A Garden of Vipers

CHAPTER 49

Nautilus awoke to a roar in his ears and the smell of blood and excrement in his nose. His head ached and something dry filled his mouth. A gag, he figured, consciousness swirling into his head on a blaze of fear and adrenaline.

He was still tight to the floor of the Crown Vic, moving. Occasionally the interior of the car brightened from lightning or passing cars. Private Security slumped sideways, head between the front seats, trails of blood draining from his nostrils. Rain whipped in the open passenger window. Nauseated, dizzy, his head throbbing, Nautilus still managed to figure that was how the extra water had filled the floor of Taneesha’s car.

The truck slowed and turned and the ride became bumpy, like on a rutted dirt road. After a few minutes they stopped. Nautilus heard Crandell get out of the truck. The dark turned to a hazy light.

Crandell opened the door, freed Nautilus from the D-ring, reattached the cuffs, the weapon never straying from Nautilus’s head.

“End of the line,” Crandell said, yanking tape from Nautilus’s mouth, followed by a wadded rag. Nautilus gasped, sucked in air, his tongue dry as sandpaper. He looked out the cruiser’s windows.

They were inside a barn, yellowed utility lights casting shadows across bales of hay, an ancient tractor, and a miniature backhoe. Beside the backhoe’s bucket was a trough seven feet long, three wide. A mound of fresh dirt was piled beside the ditch.

Lightning flickered outside the barn, doors open at one end, thunder hitting seconds later. Crandell jumped to the ground. “Step on out, Detective Nautilus. Sorry about your head. It was a light tap, you’ve been out under ten minutes.”

Nautilus looked at the ditch, then at Crandell, polo-shirted, hands in the pockets of his Dockers, muscles rippling in his forearms as he jingled coins in his pocket, looking like he’d just finished an excellent supper.

Nautilus said, “Why should I get up just to lay down in the hole in the ground?”

“Because ends can come fast, or they can come slow. I have an hour or so to kill-pardon the pun-and it can be a fast hour for you, or it could be agonizingly slow. If I put a couple slugs in your hip bones, I guarantee it could feel like days. Do you really want to spend days with me, Detective?”

Crandell popped open a utility room at the side of the barn, pulled out two wooden folding chairs, snapped them open, set them beside the trough.

“How’d you know I was coming, Crandell?” Nautilus said, looking at the thick barn rafters above. “Someone tip you off?”

“Shuttles did.”

“What?”

“You’re a star, big boy. Celebrated member of the MPD, big-shot detective. You and Ryder got reps of going against the grain, hot dogs. But you always get ’er done, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Before all this got set in motion, Shuttles and me worked out a simple code to ID the potential problem types. A person’s initials plus a letter. F’rinstance if it was Ryder, the code was DS. What’s Harry Nautilus?”

“IO,” Nautilus said. “Like in the note Shuttles had me send you. IO was in there two times.”

“Shuttles is a bright boy.”

Crandell gestured to the chairs he’d set up on the barn floor beside the trench. “Come keep me company, Harry,” he smiled. “Who knows what might happen?”

Nautilus wriggled his back against the seat, felt the hard shell of the leather holster in his waistband. The. 380 was unbuckled; if he could knock it loose of the holster…He struggled from the cruiser, hands cuffed at his waist.

Crandell jumped up on the flatbed, pulled Private Security out, slipping under the body, steadying it on his shoulders. He jumped the four feet from the trailer to the ground, his knees bending but not collapsing. Power-lifter strength, Nautilus noted as he stumbled down the ramp to the ground.

Crandell went to the trough, shouldered the body into the earth. It landed with a thud. He whisked his hands together as if the guy had been dusty.

“Seven feet deep,” Crandell said. “What happens is I fill in the hole later, dump your car in a big ol’ swamp-hole in the delta, then return the backhoe to Buck’s spread about ten miles down the pike. It’s gonna storm all night…” Crandell raised his eyebrows, waiting for Nautilus to catch his drift.

“And barns get struck by lightning,” Nautilus said. As if cued by a Hollywood director, a lightning flash lit the barn. Rain dripped through the roof, pooled in the dirt.

“Old wood, all this hay. It’ll collapse into a big pile, and no one will ever know what’s sitting in the basement, so to speak. I do love a good fire.”

Nautilus shrugged. “Seems like a waste of a good barn.”

“The property is owned by the Kincannons, but not used. Not used much, I should say. Sometimes Buck’ll bring someone here.”

“He have barn dances?”

