Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

  The doors were locked. You could never be too careful in neighborhoods like that. I wasted thirty seconds searching for a rock to smash out the passenger side glass, and another thirty seconds hunched in the roadside weeds in case somebody came to investigate the noise.

  All that, and I found more of the nothing I expected. Neither man had a weapon. If they carried wallets, I couldn’t see them and didn’t feel like groping beneath sitting corpses. The glove box held an unopened owner’s manual, a penlight, and a travel first aid kit. I helped myself to a foil packet of aspirin and ate them dry. The bitter taste helped me focus elsewhere besides the smell. I bumped the glove box shut with a wrist and frowned at the dark plastic touch screen in the dash, which presented me with an interesting idea.

  Leaning over the passenger’s cold knees, I twisted the key in the ignition to the accessory position. Dash lights glowed. Bopping a knuckle against the navigation system buttons rewarded me with the last entered destinations.

  Ted Rhodes Golf Course. Not helpful, we all knew where that was.

  600 Marriott Drive looked promising. The rest were addresses for restaurants where locals knew better than to eat.

  I turned the key off and eased back out into the fog. That proved more jostling than the stiff in the passenger seat could tolerate. His ruined face lolled forward a few inches, as far as the seat belt and rigor mortis allowed. Metal glinted in the mess where his head had rested.

  Christ…

  I opened the glove compartment again. My better judgment began to lose patience and made my hands shake. The penlight seemed dazzlingly bright. Nonetheless, seeing past crusted hair and gore wasn’t easy. My eyes would rather not focus anymore. I insisted.

  It was the base of a bullet, all right. Very shiny. Engraved.

  “Hello, Number Eight,” I murmured to an ear that couldn’t hear. I shut off the penlight, closed the glove box again and backed out of the car.

  A woman in neon Spandex watched me stand with eyes so wide the whites showed all around. She fumbled for a pepper spray canister on her hip. As frantic as she was, she’d probably only blast herself, so I shook my head. She took the hint and sprinted off—not in the direction she’d come, because she’d been trespassing to run on Ted Rhodes’ fairways—but down the greenway where I’d just been. Karma had three more grisly rewards for her.

  I went the opposite direction, up the hill toward the street, fast as I could manage.

  Funny, when dormant memory decides to kick in. I’d been in that exact spot two springs ago. There’d been less fog. The guy I chased then hadn’t beaten the hell out of me, and no one had gotten shot. I recalled a straight stretch of greenway from there to Ed Temple Boulevard. The direction chosen by that morning’s jogger required her to run all the way to the river, past the trio of corpses left by Nick and Del, then under the bridge and around the rest of the golf course for a quarter mile to the nearest parking lot. Cutting across the fairways wouldn’t get her anyplace sooner. Maybe after today she’d give up exercise altogether.

  Either way, there’d been nowhere to hide a phone under that Spandex. I might just make my way off the greenway before a 911 dispatcher heard about me. My sprint closely resembled a shuffle but at least it was a damned quick shuffle.

  Colors moved ahead. Sounds emerged. Passing headlights half blinded me when I staggered onto a sidewalk. No one slowed. Every city’s got drunks, and the ones still mobile at four A.M. are best avoided. It was a smart role and I went with it.

  Left, toward the bridge. Better cross now, before every on-duty Metro cop started searching. The crossing light took a million years to acknowledge me.

  Had she gotten to a phone?

  WALK, the crossing light commanded.

  Thank you, I will.

  The far side of the Cumberland from five men dead of suspicious causes was where I wanted to be. I’d call a cab from the drugstore over there. Just a drunk on my way to somewhere else. Maybe I’d buy a candy bar.

  Fog the consistency of sawmill gravy reduced bridge traffic to creeping. It also amplified approaching sirens. I kept my head bent, hat pulled low, hand on the rail the way any career sot would cross a bridge. Blue light startled me, not a prowl car but my mobile phone winking through the torn lining of my jacket. Didn’t anybody sleep in this town?

