Hellbound

by Chester Campbell

  So when the passengers flocked off the bus at the Tupelo mall, he reverted to the loner image that had served him so well in the past. Lagging back while Troy joined a few of his friends, Bryce moved into the large food court and steered away from the milling crowd of Silver Shadows. He found a place that served sub sandwiches, ordered a half portion, which still looked monstrous, and chose a table on the periphery.

  As he ate, he kept searching the tables until he finally found Marge seated with the Scotts and another woman he couldn’t identify. He thought she was the one who had called to Marge after the shoe-tying episode. He felt a little silly gawking around like this.

  In the solitude of his corner spot, Bryce let his mind churn over what had happened that morning at the church parking lot and what the incident might mean for his immediate future. Basically, he saw two possibilities. One, Boots had died or was incapacitated and had not communicated his findings to anyone else. In that case he was, at least temporarily, home free. Two, Boots had survived mentally intact or had already told others what he knew about Pagano/Reynolds. If that were the case, he could expect company at any time. What that might mean for the innocent bus passengers was a major concern. He would have to remain vigilant, wary of any strangers approaching the group. His only advantage was he had been around them long enough he felt he could spot a Mafia hood a block away.

  After he had finished lunch, Bryce encountered Troy standing in line at an ice cream shop, waiting to order a cone of frozen yogurt.

  “Want me to get you one?” Troy asked.

  “No thanks,” Bryce said.

  “Where’d you go? I looked around and you’d disappeared.”

  “I went to the sub sandwich place. Almost got more than I could eat.” Bryce patted his stomach.

  “Know what you mean. Say, if you don’t mind, Fred would like to swap seats with you on the next leg. We’re both on the Trustees at church. He’s chairman. He has a project he wants to discuss with me. You’d be sitting with his wife, Betty Lou.”

  Marge’s friend, Bryce thought. “No problem,” he said. But he wasn’t so sure.

  They headed out to the front of the mall and found Chick waiting beside his bus. Tillie Ellis had just begun to question him when they walked up.

  “They found some bad injector nozzles,” the driver said.

  Tillie pulled her glasses down and stared. “I have no idea what that is. Did you get it fixed?”

  “They did a rush job for me. Got new nozzles. The mechanic said it looked like they may have been purposely contaminated.”

  “What do you mean ‘purposely’?” Troy asked.

  “Sabotage.” Chick had a grim look on his face.

  “Who would have done that?” Bryce stared at him in disbelief. Though it sounded like the sort of thing that might be expected from the Vicario family, could that be possible? Had Boots known about this trip beforehand?

  “The company fired a couple of mechanics a few days ago. Only thing I can figure is they might have done it to get even.”

  Tillie shook her head. “If that’s the case, let’s hope they didn’t do anything else.”

  “I called the company and told them to keep another bus on standby in case we should need it,” the driver said. “But this one seems to be running fine at the moment. Only problem I see now is the weather.”

  That was hardly the only problem Bryce saw. If Minelli’s crew had already been out making mischief, he faced the challenge of blending in with his fellow passengers while avoiding anything that might single him out as the target for a Mafia hit squad.

  11

  A few minutes later, Bryce eased into an aisle seat near the front of the bus and said, “Hi, I’m Bryce Reynolds.”

  Betty Lou Scott had short gray hair and a plain, uncomplicated face. As she smiled, her crinkled brown eyes viewed him from behind oval-shaped, gold-rimmed glasses. “Fred has spoken of you many times.”

  Right now he was more interested in talking about anybody but himself. But he replied, “Favorably, I hope.”

  “Fred’s one of those people who think you shouldn’t say anything about a person unless you can say something good.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  She leaned toward him, speaking in a conspiratorial voice. “I’ll tell you a little secret, though. He’d dearly love to get you to church or Sunday School, but he won’t push you because he’s afraid it might turn you off.”

  Bryce shrugged. “Maybe after this trip’s over I’ll drop in some Sunday and surprise him.” If I’m still alive, he added silently.

  “That would make his day. Dr. Trent was kidding him last week about falling down on his recruiting job.”

  “Any vacant seats back there?” Tillie asked over the loudspeaker. After a chorus of “no’s,” she continued. “We must be all here then. For all of you who’ve been worried about the bus, it’s fixed. At least for the present. We’ll head on down toward Natchez, where we’ll eat supper. Chick will give us a rest stop after a couple of hours. Polly Pitts has a big bag of cookies she’s going to pass out when we get on the road.”

  “Which one is Polly?” Bryce asked.

  “Short woman in the front seat on the left. Looks sort of like Humpty Dumpty. She raised four kids. Obviously she ate all the leftovers. I might have been that way with my three, but fortunately we had dogs to take care of the table scraps. You have children, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “Please, just call me Bryce,” he said. “No, I don’t have children any longer. I’m afraid there’s nobody left but me. I committed the unfortunate sin of outliving my wife and kids.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. But I sometimes think a little solitude would be nice. Seems we spend half our time hauling grandchildren around, baby-sitting, going to ball games. I spend at least two days in the kitchen before a holiday.”

  Bryce turned to get a better look at her face. “And I’ll bet you love every minute of it.”

