by Ninie Hammon
The old man lifted his feet up out of the footrests, pushed upward with his hands on the arms of the chair to lift himself upright. Nothing happened. He pushed again, but he only got a couple of inches off the chair seat before tumbling back in.
“Please…” Jack bleated, trying not to cough. He hated how childlike and scared his words sounded, but he couldn’t help it. He didn’t want to die! “Help me, mister…who are you?”
“Ollie Marshal,” the old man barked and tried a third time to heave himself up out of the chair. But he had no more success than he’d had twice before.
Jack was seized by a chain of coughing that went on and on until his throat was raw, and he was afraid he was going to throw up. The old man was struggling to rise out of the chair again. Weak as he was, he was trying, doing everything he could to help somebody he’d never met.
As soon as Jack could catch his breath, he cried out, his voice ragged from coughing and thick with unshed tears, “Thank you, Mr. Marshal.”
The old man’s head snapped up, and he stared at Jack, who looked into his eyes and didn’t blink. They froze like that for a beat, then tears welled up in the old man’s eyes—must have been the smoke—and he looked away.
“Can’t unlock the dad-gum padlock from here,” he said, seemed to consider a couple of options, then shrugged.
Marshal took hold of the arms of the chair, using hands so arthritic they resembled turtle flippers, and shoved, leaping/falling forward out of it. He tumbled over the low fountain rim and splashed down face-first into the foot-deep water. He struggled, fought to get his head up, turned over on his back and rested on his elbows. Then he shoved and scooted himself to the base of the dolphin. Jacob Dumas had ended the chain wrap-around at the bottom so the lock was there by Jack’s feet. Jack watched in fascinated terror as the old man fumbled with the wet key in his crippled hands.
The man grasped the padlock to hold it steady and shoved the key at it. He missed the hole. When he started to try again, the key slipped out of his wet hands and plopped into the water. Marshal felt around on the bottom of the fountain, groping for the key. It seemed to take a hundred years for him to find it and another thousand for him to grab the padlock and point the key at the hole again. He shoved and missed, jabbed at the hole a couple more times. His hands began to tremble. Now both the lock and the key were moving targets. He tried again. And again.
Jack burped out a sound that was half cough, half sob. Then he found he was crying in earnest, tears of fear and frustration. Marshal fumbled the key again and it plunked back into the water. Jack was sobbing and coughing, unable to control either. When the old man fished the key out of the water a second time, he mumbled words as he stabbed it at the lock.
“…old fool…stick a key in a lock for crying out loud…can’t even—”
Then the key slid into the padlock, the old man gave it a twist and the lock opened. He pulled it free from the chain links and dropped it into the water. The straightjacket of chains instantly loosened, but Jack still couldn’t get it off without help.
“I’ll unwind far as I can,” the old man said, spacing his words out between hacking.
The unwinding took interminably long. Jack wiggled and sobbed and coughed and squirmed and as soon as Marshal unwrapped his arms sufficiently, he shoved at the chain binding his chest, loosening it, forbidding himself the great intake of air his lungs were begging for. He clawed the rest of the chain off his neck, dropped the chain into the water, and staggered a couple of steps away from the dolphin. Then he reached down and grabbed the old man’s collar and began dragging him toward the edge of the fountain.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” Marshal struggled to shake free of Jack’s hold on his shirt.
“I can’t carry you!” Jack barked out another chain of coughing, then spoke in gasps. “Dragging is the only”—gasp!—“way I can get you out of here.”
“Who said I want out of here?” The old man jerked backward out of Jack’s grasp and splashed down into the water. “Other folks are always deciding what I want and what I don’t.” He was coughing hard as the smoke settled around him. “Leave me alone!” He waved his hand dismissively. “Had an appointment on this day for going on twenty years.” Cough. “And I’m finally going to keep it.”
