CRIME THRILLERS-A Box Set (50 page)

Sully flipped the metal water cup he held over and over, juggling the object to keep his hands busy, his attention diverted from the anger he felt building. "Banks," he said softly so that no one else could hear what he had to say. "If we find my sister-in-law dead on that mountain, and if it's because you called off the search on account of the dark..."

Banks, who had moved in closer to hear Sully now backed off, and the wattles circling his neck shook. "Go on, Sullivan, why don't you? Why don't you finish what you've got on your mind? But, of course, I'd advise you to think about it first, 'cause that sounds mighty damn close to threatening a peace officer, and I ain't never took kindly to threats."

Sully threw the cup into the metal bucket, splashing the sheriff's pants' leg. "I don't have to threaten you, Banks. I want us to understand each other. Carla means a lot to me. She's the only family I have left in this world, and if she dies, I want you to know your responsibility will be weighed, not only by me, but by my attorney. And if your actions here tonight are found wanting, I won't have to threaten you."

Sully walked past Banks and joined Janice and Flap near the back steps, where they kept vigil over the men. Janice still wore the clothes she had worn to visit him the night before. The magenta slacks and matching blouse creased, the sleeves rolled up past the elbow. Her eyes sought his, the sadness he saw there as deep and personal as his own. She had not forgotten Mike Dalamas and how she'd lost him. She had hoped to spend time with Carla, though never presuming to take Frannie's place. Sully took Janice in his arms and went with her into the brightly lit house. Flap followed, his studied silence evidence of a troubled state of mind.

"I despise that man," Sully said, picking cockleburs from the cuffs of his pants.

"Is the search over for tonight?" Janice asked.

"He says yes. I think he's wrong. With lanterns we could keep looking. Carla's out there with that madman, and Banks won't put himself out to find her."

"Maybe tomorrow they'll succeed, Sully."

"Hell, the dogs tracked Carla's scent right to the foot of Burdock Mountain. It was getting dark then, and Banks said we had to turn back. I think Lansing's taken her up there somewhere. I don't know what he's doing now. I can't understand what he's up to."

Flap took a chair at the kitchen table and crossed his hands on top. His eyes glistened as he watched and waited quietly.

"Are the men coming back in the morning?" Janice went to the stove to warm the coffee.

Sully sat down at the table. He dropped a half dozen brown cockleburs near Flap's hands and flicked them around with his thumb as if playing marbles.

"They're coming back--most of them, I guess. I don't know if we're doing any good. The helicopter gave up after an hour. They reported seeing nothing moving on the ground. As if they could see through that forest cover..."

"Sully..." Flap's interruption brought both their attentions around to him. He cleared his throat first before continuing. "Look here, I don't want you to go getting beat down about this search party stuff."

Sully, at once interested and afraid to hope for fear of disappointment, said, "What am I supposed to think? He's had her for hours, Flap. He's had her one whole night and day."

Flap nodded his head. "Yeah, them's the facts, all right, but it don't mean a fart in the wind."

"Why not?"

"Well, way I see it, she's either alive or dead, them's the alternatives even if it's not something we wanna think about. If he's killed her we already lost. If he ain't, then we can't go getting ourselves down in the dumps this way. It won't help her none if we give up too early."

"He's right, Sully." Janice joined them at the table. "It's not hopeless yet. Flap knows how to track. He's in great shape..." He winked at her. "And if you start fresh tomorrow with Flap beside you, you'll have a real chance of finding them."

"Well, since I have no faith whatsoever in our venerable Sheriff Banks," Sully said, "I suppose I'd better have faith in something."

"You do that, Sully. Now I got to go tend to unfinished business at my house. I'll be back here right early, so you be ready." Flap rose tall and stooped to shuffle through the house to the front door.

"He's the only hope we have, Sully. His knowledge of the country around here is legendary." Janice refilled Sully's coffee cup.

Sully massaged his eyes. "I'm too tired of incompetence to argue. We've got to have help."

Banks stood pressing his fat cheeks to the screen door. Sully heard his laborious breathing and twisted in the chair to face him.

"We'll be going now, Sullivan. I suggest you get some sleep." He tipped the brim of his tan felt hat at them and stepped away from the door.

