Perfect Killer (24 page)

Loud, muffled thuds ripped apart the seams of my solid, dreamless sleep. The thuds came again, louder, faster. Then, a man's voice: "Jasmine!"
I jerked awake then. Hazy light frosted the windows and filled the room with soft quilted colors. Then a key rattled the front dead bolt.
I sat up. Jasmine's exquisitely black hair and the red hues of her brown sugar skin connected with the deepest parts of my heart. Then I remembered my faint dream and realized it had been more than illusion. I wanted to wonder more about this when the front door slammed opened and a man's voice boomed in from the front room.
"Jasmine?"
Her eyelids snapped open wide, revealing bright wisteria eyes that distilled the sunshine and threw it back, deeper and more intense.
"Girl? You here?"
Footsteps thudded closer; old boards creaked.
I sat up and realized I was naked except for my briefs. I stretched over and fumbled around on the floor before locating the Ruger.
"No," Jasmine said as she touched my shoulder. I stopped with my hand still outstretched, fingers curling around the butt of the pistol. I turned my head toward Jasmine and saw she was dressed in an oversize, gray Valley State T-shirt that came dawn to midthigh. From there down it was all beautiful skin.
"It's okay." She sat up.
I didn't move my hand until she said, "In here, Uncle Quincy."
The door opened. As I sat up in the bed, a man of average height and build with light mocha skin, an embroidered dashiki-style shirt, and matching brimless hat walked in. His facial structure reminded me more of Vanessa and less of Jasmine. His eyes were a pale blue and his face touched a memory I could only feel and not remember.
I had seen this man once before in my life. In Jackson, at the Christmas party that had been the end of a beginning that had not really started for Vanessa and me. Quincy Thompson was Al Thompson's son, Vanessa's brother, Jasmine's uncle.
He looked at Jasmine, then me. His eyes did this three or four times, and with each iteration Quincy's face twisted itself deeper into a mask of rage that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
"You gonna be the white man's whore, just like your mama?" he raged at Jasmine. "She always talking black and sleeping white like a brother ain't good enough for the likes of her!"
"Uncle Quincy—"
"Don't uncle me, girl! Don't you have any pride in your race? Any loyalty? You so damned ashamed of being black you want to have a light-skinned baby?"
"You're off base, Uncle Quincy." Jasmine's tone was low, even, and forceful. She got quickly out of bed and stood face-to-face with Quincy Thompson. She was taller by an inch or two even in her bare feet. She had the strong legs of an ice-skater and well-defined muscles that rippled as she moved.
"You made Mama's life miserable carrying on and I am not going to let you do the same thing to me." Her voice was calm and full of steel and made me pray I would never have to face off against her in court or anywhere else.
"Honey, be true to your race," Quincy said.
"I will be true to myself," Jasmine said, "and not to some prehistoric notion that all black women are the exclusive property of black men."
"You've got a sassy mouth, girl. But it's not going to save you from that white man's jungle fever."
Quincy threw me a white-hot, fastball glare burning with hate. The pitch came high and inside, identical to the one LAPD detective Darius Jones had thrown. Anger rose in my chest, but anything I'd say would only fuel his rage.
"My life is my own, Uncle Quincy." Jasmine's cool voice diluted my anger and helped me understand they had been through this conversation before. "I will not allow black men to own me any more than I will allow white men to tell me what to do. I will not trade one form of oppression for another."
Quincy Thompson opened his mouth, then shut it quickly when nothing came out. He stared at Jasmine for several long moments. "You're making a big, big mistake letting some white plantation boy come down from the big house and get into your pants," Quincy said. Then he whirled on his heel and headed toward the door. He stopped and fished in his pants pocket and pulled out a bright pink slip of paper.
He paused, and for a long moment all I heard was the man's labored breathing. "Well, this is why I came." He turned, tossed the paper. Then he stomped out of the house, slamming the door so hard it rattled the windows.
Jasmine and I studiously avoided making eye contact as the paper fluttered to the floor. It landed face up, obviously a telephone message. A car started up outside and sprayed gravel in its haste to leave.

With the M21 and a Leupold sight for daytime work slung over her shoulder, Jael St. Clair made her way through the underbrush parallel to the road, steadying her gait with a collapsible aluminum walking staff.

