Only the Wicked

by Gary Phillips

  His jacket and shirt were wet from sweat, mud and blood. He had to keep going. If he slowed down too much, if he stopped to rest, he’d become too aware of the fatigue starting to corrode his energy. He reached a large machine, the harvester. Fantastically, Monk figured how long it might take him to get the tiling going and drive to the buildings. He Just as quickly dismissed the idea. Stuck in the cab, fumbling with the levers and buttons in the dark, was putting himself in too vulnerable a position.

  Going around the machine, a bolt of pain lanced his side. He sagged against the harvester, pinwheel bursts going off behind his eyes. Come on, Monk, don’t let yourself down now. Come on, breath in, breath out, legs up then down. He got up, the butt of the Desert Eagle pistol digging into his back where he’d tucked it snug in the waistband of his ruined Dockers. He listened and of course there was no sound of another human. No creak of feet on leaves or the click of a gun’s hammer.

  Monk was now feeling along the harvester. In front of that was the low-slung rectangular hulk of the main building not more than twenty-five yards away. Its door was probably locked, but that wasn’t a problem with a shotgun.

  Then again, maybe he wouldn’t go there. Didn’t it seem the most obvious way to go—for the main building? Why not try one of the ones he’d noticed set at angles to this central one? Whatever he chose, he was going to expose himself. He didn’t think Kanner had a high-powered rifle with a night scope. At least, to keep himself from freezing up with self-doubt, he had to believe he didn’t; Kanner would have used it by this time. Kanner had to believe he was as alone as Monk was. But Monk had to believe he had more to live for.

  Whatever prankish supernatural being rolled the dice to decide his personal destiny, he just had to believe he had one more throw of good luck left. He didn’t run straight toward the main building, but toward the one tucked behind a stand of several tractors. A couple of the machines had loaders attached. Several shots cut the dirt to his right ahead of him. Kanner was in the main building, having guessed that would be where Monk would head. Monk dove beside one of the loaders. Kanner didn’t waste a shot.

  Luckily too, Kanner only had a pistol, judging from the weapon’s report. Which meant he’d have to get close to get the job done. Good enough. Monk felt around and undid the wheel locks of the loader. Pressing his shoulder against it, the throbbing steady, he pushed the thing. Designed to be mobile enough to hook and unhook from a tractor, the loader with its slanting elevator leading up to its discharge spout creaked along. Monk had placed the shotgun on a horizontal area of the machine. Having gone several feet with the loader for cover, he was now breathing hard and sweating like a stuck pig, as his dad used to say.

  The gun clattered and got caught in something at the loader’s base. The wheels stopped turning, and Monk concentrated on remaining calm. In the murk, he felt about and latched onto the Browning, partially jammed against the tilling shaft. He yanked on it, his shoulder blade warm with his blood. Was that footsteps? Come on, please, he pleaded with himself, trying to wrench the shotgun free.

  Abruptly it loosened, and Monk staggered backward, bumping into something smooth and cold. It was another piece of farm machinery, the purpose of which escaped him at the moment. He was near his destination and took several moments to get some strength back up.

  “Monk,” came a quiet voice over the stillness.

  Monk cradled the shotgun.

  “There’s money in this for you, Monk. Two hundred, hell, three hundred thousand for you to make it go away.”

  “Aw, why didn’t you say so before, buddy?” He started moving the loader again toward the smallish bulk of the building. “Those guns going off at me were just to get my attention, huh?” His shirt underneath his mud-caked jacket was clammy and clung like Spandex to his skin. The building was less than forty feet from him.

  “Two bodies in the woods, even in Mississippi, are going to take some explaining,” Kanner went on. “You’ve proved yourself a difficult man, Monk. We want to keep things efficient. Money is a great way to achieve understanding.”

  Monk assumed he wanted to keep him talking as he snuck out of the main building and crept toward where he could hear the loader being moved, the sounds masking Kanner’s movements. Monk stopped moving the loader. He was tired and he was getting fuzzy in the head again. He plucked the shotgun off the machine, and sat in the dirt next to the wheels.

