I put my hands on it, though, and it was real. I shook my head. “What am I gonna do with you?” I tossed it to the floor and huffed and puffed for a little while.
She’d tricked me that day when I was changing her tire, and she may have had accomplices. I’m no pushover. She’d been the exact opposite. So cool, laid-back. Smart. She could have fooled anyone. She would have fooled you.
27
The next morning, with one beast of a hangover, I threw on some shorts and my Washington Redskins T-shirt and went out into the heat. Started a nice jog. Ran through a nearby neighborhood along the water. Nearly felt normal again.
I was thinking about the rest of the day when I felt something. A little stir in the natural order of things.
Someone was staring at me. Watching me. Something.
I turned my head just in time. Behind me, fifty yards off, a rifle and scope were pointing directly at me. The metal of the scope shined brightly in the sunlight. The person was in a blue sedan, sitting in the driver’s seat, getting ready to take a cheap shot at me from behind. I dropped to the ground just as I heard the first report. He missed.
I stood, instincts taking over. The houses near me had tall chain-link fences on either side, so I didn’t want to explore that route. There was a bridge not too far off. I sprinted in zigzags down the road, heading in that direction. He took two more shots but missed. Then I heard his car engine roaring. He was coming for me. Trying to run me over. I ran onto the sidewalk. He sped up. The bridge wasn’t much further. I ran for it. He pulled up onto the sidewalk. Got closer and closer to me. I turned and caught a glimpse of the driver. He wore a mask. He was twenty feet away and gaining.
I tripped over a piece of broken sidewalk and skidded onto my left side. The cement tore at my skin but I knew that I had to keep moving. I could almost feel his bumper on my back.
I didn’t have time to stand, so I scurried on all fours toward a tree planted in a square of dirt next to the sidewalk. Right as I got my legs behind the trunk, he hit it. The tree split two feet up from the roots but it stopped the momentum of the car. He backed up as I returned to my feet. Ran like hell. By the time he was moving toward me again, I had reached the bridge. I jumped over the rail. Dropped fifteen feet into the river. I popped back up and saw the car door opening. I dove under. The first bullet hit the water. Fizzled past me. I kicked as hard as I could and went deeper. Then changed direction. Opened my eyes. The saltwater burned. I couldn’t see much more than a foot or two in front of me. I began to move along the bottom. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. A minute.
I didn’t want to pop up to grab a breath. That’s what he was waiting for. A little potshot, like an arcade game. If he could guess which way I was moving. But I couldn’t hold my breath much longer. I started pawing at the mud below me, moving as fast as I could. Rays of sunlight showed the bottom as it became shallower. I put my feet into the mud. They sank some. But I began to run as I reached three feet of water. Didn’t look back once.
Ran out of the water and dove into the marsh grass, which was several feet high. Landed right on an oyster bed, and the shells cut my legs and arms. I didn’t feel it, though. I carefully pushed myself off the shells and got to my feet in a crouched position. I looked back and didn’t see him on the bridge. Didn’t see his car either. I’d swum about sixty yards. I moved forward into someone’s yard, trudging through the grass and mud, stepping in the places that looked like they wouldn’t swallow my shoes.
I started running again once I hit solid ground. Mud, water, and blood dripped down my legs. My lungs burned but I didn’t stop for two miles.
Finally made it back to my house. I burst into the door, no energy left. Locked the doors. I couldn’t have made it much further. First I found my Benelli and my nine. Checked the house. It was empty. Then dialed Chester. He didn’t answer his phone. I went upstairs. Put some jeans and a T-shirt on. My cuts were still bleeding but I wasn’t too worried about it. The adrenaline in my body had begun to ebb and I started getting pissed off.
I wanted to know who was behind it. And I didn’t want people getting in the way. So I didn’t call the police. I like to clean up my own messes.
I’ve got a few enemies and I decided to call one of them. Just putting some feelers out.
“How’s it going?” Jack asked, very nonchalantly, from his newest disposable phone. “You on a clean line?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Just checking in.”
“I was about to call you. You in town?”
“No, down here in Savannah,” I lied.
“You still coming over for Friday night’s get-together? Trust me, you’re gonna want to be here. I throw the finest parties in South Carolina.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“You in?”
“I’m planning on it.”
“I need you there. We gotta meet Edgar Winter.” He sometimes called cocaine Edgar Winter, after the albino musician.
“The same night?”
“Yeah, some things changed with the delivery. We’ll just leave the party for a little while. Won’t take long.”
“All right. Count me in.”
“If you want to come up tomorrow, we’re gonna head over to Tela’s set at Magnolia Plantation. She said we could come watch them film. Could be fun.”
I told him I’d be there and bid farewell. I had other business to attend to at the moment.
