Cripple Creek Part 10

On the last, the lead inmate, one Billy Basil, stepped through the door to pick up a pizza left just outside, only to meet a sniper's bullet. The governor hadn't come down from the capitol to parlay, but he had sent instructions.

"So then it was over, at least," I said. "The trauma, what they did to you, that'll be with you for a long time, of course."

"You don't understand," Stan Bellison told me. "The other inmate? His name was Kyle Beck. That last day, as he stood staring at Billy's body in the open door, I came up behind him and gouged out his eyes with my thumbs."

He held up his hands. I saw the ragged stumps of what had been fingers. And the thumbs that remained.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

" SHE'LL NEVER LEARN, will she?"

"That's what she said you'd say."

We were sitting on the bench outside Manny's Dollar $tore, where almost exactly a year ago Sarah Hazelwood and I had sat, when her brother was murdered. Lonnie took a sip of coffee. A car pa.s.sed down Main Street. Another car. A truck. He sipped again. A light breeze stirred, nosing plastic bags, leaves, and food wrappers against our feet. "You still have that possum you told me about?"

"Miss Emily. Yeah. Got a family now. Ugliest little things you can imagine."

Brett Davis came out of the store b.u.t.toning a new flannel s.h.i.+rt, deeply creased from being folded, over the one he already wore.

"Lonnie. Mr. Turner."

"First purchase of the millennium, Brett?"

"Last one just plumb fell apart when Betty washed it. Says to me, Brett, you better come on out here, and she's holding up a tangle of wet rags. d.a.m.n shame."

"For sure." Lonnie touched forefinger to forehead by way of saying good-bye. Brett climbed into his truck that always looked to me like something that had been smashed flat and pumped back out, maybe with powerful magnets.

"June's right," Lonnie said after a while. "I've always blamed her, always turned things around in my mind so that they got to be her fault. I don't know why."

"Disappointment, maybe. You expect as much from her as you do from yourselfa"and expect much the same things. We construct these scenarios in our minds, how we want the world to be, then we kick at the traces when the world's not like that. We're all different, Lonnie. Different strengths, different weaknesses."

"Don't know as I ever told you this before, but there's times I feel flat-out stupid around you. We talk, and you tell me what I already know. Which has got to be the worst kind of stupid."

"It's all the training I've had."

"The h.e.l.l it is."

Lonnie took June to dinner that night, just the two of them. She'd spent the day, with J. T.'s help, getting her house back in order. He put on his best s.h.i.+rt and a tie and the jacket of a leisure suit that had been hanging in the back of his closet for close on to thirty years and met her at her door with a spray of carnations and drove all the way over to Poplar Crossing, to the best steakhouse in the county. "Everybody must of thought this was just some poor foolish old man romancing a young woman," June said when she came in to work the next morning.

With her there to hold down the fort, I decided to go visit Don Lee. He'd been transferred to the county hospital an hour or so away.

He was off the respirator now. An oxygen cannula snaked across the bed to his nose. Water bubbled in the humidifier. IV bags, some bloated, others near collapse, hung from poles. One of the poles held a barometer-like gadget that did double duty, registering intercranial pressure and draining off fluid.

"He's intermittently conscious," a nurse told me, "about what we'd expect at this point. He's family? A friend?"

"My boss, actually." There was no reason to show her the badge but I did anyway. She said she was sorry, she'd be right outside the door catching up on her charting, and left us alone.

I put my hand against Don Lee's there on the bed. His eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling's blankness.

"Turner?"

"I'm here, Don Lee."

"This is hard."

"I know."

"No. This is hard."

I told him what went down in Memphis.

"Kind of let the beast out of the cage there, didn't you?"

"Guess I did, at that."

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"Good. I'm tired, really tired. . . . Why did someone stick an icepick in my head, Turner?"

"It's a monitor."

"Man-eater?"

"No, monitor."

"Big lizard you mean."

"Not really."

He seemed to be thinking that over.

"They keep telling me and I keep forgetting: June's okay, right?"

"She's fine. Back at work as of today."

I thought he'd fallen off again when he suddenly said, "You sure you don't want to be sheriff?"

"I'm sure."

"Smart move," he said.

I was backing the Chariot out of a visitor's s.p.a.ce when the beeper went off. I sat looking at the number while a car and an SUV roughly the size of a tank blared horns at me.

June.

I pulled back into the s.p.a.ce, earning a middle-finger salute from the tank driver, and went to use the phone in the hospital lobby.

"How's Don Lee?" June asked.

"Looking good. Still gonna be a while. So what's up?"

