A Clean Kill (17 page)

A sound like
whooah
gushed out of the Cajun in a wash of hot air, and my kick spun him away from the knife. Before he’d landed, I was scrambling across the
sand on my stomach like a sick animal. My fingers found the blade. I rolled up onto one knee and saw the man who had been making my life a living hell stumble away.

First he staggered. Then he ran. He was bent over; he held his side; he limped badly and painfully each time his left foot struck earth. But he
was
running, which was a damn sight more than I could have done right then.

It was a stupid plan
. It hadn’t worked.

I pushed up onto my feet to try and follow. But, as the Cajun limped away from the water, he stopped short and tried to turn in his tracks. I could see his hard black eyes focus on mine just before a white-haired giant stepped into sight and smashed him across the base of his skull with the butt of a shotgun.

The Cajun spun into the sand face first and went limp. Joey reached down, flipped him over, and removed his belt. After using the belt to tie the Cajun’s hands behind his back, Joey walked over to check on me. He was dragging the Cajun by one limp foot, like a toddler dragging a rag doll across the playground.

I could feel liquid heat flowing from the gash across my nose, coating my lips and chin with blood. I said, “Good timing.”

“You did okay.”

“If this is okay,” I said, “I’d hate to get my ass kicked.” I reached out and handed Joey the knife. It was taking too much strength to hold it. “What took you so long?”

Joey laughed. “It probably seemed like a hell of a long time to you, Tom. But that whole nut-snatchin’ fight you just had probably lasted six or seven seconds.”

My friend glanced down at the unconscious stranger. “Good thing he wasn’t supposed to kill you. You’d’ve never seen him comin’.”

“Yeah.” I spit a mouthful of blood into the sand. “I feel lucky as hell.”

Kai-Li’s ashen face was close to mine. Her bright eyes jumped over the Cajun’s handiwork. She guided a cotton swab over cuts and bruises. She’d dipped the cotton in something cool. Whatever it was stung and felt good.

She straightened to examine her work. “What’s your friend going to do with the man who did this? Nothing stupid, I’m hoping.”

I shook my head. “I’m sure Joey will wait till the guy wakes up and try to get some information, if he can. But then he’ll call the cops.”

“Shouldn’t you have waited for the police? You were the one attacked.”

“I couldn’t wait. I was too traumatized by the vicious brutality of an unknown attacker.”

Kai-Li gave me a look and turned to the first-aid kit she’d laid out on the kitchen table. She began tearing thin strips of adhesive tape and snipping them into one-inch lengths.

Her hair was clipped into a loopy thing on the back of her neck. I spoke to her back. “We don’t expect him to tell us anything. We set this up to get the Cajun arrested, not to torture information out of him. Mostly we just want the guy ID’d.”

She turned back and grimaced. “I’m going to have to pull that cut together.”

I watched her fingers work.

“Twist the strips in the middle.”

She nodded.

Kai-Li gently pressed one end of a bandage beneath the gash across the bridge of my nose. She put the index finger of her other hand above the cut and pushed. Firecrackers exploded inside my eyeballs, and a less-than-masculine yelp sounded deep in my throat.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I knew the pain was coming sooner or later. It didn’t really hurt when it happened.”

“Adrenaline?”

“Sharp knife.”

She stretched two more twisted strips of tape across the cut. “You said you set it up.”

“What?”

“You said you set up your fight with the, uh, the Cajun man. Why would you do that? I mean, if you knew where he was …”

“We didn’t know. Joey’s tried tailing the guy twice. Both times the Cajun lost him. So, I was sitting around here after you called from Montgomery yesterday, and something occurred to me. I called Joey—he was in Montgomery too, checking out Judge Savin—and asked him to come down here and tail
me
.”

Kai-Li smiled. “Instead of trying to track the lion. You decided to stake a lamb in the jungle.”

“Baaa.”

She smiled. “Did you ever stop to wonder why you
chose
a trap that would put you in physical danger?”

I shrugged. “It was all I could think of.”

“You couldn’t have taken a gun? You couldn’t have led him to the police? Think about it.”

I looked into her eyes. “You’re not going to start telling me about how I’m three people again, are you?”