Sully swept the cockleburs from the tabletop to the floor in one furious motion of his arm. "Compared to Banks, old Flap is a real charmer." He was thinking of the seemingly ineffectual methods a dozen men, dogs, and a helicopter employed to find a missing person. It was not as if he did not appreciate what the volunteers had done or what the sheriff had tried to accomplish. He just knew it had done little good. They were still far from finding Carla.

"You want something to eat?" Janice asked.

"Not right now." While he sipped he contemplated Janice's strong profile from where she stood at the sink rinsing cups. "Janice, I haven't told you yet how much your support means to me."

Janice smiled over at him. "I'm on your side, Sully. What you love, I love. What hurts you, hurts me."

Sully pulled off his muddy shoes and leaned back in the chair. "Did you know that Flap once before found Carla when she was lost?'

"Carla? When was she lost?"

"Frannie told me about it. Carla was five and wandered off from a church social. She couldn't find her way back through the woods. She wandered for hours and finally tired, she stopped. Flap found her curled up asleep in the roots of a tree. If it wasn't for him, she might have died of exposure or starvation."

Sully nodded to himself. Maybe Flap was right, he must think positive. The game wasn't up anymore than it had been when Carla had gone missing as a child. Just as then she was either alive or...or...dead. It did no good to think he had lost the game to Lansing. So he wouldn't think it. He swore he wouldn't.

CHAPTER 7

Flapjack Cohen was as great an anomaly as the state of Georgia had ever bred. He was Frannie and Carla's great uncle, younger brother to Marvin Cohen, their grandfather. The Cohens, Jewish with a background of European ancestors sailing to the Eastern Seaboard to settle in Virginia before migrating into the Georgia hills, had over the generations intermarried Irishmen, Englishmen, and Italians until their Jewishness was all but lost and forgotten. Just the name remained and a heritage if they cared to explore it, as Carla had.

Flap's real name was Hershel, but he had hated it from the beginning. When young he had such a voracious appetite for pancakes, his family called him "Flapjack," and it was later shortened to Flap. He liked it better than Hershel and let it stand. It suited him well in the lumber camps he worked as a youth. "Flap, get over here," they'd say. "Hep us lift this gawdamn log outta the way." The best joke played on his name was when he worked a stint as a "topper," the man who climbed to the apex of the tallest trees to top them out before they were cut down. While up there swaying dangerously in the wind, the harness all that kept him from falling hundreds of feet to the ground, they would yell up at him, "Flap yore wings, flap 'em away so you won't fall! Lookit that boy flap."

He was a big man and strong, his muscles rippling from the manual labor, his features hard and rough from outdoor work. He stood six foot four and still weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, although some of his muscles in later years were running to flab. Gray-flint eyes bored to the truth lying behind a man's words. He was cagey, questioning what was told him, masticating his own words before speaking. At sixty-seven years old his body looked as if it belonged to a younger man, while his face, reflecting years of toil, was the face of an old man. Lines crisscrossed craggy cheeks and made ant trails across a suntanned forehead.

He had never married. He lived alone in a house he built with his own two hands from the timber off his land. People in Jamison thought of him as eccentric and steered a wide course. It was only to his grandniece, Carla, and her family and friends that he was known to radiate a sweet, honest warmth.

Used to rising before the dawn, he rolled from a rusty iron bedstead that had belonged to his mother. Throwing open both the front and back doors to the crowing roosters and pecking hens shuffling in the yard, he pulled overalls over his long-johns while shivering from the morning air. From a cantankerous coil-topped refrigerator he withdrew a covered pitcher of pancake batter and set a skillet on the stove. "Come on in," he rumbled at the chickens. "I got leftover cornbread, I got a pan of salad scraps. You want breakfast, you better sidle on in, you rascals."

While he ate a huge stack of flapjacks, a meal he never tired of, his scrawny companions milled around the bare wood floor taking morsels from first this tin plate and then from that one. The hens clucked and shook their feathers. The roosters spurred away competition and devoured chunks of cold cornbread as if it were the rarest delicacy.

