Perfect Killer (31 page)

From his vantage point half in a culvert leading under Martin Luther King Jr. Drive close to its intersection with Sunflower Road, the compact, muscular man surveyed the ramshackle cotton gin with his small monocular night-vision scope. Brad Stone had been good with his caution and preparation, but nobody was perfect.

The man bristled with a poised aggressiveness that made his fingertips pulse with every beat of his heart as he crouched in the standing water left by the previous night's rain.

He was as dark as the shadows embracing him, dressed entirely in black from his tightly laced, government-issue, high-top tactical boots to the summer-weight, cotton, skistyle mask never found in retail stores and designed for cool concealment, not warmth on the slopes. His black turtleneck was turned up to meld darkness with the bottom of the mask. Thin, black latex gloves covered his hands. A small earphone wire led to the man's portable radio as he monitored the law enforcement channels.

In the round image intensifier, the man observed Jasmine Thompson cross the street and give Brad Stone a hug as they stood under the tin-covered overhang where cotton wagons once stopped to be emptied.

Not long after the two had gone inside, the man watched an Itta Bena police car approach from the direction of Balance Due with its headlights out. Three men got out of the police car and walked over to a pale silver SUV. One of the policemen checked the license number against a sheet of paper, then proceeded to transfer the SUV's contents to the squad car. They drove away as stealthily as they had come. The man frowned as the taillights disappeared. There had been absolutely nothing in the radio chatter about this.

After the police cruiser left, the man made his way like a shadow to the gin and tucked himself under a tumbled-down loading dock near the wagon shed. The distant sounds of blues music trailed off about a quarter before three. The man waited easily with his thoughts. Nine minutes later a dark, older-model Jeep turned off MLK Jr. Drive, cut its headlights, and bounced slowly along the dirt path. The man raised the monocular and spotted attorney Jay Shanker's face through the windshield.

I slipped through a siding gap and scrambled toward the Jeep on all fours. After seeing no one else in the vehicle, I tapped on the window.
Shanker's startled face whined toward me, wide and white. It took him several seconds to recognize me. Then he got out.
"Where's Jasmine?"
"Inside."
Shanker followed me through the hole.
Jasmine shook his hand and without preamble asked, "Did you bring the second CD?"
Shanker shook his head. "There isn't one."
Jasmine and I stood speechless.
"There never has been," Shanker said, his voice heavy with regret. "They got to Talmadge before he told me where he hid the rest of the documents. But they don't know that. They would have killed him by now if they knew the CD didn't exist."
"You lied!"
"I'm sorry. I had to. It was the only way to save his life. I had to get you involved."
"That's no excuse—"
"Please, hear me out."
Pain colored Shanker's words. "More's at stake than Talmadge. Braxton's a psycho car bomb headed for the White House. Even if he doesn't disintegrate like Talmadge, Braxton has no compassion, none at all. We can't afford to have his finger on the trigger of the world's most powerful military power."
Something rustled against the tin siding. Instinctively I ducked and pulled Jasmine down with one hand and brought the H&K up with the other, thumbing the safety off as I did. The rustling stopped. I let go of Jasmine and scanned the room with the night-vision scope. Nothing.
"Possums," I said as I stood up and offered my hand to Jasmine.
Shanker exhaled loudly.
"Jay, do you have any idea where the documents might be?" Jasmine asked.
"I suspect they're buried in or near one of the duck blinds he used, but those are scattered all over the state from the Ross Barnett Reservoir down in Jackson all the way up this side of the Mississippi River to Tunica. It might be anywhere."
"Do we have to have those documents to make the case?" I asked.
"Absolutely" Shanker said. "Without the original records, and preferably Talmadge's testimony to establish the trail of evidence, Braxton just might get off the hook."
"Meaning we somehow have to spring Talmadge, recover the documents, and keep him alive to tell his tale."
"Not an awfully practical matter," Jasmine said. "He's being held in a guarded, topfloor room at the VA hospital in Jackson."
Suddenly, the shrieking syncopation of a helicopter shattered the silence, followed by a swift blur of simultaneous terror. First came a red laser dot's lethal dance, which found its mark faster than I could react. The unmistakable crack of a Heckler and Koch MP5 reached my ears an instant after Jay Shanker's head opened up like a dropped melon.
Before Shanker hit the ground, the red dot danced over Jasmine like a red wasp heavy with death. I threw myself against her and prayed.