  “I suppose so.” Her expression was a cross between a smile and a grimace. “It’s nice to be around a bunch of young folks now and then. Keeps you from feeling so old. On the other hand, I guess it can get pretty lonely when you’re left by yourself.”

  “It was rough at first, but I stayed so busy I didn’t have time to dwell on it...except at night.”

  But the nights had been more than enough. After he had slipped a sheaf of documents out of the consigliere’s office and turned them over to the FBI, they took him into protective custody. During those lonely nights of virtual house arrest, he berated himself for the mess he had made of his life, for the curse he had put on his family. By the time the case went to trial, he had begun to accept that he could do nothing for his wife and sons except try to destroy the criminal conspiracy that had led to their deaths. His testimony was the prosecutors’ key weapon against the mob. They guarded him like gold at Fort Knox, then gave him a new name and spirited him off to Portland, Oregon, where they proposed to give him a new start.

  He had other ideas. He didn’t trust the FBI any more than he trusted those they called the Cosa Nostra. He would rely on his own abilities. After a brief sojourn on the West Coast, he suddenly took his leave, resurfacing some months later in Nashville as Bryce Reynolds, a retired businessman from Tulsa. He had detoured to Oklahoma City, posing as a homeless old man, borrowing the Reynolds name from a fellow derelict who died of hypothermia not long after they met. The real Reynolds had no identification on him when he died and was buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. Pat Pagano found a battered Social Security card among the meager possessions in the man’s cardboard shack. Using the number, he learned a few basic details about the man, enough to construct a plausible story should he find one necessary. But, up to this point, he had managed to avoid any problems by living as a quiet, unobtrusive retiree who existed comfortably on the proceeds of his investments.

  Betty Lou remained silent for a few minutes, gazing out at a peaceful view of a small valley darkened by clouds that jostled one an
other in a crowded sky. She appeared to wear the lines around her eyes proudly, like service stripes earned for tolerance, patience, and endurance.

  When she turned back to Bryce, she had a look of uncertainty on her face. “I understand you were asking Troy about Marge Hunter.”

  “I was curious about her,” he said. “Actually, it was after Troy volunteered that she was his former sister-in-law.”

  “Then he told you about her second marriage?”

  “Yes. What he had learned from you, I believe. Which wasn’t a lot. Sounded like a real sad situation, though. I once knew a man like that, had a major hang-up with jealousy.”

  “If you ask me,” said Betty Lou, “it was pathological. He insisted they move to a another church, one he selected after checking out several different ones. She said it was a church where the people were cold and indifferent. There were several adult Sunday School classes, but nobody invited them to join one until they’d been there almost a year.”

  “That sounds kind of bizarre.”

  “That was just the start. He forbade her to associate with her former friends in Madison. Especially me, when he found out I was Fred’s wife. Marge and I had been close friends since she and Keith were married.”

  “Was she physically abused?”

  “Not that I’m aware of. But she’s been pretty reluctant to talk about any of it.”

  Bryce rubbed his chin. “I remember some Army officers in the war who thought they were God, could do anything they pleased. I think it’s one of the hazards of a military career. Why didn’t she leave him?”

  “That’s the question people always ask, isn’t it? But there’s no easy answer. I think at first she was too shocked to believe what was happening. Her high school alumni association had written it up in their little newspaper, called it a fairy tale romance.”

  “One that ended up a horror story,” Bryce said, shaking his head.

  Before Betty Lou could reply, a jagged flash of lightning struck in a nearby field, lighting up the interior of the bus as if it had been bracketed by a spotlight. A blast of thunder quickly followed, shaking the bus and rumbling off into the distance, triggering a chorus of “Oh’s” from the passengers.

  “That was close,” Bryce said, gazing out the window.

  Betty Lou blinked and composed herself. “Yes. I guess that wasn’t too far from the shock Marge felt over the way Herb acted.” Rain began to pelt the window beside her. “After the shock wore off, I think she went into denial. Except for one earlier period in her life, she was always the strong one. She’d stand up in a community meeting and tell the mayor exactly what she thought.”

  “Sounds like a gutsy lady.”

  “She was, before Herb Hunter came along. But after a while, she apparently came to accept that she’d made a horrific mistake in marrying him. Still, she endured it. She told me once her mother had lectured her on making a marriage work. There’d never been a divorce in the family. Whatever happened, she was too embarrassed to tell any of her old friends.”

  Bryce recalled Marge’s reluctance to accept his well-intentioned assistance outside the bus and understood why.

  “Did you talk to her during that period?” he asked.

  “I called a few times. She’d say she couldn’t talk but she would call me back. She never did. I got my feelings hurt and finally gave up. I wish I hadn’t. It took a terrible toll on her self-esteem. After Herb died, it was a while before she could muster the courage to come back to Lovely Lane. Just about six months ago. She hasn’t told me the whole story, but it’s more than she’s told anybody else.”

  Bryce gave her a curious look. “Why are you telling me?”