Flap grinned at them even when he had to shoo them out of the house before locking up. In his opinion chickens, thought to be brainless birds, possessed ample intelligence. If left to their own devices to survive, they could manage dandily until it came to the problem of predators. Chickens couldn't fight worth shit. Bantam roosters could fly into trees and were known to spur their enemies, but generally chickens were next to useless in a fight to the death. Come to think of it, Carla reminded him of one of those huff-puffing little banty roosters. Full of bravado and wild fury, but truly at the mercy of a wolf like Lansing. Given a world devoid of wolves, cats, weasels, and other assorted animals long in the tooth, chickens--and youngsters like Carla--might have the chance to live just as long as any other of God's creatures. Or at least that's what Flap believed. It was a fine thing to be hardy and durable and brave as the livelong day. It was quite another to be let loose in the world without the benefit of big teeth.

Standing on the front porch, eying the water trough and the chicken feed dispensers to be sure they were full, he said his good-bye. "I don't come back, I'll have Janice or Sully see about you, don't you fret." Then he saluted solemnly, as firm a salute and as meaningful as one given a commander of the armed forces. "Eat them goddamned bugs, you hear me? I don't want to see no grasshoppers and crickets around my place. Do your job like you oughta, and all'll be right with the world."

Stepping down to the yard he carefully maneuvered between the cluster of chickens to his tri-colored, oft-painted El Dorado. The night before he had loaded the truck bed with a small bedroll, an extra blanket, a "hogleg" Smith & Wesson nine-shot long barrel .22 pistol, and a box of cartridges. It might not be the deadliest of weapons, but Flap knew how to shoot a flea off a fencepost and a .22 in the brainpan was just as lethal as a .45. In the truck seat he settled a knapsack carrying a thermos of coffee and food for the trail climbing to come.

He took one last look at his home place, humble as it was, and started the truck just as the first rays of the sun peeped over the mountain ridges.

#

"Get him up, get him up, tell him it's time we're moving," Flap commanded Janice when she sleepily opened the door to him.

Sully came staggering into the den. "Flap, I was so worried I hardly slept a wink all night. I couldn't do anything but think about Carla."

"I can't help that. You wanna find Carla, we got to go. Now, listen to me. Put on thick socks, good, comfortable boots for walking. Wear overalls like me or some of them denims the kids wear. Put on a long-sleeved shirt, find a light jacket." While Sully seemed to come awake, Flap turned to Janice. "Make this man something to eat, anything's got protein in it to get him awake. Fix him a sack lunch. No telling how long we'll be on that mountain."

Sully and Janice stood there a moment gawking at him. "Well? Did I misspoke myself? Are you gonna get moving or do I have to leave alone?" Suddenly they were in motion, and Flap, grumbling about late sleepers and other ne'er-do-wells, went to the kitchen behind Janice to put on coffee. He opened the back door, squinted at the rising sun. It was just about five-thirty, he gauged. Time to be gone soon, they were wasting time.

Minutes later Sully appeared dressed as he had been told in jeans, shirt, and boots. He still did not look awake. "Sheriff Banks isn't here yet."

"What do we care if he's here? I ain't scag-tailing behind that idjit. We're going on our own. We'll make better time. The dogs already led to Burdock. I know where to go from there. I worked that mountain once. I been hunting it ever since. I don't need Eustus Banks to lead me by the hand."

Sully slurped down coffee and grabbed the sausage and biscuit sandwich Janice had found in the freezer and heated in the microwave. She was busy preparing sandwiches and stuffing them into Ziploc bags.

"Now, before we set off, I've got something to talk to you about, Sully," Flap said. "Sit down a minute, don't gulp your food, you'll get indigestion."

Sully, feeling more and more like a boy at home with his parents, did as he was asked. It gave him a little start to realize he was more comfortable with Flap's blustering authority than he had been with the sheriff's. Flap gave no quarter; he was the cavalry sergeant who brooked no hesitation. It was easy to follow a man who knew what to do and how to do it.

"What I've got to say is this. That mess you found in the garden, what the medical examiner said was a human eye..."

Sully had the biscuit to his mouth, but lowered it swiftly. If Flap wanted his attention, he had it totally. Sully tried to deny the image that came to mind--the wet stringy mess in the swatch of cloth.

"You say you're convinced it's not Carla's eye. That right?"