by Mike Stewart
She looked less-than-genuinely surprised. “Que?”
I smiled. “Fine. Can we take you somewhere?”
“The four-wheel. It is outside still?”
I nodded.
“You will leave it for me?”
I nodded again.
A weak smile turned the corners of her full lips. She saw hope for her son.
I asked, “Can you help me? I’m looking for a friend. I believe your husband knew where she is. Now he cannot tell me.”
“No. Now he cannot.”
“Can you?”
“I am the wife. My husband did work not… I have no understanding of his work.”
“My friend will die. She does not deserve to die.”
“My husband, he deserved to die?”
I didn’t answer. Seconds ticked by. Señora Carpintero said, “Your friend, she is granjero?” I raised my palms in the air and shook my head. Her face brightened. “Farmer. She is farmer?”
“Yes. She has a farm.”
“Then she is with a man who is the fisherman. That is all I know.”
“Is anyone else with them? A young girl? A teenager?”
She repeated, “That is all I know.”
“What do you know about why your husband, the doctor, was here?”
She went back to, “I am the wife.”
“Yeah. I got that. You are the wife. But I don’t think even a South American wife boards a boat with smugglers and lands in a new country in the middle of the night without a pointed question or two for her husband.”
“Que?”
Wonderful. We were back to Spanish again. I tried a more direct path. “Is that your husband’s laboratory out there?”
“Yes.”
“What’s he been cooking up? Meth? Coke?”
The señora’s high cheekbones burned red. “My husband was a medical doctor, expert in tropical disease. He was not the drug lord.”
I started to ask more, but decided it was a lost cause. Or maybe I was a little afraid of Señora Carpintero.
Billy Teeter and I left dark, beautiful, dangerous Señora Carpinteroâor whatever her name wasâsitting on the green sofa in the living room of a metal house deep in the bowels of Tate’s Hell Swamp.
After taking a cursory look into the doctor’s lab, I retrieved Joey’s Walther PPK from Willie’s corpse. Captain Billy and I loaded his grandson’s body onto the air boat that The Sequel had used to tail us to Carpintero’s compound. Billy climbed into the high chair in front of the fan. I sat at his feet as he steered away from the compound and skidded across miles of flooded saw grass.
We didn’t talk.
I didn’t kill Willie. I hadn’t even gotten him killed. Not really. Willie got killed playing tough guy. It was his choice. If it hadn’t been that day, it would have been another. Sooner or later, he would have met up with men who don’t play tough, the kind who make money by taking it away from wanna-bes.
Billy Teeter and I would not be friends. And, from that day on, neither would he and Peety Boyâthe childhood friend who had fought Hitler in France. And won.
Marina was too complimentary a term. It was a gray-weathered shack with sodas and bait inside and a ragged dock outside. Billy was using the pay phone. I waited with Willie’s corpse.
A bass boat pulled up and two men climbed out and walked over to look at Willie’s body. “Goddamn. What happened? Who is that?”
I looked at the men, who looked excited. To them, this was a story to tell, something to spread around work the next day.
I said, “Show some respect.” They ignored me, so I tried another tack. “Get the fuck out of here.”
One of the menâhe wore a slouch hat with fishing flies stuck in the sweatbandâsaid, “What’s your problem?”
I stepped into the boat and picked up one of the carbines. The men moved off. When he thought he was out of earshot, the one with the flies called me an asshole.
Captain Billy walked out onto the small dock. “Ambulance is on the way. I talked to the other boys who got shot. Told ‘em to say somebody shot them and Willie from a bridge. Told ‘em which one.”
“Cops going to buy that?”
The old fisherman shrugged.
“Thank you.”
Billy sat on the dock with his feet hanging off the side and rubbed at his eyes with the thick muscles at the base of his thumbs. “Way I see it. You didn’t kill Willie. You might’ve got him killed a little sooner than he should’ve been. But you called me up on the phone last night to tell me what’d happened, and I told you me and Peety Boy’d cover your back.” The old man wiped his palms on his pant legs. “Naw. You didn’t kill him, Tom. But my grandboy did try to kill you. Twice. I owe you something for that.”
