Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

  “Was the box empty when you opened it?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was low, gentle, disconcertingly near.

  Neither of us spoke for a while. Our eyes kept to the phone’s display except for wary glances through the streaked windows. No one interrupted our little drive-in movie. Cars left the school lot, dazzling headlamps and vibrant taillights affixed to lackluster shapes. I avoided looking at the woman beside me, though she hardly needed to be seen to be a distraction.

  As expected, not much happened at the post office. Every arrival was heralded by glaring lights, followed by motion on the camera’s right side. Most customers had business at the counter, not the boxes, till after ten thirty. Then, instead of vague movement outside the lens’s limits, whole torsos momentarily blocked everything. After each water-beaded rain slicker filled the display, however, the box holding the Donovans’ cash hadn’t gotten emptier. When the right person did show up I doubted we’d gain much except what color raincoat they owned. The morning’s delay had kept me from positioning a second camera across the street to record vehicle makes and plate numbers.

  “Not as thrilling as you expected?”

  Sandra laughed. Her unforced humor had the warmth of a good Kentucky bourbon. “This has been the most relaxing part of my day,” she confessed.

  “The money could sit there for weeks,” I said.

  “Do really you think they’d leave it that long?”

  “Probably not. Whoever picks it up will wait till he or she feels safe. But the longer it stays in the same place the more people could know about it.”

  She straightened and drew her shoulders back. “JD has millions that sit around all the time. This isn’t much different, I suppose.”

  “No chance of getting a return on this investment. And it’s your money, too.”

  “Not really. Marrying old money isn’t the same as being born into it.”

  I hadn’t considered JD as old money in the traditional sense, no more than my father’s fortune. The Nashville music industry didn’t go back that far. Yet slaves had chiseled Hillbriar’s foundations and as far as I knew only the Donovan name had ever been associated with it.

  “What did the family do before JD?”

  “Are you investigating Jonathon, too?” Her tone and expression were indecipherable.

  “I’m trying to make conversation while we watch people collect their mail,” I said. “And it wouldn’t hurt for me to know something about my clients besides what the tabloids tell me.”

  “It might.”

  “Then edit as you go along. Everybody does.”

  Her emerald eyes regarded me for a moment, revealing nothing. Then she tipped her face toward the phone and its tiny motion picture featuring actors who hadn’t realized they’d been cast. “Is this legal?”

  “The camera? Compared to blackmail, yes.”

  Sandra knew better than anyone the perils of being spied on.

  “Tobacco,” she said flatly. “Jonathon’s ancestors came over during the Irish potato famine. They were O’Donovans then. They didn’t mind digging for a living but mines were more digging than Jonathon’s great great grandfather had in mind. So he planted tobacco. When he had more than he could harvest alone, he bought slaves, same as his neighbors. Jonathon prefers that isn’t mentioned.”

  “Naturally,” I agreed.

  “Hillbriar was originally a plantation. You can’t even guess where the fields might have been now. After the war the slaves left, but Donovans held onto Hillbriar till the generation that had to finally go find work far away. Jonathon’s grandfather came back in the Twenties and paid off the mortgage or old debts or whatever obligations had kept the family away.”

  Another rotund postal patron finally quit blocking the camera. When the little numbered brass doors reappeared, ours still had a manila envelope smashed against the little window.

  “I thought nobody had money in the Thirties.”

  “Noah Donovan did. He had a fortune stowed someplace besides the banks. The market crash didn’t hurt him much.”

  “I’m thinking his business was something other than tobacco.”

  Sandra smiled at me the way a kindergarten teacher smiles at the kid who asks too many questions, all saintly patience. Just sexier.

  “Nobody knows,” she said. “Jonathon’s mother used to whisper that her dad ran moonshine right out of Hillbriar. Jonathon shushed her whenever she brought it up. No one ever caught Noah with a shred of evidence, though, and there aren’t any stills on the property.”

  “His mom sounded like an interesting woman.”