It definitely didn’t sound like Jack was behind my attack. He wouldn’t have played it that cool. And if he knew nothing, Ronnie didn’t know anything, either. They shared their secrets. Kado was still a possibility. After pulling off the lie of the century apropos Liz and me, he was capable of anything. I decided to go see him.
Kado lived downtown on Limestone Street in an old Charleston mansion that had been converted into apartments. He had the whole third floor. The building was too old to have an elevator, so I climbed the worn-out stairs. At the top of the stairwell was a window. I pulled it up and climbed out. I stepped onto the ledge and shimmied along the side of the building toward his balcony. I would enter a world of pain if I fell. Last time I’d been there, I noticed a corner of Kado’s balcony screen was torn. I stepped off the ledge onto the balcony, bent down under the screen, and snuck in. Then I opened the unlocked balcony door leading into his apartment.
I found him in bed, snoring. Didn’t even bother waking him. Went out the front door, satisfied he hadn’t tried to kill me. If he’d been behind it, he wouldn’t be sleeping right now.
Still fueled by fury, I tried to rationalize who it might be. Eliminating Jack, Ronnie, and Kado had been necessary. Now that I had, only one person really made sense. He’d already tried for me once. Any man with some sense of deduction would have made the same assumption.
Tux Clinton was a dead man.
28
What had given Tux the idea that he could mess with me again? You know, I get it. He’s gotta be a man. Stand up for his cousin. Look good in front of his people. But bad idea, Tux. I wasn’t taking this lightly. Don’t make things personal. Don’t come attack me in my own neighborhood.
I was fuming as I climbed into my Jeep with my nine. Headed straight to the highway. I really hoped he was going to be home. Nothing was on my mind but hitting him. I didn’t care if I went to jail for this. Didn’t care if I lost my job. Liz had gone running on that road with me. What if she had been with me? Tux needed to pay.
I pulled into his driveway. Seeing his BMW made it more real. I went up the steps and kicked the door open, the lock shredding the wood. I heard a voice and went in that direction. There was a faint smell of something cooking in the microwave. His whole house seemed to be green inside. The walls. The furniture. There was a sculpture of a shark’s head on the mantle.
Tux came around the corner. I didn’t care that he was bigger than me. I didn’t say a word. Breathing loudly, I went up to him and punched him in the stomach. He doubled over but didn’t fall.
“You send people to my neighborhood to kill me,” I said. “What did I tell you about that?” I pushed him and he fell back onto the shag carpet.
“What are you talking about? I didn’t send anybody your way.” He started to stand, and I kicked him in the side. He fell back down. I was starting to piss him off. Went to kick him again, but he grabbed my leg. Twisted it. I fell down on top of him. He got to his knees and elbowed me in the face. My head cocked back.
Somehow, he took the advantage. The guy could throw down. I tried to sit up. He punched me in the temple. Then punched me again, harder, with the force of his body behind it. I blacked out for a second. Long enough for him to stand. He took my arm and dragged me across the room toward the front door. I was still dizzy and couldn’t break free. He dragged me out the door and onto the porch. Pulled me down the first couple steps, and then I rolled down the rest, landing at the bottom on the cement. As I get older, those kinds of things hurt.
He did all the talking, standing there above me. “I don’t know what happened with you, but you messed up. I haven’t even thought about you in a while. You need to learn who your enemies are. If I had come after you, you wouldn’t be here. Bet your ass, that. Now get the hell off my property. You brought this on yourself.”
He left me there at the bottom of the steps. I didn’t have enough in me to retaliate. Not that I could have. I really didn’t want to get back in my car and run away like a man defeated, either. But I had been beat and needed to respect it. He’d bested me. Grabbing my gun would have been a pansy’s move.
Besides, I didn’t think he was lying. I’ve been interrogating people for a long time, and I can read innocence, from a person’s tone to their mannerisms to their eye movements. I didn’t know who else it could be, but Tux hadn’t been behind it. I’d attacked him for no reason and probably deserved to get my ass kicked.
Still, it didn’t feel good. It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last, but I didn’t like it at all. I moved slowly to my feet and started walking to the Jeep. I climbed inside and as I put her in reverse I looked up at his house. He was holding back a curtain, looking at me. I gave him a look that said we’d meet again. He let go of the curtain and I backed out of his driveway.
I scrolled through a list of other possibilities. It couldn’t be Stephanie. Baroni didn’t like me but I doubted he was out to get me. Diego Vasquez? Hell, any person I’d put behind bars could be after me.
Chester finally called me back on my way to Savannah. I’d given up finding my attacker for the moment. No way I was sleeping in my Charleston house tonight, and I needed a good night’s sleep. Getting chased and shot at and beat all in the span of a few hours takes its toll.
