by Ninie Hammon
The detective stepped back so he could cover all of them and Bubba said to Seth. “You sit right there where you are. Don’t move.”
Then Bubba reached into the back of the pickup and hauled Sonny out, pulled him by the arm the few steps to Hayes’ car and shoved him through the open door into the back seat. He fell in face first and couldn’t right himself because his hands were cuffed together in the back. So he lay there on his belly with his feet hanging out the door.
Hayes pointed the gun at the car door and fired three rounds into it.
“Three bullets to match to the one that killed the little Davis girl,” he said to nobody in particular. “One more round in the chamber.”
He turned to Bubba then, and gestured toward Sonny. “Roll him over. It needs to be a gut-shot, lots of blood.”
Bubba reached into the car, grabbed Sonny’s arm, flipped him onto his side, then set him upright in the seat with his feet in the floorboard.
Then he stepped back and said to Hayes, “Kill him.”
“No!” Sarabeth screamed, a strangled, anguished cry. Sonny heard her. She did care. She did!
Hayes lifted the pistol. “Any last requests?”
Sonny had time to think—here it comes; game over—before he looked Hayes square in the eye and spoke in a clear voice, didn’t falter even though his heart was hammering like the pistons in a run-away train. Just three words and then Hayes fired.
Sarabeth screamed, really screamed then, a high piercing, horrified wail. Sonny merely grunted. A bright red stain appeared on his brown shirt just above his belt. He looked down at it, almost surprised. Then he began to slide slowly over onto the seat until he was lying on his side. Blood quickly soaked his shirt and began to pool on the seat.
Hayes leaned in and rolled the sheriff over enough so he could get to his hands and unfasten the handcuffs.
“Wouldn’t want to leave any marks,” he said to Bubba.
Sonny couldn’t see her, but he could hear Sarabeth sobbing. He felt no pain, just a profound, whole-body weakness. And dizzy, the world was spinning. He could hear people talking, but their words were as hollow as voices shouted through a drainage pipe.
“A gut-shot will bleed a long time; I need to be covered in his blood from where I carried him to the car after Jimmy Dan shot him.”
Sonny was exhausted, more utterly spent than he’d ever been. Had not the strength even to move his hands where they’d been bound behind him. His face was on the seat of the cruiser. He could smell the warm vinyl. And honeysuckle! He could smell honeysuckle. Just like he used to smell when he was a boy and he stood on the back porch beside the honeysuckle trellis. He’d pull off the little yellow-and-white flowers and a tiny drop of liquid nectar would drip out the hole in the bottom onto his finger. And he’d smell it, then put his tongue to it and taste the sweetness. He wondered if there’d be honeysuckle in Heaven. Maybe there was. Maybe that’s where he was smelling it!
He smiled and sighed out a long breath.
Bubba leaned in the back door and looked at him. “So much for bleeding a long time,” he said as he straightened up. “The sheriff’s dead.”
Sarabeth sobbed harder. Hayes shoved past Bubba to see for himself, then let fly a string of expletives.
“It should have taken him 10 minutes to bleed out!” he roared. “Shoot, there’s barely enough blood here to get my shirt wet!” He spewed out a few more curses, then let out a resigned sigh. “Well, it is what it is. Guess something just stopped his heart.”
From where he was sitting, Seth could only see the back of the sheriff’s head when Hayes shot him, watched it slide sideways as he fell over.
At the sound of the shot, Seth’s mouth went dry. In a heartbeat, he had no spit, couldn’t have licked a postage stamp and gotten it wet. He shook his head violently to orient himself, to get his bearings again. Hayes had pointed the gun at Sonny and shot him. Just shot him! There was no room anywhere for denial. These men had killed Sonny and they intended to kill the rest of them, too.
Bubba stepped over to his truck and motioned for Seth to climb out. “And bring him with you.” He pointed to the unconscious Billy Joe.
Then Bubba moved back, out of range of Seth’s long arms.
Seth climbed out, reached in and dragged Billy Joe out behind him. Billy Joe opened his eyes briefly, then blacked out again. Seth had to maneuver him out of the back of the truck and up onto his shoulder. B.J. was dead weight, and Seth staggered toward Bubba.
