’s a young boy I want you to meet who could use two more good friends.”
When Hattie came back in carrying a cup of tea Hank gave her a wrinkled grin and said, “Well, here we go again, Mother.”
She smiled back, a glint in her eyes, and said, “Don’t forget to bring a pencil and paper. We’ll have to start making a buy-or-borrow list.”
He met the woman late in the afternoon at the Asheville Airport. She was a tall blond built like a Nordic queen. She had shoulder-length hair tied back with a red scarf, and was wearing a dark blue skirt with an impressively breast-filled white blouse. She had a black briefcase by her feet as she prepared a cup of coffee for herself at the FBO courtesy snack table.
He walked over and said, “Hello. You’re Susan Davenport?”
She smiled like a sunrise and said, “Yes. The Stilleys sent me. Maybe we could go over there by the windows and talk a little?”
; “Sure thing.”
She picked up the briefcase in one hand and her coffee in the other and he followed her. A young red-headed woman behind the service counter beamed at him and he nodded back. There was also a handsome and muscular shaggy-haired young man with piano-key teeth behind the counter. He was wearing BP coveralls. He said, “Mrs. Davenport. The plane is topped off for you. Checked the oil. It’s ready to go.”
She gave him her radiant smile and said, “Thank you. That was fast.”
She sat on a sofa facing out the tall windows, put her coffee and briefcase on the low glass table, and gestured for him to take a seat beside her. He did, at a respectful distance. He said, “You flew in?”
She nodded, sipping coffee. “Yes. That 182 over there.”
The plane out on the apron looked new, with glossy white paint set off with backward-sweeping burgundy and gray stripes. It looked like his old Skyhawk only bigger. The 182 had a reputation as a good short-field load hauler with plenty of power and tame handling. He said, “That’s a nice-looking plane you’ve got there. What year is it?”
“It’s a 1986 model but you’d hardly know that. It’s been gone over nose to tail. Rebuilt 230-horse Continental O-470, injected and turbocharged. Reworked prop. The Horton STOL kit. Full IFR panel. Three-axis autopilot. New paint and a gray leather interior. It will tolerate an out-of-shape driver up front, three 200 pound passengers, and baggage stacked to the roof without exceeding the CG limit. Unless somebody’s hauling gold bars it’s pretty tough to bust the gross load limit. And it handles like a pilot’s wet dream. You can practically operate it out of a Burger King parking lot.”
“Well, I envy you,” he said.
“I don’t know why you should. It’s yours.”
“Excuse me?”
“I just flew it over from Raleigh-Durham for you. Executive Aero. I own the company. I deal in top-quality used Cessna singles and light twins. I don’t believe I’ve seen a better 182 than that one right there. I found it in Colorado, owned by a rancher who could afford to have it his way. I traded him up to a cherry 310.”
