by Jack Kerley
The firing stopped. I heard tires squeal and engines roaring in retreat.
I turned to see Harry, gun by his side, his jacket ripped half off, the lining hanging to his knees.
“You all right?” I said. “You hit? You said you couldn’t move.”
“My jacket got caught on the goddamn pedal, couldn’t tear loose.”
He wavered, looked around at the shattered station, black smoke, totaled Crown Vic, crossing gates like shattered candy canes, the ground littered with shotgun shells and bright brass casings aglint in the sunlight.
Then he looked at me for an uncomfortably long time.
“You walked straight into them.”
“Seemed the thing to do,” I said.
Chapter 31
“Yeah,” I heard Harry say into his cell, talking to the State Police. “Carson put a round in one of the perps.”
“I caught him in the lower right abdomen,” I called to Harry. “Punched through intestine. I expect he’ll make it if he gets to a hospital, has everything cleaned and sewed and gets pumped full of juice to ward off peritonitis.”
Harry passed the info on. The Staties would check the hospitals and clinics stat. Plus visit physicians’ offices in the area, making sure no one was being forced into playing emergency room for a gunshot victim.
The State Police did themselves proud, arriving in four minutes, the tech squad rolling the big traveling lab down the road a few minutes later. The ranking officer from the Staties was Sergeant Waylon J. Plummer, a black guy in his early forties. It had always mystified us why he bore the name of one of the South’s preeminent country stars, Waylon Jennings.
One day, unable to take it any more, we’d asked. Turned out Waylon’s mama was white and she’d decided that eleven hours in labor outweighed the ten minutes Daddy had invested in the whole process, giving her naming rights, and she’d chosen to honor her favorite singer in the whole world.
“I’m just happy Mama wasn’t big on Dolly Parton’s ex partner,” Plummer explained. “Imagine being a black guy and everyone yellin’, ‘Hey, Porter!’”
We leaned against an ASP cruiser and did the overview thing as Waylon took notes and his partner Hugh Tandy walked the roadside looking for evidence.
“Got blood here,” a junior tech a young redheaded woman with Asian-esque features, said. She knelt and took a sample, set a marker down. The photographer whisked in and documented the find.
I said, “That’s probably from when they lifted the wounded guy into the pickup bed. Your blood trail probably ends…”
“Right about here,” Tandy said. “Nice recollection for a guy getting half an armory dumped in his direction.”
“What were you doing while Kid Carson was fighting the Indians, Harry?” Waylon asked.
“I was stuck to the floor of the Vic, the brake pedal caught in my jacket’s lining. I finally tore loose.”
Harry reached to the ground, picked up the jacket, one purple sleeve waving disconsolately in the breeze. It looked like a deflated elephant.
“A two-hundred-buck jacket and a seventy-five-buck replacement allowance,” Harry lamented.
“That thing’s bright enough for any three jackets, Harry,” Waylon advised. “Submit in triplicate.”
“I’ve tried before. The bean counters only pay in monotone.”
Waylon turned my way. “You didn’t see any features, Carson?”
I put my hands in front of my eyes as if holding binoculars. “They were all wearing those full-face helmets used in racing. Gloves. Shades. Hell, I couldn’t tell you if they were white or black. Didn’t see an inch of skin.”
“Plates?”
“Taped. Duct tape. I noticed it when the bike dropped, filed it away. I did manage to note body types. I had a well-built guy as one of the drivers – the bike that stayed up – maybe six to six two. Wide shoulders, slim waist. He had a heavier, shorter passenger, leaning to fat, maybe why I hit him in the love handle. The other two bikers were pretty large, six two to six four. Shaded to the slender side. The passenger on the first bike, not the injured guy, had a ponytail out the back of the helmet. Brown and greasy, like a foot of dirty rope.”
I saw the picture in my head, but it was like I wasn’t there.
“Nice memory, Carson, and the description’s pure poetry,” Waylon said, writing in a neat little leather notebook. “How about the guys in the truck?”
“The guys in the truck weren’t roaring at me. Grubby clothes, medium builds. That’s about all I recall of them.”
Waylon nodded, wrote a couple lines.
“Anything from the local hospitals?” I asked, figuring the wounded guy would at least be dropped in the parking lot of a clinic or hospital by his accomplices. Maybe they’d simply taken him somewhere to die. But that was at odds with the guy who’d been boosting him into the truck.
Waylon said, “Nada. At least so far.”
I leaned against Waylon’s cruiser and replayed the action with a clear head. It had been planned by someone with both intelligence and a penchant for detail. I figured the gunners had planned to blow twin barrels of double-ought through our windscreen, one guy targeting Harry, the other one me. The Harleys would roar away just as the truck zoomed up from behind, ready to handle any clean-up chores, like if Harry or I were still breathing through our headless necks.
The only fly in the planner’s ointment had been the intervening freighter. Had Harry and I not been train aficionados, I never would have looked through the freight-cars, noticed the shotguns coming out. The oncoming bikers and the shooters in the following pickup would have blown us apart in ten seconds and been on their merry way.