“Don’t even think about it!” Bubba growled as he moved with astonishing quickness out of Seth’s way. “You think I don’t know you’re aiming to jump me. Well, if that’s the way you want to die, suit yourself. But I’d think you’d want to keep your lady friend company, be a shame to make her die alone.”
Hayes slammed his car door shut, turned to Sarabeth and motioned toward the Quart House. “In there.”
A stonework fence about 2 feet wide and 3 feet tall encircled the little building. Begonias had been planted in shallow dirt on the top of it and a manicured lawn stretched out between it and the building. An ornate wrought-iron gate with a National Historic Landmark insignia was set in the fence between the parking lot and the stepping-stone path leading to the porch, but the gate was blocked by a pile of dirt where the grounds crew had stopped work Friday on a small fishpond they were digging.
Hayes and Bubba stepped over the wall, then stood back while Sarabeth eased over it barefoot and Seth climbed over with Billy Joe thrown across his shoulder.
When they got to the porch, Bubba held out his hand to Seth.
“Gimme the key.”
“I don’t have a key. You think I carry a key to every building on this property around with me?”
Hayes spotted a large rock in the flower bed beside the building. He used it to smash out one of the panels of glass in the front door, reached in and unlocked it. Sarabeth stepped inside, careful to avoid the broken glass. Seth followed, carrying Billy Joe.
“Put him down,” Bubba said, “over by that barrel.” A whiskey barrel rested beside one of three huge posts that rose like tree trunks out of the floor of the building to hold up the ancient roof. Seth laid the injured man gently down on the floor.
“Guess you’re wondering what we’re doing here since I told you I was planning to burn you with the distillery.”
Neither Seth nor Sarabeth spoke.
“What, not the least bit curious? Well, I’ll tell you anyway.” Bubba leaned close. “You’re going to burn all right. But it ain’t going to be quick. You’re gonna die inside while you watch death come at ya.”
“Get over there to that post,” Hayes said. For the first time, Seth noticed that Hayes carried a roll of duct tape in the hand that wasn’t holding Jimmy Dan’s gun. “Stand up against it and put your hands behind you around the post.”
This was it, Seth’s last chance. Once he was tied up, it was over. He took a step toward the post, then whirled around and launched himself at the tall, thin detective, slammed all the force of his huge height and weight into the smaller man in a full body tackle.
Hayes crashed backward, hit the wall and went down on his back with a grunt. Seth grabbed for the gun.
And the world went black.
Bubba leapt with the quickness of a cat. As soon as Seth turned toward Hayes, Bubba knew what was coming. He could have shot Seth, but that would have spoiled his fun. Instead, he slammed the gun down on the back of Seth’s head.
Bubba had invested a lot of time and emotional energy into figuring out the best way to kill his prisoners. He’d have liked for the sheriff to have joined in the festivities he’d arranged for the others, but they needed his body to substantiate Hayes’ story about what had happened. Bubba would have to settle for Seth and Sarabeth. And Billy Joe, too, if he woke up. They’d be enough, though. They’d be plenty.
The big man understood death. He understood pain and terror, too, reveled in the whole process on a tactile, visceral level. He recognized
that suffering and dying were, after all, the ultimate human act, the ultimate art form, and the most delicious element of that art lay in the knowing.
When a creature knew it was going to die, knew but couldn’t do anything about it, ahh, that was the most exquisite death of all. Bubba’d killed hundreds of animals in his life—from squirrels to deer—and he had made each one of them suffer in the end. Always made them wait for an inexorable, inescapable death. He’d killed more than a few human beings, as well. Whenever he could, he made them watch death come for them, too.
And every time he killed, he re-lived the supreme death experience of his life. The Vietnamese villagers, the ones who’d been tied to posts when the rivers of napalm streamed down the hillside toward them. He’d watched their faces, stayed behind until he dang near got burned up with them. They’d screamed, wailed, writhed in agony long before the first tongue of fire ever reached out for them. Watching them die, seeing the door of their souls open up to the Night Stalker, had been a high the sadist in him had never been able to equal.
