Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

by Sallie Bissell

  “Hey,” she called as they loaded him in the back of the ambulance. “How do I get to Vanderbilt?”

  “Just follow us,” called the EMT. “It’s only five minutes away.’’

  “Thank God,” said Mary, buckling herself into the driver’s seat of Gabe’s van, praying that the hopeful words she whispered to him would turn out to be true.

  Thirty-three

  “ISN’T SHE THE most beautiful little thing you’ve ever seen!” Kimberly Khatar’s teaspoon pinged against the side of her glass as she stirred a pink packet of no-cal sweetener into her coffee. She and Bi­jan sat in the food court of the Atlanta airport, eating a hurried breakfast before starting the sec­ond leg of their flight to Nashville. It had been an extraordinary morning. Three hours earlier, they had been dressing for an ordinary day at work. Then their lives had done a complete U-turn, and now they were at the midpoint of the most important journey they would ever make. They’d managed to make last-minute air­ line reservations, had dressed frantically, and thrown extra clothes in a carry-on bag. Bijan had grabbed his briefcase and checkbook, and here they sat, staring at the picture of the little girl who might well become their daughter.

  “She really is pretty.” Bijan pulled his chair closer to his wife’s and smoothed the photo they’d examined a hundred times in the past three hours. “Too bad you can’t see her eyes anymore.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve unfolded the paper so much, you’ve almost lost her eyes in the crease.”

  “Oh, Bijan.” Laughing, Kimberly leaned her head against his shoulder and looked down into the little girl’s dark, knowing eyes. “What do you think we should name her?”

  “Kimberly, we don’t even know if we’ll like this child. And we have no real reason to think we’ll get her, even if we do.”

  “But we’re first in line this time, honey. Mrs. Hatcher said so. Come on, Bijan. Play the name game. Just for fun.”

  Bijan took off his glasses and studied the photo. “My folks will want Jannat or Atiyeh,” he told her solemnly. “Your folks will go for Stephanie or Megan.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Something cool.” He watched a woman sit down at the next table and release a tiny white dog from a blue nylon pet-tote. “How about Britney Teagarden? Or Xena the Warrior Princess?”

  “Xena the Warrior Princess Khatar.” Kimberly nodded as the waiter put a plate of bacon and eggs down in front of her. “I like that. Has a nice ring to it.”

  Bijan waited until the waiter left his lox and bagel, then he spoke more seriously. “You know, Kim, if this should work out, I don’t care what we call her, as long as it’s something American. Anything else, and they’ll think she’s a terrorist.” Kimberly’s smile faded. Her husband had told her about the hard time he’d had when he arrived in the states as a twelve-year-old with little English. His classmates had called him everything from Bichon to Be-Jesus and accused him of being a spy for the Ayatollah Khomeini. Only after he developed a sharp bilingual sense of humor and a deadly accurate fastball for his high school baseball team did his classmates call him by his proper name.

  “I understand how you feel, Bijan. But I hate for her name not to reflect her heritage.”

  “She’ll have a hard enough time with her heritage as it is.”

  “But Iranian names are beautiful. And we can’t just pretend that she’s an all-American girl.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe an Iranian middle name, then. But nothing long or hard to pronounce. I don’t want kids making fun of her on the first day of school.”

  “Then choose one.”

  He looked at the photograph again, then smiled. “How about Aziz? Jennifer Aziz Khatar. We’ll call her Jenny.”

  “Bijan, that’s perfect!” Kimberly felt her eyes filling with tears, as they had numerous times this strange and wonderful morning. “I love that name.”

  “I may not be able to make babies,” he remarked cheerfully, taking a bite of his bagel. “But I can name the hell out of them.”