The man hiding amid the ruins of the old cotton gin loading dock watched a Hueysized chopper close in, leading a convoy of military Humvees down Sunflower Road, straight for the T-intersection at the gin. None of the vehicles had lights on. As the convoy approached, the sounds of racing engines came from opposite directions on MLK Jr. An instant later, the light bars on two police cars lit up, with sirens in full opera soprano mode.

The man's jaw dropped as an old stake-back truck raced down the middle of the street, from his left, pursued by one police car and heading straight for the second. With no options left, the stake-back truck careened left onto Sunflower Road head-on into the convoy.

Then the night filled with a concerto of squealing brakes, skidding tires, and the eruption of broken glass and tortured metal. The concerto's second movement commenced when the other vehicles in the convoy rear-ended each other in an extended chain reaction.

The two police cars skidded to a stop behind the stake-backed truck. The helicopter lit up then and spotlighted a tall, thin black youth as he sprang from the cab of the stake-back truck. Uniformed police officers leaped out of the squad cars and gave chase.

A third police car arrived less urgently and disgorged a huge man with a uniform and a black cowboy hat. The sounds of more sirens grew closer. The big man walked over to the Humvee as the passengers got out. Undamaged vehicles made their way around the collision but found themselves blocked by the Itta Bena police cruisers. A tall man with gray hair and a cigarette screamed obscenities at the huge man in the cowboy hat. Men in helmets and SWAT gear swarmed out of the vehicles.

The far end of MLK Jr. Drive lit up then with more police light bars. The faintest of scraping sounds came to the man as he took in the
scene. He whirled, but saw only the blur of a boot
disappearing through a gap in the siding. The man followed the boot inside.

The MP5's next shot lifted the hair at the back of my neck as I rolled Jasmine away from Jay Shanker's lifeless body. But the red dot was relentless. There was no time to aim my H&K because the slightest pause meant certain death.

Just as I feared history would repeat itself, a sustained burst of full-auto weapons fire came from the front of the gin, shunting the persistent red dot off into the darkness to paint a still life on the rusty tin roof.

My relief deepened with a totally unexpected voice.
"Old son, don't you have enough good sense to stop pissing off the
federales
?" "Rex?" I stared at a shadow emerging from the darkness.
"Keep your voice down, podnuh. We don't want our buddies outside to connect the

I helped Jasmine stand up as Rex's compact muscular form grew near. From outside, the sounds of urgent voices and the thuds of running feet sifted into the gin's confined space, filled now with the smell of gunfire and death.

I shook the gloved hand he offered me as tin siding rattled at the rear of the girl. We all three dropped for cover and brought our guns to bear.
"Don't shoot."
The voice was familiar.
"Uncle Quincy?"
"Jasmine!"
Quincy Thompson emerged from behind a sheet of corrugated tin siding, which swung out like a secret door at the back of the gin, right about where it abutted the adjacent building.
Instants later, I made out Quincy's face, which changed from relief to anger when he turned his head from Jasmine to me. Then he spotted Rex.
"Who the hell are you?"
"Chill out, cap'n. I'm just along for the ride."
Quincy muttered something beneath his breath. Then: "Come on! Quick!"
As we followed Quincy, the sounds of a siren grew near; flashing lights leaked through the old siding at the side of the gin. Then, almost lost in the dazzling of light-bar flashes from outside, a red dot danced about Quincy's back.
"Down!" I yelled, and launched myself into the backs of Quincy's knees, cutting him down with a clip that would have drawn a penalty flag in any football game. Shots sparked off a rusted piece of machinery I heard Rex's TEC-9 and a distant cry of pain.
Then a voice at the rear called out, "Come on! Come on! Come on!"
I helped Quincy to his feet. He stared at me.
"What the hell you staring at?" I said.
His mouth struggled for words, which would not come.
"Get your rear in gear, pal," Rex broke the impasse, pushing us along.
"Or your ass is grass and those folks're lawn mowers."
Quincy and I followed Jasmine through the makeshift opening. Behind us, Rex emptied the TEC-9 at the far corner of the gin, then tossed it away.
"Bought it off a street dealer in Jackson. When they track it down to him, he'll be in a world of hurt." I followed Rex through the narrow opening and let the tin panel close behind me right as the light and concussion of a flashbang filled the interior.