Flames were all around Jack as soon as he stepped out of the fountain. The heat was harsh without water running over him. Pieces of the ceiling had fallen to the floor and formed mini bonfires everywhere. The stink of burning flesh from the bodies on the floor made Jack gag. The overstuffed furniture was on fire, and the silk flowers in vases had been turned into torches. Jack could hear the horrified screams of the old people trapped in their rooms on the second and third floors as fire came for them.
There was a sudden agonized shriek in the swirling smoke that now obscured the spot where the fireman had died. Jack tried to see who had cried out, but the smoke was too thick. Then a figure appeared in the flames. He seemed familiar, someone Jack had seen before. And it looked like…the flames backed up from him, moved out of his way as if shoved by an invisible hand. Jack recognized him—it was Chapman Whitworth, the son of the man Jack’s father called a “sticky-fingered anthropologist.” Was he possessed, too? How could he move through the smoke and flames like that?
Jack watched in horrified fascination as Whitworth crossed to the hospital bed that contained the feeble old man in wet pajamas that Cole had threatened to tie down with straps. The old man was trying to push Whitworth away, shaking his head no. Whitworth turned around and faced where Jack stood, dripping water into a puddle. Then he reached out to the table beside the old man’s bed—his eyes never leaving Jack’s face—and picked up a vase that flaming silk flowers had turned into a torch.
Holding the flaming flowers in his right hand, he did an odd thing. He touched the fingertips of his left hand to his forehead and snapped them upward in a strange salute to Jack. Then he dropped the torch of flowers on the old man. The man was an instant fireball from head to foot. His wet pajamas—that was gasoline! Whitworth watched him burn and scream, writhe, and twist—did nothing, merely stood with an odd little half smile on his face. Then he picked up the blanket on the end of the bed and smothered the flames on the lower part of the old man’s body. He left his shirt burning though, and when he lifted the old man into his arms, those flames snaked up the side of Whitworth’s face. He didn’t seem to notice or care, merely gave Jack a crooked smile, and turned for the door, an invisible bubble shielding him from the flames he passed through. When he reached the barrier beams, the bubble vanished. Whitworth’s shirt and hair were on fire now—and he leapt over the timbers and out the door.
“You just going to stand there and burn up?” barked the old man in the fountain.
Suddenly, Jack knew where to go.
“Which way’s the kitchen?”
The old man pointed.
******
2011
There was very little in police work Crock enjoyed more than seeing the look on a perp’s face when he figured out he was the one who got conned. As soon as Bosko stepped into the projection room, the two uniformed officers stationed by the door grabbed him, and one of them cuffed him quicker than a rodeo cowboy in a calf-roping contest.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Boskowitz,” Crock said.
“Where’s my poster?” Bosko asked.
Crock burst out laughing. “You want a poster, maybe we can see you get one to hang on the wall in your cell on death row,” Crock told him. “They’ll probably make a whole new movie by the time all your appeals are denied, but that’s part of the fun, don’t you think? The anticipation. Looking forward to the movie…and waiting for the feel of that needle sliding into your arm.”
“I want a lawyer,” Bosko said.
Crock went on as if he hadn’t heard him. “Of course, you could get to see it the next time J. K. Rowling starts hallucinating--seeing boys in nightgowns flying around on sticks. I could make the whole death
row scene go bye-bye. All you have to do is answer a few questions.”
“I’m not saying nothing.”
“Ah, but in this case, silence is not golden. It is deadly. You tell us who hired you, and the death sentence for three—count them, boys and girls, three—premeditated murders is off the table.”
Crock had absolutely no authority to make any such offer. Prosecutors made plea bargain arrangements, not police officers. But Bosko didn’t know that. There was no law against a police officer lying, and most had perfected it to an art form.
“I don’t have to talk. I said I want a lawyer, and you got to get me one.”
He’d apparently learned something from watching cop shows on television. Crock did, indeed, have to provide him a lawyer. But in the grand scheme of what really mattered in life, violating this scumbag’s civil rights was more than a few rungs down the ladder from stopping a monster demon from sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Did I just think that?
