Next Last Chance

by Jon A. Hunt

Truck tracks crossed themselves. Fresh mud jutted from the edges of deeply shadowed ruts. The flatbed had turned around here.

  On the northern, uphill side of the road I saw a shed.

  Sunshine wasn’t likely than moonlight to coax more color from the old-fashioned clapboards; they hadn’t met a paintbrush in decades. But the shed had gone up long before people started complaining that no one built things like they used to. The roof hardly sagged. The walls, where visible beneath knotted vines, ran straight. Cut stone footings rose to knee height. The style reminded me of Hillbriar’s old haunted guest house.

  I squinted up the steep hillside into which the shed partially nestled. All I saw were trees and shadows. But the Donovans’ estate had to near enough I could shout hello.

  The penlight beam, muted red by my fingertips, traced tire marks from the road to the antique carriage doors. The wrought iron hasps looked functional but held no padlock and hung apart like an invitation. I tried the handles. Neither door budged. Shiny steel interrupted the gap between the doors, a very modern internal deadbolt. The shed was locked from inside.

  I killed the light and thought a while in what the moon provided, just me and the crickets and frogs. The shed’s more immediate riddle had shut out the voices.

  I tried the penlight again. The crack between the doors was too narrow to see much except maybe a glint of new chrome. The doors themselves were less timeworn than they appeared. I checked the side walls for windows.

  The lone window sidestepped my wishful expectations by a country mile. Small, barred, opaque with grime, it might as well not have existed at all. Poison ivy caressed the frame. I needed to look inside that shed regardless, so I tramped back to my car for the tire iron.

  The trunk light glared. Sandra’s blackmail package formed a stark beige rectangle on the carpeted floor where I’d left it in case anyone happened to nose around the car while I wasn’t watching. If I’d been smart a week ago I’d have stowed my gun in the trunk when I chased my wild goose to Mount Olivet. If I’d been smarter still, I’d have taken the gun with me. Either way nobody had broken into the trunk, and the dealership hadn’t disturbed it: a box of old receipts and an opened padlock from my previous case were still in there.

  Something malicious made me gather up the padlock with the tire iron. I’d picked the lock to get to the receipts. I didn’t have a key for it.

  Back at the shed, the tire iron won a two-minute battle with the noxious vines. A sharp rap against the filthy window pane sent it crashing inward. I waited for my pulse to slow and the crickets to speed up again. Nothing moved reactively inside or outside the shed. I tapped the rest of the glass free, stood on my tiptoes and shined the penlight through the opening.

  Whatever the shed’s original purpose, all it contained now was a new silver hatchback, one of those souped-up variants with alloy racing wheels and a hood scoop for a turbocharger. The tires hadn’t collected much dirt. Through the driver’s side window I spotted carbonless forms peering from the armrest console. My hunch was the Allred’s driver had left this number and hauled away the convertible. Obviously he’d had better luck with the lock.

  The rest of the shed’s interior was uninteresting. Above the hewn stone foundation were hand sawn planks. Hefty-looking built-in shelves were recessed into the back wall and held in place with iron clasps, an absurd bit of finery for a storage building. The shelves held only dust.

  I flicked the light off and listened to the crickets till my eyes worked again. Then I circled to the front, brought the old iron clasps together and secured them with my stolen padlock. Whoever eventually came around to collect the hotrod would need industrial-grade bolt cutters to do so. That’s what they got for parking a fancy new car in the middle of nowhere. I’d been just awake enough leaving my place that morning to stow the three remaining micro-cameras in the Dodge’s glove box; one of them got clipped to a suitable shrub across the road. Then I kicked the gravel out of my shoes, and left.

  The vanilla Chevrolet that found me interesting when I returned to Franklin Pike had a driver shaped like Agent Keith. He didn’t wave. I stopped for a burger. Somewhere between the burger joint and home it got dark and I lost sight of the vanilla car.

  Smally hadn’t returned. Rafferty had already lost one man on babysitting detail. I set the deadbolt and followed the Smith & Wesson from room to room. If I’d had visitors, they’d been careful not to leave a trace this time. I dumped my keys and hat on the breakfast bar, squirmed out of my jacket and shoulder rig, checked my phone. Jerry Rafferty had left two text messages.

