Perfect killer

CHAPTER 68

By midnight, the full moon had slipped to the horizon as Jasmine brought us into Itta Bena along a one-lane dirt road. She turned the headlights out as soon as we left Highway 7 and navigated by the now-fading moonlight. We navigated an overgrown section where blackberry vines clawed at us. Then she stopped. Ahead lay a patched asphalt road lined with modest houses.

"Where in the world are we?" I asked.

"A little north of the gin."

I rolled my window down. The scent of night blooms and summer flowers rolled in with the moist, cool air. "Let's make a circle to look for bad guys, then find a parking spot."

"No problem." She accelerated slowly, turned left, and clicked the headlights on. Less than a minute later, we intersected the main drag right at the old Turnipseed house and turned right.

Miss Eve's house-I couldn't for the life of me remember her real name-passed by on the left. She had been a widow with a house full of yellow and green parakeets and chickens outside. I remember going through the coop with her often. There were hens sitting on hay nests, and she would collect brown eggs and put them in a straw basket she allowed me to hold the day I turned six. Next to Miss Eve's, someone had built a house on the lot the Judge's wife, Mamie, had used as a vast rose garden.

Shortly after Jasmine turned left by the little brick Presbyterian church, a small car with glaring blue halogen headlights and purple under-the-chassis neon rocketed by in the opposite direction. Moments later, we passed the gin. Instants later, an Itta Bena police car trawled past us in the opposite direction. My heart held still for a moment. I followed it and exhaled when it disappeared without making a U-turn. "Can you make a circle and bring us by the gin so it's on my side?"

She nodded and made a loop through a modest, well-kept block of houses. It took me a moment to recognize it as Balance Due. Gone were the unpainted, weathered shacks with ditches out front full of excrement and waste water.

"You know, there's a street named for my grandfather not too far from here." I shook my head. "Al Thompson Street? Really?"

"Really."

I thought about this for a moment. "He deserved a lot more as far as I'm concerned."

A persistent smile brightened Jasmine's face as she drove the SUV back around the gin clockwise. When we slowed for a right-hand turn short of the square, I heard somebody playing " Hard Time Killin' Floor. " And the people are driftin' from door to door Can't find no heaven, don't care where they go.

Whoever was playing the guitar was doing a damn fine job of emulating the open D-minor licks that had become a trademark for Nehemiah "Skip" James and the rest of the Bentonia bluesmen.

The singer finished off with a single note on the open second string followed by a D7 chord. It was one of James's trademark endings and brought thunderous applause.

"Skip James," I said. "One of my favorites."

"Mine too. The music's coming from Lena's. Real blues."

She turned right and made her way back toward Balance Due without driving past the police station.

"You'll have to take me there sometime."

"Yes, I will." Jasmine offered me her best smile. "I surely will."

Across the street from the gin and about a block down, I spotted a gas station and auto repair shop, closed for the night. Vans, cars, and pickups, obviously left for repair crowded its parking area and the concrete apron around the pumps.

"How about there?" I asked.

In moments, Jasmine backed the SUV up between two pickup trucks and turned off the lights. The space fit the SUV like a knife sheath, but offered a clear view of the gin.

"Keep the engine going for now."

I scanned the gin and everything around it for maybe a quarter of an hour.

"Okay, kill the engine."

We sat there watching the occasional vehicle pass and listening. I strained to hear sirens or a helicopter thrumming. But the darkness carried only the occasional loud stereo from passing cars along with the distant rumble of thunder. We also enjoyed the blues music carried sporadically by the night air. No sirens, No choppers.

Just before 1:00 a.m., I climbed over my laptop bag, our packed luggage, and the sniper armament and ammo in the back of the SUV and left Jasmine in the SUV with her Ruger in her lap. I headed for the gin with the H amp;K automatic tucked in the back of my cargo shorts.

My cargo pockets were jammed with every spare magazine I could find. It was all covered by the tail of one of my blue oxford-cloth shirts left unbuttoned and hanging out. My clothes and white skin made me a good target in the dark, but unlike Jasmine I had brought no dark clothes and all of Tyrone's were too small.

I carried the dead sniper's small night scope casually in my right hand as I made my way down a weed-covered track toward the old, rusty hulk. A young child's irrational fears of the place stirred in my belly. It took me more than half an hour to make my way around the building and inside it. I couldn't make a full circle because some sort of annex at the back was attached to another block of structures.

Waning moonlight sifted through holes in the tin roof, casting subtle shadows across the vast, vacant space. The shadows rustled. I feared rats, but the night scope showed a mother possum with her young clinging to her underside. I looked around and found the interior crawling with the sluggish and shy marsupials. They crawled over the tall rafters and beams high above the floor and nested almost everywhere I looked.

Snakes undoubtedly lived here as well, feeding off the possums and their young. I feared the copperhead most because, unlike rattlesnakes, it struck without warning. Finally, I walked outside and stood under the wagon-shed overhang, right under the big suction pipe that had once terrified me, and used the small, thin LED light attached to my Leatherman to signal Jasmine. I followed her through the night scope until she was safe next to me.

Shortly before 2:00 A.M., we went inside to wait.