Until now.
Oh, he wouldn’t get to watch this time. Watch them writhe in terror as death flowed down to burn the flesh off their bones. But he could imagine it. He could watch the fire and imagine it. That would have to be good enough.
Hayes shoved Seth’s limp body off onto the floor and stood up, sputtering and cursing.
“Why didn’t you shoot him?”
Hayes had made it clear he didn’t like the way Bubba planned to kill the newspaper editor and the distillery owner. Why not just shoot them and be done with it? Just put them in the warehouse and burn it down on top of them. Bubba hadn’t even bothered to explain. Hayes wasn’t the kind of man who could appreciate the fine art of jagged-edge terror. He wasn’t smart enough.
“He could have killed me!”
For a moment, Bubba thought that might not have been a bad idea. But no, not now. He still needed Hayes to make this plan work. Later, there’d be time for that later. And then the skinny albino would understand why Bubba’s plan had been an infinitely more fitting way to die. He’d get it then, when the death terror was clawing around in his own belly. Yes, that was something to look forward to. Indeed, it was.
“You’re all right. He didn’t hurt you. Drag him over to the post.”
Bubba kept his gun on Sarabeth, not that he expected the newspaper editor to put up a fight. Still, you never knew. She’d shown more guts all along than he’d expected.
Hayes dragged Seth’s limp body over to the post nearest the door, hauling him up to his knees with his back to the post and his feet on either side of it. Bubba grabbed a handful of Seth’s hair and held his body in place while Hayes duct-taped his hands together behind the post. Then the detective wound tape around and around Seth’s body and the post, starting at his shoulders, all the way down to his waist. It was a silver prison; he’d never wiggle free.
“You, over here,” Bubba said to Sarabeth. She stepped up to the post next to Seth’s and obediently put her hands behind it. Hayes wrapped them in duct tape, then enshrouded her in a cocoon of it from her neck to below her hips.
Bubba cast a glance at the still-unconscious Seth and shook his head. “He may not wake up in time for the party,” he said to Sarabeth. “In which case, you’re going to have to enjoy it all by yourself.”
He could see fear and confusion in her eyes and it excited him.
“You’re going to die, Sweetheart. Think about that. You might die here all by yourself, with two,” he indicated Seth and the unconscious Billy Joe on the floor, “deadbeats who can’t even offer you company or comfort.”
He leaned closer. “You think about it, think about it real hard. You’re going to die. You’re going to burn! Burn to death.”
He gestured to the huge picture window in the front wall of the building, pointed up at the Family Five at the top of the hill you could see clearly through the window. “And you’re going to watch death come for you. Watch it stream down the hill at you—fire coming to burn the meat off your bones!”
He grabbed a handful of her red curls. “Your hair on fire, burning off your head. And there won’t be anybody around to hear your screams.”
He cocked his head to one side, studying her. “You do favor your daddy, missy, and that’s a fact. Got the same look in your eye right now he had in his when I shot him.”
She gasped and Bubba’s predatory smile grew wider.
“Yes, sir, Jim Bingham was scared to death soon as he saw my face, never even noticed the gun in my hand. He wasn’t scared long, though.”
He leaned in and added in a ragged whisper. “But you’re gonna suffer enough for the both of you. Payback the Binghams get for messing with Bubba Jamison.”
The two men turned, walked out the door and slammed it shut behind them.
Chapter 27
The call came in to the Callison County Fire Department at 4:39 p.m. Fire Chief Jedediah Craddock was at the fire house playing Rook with the four on-duty firefighters and he made the dispatcher repeat what she’d said to be sure he’d heard it right.
He swallowed hard and a cold chill ran all the way down his spine.
Fire at Double Springs Distillery.
He reached over and grabbed the big red handle on the wall that set off the claxon cry of the fire alarm and yanked down on it hard. Then he bolted out the door, yelling over his shoulder at the dispatcher to put out an emergency-assist call to every volunteer fire department in a 50-mile radius.
“Fifty miles?”
“No,” he yelled back. “Make it 75!”
