Last Call for the Living (29 page)

What's the move, then?

Take that .22 in the glove compartment and bury a round in the kid's head. Then dump him and the truck at a gas station car wash.

I think I need a doctor.

I'll find you one. Now do what I say. We're running out of time.

*   *   *

Lang looked out
through sticky eyelids. Whatever was being done to him hurt. He didn't like it. Ventilator down his windpipe. Breathing short and shallow. When they touched the edema in his right hand and forearm, pain and nausea flared up.

He'd been immobilized. The ambulance was moving. Somebody repeated his name, called out vital signs. He heard the words “hypotension” and “severe envenomation.” Sound of tires rolling over gravel, crackle of a CB radio, emergency codes he recognized.

This is goddamn serious
.

He tried to envision all his considerable pain being dumped into a steel drum. Mentally pushing the swollen kneecap down into the barrel, then piling on the shrapnel torching his shoulder, the ember that was his palm.

Sometimes the effort to stifle pain worked. But not this time.

I need more goddamn drums
.

Lang found it nearly impossible to concentrate. He wasn't sedated enough not to feel panic. The urgency in the voices of the paramedics suggested that death was a possibility. No dream this time, the one in which he needed to pull the trigger on his sidearm but couldn't—typical nightmare for law officers.

The ambulance moaned to a stop. A paramedic popped the release and Lang's gurney was lifted from the rear of the bus. He heard the pneumatic
swish
of the sliding glass doors, wincing from the strong lights overhead as they rolled him down a hallway.

He couldn't see much of the faces looking down at him. He felt cold. Smelled the plastic of the ventilator mask, the hands in latex gloves tending to him.

There was a commotion of which he was dimly aware, doctors and nurses in the emergency room of some hospital working around his limp body. A trauma surgeon waited. There were problems around the multiple bite wounds. Except for these places, Lang's body had turned the color of discarded snakeskin.

That dream again.
Throw down the useless gun. Anywhere. And run.

Lang kept on trying to dump all his pain in the barrel, but his hand felt like it'd been dipped in lava. And he wondered, with all that pain spilling over the edges of the drum, if Charlie Colquitt had lived.

*   *   *

Crews watched the
sunrise, hands in her jacket pockets because they were trembling from too much caffeine and no sleep. She was used to exhaustion, but this was a special type of fatigue. She suppressed the urge to bum a cigarette from a deputy smoking along the perimeter of the crime scene.

They found two bodies on the mountain. One on an old logging road, half a leg missing, bled out—the other kneecap blown out—blood still viscous in the early light. It led to the rest of the leg, still caught in a bear trap and pecked at by crows.

The cottage was three hundred yards away, hidden amid thick timber. On her walk up she'd noticed a few paths leading to God knew where, some of them wide enough for a pickup or sport-utility to pass. They had an unidentified near-headless male, the remains crackling with dung beetles. Inside the cottage was an unidentified female. Badly beaten, her head kicked in like a rotten pumpkin. At least two dozen bullet holes in the walls.

Last night's rain had softened the ground. A spiderweb anchored beneath one corner of the roof glistened with dew. Crews walked carefully around Flock's corpse, trying to reconstruct events while she craved a smoke.

Birds soared in sunlight. Squirrels were everywhere, chasing one another through the hemlocks at top speed. A helicopter circled, blades whipping the treetops. She turned and watched men in windbreakers on the wooded slope.

A good square mile of mountainside began to swarm with federal and state agents as it became light enough to see well. A lot of experienced personnel, but Crews thought it for everyone.

This is one huge fucking mess.

They soon identified the bleed-out as one Leonard Lipscomb, otherwise known as Preacher or LB in hard-core state pens like Hays and Calhoun. The deceased had worked at his leg for a good hour before breaking both his tibia and fibia in half. Cutting through the tendons and muscle with a Gerber multitool. Crews couldn't begin to imagine the man's agony, or his will to be free. He'd finished the job with a pretty decent tourniquet, using the sleeve of his twill shirt, and crawled on his belly leaking blood like a beer tap before finally passing out.