  “I suppose I’m to wait here while you go fetch the dough.” And more gun hands.

  Kanner laughed easily. Monk could tell he wasn’t calling to him from the building. “I know you’re no fool, Monk. I drive off, you drive off. The money gets wired to you where you say.”

  “You got Tigbee’s say-so to approve this?” He got up on one knee, listening for the footsteps beneath the voice.

  “You know I do,” the other man said with confidence.

  Monk positioned himself so the barrel of his Browning was pointing toward the main building. He adjusted, swinging the shotgun left, guessing, if he were Kanner, what path he’d take toward him. Certainly not a straight line from the structure. “Let’s say four hundred grand. That way I got enough to set aside, and your boss has made a substantial payment knowing I won’t be showing up for another bite.”

  “Fine,” Kanner said casually. “I’m sure you’re a man of your word.”

  Monk let off two blasts, one beside the other to hopefully give the other man pause. He darted for the small building and sank beside a corner and some overgrown grass just as a shotgun blast tore into the air. Kanner had been holding back. Monk crawled on his hands and knees to the rear of the building. He got up and felt along the wall until he clasped a metal knob. The door was locked, but one blast took care of that. Monk plunged inside, closing the metal door behind him.

  The Browning was empty but he still had the five shells he’d gotten off Grainey. The room he was in had several low tables at right angles to each other. He felt around and determined the room was for repair and general maintenance. Various parts lay about the tables, and numerous tools were pegged on the walls and encased in their rollaway tool boxes. Monk went to the front door.

  The area around his shoulder blade had settled down again to a dull numbness, and the blood seemed to have begun clotting.

  There were safety-glass windows on either side of the front door. Crouching down, Monk looked out as he reloaded the shotgun by feel. Gasping, he put one of the rollaway tool boxes, itself about four feet high, against the door. If Kanner blew off the lock, the rollaway would slow him up a few steps.

  There was a phone with several lines available on an industrial-type office desk. Picking up the handset, Monk couldn’t get a dial tone no matter what line he punched. He didn’t expect to, but he had to try. He reviewed the possibilities.

  Kanner might have called for backup already, but Monk doubted it. Surely Tigbee had learned from experience that the more people he called in on this, the more chance there’d be a leak about the killing later. Conversely, waiting here until the sun came up didn’t necessarily improve his odds. This must be a company Tigbee owned. No doubt he could shut it down for a day or two for some reason or another, and wait Monk out.

  No, he had to do something of a more aggressive nature, because Kanner would also be upping the stakes. He would have to show Tigbee, now, after Monk had bested the first two, that he was the man. That he could get the job done.

  An engine revved. It must be the LTD since the Taurus wasn’t driveable. With icy certainty, Monk leaped ahead in his reckoning as the lights snapped on from the vehicle. The car’s lights swung toward the building, then veered off. Monk unlocked the front door and cracked it open a millimeter. He could hear the car circling, the lights off now.

  Kanner plowed the stationwagon through the rear of the repair building. Parts and tools sailed everywhere as several work-tables got shoved toward the front. Monk tumbled out the front door, seconds ahead of getting trapped against the wall. As quickly as he could, he ran
around the building. Kanner would think he’d dash away—he was going to catch him as he came around the corner.

  The Browning was up and aimed and suddenly Monk was staring at a heavily breathing form also holding a shotgun up and ready. So much for his plan.

  “My, my,” Kanner proclaimed. The barrel of his shotgun twitched.

  “Isn’t it,” Monk responded, his finger tightening on the trigger. Oddly, he could hear frogs splashing into the stream but not his own heartbeat. The world was Kanner and his shotgun. Time crawled. Sweat clouded his right eye, blurring his sight. The wagon’s engine was still running. His finger shook. Monk blinked rapidly, trying desperately to clear his eye. The shotgun felt so heavy.

  Both guns went off almost in the same instant.

  Chapter 24

  Sheriff Brian Lauter of Tunica County scratched at the back of his ear with the blunt end of a pen for the umpteenth time. He and two of his deputies regarded Monk. The three men and the doctor were white. The PI was stretched out on the table, like an exhibit they’d read about, but weren’t sure what to make of once the thing had arrived in town.