By the time he and his men roared up to the covered bridge spanning the Rolling Fork River at the base of the distillery grounds 14 minutes later, it looked like hell itself had opened up its back door and was having a cook-out right there on the top of the knob. Fire leaped 150 feet into the afternoon sky above a blazing inferno.
There were already dozens of cars parked on the side of the road, maybe 100 gawkers, folks who lived nearby and had seen the column of black smoke that was visible from just outside Brewster, 11 miles away. There was a big blue car sitting crossways, blocking the entrance to the bridge, but the driver saw the fire truck coming and moved it out of the way. When Craddock got closer, he could see the car was an unmarked Kentucky State Police cruiser, and as the fire truck roared past and over the bridge, Craddock saw Detective Darrell Hayes get out of it. He had something all over the front of his shirt, something red. Looked like blood.
As the big pumper truck pounded up the winding road, leading a train of two other pumpers, two ladder trucks—100-foot and 50-foot—and two tankers, Craddock surveyed the scene and formulated his strategy, such as it was. There was no sense trying to fight the fire. He’d figured that out 30 seconds after the truck rounded the last corner and he could see what was burning, what lay at the base of the column of smoke that turned the blue sky black over the whole knob.
When he saw it, he thought for a minute he was going to be sick. It was the 54-year-old career fireman’s worst nightmare. He’d worked at Double Springs on the grounds crew when he was a kid. He knew the layout. As the truck had raced down the winding roads toward the mounting mountain of smoke, Craddock had prayed that the distillery itself was burning.
Lord, let it be the fermenting rooms, where the big vats of mash are brewed, the bottling plant, the print shop, anywhere but—
And then they’d rounded that corner and he’d seen. A barrel warehouse. Not just any warehouse, either, but one of the Family Five, Flying Ebony, the big one in the middle. If somebody’d set the fire deliberately—and maybe somebody had, that’d be for the fellows from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to figure out—they’d picked the perfect spot.
The five warehouses were spaced out like the number 5 on dice, with Flying Ebony as the center dot. They were set 300 feet apart, but the fire was so huge in the middle one that flames were dangerously close to the other four. Each warehouse was 100 feet wide and 200
feet long, built out of wood—old and dry now—that had been covered over with metal siding.
The four smaller buildings were seven stories tall; Flying Ebony was eight. They all had tar roofs. He figured there had to be 15,000 to 18,000 barrels in the warehouse that was burning with 50 gallons of whiskey to a barrel. It was ludicrous to believe he could pump enough water to extinguish more than half a million gallons of flaming bourbon—alcohol burned hotter than gasoline!
What he had to do was contain the fire, keep it from spreading to the other warehouses around it. Each of the smaller ones probably held 12,000 barrels. Craddock was good at math; altogether, the Family Five held more than 3.25 million gallons of whiskey. If they all went up…
A fire that size was absolutely incomprehensible.
And on the other side of the road from the Family Five on the hilltop, stretching all the way across the top of the knob, was the distillery itself, and eight more warehouses, far bigger warehouses, back in the woods behind it.
Jedediah Craddock shook his head. He couldn’t go there. His math wasn’t that good. And he did have one thing going for him—the wind. Must be blowing 40 miles an hour, left to right across the hillside and away from the distillery buildings.
Before the fire fighters even got to the top of the hill, the heat hit them like a fiery fist. The burning building was a furnace, belching blistered air 250 feet out in every direction. They could smell it, too, the pungent odor of flaming booze, and fear slithered into their bellies.
Sarabeth couldn’t feel her fingers. She was wiggling them. She thought she was wiggling them, but she couldn’t feel them moving. Hayes had wrapped the duct tape so tight around her hands that he’d cut off the circulation.
And without circulation, her hands could—
She didn’t finish the thought. Why was she worried about the circulation in her hands when the panoramic view out the big window on the front of the Quart House showed the most spectacular fire she’d ever seen straight up the hillside above her! Flying Ebony was burning. She could see it between the two front warehouses, the flames leaping high above them, yellow and red turning into soot black smoke in the sky.
