Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

  I redialed the number JD used when he’d left that afternoon’s message. Three rings. He seemed the sort who never answered on the first or second.

  “Hello, Mr. Bedlam.”

  “You wanted me to call.”

  His voice sounded a little too polished. Maybe without JD’s mild gray eyes to look into, he sounded that way to everybody. “I wanted to see if you made any headway. You haven’t checked in.”

  “I figured you’d prefer hearing from me when I had something to report.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not yet. These things take time.”

  “Where have you been looking?”

  People like JD prefer to know how people like me spend their money. I just wasn’t in the mood to validate my actions, there’d nearly been actions at Hillbriar I couldn’t justify, and if the man knew where I should look he ought to have told me so by now.

  “Under a lot of rocks,” I said.

  Some of the polish came off. JD hadn’t practiced this part. “Please don’t be cavalier with my time.”

  “Then how about you stop wasting mine?” I snapped. I was running out of it.

  “I—”

  “Who’d you really hire DeBreaux to watch? I’ve had different versions.”

  “The police.” The voice got downright flinty. “Sandra and I expected discretion—”

  “—which you’re getting. I’ll not breathe a word of any client’s business elsewhere. DeBreaux came up in an unrelated conversation. But if you didn’t lie to me, why lie to them?”

  The LearJet’s engines filled the void till my client finished rewriting his script, then:

  “Those were difficult times, Mr. Bedlam. Painful times, for a family that must suffer in the public eye. More reputations than mine were at stake. The police didn’t much care that I’d lost my mother, that Jetta had lost—she didn’t need more trouble than she found on her own.”

  “Why did you hire DeBreaux?”

  JD sighed. He was Nashville’s most honest businessman. The sigh proved it. “Mr. DeBreaux’s job was to keep an eye on both of them. The police didn’t need to know about Sandra. You didn’t need to know about my daughter.”

  I disagreed. I typically decide for myself what information I need.

  “Where’s your daughter now, Mr. Donovan?”

  “We’ll talk later,” he said and hung up.

  That finished me for conversation. I found headphones under the armrest and scrolled through on-board musical selections via the touch screen. Ray Charles suited. He’d probably never met the Donovans. I eased back against the seat and watched the sky transition from gold to velvet, as the LearJet outran the sun and Ray drowned in his own tears.

  Nashville’s freshly washed skyscrapers glittered along a misty curve of the Cumberland. Concrete arteries pulsed with Friday night traffic. John C. Tune’s marker lights sparkled as we banked into our approach path. Aircraft between the runway and terminal building were unlit and dormant, but headlight beams from a passenger car stretched past the sleeping aluminum wings. I stopped Ray in the middle of ‘Georgia on My Mind’ and tapped the intercom.

  “What’s the fuel status?”

  The copilot answered. “We’re good for another hour and a half if we took right back off.”

  “Once I’m clear, why don’t you two make a dry run to Memphis. Fill up there and fly back in the morning. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Yessir.”

  The intercom switched off so the men in the cockpit could debate privately what the hell I was up to. Flying empty jets around never makes fiscal sense. I just couldn’t come up with a better way of keeping the crew safe. That car on the ground could have business with no one but me, and even small regional airports don’t typically let people drive where the planes park. Police might have that kind of pull, but they’re big into flashing blue lights. That left the FBI. Or people the FBI wanted. After touchdown, I stashed the .45 under my arm and disembarked.

  The night air stank of jet exhaust and clung to me like it had missed me. Hydraulics sucked the stairs back into the jet’s fuselage behind me. I strode toward the waiting sedan as Pratt & Whitney turbines spun back to business and hauled the LearJet once again to the runway.

  The late model Impala was silver, unadorned. Three athletic men, barely into their twenties, gripped the top edges of its open doors like they needed to hold the thing down. Regulation haircuts. Jeans and t-shirts instead of slacks and jackets. All they needed were cigarette packs rolled up in their sleeves and they’d be extras from “Grease.” None wore shoulder rigs but that just meant their government issues were tucked into waistband holsters.

