The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  I remove the broken length of chain and ease my leg back down again. I allow myself exactly thirty seconds of blubbering, my head hanging over the anvil, hot tears falling and splattering on the metal like liquid mercury, the relief of ridding myself of the stone as exhilarating as stepping away from a plunging chasm.

  Using one of the long iron pikes resting against the wall as a cane, I grab the crowbar and make my way cautiously back onto the street, the remaining length of chain clattering behind me.

  The next building on my side of the street is the apothecary shop. I find the front door locked. It has two large plate-glass windows, one on either side of the door, but a break-in would be obvious to anyone approaching the building from the main street. I limp around to the back and find another door. It too is locked, but I jam the crowbar into the frame and within minutes I’m inside.

  The exhilaration of freedom has given way to a desperate thirst, but a quick glance around the re-created nineteenth-century drugstore reveals nothing but shelves of ornate, and empty, physicians’ bottles and jars, their labels for tincture of iodine and potassium bromide faded and curling. Vials of cocaine tooth drops and opium-drenched sleep remedies rest inside the large glass druggist’s case. What I wouldn’t give for some laudanum drops right now, I think. I’m tempted, for the briefest moment, to take one of the vials out of the case, but then I come to my senses. Even if there remained a trace of the drug inside one of the bottles, it would have lost its efficacy a hundred years ago.

  Next to a velvet-upholstered surgical chair, a Victorian torture machine of levers and restraints, is a basin with some muslin strips, cut and folded for bandages. They’re dusty, but I shake them out and wrap several of the strips tightly around my ankle. The sensation at first is almost unbearable, but soon the compression helps to dull the pain of the brutalized tendon. I tie the remaining cloth around the cut in my hand.

  The next building is the printing press, front door locked. It also has a rear entrance, but long nails have been driven into the frame, securing the door. It would be futile to try and force the door open. But at the far corner of the press is a large rain barrel three-quarters full of water, a few pine needles floating at the surface. The water looks fairly clean, but I have no idea how many mosquito larvae may be floating in it, suspended until they can hatch in some warm host body. I plunge both hands into the barrel and drink from my cupped palms until I think my belly will explode. If I survive, I’ll be on massive doses of antibiotics for my leg. If I don’t make it, it won’t matter anyway.

  Wiping my dripping mouth with one sleeve, I feel the faintest vibration beneath my feet. It’s a low-level throbbing that soon crescendos to a mechanical roar. The vehicle making the sound is fast approaching from the opposite end of the compound, where the main entrance lies, obscured by another vine-covered gate.

  Crouching, I crane my head around the front of the building, peering down to the far end of the street, and soon hear the idling engine of a large truck on the other side of the fence. There is the slamming of truck doors and the rattling of chains against the gate.

  A moving, disembodied voice, not Tommy Roy’s, yells, “I’m going to check the far side. See if the gate is open at that end.”

  The truck’s engine is turned off, and the silence allows me to hear the progress of the running man crashing along the fence as he circles it to the gate that I passed through fifteen minutes ago.

  I don’t know if Tommy Roy, waiting on the other side of the main entrance to the compound, has a key or a bolt cutter or just a gun to blast apart the lock, but if the other man discovers that I’m inside the enclosure, Tommy will be coming through that gate.

  The next building has a shingle over the door that reads JUSTICE OF THE PEACE. I move as rapidly as I can across the narrow porch and try the door, and it opens. Once inside, I pull the latch bolt, locking the door. It’s a large room containing an old rolltop desk, several small chairs, and one long coffin standing on end, open and empty. Inside it is nailed a sign reading HORSE THIEF. Next to the coffin, tacked to the wall, is a hangman’s rope. A narrow staircase with a velvet rope across it leads to a shallow second-story landing, but if there were any doors there originally, they’ve been walled over. There is one narrow door, vented in three successive half-moon shapes, that opens to a water closet with a wooden commode fitted snugly into the space.