  Her cheeks colored a bit, like a little girl caught doing something naughty. “I’ll admit, I probably shouldn’t. But I got the idea you might be...well, interested in her. It was my fault she dated that horrid man in the first place. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not implying anything about you. As I said, Fred thinks the world of you. But I just thought you ought to know. She’s finally gotten herself straightened out, rebuilt her self-confidence.”

  Betty Lou’s face softened into a grandmotherly grin. “What she needs is plenty of good old TLC.”

  Bryce thought about that for a moment. He had to admit, he was definitely interested, but what were his real intentions? Did he have the right to even consider starting a relationship with Marge, or anyone else for that matter? After all, he was under a death sentence that could easily be carried out at any moment.

  As that thought began to sink in, it touched off a spark of ire. Was he going to continue to let these cutthroats dictate his every move? He hadn’t hesitated to step up and meet the threat during the war. After the Mafia trial, he had changed identities and adopted a subliminal existence for good practical reasons, an overwhelmingly clear and present danger. But there was a big difference between fear and prudence. If these guys were out to do him in, he did not intend to make their job easier.

  What he felt most was anger and frustration. Right now he had no clear idea of the dimensions of the problem. All he knew for sure was that Boots had found him just before he boarded this bus. The next move was up to his pursuers.

  12

  Streaks of lightning flashed overhead and the dark clouds began to unburden themselves as the Cadillac cruised down the Trace south of Tupelo. Locasio’s cell phone rang. He punched the talk button.

  “Yeah?”

  “Dom, it’s Marco.”

  Locasio leaned forward in the seat and slipped a cigarette from the pack with his free hand. “How’s Boots?”

  “Not too good. They’ve got him hooked up to all kinds of tubes and monitors. He hasn’t opened his eyes. He’s in the Cardiac Care Unit. They’ll only let me in to see him every few hours.”

  Locasio clicked his lighter and took a short puff. He knew only family members could visit patients in the CCU. “Who did you tell them you were?”

  “A nephew traveling with him,” Marco said.

  “Good move.” Marco wasn’t the swiftest cat in the litter, Locasio thought, but he wasn’t a total blockhead.

  “They let me check Boots’ clothes and I found something that should be a big help to you.”

  “What’s that?” Locasio blew out a stream of smoke and moved the phone to hear Marco better.

  “It says Lovely Lane United Methodist Church LLSS New Orleans Tour Itinerary. It has dates and times for where they’re going to be.”

  “Did you find a passenger list?” Locasio asked.

  “No. Just this itinerary.”

  “Damn, Marco. That’s not much help. We know where they’re headed, and we know they’re staying at the Day’s Inn in Natchez tonight. We can follow the bus on to New Orleans.”

  “Sorry, Locasio. That’s all I found.”

  “Well, get the hell back in there and keep an eye on Boots.”

  Locasio had just switched off the phone when Joe Blow let out a loud whoop. Locasio gave him a surly look. “What the hell was that for?”

  “We’ve caught ‘em,” Joe said. “That’s the Nova Tours bus up ahead.”

  A grin spread over Locasio’s face. “Just follow it and let’s see what they do. Pagano, get ready. We’re after your ass.”

  The rain had turned to a slow drizzle by the time Chick turned into the rest area north of Jackson. Bryce followed Betty Lou off the bus and found Marge and her seatmate huddled under a large red umbrella. Betty Lou tugged Bryce beneath a small, collapsible model as she made the introductions.

  “Bryce Reynolds, this is my sister, Sarah Anne Yeager. She’s from Chicago.”

  “Nice to meet you, Sarah Anne,” Bryce said, smiling.

  Sarah Anne was a little taller than her sister, and a bit thinner. She also had a more sophisticated look, which he took as the mark of a girl who had spent most of her life around the big city.

  “Actually,” Sarah Anne said, “I live on the north side of Chicago, in Evanston.”

  “And this is
Marge Walden Hunter.” Betty Lou emphasized the middle name. “I believe you two have already met.”

  “Very informally,” Bryce said with a nod. “We read each other’s badges.”

  “Mr. Reynolds tied my shoe for me this morning,” Marge said with a look of distraction. “I’m sure you heard about it.”

  Betty Lou rumpled her brow. “Oh, yes. Clara Holly made a beeline to where I was standing. She couldn’t wait to tell me.”

  Bryce cocked his head to one side. “Am I missing something here?”

  “Small minds fixate on small details,” Sarah Anne said.

  Betty Lou threw up her hands. “You’d have to know Clara.”

  Marge looked at him, a trace of sparkle in her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll meet her soon enough.”

  The building beyond them had restrooms on one side, drink dispensers and snack machines on the other and a small lobby in between. Betty Lou turned to Bryce. “I don’t want to point, but see the terribly fat man and the skinny little woman going into the lobby?”

  “Betty Lou,” her sister said, frowning. “You shouldn’t call him terribly fat.”

  “Who just said something about small minds? Anyway, I call it like I see it. Clara Holly is skinny and Horace is short and fat.”

  Sarah Anne smirked. “I’m sure you’ve noticed my sister doesn’t mind expressing her opinions, Mr. Reynolds.”

  “Hey, I’m Bryce,” he said. “Everybody keeps calling me ‘Mister.’ Makes me sound like some kind of dignitary. I’m just plain folks.”