Blood Lines

26

›› Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner

›› 618 North College Street

›› Charlotte, North Carolina

›› 0420 Hours

Victor Gant walked fearlessly through the morgue. His boots thumped against the tiled floor. The red glare of the exit signs shone against the floor’s surface and made it look like coals burned underneath. Almost as if he were walking above the pits of hell.

Victor’s quick research had indicated that the offices closed down at five and that everyone went home shortly after that. An answering service picked up any after-hours calls.

Except for the lone security guard, Victor had the place to himself. They’d gotten a description of the layout from a Mexican janitor who’d worked there until he was busted selling weed. After the question was raised at the bar, Shaky Carl had come up with the ex-janitor’s name.

In minutes, Victor was in the vault. The book listing the locations of the bodies-apparently nobody completely trusted the computer systems-was on the desk.

Victor plucked a pair of disposable surgical gloves from a box near the chemicals and equipment, then strode to the desk and flipped through the book’s pages and found the latest entries.

Bobby Lee’s name was there.

Stomach tight and temples pounding, Victor tossed the book back onto the desk and stepped over to the vault area. He took hold of the handle and pulled.

The table extended outward soundlessly.

There wasn’t enough light to see clearly, so Victor took his Zippo from his pocket and spun the striker. The yellow and blue flame climbed upward and brightened the room.

Even though he’d steeled himself for what he was about to see, Victor’s heart thudded to a stop inside his chest.

Bobby Lee lay on the table. Two bullets had punched through his face, leaving hideous wounds behind. His lower jaw was shattered and torn loose. The second bullet had punched through his cheek under his right eye.

Then Victor’s heart restarted with an explosion that filled him to bursting and quickly subsided.

“I will kill the man that killed you,” Victor whispered. “I never gave you any promises while you were alive, but I promise you that now.”

He bent down and kissed his dead son’s forehead.

A footstep scuffed the floor outside the room.

›› Intensive Care Unit

›› Presbyterian Hospital

›› Charlotte, North Carolina

›› 0423 Hours

“Hey, Don.”

Don rolled over on his side and pulled the blanket up over his shoulder. If he was lucky, Shel would forget about him for another ten minutes and he could get some more sleep. All he needed was a few more minutes and he’d be-

“Hey, man, come on. Wake up.”

Don ignored Shel.

“Don.” Shel’s voice was louder now. He had always been the one more like their daddy. Shel and Daddy always got up at the crack of dawn, even if both of them had gotten to bed late the night before.

“Hey.”

Exasperated, Don said, “Give it a rest, Shel. A few more minutes isn’t going to kill anybody.”

“Your phone is ringing. Wake up.”

Worn to the bone, Don rolled over and looked up at the dark ceiling while he waited for his brain to make the necessary connections. Then he remembered; he was in the hospital in North Carolina with Shel.

“You awake?” Shel asked.

“Yeah.” Don listened. “I don’t hear a phone.”

“That’s because it stopped ringing.”

“Oh.” Don groaned as he sat up.

“So how’s that chair for sleeping?” Shel taunted.

“Remember when we had to sleep out in the barn when the cows were calving?”

“Yeah.”

“Those were good times by comparison.”

“I remember. Me and Daddy would be awake all night, and you’d sleep most of it away.”

Don heard the country accent come back into Shel’s words. It was funny listening to it happen. Shel had cleaned up his diction a lot after he’d entered the Marines. A lot of the men he’d served with had been merciless about accents, and he’d had a bad one.

“Not my fault. I’ve always needed more sleep than you guys.” Don rubbed the heels of his palms against his eyes.

“You going to see who called?”

“What time is it?”

“About four thirty.”

Don thought about that. “Joanie and the kids won’t be up by now.” Then he factored in the time difference. “It’s three thirty in Texas.” Since it wasn’t the family, that narrowed the possibility to a parishioner at his church. Don had a reputation for being a good counselor and a lot of people had his cell phone number.

He laid his head back and closed his eyes. All he needed was a few more minutes of sleep.

“Don,” Shel said.

“Yeah.”

“You need to check that phone?”

Don fumbled with his pocket. “Why are you awake?”

“The night nurse is cute. I didn’t want to miss her.”

“Thanks for that.”

“You’re too married to appreciate things like that.”

Don peered at his brother. He could barely make him out in the darkness. “You sound better.”

“I feel better. I’m ready to get out of here.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Shel sighed. “This being laid up is going to be wearisome.”

“You should enjoy the downtime.”

“I wasn’t made for downtime.”