  Kimberly poked at her eggs. It was God or Allah’s own irony that of all the people in the world, they had found each other—she congenitally with only half a uterus, he rendered sterile when his cousin Amir, an Iranian med student, had mistakenly treated his swollen glands for mono instead of mumps. Years later they met on the beach at Fort Lauderdale, both sophomores at the University of Miami. They married the day after they graduated, and for the past twelve years, they’d been happy. Bijan had taken over the management of his father’s real estate holdings, and she had earned an MBA, starting an insurance company that sold tailor-made plans to small businesses. Children, or the lack thereof, had not been an issue until Bijan’s father suffered a stroke and started repeating the word bace—baby—every time they set foot in his condo. While most stroke patients obsessed about fresh water or itchy catheters, Farzam Khatar, beach front real estate king, wanted a grandchild. Soon Kimberly caught the obsession like a virulent germ and she, too, started to long for a child. Bijan, who wanted to please both his father and his wife, was agreeable to adoption, but so inflexible in his requirements that over the past three years only two children had become even remote possibilities.

  “We want an olive-skinned, beautiful, intelligent baby with almond eyes,” she remembered him informing Mrs. Hatcher. “Our child must reflect ourselves.”

  At first she assumed Bijan would want only a male child, but she had misjudged him. He’d considered the other little girl they’d had a shot at as carefully as the little boy. But other couples had been ahead of them. Adopting healthy children, Kimberly had learned painfully, was a fiercely competitive venture. Those who got the call first were the ones who carried off the child. “Heads up.” Bijan nudged her back into the present. “Here comes Mrs. Hatcher.”

  She looked to where he pointed. A bosomy woman wearing a bright yellow pantsuit hurried toward them. She blinked, as if she couldn’t re­member where they’d been sitting, then she caught sight of them and waved something in a brown paper sack.

  “Look what I found at the newsstand!” she called in a loud singsongy voice that made other travelers turn and look at her. “A book! What to Expect in the First Year of Life!”

  “Dear God,” said Bijan, moving his briefcase out of Mrs. Hatcher’s chair. “I guess this is for real.”

  Kimberly put her fork down. She would remember this moment for the rest of her life. She and her beloved Bijan eating breakfast at the Atlanta airport, goofy Mrs. Hatcher hurrying to help them meet the child who might become their own. When next her parents held their family reunion, she, Kimberly Susan Khatar, might be there with her own child, a dark haired little girl who would bloom among her sisters’ fair-haired progeny. She smiled as she put her arms around her husband.

  “Whatever happens, Bijan, I’ve never loved you more in my life than I do right now.”

  He looked at her with dark eyes that held mystery and promise and just as much unspoken hope as her own. “Me, too, my love. Me, too.”

  Miles to the north, in a cheap motel room in Franklin, Tennessee, Stump Logan sat on a lumpy mattress, sighting down the barrel of an old Winchester .70, drawing a bead on a small dog that was trotting across the parking lot of the motel.

  He had not hunted anything four-legged since he was kid. Back then it was deer with his father, a raw-boned mountain farmer who’d spent most of his days digging rocks out of his sticky clay soil by hand. They’d hunted out of necessity rather than sport, and the old man had once slapped him hard when he’d been so awed by a young doe bounding over a six-foot fence that he’d forgotten to lift his rifle to his shoulder. He’d never seen anything so utterly graceful, nor did he again until years later, when Jack Bennefield rose like a gazelle over a verdant green field in Vietnam, trying to snag a football intentionally thrown too far and too high.

  Jack Bennefield, Stump thought, followi
ng the dog as he raised up on his hind legs to smell the intriguing aromas of the garbage Dumpster. His old buddy. Mary Crow’s father. How differently things might have worked out, had he and Bennefield never met. He might well be sitting comfortably on his own front porch, carving whistles for his grandchildren. A cat would be curled up at his feet and his wife would be in the kitchen, pulling a blackberry cobbler from the oven. He would be happy. He would be content. He would be living the life he’d always wanted.

  But no. He’d met Jack Bennefield, and that lanky, grinning boy had cast a blight upon his life that he felt to this day. Like an apple tree permanently damaged by a killing frost, his post-Bennefield years had passed stunted and fallow, bearing only the small, bitter fruit of hatred and desire.

  “Don’t think about it,” he told himself, watching as the dog tugged a discarded McDonald’s sack from the trash. He’d worked hard. He’d planned hard—everything from the getting the proper ordnance together to switching the license plate on Edwina’s van. Right now he had only to make one more phone call. Then everything would start. If Clootie Duncan’s “Jesus” card held out, he would soon be pushing Mary Crow down that same bottomless hole. How good that would feel. He could almost taste his revenge.

