House Blood - JD 7

by Mike Lawson

  “Then how in the hell are we going to be able to get to him before he’s released?” Fiona asked.

  “Does your company have a jet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then what I’d do,” Bernie said, “is fly a guy to Memphis right away and tell him to charter a fast plane that can land at small airports.”

  “Why Memphis?”

  “Like I said, Hobson is headed southwest. If my plan works, ­Hobson will get picked up someplace between Knoxville and Dallas, and Memphis is about halfway between those two cities. So if your guy is in Memphis and has a small, fast plane at his disposal, he might be able to get to wherever Hobson is before he’s released by the cops.”

  “Somebody else is looking for Hobson,” Neil said.

  “How do you know?” Emma said.

  “Because whoever’s looking is using some of the same sources I use. And one more thing. The FBI just issued the equivalent of an Amber Alert for Hobson.”

  “An Amber Alert?”

  “Yeah. A bulletin that says Hobson kidnapped a five-year-old girl. I’m assuming the bulletin’s a phony, but it’s going to cause a lot of people to start looking for him.”

  “It’s gotta be Mulray Pharma,” Emma said. “They’re hoping the cops will pick him up and, when they do, they’ll be there to kill him.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” Neil said.

  “I want you to find him before Mulray does.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that, Emma. I don’t have ten thousand cops helping me.”

  “Will you know if Hobson gets picked up?”

  “Yeah. But if the cops do pick him up, they’ll have to release him when they find out the bulletin’s a fake. And that means that once the cops notify the FBI, you’re gonna be in a footrace with Mulray Pharma.”

  “Call me as soon as you hear something,” Emma said.

  40

  Hobson couldn’t believe his luck—or, to be accurate, the fact that the only luck he had was bad luck.

  The Camry he bought from Hamilton Motors overheated four hours after he left Philadelphia. No wonder the goddamn salesman hadn’t haggled over the price. Then, because he didn’t have a cell phone, he and General Bradley had to walk for thirty-five minutes—him holding Brad’s leash in one hand and the garbage bag filled with his money in the other—until he could find a pay phone.

  The closest town to where his car broke down was Harrisonburg, Virginia, and he had the car towed there—thank God he’d kept his AAA card—but the garage had to order him a new thermostat from Richmond. By the time the car was fixed, it was almost seven P.M. and because he and Brad were tired, he decided to spend the night in Harrisonburg.

  The next morning at five A.M., he set off again for Little Rock, but at ten he got hungry and pulled off the interstate into Morristown, Tennessee, for some breakfast—and got pulled over by a cop, who happened to be a six-foot-three-inch female. She looked like LeBron James’s mean big sister. The lady cop told him that he was going thirty-two in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone, and when he asked where in the hell the fucking speed limit sign was, she pointed back up the road to a sign that was almost totally hidden by the branches of a tree—and then told him that if he didn’t want to get arrested, he’d better watch his foul mouth.

  The other thing was, the car wasn’t registered in his name because he’d given Hamilton Motors a phony name when he bought it. The good news was that he’d picked the name of a guy who he knew was in Uganda working for the Warwick Foundation. He told the cop he’d borrowed the car from a friend and all she had to do to confirm he was telling the truth was call the man—knowing that if she called, the guy wouldn’t be at home. But being a cop, she was skeptical, and he’d pissed her off by swearing at her, so she got on the computer in her patrol car and spent half an hour checking to see if he had any warrants out for his arrest—and this wasn’t good since he was trying to stay completely off the grid. She finally decided he wasn’t a wanted criminal or a car thief, but she made him follow her to the city treasurer’s office to pay his fine, which he had to do before he could leave Morristown.

  After he paid the speeding ticket, he decided to skip breakfast and headed out of Morristown as fast as he could—meaning twenty-five miles per hour. He figured the chance of somebody seeing that he’d gotten the ticket was small, but these days, with everything on computers, everything connected to the Net, he was nervous. He had a decision to make. Should he ditch the Camry at the next town he came to and buy another car, or just keep on going to Little Rock? He finally decided that since Morristown was almost six hundred miles from his destination, the fact that he’d gotten the ticket shouldn’t be a problem. How would anybody know he was headed to Little Rock?