  “Mr. Bedlam?” The driver shouted over the roar of a departing aircraft.

  “You know who I am,” I yelled back. “What do you want?”

  “Come with us.” No please.

  “I’ll call a cab.”

  The driver shook his head. One way or another I was getting in their car. A businesslike pat-down yielded my wallet, keys, phone (which I’d shut off), and the Smith & Wesson. My frisker wore vinyl gloves. I let myself into the back seat without requiring a shove. The boys got in, too. The driver gunned the engine and exited through a gate in the chain link fence.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Not far.” Chit-chat finished.

  We passed under Briley Parkway onto Continental Boulevard. I caught glimpses of the old abandoned state prison’s sandstone turrets, jutting unlit into the sky. Whatever livened up the city proper didn’t reach this far west. The guy beside me seemed nervous. The driver’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror frequently. I got a feeling in the pit of my stomach this wasn’t about me being asked a bunch of questions I wouldn’t answer.

  Somewhere near Clarksville Pike the driver pulled onto a paved side road. There were no streetlights. I vaguely recalled a golf course in the vicinity. Nobody plays golf at night. Mist coiled around the headlamp beams. The river was close. The driver doused the main beams and drove slower with just the running lights. Metal glinted up ahead, another unmarked Impala. That car started itself, moved sluggishly out of the way, then returned to position behind us, parked perpendicularly across the single-lane road. A third vehicle’s headlights flared irately in the thickening fog and swept across us as its driver gave up and turned around.

  The front passenger tried to slip his own gloves on without being noticed. I noticed anyway. If they worried about leaving fingerprints, I could forget about being chauffeured back to the airport. My brain quietly searched for options. There weren’t many.

  Brake lights changed the fog to blood. Both front passengers had their doors open before we quit rolling. I let myself out, too, quick. My break was expected, but I went low, not high. The front passenger reached around, caught air at four feet and my elbow in his nuts. When he doubled over I snagged his knee and his chin came down hard on the open door. Window glass burst. One down. I spun toward the rear of the car—straight into somebody else’s right hook.

  Two more blows to my lower spine nearly broke me in half. Another fist flashed at my face, seeming to move slower than it really did. I had time to marvel at the irony of a hand in a doctor’s glove inflicting violent damage—but no time to avoid it—then my jaw was on fire and the back of my head smashed into a fender. They worked me back and forth between them, a punching bag that occasionally snuck in punches of its own. The fog’s red tinge flooded my vision and I slumped to the ground beside my first assailant, curled in a swamp of his own vomit.

  “No, sir!” His colleagues hauled me up by my jacket collar. “We gotta talk first.”

  I squinted through looming unconsciousness, battled for comprehension beyond the explosions inside my skull. The kid in front of me had a gloriously blackened eye, which might have given me more satisfaction if he hadn’t also been pointing a gun at my stomach.

  “Where’d you go today, Bedlam?”

  “Coulda asked at the airport.”

  My
words came out like applesauce because I’d bitten through my tongue. The guy holding my collar grabbed a wrist instead and torqued my arm the wrong direction. It hurt.

  “Don’t get cute! Who’d you meet in Vegas?”

  Christ, my head is killing me! Just let me pass out already.

  Pain overmatched my brain. Tendons in my shoulder and elbow were losing their fight to stay connected. I tried to focus on the man with the gun. Figures materialized in the fog beyond him. As if these two needed reinforcements…

  “Who did you meet?”

  This wasn’t legal questioning. If I caved, nothing I told them would stand up in court. Gabe Andrews could take care of himself, he’d understand, wouldn’t he?

  Horse shit! he’d say.

  So I evaded with elegance. “Go fuck yourselves!”