  Ellis Ball was dead. He’d hung himself with a dress shirt in a county jail in 2011. That saved me one lead to follow and gave me yet another argument against button-up sleeves.

  The second message had two capital letters—CD—and a camera phone shot of a computer screen in a tiny office. On the screen was a photograph of a man with 1970’s sideburns and a ponderous nose hooked over a handlebar mustache. How in the hell a a baddie from a Dirty Harry movie had kept out of sight so long was beyond me, but Clarence DeBreaux had done it.

  I doubted Sandra would answer my call before she’d slept off half a fifth of ‘39 Macallan. But I could look over her new blackmail letter. I dug the parcel from my jacket.

  Three different stamp denominations suggested a sender with either a solid knowledge of postal rates or a lot of oddball stamps to get rid of. Like the others, this message had reached its destination without cancellation scars. I shook its contents onto the counter. Another key clanked beneath another folded note. The routine hadn’t much changed. A butterfly was mentioned. $85,000 in hundred-dollar bills was to be left at the same time, on Thursday, in another post office, this time on Ezell Pike out by the airport. No pretty picture was enclosed, though Sandra could have extracted what she chose prior to her whiskey-fueled half-naked tantrum. It all had disturbing familiarity, like I should have figured out the punch line by now….

  …son of a bitch.

  Realization clicked like a brass key in a post office box precisely the right size to hold eight-hundred fifty stacked Benjamin Franklins. Exact postage. No cancellation marks. Drop time chosen specifically when a post office would be open, yet not typically busy. No wonder I hadn’t nabbed anyone taking JD’s cash from the box at Whites Creek. The money had been removed from the sorting room side.

  Sandra Donovan’s tormentor had a day job with the United States Postal Service.

  It was easy to pretend I’d gotten out of bed the same time as everyone else. I kept the illusion going till lunchtime by checking my day’s first lead over the phone in my underwear. The second dealership I called had sold the car in the shed. The sales manager wondered why I wanted to know. I lied and said I’d been looking for that exact model.

  “Sorry, there won’t be any others in Middle Tennessee for a while. Track suspension, ride’ll jar your fillings loose, but the thing corners like an Indy car. It takes months to get hold of one, but I can sure put you on the waiting list if you want to leave a deposit.”

  “I’m hoping the owner might sell me that one used. I’d love to add it to my collection.”

  “Uh huh.” The man wasn’t going to give me any names.

  “Well, can you at least give me an idea how long the buyer had to wait?”

  He chuckled. “Not long. But he paid for the car sight unseen, over the phone. Had it flown over from Seattle. If you can do that, I’m sure we could work something out….”

  I had that kind of pull. So did JD. I ended the conversation before I accidentally told the man on the phone he could screw himself. Then I put on sweats, took the stairs to the gym, worked out in spite of soreness, climbed back up the stairs, all without an audience. I showered, made myself presentable, strapped on the .45 and headed downstairs again.

  The sun was up, though sometime during the night Nashville had gotten yet more rain. Streets and sidewalks steamed. The air felt thick enough to chew. I walked to the downtown library because it wasn’t fa
r, parking always took too long, and I didn’t mind sweating.

  I hadn’t called Sandra. I was going to read up on her husband’s family history first.

  History hadn’t paid as much attention to the Donovans as modern tabloids had. A somber librarian at the second-floor Special Collections desk searched for things on her computer to help me get started. She was dismally polite. Backward text from the monitor scrolled across her bifocals. Her voice crackled like parchment pages turning.

  “Immigrant surnames often changed over time. Not because Ellis Island people felt like changing them, as you’ve no doubt heard.”

  “I never believed it,” I quipped. She didn’t look amused. “The original was ‘O’Donovan’. ‘O’ got dropped. They came over during the potato famine.”

  “Who?”

  “Uh, the O’Donovans.” Had Sandra mentioned which O’Donovan? I didn’t recall.

