Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  Judd smiled grimly. Fitch is right, right about everything. And Jesus, he’s in big trouble now. “And you’d be right. Special Agent Gower has stated that he has no knowledge of the weapon previous to the girl’s use of it in the basement of Lincoln County Memorial Hospital.”

  Bird almost choked on the cigar smoke. “They just finished typing that shit up, how in hell did you...” his words trailed off as he considered the possible source of the information of a man who worked squarely for the Director of the National Security Agency. “As soon as one Special Agent Gower shows up at the crime scene over at the Lee’s beach house one of my ding-a-ling deputies goes and loses an evidence baggy full of the five empty bullet casings left at the scene, and which very likely had some more of his prints on it. The brass is probably at the bottom of the ocean right now. And I got a forensics gal over to Portland who tells me she’s found a latent print on the neck of the reporter fella. Used some kind of new-fangled technique to get it. She’s supposed to call P.D.Q. with the results of the print. And I gotta certain expectation about whose print that’s going to turn out to belong to. Well, in any case, that makes Mr. John Gower a liar. And I hate men who abuse their authority.”

  “So does the Director, Sheriff,” Judd informed him quietly. “So do I.”

  •

  Teddy was dreaming again. In the back of her mind there was a rumble of noise that strangely comforted her. In the forefront of her mind she was trapped in the mansion again. There were bars on the lower windows, elaborate affairs with curlicues and gingerbread decoration that made them appear to be ornamental rather than useful. Her father was outside tapping on the windows again, as if he were trying to tell her something so very important. There were alarms fixed to every door and each window, on the top two floors as well as the basement of the mansion. And there were the cameras. Each was fastened in positions where almost every inch of the property could be viewed. One had even been placed in her bedroom, but she kept disabling it until they decided to leave it alone.

  Anger had been her motivating factor. She had returned to the Howe Mansion in northern Louisiana, alone except for her nurse alias her bodyguard. None of the former servants had remained. Instead they had been replaced by Jackson Theron’s personally hired staff, a staff that were very much aware of which side of the bread their butter was spread. They kept aloof from Teddy and they spied upon her. She was given medicine for the first six months that she was forced to take. The next six months she managed to avoid taking the pills that made her lethargic and unfocused. Then she began to plan her escape. Sometime she felt like the cast of a Hollywood movie intent on an extrication of Tinseltown proportions, and sometimes she wanted to let her uncle win, taking her own life, allowing the depression that being cornered in a gilded cage brought. There was no one to trust, but there was something she could do.

  She detailed the location of each camera in the house. She monitored the comings and goings of each member of the staff. She made judgments on who might look the other way and who might be paid off. And she looked for proof.

  The biggest mistake that Theron made was leaving her computer in her room. He did leave her without access to a telephone line, but Teddy was able to reconnect without a problem. After all, he hadn’t removed the telephone port from her wall and he always seemed to forget how intelligent she actually was.

  One day, a year and a half into her enforced isolation, she was able to hack into the security cameras that watched her own house, using the mainframe that controlled the modernized house that her father had built for her mother. And two months after that, she watched and listened with dumbfounded amazement as Jackson Theron and John Gower incriminated themselves on camera, positive that their position was not only secure but untouchable.

  Teddy dreamed about the past that she’d lived, stirring in her seat as the Fairchild droned away, scouring through the night, and as Fitch absently stroked her scarlet colored hair. The darkness that had covered her life, that had obliterated the last six years of her young existence, was beginning to lift away, and she knew that somewhere, somehow there was a little hope remaining.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Southern United States - August 17th

  From Dr. Morrison’s Guide to Birding, written by Frank Morrison, Starlight Publishing House, May, 2001, pg. 158: The Circus cyaneus is also known as the Northern Harrier. Sometimes the animal is referred to as the Marsh Hawk, in reference to its interest in marshes, which is its almost exclusive habitat during mating season. It is a western hemisphere bird that ranges from Alaska to parts of Central America. These amazing birds have specialized feathers around their faces in the shape of a disk that focuses sound and augments an exceptional sense of hearing. Their rounded face with concave facial disk and large, offset ears is similar to their bird-of-prey cousins, the owls. With dihedral shaped wings, they also possess a recognizable white patch on their rumps that is conspicuous during flight. Adults vary from 16 to 20 inches; the female is somewhat larger. Like the infamous aircraft that is named for them, the Harrier systemically can search an area for prey and then stalls in flight, or hovers for a better look. This is, of course, followed by the hawk pouncing on their prey, whether it is field mice, or some hapless, much smaller bird...