  “She was.” The note of finality meant Sandra didn’t have more to say about her mother-in-law. Muriel Donovan was probably difficult for any of the family to discuss with strangers.

  “And JD?”

  Sandra brought her shoulders up again. “He went to college. The first Donovan to get a degree. No tobacco or moonshine for him.”

  Of course not. JD Donovan was a clean respectable citizen. But I’d gotten two conflicting stories about why he’d hired Clarence DeBreaux, and my money was on JD’s version being untrue. Cigarettes and corn liquor still smell better than bullshit.

  A flicker from the phone’s display interrupted us. Another vehicle had pulled up outside the post office, a low car whose headlights shone under the counter and glared from the little box windows. Neither of the car’s doors opened. Maybe it was blue. Another rain slicker blocked our view and by the time the rain slicker left, so had the small, low car.

  “It’s gone!” Sandra hissed.

  She didn’t mean the car. The post office box where she’d stuffed $85,000 was empty.

  “Aren’t you going to follow them?”

  “Follow who?” I asked. “All we have is a green raincoat that didn’t arrive in a blue car. It’s not as easy as that. We’ll wait a bit and go back. I’ll go in and ask around. You wait in the car someplace out of sight. There’ll be a lunch break or shift change around noon.”

  She sounded unconvinced. “What about the blue car?”

  Now she did mean the blue car, because it had stopped on the entrance to the school’s back lot directly in front of us. The lights were off in spite of the rain. It hesitated, steaming, a wary fox, far enough to not be obvious, near enough for me to recognize the same Mazda roadster I’d seen in the Roundabout Plaza garage yesterday and in my condo’s garage last night.

  I flipped on the Viper’s high beams. I disengaged the parking break. Confrontation might be a bad idea, but at this point Sandra and I were pretty much committed.

  “Good question,” I said. “Let’s see.”

  Four times the horsepower waited under my right foot and the hood already pointed the direction I wanted to go. The roadster compensated admirably, though, with a backward lunge and a near-perfect handbrake pivot. Padlock-shaped taillights winked and the car sprang away with minimal wheel spin. This was no ordinary driver.

  Sandra tipped her face toward the windshield in a way that forbade debate.

  All right...

  The Viper shot after its prey. I didn’t get overzealous, so the back end merely wagged a couple times before the rubber found something to grab. Past the flooded baseball diamond we charged, flinging rooster tails of spray, then hooked a careening left onto Old Hickory. The little Mazda’s left hook went truer than the Dodge’s. I let off the gas as the tires chewed through grass on the highway’s shoulder, felt the shudder of traction regained, accelerated. Taillights flared ten feet off the front bumper and the roadster darted left again. The road between Whites Creek High School and its namesake stream bucked and twisted, but I knew this beforehand and didn’t push the car too hard there. 4The nimbler MX-5 never slowed.

  For all my concentration on staying alive at speed, I still noticed Sandra’s bone white knuckles as she clenched the passenger grab bar.

  Right, left, right, jarring dip in the road, left, then eight-hundred yards of straightness: memory danced in tandem with feet and
hands. The road I knew. The overpowered monster beneath me was the stranger.

  The Viper exploded from the last turn. The wipers had no faster setting and seemed to move like clock hands. Ten cylinders of rage devoured whatever lead the smaller car had gained. Not enough. More curves waited at the straight’s end and Sandra and I spent as much time going sideways as the Mazda did going forward. Agility trumped speed.

  What I hoped to accomplish if the Mazda lost hold of the road first was anybody’s guess. Sooner or later one of us would make a mistake. I wasn’t allowing either of us room for error.

  Another straight, longer than the last, came with another gap to close. The dash’s crimson snake head lit my fingers with digital fury before every upshift. 158. On skinny roads. In the rain. Maybe Sandra wouldn’t need to worry long about butterfly pictures.

  Wet fire filled the windshield. The woman beside me screamed.

  Brake hard! Turn right! Too far—correct left! Gas!