  “We’ll filter out anything before 1840.” I was glad she knew when the potato famine was. “So just ‘Donovan.’ Like the music tycoon.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She typed deliberately. A printer chattered behind the counter and she offered me the resulting pages. I thanked her with a smile. Charm bounced ineffectually off those bifocals.

  For the next hour and a half I trolled through census records on one of the library’s public terminals. Tennessee had had its share of Donovans, O’Donovans, Donaldsons, et cetera, but pinning any of them to Hillbriar proved challenging. The state’s decision to secede at the outbreak of civil war left information holes big enough to march Sherman’s army through. Hillbriar finally turned up around 1880. I jotted the record down, even though the family associated with it then was Schrader. Nothing more substantial showed till Noah Donovan, JD’s grand-daddy, put his signature on a mineral rights form, south of Nashville in 1927.

  Progress, finally. Between marriage records, obituaries, and a daunting array of antique newspaper scans, I found glimmers of a family’s evolving character. Half a day downtown netted me more answers from dead Donovans than I’d ever coax out of the three living representatives, JD, his absent daughter Jetta, and one sister presumably living in Des Moines.

  The Hillbriar plantation struggled after the war. A man named Schrader purchased it from T. Donovan (no further information). T. vanished and no other Donovans reappeared till the Twenties when Noah bought his ancestral home back for a not unremarkable sum.

  JD and his grandfather hardly seemed to have waded from the same gene pool. The younger Donovan built an empire on discretion; Noah did just as well wearing a reputation for scandal like a Hawaiian shirt to the opera. Newspaper photos invariably showed a ostentatiously-dressed man grinning to beat Teddy Roosevelt with beautiful girls draped over his arms. Never the same girls. He lived loud and partied hard in spite of Prohibition, and whenever Nashville got dull he’d find another banker’s wife to sleep with to liven things up again. The local elite rarely did business with him. They didn’t trust Noah Donovan with their money or their wives. Noah couldn’t care less. There were always women and he had more money than anyone. When the South skidded into the Depression, the best carpenters, stonemasons and artisans in the wound up on Hillbriar’s payroll while their former employers were throwing themselves off the tops of buildings. The plantation was rebuilt to exceed its past grandeur. Hillbriar’s employees didn’t worry about market crashes, and that was why I had so much reading material about Noah Donovan eighty years later: nobody knew where he’d gotten the money.

  Writers at the Herald and Tribune and Globe offered theories, each more lurid than the last, none substantiated. The least implausible notion, which Sandra had mentioned, was involvement in the black market liquor trade. But even with Noah’s penchant for impropriety and the sheriff himself living half a mile from Hillbriar, no evidence ever connected him to anything illegal. The seemingly bottomless wellspring of Noah’s funds remained a mystery.

  The estate itself held unanswered questions. Noah reputedly burned the blueprints, and no one knew exactly what improvements had been made. None of the workers he’d fed through the country’s lean years breathed a word; they’d been paid as much for their silence as for their skills.

  By the Forties Nashville and the world had more pressing concerns. Wild Noah Donovan settled into a peaceful common-law marriage and let go of the limelight to raise a daughter. I found a picture of Muriel Donovan in the Herald, when she was about ten, perched atop a pony her father had given her. Cute kid. She looked like trouble.

  The next decades were quiet except for a marriage notice and two obituaries. The marriage was Muriel Donovan’s to Mr. Horace O’Dell. A clear indication of family influence was that O’Dell changed his last name to match his bride’s. A lot of good it did him. He died two years later, the same year Noah passed, leaving Muriel and two small children to carry on the Donovan name. Nothing substantial appeared about JD till his graduation from Vanderbilt, then nothing further till he appeared on the music scene. But I knew where to look next.

  JD’s first wife, Katherine, died on September 7, 2001, less than a week before world-changing events rocked New York and DC. Otherwise, it might have made the front pages. The Tennessean’s story ran in the middle of the paper. Whiskey’s tiny two-dimensional self didn’t look too frightening for having just broken a woman’s neck, but I’d met him in person and knew better. The late Mrs. Donovan’s parents channeled their grief into criminal charges against JD.

