Perfect killer

CHAPTER 72

Smoke and flames persisted behind us in the gin. The flashbang had found plenty to burn in the old gin's debris, desiccated wooden beams, decades of cotton lint from ginning.

We slogged through mud and standing water along a narrow passage between the gin and the back of a brick wall of an adjoining structure. After maybe forty feet, we reached a low, narrow hole and shoehorned ourselves through it into the brick building's crawl space. After crawling under floor joists for twenty feet or so, we climbed up into an abandoned warehouse.

Our guide helped us up from the access hatch one by one. As soon as he let go of my hand, he unzipped the front of his Ben Davis coveralls to reveal the uniform of the Leflore County Sheriffs Department. His name tag told me his last name was Mandeville.

"I'm Pete," he said. I shook his hand. Then behind him, I spotted a wizened old man holding a guitar case.

Mandeville caught my gaze. "That's Pap. He used to work at the gin. He's probably the last man alive who remembers the passage we just took."

The old man gave us a broad smile filled with teeth too white and even to be anything but dentures.

"Uh-huh, tha's right," Pap said "We use that way when we late or need a break. Gin boss never caught us. Uh-uh."

"Come on, John's waiting," Mandeville said.

Pap stood by the door with his guitar case.

"Thank you," I said.

He nodded.

"Were you the one singing 'Kilin' Floor'?"

Pap nodded.

"You played the best set of open D-minor licks I ever heard. Better than Skip himself"

Pap smiled.

A Leflore County sheriff's van sat on the other side of the old warehouse. Mandeville slid open the side door and motioned us all to hurry.

Inside sat John Myers in front and Tyrone Freedman way in back, sandwiched in among all of the luggage and gear from the SUV. The radio crackled nonstop. Half a block away, fire station sirens began to wail.

"Tyrone!" I said. "What the hell?" I leaned over to shake his hand before sitting down at the end of the rearmost bench seat. Jasmine sat next to me.

Quincy got in, sat next to Jasmine, and gave her a hug. Then Pete Mandeville slid the door closed. The sky brightened with a warm flicker over by the old gin.

"They connected you to my Internet traffic," Tyrone said. "A whole gang of federal agents came in the hospital's front door, so I went out the back and paid Deputy John here a visit."

Myers nodded. I looked around at the faces.

"Oh, man." My heart fell. "Tyrone, I am so sorry to drag you into this."

Mandeville slid into the driver's seat and put the van in gear.

Tyrone shook his head and laughed.

I looked around at the lives I was dragging into this black hole of trouble: Myers, Tyrone, Quincy, Jasmine, and Rex, who held his black gloves and mask in his hands. I had grown accustomed to getting myself in and out of trouble all by my lonesome. Until now, when it mattered most.

"I'm sorry for all of this," I said, looking around me. Beyond the windshield, the corner where Durham's Drug Store had once sat passed by on the left.

Then we passed the post office, where, despite my mother's strictest prohibitions, the itinerant crop duster's son and I used to hang out in the dim, cool lobby with the shiny linoleum floors, pictures of criminals an the walls and a bank of shiny brass post-office boxes with combination dials stretching up almost out of sight. Then we passed the Judge's law office, followed close on by the old VFW hut, where I loved to play the illegal slot machines. Finally we crossed the new Roebuck Lake bridge.

Across the square, boarded-up storefronts glowed like a summer sunset as the gin's flames leaped into the night sky.

"You didn't drag anybody into this," Jasmine said. "Mama did."

"Uh-uh, child," Myers interrupted. "Nope. It was my own damn fault for sticking my big nose in things."

"But still, I should have-"

"Old son," Rex spoke up, "you're so damned used to being in charge of things, you're just gonna have to recognize this ain't your fault and it's gonna take some teamwork and a little help from your indictable coconspirators to get out of."

"Lady and gentlemen, this is Rex," I said.