"Maybe nothing. Thelma called. From the diner? Said some guy was in there early this morning. Waiting in his car when they came in to open, actually. Just ordered coffee. Then a little latera"she and Gillie and Jay were setting up, of course, but she swung by a time or two to check on hima"he asked after you. Said he was an old friend."

Any old friends I was supposed to have, I probably didn't want to see.

"When Thelma said he should check in at the sheriff's office, he said well, he was just pa.s.sing through, pressed for time. Maybe he'd come back."

"Thelma say what he looked like?"

"Slight, dark skin and hair, wearing a suit, that was dark too, over a yellow knit s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned all the way up. Good shoes. Thing was, Thelma said, he didn't ask the kind of questions you'd expect. Where you lived, what you did for a living, all that. What he wanted to know was did you have a family, who your friends were."

"Thanks, June. He still around?"

"Got back in his car, Thelma saida"a dark blue Mustang, I have the license number for youa"and drove off in the direction of the interstate."

"I'm on my way in. See you soon."

Half an hour later I pulled off the road onto the bluff just above Val's house. The old Ames place, as everyone still called it. Val was up at the state police barracks doing her job, of course, but a dark blue Mustang sat in her drive.

I went down through stands of oak and pecan trees trellised with honeysuckle, through ankle-deep tides of kudzu, to the back door opening onto the kitchen. No one locked doors here, and the kitchen would have no interest for him.

I also had the advantage of knowing the house and its wood floors. Focusing on creaks above, I followed his progress: master bedroom, hallway, second and third bedrooms, bath. Then the tiny tucked-wing room probably meant for servants, and the hallway again.

"You'd be Turner," he said from the top of the stairs.

One cool guy. Sure of himself and waiting to see which way the wind blew.

I put a round through one knee. He came tumbling down the stairs with left hand and drawn weapon b.u.mping behind him, to the base, where my foot pinned his wrist.

"Apologies first," I said. "You're obviously not one of the thick-neck boys. They wouldn't know subtlety if it ran over them, then backed up and had another go."

"Contract," he said.

"Who's paying?"

"You know how it works. I can't tell you that."

I moved the snout of the Police Special vaguely in his direction, a sweeping motion. "Ankle or knee?"

I used Val's phone to call and tell June I was going to be a little later than I'd thought. Then I drove back to the hospital, one of Val's sheets wrapped tight around my pa.s.senger's leg. There wasn't much vessel damage, but joints do get b.l.o.o.d.y. Ask any orthopedic surgeon.

I was doing just that ("Case like this, we can rebuild the joint from the fragments, adding a bit of plastic here and therea" sometimes that's best, staying with the originala"or we can replace the whole thing. The newest t.i.tanium appliances are remarkable") when Val walked through the double doors.

"June called me."

I thanked the doctor and said I'd get back to him about cost, responsibility, and so on.

"Not a problem," he said. "Mr. Millikin had proof of insurance with him. He's fully covered. Says he wants to be the man of steel. I've got to go finish a procedure up in ORa"got interrupted to check him out. Then we'll have him brought up." Nodding his leave-taking: "Sheriff. Ma'am."

"What the h.e.l.l is going on?" Val asked. "This guy was in my house? Why was this guy in my house? Who the h.e.l.l is this guy?"

In the bas.e.m.e.nt we found a place to get coffee, not really a cafeteria, more a kind of commissary, and I walked her through what had happened.

"So, what? He was going to hold me hostage?"

"Or worse. Beyond saying it's a contract, he won't talk."

"This ties in with what went down in Memphis."

I nodded.

"Going back in turn to Don Lee's arrest of what's-his-namea" Judd Kurtz?"

"Right again."

"From what little I know about it, farming out enforcement work's not the way these people usually handle things."

"True enough. What I'm thinking is, given how it went down last time, they've elected for a low profile. Set it up so nothing can be traced back to them."

Blowing across her coffee cupa"absolutely superfluous, since the coffee was at best lukewarma"Val tracked a young woman's progress down the line. An elaborate tattoo scored the nape of her neck. She wore studded boots and sniffed at everything she took from narrow, gla.s.s-shuttered shelves. Most of it, she set back.

"These guys have the longest memories of all," Val said. "They've got wars that have been going on for centuries. Sooner or later, they don't hear from their scout, they'll figure out it went wrong."

"We could send them his head."

Having reached the register, the tattooed young woman stood beaming at the cas.h.i.+er as he spoke, waited, and spoke again. Then the smile went away and she came back into motion.

"Just kidding," I said. "You're right. They'll wait a while, but they'll be back. Someone will."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.