Smoke and flames persisted behind us in the gin. The flashbang had found plenty to burn in the old gin's debris, desiccated wooden beams, decades of cotton lint from ginning.

We slogged through mud and standing water along a narrow passage between the gin and the back of a brick wall of an adjoining structure. After maybe forty feet, we reached a low, narrow hole and shoehorned ourselves through it into the brick building's crawl space. After crawling under floor joists for twenty feet or so, we climbed up into an abandoned warehouse.

Our guide helped us up from the access hatch one by one. As soon as he let go of my hand, he unzipped the front of his Ben Davis coveralls to reveal the uniform of the Leflore County Sheriffs Department. His name tag told me his last name was Mandeville.

"I'm Pete," he said. I shook his hand. Then behind him, I spotted a wizened old man holding a guitar case.
Mandeville caught my gaze. "That's Pap. He used to work at the gin. He's probably the last man alive who remembers the passage we just took."
The old man gave us a broad smile filled with teeth too white and even to be anything but dentures.
"Uh-huh, tha's right," Pap said "We use that way when we late or need a break. Gin boss never caught us. Uh-uh."
"Come on, John's waiting," Mandeville said.
Pap stood by the door with his guitar case.
"Thank you," I said.
He nodded.
"Were you the one singing 'Kilin' Floor'?"
Pap nodded.
"You played the best set of open D-minor licks I ever heard. Better than Skip himself"
Pap smiled.
A Leflore County sheriff's van sat on the other side of the old warehouse. Mandeville slid open the side door and motioned us all to hurry.
Inside sat John Myers in front and Tyrone Freedman way in back, sandwiched in among all of the luggage and gear from the SUV. The radio crackled nonstop. Half a block away, fire station sirens began to wail.
"Tyrone!" I said. "What the hell?" I leaned over to shake his hand before sitting down at the end of the rearmost bench seat. Jasmine sat next to me.
Quincy got in, sat next to Jasmine, and gave her a hug. Then Pete Mandeville slid the door closed. The sky brightened with a warm flicker over by the old gin.
"They connected you to my Internet traffic," Tyrone said. "A whole gang of federal agents came in the hospital's front door, so I went out the back and paid Deputy John here a visit."
Myers nodded. I looked around at the faces.
"Oh, man." My heart fell. "Tyrone, I am so sorry to drag you into this."
Mandeville slid into the driver's seat and put the van in gear.
Tyrone shook his head and laughed.
I looked around at the lives I was dragging into this black hole of trouble: Myers, Tyrone, Quincy, Jasmine, and Rex, who held his black gloves and mask in his hands. I had grown accustomed to getting myself in and out of trouble all by my lonesome. Until now, when it mattered most.
"I'm sorry for all of this," I said, looking around me. Beyond the windshield, the corner where Durham's Drug Store had once sat passed by on the left.
Then we passed the post office, where, despite my mother's strictest prohibitions, the itinerant crop duster's son and I used to hang out in the dim, cool lobby with the shiny linoleum floors, pictures of criminals an the walls and a bank of shiny brass post-office boxes with combination dials stretching up almost out of sight. Then we passed the Judge's law office, followed close on by the old VFW hut, where I loved to play the illegal slot machines. Finally we crossed the new Roebuck Lake bridge.
Across the square, boarded-up storefronts glowed like a summer sunset as the gin's flames leaped into the night sky.
"You didn't drag anybody into this," Jasmine said. "Mama did."
"Uh-uh, child," Myers interrupted. "Nope. It was my own damn fault for sticking my big nose in things."
"But still, I should have—"
"Old son," Rex spoke up, "you're so damned used to being in charge of things, you're just gonna have to recognize this ain't your fault and it's gonna take some teamwork and a little help from your indictable coconspirators to get out of."
"Lady and gentlemen, this is Rex," I said.
I didn't use Rex's last name because Rex wasn't his real first name anyway, and I never knew when he was comfortable revealing his last. At the very least, I figured having two sworn law enforcement officers within an arm's length would not be the time despite their own illegal complicity in helping Jasmine and me avoid the hellhound dogging us.