“If that’s what you want to call it. He brought a blind girl here a couple weeks ago. I been keeping extra tabs on Buck, and by the time I got here, the lady was about danced out.”

Nautilus recalled Carson’s story about the blind girl who’d been savaged.

“Why’d Buck Kincannon take her to the hospital?”

“He didn’t. I figured her as more trouble dead than alive. Not like she’s gonna make anyone from a lineup. So I washed her up real good and made her somebody else’s problem.”

Nautilus nodded. He frowned across the floor at the shadowy trench. “My partner down there?”

“Not yet.”

“Will I see him tonight? Alive, I mean.”

Crandell paused as thunder shivered the barn. “That would mean leaving you here by yourself. Even if you’re trussed tight, I can’t take that risk. Come have a seat, Harry. Get comfortable. I’ve made it easier.”

Nautilus studied the rickety wood chairs Crandell had set beside the trench. They faced one another from a six-foot distance. Crandell’s chair was two steps away; he could head-butt the bastard. Nautilus visualized the moment: roaring, diving, wiping everything from his mind save that his head was a battering ram. He had teeth, too. Use everything. Do a Tyson on Crandell’s ear. Or bite one of his eyes out.

Harry Nautilus sat.

Crandell picked up his chair, folded it shut. He walked to the far side of the ditch beside the dirt mound and reopened the chair. He sat, smiling with his teeth.

“You didn’t really think I was going to sit across from you without a moat, did you, Harry? And by the way, if you’re still a bit dizzy to notice…”

Crandell reached in his pocket, pulled out Nautilus’s. 380, letting it dangle by the trigger guard.

It’s over, Harry Nautilus realized, listening to the rain drumming the roof of the barn. I’m being written out of the Big Play. He was amazed at how little fear he felt. Only a sense of sorrow that his death would be at the hands of a sociopathic subhuman like Crandell.

Nautilus had never romanticized dying in the line of duty. He figured it would be nice to eat a grand meal, drink a few ounces of hundred-buck-a-bottle scotch, put on Duke Ellington playing “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” then shut his eyes and fly away as the muted horn closes the song.

And be a hundred and ten years old at the time.

Nautilus shot a glance into the trench, one of Private Security’s arms flung above his up-looking head and propped against the trench wall like he was trying to backstroke through the earth. Though the night was hot, Nautilus shivered at the thought of his meat rotting into that of a malignant peckerwood.

But Carson would be in the grave as well, Nautilus suddenly realized. They’d outflank the peckerwood.

“Jesus, was that a grin?” Crandell asked.

Nautilus didn’t answer. But had a few questions of his own.

“My partner saw Carole Ann Hibney at the Shrine Temple, Crandell. What was she doing there?”

“You mean Mistress Sonia? You’d have to know the Kincannon boys. They’re playful, in their own way. Buck needs an occasional visit to a Mistress Sonia type to level out or something. I don’t pretend to understand. The boys try and keep tabs on one another.”

“You mean like spying.”

“It’s a grand family tradition. Nelson found out about Mistress Sonia, paid her a couple thousand to show up at the party.”

“To do what?”

Crandell’s eyes danced with glee. “Simply walk silently in front of Buck and pretend to crack a whip. Nelson convinced leather lady it was Buck’s birthday party, and Buck had requested Mistress Sonia do the gig, as an inside joke. Nelson knew it’d about make Buck crap his pants, his mama by his side as Whip Woman walked past.”

Nautilus felt the bottom drop from his stomach. “Buck didn’t think it was funny, obviously. So he took it out on Carole Ann. Do you have any idea what your employer did to her, Crandell?”

Crandell shrugged. “This is my last job for the Kincannons. Buck’s getting worse. The wrappings are about to tear loose.”

“Pity. I’ll bet you’ve made a shitload off the family over the years.”

“Enough to retire on. I only came back to put a little extra gravy on the taters, so to speak.”

“Not out of a perverse loyalty? Help in their time of need?”

Crandell wagged an admonishing finger at Nautilus. “Loyalty is not a word the Kincannons understand. If they were sure they’d never need me again, I’d be dead.”

“They’d Crandell their Crandell. Where would it stop?”

“I don’t want to know. That’s why I’m checking out and heading to Rio. Time for me to learn to samba.”

A cell phone rang from Crandell’s jacket. He slipped it from the pocket of his blazer, looked at the incoming number and winced. He put the phone to his ear.

“What, Race?”

Crandell stood and walked to the shadows in the corner of the barn.