Don silently agreed with that. He didn’t know who was more driven: Shel or their daddy. When he opened the phone and checked under recent calls, he was surprised at the number he found.

“So who was it?” Shel asked.

“Daddy,” Don said. “I didn’t even know he knew my cell phone number.”

›› Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner

›› 618 North College Street

›› Charlotte, North Carolina

›› 0423 Hours

Howie Jernigan attended junior college and loved horror magazines. He needed money to go to college, and he intended to be a writer. Both of those things were parts of the reason he’d taken the job as night security guard at the county medical examiner’s office.

The money thing was self-explanatory. The writing part was almost as easy to explain, but it was slightly twisted. When he sold his first horror novel, he wanted the About the Author page to mention that he’d once worked in a morgue.

That would get people’s attention and boost up the cool factor. And it would be something he could talk about on Leno or Letterman.

The fact that the medical examiners did autopsies of murder victims there only added to it. He could claim he’d been part of big murder cases. Instrumental, he told himself. I was instrumental in the solution of several big crimes.

Unfortunately, during the four-month tenure of his employment, there had been no big murder investigations. There had been drunk drivers and heart attack victims, people who’d drowned and people who’d burned to death in fires.

There hadn’t been a single murder of note.

At least, there hadn’t been any until Bobby Lee Gant had gotten his head blown off at the tattoo parlor. Even then, Bobby Lee wasn’t murdered. He’d been killed in self-defense.

But still, the shooting went down as a homicide. And that was what it would stay called too. If a person killed a person, no matter if that killing was justified, it was a homicide. A justifiable homicide, but a homicide nonetheless.

Howie had played high school football and remained in shape. The shirt of his security uniform was tight across his shoulders and chest. He was twenty-one years old and knew how to take care of himself. He was prepared for anything.

But during his employment at the medical examiner’s office, there had never been any break-ins or even juvenile destruction of any kind. It had always been quiet. He’d sat in the office where he watched the security monitors in between reading books by favorite authors. Mostly he’d read.

But tonight the security cameras had gone down.

There hadn’t been any real instruction on what to do if that happened. Howie didn’t want to call the police department all freaked out if it was something as simple as plugging a wire back in somewhere or throwing a switch.

And he didn’t want to look like he was scared being there alone. Being remembered as the wannabe horror writer scared of his own shadow wouldn’t have been a good thing.

So he’d gone looking for the switch.

That was when he thought he’d seen a light in the autopsy room.

Going into that room pretty much guaranteed he’d be creeped out. Every time he went in there he was pretty much creeped out.

He’d only actually seen a dead body in there once. That had been when he’d gotten the tour during business hours. Seeing the wrinkled and withered body of the old man had almost been enough to put him off the job.

Standing outside the autopsy room, Howie told himself that the medical examiners went off the clock at five and he didn’t come on till ten. That almost guaranteed that there’d be no dead bodies from ten till six in the morning Monday through Friday.

When the light flickered out in the vault room, Howie almost went for the police anyway. Only a deep fear of being ridiculed kept him from it. Despite his size, he was always the kid who’d gotten shoved into his own locker in junior high.

Some of the people who’d done the shoving had gone on to become police officers. Some of them had gone on to become the druggies and thieves in town too. That was just life after high school.

He wasn’t armed. Protecting dead bodies didn’t usually involve any kind of real danger. The only problem would be kids wanting to break in to look at bodies and challenge each other to touch one.

Kids, Howie reflected at the grand old age of twenty-one, did some awfully strange things and had truly weird ideas.

With his long-handled flashlight in hand, he approached the door of the vault. The beam fell over the open doorway. That was strange, because he’d been certain it was shut. He always liked to make sure this door was closed. Sometimes-actually more often than he liked to admit-he imagined some of those dead people in the vaults getting up off the tables and coming calling.

Those were definitely not happy thoughts.

As he held the flashlight on the door, he listened for any sound of movement inside. If it had been kids, he’d have figured they would have given themselves up by now.

But there were a few kids these days who wouldn’t give up anything unless they had to.

Howie cleared his throat and said, “Come on out of there now. Come on out and we’ll talk. We don’t have to call the police if we can talk.”

There was no response.

Getting aggravated, Howie rapped his flashlight against the doorframe. “Come on out. I mean it. If I have to come in there after you, we’ll be calling the police-and your parents-for sure.”

There was still no response.

Howie screwed up his courage. He heard nothing in the room. Of course, he reminded himself, zombies that weren’t moving were quiet too. But he didn’t really believe in zombies. They were just cool monsters.