  “Where are we?” asked Teddy groggily. The plane was sitting on the ground; the engine was silent. She blinked against the bright light of day. Sitting with his feet dangling out the door, the Jumpmaster was drinking an icy bottle of Pepsi and observing the outside world. His appearance and demeanor was mundane. He seemed to be enjoying a brief respite of doing nothing at all.

  “Not sure. Definitely Texas. Bumfuck, Texas. Butterbutt, Texas. Something with a ‘b’,” answered the older man. “Don’t like Texas. Especially rural Texas.” He took a long gulp of cola and wiped his mouth off. “The guy filling up the tank said, ‘Hey, you boys ain’t from round here, are ya’ll?’” he exaggerated the drawl. Then he looked over his shoulder at Teddy, expansive blue eyes studying her. “You slept like the dead. Fitch was worried you wouldn’t wake up.”

  Wiping sleep and dirt from her face and eyes, Teddy stretched cramped legs. The Fairchild wasn’t exactly made for comfort. She had slept through hours of the trip, and possibly another stop somewhere in between, and her muscles were protesting as if she had been in a fight with the guys from the WWF at a dockside dive. She grimaced and found the stitches above her eye, touching them gingerly. Two days later and the throbbing was finally starting to abate. “Bathroom?” she requested in a hoarse voice.

  The Jumpmaster grinned and pointed. “Hanger. Same place Fitch went. Trying to rustle up some food. Had to give him my credit card though. Actually it’s Bob’s sister-in-law’s credit card. No Feds tracing that bad boy today.”

  “I’ll pay you...”

  The older man interrupted. “Oh, screw that. F-Bob said you needed help. Needed it bad and I’m not such a bad sort. Besides I needed to put some hours on my license.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Too much time jumping out of the plane and not flying it.”

  Teddy winced at the word jumping, and he moved aside to let her stumble out of the plane. She shielded her eyes and looked around her. If she had to guess she would have said somewhere in the panhandle of Texas. She’d been through there before, a year before, too close to Louisiana for her own comfort, and hadn’t stayed long. A pair of dirt runways extended north and south. An air sock showed the wind was blowing lightly out of the west. A set of hangers and some kind of office sat near where the Fairchild was parked. Beyond that, flat plain land, the color of desert scrub, no trees, and nothing to break up the monotony.

  The sun was up, midway across a blue sky and she thought for a second that it was the same color as the Pacific Ocean at dawn’s first peak, where the sunlight spilled across the cliffs onto an abyss of water teaming with life, waiting for the day to begin anew. Only the landscape was different. No greenery. No lush forest. No rain-swollen waters. />
  And she was in another state, more than several away from where men were actively searching for her, and away from where men used laser-sighted weapons to ensure that their shot was the killing shot. Teddy was hungry, groggy, dirty, and thankful, all at the same time. She smiled gingerly at the Jumpmaster and said, “I don’t even know your name.”

  “Well I know yours, Theodora,” the Jumpmaster said politely. He watched her immediate change of expression and added, “From the moment I saw you. Hey, F-Bob said I shouldn’t watch TV, but he didn’t say I should forget everything I ever saw or read. Anyway, my name is Jerry Garcia. Just like the Jerry Garcia, except I don’t play with the Grateful Dead of the afterlife. And I’m not about to do anything to hurt you, or Mr. Fitch, there. I happen to like that kid, smart mouth and all, and I know for a fact that he means the world to Bob.” And he certainly wasn’t going to mention that Fitch had spent an inordinate amount of time when they’d stopped at Salt Lake City calling up lawyers to spring his old bud, and then setting up a plan that he deliberately excluded Teddy from. Nope, not going to say anything ‘bout that. Just gonna fly the plane.