Kai-Li raised her eyebrows and sighed. “Anyway, I’ve done the best I can on these cuts, but you’re going to need stitches on your nose. Who’s your doctor? I should call ahead.”

I thought about that. “Call Dr. Laurel Adderson. Her number should be on a pad by the living-room phone. Ask her to meet us at the emergency room in Daphne.”

Kai-Li spun and hurried toward the door. Then she stopped short and turned back. “Isn’t that the juror’s doctor who won’t take your phone calls?”

“That’s her.”

“Why would you think …?”

“She hears I’ve been attacked, I think curiosity will get the better of her.”

Kai-Li raised an eyebrow. “And your natural charm will overwhelm her once you’re face-to-face? Is that it?”

“I don’t need charm.” I tried to smile. “Look at me. I’m pitiful.”

I locked the door and turned to trot down the front steps and almost ran into Kai-Li. She was frozen at the edge of the porch.

“What’s that?”

I looked. Joey had reclaimed his giant Expedition and left my
Hatari!
loaner in its place. “I think it’s called a Land Rover Safari something-or-other.”

Kai-Li looked at me, but I couldn’t read her. All she said was, “Good name for it.”

Small-town emergency rooms don’t look like much. I shared space in a tired yellow cube with two other patients—one, a bald plumber with soiled overalls and a broken finger, and the other, a pretty, young housewife who complained of migraine and occasionally vomited into a trash can.

The volcanic housewife went back first. I went ahead of the plumber.

Triage.

Kai-Li went back with me. I wanted her to meet Dr. Adderson and explain that I wasn’t crazy. A nurse in baby-blue scrubs told me to remove my clothes and put on a cheap apron that she called a robe. I sat on the examining table in my running clothes and waited.

Kai-Li asked, “Aren’t you going to put on the robe?”

I shook my head. “They always say that.”

“Do you want me to step outside?”

“Nope.”

“Do you need me to help you?”

“Thanks. But I don’t think getting naked’s going to help her sew my nose up.”

Kai-Li stepped in front of me and unzipped my sweatshirt. “Do you know the difference between men and boys, Tom?” She paused. “There isn’t one.”

She pulled the sleeves off by the cuffs and gently lifted the sweatshirt away and draped it over the back of a cheap plastic chair in one corner of the examination room. Next she slipped her fingers under my shirttail.

“Lift your arms.”

When my hands reached shoulder height, I felt a hot coal fire up inside my chest, and I made a noise appropriate to the sensation.

Kai-Li shook her head again. All she said was, “See?”

“I don’t think my arms are going much higher than that.”

She worked the T-shirt up and over my head and arms and tossed it across the sweatshirt. When she
turned back, Kai-Li made a little gasping sound and pointed a finger at my chest.

“My God, Tom. What’d he do to you?”

I looked down at a black, purple, and green bruise about the size of a softball. It was not unimpressive.

“I think he kneed me in the chest.”

“And you didn’t want to take your shirt off.” She had her hands on her hips. I had the feeling I was getting a look usually reserved for her daughter. “I’ll step outside if you need to remove the shorts. I mean, be a grown-up about this. You aren’t hiding something under there too, are you?”

I could have said something sophomoric, but that’s when Dr. Adderson walked into the room. She didn’t look happy to see me.

“I am
not
your doctor, Tom.”

“You treated me after the wreck. You were close by, and I needed help.”

Dr. Adderson held a manila folder in one hand. It had a row of colored squares along the edge with numbers on them. My name and social security number were typed across a label stuck on the top corner. She stepped in front of me and tossed the folder on the examining table.

Placing the tips of her fingers on my cheeks and tilting my face toward the light, Laurel Adderson nodded toward Kai-Li and asked, “Did you do the butterfly bandages?”

“Yes.”

“Good job. I need a plastic surgeon to look at this.” She stepped outside the room and spoke with a nurse. When she came back, she said, “We’re seeing who’s here.”

Seconds later, the baby-blue nurse came in with a stainless steel bowl full of chipped ice. As the nurse began filling a clear plastic bag from the bowl, Adderson asked, “How long ago did this happen?”

I said, “A couple of hours.”

“How’d you do this, Tom?”

I told her I had been attacked on the beach by a man who had been shadowing me since I started work on the Baneberry case.

