Pawnbroker: A Thriller (23 page)

Chapter 103

T
he redline phone rang at 11:18 P.M. “Hello?” I said.

“Gray!”

“Doc?”

“Who else would it be?”

“We’ve been trying to call you all day!”

“You can thank the old battle ax for that. She had our phone stuffed down in that junk heap she calls a purse, and it got turned off. Owww! She punched me, Gray.”

“Jimmy said you never got there.”

“Car broke down. We lucked up and found a mechanic who finally got us going. We’re heading on over to West Memphis now.”

“No, no, don’t do that. Jimmy’s fine. We talked to him.”

“Well, ain’t that a kick in the head.”

“You can’t go home either, though. There’s been some trouble and there might be people waiting there. As soon as we hang up, turn your phone off and remove the battery so they can’t track you, and go somewhere and hole up. Don’t tell us where, and don’t try to contact us. Day after tomorrow, turn your phone on at eight in the morning. Hopefully this will all be over by then, and we’ll call you.”

“Whatever you say, my boy. Sure we can’t help out in the meantime?”

“Thanks, I’m sure. Talk to you then.” I hung up and turned to Penny. “Let’s get some sleep.”

Chapter 104

Ray Earl pointed the remote and pressed PAUSE. His TiVo was the best present he got last Christmas. No. It was the best present he got in his whole life, ever. He should probably call Mama and thank her for it again. He picked up the phone, dialed the first three numbers, then laid it back down. He could do that later. Right now he had a crime to solve, and there was only one way to do it. He had watched twenty-seven episodes of CSI to be sure, and now he was. When Gil Grissom couldn’t figure things out, he went back to the crime scene.

In the small utility shed that served as Ray Earl’s garage, he meticulously stowed everything he might need in his backpack: flashlight, notebook and two pens, three double packs of Reese’s, a hammer, his cell phone, a half-dozen paper bags (for evidence), and a monstrous roll of duct tape. He checked the air in the tires and backed out. After one last provisions check, Ray Earl straddled his bicycle and pedaled away.

*          *          *

Ballard reached to the driver-side AC control and cranked the Escalade’s temperature setting as low as it would go, then did the same for the passenger and rear controls. Fucking Mississippi. Hicks, heat, and humidity, three things you could always count on in this backward-ass joke of a place. He should’ve stayed the hell in Canada. Better climate. Better people. Maybe he’d go back. He was damn sure fed up with this whole affair. Yeah, some mistakes had been made. Shit happens. But mistakes could be fixed, and if they thought they were going to cut him out of this payday, well, they’d need to think again.

He killed the lights and turned into the driveway, slowly, to minimize the crunch of tires on gravel. The tiny duplex was dark. A sign in the yard said “Left Side For Rent” and gave a phone number. Perfect. The right side would be available shortly, as well. The driveway ran alongside the right side of the crackerbox and extended all the way back to a small utility shed. A tall, unkept row of hedges walled in the backyard. Perfect again. He turned left and pulled completely behind the house, then switched off the engine, got out, and quietly shut the door. Time to start fixing mistakes.

The back door was old, wood, with a grid of glass panes up top. Ballard rapped against the glass, quietly at first. Then louder. And louder. Patience expired, he pulled his lead-and-leather sap and gave the lower right glass a controlled jab. It cracked. He worked the pieces out of the old frame, reached in, and unlocked the door.

The little apartment was clean and neat. Everything was straight, organized. Ballard figured Ray Earl’s mother came by and kept the place up. Or maybe the weird-ass retard did it himself. Who gave a shit? It took about fifteen seconds to figure out Ray Earl wasn’t home. Where the hell was that goofy bastard at this time of night? He walked out and got back into his vehicle, then cranked up and headed toward Beatrice Higgins’s house.

“Sonofabitch,” he groused to himself when he turned onto her block and saw a multitude of cars parked along the street. The house across the street was lit up, with people milling around in the front yard. He drove by slowly and saw that the people in the yard were teenagers. Of all the nights for somebody to have a damn party. A couple of the kids waved. He shook his head and hit the gas.