She stopped to take a deep breath and cursed silently when she exhaled. She should have driven the new Toyota SUV rental farther along the narrow, rutted lane, but she worried the 4Runner wouldn't be able to handle the terrain.

She looked back, but through the dense fog could barely make out anything more than fifty yards away. Sometimes less. The 100 percent humidity combined with the cold front that had followed the tornadoes and thunderstorms across the Delta the night before had combined to produce pea soup so thick on the highway she couldn't see more than a car length or two in many places. Highway 82 had been littered with accidents. Fortunately Quincy Thompson had driven like her grandmother.

Jael cursed the fog. She'd have to get closer to her targets than she preferred. No matter. The mission had to be completed. She pushed on through the brush, grateful the fog thinned some as the woods grew denser.

Her lungs burned again from the cigarettes, and her head spun bright from a lack of sleep. But the new patch was doing its job. And doubling up on the pills had rounded off most of the jagged edges of her anger and brought the usual rock-steadiness back to her hands, her eyes, and her thoughts. The old doctor who worked for the General had been adjusting her dosage continuously over the past six months and told her that was a natural thing and not to worry about it. She'd have to tell him she needed another adjustment.

Jael made her way across the soggy ground thatched with knee-high grasses and saplings, perfect cover for quail and copperheads. She'd already flushed one covey, but snakes didn't concern her. A symphony of
birdsongs, mockingbirds, the screeches of jays, filled the morning. Then
the sound of Quincy Thompson's car growing louder again, coming
from the cabin area.

She knelt low in the bushes and unslung the M21, flipped open the Leupold's covers, and sighted in. Through the hazy shroud of fog, she made out an angry black face. She tracked the face as it drew abreast, then headed off in the distance.

"Bang," she said softly as she closed the sight covers and reslung the M21. She stopped for a moment and concentrated her mind on hearing. She'd heard faint rustles since leaving her SUV. But it lacked any sort of pattern connected to danger. The woods here were filled with birds, deer, possums, raccoons, and every other manner of woodland creature. That's what she heard now as she filtered through the chatter of the trees and brush.

Jasmine stood with her back to me, shoulders slumped, staring down at the pink sheet of paper. The fading sound of Quincy's car left us holding on to a brittle silence filled with ancient hurt and modern pain. I wanted to reach out, but Quincy's insults made me second-guess my own motives.