  Whiskey was ‘er daddy’s horse ‘fore Mr. JD bought him.

  Accusations were made, ugly accusations. Katherine wasn’t a drinker. She wouldn’t have thought so lightly of her daddy’s fierce jumper that she’d take him for a bareback gallop while stinking drunk. JD said the same thing and was puzzled. Her parents pulled strings to involve the FBI, even though in September of ‘01 the Bureau was very busy. A photo on page twelve showed JD and his gray-haired mother, speaking with unidentified federal-looking men. Beside that image was another of Whiskey grazing in his paddock. Horses aren’t big on drama.

  In the end, everyone agreed Katherine Donovan’s poor judgment had killed her. At least she left the world with a belly full of the good stuff.

  I skimmed through articles about JD’s successes, about the killer horse he refused to put down, about his second wedding. He and Sandra probably looked happy as any other pair of newlyweds but recent experience tainted my view of their engagement photo. The Tennessean oddly downplayed squabbles between JD’s second wife and her stepdaughter. I remembered the stories fine from tabloids. Then came Muriel Donovan’s death, also fresh in my memory.

  Armed with Rafferty’s more accurate history, I wondered if I’d view the business differently. I did not. JD’s charismatic mother had died too soon, too violently, and no one found closure. The official reason for FBI involvement was that their agents were already in town mopping up after a bribery sting; unofficially, the most viable suspect had been killed Rico-style. There was Pennington, in black and white on page three, handling press questions.

  Something jangled a nerve. I clicked back to page twelve of the Tennessean from September 2001. I stared at the scanned photo of a younger and paler JD who’d just lost his first wife in a riding accident. I squinted at the unidentified federal investigators in front of him.

  I’d knocked one of those men around the main lobby of the Airport Marriott yesterday. He was my new best friend, Agent Keith.

  It was time to shut the computer off. When the screen darkened I caught Agent Honeywell’s reflection watching from a couple tables behind me.

  She kept her seat when I claimed one of the empty chairs at the table. Honeywell might be green but she wasn’t dumb enough to try pretending innocence.

  “I’m keeping my gun today,” I told her.

  Her slate gray eyes narrowed. “So am I.”

  That blouse was too tight and smooth to conceal bra straps, let alone a shoulder holster. She probably carried the standard-issue Glock at the small of he
r back. But neither of us was going to shoot anybody. You’re supposed to be quiet in libraries.

  “I’d be a little miffed if they flew me in from DC just to watch some guy surfing library computers.”

  Honeywell shrugged. “Till yesterday I was just running errands. You showed up and got me promoted.”

  “Well, you and Keith, I suppose.”

  Gray eyes met mine directly. “Keith’s Pennington’s right-hand man.” The way she said man had acid. Honeywell faced an uphill battle in a man’s world with the Bureau, and she knew it. “We’re a little short-handed.”

  Down by five.

  “How much do you know about Rico?” I asked.

  “Have you ever had luck questioning Bureau field people about their operations?”

  “I figured I’d try anyway.”

  Honeywell had a killer smile.

  “I didn’t expect an answer,” I said, “How about I give you something to consider?”

  “Do I need to write down your confession, Mr. Bedlam?”

  “Hardly. I’ll just suggest you think about why your boss—and I bet Keith—have been to Nashville at least three times since ‘01, and all three times involved the Donovan family.”

  Her smile faded and her eyes were guarded. I stood.

  “I’ll just be over here looking at maps,” I promised and went back to see the bifocal lady at the Special Collections desk who never smiled no matter how much I flirted.

  I waited for Sunny Miss Bifocals to return as promised, with my elbows on the counter, and glanced through the white-trimmed archway to my left. Honeywell’s red hair, done up in a loose bun, moved so I could tell she was using the terminal between us. A gray eye peered around the monitor every few seconds to make sure I hadn’t run off. Keith was a phone call away. The Special Collections lady reappeared at last, clutching a thin stack of poster-sized maps before her like a shield. She laid them soberly on the counter between us.