A block away, he pounded the steering wheel when he remembered that Ray Earl had said somebody was with him when he found the old work camp. Who was that redneck the retard always ran with? He had it on the tip of his tongue. Shelton? Simmons? It hit him:  Shackleford. Rocky Damn Shackleford. Dumber than a box of rocks, which is probably why his best friend was a retard. That’s where Ray Earl would be, and Ballard would eliminate two problems at once. Perfect.

Chapter 105

I dropped into the sleep zone sometime between my head touching the pillow and drawing my next breath, but the slumber turned fitful, a Pink Floydian collage of crazy dreams that made me twist and turn and sweat in the big comfortable bed. I was back on the deck, looking out at a blue lake from which living funnels reached up, reached out, reaching for me. Somewhere in the distance I heard a woman moaning in what could only be described as orgasmic ecstasy.

The visuals of the dream shifted, changed channels, but the soundtrack remained the same, until I finally realized the sound wasn’t just in my dream. It was coming from the next room. I got out of bed and headed toward the noise. By the time I made it into the hallway, it was obvious that it was coming from Penny’s room.

I stepped into the room and shook my head, thinking I must surely still be asleep. She was on the bed, sitting up, back against the headboard. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed, as she screamed in an orgasmic fit. For good reason. Stark naked. Legs spread wide. She was doing herself with a shampoo bottle, a big one, writhing around it as she continued to come.

Now my own body was heating up. I thought I had gotten beyond this lust issue with Penny, but with this show going on, Harry Johnson wanted to come out and play. My intellect was still in control, but the advantage was slipping quickly into Harry’s corner.

I said, “Penny! What the hell are you doing?”

Then I noticed that she had headphones on. Maybe she wasn’t aware of how loud she was. If that was the case, she’d freak out when she opened her eyes and saw me standing there gawking at her. Or worse, maybe she wouldn’t.

I stepped back out of the room and eased the door shut, then started knocking on it. More animal moans. I knocked harder. Harder. I opened the door and stepped back in. No change, and she was starting to scare me. “Penny!” I screamed.

She kept moving, getting her money’s worth and more out of the shampoo bottle, but she did stop moaning. I walked over to the bed, grabbed her ankle, shook it a little. “Penny!”

This time she opened her eyes and looked right at me with those light brown beauties. “Oh, dear God,” I said. Each eye had a bright red ring around the iris.

Chapter 106

COURTYARD MARRIOTT, SUITE 135

MONTELLO, MISSISSIPPI

“I
have a very special assignment for you,” the man said to Docker, “and there’s a considerable bonus involved. Interested?”

“Sure, Boss.”

“Are you familiar with...” He pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket and looked at it. “...a place called Tombigbee State Park?”

“Yeah, it’s outside Tupelo.”

“There are apparently a number of rental cabins at this park?”

“A few, yeah.”

“I want you to go there, right now.”

Docker nodded, listening carefully.

“There are three troublemakers in cabin number four. I want you to bring them to me. Don’t hurt them, just bring them, and be sure they don’t make a fuss. This needs to be handled delicately. Can you handle that?”

“No problem.”

Chapter 107

I
couldn’t believe my eyes. Penny was obviously on the same drug Abby had been on. Probably the same one Homestead and all the others in that motel room had been on. Had I been duped all along by her? The thought infuriated me.

“Penny, what the hell are you doing?”

She looked at me with lust, slathered her tongue over her upper lip. “Drop those boxers and get on me, Gray,” she said in a voice somewhere between sultry and demon-possessed, as she continued to writhe around on the bed. I leaned over so I could reach her, and slapped her hard across the face, knocking the headphones off.

While I looked straight at her, a confused look slid across her face and her body stopped moving. She let go of the shampoo bottle, and it slid out of her with an audible slurp. She reached up, rubbed her face where I had slapped her. My handprint was very visible and growing more so.