She asked if I’d be willing to consult with a staff psychiatrist.

I said, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll talk to your shrink if you’ll sit down with Dr. Kai-Li Cantil here …”

Kai-Li said, “I’m not a medical doctor. Professor of psychology.”

Laurel Adderson nodded.

I went on. “If you’ll sit down with Dr. Cantil for ten minutes and hear her out, I’ll talk to anybody you want me to.”

Dr. Adderson’s eyebrows arched. “I’m not in the habit …”

“I’m not talking about habits. I’m talking about ten minutes of your time to get me to do something that you, as a physician, believe is necessary to my health. Are you too proud to swap ten minutes for a patient’s health?”

“Don’t try to manipulate me, Tom.”

“I’m trying to help you. You don’t believe it yet. But I’m trying to help both of us.”

Sunshine had melted December drab into bright, cloudless skies. Sitting in my living room, chewing a
mouthful of pepperoni-and-banana-pepper pizza, it looked almost like early spring through the windows.

The noonday news played beneath squares of bright sunlight that faded the screen. The pretty blonde was anchoring—Gina something. Apparently, there were only fifteen shopping days till Christmas. Another pulp mill was closing. Pollution in Mobile Bay would be reduced. Two hundred thirty-three people would lose their jobs the week before Christmas. The high temperature was going to be thirty-eight degrees.

And I couldn’t find my client.

Sheri Baneberry was not at work.
She’s out of the office on business. Try back next week
. Her home number yielded an answering machine. I tried a listing for Bobbi Mactans and got a series of unanswered rings.

Rather than waste time trying to get information out of Jim Baneberry, I called Joey’s cell phone, then his house. When he answered his home phone, I said, “We’ve got a missing client.”

“That’s not good.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. What are you doing today?”

“Nothin’ really. Just hangin’ around here, you know, waitin’ to hear if the cops have ID’d the Cajun.”

“The country cops have him?”

“Yeah,” Joey said, “Baldwin County sheriff’s Department. The Mobile cops would be movin’ faster, but you’re in the sheriff’s jurisdiction out there.”

Kai-Li and my lawyer, Sully Walker, walked into the living room from my study. They’d been huddled in there getting ready for an upcoming hearing on my fitness to practice law—what with my being a ruffian and a possible murderer and so on.

Sully wanted to submit Kai-Li’s research at the hearing in Montgomery to show that Chris Galerina had been fixing jury trials before he caught a bullet in the temple near my beach house. But, I thought, even if the State Bar Disciplinary Committee accepted Kai-Li’s data, I wouldn’t necessarily be in the clear. I would, however, be taking a lot of powerful people down with me.

Sully had argued that the political types at the Bar would choose to leave my license to practice alone—until I was actually convicted of something—over stirring up a hornets’ nest at Russell & Wagler. I figured he was right. Probably right.

Joey said, “Tom? You there?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I was thinking about something.”

“That Cajun boy scramble your brains?”

He didn’t expect an answer. “Think you can find Sheri Baneberry?”

“It’s what I do.”

“Call me when you know something … about Sheri or the Cajun.”

Joey said, “You got it,” and hung up.

Sully, Kai-Li, and I talked. She’d hurried down yesterday after dropping off her daughter at the Montgomery Airport, which meant she’d arrived at my doorstep without a change of clothes or a bottle of shampoo. Fortunately, though, Kai-Li had a habit of carrying work projects around in an ancient satchel that moved with her from home to office to wherever. She had her jury-fixing data on disk and in her satchel. Now Sully had it too. And he had more faith than I did that he could make use of it.

He and I argued about that some, and he left.

Kai-Li needed clothes. She left to buy some.

I settled my head against the sofa’s back cushions. Dr. Adderson had prescribed something for the ache in my chest, and, as the painkiller kicked in, the television began to fuzz around the edges. I focused on blue sky through the window to clear my eyes. When I looked back down, the screen wobbled like the view through a handheld video camera. An unnecessarily happy guy in a beard and a chef’s hat prattled about “holiday treats.” I could have sworn he said the words, “Bake the cookies or die,” just before I fell asleep.

The news anchor had changed, and the window over the television had gone black. One lighted lamp cast long shadows across the room. I sat up and looked around.