Shedrow (15 page)

“Yeah, about,” Gianni said.

“I hardly feel it. This damn thing is rock solid,” Highet said.

Gianni glanced in his rearview mirror, noting a plain-looking sedan not more than ten car lengths back. He slowed the Porsche down to 80, then to 75, and the sedan continued to maintain a constant distance between them. The radar detector was silent, so it was unlikely that it was an unmarked police car.

“Okay, Steven, hold on because you’re about to feel it a little more now.” He downshifted the manual gearbox from sixth gear into fourth, and quickly accelerated as he shifted back up through the gears to sixth. The digital speedometer now read 120. Trees on the side of the highway moved past the windows in a blur, and the Porsche passed three lone vehicles as though they were standing still.

“I think we’re being followed,” Gianni said.

Highet looked at Gianni, then at the speedometer. Gianni’s hands gripped the wheel securely at the nine and three o’clock positions. Highet then turned to look through the wide rear window of the Porsche. At 120 mph, the sedan still appeared to be closing on them.

“He’s coming up on us,” Highet said. “What the hell kind of car is it that’s able to keep up with us at this speed?”

“Probably some modified police cruiser. But it’s no cop, that’s for damn sure.”

“How do you know?” Highet said.

“Because I would have been stopped long ago. It’s not a cop.”

Gianni saw the vehicle in his side mirror now, in the passing lane and closing in, even as the speedometer read 125. “Steven, there’s a gun under your seat. Reach down and get it.”

“What?”

“I said there is a gun under your seat. Reach under your seat and grab the gun, NOW.”

Highet reached under and brought out a silver handgun, a Beretta 90-Two. Gianni applied the brake steadily but firmly and the sedan soared by, then slowed down to again position itself alongside the Porsche. The sedan then made a series of erratic but deliberate
turns directly into Gianni’s path, attempting to force him off the highway. Gianni met each of the assaults with a counter maneuver, swerving and managing to avoid the sedan and still maintain control of his car. It helped that he had slowed to about 80 mph during these continued assaults. Suddenly he downshifted and accelerated past the sedan. At 110 mph the vehicle was still on his tail and once again pulled alongside. The tinted window on the passenger side of the sedan opened and a gun barrel emerged.

“God damn it,” Gianni yelled and once again put the gas pedal to the floor. He managed to pull about four car lengths ahead of the sedan. Then in a bold and sudden move, he forcefully hit the brakes. The sedan flew by and Gianni pulled the Porsche onto an exit ramp at a speed that Highet must have thought would end in a fiery crash. Instead, the Porsche accelerated and stayed glued to the road like a roller coaster on a ramped, sixty-degree turn and with the same kind of g-force felt deep in the gut of the two riders. Where the exit ramp straightened, Gianni hit the brakes hard and the Porsche screeched to a halt, careening across an intersection before finally coming to a complete stop at the opposite side of the cross road.

Highet flung his shoulders back into the seat, his head firmly against the high head restraint. Slowly he turned to look at his old college buddy.

“Holy shit,” Gianni said.

“Thank God Almighty,” Highet said. “I guess we took the right car after all.”

“Now what?” Highet asked.

“I’m going to pull into that station. I need some water or something.”

“Do you still want to go to Clay City?” Highet said.

“We’re almost there. I say we may as well move on. Our friends in the police cruiser are probably half way to West Virginia by now. I doubt if they’d bother heading back. There are too many different routes off this exit.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?”

“I don’t know yet,” Gianni said. “Just let me collect myself.” He got out of the car and went with Highet into the small convenience store attached to the gas station. Outside the door was a newspaper stand containing copies of the
Lexington Herald-Leader.
The headline instantly caught Gianni’s eye. He walked inside and paid for two bottles of water. Outside, he fed two coins into the newspaper dispenser and removed a single copy. The headline read:

WITNESS TELLS ABOUT FINDING
SLAIN CLAY CITY POLICE OFFICER

MOUNT STERLING
—Something wasn’t right about the way Randy Lacy’s police cruiser came down U.S. 15 toward Stanton on June 13
^th
. The Clay City police chief’s car went airborne for a few yards before it landed in a ditch off the side of the road.