I didn't use Rex's last name because Rex wasn't his real first name anyway, and I never knew when he was comfortable revealing his last. At the very least, I figured having two sworn law enforcement officers within an arm's length would not be the time despite their own illegal complicity in helping Jasmine and me avoid the hellhound dogging us.

Amid the quasi-sentient static of frantic police radio communications, everyone acknowledged the introduction in a way that indicated Rex's name was irrelevant because he had, after all, proved himself where it mattered. We listened to the bits of radio traffic for a few moments before Quincy spoke up, his voice as resolved and hesitant as a wedding proposal.

"Thank you for what you did tonight," Quincy told Rex, and extended his hand. Jasmine's face looked as if she had been slapped; she looked at her uncle as she would a stranger.

Quincy turned to me and offered me the same hand. The unremembered familiarity of his face touched me again, but again I could only feel the memory, not recall it. It felt important, very important, and frustrated me in its elusiveness.

"And thank you," he said. I shook his hand and a gate opened in his eyes. "Thank you very much."

"You're welcome," I said. "Very."

Jasmine hung on every syllable of her uncle's unspoken conversation and gave him a nod and a smile. When he sat back down next to her, she took his hand and gave it a squeeze.

John Myers loosed a broadside of laughter then. We all turned toward him.

"Lordy! I wish I could be there!" He laughed, then caught his breath; he pointed at the radio. "Rats and possums and a whole damn herd of mice and feral cats are streaming away from the fire, and I guess most of those city-boy Feds ain' never seen nothing like that afore." He laughed again. "They cuttin' loose, shootin' what moves."

He laughed, grimaced in pain as he grabbed his wounded shoulder with his good hand, then laughed some more.

"And the chief's been raising hell with that Homeland Security asshole about not notifying him about activity on his turf."

"Did Pap's grandson get away?" Mandeville asked.

"Course he did," Myers said. "And the fire department said it's not leaving the station until the gunshots stop, so all the Feds can do is stand around and shoot possums and stray cats."

We hit the unpaved part of the road and bounced into the night. When our laughter faded, Myers turned the volume down on the radio.

"That ain't the last surprise that ole boy's gonna get either. Sometime tomorrow, Homeland Security's going to get a call from two very embarrassed agents." Myers looked at Jasmine and me.

"I had two babysitters watching me, followed me over to Lena's." He chuckled. "Itta Bena PD's evidence locker is missing just enough GHB to send those folks to nevernever land. Lena slipped that old date-rape drug in their drinks." He smiled at the thought. "The chief left 'em in the backseat of one of their cars, naked as a jaybird and covered in their own jism."

"How did-?" Jasmine started to speak.

Myers shook his head. "You really don't want to know."

We road in silence for a long time, way past Runnymede. The sky glowed yellow over toward Itta Bena.

"Jay Shanker's in there," Jasmine said then, her voice low and heavy.

"Oh lordy, lordy" Myers said. "There was a man we all needed." He shook his head. "I can't tell you how many people's lives he made a difference in, how many youngsters had their lives turned around by him, how many people-like Pap-who finally got rewarded for their backbreaking labor because that man went to bat for them out of the goodness of his heart."

I had known Jay Shanker for only those handful of minutes in the gin, but Myers's words iced the darkness that hung black in my soul.

Mandeville steered the van toward the northeast and over the newly opened Yazoo River bridge to Greenwood.

"So what's your plan?" Myers asked me as we approached Highway 82.

I shook my head. "Don't have one yet, but somehow we've got to get Talmadge out of the VA in Jackson and find the load of records he hid." I summarized what we had learned from Shanker.

"I'd like to help you there, but I think Pete and I… the chief and all the others have gone about as far as we can without landing in jail."

"I understand."

"You can count on me," Tyrone said. "I went to med school right next to the VA, been in there any number of times."

"Anita still works there," Rex said.

"I'll do what I can," Quincy said, amazing Jasmine and me again.

"Get me back to my truck," Rex said. "I got me an idea."