  “Pow!” he whispered softly, smiling as he mentally blew the dog to bits. He put the rifle down and returned to the stale honey bun he’d gotten from the vending machine outside his room. That Mary Crow would come, he was certain. Though he knew she was swift and smart as a real crow, he also knew she would be unable to resist the bright lure he’d chummed her along with: Walkingstick’s baby. The irony of that made him smile. He almost hoped Walkingstick would come with her. He would push both of them down that hole and they could rot for all eternity, together forever.

  He looked at all of the weapons spread out on the bed. The Winchester for long range, a Smith & Wesson automatic for up close. Two Tasers that Edwina kept to calm down the young bucks who sometimes came rutting after their knocked-up girlfriends. Looking like TV remote controls but packing a mighty electrical charge, the Tasers had been new to him. He’d tested them out, outright electrocuting one of Edwina’s barn cats and bringing a young bull calf jerking to his knees. He picked up one of them and smiled. Who would have thought a dopey little weapon that ran on CD batteries could coil a man up like a fetus for the better part of an hour?

  He had five hundred .375 H&H Magnums for the rifle, a hundred dumdums for the auto­matic. Target practicing in the calm of Edwina’s farm, he’d nailed a beer can from four-hundred yards away. Handicapping himself a hundred yards for nerves and the trees, he figured he could still drop anybody long before they could shoot him. If all his plans failed, he could always take the time-honored route of all rogue cops and fix himself an S&W sandwich. One way or the other, he would have the last laugh. If Mary Crow outfoxed him here, at this juncture, she would have to live the rest of her life wondering what in the hell happened to little Lily Walkingstick. It would not be the ultimate revenge he’d planned for the daughter of Jack Bennefield, but it would do.

  Thirty-four

  THE AMBULANCE PULLED away, red lights flashing. Just as Mary was preparing to follow in Gabe’s van, her cell phone rang.

  “Damn!” she cried, slamming on the brakes. She grabbed for the phone, which she’d stashed in Gabe’s drink holder, and checked the screen. To her great relief, it was not an e-mail, but another call. Quickly she put the phone to her ear. “Mary Crow.” She answered in her brusque Deckard County voice.

  For a second she heard nothing. Then, to her horror, she heard the sound of an infant, crying. Loud, inconsolable cries that connoted pain or hunger, or something worse.

  “Lily?” she blurted before she could stop herself. “Is that you?”

  Ruth, who was sitting beside her, jumped as if she’d been jolted with electricity. “Lily? What do you mean, Lily?”

  Before Mary could answer, Ruth lunged for the phone. Mary tried to dodge her clawing fingers and listen to the call at the same time, but Ruth wrenched the phone from her grasp. It fell, bouncing off the dashboard, finally clattering somewhere underneath the gas pedal.

  “Damn it, Ruth!” cried Mary. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I want to hear my baby!” Ruth screamed. Unbuckling her seat belt, Mary ducked under the steering wheel. She groped frantically for the phone, but it slipped through her fingers, sidling over beneath the clutch. As precious seconds passed, she finally grabbed it and held it to her ear. The baby’s crying had gone, replaced by a male voice with a thick mountain accent, already in mid sentence.

  “...Photography studio. Cool Springs mall, at noon.”

  “Wait!” Mary cried. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Sure you did,” the voice snarled.

  “No, wait, we dropped—” Mary began, but the line went dead.

  She sat back in the driver’s seat, gasping, feel­ing as if some lizard had touched her with its tongue. She’d guessed right—it really was Stump Logan. She’d recognize his voice anywhere.

  “Give me the phone!” cried Ruth. “I want to hear Lily!”

  “Here.” Mary tossed the phone in Ruth’s lap. “Be my guest.”

  Wide-eyed, Ruth clutched the thing to her ear. “I don’t hear anything! Where did she go?”

  “By the time I picked it back up, Logan was on the line. All I heard was photography studio, Cool Springs mall at noon.”

  “Oh, my God!” Ruth clasped her hands to­gether, as if her prayers had been answered. “He must be taking Lily there! He must want to give her back!”