It still hit Crock like a blow to the solar plexus to tack words onto what he now understood to be the reality of the true functioning of the universe.
“Get him out of here,” he told the uniforms, and they escorted the handcuffed Bosko out the door and down the hallway to the stairs leading out of the building. They’d leave by the side door to avoid the crowd out front.
Crock paused in the hallway to shake hands with the theater manager and thank him again for his cooperation. That’s why he lagged a few steps behind the other officers, why he didn’t see exactly what happened once they stepped out into the parking lot.
He heard part of it, though. A little kid’s voice yelled something like, “That’s him, Daddy. He stole my poster,” followed by the sounds of a scuffle. When Crock opened the door that had closed behind the other officers, one of them was cuffing a large man sprawled facedown on the asphalt beside a little kid in the full throes of a temper tantrum. And he could see the bright red of Bosko’s University of Louisville jacket, zigging and zagging between parked cars in the lot with the other officer only a few steps behind him.
CHAPTER 43
1985
Jack started in the direction the old man pointed, making his way past burning debris from the rapidly disintegrating ceiling. The smoke was so thick now, he couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe. Coughing until there were spots in front of his eyes, the world began to gray out. Dizzy. Couldn’t stand. He staggered and fell to his knees. No air, only smoke. Then he was on the floor, the tile cool on his cheek. He’d tried, done the very best he could. The world began to gray, and he was aware enough to be grateful he wouldn’t feel it when the fire got him. The pigeon-wing sound of flames faded gradually away.
A great cracking roar high above roused Jack, and he covered his head with his arms and squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for death as the ceiling fell down three floors to land on top of him. But only a few small pieces of debris clattered on the tile around him. He opened his eyes and squinted. The smoke wasn’t as thick as before. In fact, it was clearing away, not puddling on top of him but flowing upward, away from him. He looked up. The roar had been the fire in the ceiling breaking through the roof. Like a chimney, the hole was now sucking the smoke and heat up and out. The air around Jack cleared. Still woozy and disoriented, with the room swimming in and out of focus, Jack began to commando crawl forward, sucking in little sips of the much cleaner air off the floor. Above the crackling of the flames and the crashes of collapsing walls, Jack could hear…nothing.
The old people had stopped screaming.
Jack continued forward, grasping frantically at the vague memory he had of one of the times he and Daniel had talked about the nursing home.
“I was filling the tray of communion cups in that little room off the kitchen on Saturday, and I spilled half a bottle of grape juice,” Daniel says.
They are fishing, sitting on the bank of Buzzard Roost Creek, leaned up against a tree as the corks atop their baited hooks lounge languid in the slow water. Becca is playing with McDougal, tossing him a Frisbee. Her bell-clear laughter wafts to them on air scented by the honeysuckle vine climbing the tree behind them.
“How much trouble did you get in for making such a mess?”
“None. No mess. I grabbed a rag to wipe the floor where I’d spilled it, but there was hardly any juice at all. Most of it had leaked down through cracks between the floor planks…like maybe there was a hole there or something. So I tried to pry up one of the planks. It was a trapdoor.”
“Cool!”
“Most of the trapdoor was covered up by a big rug. So I waited until Dad was busy on the second floor, moved the rug, pulled the door up and crawled down through it.”
“And you found a huge room like the one under the opera house in Phantom of the Opera?”
“Nope. I didn’t find anything at all. There was nothing there but a crawl space and a big dirt hole. Must have been where the furnace used to be because there was a coal chute.”
If Jack could crawl down into that hole under the floor, he could get out through the coal chute.
He finally made it to the edge of the tile flooring where the atrium opened into the big hallway that housed the kitchen in the back corner. The carpet on the hallway floor was burning, and the plank flooring in the kitchen beyond was on fire, too. And Jack had no idea where the little room was where Daniel’s father filled up communion cups.