I said, “You didn’t owe me anything. But I appreciate what you did.”
Billy looked out across the water. “Yep.”
“I don’t guess you want to see me again, though.”
“No, Tom. I don’t.”
chapter thirty-five
The ambulance bearing Willie Teeter’s young body pulled into the emergency entrance of Apalachicola Memorial Hospital more than an hour after Captain Billy placed the call. No need to hurry. The EMTs off-loaded the gurney with its lumpy, sheet-covered cargo and wheeled it inside. Billy followed along to the morgue, and I went in search of Joey. I found him in a private room on the third floor. A clear bag of something dribbled through a tube into his arm; silver wires peeked out through his lips; and he was seriously sedated.
I went in search of a doctor, then a nurse, then another living soul. Lots of patients, but no healers in evidence. Finally, I just reached over the nurses’ station and helped myself to Joey’s file, which was hanging on a rack with the rest of the patient histories. I had just hooked the file folder and flipped it open when a nurse appeared as if by magic.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to find you.”
She said, “Did you think I was hiding inside that private folder,” and took Joey’s chart out of my hand.
I smiled. “It was the last place I looked.” She didn’t return my smile, which was kind of a shame. Nurse Ratched wouldn’t have been a bad-looking woman if she smiled or maybe just quit looking quite so pissed off. “The patient is a friend of mine. I wanted to find out how he is.”
“Are you family?”
“If I were family, I would have used that word. I just want to know how he’s doing.” So much for charm.
She flipped open Joey’s chart. “Your friend has a fractured nose, multiple hairline fractures of the left orbital globe, and a dislocated jaw. His left shin has been fractured.” She skimmed the page. “He also has a minor concussion. He has been sedated.”
I said, “Thank you,” and turned to walk away.
Nurse Ratched said, “This is a hospital. The way you live is your business, but you shouldn’t come in here covered in filth.”
Nice lady.
I found Joey’s room again and placed a credit card call to Loutie. She promised to be in Apalachicola as soon as possible, and I promised not to leave Joey’s side until she got there.
I sat down in the hospital’s idea of an easy chairâa metal frame holding foam rubber cushions covered in tan plasticâand tried to get comfortable and think. The swamp water had evaporated out of my clothes, leaving my pants and shirt, even my underwear, crisp with dry sand and sludge. My mouth tasted like mud; my hair felt like steel wool; and, in every little out-of-the-way, never-seen crevice of my body, I could feel small, crusty remnants of my morning dip in the swamp each time I moved.
Two long nights had gone by now without sleep. I put my head back and tried to concentrate.
Somewhere, buried deep in the foggy recesses of my mind, I knew that I knew where Carli was, if only I could reach in there and pull it out. I started with her goodbye note and tried to work forward. The room got kind of shifty. Shadows floated and blurred, invisible weights pressed on m
y eyelids, and I fell into a dark pit of unconsciousness. When a woman’s hand finally shook me awake, I was vaguely aware that I hadn’t dreamed or turned or even moved my hands for more than four hours.
“Tom?” It was Loutie Blue’s voice.
I think I said, “Umphum.”
“You okay?”
I sat up and moved my head around, trying to roll the crick out of my neck. “Fine. Just tired.”
Loutie stepped into the bathroom. I heard water running, and she came back out with a wet washcloth. She wiped my face with the warm cloth, like a mother waking a toddler from a nap. She asked what had happened and I told her, starting with Joey’s condition and then looping back to our encounter with Willie at my beach house and coming forward.
When I was finished, Loutie said, “We have news about Carli, but we haven’t found her yet.”
“What news?”
“She’s back in the state. A pulpwood-truck driver reported seeing her either yesterday or the day before, hitching outside a little town called Pine Hill. There’s a big pulp mill there…”
“Yeah. I know.” And there was the thought again.
Loutie had moved over by Joey’s bed and was squeezing his huge thumb in her hand. She cocked her head at me. “What is it?”