  I made the end of the bridge, veered to my right between the railing’s end and an electrical transformer, dropped into weedy shadows before the first Metro car charged the bridge from the Clarksville end. Alternating white and blue flashes convinced every driver on the span to stop there. The officer barked over his loudspeaker but nobody remembered which way “to the right” was. More sirens on the far bank taunted him. Cold concrete and clutching brush concealed me. I adjusted the phone’s screen to the lowest brightness setting.

  Danny Ayers had tried me from his direct line in the basement at Cool-Core. I wondered if he’d be able to hear me.

  “Danny?”

  “Ty? Ty! Is that you? Good grief, who else would you be? Thank God—” He sounded awfully awake for four in the morning.

  “Calm down, Danny. Can’t talk long—”

  The prowl car inched onto the bridge directly behind me and blipped its siren.

  “What was that? Cops?”

  “Traffic,” I evaded. “You going to tell me why you called?”

  Danny was drowned out by honking and more yelling over a megaphone, then: “—locked the building down. Nobody can get into the garage. We can’t go home unless we call a cab.”

  “Who locked the building down?”

  “The FBI! Dozens of them, suits, badges, guns, everything. They were looking for you.”

  I was pretty sure they’d found me. I had bruises to prove it. Then again, none of those agents had had inclination or means to share their happy discovery…

  Danny didn’t know I was thinking and hadn’t paused. “—they said you were in trouble and if anybody knew where to find you—”

  “Jesus, Danny, what did you tell them?”

  “Are you okay? You sound funny.”

  “Danny!”

  “I—I just said you’d dropped the car off and left. They didn’t spend ten seconds looking at it through the lab window and started grilling everybody else.”

  Great. If the feds had sealed up Cool-Core, every cop, taxi and bus driver, security guard and traffic warden in Nashville had my description memorized. Rafferty wouldn’t be able to run interference for me if he wanted to. Staying in Vegas might not have been such a bad idea.

  “Are they watching the building now?”

  “Um….I don’t know. I patched into the security cameras. Nobody weird shows up outside. People with shotguns and white gloves are going through every car in the garage.”

  “You can probably leave, then. I assume this line is secure?”

  “Absolutely!” He sounded hurt and prideful at the same time.

  “Okay. I need you to come get me. Can’t trust public transportation, too obvious.”

  “My VW is in the garage.”

  “Sorry, Danny. Think of something. Please just quietly come and get me. Walgreen’s on Clarksville Pike, across the river. Borrow somebody’s car if you have to, just come alone.”

  “Ty, you’re….you’re not all right, are you?”

  Danny was a friend. I had a shortage of those, so they needed to know I trusted them.

  “I’ve been better,” I said.

  “I’ll be there quick as I can.”

  The air had begun to clear. Honest-to-goodness sunshine stretched across the fuzzy Cumberland. None of the drivers heading downtown saw me as anything besides a weaving silhouette and the police car had gotten across. The fast food restaurant twenty yards from me remained dark—fried chicken still wasn’t that popular for breakfast—but a sign with a church steeple and a blue stream and purple flowers gleamed proudly in the new daylight:

  Welcome to BORDEAUX.

  I took a moment to steady myself and limped into
Bordeaux.

  The drugstore was open for business. And full of security cameras. So much for that candy bar. Red and white placards on the brick exterior warned that the loitering I was doing was prohibited. Fortunately, Danny showed up before my transgression was noticed.

  The kid arrived with a ponderous rumble and a clumsy thumping lurch when he forgot to disengage the clutch before stopping. I’d asked him to come quietly and he’d brought the Viper.

  I got in the passenger side before he unlatched his seatbelt. “You got it this far,” I said.

  Danny’s face colored to match his unruly red hair. He jumped a little at my battered appearance but had gathered by now I didn’t wish to discuss it. “This was the only thing not in the garage,” he explained. “I drove back out the lab delivery doors.”

  The gears made a protest that set my teeth on edge as we lunged toward the lot exit.

  “The clutch is a lot more sensitive than the last model’s.”

  “You’ve driven one?” I was too tired to window-dress my incredulity.

  “Sure! On my PS4. I’m pretty awesome in it there.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Where to?”

  Where else can you go when every person in the city has been searching for you?

  “Home,” I said.