  On the desk is an old manual typewriter and a large nineteenth-century revolver. Throwing aside the crowbar, I grab the revolver and check the cylinder, foolishly hoping to find at least one cartridge loaded, but it’s empty. My brain fires off ridiculous, random scenarios: pitching the typewriter down from the landing onto my pursuer’s head, bluffing my way to freedom with the empty revolver.

  I hear a male voice roaring from the end of the street where the forge is. “The gate’s open. I’m searching the buildings.”

  A moment later, I hear half a dozen gunshots twanging off metal and I know that Tommy Roy has found the solution to the locked front gate. Both men are now inside the compound.

  I kneel in front of a window and watch Tommy, his pistol drawn, shoulder his way into the first building—a general store—at the opposite side of the street.

  The second man calls out, “Tommy, she’s been in the forge. I’m going into the apothecary’s.”

  They’re working their way down both sides of the street now, coming from opposite directions. After the apothecary store on my side of the street is the printing press, which is nailed up tight. And then the JP’s.

  I decide to sneak out the back of the building and stagger for the entrance as rapidly and quietly as I possibly can, hoping that Tommy has left his keys in the truck. I pick up the dragging chain, begin hobbling my way to the back exit, and see, above the door, a brace of old muskets hanging on the wall. One of the muskets has a bayonet.

  I drag a chair over and haul myself up to stand on it. With a forceful tug, I free the rifle from its brackets. The bayonet is rusted but sharp, more like a narrow sword than a pike, and firmly fastened to the end of the rifle. I stumble down from the chair and risk a peek out the window again in time to see Tommy walking into one of the little log cabins across the street. He comes out right away and walks toward the neighboring cabin. I catch the faintest strain of a melody coming from him, a bitter cadenced sound, and I realize that he’s loudly, and angrily, humming.

  Tony Ha had heard him humming as he butchered Lana Yu. Like a man happy at his work, Tony had told me. Lana had been only a job for him, a means to get information. I’ve just killed his brother, and, for the first time, I begin to think that I should take precautions to end my own life rather than fall into his hands again. I look at the hangman’s noose and then up at the railing across the second-story landing.

  The other man is rattling hard at the doors to the printing press, and then there is the sound of his boots slamming across the porch, moving in this direction. He’s coming for the front door.

  There is only one place to hide. I close the water-closet door behind me just as the front door is muscled open, the broken lock splintering the frame. I hear the heavy footsteps of the man as he moves about the room. Then the sound of him mounting the stairs, even though there is nowhere for anyone to hide on the landing. His footsteps rattle down the stairs again, and I grip the rifle hard in both hands, ready to strike with the bayonet once the door flies open. But chances are he’ll shoot me before I can attack.

  His footsteps creak past the closet toward the back door. I can see his moving form through the half-moon vents.

  A pause in the footsteps. He turns back to stand in front of the closet door, his bulk blocking the light. It’s dark inside the closet, but he puts an eye against the topmost vent.

  He leans his bulk against the door and says, “Gotcha.”

  The third vent is chest level, and, with every ounce of strength, I jam the bayonet through the half-moon opening, just below his sternum. And then, twisting the blade, I aerate his lun
gs.

  He makes high-pitched keening noises of surprise and pain and when I finally pull the blade from his chest he collapses in front of the closet door. He’s thrashing, kicking against the floorboards, trying to summon air with which to scream for help, but the vital gas leaks from his lungs and he soon stops moving.

  I push against the door, but his body is blocking it. Panicked, I brace my feet against the commode, my back against the door, and, with successive tries, I get the door open just wide enough for me to squeeze through.

  My breathing is loud and wheezing. I’m close to collapse, and I let myself sink to my hands and knees, panting, with black at the edges of my vision. I hear a distant voice. It’s Tommy Roy calling out to his companion.

  He hollers, “Checking the schoolhouse!”

  And after the school, he’ll search the church, and if he doesn’t hear from his partner soon, he’ll know something’s wrong.