  “He doesn’t want to give her back, Ruth. He’s trying to set a trap for me.”

  “For you?” Ruth’s lips curled. “Mary, did you ever think that maybe just once something isn’t about you? That this might be about Lily? My child?”

  “I did at first,” Mary answered patiently. “But I don’t anymore.” She looked for the ambulance, but it had disappeared from sight. She took the phone from Ruth and started to punch in 911.

  “Why are you calling the cops?” asked Ruth.

  Mary gaped at the woman, incredulous. “Because Stump Logan is a murderer who’s kidnapped your baby. When things like that happen, you call the cops.”

  “No!” Again Ruth lunged for the phone. This time, as she grabbed it, her nails left three long scratches down Mary’s right cheek.

  “Have you gone totally nuts?” Mary cried, her eyes tearing from the sudden biting pain.

  “Just what makes you think the Nashville police will do any more than Dula? Or your precious FBI?” Saliva spewed from Ruth’s lips. “The cops haven’t given a shit about Lily since day one—what makes you think this time’s going to be any different?”

  With one hand on her cheek, Mary stared at Jonathan’s wife. Though Ruth was currently spinning into and out of her mind like someone caught in a revolving door, her words held some truth. Dula had not acted fast enough, and the Feds had chosen not to act at all. Would the Nashville cops really roll out over an unidentified baby’s crying and a half-heard sentence? No.

  Ruth scooped the Nashville map from the dashboard. “You do what you want, Mary. If there’s any chance at all that Lily’s going to be at that mall at noon, then I’m sure as hell going to be there, too.” She left the phone on the dashboard and scrambled out of the van, slamming the door behind her.

  Mary listened to Ruth’s staccato footsteps as she strode to her truck. If Ruth went to that mall, anything could happen. Logan could lure her anywhere on the promise that Lily was there, waiting. Then both mother and child would be gone, and both would be her fault. Damn, she cursed, her hands tightening around the steering wheel. Logan had rigged his trap as cleverly as any spider; now she was fully ensnared, with no way out.

  “Hang on, Ruth,” she called wearily. “I’m coming with you.”

  The vast commercial sprawl of Cool Spri
ngs Galleria lay twenty minutes south of Nashville. It reminded Mary of Atlanta, where huge shopping malls spread like metastasizing cancers over rolling hills where cattle had once grazed and corn had been the major cash crop. Ruth had driven down I-65 like a madwoman, changing lanes to zoom past slower drivers, finally skidding to a stop in front of JCPenney.

  “Come on,” she said, hustling out of the truck. “We’ve only got ten minutes.”

  “Just a second, Ruth.” Before Mary had locked Gabe’s keys in his van, she’d found his pistol and a box of bullets in the cabinet over the sink. Unsurprisingly, Gabe kept the gun clean, oiled, and in perfect Marine Corps condition. Now she stuffed the old Glock in the waistband of her jeans and pulled her loose cotton sweater over it. It didn’t hide it much, but if she wore her shoulder bag slightly in front of her left hip, she looked a little less like Annie Oakley at a shooting match. “Okay,” she said, wondering offhand how many local laws she was breaking by going into a shopping mall with a loaded weapon. “Let’s go.”

  Inside, the mall was crowded with people. A group called the “Tennessee Artisans” jammed the already cluttered concourse, selling handmade merchandise from portable displays while a country singer who looked like Clint Black serenaded the shoppers from a small stage. Mary scanned all the storefronts she could see—a photography studio was not among them.

  “We need to find a directory,” she told Ruth, squeezing past two men dressed in blue Tennessee Titans football jerseys.

  They hurried past a maze of quilt displays, an old hot rod that was the prize in a charity raffle, a man vending something called “Roasted German Nuts.” Mary checked her watch. Five minutes to noon. She looked around, frantic to find a directory, when she spotted a triangular backlit sign that read “Locate Your Favorite Merchant Here.”

  They raced over. Every store was listed and located on a diagram. Mary’s heart sank when they found three entries under the photography category—Wolfe Camera, the Sears Portrait Studio, and something called KidShotz.