  There was a hesitation where the old Teddy fought with the new Teddy, trying to judge whether a complete stranger could possibly be trustworthy and someone who would be willing to help them without asking for something in return. Finally, she held out a hand and smiled tentatively at him. She locked eyes with the man and said earnestly, “No one ever called me Theodora except people who want to kill me.”

  Jerry put the bottle of Pepsi into his left hand and grasped her hand solidly for a moment. “Then what? Theo? Dora?” his voice was matter-of-fact. He wasn’t interested in killing her. Hell, no, I wanna jump another thousand times and eating some more of Sheila’s killer brownies. A favor for Bobby-wobbie is the least I can do. A quick jaunt to Sportsmen’s Paradise and then back to floating the winds on my way down, slicing clouds like they were butter.

  “Teddy,” she said. “Teddy’s just fine. It’s what my parents called me.”

  He let go of her hand and pointed toward the office. “The lady over there is real nice. She’ll let you use the little girl’s room and then we can get back on our way again. Just remember though, eagles may soar, but weasels never get sucked into jet engines.”

  The overriding need to urinate battled against the portion of her that wanted to look Jerry the Jumpmaster in the face and say, “Huh?” The former won hands down and Teddy crossed the tarmac where half dozen small planes rested peacefully, and made her way to the small building. Pushing the glass door open she immediately saw the woman that Jerry had been talking about. She was a woman in her fifties with blonde-gray hair tied into a ragged ponytail and sparkling green eyes. She had the tanned, weathered skin of a woman who liked to be outside and the twisted mouth of a woman who was forced to stay indoors on a perfectly fine August day.

  “You must be that gal with them fellers,” said the woman genially. “And don’t you look like something the cat done dragged in after a hard night’s rain.” She chuckled to herself and her eyes immediately shifted back to what she had been doing, typing on an old Smith-Corona that was sitting on a makeshift desk. “The younger one said you’d want to freshen up some. Bathroom’s back that way.” Her fingers kept running over tired keys while she jerked her head to indicate the door behind her. “Ain’t much of a bathroom, but it’s clean and I keep some perty-smelling soap in there. You’re welcome to use as much of it as you want.”

  “Thanks,” said Teddy. “It’s been a long trip.”

  The woman smiled to herself, keeping her eyes on the paper she was typing on. “Sounds like this gal is from Mississippi or maybe Louisiana to me. Am I right, sugar?”

  “Louisiana,” Teddy said, the words dragged out of her. She’d never been able to drop the accent no matter how much she tried. But it was ten times worse when she spent even a minute around someone from the south. “But it’s been years since I’ve been there.”

  “You can take the gal out of the south, but you cain’t take the south out of the gal,” said the woman cheerfully. “Go use that bathroom, girl. Your boy’s out around here someplace. What a cute piece of yummy candy.”

  “I sure appreciate it.” Teddy smiled. Less than two minutes with someone from the south and her accent had returned effortlessly and thoroughly unwanted. She went through the back door to another open hanger and looked around. There was a disabled plane there, sitting inside with a mechanic whose head was stuck into the engine compartment. His upper body was halfway inside the compartment as well and didn’t budge as Teddy made her way across the concrete floor to a door stenciled with ‘restroom’ on it. She went inside and did all the necessary things, including washing her face, arms, and hair. Combing through wet strands of scarlet hair she strained most of the moisture out and immediately felt a thousand times better. A long bath would be ideal, she thought, but that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

  When Teddy exited the bathroom she looked around for Fitch. He wasn’t in the office and the graying, blonde-haired woman had vanished. The mechanic muttered irately that, “I ain’t seen no one for the last two hours, dammit, and Mr. Latimer Freeman is going to be a purely pissed off individual ifin his plane ain’t fixed today like I done told him it would be. Good God, girl, you don’t want to piss off Mr. Latimer Freeman because he owns half the county.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” she assured the mechanic. Then she walked outside the open hanger and saw that Fitch was walking back from a telephone booth that was a hundred feet from the nearest building. He saw her at the same time and his posture changed.