Then, from outside, a mockingbird broke the silence nd the tainted mood. Jasmine leaned down and picked up the slip of paper.
"It's from Jay Shanker," Jasmine said as she stood up, her back still to me. "Talmadge's lawyer."
"I remember."
She squared her shoulders and turned to me. "He wants to meet at his office this morning."
Her voice was all business and her gaze had a distance I had not seen before. Quincy had played the enforcer better than he knew.
"He left a number. Said we had to call at precisely eleven A.M." She paused, and when she spoke again, warmth filtered into her words. "This is weird. The note says under no circumstances should I call his office.
"Strange man." Jasmine shook her head and went into the front room. And why didn't he call my cell?"
I took the occasion to pull an unadorned, navy blue polo shirt from my bag, along with a fresh pair of cargo shorts.
"Damnation," she mumbled. With my back to the door, I tucked the shirt in and zipped up the shorts. "My cell battery's dead."
I turned as she walked back in. She had pulled on a pair of jeans under the Valley State T-shirt.
"Let me check mine." I went over and excavated the plastic hospital bag from beneath a pile of green surgical scrubs on the floor. I rummaged my phone from the bag and pressed the power button.
"Nada." I held it up and looked at her. Anxiety welled up then as I thought of Camilla and wondered if Flowers had called back. "My charger's in my bag."
Jasmine shook her head. "No good. Mom's authenticity, remember? No electricity, no phone."
"Oh, terrific."
We listened to the mockingbird for a moment before Jasmine spoke. "I don't know about you, but I can't take much more of this morning without some coffee. You?"
"Yeah. Me."
"Okay, but like everything else here, you're gonna have to work for it." She tossed me a Mona Lisa smile, then headed into the front room. I followed her, jamming my wallet and the rest of my stuff in my cargo shorts pockets. I found her fiddling around with a black cast-iron stove in the corner.
"There should be some dry wood on the front porch."
I went out front and pulled several split pieces of pine from the pile. I grabbed the smallest pieces I could find and made sure a couple of them had nice globs of hardened resin. Pine made for a dirty flame that fouled flues, but it would give us a quick, hot fire for coffee. I pried off a chunk of dried resin the size of a marble and crushed it under my heel. I scraped up the coarse granules, grabbed a fistful of pine twigs for tinder, and carried them in along with the wood.
When I came back in, Jasmine had filled a battered, old steel coffeepot with bottled water. A Starbucks bag sat on the adjacent counter next to a hand-cranked coffee grinder.
"Sure beats muddy creek water and ground-up chicory," I said as I made my way over to the stove and looked it over. I had never lit a fire in one of these.
"In there." Jasmine pointed. "Lift the cover and put the wood in.
"Mama was a coffee snob. It's one of the things I picked up from her." Jasmine placed a conical paper filter in a funnel holder and put it in a thermos. Then I pulled off a heavy cast-iron disk from the top of the stove and bent over the opening to build a fire. I arranged the resin granules over a small bed of pine twigs, then carefully placed the larger pieces.
"Black men really resent successful black women," Jasmine said evenly as I bent over my task. I resisted looking at her. "They come up with every hang-up imaginable. I think Uncle Quincy knows he's off base, but he's too old to shake it off."
I straightened up to grab a large wooden match from a box next to the stove. I carefully avoided looking at her. I did not want her to stop talking.
"My grandmother really liked you," she said as I scratched the match head on the inside of the stove and held my breath against the fumes. "But she was just a woman, and my grandfather and Uncle Quincy hustled Mama away."
"I'll never forget," I said as I touched the match flame to the resin powder. It caught immediately. I stood up and blew out the match.
"Mama told me she always wanted to see you marching through the door to get her."
"Damn." I swallowed hard against the old painful feelings and took a deep breath."I thought maybe she felt the same way as Quincy and your dad." I shook my head slowly, "I had no idea what to do. Not a clue."
Jasmine smiled and turned her attention to the coffee.
The pine resin, knots, and wood blazed high and hot. I covered the hole in the stove with the black cast-iron disk and Jasmine put the coffeepot on top of it.
"Something to eat?" Jasmine said as she bent over and opened a crude, unpainted cupboard door. She stood up with a box filled with an assortment of foil-wrapped bars: Balance, Power, breakfast, granola. She set the box on a table made of wide pine planks ornamented by decades of use.
"Most everything's past its expiration." She pulled out a Balance bar and pushed the box over toward me. "But I don't think this stuff ever goes bad."
Jasmine unwrapped her bar and took a bite. "Probably not lethal."
I pawed through the box, listening to the coffee water start to tick. I pulled out a bar, unwrapped it.
She walked over to her pile of bags and came back with a legal-size manila folder I recognized as part of Lashonna's files we had retrieved the night before. A CD in a thin plastic jewel case fell out of the bottom of the folder. It landed on a corner and split apart, sending the top of the jewel box and the bottom in different directions and the CD rolling off in a third.
"Damnation!" She dropped the folder and stretched out to pluck the CD off the floor while it was still rolling. "Sometimes I am such a klutz." I helped her gather the jewel box remains, then went to get my laptop.

The mixed woodlot of oak and pine shed the previous night's rain with every breeze, showering Jael St. Clair as she made a broad circle through the brush. She wanted a clear shot to the path between the shack's front door and the red Mercedes.

Jael quickly found the correct angle, then walked a line back from the shack. She found the spot, but when she looked back, banks of fog drifted in and out, totally obscuring the shack as often as not. She moved closer and found a small cove surrounded by pine saplings. She pulled out her laser range finder and speced the distance at thirty-six yards. Not even a proper sniper shot. No matter. Business was business. She adjusted the Leupold for the distance. Then she jammed the aluminum walking staff into the rain-soft dirt. It sank in deep and steady.

Picking up the rifle, she knelt beside the walking pole, grabbed it with her left hand. Then she rested the M21 on that hand, holding it tight against the pole with her thumb. Then she placed her cheek against the M21 and looked through the Leupold, down at the path Stone and the lawyer would eventually walk when they went to the Mercedes.