I reached back to massage the stiffness from my neck. “It’s just… I keep thinking I know where she is. It’s in the back of my mind somewhere, and I can’t get to it.”
Loutie looked down at Joey. “Go grab a quick shower. I’ve got clean clothes for you and some for Joey when he needs them.” I stood there trying to think. She said, “Go! I’m here with Joey now, so you’re free to go find Susan. Get in the shower. Wake up. It’ll come to you.”
And fifteen minutes later, as I toweled the water out of my hair, it did.
With more than three hundred dollars in her pocket, why hadn’t Carli grabbed the first bus or plane to Denver or Tucson or Los Angeles? Why head west and then turn back toward the northeast? And why, in the first place, did she write a cryptic goodbye note on the bottom of a sheet of notebook paper where she had sketched Susan’s old Ford pickup sitting in a hay field with rosebushes covering the front wheel?
Simple. But everything seems simple after you finally get it. I should have had it sooner. On some level, Carli had wanted to be found even before she dropped out of Loutie’s guest-room window.
Susan’s farmhouseâa place set among rolling hay fields and nestled inside swirls of holly and boxwoods and rosebushesâwas empty. And Carli knew it. She had traveled to Biloxi by bus to throw off her father. Then she had started her real journey when she began hitchhiking northeast toward Meridian. And that’s when I really did have enough information to have found her, if I had just been able to put it all together.
My father owns a sawmill just outside a small town on the Alabama River called Coopers Bend, which, as it happens, is about two hours drive due east of Meridian, Mississippi. If you drive to the side of town opposite the mill, cruise a few miles up a county highway called Whiskey Run Road, and turn down a narrow dirt road and follow that for four or five hundred yards through cow pastures and stands of loblolly pine and water oak, you will come to a mailbox that marks the entrance to the farm that Susan Fitzsimmons had shared with her crazy artist husband before he was murdered. It was where I first met Susan, and I was now sure that it was where Carli had been headed the minute she climbed out of the window in Loutie Blue’s guest room.
I should have had it figured out a second time back in Tate’s Hell Swamp when Señora Carpintero had asked if Susan was a granjeroâa farmer, and then said Susan was with “the fisherman.” My third bite at the apple came when Loutie reported that Carli had been spotted in Pine Hill, which is almost dead center between Meridian and Susan’s farm in Coopers Bend.
The only question now was whether Rus Poultrezâ“the fisherman,” as the señora had called himâhad both women, or only Susan. It was possible that Carli hadn’t yet made it to Coopers Bend. It also was possible that Poultrez was holding Susan somewhere else and that Carli would find the safe haven she had been seeking at Susan’s farm. These things were unlikely, but still possible, which is why I didn’t call the state police, the FBI, or even a few bad-ass boys I went to high school with to rush out there and take care of Poultrez. Instead, I pulled on clean clothes and went out to hurriedly explain things to Loutie. Then I placed a call to the Sheriff’s Department in Coopers Bend and spoke at length with local law enforcement.
As I replaced the receiver in its cradle, Nurse Ratched came in. “What are you doing in here?”
I wasn’t in the mood. “What is it?”
The nurse looked like she had just sucked a crawfish head. “Are you Tom McInnes?”
“Yep.”
“Then you have a phone call at the desk.”
Nurse Ratched turned and marched out, and I followed. A beige receiver was lying on a raised, white-Formica platform on the horseshoe-shaped nurses station. I picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Hi. How’s Joey?” It was Kelly’s voice.
“He got smashed in the face, and he’s got a broken nose, a dislocated jaw, and some hairline fractures. But he’s going to be fine. They’ve got him doped up for the pain.” I was glad to hear Kelly’s voice, but I also wanted to get off the phone and get on the road to Susan’s farmhouse. The sheriff was checking it out, but… “Thanks for calling, Kelly. Sorry, but I’ve got to go. Call back later if you want. Loutie’s in Joey’s room with him.”
“I found out something about L. Carpintero.”
I said, “He’s dead. Is it something that still matters?”