“What the hell are you talking about? How the hell did you get that idea? It’s fucking ridiculous. No, don’t call Nelson. Here’s what you do, open another bottle of scotch, call one of your girlfriends over, relax. What? Racine, calm down, buddy.”

Crandell flicked the phone off, stuck it back in his pocket. When he returned, he was holding a semiautomatic aimed at Nautilus’s heart. Crandell looked at Nautilus and sighed.

“Dealing with this family truly is herding cats, Harry. Racine’s drunk and babbling about how I’m fired or something. Typical. I’m sorry to cut our evening short. If you come stand here at the head of the ditch I’ll make it clean, you won’t feel a thing.”

Nautilus took a deep breath and spat across the trench, his spit falling short, landing on Crandell’s loafers.

“Game to the end,” Crandell said, cocking the weapon. “I like a man with spirit. But if you don’t get up here, I’m gonna put one through your knee.”

Nautilus laughed. It was real and full. “You’re a sick and sad little boy, Crandell. I expect I can deal with it.”

Crandell stared in disbelief. He shook his head and raised the weapon, finger curling around the trigger.

Three hard reports echoed through the barn.

Crandell seemed to lift from his feet for a split-second. He staggered three steps backward, slammed into the wall of the utility room, then crumpled to the ground. The weapon tumbled into the ditch.

Nautilus stared wide-eyed at the dark. Lightning flashed and he saw a man crouched at the edge of the door. There was a gun in his hand, the muzzle scanning the barn’s interior.

“Racine?” Nautilus called. “Racine Kincannon?”

Pace Logan rounded the corner, his service weapon trained on Crandell’s writhing form. He crept to Nautilus.

“Jesus, Harry. What’d you get yourself into? Who’s that crazy fuck? Who’s Racine?”

Nautilus sat with his mouth agape, unable to find words. He stood, and his head swam and his knees wobbled. He sat down again. Logan advanced toward the supine Crandell, who was moaning, rocking side to side, the front of his shirt turning to a scarlet swamp.

Nautilus managed a breathless whisper. “What the hell are you doing here, Pace?”

“You sounded bad worried when you told me how you were looking for a curly-haired blond guy Shuttles might have met up with.” Logan nodded toward Crandell. “Him?”

“Him.”

“It got me started thinking. You know Dominick Purselli was Shuttles’s training officer?”

Nautilus said, “I tried to talk to Dom a couple days ago. He’s way the hell up in Canada.”

“Dom Purselli’s a good buddy of mine,” Logan said. “I had his cell number, called, got lucky. I asked had he ever seen the guy you described. Turns out that when Shuttles joined the force, the two of ’em did some stuff together. Shuttles told Purselli he knew a guy came to town now and then, always stayed at this old farm on about thirty acres, would Purselli like to go squirrel hunting there?”

Crandell’s mouth opened and closed like a dying fish gulping air from the surface. His eyes rolled back in his head. Logan knelt and put a finger against Crandell’s throat, feeling for a pulse.

“He’s gone. Purselli said when they got there, they announced themselves at the house on the property. It was a blond guy, curly hair, strong-looking, square as an outhouse. A hinky kind of guy, like he didn’t want to be seen, and that’s why Purselli remembered him.”

Logan stood, holstered his weapon at his side, walked to Nautilus.

“Purselli said Shuttles drove. Dom couldn’t remember where the farm was. But he’d walked all over it hunting, and described a rectangle of land with a barn about half a mile from the road, a white house on the far side of a windbreak, two decent-sized ponds toward the back of the place, a creek cutting between the ponds.”

Logan pulled a handcuffs key from inside his jacket. “Guess what happened then, Harry?”

“I couldn’t begin to guess, Pace.”

“I remembered Shuttles babbling about this place on the Internet where you saw aerial views of just about anywhere, pictures from a geo-satellite or something. Purselli knew the basic area, low on the delta and east of Chickasaw. I went to the library, got a library lady to help me get on the doggoned Internet, Harry. Me.”

“You found this place from above?”

“It was wild, Harry, like I could fly back and forth over the area-go up and down, too-and I just kept looking at all the ponds up there. Then I found a couple ponds with a creek between them, saw the roof of a house and barn a hundred yards apart…”

Nautilus held up his bound wrists. Logan slipped the key into the cuffs, popped them loose.

“You did all this in under three hours, Pace?”

Logan showed a wistful smile and shook his head.

“I’m almost gone and maybe I’m beginning to figure things out, Harry. Jeez, now there’s an epitaph, right?”