******
2011
Jack had only gone a few dozen yards up the trail in the woods when he saw a tuft of white fabric stuck to a bramble. Then he spotted a twig on a bush, broken and dangling. Odd. A few yards farther on there was another. It was out of place, which was, of course the point. Andi had done it—to leave a trail so somebody could follow.
Andi believed her Uncle Jack was coming for her.
I don’t ever have to be afraid, Uncle Jack, because you’ll always keep me safe.
That’s what she’d said in the hospital the day after he’d shot her—had called him “Uncle Jack,” when she’d never met him.
He ruthlessly shoved those images out of his mind before they could muddy his focus and cloud his judgment. He still didn’t know exactly what he was up against so he shifted off the trail into the woods and moved parallel to it, proceeding as fast as possible without sounding like a water buffalo stampeding through the trees.
If the man were packing a .30-.06 deer rifle, it would have a scope. It’d be easy with a scope for the man to sight in on Jack if Jack were coming straight at him. But trying to focus a scope on an object moving laterally through woods with limbs and trees and other things that’d take the focus would be far more difficult. It could give Jack the edge, a couple of seconds. That's all he needed to drop the guy.
Jack slowed as he reached the slope that stretched to the top of the ridge. The trail led up it and then out across the summit to the edge of the rocky bluffs. He moved from tree to tree, peering through the undergrowth at the trail. When he reached the top of the bluff, he spotted the man. A big guy in a white shirt.
Jack took in details instantly.
He was armed, but not with a rifle. He held a big hunting knife in one hand.
The man was standing with his back to Jack about twenty-five yards away. Just standing there, staring off the bluff at the river below.
He was alone.
******
In a slow, almost lazy motion, Billy Ray Hawkins lifted the .22 rifle and pointed it at the chest of the suit-clad man in his front yard.
“You wanna tell me what you’re doin’ here?” he asked. Not that he wanted to know. It was of no consequence whatsoever why the man had come. All that mattered was that he wasn’t never going to leave. It was his own fault, showing up unexpected like he done. He’d seen Billy Ray with the gun, and that was a parole violation that’d land Billy Ray back in prison. And Billy Ray was not going back to prison.
“I brought Mrs. Washington here to get her friend, Becca,” he said. He was scared,
you could see that. But he was handling it pretty well.
“You figure to take Becca away with you, do you?” Billy Ray was stalling, needed time to figure out the best way to kill him.
“If she wants to leave, then yes, we’ll take her with us.”
“Well, now see, there’s the rub of it. My Becca girl belongs here with her daddy.”
The fat nigger woman kneeling in the dirt had been magic. She’d soothed Becca with her words and her patting, and the girl had stopped screaming altogether. Was lying there, curled up in a ball, whimpering and moaning.
“Look, we don’t want any trouble. All we want is—”
“You ain’t smart as you look, Mr. Suit-and-Tie Man, if you think it matters diddly-squat what you want. Only thing that matters is that you’s trespassing on my land. And around here, we shoot trespassers.”
Billy Ray loved the look on the Suit’s face when he said that, how all the color drained out of it 'til he was chalky pale. He thought to wonder how pale the man’d get if he knew Billy Ray absolutely did intend to shoot him, put a bullet square in the middle of the red tie on his chest—which is where he’d have to put it to drop the man with a single shot from a .22. Not a whole lot more powerful than a glorified pellet gun, the rifle was for small game—a squirrel, a rabbit, maybe a fox. But a .22 could still kill a man if you knew where to shoot him. Billy Ray knew, and he’d prefer the back of his head if he could manage it.
But instead of shooting him, Billy Ray really ought to slap the guy on the back and thank him for delivering Theresa Washington into his hands. Never in his wildest dreams did Billy Ray envision having both Theresa Washington and Becca under his thumb, so he could extract a full measure of payment from Becca for what she’d done and kill Theresa just ’cause she was a nigger. If he’d learned anything from his useless father it was that a man ought never pass up a chance to kill a nigger. But before he killed her, he’d tell her how her boy squealed when that chain saw blade cut into him.