  Danny’s grasp of geography was several notches below his driving skills, so I told him to just follow Trinity Lane along the curve of the river, then I-24 south. His ratchet steering and hammer-footed manipulation of the pedals had me thankful for an empty stomach. The bridge after the stadium arched through sodden remnants of morning fog. Traffic multiplied till even an awkwardly handled V10 sports car wasn’t that conspicuous. My chauffer managed to settle the Viper into my regular parking slot beneath the condo without leaving paint on the concrete columns. The lobby was empty. We risked the elevator to spare Danny the trouble of carrying an injured man half again his weight up the fire stairs. I let him unlock the door with my key and I pushed ahead of him into the condo.

  Smally wasn’t there. The entry light had been left burning. I typically shut it off unless I expected company; Smally might be fine with running up my electric bill. He’d not seemed the type to leave every light on, though.

  “Hold up,” I warned Danny and he froze mid-step as the door snicked shut behind us.

  My breathing made more noise than I liked and my pulse echoed around inside my skull. If somebody waited besides Smally, I didn’t have much fight left in me. All was not shipshape.

  The kitchen had a couple empty Coke cans beside the sink. The television in the living room still hadn’t been dusted. Sunshine flooded at oblique angles through the space and separated my belongings into deep shadows and dazzling highlights. Two-year-old magazines fluttered on the coffee table in the breeze of the ceiling fan and the box with Danny’s micro-cameras sat there, undisturbed. Smally wasn’t the sort who’d be interested in electronics or periodicals. My eyes darted to the bookcase. Several old leather bound volumes were upside down….not the ones I’d put that way.

  I darted forward almost too quick for my unsteady knees to handle, to the bookcase. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. I’d never been a fan, though I’d let the pages of his writing safeguard several hundred in cash for emergencies. The money was all there. I left Danny in the entryway and stumped to my bedroom. The socks in my dresser drawer no longer had my other bobtailed Smith & Wesson to keep them company.

  Every room had been gone through, by a professional who knew how to look but hadn’t been overly concerned that I might suspect snooping. I needed to check one more place. When I opened the cupboard under the kitchen sink, stooping introduced a surge of vertigo that slapped me in the face with a tiled floor.

  “Ty! You okay?”

  I let Danny help me to a sitting position. “Yeah, yeah, I will be,” I muttered. “There’s a can taped up under the sink, way in back. Can you get it?”

  Danny plunked to the floor beside me and dug inside the cabinet. My eyelids flopped shut till the tear of tape roused me. A small metallic object clattered onto the tiles and rolled under my knee. I covered the familiar shape with a palm before Danny could see it and I slipped it into my jacket pocket. He turned and presented me with the old metal bandage tin I kept duct-taped to the plumbing. I flipped the lid open. Sandra’s tattoo picture wasn’t inside anymore.

  “Thanks. You know how to operate one of these?”

  “Smith & Wesson 1911. Great gun, shot it thousands of times on the PS4.” To demonstrate his knowledge, Danny took it and checked the safety like a pro, though I could tell the weight of a real 1911 surprised him. Handing Danny my sidearm wasn’t ideal, but I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes open another ten minutes and someone needed to be ready for trouble. He grinned reassuringly. “Go ahead and get some sleep, I’ll keep watch.”

  I smiled back at the kid—smiling hurt—then heaved myself up and headed to the shower. While the water heated up, I draped my shoulder rig over the towel bar, fished the small metal cylinder from my pocket and held it up to the vanity light. The spent brass casing didn’t belong to me. Very neatly, near the base, the number 9 had been scratched.

  “Hey, Danny?” I called out to the living room.

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep away from the windows.”

  Fifteen

  I slept like the dead. Except at midnight, when I popped out of the covers craving Tennessee whiskey. I was nowhere near the drinker my old man had been. The bottle in the kitchen was as old as the cupboard and two thirds full like I’d left it. Whoever rifled my condo had liked guns and naked women better than a stiff drink.