  Five hours later, about four in the afternoon, he pulled into a truck stop near Waverly, Tennessee, for an early dinner. When he saw the two police cars parked in front of the restaurant, he didn’t give them any thought at all. He took a seat at the counter and ordered a cheeseburger for himself with everything on it and a cheeseburger without a bun for General Omar Bradley; Brad liked a good cheeseburger now and then. While he was eating, he glanced over at the two cops sitting at a table off to his right—and noticed they were staring at him.

  The cops looked like brothers, both of them beefy blond guys with buzz cuts. He glanced at them again—they were still staring at him. They were starting to make him really nervous. He finished his cheeseburger in four big bites and paid the bill.

  The cook put Brad’s cheeseburger into a square Styrofoam box. Hobson had planned to feed the burger to him in the parking lot and then let him walk around for a while until he did his business. But, because of the cops, he decided he’d drive a few miles farther down the road and see if he could find a park or rest area where he could feed and walk his dog. He could practically hear Brad’s little tummy growling.

  He was unlocking his car when a voice called out, “Hey, hold it right there.”

  He turned around and, sure enough, it was the two cops. What the hell did they think he’d done? When they got closer he saw that one’s name tag said J. Johnson and the other one was R. Johnson—brothers just like he’d thought, or maybe inbred cousins.

  “Sir, what’s your name?” J. Johnson asked him.

  “Uh, Bill Hobson,” Hobson said. By then the cops were standing next to him—and as soon as he said his name, R. Johnson grabbed his arm, spun him around, and slammed him up against the side of his car. The cheeseburger that he’d bought for Omar Bradley fell to the ground.

  “Where is she, you son of a bitch?” R. Johnson said.

  “What?” Hobson said. “What are you talking about?”

  R. Johnson pulled his arm up behind his back so hard that Hobson screamed in pain, and he wondered if the guy had dislocated his shoulder.

  “Sir, do we have permission to look in your trunk?” R. Johnson said as he continued to apply pressure to Hobson’s arm.

  “Yeah, yeah, just let go of my arm. You’re hurting me.”

  R. Johnson ignored Hobson’s plea and said to his partner, “Open the trunk.”

  “We should get a warrant,” J. Johnson said.

  “She could be suffocating in there. Open it.”

  “Who could be suffocating?” Hobson said—then he thought: Oh, shit, the money. Please, please, God, don’t let them see the money.

  A moment later, J. Johnson said, “She’s not in the trunk.”

  “She who?” Hobson screamed. “What do you think I’ve done?”

  “We know what you’ve done,” R. Johnson said. “You’re a goddamn baby-rapin’ pervert and we’re gonna make you tell us what you did to that little girl.”

  “I haven’t done—”

  “Shut the fuck up!”

  R. Johnson cuffed his hands behind his back, grabb
ed him by the nape of his neck, and walked him over to one of the patrol cars. As he opened the back door of the car, he said, “Watch your head”—and then rammed Hobson’s head into the roof of the car. Hobson was almost knocked unconscious, but he heard R. Johnson say, “I told you to watch your head.”

  “What about my dog and my car?” Hobson said, his vision still blurred from the blow to his forehead.

  “Fuck your dog and your car,” R. Johnson said.

  But J. Johnson said, “Your car will be towed to the station for our crime scene guy to look at, and we’ll have Ray here at the truck stop look after your dog until we figure out what to do with it.”

  From the backseat of the patrol car, Hobson watched J. Johnson put Brad in his travel cage and take him into the restaurant. While that was happening, R. Johnson got on the radio and said, “Marge, I need to talk to the chief. It’s important.” A moment later, he said, “Chief, we got that guy they issued the Amber Alert for. We found him out at Ray’s eatin’ his dinner like he didn’t have a worry in the world. The little girl wasn’t with him.”