He walked into the room and shined the light around for a second. When he caught sight of the body rolled out of the vault and hanging there over the floor, he froze. He couldn’t even breathe.

Despite the fact that he hadn’t been there when the doctors had gone home, Howie was fairly certain they never left the bodies hanging out in the open like that. His hand crept down for the cell phone he wore on his belt. The phone wasn’t for use on the job. It was more to keep up with his peeps.

Before he could pull the phone from his belt, he heard someone breathe behind him. He wasn’t alone in the room.

Just like that, he realized his mistake. He’d become that guy. In every horror movie, there was always that guy who became the sacrificial lamb. Usually he was the one who walked into a basement-or a medical examiner’s morgue-when everyone else understood that you weren’t supposed to do that.

He turned around slowly, but it was actually as fast as he could move. All of his muscles felt numb and dead. Although he didn’t point the flashlight at the figure standing behind him, there was enough reflected glow to recognize that a man stood there.

In the darkness of the morgue, the man looked like some wild-eyed creature. Howie had just a moment to wonder if maybe zombies did exist after all.

Then the man swung something that caught Howie in the face and drove him backward. Darkness drank down his thoughts and took him away before he hit the ground.

v 27

›› Intensive Care Unit

›› Presbyterian Hospital

›› Charlotte, North Carolina

›› 0428 Hours

Shel cranked the bed upward with the remote control taped to the side of the bed. Movement hurt, but hurting meant he was alive. It also meant that the doctor had cut back on the pain medication, but that was all right. Pain meds were a necessary evil in recovery. He’d been wounded enough times to know that. But he was just as glad to get over needing them.

Don just stared at the phone in his hand.

“Are you gonna call him back?” Shel asked.

“I’m thinking about it,” Don said. He gazed at the phone like it was a coiled rattler about to strike.

“If Daddy called, it must have been important,” Shel said.

“It could have been a mistake.”

Shel snorted. “Wimp.”

“Nope. Just thinking things through. The one thing that keeps coming back to mind is that Daddy has never-and I do mean never — called me on my cell phone.”

“All the more reason to call him.”

“He might have accidentally hit the buttons.”

“And dialed your cell phone number?”

Don grimaced. “Does sound pretty weak when you say it like that.”

“It is weak,” Shel said. “Give me the phone and I’ll call him.”

Don started to hand the phone over, then pulled it back. He eyed Shel suspiciously. “If I give you the phone and you chicken out, Daddy’s going to see my number on his caller ID.”

“I didn’t know Daddy even had caller ID,” Shel said. His daddy was notorious for being against technological advancement, though he’d gotten satellite television once it became available.

“He’s got it,” Don said. “You can call him from the hospital.”

“If I call him from the hospital, they’ll mask the numbers. When he sees a number he doesn’t recognize, he’ll probably ignore it.”

“Don’t you have a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you use it?”

Shel tried to be very patient. He also tried not to think about his daddy having a heart attack and calling for help.

“Because Daddy won’t recognize that number either. Give it up, Don. Your phone is the only one we can use.”

Reluctantly Don handed his phone over. “Have you ever thought about how ridiculous it is that two grown men have trouble calling their daddy?”

“Not really,” Shel replied.

“Well, maybe you should,” Don said.

Shel found the number and hit Send. His breathing grew shorter and tighter, and he felt like he was going into combat. He hated the fact that the machinery connected to him revealed that rising stress level to Don.

Tyrel answered on the second ring.

“Don,” Tyrel growled.

“It’s not Don, Daddy,” Shel said. “It’s me.”

“Where’s Don?”

“Went to the bathroom. He left his phone on the nightstand. He’ll be back directly.” Shel was conscious of how his accent had crept into his words. “I figured I’d call you back and see if something was wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

Shel listened to the slur in his father’s voice. Tyrel drank every now and again, but he never let it get ahead of him. In all his years growing up on the Rafter M, Shel had never seen his daddy drunk. He suspected he was listening to that now.

“I called to talk to you,” Tyrel said.

“Yes, sir,” Shel said.

“I didn’t come up there because I figured you were too mean to kill. You got too much of your old man in you for that.”

Shel honestly didn’t know whether to feel proud or angry about that comparison. Other people had always compared him to his daddy, but he’d never done it himself.

It was something he would never do.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Are you doing all right?” Tyrel asked.

“I am.”

“Nurses taking good care of you?”

“Yes, sir.” Shel felt uncomfortable talking to his daddy like this. Tyrel wasn’t one for talking about things. It’s the alcohol, Shel couldn’t help thinking. He braced himself as best he could because he knew the call could be as unpredictable as a roller coaster ride.