  I braced for fresh hurt that didn’t come. Our little get-together grew by two when the figures from the fog solidified into familiar faces. My arm was released. My knees buckled. Lightning movement passed me as my tormentor sprang and lightning movement met him in the form of a pile-driver forearm with wrist cocked so the heel of the hand made contact. His head jerked backward with a splitting crack. Either the broken neck or the cartilage from his nose driven into his brain would have killed him; he got both. His corpse banged off the Impala’s trunk and slid out of sight.

  The fog fluoresced and stung my eyes. Someone had flipped on the car’s high beams. I sucked in glowing wet air, got my feet beneath me, heaved myself up by the doorframe. The nerves in my arm promised they’d never forgive me.

  The man in the driver’s seat didn’t work for the same outfit as my new boxing partners. His frame was stockier, his hair was long, and a gaudy cut stone fastened to his earlobe fractured the dash lights into rainbow shards. Nick Jones hadn’t grinned that large for his mugshot.

  Delaware Darrowby was there, too. He relieved my other assailant of his gun and both moved in front of the idling car. The younger man had to squint against the lights.

  I wasn’t clear on whether my situation had improved or worsened. But Jerry Rafferty had described me as chum. If they hadn’t caught Rico, they wouldn’t cut bait yet. I wiped the back of a hand across my mouth. It didn’t help. I still tasted blood and my voice still sounded muddy.

  “It’s okay. We were just having a friendly chat.”

  Del smiled wanly. When Nick finished inside the car, Del passed the federal-looking man’s gun to him as if it were a dead rodent, grasping the barrel between two knuckles.

  “I doubt there was anything friendly about this.” His accent reminded me of Peter Lorre in an old black and white horror film, foreign, enunciated, yet classless. But I sounded funnier.

  “What’re you going to do? Arrest me?”

  The big weird blond head shook and icy blue eyes strayed to the boy with the shiner. The kid just stood there while Del’s own handgun loosely tracked him. Nick tipped the confiscated weapon side to side in front of the headlamps.

  “They weren’t gonna arrest you either, dumbass,” Nick said. He drew the slider back and caught the ejected round on a beefy palm, tipping the action so I could see an empty magazine. “Number’s filed off and just one shot.” He returned the cartridge to the chamber.

  The Bureau man—if that’s what he was—had gone paler than Del. Nick walked up to him till he could glare directly into his good eye. Del, ever the diplomat, lowered his weapon and shrugged his wide shoulders at me.

  “Close to the river. So you could dump the body.” Nick wasn’t asking the kid. He was stating facts. “Shit, you good guys are worse than us!”

  He raised the gun, pressed the muzzle to the kid’s sweaty forehead and pulled the trigger. The noise wasn’t much, a sodden thump muffled by bone and tissue. I could have done without watching it right there in the headlights. Nick dropped the gun unceremoniously on the body. He and Del had gloves on, too, like the men they’d killed so casually. I was the only person leaving fingerprints around.

  Del came around to my side of the car while Nick extracted the key from the ignition. He contemplated me sagging against the busted rear door, his expression a study in contempt.

  “For a private investigator, you don’t seem a very astute judge of character,” he said. “A good P.I. would know who his friends are.”

  “You aren’t my friends,” I said.

  His backhand hit my jaw like a runaway freight train and I finally got that nap I’d been dying to take.

  Fourteen

  Who’d added the extra rooms to the condo in my absence? There were thousands. Every door had a number on it and the room behind every door held a dead man with a bullet hole between his wide-open, surprised eyes. I left each room disappointed.

  I never found the butterfly.

  My lids opened at half throttle and I remembered how to focus slower than that. Damp asphalt ground into my cheek. Two yards away in the grass, a mockingbird cocked her head and regarded me quizzically. I’d starve for sure, the way I was trying to hunt. She hopped to a new spot, rhythmically jerking her striped wings outward to startle groggy bugs from the lawn.

  I shut my eyes to be certain the dream had gone. It had. I tried the waking world again.

  By most people’s definition, it wasn’t quite morning. The Cumberland’s mists had gotten denser as sunrise threatened. I’d have stayed with my bruised face on the pavement longer, if the corpse beside me would quit staring. I pressed downward. Rousing pain accompanied me to a sitting position, though last night had been worse. The bird flew off.