  The blue roadster and the black coupe skidded across a concrete bridge side by side, too close to open a door between us. Guard rails turned to horizontal lightning fore and aft. Engines strained and I heard both, a throaty bellow and a higher-pitched rattling whine. The Mazda held the lead because we hurtled over the bridge sideways. The driver and I made eye contact.

  She looked terrified.

  Galvanized steel gnawed the little car’s tail. The woman snapped her pale face forward. Sparks whirled like radioactive hornets, four cylinders buzzed, then the girl and the car vanished.

  Ten

  I kept the Viper off the rail. But miracles aren’t necessarily freebies. The injured Mazda still finished the turn immediately after the bridge, the overpowered supercar did not. Instead of the road we chose a hayfield. Grass and mud splattered the windows. A power pole crossed in front of us going a lot faster than power poles are supposed to go. The highway smeared past the headlights. Twice. Halfway through a third spin, the Viper lurched and settled, motionless.

  Tires whizzed. Side-mounted exhaust pipes spewed mud and the engine shrieked. I remembered to take my foot off the gas. The Viper bubbled like a pig in a mud hole, and the roadster’s motor faded with distance. A brown trough any Jeep owner would’ve been proud of stretched from us to the road. The electric fire in Sandra’s eyes was less terror than exhilaration.

  “Okay?” I asked. She’d wanted me to try. Apologies were unnecessary.

  “Waldron….doesn’t drive like that!” she gasped.

  I laughed. So did she. Stuck in the middle of a soggy field, in a car that had no business being in any field, a woman with a price on her secrets and a man with his head in the crosshairs surrendered to a little mirth. The rain pounded on but seemed cheerier. Just weather, it wouldn’t stay that way forever.

  When the gravity of our circumstances reasserted itself, Sandra touched my cell phone which had slid into one of the cup holders. “Should we call somebody?”

  “I’d rather not if we don’t need to.” I unfastened my seat belt.

  My window was opaque with mud. The door opened, though. Young grass sizzled against the exhaust pipes. I swung my legs out, ducked under the door frame and stood blinking in the rain. A car slowed on the asphalt two hundred feet away, one of those unimaginatively formed sedans you always see parked in front of government buildings. Two vaguely human shapes watched me for half a minute, then the car drove off.

  “Who were they?” Sandra asked from the dry side of the windshield. I let go of the Smith & Wesson’s checkered butt before she noticed.

  “Not Triple-A,” I said.

  The field wasn’t as soft as I’d feared. The ruts we’d made probably had more to do with traveling perpendicular to the norm than anything. A little finesse should get the Viper back onto its native pavement, though one of us might need to push.

  “Can you drive a manual?”

  She shook her head. Mrs. Donovan hadn’t had much reason to learn if she didn’t want to. For the record, I’d tried to be chivalrous.

  The shift change at the Whites Creek post office happened as scheduled in spite of our difficulties and we missed the event by a good hour.

  Sandra stayed in the car up the road, behind an out-of-the-way Cajun diner which hadn’t opened for lunch. Leaving a client out of my sight under those circumstances didn’t feel right, but she’d already been seen inside the post office, and with the people interested in me, she was safer alone. She was also covered head to toe with mud from pushing a car out of a field.

  She’d insisted on being behind the Viper rather than inside at the wheel. When the car finally chewed itself back to asphalt, she had fallen at least half a dozen times. Not a word of complaint came of it. JD’s trophy wife was nowhere near as delicate as she might appear.

  I tugged my hat low and left her locked inside the grimy Dodge with the motor rumbling. A pickup truck sloshed by as I hustled along the shoulder. I continued past the post office building to see what had changed outside. One of the mail Jeeps remained in back, and the oxidized Mustang had been replaced by an equally classy minivan with duct tape securing the rear hatch. I backtracked and ducked in through the streaked glass door.

  A mosaic of muddy shoeprints adorned the linoleum. The air inside was thick enough to drink. I found and quietly pocketed the micro-camera. The box where Sandra had left the demand money faced me in the wall opposite the window, two feet up from the floor, empty. Even if the person currently behind the service counter had been there at the right time, what would I ask? I’d done stakeouts better in the past.