  The doctor finished and stepped back, examining his handiwork. “Not bad, not too bad.” He lit up a filtered Marlboro.

  “This is nasty,” Lauter said, again, not for the first time.

  Monk sat up, the cuff around his wrist pulling on the other end that clinked around the railing. “You call my lawyer?” The gauze and tape on his back and the top of his shoulder chafed. He was woozy from the local anesthesia, and he was freezing. He flexed the stiffening muscles in the shoulder and chest the doctor had plucked buckshot out of for the last two hours. He was lucky it was mostly a miss, the bulk of the pellets having gone past him as he’d ducked and dove aside. Had the blast been full-on, they’d be calling him Lefty.

  “This office ain’t your legal service department,” one of the deputies growled. “Maybe y’all get that kinda treatment back home, but not down here.”

  Monk grinned listlessly. “Nice to know law enforcement is consistent no matter where I go.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” The belligerent deputy took two steps forward.

  Lauter tipped his hat up and zeroed the deputy before turning his glare back at his prisoner. “Maybe you don’t realize what kinda predicament y’all are in, Monk, but lookie here: You done bored out Lester’s guts with your non-registered weapon. Interestingly, he survived despite the mud and filth he was wallowing in. Of course, a colostomy bag is gonna seem like a luxury to him from now ’til whenever. Then there’s Grainey, whose nose and jaw you done broke and fractured. Now he’s probably gonna sue you for all you’re worth.”

  “That can’t be much,” the other deputy, a tall balding man, snickered, his thumbs hooked in his gun belt.

  Lauter continued with his summary. “And Kanner was a licensed private investigator in four states—well, three, you don’t need a license in Denver where he kept a desk and a phone in the upstairs of a peek-a-boo joint.” Lauter got miffed at allowing himself to digress. “What I’m getting at, he counted judges and members of the Mississippi State legislature as his clients and friends.”

  “And I imagine his wife is going to be real displeased with the knowledge of you blowing her husband away,” the first deputy prophesied. “He’s got more than one friend gonna cause you to tip-toe around … brother.”

  Monk shivered in the cold room they’d wheeled him into off the main wing of the emergency ward. His shirt had been ripped away and his drenched torso and mud-soaked pants were clammy against his legs. Nobody offered a blanket, and he wasn’t going to give the law the satisfaction of asking for one now.

  “Did you call Manse Tigbee yet, Sheriff?”

  That surprised Lauter. “Of course, Mr. Kanner had been in his employ for some time.”

  “Then you should know two lawyers in Los Angeles, a judge, a cop, and a private investigator—who’s an ex-cop—know all about the information which made Tigbee send Kanner and those other two after me. Information Tigbee doesn’t want known, but it’s too late. Even if his hired motherlovers had succeeded in icing me, it was already too late.”

  “What you getting at, Monk?” the hard-nosed deputy asked. There was the hint of worry behind his tough talk.

  “What I just said.”

  The three law enforcement men stared at Monk. The doctor busied himself lighting another cigarette, a thoughtful frown on his face.

  Monk laid back, tired like an old dog.

  Two days later, while Monk remained in jail, domestic and international media camped out near Manse Tigbee’s mansion in Oxford and his various businesses in the Delta, in Biloxi, and his other mansion in Plaquemine, Louisiana. More reporters and stringers were checking out the various companies he owned, or had money in other nearby states, including the BMW plant he’d complained to Monk about.

  Protected by a barrier of lawyers and spinmeisters, Tigbee did damage control worthy of Bill Clinton. On the fourth day, Tigbee released a half-hour slickly produced video where he explained matters from the comfort of an undisclosed location. There he sat in a modest leather chair, a living room setting behind him, the prop windows letting in carefully modulated stage lighting. His face had a composed, pained look to it. He presented the image that he was stoically bearing the weight of the Jacobeans arrayed against him.

  Monk, finally released on bail the previous day—his lawyer Parren Teague in Los Angeles had secured an attorney over in Mound Bayou—watched the taped message first on CNN and then when it aired again on C-SPAN 2 at his hotel room in Memphis. A reporter from the New York Times interviewed him over the phone, but several other outlets would have to wait until he got back home.