Seconds after the car stopped, a handcuffed James H. “Jamie” Barnett kicked out the back window of the cruiser, crawled out and attempted to jog away, drivers who were the first witnesses at the scene testified Thursday. It was then they knew that something terrible had happened to Clay City’s sole police officer.

The article and some related pieces went on to describe the bloody crime in which the officer was shot with his own gun following a DWI arrest. The defendant was thought to have links to a growing drug trafficking problem and a crystal meth lab operating in Powell County.

“It appears there is quite a lot of activity in this little town,” Gianni said.

“I know,” Highet said. “That murder was big news, even in Lexington. The police chief was a very well-liked fellow. He often was known to cuff suspects in front, because he thought it was more humane. He probably thought this guy was so intoxicated that he wouldn’t be much of a threat. But the guy hid the police officer’s gun while the officer was outside the cruiser, and then shot him with his own gun while he was driving down Main Street.”

“Sure sounds like a nice place,” Gianni said.

“You made up the itinerary, Anthony.”

“I know, and we
are
going there today.”

“You know,” Highet said, “I’ve never liked guns, never wanted them around. But I think I’ve just changed my mind. This may just be the week I get myself a gun.”

“Not a bad idea, and it’s a hell of a lot easier in your state than in mine,” Gianni said. He looked at the photo of the suspect in the paper. He was a man in his thirties with deep-set, dark eyes, pale and gaunt cheeks, wild, unkempt shoulder length hair and a scruffy goatee. He handed the paper to Highet. “On to Clay City,” he said.

They approached a diner on Main Street in Clay City, an all brick building with a large, old-fashioned storefront window. It looked like it might have been one of those Rexall® storefronts in years past. Gianni parked the Porsche amidst an assortment of pickup trucks and rusty jalopies, down the street at some distance from the diner. He hoped no one in the diner would notice the vehicle. Both he and Highet were dressed in jeans, work boots and clean but casual cotton shirts, so he hoped they would blend fairly well with folks in the diner and that he might be able to speak with some of them.

They walked in the door and a dark haired, slightly plump lady greeted them cordially. “Morning,” she said. “Sit yourselves anywhere ya like.”

They took a seat near one of the large front windows and surveyed the tables in the diner, then looked out to the street. The patrons in the diner did not seem to pay much attention to them. It was apparent that most of them knew one another and appeared to regard the two newcomers as strangers but not necessarily intruders.

Gianni and Highet reached for two plastic-covered menus that were standing up between a glass sugar container and a napkin dispenser. The waitress came to the table with pad and pencil in hand. Her dark brown hair was piled high onto her head, in a sort of beehive that reminded Gianni of a favorite aunt, long since gone along with the hairstyle, or so he had thought. She chewed her gum energetically.

“Whatcha fellows want?”

Gianni had not really read the menu, but he ordered first in a rather automatic or unconscious manner. “Can I have an egg white omelet with mushrooms, home fries and dry wheat toast?”

The waitress stopped chewing her gum for a moment and cast a sideways glance at Gianni. “No egg whites, hon.”

“Um, okay. Mushroom omelet then.”

“Home fries or grits?”

“Home fries, please.”

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Sure, thanks,” he said.

Highet ordered a hotcakes breakfast special from the menu, orange juice and coffee. The waitress returned with the drinks and asked rather cheerfully, “So what brings you all to Clay City?”

Gianni answered, “Well, believe it or not, my wife grew up in Winchester.”

“No kidding,” she said. “So what brings you to Clay City then?”

“I’m trying to locate an old friend for her,” Gianni said. “I think he’s rather well known around here. They refer to him as the old hermit.”

“Sure. I know him,” she quickly replied.

Gianni could barely disguise his excitement. “Oh really?”

“Sure, he’ll come in once in a while. Why are you looking for him?”

“Well, my wife…she knew him a long time ago, before he became such a loner.”

“Where’s your wife now?” she asked.

“She’s…sick.” He deliberately and somewhat instinctually crafted the lie. He thought it might evoke some sympathy, and he was right.