“What...” she said, her speech trailing off into nothingness. With me staring straight into her eyes, the red rings faded away, as if someone had pulled down a dimmer switch. The drug was obviously wearing off.

“I want the truth, Penny, now. What did you take?”

She stared up at me, still looking very confused. “I didn’t take anything.”

“That’s bullshit, Penny. I saw your damn eyes, and I want the truth!” I couldn’t believe her gall, and if not for some innate sense of chivalry that took over, I think I might’ve slapped her again. But I couldn’t.

Her eyes grew fluid now, and the tears spilled out, running down her cheek. My handprint was vivid. She shook her head, and seemed to notice for the first time that she was naked, gasped, grabbed the edge of the comforter and pulled it over herself.

“The truth,” I said. “I deserve that.”

She wiped away the tears. Her eyes were clearing now, looking more awake, intelligent, in touch. “I didn’t take anything, Gray. That’s the truth.”

“Then what—”

“Here!” she said, and picked up and shoved the headphones at me. “Put them on!” Only then did I see that they were connected to the device that had brought us all this grief.

“Why on Earth would I want to list—”

Now she was heating up. “Put them on!”

I slipped them on, fitted the earpieces into my ears. She had the main body of the device in her hand, pressed the PLAY button. A strange new-agish song started playing, full of smooth tones, a soothing melody that instantly connected with the musical receptors of my soul. After a few seconds, I decided it was the most wonderful thing I had ever heard.

Chapter 108

T
hirty seconds into the song—or maybe it was thirty minutes, or a month—a tingling sensation started in my forehead and began spreading, as if someone were pouring liquid euphoria over my body. All sense of time vanished; it was as if I had stepped outside the space-time domain that binds the mere mortals of the universe.

I didn’t feel drunk, woozy, or out of control. In fact, I felt in supreme control of each of my senses, and there were far more than the five I had previously known about. Oh yes, many, many more. I looked down at the bed, looking for Penny. I suddenly wanted her with every fiber of my being and nothing else mattered. Nothing. She was mine. My crotch was on fire and Harry Johnson—I still remembered his name quite well, thank you very much—was bursting at the seams of my boxers.

Unfortunately, Penny wasn’t on the bed anymore. Where’d she go? I looked around the room, didn’t see her. Then a door opened and she stepped out, fully clothed. She glided over to me, the way a goddess might have approached the alpha god when she longed to be mated. She took me by the hand, led me through the door she had just come from.

For some reason, I expected to find a lush and verdant paradise on the far side of that door, but I was greeted by a bathroom instead. A nice one, no doubt, full of marble and gold, but still just a bathroom. She pulled me along by the hand, then stopped in front of a mirror. She wanted to be able to see us as we joined in our ecstatic union. Fine by me. I reached around and rubbed her breast through the tee-shirt she was wearing. She grabbed my hand, pushed it down.

“Look in the mirror, Gray.”

I didn’t want to look in the mirror. I wanted to rip those damned clothes off her and take her right there on the cool tile floor. She grabbed my face and forcibly pointed it toward the mirror. “Look at yourself,” she said.

“I’d rather look at you, while I’m—”

“Look! Now!”

I did. My eyes had bright red rings around the irises, rings of flame, rings of burning passion. “Awesome,” I said.

Suddenly the music was gone and Penny was holding the headphones. I felt myself being pulled back into the realm of mortals, and I didn’t like it. “I don’t want to go.” I said it out loud and didn’t even know it.

“No one wants to go from where you were, Gray.”

The pull grew stronger. My grasp on the extra senses was slipping, the tingling euphoria drying up, evaporating into the air around me. I must’ve walked back into the bedroom, because I looked up and realized I was sitting on the bed, the bed where Penny had been squirming earlier. She was standing in front of me.

“Do you understand now?” she said.

I thought about it before I answered. Looked around. Saw the device and headphones lying on the bed. Slowly, I did understand.