  “It is the doing of irresponsible elements, working in concert with certain forces operating out of Iraq and, Libya, that have weaved this vicious, tenacious lie, my friends. Their chief agent is a man who now goes by the ludicrous name of Ivan Monk. He, in turn, has paid off known drug abusers and extramarital fornicators to do his bidding.” Tigbee paused in that part of the tape and drank from a glass of water. Then he proceeded to vilify members of the Tunica Sheriff’s Department for letting said dangerous agent go.

  Tigbee tried to control the fallout, and he certainly had holdings in various media conglomerates to work his will. But the competition for ratings and ad revenues among those conglomerates dictated that at least one of them would pursue the story.

  Monk’s .45 had been recovered and the Tunica County DA made a lot of noise about prosecuting him for the interstate transportation of a weapon for the purposes of committing a crime. That was after neither the man with no stomach, nor the one whose nose he broke, would answer the prosecutor’s questions. And Kanner’s wife and two children had abruptly, and unannounced, left Jackson for parts unknown.

  The Tunica County DA impounded the .45 pending a close of the investigation. Monk’s local lawyer obtained bail and permission from the judge for him to travel back to L.A.—since it had a bearing on the charges brought against him. Monk had to surrender his passport. By the end of the week, it became obvious the most Monk would be charged with would be possession of an unregistered weapon in Mississippi. And given all the public attention, he’d be fined and given probation just like any good ol’ boy.

  Kodama and Teague had set up Monk with several media operations to provide him avenues to put forward his version of events, and to put the spotlight on the law in the Magnolia State. It also didn’t hurt that cutting-edge sociologist and writer of the hip Robin D.G. Kelley was doing a major piece about Tigbee and the Creel case for Vanity Fair. The magazine put up the money for Monk’s bond. He promised to provide Kelley with exclusive information, whatever the hell that would be.

  “So Ava Green was Manse Tigbee’s granddaughter?” Geraldo Rivera asked Sheriff Lauter on a remote broadcast of his cable show from Tunica, a shocked look on his bespectacled face.

  Lauter tipped his hat way up on his forehead. “Yes, sir,
it appears that Mr. Tigbee’s first wife Dolly Lee had remarried up there in Akron. Merrill, their daughter, who, mind you, was already a young teenager when the wife took her away, and also went by her middle name of Sarah, had taken the step-father’s name of Green.” Lauter chewed his bottom lip in disapproval. “He was a history professor from that college in Yellow Springs.”

  “She went from being married to a buttoned-down racist to marrying a Jew,” Geraldo observed for his TV audience.

  Having been coached that something like this might be said, Lauter wisely said nothing, only stared ahead with a steely look of ruggedness.

  Geraldo said, “And Dolly’s daughter, Merrill, herself a teenager, gave birth, out of wedlock, to Ava, in nineteen fifty-four. Merrill simply used Green as Ava’s last name.”

  That said something about living up north, but Lauter bit his tongue on providing the obvious.

  “Ava,” Geraldo said, “it seems, had been raised with a lie, too: She was told her mother’s father had died, and of course never been told his last name was Tigbee. Tigbee apparently tried to contact Dolly Lee unsuccessfully several times over the years, so he might not even have known about Ava’s birth.”

  Camera one dollied in on Geraldo. “Not only did Ava’s fate return her to her ancestral home to fight injustice, there are those—including the Los Angeles-based private investigator who declined to be on our show—who allege Ava Green’s grandfather, Manse Tigbee, may be the man who caused her brutal murder decades ago. And I have it on good authority that this PI was lured by a staged photo to one of Tigbee’s businesses in an effort to kill Monk, who had found out the truth.” Geraldo adjusted his glasses, “Tragic, tragic. More after this,” he said, looking properly forlorn into the camera. The program went to commercial.

  Chapter 25

  “You killed my cousin Kennesaw because you believed the myth about Charlie Patton’s ‘Killin’ Blues’. Maybe he believed it, too.”