  I pat down the dead man for his weapon, but find no gun. Not in his hand or in his belt or on the floor nearby where he might have dropped it. Ever more frantically I search the room, thinking it could have gone sliding under a piece of furniture, but find nothing.

  “What kind of Texan doesn’t carry a gun?” I rail at the body. “Thought you wouldn’t need it hunting down a girl, didn’t you?”

  I stand up, kicking him in the ribs for good measure.

  My only chance now is to get to the truck and hope that the keys are in the ignition. Or pray that he’ll be true to his redneck nature and have several loaded hunting rifles inside the cab. Tommy is about a hundred yards away, maybe a little more than a football field’s distance. Once he gets traction, he can get to me in about twelve seconds. The justice of the peace office where I’m hiding is the closest building to the main entrance. Given my injuries, it will take me half a minute, at best—if I don’t stagger and fall—to make it to the gate. Another fifteen seconds to reach the truck.

  I wait for him to walk out of the schoolhouse and enter the church. I throw open the door and shuffle-walk toward the gate, my feet kicking up dust like twin tornadoes. With the remaining length of leg chain in one hand, rifle in the other, I press forward, the pain a dragon with its teeth in my calf, its burning scales of acid and flint razoring the flesh from my bones.

  I’m a few feet from the gate when I hear a noise far behind me. A guttural cry of discovery. I don’t stop; I move faster. But the truck is too far away. The gun too heavy. A bayonet against his pistol too absurd even to contemplate.

  The cry again, ragged, bounding, closer this time. He’ll be on me in a few seconds. I don’t want him to shoot me in the back, so I turn, alarmed to see the solid form of Tommy Roy running, looming, not with a gun in his hand but with his knife outstretched.

  This is right, this is proper, that I face my attacker. My right arm is raised, the bayonet poised to slash downward like a stabbing sword, the chain held hard in my left hand, like a balancing counterweight against the storm. One savage, wounding jab from me before he severs my windpipe.

  Saint Michael, protect me, I pray.

  He kicks up dust with his own churning feet, and through the scrim of red Texas dirt behind him I see the shimmer of forms in motion. Figures like the ghosts of Jubilee’s past.

  His knife’s edge is a lover’s reach away, but there is an explosion, like the cracking of mighty wood, and he pulls up short, and falls facedown at my feet.

  The moving figures behind him are two. Not ghosts. Not angels. But men. With guns.

  I look down at Tommy Roy, unmoving on the ground.

  I place one foot on his flame-colored head and grind it into the dirt.

  Then I close my eyes. And I fall with him.

  37

  It’s like the scene from The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy wakes up from her dream of being over the rainbow and finds, standing around her bed, the real-life versions of the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow. Except in this case, standing around my hospital bed are Seth Dutton, Tom Craddock, and Kevin Ryan, allowed into my room only after the nurse had given me a bump in my pain meds.

  I think only to blink my eyes, but when I open them again, the three men have changed their positions in the room. The morphine is playing with my perception of time, telescoping minutes into seconds, scrubbing whole hours into a pit of amnesia.

  The doctor saw me earlier in the day and gave me the sum total of the damage done to my body while in Evangeline’s care: a fractured cheekbone, a badly bruised sternum, severe dehydration, multiple scratches and bruises, a deep cut in my palm requiring half a dozen stitches, and a torn Achilles tendon that will require surgery. He saved the best for last, assuring me that they will do all they can to repair the damage. But there’s no guarantee that I will ever be able to run again.

  Jackie stood on one side of the bed, holding my hand, trying to look professionally detached as the doctor droned on but with a grip on my fingers that was more painful than the collection of hurts that seemed to radiate from every part of my body, converging together behind my left cheekbone, cracked like a brittle mirror by the butt of a gun.

  James Earle stood on the other side of the bed glaring at the doctor, chin down, brow furrowed, as though the doctor himself were responsible for the bad news.

  Jackie had not left my side through the whole of the night, sitting perched in a chair, alert to any movement I might make, hovering over the nurses like a vengeful Valkyrie, refusing even to eat until I insisted that James take her to the cafeteria. I had murmured in Jackie’s ear that if I was going to be a breeding ground for emerging mosquitoes, the least she could do for me was ingest some relatively benign bacteria.