The Medical Examiner agreed it was the toughest thing he'd ever seen a man do to himself.

One huge fucking mess,
Crews thought again.

From witnesses who had been in the church she got a make on the pickup, partial plates, positive ID on the perp and probable hostage. The camcorder had been smashed, but there was a good chance they could salvage the tape. Someone had pulled a piece on the fleeing suspects, got off a round, but had little to say from the morgue. This break had come to Crews as a game changer. Hicklin had a two-, maybe three-hour head start. And he or Charlie might be injured.

The call was made.

Crews gave in to her weakness and bummed a Marlboro Light from the first person in uniform she found with a pack of smokes. Her old brand. The first drag tasted the same as it had ten years ago. The nicotine shot straight to her head. She studied the layout of the cottage, noting the generator and water pump, linkages forming.

This Hicklin must have planned to hide out for a month, maybe more, wait till the heat died down and drive off with all that loot.

Then what was the point in taking a hostage? Why piss off your convict buddies in the process?

Crews knew that Charlie Colquitt was still alive and being kept alive when he and Hicklin had left the church. Still alive yet for unknown reasons. The teller couldn't be leverage or collateral. This Hicklin character could have done him in the bank, or five minutes later or—hell—five
days
later. This was Hicklin's safe house. Flock and Lipscomb either knew just where it was or found out about it from Kalamity Bibb. And the dead woman inside the cottage with her head smashed in? Probably killed for not giving up Hicklin right away. Possibly Hicklin's point person on the outside. A lot of hard-core bangers in the joints had one or more women checking things out, making moves for them on the streets. Smuggling drugs, laundering money, relaying messages, mailing care packages.

Crews studied .45-caliber shell casings scattered about like loose change as ERT techs set up shop at their newly discovered crime scene. They used digital cameras, covering Flock's body from a dozen angles. Crews mashed her cigarette against her heel and pocketed the butt. An image came into focus in her mind like a photograph in a chemical bath.

Charlie and his captor. On their way to … where?

*   *   *

A rookie patrolman
named Terrence Malloy was still on call for another six hours. It didn't stop him from taking a Code Five-M at his mother's place on Tulip Street. He picked up coffee and a fried-egg sandwich, his breakfast greasing its way through a brown paper bag.

The sun showered the street with orange light, oaks and alders shading the path behind the old frame house. The Stars and Stripes hung from pole brackets on the front porch. His mother had left the garage door open, expecting his arrival. Malloy parked inside and cut the engine of his cruiser. The police band went dead. A night and morning of misdemeanors and DUIs in Zone Seven silenced for a little while at least.

“Hey, Momma,” he said.

Althea Malloy opened the screen door and shuffled aside to let her son pass. She wore her favorite bathrobe, slippers, wide awake and cheery eyed even at such an early hour. He followed her to the kitchen, noticing her arthritic movements as she pulled out a chair and turned to the stove. Still a couple good years before Malloy expected her diabetes to start calling the shots. She had tea brewing.

“How's work, sweetheart?” she said.

Malloy sat down at the kitchen table. Opened the lid on his coffee. On cue his mother was there with a spoon and a napkin. He poured some sugar and stirred it. Put the lid back on. He unwrapped the sandwich from the wax paper and ate.

“Six more hours on call and then forty-eight off. Been one damn thing after another this week,” he answered between bites.

“I pray every night,” his mother said, her voice almost theatrically weary.

“I know. It's okay. They gave me a gun and everything.” Malloy winked at her. He took a bite from the sandwich, savoring it for a moment before chomping it to bits.

“So much wickedness out there.”

“True,” he said with a shrug. “But most times it's fender benders and kittens stuck in trees. The occasional homicide. Domestic dispute.”

Malloy's mother gave him that
look
only a retired schoolteacher could give. Thirty years in the Georgia Public School System. Won every award an English teacher could win.
You are a smart butt
.