I heard a squeal of metal over metal as the Crown Vic was pulled from the wreckage of the old train station. It would be winched on to a platform tow truck and taken to forensics for a full inspection. There were no windows remaining and the panels were pocked with holes, thankfully most of them on the trunk side with only a couple of holes in the upper quadrant of the door panels.
Harry stood beside me and watched as a worker ran up and sprayed a still-smoldering tire with a fire extinguisher. A door fell off as the winch groaned the car backward.
My hand started shaking. I jammed it in my pocket.
Dr Matthias sat down at his laptop, entering data. He’d spent the whole day inside, re-reading texts he’d already perused a half-dozen times. But one had to be sure. The texts were always interesting, dealing with the migration of early human tribes. There was a great deal of information on the measurement of nucleotides contained in DNA, the haplotypes. The diversity of the genetic variations decreased with distance from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This had been discovered within the incredible amount of work accomplished on the Human Genome Project, a project that Matthias had been instrumental in organizing, at least in its early days.
The HGP had generated so much information that biologists and geneticist would be analyzing it for years, drawing conclusions, building theories, making major leaps in the understanding of biology, medicine, evolution, human genetic diversity and its manipulation, accidental and otherwise…could the word eugenics be used any more? No, but perhaps something useful would replace it, a term that carried no baggage. Eugenics, as he had discovered, was politically incorrect.
Matthias started to close down his computer, but paused. He saw an end to this leg of his research, and there was much to do back in Mobile. Drawing threads together. Checking on Anak and Rebecca and finding them better lodgings than out in the hinterlands. Reporting his latest findings to his employer. Wouldn’t that be interesting.
Matthias opened his Bookmarks list, tapped an entry. The British Airways site opened. That would do just fine. A flight to Atlanta, then the connection to Mobile. All he needed was to assemble his final report. The prices for flights were insane, he thought as he studied the schedules. But he wasn’t paying, so First Class it was.
He filled in a few boxes. Reserved his seat for the return flight.
Harry decided to see if forensics had picked up anything useful from the scene, and I went along to kill time. The lab was a flurry of activity as techs analyzed shell casings, glass from a broken motorcycle headlamp, photos of tire marks on the roadway.
“Hey, there they are,” called a voice at our backs. “I was just about to call you.”
We turned at the voice, saw Ed “Pieboy” Blaney, the forensics guy who handled the automotive division. He took the nickname from his lunch habits, which were the same every day: a piece of pie and a cup of coffee from a bakery off Old Shell Road. Didn’t matter what kind of pie it was, as long as it was fresh made. Cherry, pecan, mud, peach, coconut cream, grasshopper…all were fuel for Pieboy’s singular passion, the study of cars.
“Hey, Pieboy,” Harry said. “S’up?”
Pieboy ran a pink hand through thinning blond hair. He was pear-shaped, probably an effect of all the pie. Or maybe the spare tire was showing empathy for cars.
“You guys are tough on vehicles. What, you moonlight in demolition derbies?”
“You sell it for scrap yet?” Harry asked.
“About to. We’re done with it.” He dug in his pocket. “Here’s why I was calling. I got something to show you.”
He picked up a metal disc, tossed it to me. It was the size of a fifty-cent piece, black anodized case, a small wire embedded in a worm of clear glue on one side. On the other was a rough patch of rubber cement.
Harry stared at the disc. “A bug, right?”
“A GPS locator. And a fine one at that. Expensive.”
“Where was it?”
“Stuck to the rear undercarriage. I almost didn’t see it. It’s basically a sophisticated version of tracking systems folks put on their dogs’ collars to let them know where Fido is at any given moment. Didn’t find any prints, unfortunately. This version probably cost a couple grand with the satellite receiver. They knew your location down to about a ten-foot circle.”
“We’re two dead dogs,” Harry said.
“Arf,” I added, lolling my tongue like Mr Mix-up.
Chapter 32
When we got back to the department, Tom Mason ordered me to go home.
“Get some rest,” he said. “You’ve had enough.”
“Him, too,” I said, pointing at Harry.
“I was talking to both of you.”
Harry said, “Can I speak to you for a minute, Tom? I want to run through some details on a court case I gotta testify at in a couple days.”
“Then you’re heading straight home, right?”
“Scout’s honor.” Harry held his fingers in the scout salute, headed into Tom’s office.
The door closed.
I went to my truck and sat there for ten minutes, rubbing my face and neck. The day was a blur, as if I’d watched a video on fast-forward, randomly freezing scenes for a few seconds before zooming ahead again. I scrabbled my fingers under my seat and came up with a bottle of ginseng tea and a few ounces of bourbon left over from my post-prison stop at the roadhouse. I swigged a bit of ginseng – the concoction tasted like boiled denim, truth be told – and replaced the tea with bourbon.
I drained off half the mix, and waited for the warmth in my belly to loosen the kinks in my back and neck. I headed out into the street, the light surreally bright and painful. Slipping on my shades, I saw a little red BMW blow by in the opposite direction, like it was heading for the department. I watched it disappear in the rear-view.
Clair drove a sporty red Beamer.
It couldn’t possibly be Clair, my mind said. What would Clair be doing at the MPD in the middle of the day?