Amid the quasi-sentient static of frantic police radio communications, everyone acknowledged the introduction in a way that indicated Rex's name was irrelevant because he had, after all, proved himself where it mattered. We listened to the bits of radio traffic for a few moments before Quincy spoke up, his voice as resolved and hesitant as a wedding proposal.
"Thank you for what you did tonight," Quincy told Rex, and extended his hand. Jasmine's face looked as if she had been slapped; she looked at her uncle as she would a stranger.
Quincy turned to me and offered me the same hand. The unremembered familiarity of his face touched me again, but again I could only feel the memory, not recall it. It felt important, very important, and frustrated me in its elusiveness.
"And thank you," he said. I shook his hand and a gate opened in his eyes. "Thank you very much."
"You're welcome," I said. "Very."
Jasmine hung on every syllable of her uncle's unspoken conversation and gave him a nod and a smile. When he sat back down next to her, she took his hand and gave it a squeeze.
John Myers loosed a broadside of laughter then. We all turned toward him.
"Lordy! I wish I could be there!" He laughed, then caught his breath; he pointed at the radio. "Rats and possums and a whole damn herd of mice and feral cats are streaming away from the fire, and I guess most of those city-boy Feds ain'
never
seen nothing like that afore." He laughed again. "They cuttin' loose, shootin' what moves."
He laughed, grimaced in pain as he grabbed his wounded shoulder with his good hand, then laughed some more.
"And the chief's been raising hell with that Homeland Security asshole about not notifying him about activity on his turf."
"Did Pap's grandson get away?" Mandeville asked.
"Course he did," Myers said. "And the fire department said it's not leaving the station until the gunshots stop, so all the Feds can do is stand around and shoot possums and stray cats."
We hit the unpaved part of the road and bounced into the night. When our laughter faded, Myers turned the volume down on the radio.
"That ain't the last surprise that ole boy's gonna get either. Sometime tomorrow, Homeland Security's going to get a call from two very embarrassed agents." Myers looked at Jasmine and me.
"I had two babysitters watching me, followed me over to Lena's." He chuckled. "Itta Bena PD's evidence locker is missing just enough GHB to send those folks to nevernever land. Lena slipped that old date-rape drug in their drinks." He smiled at the thought. "The chief left 'em in the backseat of one of their cars, naked as a jaybird and covered in their own jism."
"How did—?" Jasmine started to speak.
Myers shook his head. "You really don't want to know."
We road in silence for a long time, way past Runnymede. The sky glowed yellow over toward Itta Bena.
"Jay Shanker's in there," Jasmine said then, her voice low and heavy.
"Oh lordy, lordy" Myers said. "There was a man we all needed." He shook his head. "I can't tell you how many people's lives he made a difference in, how many youngsters had their lives turned around by him, how many people—like Pap—who finally got rewarded for their backbreaking labor because that man went to bat for them out of the goodness of his heart."
I had known Jay Shanker for only those handful of minutes in the gin, but Myers's words iced the darkness that hung black in my soul.
Mandeville steered the van toward the northeast and over the newly opened Yazoo River bridge to Greenwood.
"So what's your plan?" Myers asked me as we approached Highway 82.
I shook my head. "Don't have one yet, but somehow we've got to get Talmadge out of the VA in Jackson and find the load of records he hid." I summarized what we had learned from Shanker.
"I'd like to help you there, but I think Pete and I… the chief and all the others have gone about as far as we can without landing in jail."
"I understand."
"You can count on me," Tyrone said. "I went to med school right next to the VA, been in there any number of times."
"Anita still works there," Rex said.
"I'll do what I can," Quincy said, amazing Jasmine and me again.
"Get me back to my truck," Rex said. "I got me an idea."