  “Can I help you?”

  A rangy-looking woman with leathery features smiled from the working side of the counter. According to her government-issue photo ID tag, her name was Caroline.

  “You look like you might have a question.” She had a voice like a wood rasp. She must have started straight off with unfiltered Pall-Malls in kindergarten. But her expression held more sunshine than I’d seen anywhere else lately.

  “I was just hoping to meet a friend,” I said. “Maybe she’s already been here and gone. Dark hair, drives a little blue convertible?”

  Caroline’s expression shriveled further, demonstrating intense thought. “Sorry, hun. I’ve only been here myself forty minutes. I’d have remembered any convertibles today!”

  We grimaced at each other without laughing. I was sure I didn’t want to hear her laugh.

  “Nolman might have noticed,” she continued, half to herself. “Just that he don’t ever linger once his shift’s over.”

  “Clock watcher?”

  She shrugged. Plainly she didn’t much care for her predecessor, but even if they’d passed out cigarettes in her grade school, Caroline had still learned the value of saying nothing if you have nothing nice to say.

  I thanked her for her time, she wished me luck, and I trudged back out into the deluge.

  My rosy outlook had more or less gone to hell by the time I slogged back to the expensive dirt clod purring behind Whites Creek’s only Cajun dining establishment. Our lone potential lead had outrun me in a Japanese toy car. Damage to the Viper was limited to muddied upholstery, but mud packed into the wheels made it shake violently at highway speed. The pickup that had splashed me earlier idled across the street; I had no clue who the occupants were but they wouldn’t be friends of mine. The stunning girl waiting in the passenger seat was filthy and married to somebody else. All in all, the morning had been an $85,000 waste of time.

  “Where to?” I snarled.

  Sandra didn’t acknowledge my dark mood. It hadn’t been my eighty-five grand. “There must be somewhere I can clean up before we go back into Nashville,” she said.

  I chunked the Viper into gear and drove west. The pickup established itself behind us, a football field distant. Brutal vibration through the steering wheel answered my test of the accelerator. Thirty miles an hour, that was all. The truck never came closer.

  Five miles out of town a tree lay across the road.

  San
dra started to turn and I stopped her.

  “Don’t be obvious. They know we saw them.”

  Obedience wasn’t an act Sandra wore well. She settled back in her seat anyway and dissected me with her green eyes. I stared through the smeared windshield. The old oak’s leaves shone lushly in the headlights and its massive limbs still had strength to hold the trunk a few feet off the road. Some of us just go in our prime.

  “Well?”

  There was something in Sandra expecting me to know how to elude a pickup full of trouble or fly over fallen trees. I wished I could. But the .45’s weight against my ribs gave no inspiration and diplomacy doesn’t move trees. The road mocked us from behind the toppled oak’s half unfurled greenery. We could get out and walk under its monstrous trunk, duck through the twigs between those limbs which held it off the pavement, but then what? Being followed on foot could only be worse.

  ….through the twigs….

  I knuckled the shifter into first and eased off the clutch. Sandra forgot my warning and twisted in her seat to look behind us, which made her look slightly uninformed when I just drove the low-slung Viper under the tree.

  A painful screech etched the short rooftop. Wet leaves and branches tumbled down over the rear glass. Then the car emerged onto bare highway again and the supposed roadblock shrank in the rearview mirror. Headlamps blazed behind the old dead hulk, but the pickup was too tall to squeeze between road and trunk as the Dodge had done.

  On the far side of the tree a brighter world waited. The rain gave up shortly after the guys in the pickup had. The sky looked as if it might try wearing blue for a change. A green forest leaned over washed highway. The prettiness of it all was easier to appreciate knowing we had it to ourselves for a while.

  Beaman Park had its main entrance two turns farther on. Budget cuts had eliminated the Thursday ranger and the nearly new nature center would be locked except for the restrooms. I hoped the weather kept birdwatchers away. Mist shimmered from the pavement when I turned into the lot. No other vehicles. My luck had been due for improvement.