  Teddy had that old thought again, she stuffed it away because it coursed through her mind before she could help herself. Who did he call? And is it his father again?

  With a slow burn of apprehension and fear curling through her stomach like a lead weight sinking to the bottom of an ocean, she waited for him, not sure what to say, whether to accuse or wait for the lead weight to complete its drop to the deepest chasm of the world. Instead, all she could do was examine him mutely.

  Fitch had cleaned up as well. Dressed in a T-shirt he’d appropriated from Bob, and jeans probably from the same, his short, well cut, golden hair moved in a light Texas breeze, and his odd-amber colored eyes caught themselves on hers. He had a long, strong body that showed clearly that he pushed himself physically; the muscles in his arms and chest were visible as he strolled deliberately toward her. There was a strange lack of humor in his face for a change and it gave Teddy further pause. If Fitch wasn’t cracking jokes then it was decidedly peculiar. But he looked at her with leisurely masculine assessment and she couldn’t help the blush that billowed out of nowhere and tinged her cheeks.

  She dropped her gaze to the ground and immediately hated herself for doing it. Then she heard an amused chuckle come from Fitch as he approached her. “I haven’t seen a girl blush like that since the sixth grade,” he said.

  Teddy raised her burning face to his and he stopped before her, closer than what was necessary, studying the pink flush of her normally flawless skin. Only the stitches above her eye would mar those extraordinary features, and Fitch thought that the scar wouldn’t be so bad. It would make her appear less like a beautiful doll-like creature and more like the human being that she actually was. In his opinion, it wouldn’t detract from her attractiveness in the least.

  However, she regained her self-composure with singular ease, rattling off, “And I dread to think of what you did to that girl in the sixth grade to make her blush like that.”

  “Well,” he said sheepishly. “I was young. Raging hormones. Onset of adolescence. All of that. Rebelling against my father. I liked her, too. Pity I didn’t know how to show it.”

  “Who were you calling?” she asked and her eyes never left his.

  Gray eyes, he thought. The soft silver of a dove’s wing. Beautiful and clever. And for God’s sake, don’t forget she knows how to handle a gun. “I called for a pizza.
The town is about ten minutes to the north. Domino’s delivers.” He waved his hand to indicate the glorious array of civilization around them. “Even to South Podunk.”

  “They have anchovies and pineapple?”

  “Yeah, but the Jumpmaster threatened to push me out of the plane without a parachute if I ordered that.”

  “I would eat anchovies and pineapple right now.”

  Fitch pulled a Snickers bar out of his pocket. “How about a candy bar for now? I seem to recall that this kind was acceptable.”

  “For future reference,” she said, with her chin up. “I prefer Almond Joy.”

  He mock-saluted her with the candy bar. “I will remember it.”

  “Do you think they know about Jerry taking off, last night?” she asked him and wondered why neither of them were moving away from each other.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Someone will have located the police car. They would have checked the airport. But we refueled in Salt Lake City and didn’t have a problem. Their problem is that we could have landed at a thousand different airports, including some in Canada.” He pushed the candy bar at her. “You want this?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll wait for the pizza.” There was a hesitation. “Will he get in trouble?” She meant Jerry.

  “The Jumpmaster will deny everything,” Fitch said soberly. “We paid him to drop us off outside of Toledo, Ohio. Or was it St. Paul, Minnesota? I forget. He’ll forget, too. And he certainly didn’t hear a thing about two young people wanted as fugitives.”

  “You found a lot to talk about while you were on the plane.”

  “Long trip.”

  “Doesn’t he need to sleep for a while?”

  Fitch pursed his lips, considering whether or not to tell a woman who was afraid of flying for a very good reason, that he had watched the controls of the Fairchild on autopilot while Jumpmaster had snoozed for a good three hours. He decided that creative prevarication would be the best recourse. “He doesn’t need that much sleep.”