  Danny had switched the lights off. He was a good kid. His legs dangled over the arm of the sofa, which he’d turned to face away from the windows with no small effort, and he snored softly. The Smith & Wesson rested on the carpet. A floor-to-ceiling vista of downtown sparkled behind him. I retrieved the gun quietly as I could for being stiff and sore, sat on a stool at the breakfast bar and turned on the lights over the counter. I was in Smally’s favorite seat.

  Where was Smally? For that matter, his more diminutive day-shift alternate hadn’t shown, either. Jeffers had been his name. We’d had our little joke about Smally’s literary tastes out by the elevator. Calling off both nannies without telling me wasn’t like Rafferty.

  My phone had shut itself off, so I connected it to the charger on the counter. A leather journal lay there with a sharp pencil, waiting for me to take the hint. Flipping two pages brought me to a blank one. I scratched out some names. PIs

  think that way, right?

  1. DeBreaux (formerly Barr)

  2. Ellis Ball

  3. Sandra

  4. JD

  5. the girl in the blue Mazda

  6. Nick, Del

  7. Rico

  Rico wasn’t the world’s only list-maker. That was worth a tip of the glass. I concentrated on the burn as it traveled down to my yawning stomach. Then I sketched an arc between DeBreaux’s name and Ellis Ball’s. I drew marks connecting Sandra, JD, DeBreaux. What about JD’s daughter? He hadn’t responded kindly to my asking. I’d touched a nerve. The whiskey told me I should pencil in Jetta beside 5) the girl in the blue Mazda. Usually whiskey is an idiot.

  Rico’s name watched me think. Probably more space belonged between him and 6) Nick, Del. But they had more in common than being enemies. All three had made sure I lived through Friday night. That was something to consider. The bad guys were the ones who’d saved my ass.

  The pencil insisted on adding Pennington. His name made the least sense of all: FBI superstar, hasn’t caught his man in fifteen years, can’t keep track of his own agents, keeps his job anyway. And if those five dead men on the Cumberland Greenway didn’t really belong to Pennington or J. Edgar Hoover….who had owned them?

  Nick and Del’s boss in Nevada certainly hadn’t.

  Nor had Rico.

  And why had that engraved 9mm shell been stuck under my kitchen sink for me
to find?

  No wonder I hadn’t turned up Sandra Donovan’s blackmailer. Her screwed-up world was nothing compared to mine.

  I closed the journal. Before I flipped off the lights I dumped the rest of the glass into the sink. Whiskey’s usually an idiot and I didn’t get out of bed for idiots.

  My jaw was still tender the next morning and the shower stung my left cheek; I skipped shaving. I liked Smally’s coffee but he’d never shown up; I reacquainted myself with the brewing process. The eggs in the refrigerator hadn’t spoiled and under my nasty hat in the freezer I found a package of pre-cooked breakfast sausages. Coffee gurgling and things frying roused Danny. He slid to the floor and groped, embarrassed, for the .45.

  “I got it,” I said. “I’m the one licensed for those. Hungry?”

  “Yeah!” Danny landed on a barstool across the counter in half a blink. I sloshed coffee into his mug.

  “When was your last vacation?”

  “Thanks. Um, a while.”

  “Any pets?”

  Boyish faces are never good at showing suspicion, though Danny’s made a commendable effort. Everyone at Cool-Core knew his personal life consisted of researching gaming consoles till his thumbs wore out. “A couple fish. Why?”

  “I appreciate your helping out, but Nashville’s a place for you to avoid till this gets straightened out. Sorry. The company jet’s at the airport by now. I’ll cover bills for a couple weeks and let Griffin know. I’m guessing you don’t have a visa, so it’ll have to be in the States. Other than that—” I held my arms wide expressively and suppressed the wince.

  Danny’s eyes widened. “Anywhere? Wow. Thanks!”

  “Don’t mention it—I mean it, don’t—it’ll be a surprise when the pilots hear it from you.”

  It had occurred to me our conversation might not be exactly private. I didn’t want to add worrying about Danny Ayers to my growing list of concerns.

  No person on earth could have worn relief more plainly than Delbert Ray when Danny and I entered the showroom with the Viper’s key fob. Then he got a closer look at my bruised jaw and scabbed knuckles, and his expression changed to one of utter horror.