“I’m sorry. So is this guy like an old lost friend or something?”

“Sort of.”

“Well I’ll tell you what I do know,” she began. “He lives around here in the woods somewhere. I can’t tell you where, because I don’t know where. But he didn’t always live like that. He used to teach at the University. Science…Genetics, I think. He owned horses too, race horses. Then his wife got very ill. Some kind of lung problem, she had.

“What kind of lung problem,” Gianni asked.

“Don’t know. She never smoked, neither. He used to come in more often back in those days. He would talk a little about her needing a lung transplant, and about how he was saving up for it because insurance didn’t want to pay for it. He was in a big fight with them too, but he had some money saved from his horse business and he was trying to set aside every penny he could for his wife’s surgery. Only she died waiting for the operation, and he was never quite the same after that.”

Gianni looked across the table at Highet. For the second time
that morning, Highet’s eyes were noticeably filled, and he was looking up towards the ceiling in an effort to contain the tears.

There was a long silence. Gianni looked away from Highet towards an empty wall with a vacuous expression on his face. Then he spoke directly to him, even though the waitress was still at the table. “That’s so sad,” he said. “And it’s odd.” He looked up at the waitress. “My wife had a sister-in-law who also died not too long ago, waiting for a lung transplant. She had pulmonary fibrosis, actually. She never smoked either.”

Highet spoke next. “I never knew that, Anthony. It must have been very difficult for Janice to see her brother and his wife go through that.”

“No, it wasn’t really. Janice hasn’t seen her older brother in over ten years.”

When Gianni drove back into the entrance to the Griffin Gate Hotel in the early afternoon, two police cruisers were parked near the hotel entrance. Outside the vehicles, a pair of Kentucky troopers paced along the walkway, talking to one another and to two men at the bell captain’s stand. Gianni felt his heart race. His first thought was that someone he had passed at breakneck speed had called the police, and that they had somehow tracked his location. He avoided the front circle and parked at some distance from the entrance. He was alone, having left Highet back at Midway Farm.

As he walked towards the hotel entrance, the two troopers converged on him, blocking his entry to the front door.

“Dr. Anthony Gianni?” one of them said.

“Yes sir?”

“We’re from the Kentucky State Police and we’d like to have a few words with you.”

“About what, may I ask?”

The door to one of the police cars opened and Lt. Terri Jones approached the trio.

“We meet again, Doctor,” she said.

One of the troopers said, “We want to speak with you about Chester Pawlek. We can make this informal. Would it be okay if we just go to your room to talk? Or else we could go back to our post in Frankfort.”

“No, we can talk here.”

The two officers introduced themselves as troopers Johnson and Boggs. They had the same grey and black uniforms as New York’s troopers, Gianni thought.

They all walked in a group through the hotel corridors towards Gianni’s room on the first floor. The walls throughout the hotel were liberally furnished with paintings and photographs, most with an equestrian theme. A few of the hotel guests turned to consider the four as they walked by in silence.

They stood awkwardly in a cluster at one end of Gianni’s room as he gathered two chairs from the patio and two from the room, placing all four at a round table near the sliding glass doors. They sat down in the cramped quarters, as if preparing to play poker at a table that was far too small.

Boggs was the older of the two troopers. His hair was mostly grey, close-cropped and combed straight back from the forehead. He and Lt. Jones began the questioning.

“When is the last time you talked to Chester Pawlek?” Boggs asked.

“I can’t recall exactly when it was.” Gianni thought back to their meeting in his office, shortly after the Catroni boys had performed
the mini amputation on his finger. He wondered how much he should tell them. Just answer the questions, he thought, no need to volunteer anything. Just handle it like he would if he were sitting in court as an expert medical witness.

“What was the nature of your last contact? Was it a business or a social visit?”

“We met in my office because he had some medical questions he wanted to ask. They were veterinary issues really, but he was looking for someone with some medical background to help him.”

“Help him with what?” Detective Jones weighed in.

“He had some questions about the equine herpes virus.”

“Interesting,” Jones said. “Was that meeting before or after you and I spoke?”