  My colleagues had filed in just as Jackie and James were leaving, offering sympathetic, encouraging pats on the shoulder for Jackie, respectful handshakes and nods of professional recognition for James, the somber you’re-one-of-us inclusive head bobs that one cop will give another after a particularly difficult job.

  Now the four of us just stare at one another, awkward in the silence. I’m conscious enough to be aware of their sidelong gazes of pity as they take in my shorn head and bruised face, my ruined leg swathed in bandages and elevated on a pillow. Their expressions chill the room like a sudden blast of Freon. Easier to take would have been looks of disapproval that I’d been overtaken by a bunch of deranged meth dealers or disappointment that I’d not seen the threat sooner. Or even looks partially blaming me for Hoskins’s death. They all know I was held prisoner, brutalized physically. But for them, the question that hangs most heavily in the air, that rests most troublingly on their faces, is, Was she sexually violated? Because no matter how closely we worked together, no matter the years, no matter the circumstances, the widest gulf in understanding for male officers to overcome would be the rape of a fellow female officer.

  “You know you guys look like the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow, right?” I tell them, my words slurring.

  They smile and relax.

  Craddock points to Ryan. “He’s definitely the one with the brains.”

  Ryan’s face reddens and he grins; Seth nods in agreement and then there’s oppressive quiet again.

  Seth leans over the bed, his forearms resting on the handrail. “The drugs good here?”

  “The best,” I assure him. I smile and wince from the pain in my cheek, go to cross my arms, dangling blood pressure cuff and IV lines, over my bruised chest and wince again. I blink and when I open my eyes, the three have shifted once more, this time toward the door.

  “Okay,” I call out. “I give. How’d you find me? And why the fuck did it take you so long?”

  I know the date—Monday, September 30—by looking at the nurses’ whiteboard on the wall facing my bed. I’d left for Uncertain the Monday before, September 23. An entire week in hell.

  They shuffle back into the room.

  Seth stands nearest the bed. He tells me, “The Harrison County Sheriff’s Office contacted us within twenty minutes of your
not showing up at Caddo Lake. We couldn’t reach you either but figured it was bad cell phone reception. But it was really James Earle that set the fire to the pan. He called Jackie right after talking to you on the phone, and she called us. The old man knew something wasn’t right.”

  I struggle to stay alert while they, as briefly as possible, run down the timeline to my rescue. The sheriff’s men had started searching for us as soon as they heard that we were headed toward Karnack instead of taking the more direct route to the lake. The highway patrol soon found some detour signs near the town that had not been set up by road maintenance and, on the shoulder at a country-road intersection, a place where large trucks rarely went, deep impressions of a commercial truck. Two crushed cell phones—work phones, mine and Hoskins’s—were found roadside.

  Ryan and Craddock drove out to the location, bringing one of the sweatshirts I’d left in my desk for the local K-9 unit. The dogs followed my scent to the field where I had run and discovered my second, personal cell phone. The phone that must have bounced out of my pocket when I was tackled by Tommy Roy.

  In my befuddled mind, a question about Hoskins tries to present itself, but it swims away before I can collect it, and I sip at some ice water to stay focused.

  As I had asked him to do, Ryan had followed up on the drawing of the winged tattoo and discovered close head-shot matches of two brothers the same ages as the Roys and with bright red hair attending Chowan College in Murfreesboro. One of the brothers was a track phenom. The brothers’ names were Thomas and Curt King; mother’s name, Angela.

  Ryan shrugs and says, “Roi is French for ‘king.’ I figured it had to be them.”

  “See, high-school French is not completely useless,” I mutter.

  Ryan had tracked the King family, two brothers and their mother, from North Carolina back to Texas. Then the trail got weak. There were several businesses in East Texas incorporated under the Angela King name, but most of them were shell companies with employees who never admitted to having seen any of the King family in person.