“Your brother called. Got the interest of some agent for one of his scripts. A school buddy and he already had meetings, pitching this idea and that.”

“Yeah, well, when Knucklehead sells one he can pay off that student loan.”

“When your younger brother is accepting his Oscar we'll see who comes asking for a loan.”

Malloy knew the next question was going to be about his love life. He was working on a quip when he heard the rumbling from an old Chevrolet 350 motor next door. He looked out the kitchen window at the step-side, mud caked on the fenders and door panels, watching as the pickup backed into the driveway of Lucy Colquitt's home. Two men got out of the truck and disappeared inside the carport. The younger of the two caught Malloy's attention.

“Is Miss Colquitt home, Momma?”

“Lucy Colquitt? Probably. But I haven't spoken to
that
woman in fifteen years.”

Instinct told him that that was the kid. Malloy had already seen the All Points Bulletin on the mobile laptop inside his cruiser.

He radioed Dispatch.

Then he undid the strap on his holster, peeking between the blinds at their neighbor's house. There were neat rows of a vegetable garden in the side yard, begonias blooming along the walkway. Lucy Colquitt was a woman he barely knew. Always kept to herself. Never very friendly, either. He often wondered if the color of his skin had anything to do with it.

“I need for you to go into your room and lock the door,” he told his mother. “Did Uncle Kertus set up that flat-screen TV for you?”

“He sure did. Got that
dee-vee-dee
player hooked up, too.”

“Go in there and put it on and I'll bring you some breakfast. On a tray just like Daddy did.”

“Whatever you say, Terry. Since you won't hang out with your dear old mother, I'll just go see my friend
Mr. Poitier.
”

“You do that, Momma. And lock the door.”

 

I'm running out of roads to ride.

 

THIRTEEN

Lucy Colquitt gently
touched her forehead, rolling her eyes from the pain of a metronomic ache. She was terribly hungover, her mind thickened by alcohol. Sunlight slashed through the windows. The house was half-dark and all quiet. Could have been the next evening for all she knew. Most of the previous days had been spent in front of the television, sipping peppermint schnapps and Wild Turkey, watching
The View
and Court TV. Soap operas. The local news. The phone rang periodically, but no friends or family came calling.

Local newspeople had tried to reach her, leaving messages. Coax her into giving an interview.

She'd spoken to Sallie Crews a few times.

Lucy vaguely remembered having conversations with the woman. She might have told Crews about the day Charlie was born. About how Lucy had never felt pain like that, squeezing him out that little space between her legs. How it rained real bad that afternoon. Crews assured her she was going to find Charlie. She asked Lucy if anyone had contacted her. Charlie? A man or men? Lucy told her no.

Three days morphed into one long bender. Lucy made a drink an hour, started around ten in the morning. She recalled eating once or twice, a grilled cheese and baked potato. But the food made her sick to her stomach. She showered. Put some clothes in the wash. Made the bed. Floating through her home like a ghost with no one to haunt. There was a phone call made to Charlie's apartment complex. Spoke to someone in the office and reached an agreement for management to accept a personal check for his next month's rent. She didn't want Charlie's life to have gone to hell when he came back.

Even though Lucy secretly believed her son to be dead.

She watched the five o'clock news, reasonably sober and alert. When there were no updates on Charlie she changed the channel to a classic movie station. Humphrey Bogart on the screen, playing a bad guy in
The Desperate Hours. The Night of the Hunter
was next. She had always had a big crush on Robert Mitchum growing up, still captivated after all these years by that sinister, seductive-looking face of his. She picked up her novelty table lighter—a rooster where you pushed down on the wings and a flame shot out from between the beak—and lit a cigarette.

Charlie hated that lighter. Hated her smoking, too.
You'd be amazed how many nurses and doctors smoked,
she'd say, trying to reason with him.

But she didn't care if the whole house smelled of stale smoke. She wanted that odor on everything, between her fingertips, in the curtains and pillowcases, on the upholstery.

Let it stink,
she thought furiously.