  Amber Alert! What the hell was going on? Then he knew: Mulray Pharma. They did this to catch him. His biggest worry had been that the cops would find the cash in the garbage bag in his trunk, but now that was the least of his worries.

  “You guys are making a big mistake,” Hobson said to the back of R. Johnson’s thick neck. “That Amber Alert’s a phony.”

  “I told you to shut your mouth,” R. Johnson said.

  “Got him,” Bernie told Fiona. “He’s being held by the cops in Waverly, Tennessee.”

  When Fiona called and told him the cops in Waverly were holding Hobson, Earl Lee was sitting in the Millington Regional Jetport outside Memphis, bullshitting with the charter pilot he’d hired. The hunting rifle he’d purchased at a sporting goods store in Memphis was in an unmarked box next to his duffel bag.

  “How far are we from Waverly?” Lee asked the pilot.

  “About a hundred and fifty miles.”

  “Is there an airport near Waverly?”

  “Yeah,” the pilot said, and explained that the Humphreys County Airport was located just outside of Waverly.

  “Can I rent a car there?”

  “Sure. Call ahead and they’ll have one waiting for you.”

  An hour later, Earl Lee was parked in his rental car across from the Waverly Department of Public Safety waiting for Bill Hobson to be released.

  “He was picked up by the cops in Waverly, Tennessee,” Neil said.

  “Shit,” Emma said, and hung up. She turned on her computer, found out where Waverly was located, and saw that the nearest major city was Nashville. She checked flights from Dulles and Reagan National and saw there was a nonstop leaving for Nashville from Dulles in an hour and the flight would take two hours; then she’d have to rent a car and drive to Waverly, which would take another hour. Not good. It would be close to five hours by the time she got to Waverly, and by then Hobson would be gone—or dead. She wondered if Mulray’s people had a way to get to Waverly faster than she did, but realized that if they did, there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

  She thought about the situation for a moment, then used the Internet to find private detectives located in Waverly, and found a female detective in McEwen, only fifteen minutes from Waverly. She called the detective.

  “I’m going to e-mail you a photograph of a man named William Hobson. He’s being held at the jail in Waverly for kidnapping a little girl.” She heard the detective inhale sharply when she said this. “I need you to get over to the jail and wait for Hobson to be released, which he will be shortly. He didn’t kidnap anyone, but he is involved in a number of other crimes, and I need you to follow him when he leaves the jail and stick with him until I can meet you. But you need to be careful. There are some people who may try to kill Hobson when he’s released from jail and I don’t want you to get hurt. Believe me when I tell you that he isn’t worth dying for.”

  The detective asked a couple of questions—good questions. She sounded bright, but Emma really had no idea how capable she was. The only basis for picking her was that she lived near Waverly and was female. It had been Emma’s experience that women tended to be more competent than men. She didn’t think she was being biased in favor of her sex; it was just an opinion formed by experience.

  And speaking of a man who wasn’t always competent, she called DeMarco and told him where things stood. “Meet me at Dulles. We’re going to Nashville.”

  The Johnson brothers read Hobson his rights and asked him if he wanted a lawyer, to which he responded he didn’t need a lawyer because he hadn’t done anything wrong. They spent the next hour screaming at him, asking him where a five-year-old girl named Julie Templeton was, even though he kept telling them that he hadn’t kidnapped anyone and the Amber Alert was some kind of mistake. At one point R. Johnson left the interrogation room, and when he came back he said, “Where’d you get all that money in your car? Did you sell that little girl, you useless piece of shit?”

  It just kept getting worse and worse.

  Then R. Johnson said to his partner, “Maybe I oughta get a phone book.” Looking at Hobson, he said, “If I smack you in the back of the head with a big thick phone book a dozen times, it won’t leave any marks, but your brain will bounce from one end of your skull to the other and you’ll be a drooling idiot by the time I’m done.”