I turned for home, intending to stop at the store for a tofu burger and lentil salad, but suddenly wanted food I could feel inside me, ending up with a bucket of fried chicken, gravy and biscuits. Once home, I turned on the television, set the tub on my kitchen counter and pulled out a drum, dipped it in the gravy, brought it to my mouth.
I snapped at it, missed. Tried again. The drum dodged my mouth. Gravy splattered the floor.
My hands were shaking again.
And then my knees were shaking. Followed by my shoulders. And then everything else was shaking and I found myself tight in a ball on the floor.
It passed after twenty minutes and I took a shower and lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and trying to lose myself in the white until I heard crunching of sand and shells under tires and an engine shut off. Seconds later I heard a knock on my door. A realtor, I figured; they were always gliding through the neighborhood, trying to get their names out among residents who hoped to sell. I closed my eyes and willed them away.
The knocking persisted. I went to the door, yanked it open. “I have no intention of –”
Harry.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “Tom told us to –”
Behind him, I saw Clair, her eyes nervous. She rushed by and sat on the couch so fast I figured she needed to get anchored. I saw her shoot a glance at a pile of clothes in the corner of the living room, topped by my briefcase and a tipped-over bucket of half-eaten chicken. Harry sat beside her. He leaned back and stitched fingers behind his head, a poor attempt at casual.
“We want you to talk about what’s bothering you. It’s overdue.”
“There’s nothing bothering me. Unless it’s you showing up here when I’m trying to…trying to…eat chicken. You want bothering me? That’s bothering me.”
“Things are getting worse, brother,” Harry said.
I wrinkled my brow in puzzlement. “How can things get worse if things aren’t bad?”
He nodded at the tube, a game show where people dressed as items they wanted to win. They were made up like cars, boats, and huge televisions, jumping up and down and screaming for attention.
“You used to fish, swim, kayak, run, and so forth, a dozen hours a week. Now you run home and watch television. How much do you watch?”
“I’ll have to check with Nielsen.”
“You’re doing things out of character,” Harry continued. “Taking chances that are not just risky, they’re illegal. If you’d gotten caught forging the warden’s signature, you could have wound up in the cell beside Kirkson. I don’t know what the hell you did at Teasdale’s place, but –”
“She asked if her kid still had that goofy lopsided face,” I snapped. “Her own kid.”
“I have no doubt it was sad, bro. But in the past you would have blown the ugliness off, walked away.”
“I’m tired of the past.”
Harry studied on that for a moment. He looked at Clair, turned back to me. “Today was the worst yet, Carson. Walking into those gunslingers like it was the OK Corral. I don’t know why you’re not dead.”
“They were lousy shots.”
Clair cleared her throat. “Carson, you’re acting erratically at times. It’s getting worse.”
I walked to the door shaking my head in disappointment, put my hand on the knob. “I think you both should go home and try self-analysis. Find out why you’re projecting your problems on to me.”
I yanked open the door. Tom Mason was leaning against the railing, fanning himself with his white Stetson.
“Howdy, Carson, mind if I step inside? Hot out here.”
Without waiting for the courtesy of an answer, he walked in. I glared at Harry, mouthed snitch. Tom leaned against the wall beside
Clair and Harry, hands in the pockets of his jeans.
“I’m pretty sure Harry wanted me to wait outside so I wouldn’t hear anything to, uh, compromise my position. What this all comes down to is I’m taking you off duty and putting you on desk work unless you see the departmental shrink.”
“What? YOU CAN’T!”
Tom said, “I scheduled your first session for tomorrow at nine in the morning.”
“No way in hell…” I countered, “am I seeing a shrink.”
Tom looked down at his hat, brushed something from the felt. “Sure you are,” he said gently. “Because you ain’t got but one choice in the matter, Carson, and that’s mine.”
I turned away and walked out to my deck, where the air was free from the stink of betrayal. I heard the front door pull shut, the cars in the drive retreat. Watching the gulls flash above the waves, I decided it had been a pissant intervention and, though my interrogators were mistaken about whatever was concerning them, I deserved better. That pathetic display was supposed to save me?
But I figured if I went to the shrink’s office, sat my ass in a chair for a few fifty-minute sessions to satisfy the obsessions of my former friends, I’d pass whatever test they were imposing, and be free once again.
But what a senseless waste of time.
Chapter 33
The MPD shrink wasn’t the property of the Department, but rather a private-practice type who worked on retainer. The guy – a Dr Alec Kavanaugh – had his offices in Spring Hill, not far from the college, in an office attached to a private residence. The house had been built in the fifties, I figured, under the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright. An anomalous style for Mobile, the home was of dark brick, with a long single-story section at one end, a two-story section at the other. Given the land-scaping and overhanging trees, the house less sat the lot than embraced it.
The office area was an add-on in the same architectural style, just on the far end of the garage. A small sign on the door said, A. Kavanaugh, PhD, Psychology. I took a deep breath and popped a few mints. Despite the provocations of the preceding evening, I had slept solidly and taken my vites and such. I had decided to drink a little coffee now and then, since tea – despite its many organic benefits – showed little ability to open my eyes in the morning.