“I wouldn’t… want nothing to happen to you, boy.” Tyrel’s voice cracked at the end.

Before he knew it, and without even understanding why, Shel had a lump in his throat. It wasn’t just his father’s admission that he cared about him, which wasn’t something Tyrel McHenry had ever owned up to; it was the fact that his daddy was anywhere near to losing control.

The only time Shel had ever seen his daddy hurting had been at his mama’s funeral. Even when Shel’s mama had died in the hospital and they’d all been sitting in that hospital room listening to her gasp for her last feeble breaths, Tyrel McHenry had never shown weakness.

When she’d gone on, when the heart monitor had flatlined and the constant chirp filled the room, they’d watched as the nurses had disconnected everything. Then Tyrel had stood in those straight-legged jeans he always wore, taken his cowboy hat off, and walked over to his dead wife. He looked at her for a time, then bent down and kissed her gently on the forehead.

“Sleep easy, ol’ gal. I got my hand on the wheel. I’ll get your young’uns raised up right,” he’d whispered.

Then he clamped his cowboy hat on and turned to Don and Shel with his face like stone.

“You boys tell your mama good-bye. I’ll be outside waiting when you’re ready.” And he’d walked out.

That day, Shel had hated his father. It had been everything Don could do to keep him from forcing a confrontation right there in the hospital parking lot.

Then, days later at the funeral, Tyrel had stood at the back of the family area in the funeral home and listened to the preacher’s words. Tears streaming down his own face, Shel had turned to watch his daddy. Only one time, and only briefly, Tyrel had sipped at a breath and hiccuped. His face had knotted up in agony. Then he’d forced it back to that harsh mask he’d always worn.

That was what Shel heard now, and it left him shattered and scared in ways he’d never felt even when he’d been under fire on the battlefield.

“I’m fine, Daddy.” Shel was surprised by how tight his voice was. “I’m just fine.”

“Well, you stay that way, boy. I won’t put up with anything less.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The reason I was calling is this.”

Shel waited.

“That boy you shot-”

Shel wanted to point out that Bobby Lee had been a full-grown man, but he didn’t.

“-had a daddy,” Tyrel continued.

Through the haze that swirled inside his head and muddied his thoughts, Shel tried to get a sense of what his father was trying to tell him. He felt like he was going to have to defend himself for shooting Bobby Lee.

Instead, Tyrel said, “I knew that boy’s daddy. He’s a vicious man, Shelton. He’s one of the devil’s own. You’re going to need to watch your six for a while. And if there’s a way you can punch Victor Gant’s ticket for him, you might just be better off for the doing of it.”

Shel barely breathed. He couldn’t believe what his daddy was telling him.

“You hear me, boy?” Tyrel growled.

“Yes, Daddy,” Shel whispered.

“You watch yourself for the next little while. And you take care of Don, too. He ain’t like you and me. He looks more for the gentle side of things. He ain’t gonna know how to look for somebody like Victor Gant. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’d be better if you sent him on outta there and got him outta the line of fire,” Tyrel said. “And tell them friends of yours to watch out for themselves too. If Victor Gant can’t get at you, he’ll take what he can.”

Shel listened to the thud of his heart banging inside his chest. How does my daddy know someone like Victor Gant? Shel couldn’t think clearly enough at the moment to reason that out.

“Well,” Tyrel said, “I reckon that’s all I got to say. Now that I said it, I’m gonna go to bed. If you had any sense, you’d do the same instead of lying awake at all hours of the night.”

“Yes, sir,” Shel said, but even before he got the words out of his mouth, Tyrel had hung up. Shel took the phone from his face and gazed at perplexedly.

“Shel,” Don said softly.

“Yeah.”

“What did Daddy want?”

“To tell me to watch my six,” Shel said numbly.

“Your six?”

Shel tossed Don the phone. “My rear flank. He told me to look out for trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“From Victor Gant.”

Don took a moment to reason that out and connect the dots. “The father of the young man you shot?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would Daddy call you to tell you that?”

“He said Victor Gant is one of the devil’s own. He said Victor Gant would come after me for killing his boy.”

“I think Commander Coburn knows that,” Don said.

“Probably. Will’s a smart man.”

Don looked puzzled for a moment. “How did Daddy know about Victor Gant?”

“He said he knew him.”

“Daddy?”

Shel nodded.

“How would Daddy know a man like that?”

“That is the question, isn’t it?” Shel lay back on the pillow, but he knew he wasn’t going to get any more sleep that night.

v