  J. Johnson, who appeared to be slightly brighter than R. Johnson, said, “No, we can’t do that. But there is something we can do.” He took out his cell phone, but before he dialed, he said to Hobson, “You know that little dog of yours?”

  “Yeah,” Hobson said, not liking J. Johnson’s tone.

  “If you don’t tell us what we want to know, I’m gonna call the truck stop and tell the cook to let that little mutt out of its cage. That’s a real busy highway down there.”

  “You can’t do that!” Hobson screamed.

  “Just watch me,” J. Johnson said, and punched a number into his phone and spoke to someone named Ray, telling Ray to let Hobson’s dog take a walk. Then he said something that chilled Hobson to the bone.

  “Wait a minute, Ray,” J. Johnson said, “I just thought of something. Does your cousin Henry still have that pit bull, the one that’s blind in one eye? Oh, good. Well, on second thought, why don’t you take that little mutt over to play with Henry’s dog.”

  “You can’t do that!” Hobson screamed again, and he was just about to tell them everything when the interrogation room door opened and the chief of police walked in. Or at least Hobson thought he was the chief, because he had three stars on the shoulders of his uniform shirt. He was older than the Johnson brothers/cousins by twenty years but he resembled them: the same big build, the same buzz cut—now more gray than blond—and the same small, mean blue eyes. Hobson wondered if the whole damn police department was related to one another.

  “It seems we’ve made a mistake, Mr. Hobson,” the chief said. “The FBI just told me that somebody hacked into their computers and that that kidnapping bulletin was a prank or something. Now, I’m sorry you were detained, sir, but I’m sure you can understand that when we get what appears to be a legitimate bulletin from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one that says a little girl’s life is in danger … Well, we had to act on the information we had.”

  Had Bill Hobson not been on the run, he would have told the chief that he was going to sue his ass off—a lawsuit large enough to bankrupt the jerkwater town of Waverly, Tennessee. But as he had no intention of doing that and just wanted to get out of jail, all he said was, “My dog better be all right.”

  “Your dog’s fine,” the chief said. “But would you mind explaining why you have all that cash in your car?”

  “Because I don’t trust banks,” Hobson said. “And I’m going to count my money as soon as I leave here.”


  Betty Ann Farmer had three children, all girls, but they were married now and had moved away. She and her husband had both retired from the post office four years ago and her husband spent all day in the garage building bird feeders and doghouses that nobody bought. She volunteered at the hospital and the church, and made bridesmaids’ dresses whenever there was a wedding within fifty miles of her hometown. She could sew a purple bridesmaid’s dress faster than anyone else in Humphreys County. But she still had too much time on her hands, and her husband was driving her nuts talking about the bird feeder market, so she got a private detective’s license, over the objections of everyone in her family.

  Since she had gotten her license, she’d only had two cases before this one. Her cousin had hired her to figure out who was stealing tires from his gas station in Clarksville, and she’d been hired by a woman in Franklin to prove her husband was cheating on her with a cocktail waitress. She’d solved both cases and was proud she had, but she sure wished her business would pick up a little. She’d barely made enough to pay for her Web site.

  She put Hobson’s photo and her .38 LadySmith in her purse, walked out to the garage, and, screaming over the noise of the band saw, told her husband she had a case and he might have to make his own dinner. Forty-five minutes later, she watched Bill Hobson leave the Waverly police station and walk over to a Camry. For some reason, the first thing he did was open the trunk of the Camry and stick his head inside a black plastic garbage bag, like he was sniffing glue in industrial quantities. Then he closed the trunk and drove away.

  Hobson drove to the truck stop as fast as he could. There was no way the cops would give him a speeding ticket after what they’d just pulled. He found Omar Bradley in the kitchen, inside his travel cage, and he looked just fine; fortunately, that asshole cop had been bluffing about letting him play with a pit bull. Brad, as usual, yipped in delight and wagged his short tail when he saw Hobson, and when he let him out of the travel cage, he licked Hobson’s face like they’d been separated for a month. God, he loved that little mutt.