Kelly hesitated. “I’m not sure. I just kind of know who he is, or I guess who he was.” I didn’t speak. She went on. “The reason you thought his face looked familiar but you couldn’t place it was that he looks like someone else. A lot. His uncle was the military dictator of Panama. He’s in prison here in the states now. His name…”
“Yeah, I know who he is. Damn, it’s obvious once you know it. Take away the general’s acne scars and about thirty years and they’re twins.”
“Yeah. I didn’t get it. The lady in the newspaper morgue saw the resemblance, and once we had that we were able to find out who he is. He’s got the same last name as his uncle. And he was mixed up in his uncle’s drug business.”
“Which, I remember, was supposed to have a Cuban connection.”
“That’s it.”
Nurse Ratched walked over and glared at me. “That is not a public telephone.”
I turned my back. “And that’s everything you found out?”
Kelly said, “That’s all so far. Nothing, by the way, about him having any nicknames like Carpintero or hammer or anything like that. I’ll keep looking, though. But,” and Kelly paused for effect, “I did find out Carlos Sanchez’s real name.”
“Who is he?”
“We found a picture of him at a Republican fund-raiser in Mobile. The paper ran the shot a few months ago because the picture also included the son of a former president. Sanchez was kind of looking down and holding a glass in front of his face, but you could tell it was him.”
“Kelly!”
“Okay, okay. You know how you never see Superman and Clark Kent in the same place? Well, guess who Carlos Sanchez really is.”
I said, “Charlie Estevez.”
“You’re no fun at all. How in the world did you figure that one out?”
“I had a suspicion.”
“Well, so much for my bombshell. That’s all I’ve got.”
I thanked her and got off the phone.
Ten minutes later, I was speeding north in Loutie’s cherry-red GTO convertible.
Four hours of road time stretched out ahead, and my contact with the worldâmy little Motorola flip phoneâwas a goner. Slopping through Tate’s Hell had taken care of that. I stopped at a quick mart in Panama City and called Sheriff Nixon in Coopers Bend. Deputies had been
dispatched to check out the farmhouse. No report. An hour later, I stopped in Florala and got the same message. A little over an hour after that, I pulled over in Monroeville and made the same call. This time Nixon was in.
“Nobody’s there.”
I had been scared and nervous, worried about what might be happening to Susan and Carli while I was on the road. Now I was just scared. If they weren’t at the farm, if all the clues I had stringed together were nothing but snippets of a larger picture that I was missing…
Nixon’s hard voice cut my thoughts short. “You hear me? Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here. I was thinking. Are you sure no one was there?”
“Well, I didn’t go out there myself. But two deputies did and said they looked around pretty good. Looked for cars, knocked on the door, even looked in the windows as best they could.”
“They didn’t go inside, though?”
“Hell, Tom. We can’t just break in to somebody’s house without a reason.”
I grasped at straws. “Did they check out the barn in back?”
Nixon sounded like he’d had enough of this. “They checked the place out. You want to go out there and look some more, help yourself. I got other things to do.” And he hung up.
Nice guy.
I climbed into Loutie’s classic convertible and pulled back onto the blacktop. Before I had just been worrying. Now I was driving slower and thinking more, and I wondered if I had imagined all the clues and coincidences pointing to the farm. I ran everything over in my mind, turned it around, and pulled at it from as many different sides as I could find. The bottom line was that Carli had to be either at the farm or damn close to it. Susanâif the dark and dangerous Señora Carpintero could be believedâwas with Rus Poultrez … somewhere.
I jammed down the accelerator. Either I was right about everything and everyone coming together at Susan’s farm, or I didn’t have a frigging clue.
chapter thirty-six
According to the fluorescent lines on my diving watch, I turned onto the dirt road leading to Susan’s farm a few minutes after 7:30 that evening. The sun had fallen beneath the horizon, but the western sky still glowed with sunset colors that cast long shadows across new-green hay fields. Pecan trees, post oaks, and cedars grown from bird droppings interrupted kinked lines of barbed wire that stretched along both sides of the right-of-way. Susan’s mailbox came up on the right, and I clicked off the headlights. I pulled off onto the gravel shoulder and stepped out.