  The corpse used to be the first man I’d eliminated from the fight before Del and Nick appeared. I hadn’t killed him. Someone else had stomped on his neck and severed the spinal cord; I could see shoe tread marks on the lusterless skin. Another body rested nearby, nearly peaceful except for the upthrust chin and nasty dark stain which spread outward past the shoulders. A jogging shoe jutted from behind the Impala’s bumper, too, the ankle above it livid.

  This was the second morning in less than a week I’d greeted the dawn with death all around me. I was getting tired of it.

  The car was as dead as its driver. Nick had left the high beams burning till they drained the battery. I rummaged inside by feel, touching with my skinned knuckles instead of the pads of my fingers. I wasn’t so desperate not to leave fingerprints that I’d consider peeling gloves from the deceased’s rigid fingers. The chill and pain set me to shaking but it held nausea at bay.

  My wallet and keys were in the glove compartment. The Smith & Wesson lay in the center console. The phone proved more elusive. Like it or not, bodies needed to be searched.

  The mockingbird returned to check on me. She seemed satisfied with my more reasonable hunting methods and fluttered off again. A hint of solar warmth colored her feathers. By sun-up I ought to be far from that place. I decided to allow myself five minutes.

  The man with the busted necked seemed least likely to have my phone. He’d come around from the front passenger seat when I hit him. My best bet was the one who’d frisked me. His gloves were light blue. Out in front of the Impala.

  Walking didn’t hurt. Kneeling about robbed me of consciousness again, though, and my empty belly churned at the nearness of shattered bone and frothy tissue that used to be the top of a human head. The cadaver twisted reluctantly, stiffened with the onset of decay. The back of the skull stuck to the pavement.

  My phone was in a back jeans pocket.

  I swayed a bit in my crouch. Revulsion knotted my innards. Breathing past my swollen tongue was difficult. But something held me in place: puzzlement.

  Nothing else was in the dead man’s pockets. No wallet, no official badge or papers. Maybe some lint.

  I wobbled upright and let the body flop to its original position. I checked the dead men by the car. Their pockets were just as empty. If I’d known two of them were unarmed and the third only had one round in his gun, I’d have argued more at the airport.

  My five minutes must be done. I shambl
ed into the mists beyond the Impala’s rear fender. My hat lay on the road a few yards on, crushed yet serviceable. I nearly fell over picking it up. Buying another wasn’t something I’d have a chance to do for some time.

  Another asphalt lane intersected mine. Painted white stripes marked the crossing, neither direction of which had ever been meant for full-sized traffic. The new road was for golf carts. The one I followed had been made for bicycles, pedestrians and leashed dogs: the Cumberland Greenway. A disembodied grown-up car rush settled through the fog from overhead and to my left, pre-dawn commuters where they were supposed to be, hurrying to and from the bridge that carried Clarksville Pike across the river.

  In spite of the rules, another car waited for me, dark, motionless, stretched across the greenway. A cyclist barreling down the hill would be in for a jarring surprise. The two men inside the car wouldn’t have moved it or even turned on the lights if I asked. Not necessarily because they were rude. They were just dead.

  My head throbbed. Even parts of me that hadn’t gotten a beating ached. What I needed now was a hot shower, a good meal and someplace softer to sleep than the pavement. Poking my nose yet again where it didn’t belong wasn’t getting me any of those things. I did anyway.

  The windows were remarkably clear for such misty conditions. Not much breathing had been done inside for a while and the two slightly oblong holes in the windshield hadn’t let in much moisture. Fracturing of the glass was minimal; the shooter must have used jacketed bullets and practically leaned on the hood. The passenger stayed upright. His mouth gaped and the eyes on either side of the puckered hole where the bridge of a nose had been stared back at me through the perforated windscreen. The driver slumped against the steering wheel. His bloodied headrest was no improvement over the passenger’s unblinking stare.