No, I didn’t tell him about my attack and what happened with Tux. I’d changed my mind. I needed more information before blabbing about that. Didn’t want word getting out and someone deciding to pull the Jack Riley case from me. I told him a shipment was coming in Friday night. We’d checked Jack’s container orders with the importing company he used. He didn’t have one coming in for another two weeks. So we ruled that possibility out. I’d already told Chester about Jack’s party. He said he’d get word to Steve. I got off the phone, excited about our opportunity. We were about to hook onto a new source, but I had no idea how.
Steve called an hour later as I crossed the Georgia line. “We’re rounding everybody up Friday night.”
“What?”
“You say there’s a meet?”
“That’s what Jack told me.”
“Why’s he doing it during the party?”
“Said something changed and that’s just how it has to happen. Probably something to do with the hurricane.”
“Then we’re gonna bust the meet and his party at the same time.”
“I’m not on board with that.”
“Tough. I’m under pressure, Reddick. No better way to sweep this Chad Rourke fiasco under the table than to make a widespread public arrest that includes this new source, Tela Davies and the Hollywood crew, and Jack Riley, James King, and most of their network. Everybody’s gonna be there. It’s too good of an opportunity to pass up.”
“No way. Half of them won’t even spend a week in jail. I’m not here to pin some waste-of-time possessions on people. We need to take it further.”
“If you get this last source and he’s as big as we think, we don’t need to go any further.”
“You’re telling me this is all coming down to media coverage?”
“Doesn’t it always? You can imagine the headlines.”
“There’s always a bigger fish, Steve.”
“Yes, there is. But we’re stopping here. We’ve made major progress. Tracked the Atlanta source all the way to Houston. You did good, Reddick. Atlanta. New Orleans. Houston. We didn’t waste our time.” He paused to let me say something but I was at a loss for words. Boneheaded bureaucracy strikes again.
“I’ve already informed the other offices,” Steve said. “Coastal Snow ends Friday night. Arrests will be made across the country simultaneously. Don’t fight it. You’ve impressed people. Don’t cloud your new reputation. If you wanna work one last miracle, make sure this hurricane doesn’t come our way.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard.”
The other headache in my life was this hurricane running up the coast, and we were monitoring it closely. We’d been hearing about Hurricane Henrietta for a week now, ever since it had moved off the coast of Africa as a tropical storm and torn through the Caribbean, leaving millions of dollars in damage from Guadeloupe to Puerto Rico. Henrietta had run into a low-pressure system, and as a result, had taken a more northward track and was now two hundred miles off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. They expected the category 2 hurricane to scrape by Charleston in two days and make landfall near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina on the third day. But you never know with those things.
I bitched to Steve for another few minutes, knowing it was pointless. He listened, letting me blow off some steam. We hung up as I pulled into a little motel outside of Savannah. I checked in and, taking no chances, spent the evening with my Beretta in my hand. I wouldn’t let myself be caught off guard again.
29
I’d accepted Jack’s invitation to visit Tela on the set the next day, and as bad as I felt, I knew I still had to go. I didn’t want to start backing out of invitations and losing ground with him. Nothing was over yet.
I arrived at the plantation in the late morning. Looking at the place made me remember how a guide described it when I was on a family carriage tour back when Will and I were kids. Magnolia Plantation, built in 1676 by the Drayton family, is a key landmark of Charleston heritage. That’s about all I remembered. It was a long time ago.
“Here to see Tela Davies,” I said to the guard as I pulled up to the plantation gate. He didn’t bother standing up from his chair. I could have fit a week’s worth of groceries in the bags under his eyes.
“We all are, aren’t we?”
“It’s not like that,” I assured him.
“Uh-huh. I need to see your license.”
I gave the guard my fake ID, and he scrolled down the clipboard. “Moody, Moody…Here it is.” He handed me a laminated pass on a lanyard. “Hang that around your neck.”
“Security is tight over here today.”
“Try walking around without that thing and see what happens. You’d think the president was in there.”
“I don’t think I’ll test it.” I put the lanyard around my neck.
“You’re a lucky man. What I’d do to—”
“You don’t have any sort of history on the plantation, do you? A pamphlet or something?” He dug one up and handed it to me. I pulled away.
Oak trees stood on either side of the dirt road and hanging moss brushed the top of my truck as I passed. I had my window down and my arm out. Fall had cooled the air, and it was the kind of day you just want to kick back on the porch and listen to Amos Milburn. Tap your feet. Let the breeze bl
ow. Leave it all behind for a little while.
Eventually the woods opened up into a large field with old slave houses still standing and a saltwater river running in the background. With the help of a stranger dressed in Confederate garb, I found Tela’s trailer.
She peeked through the window to the left of the door and then opened it. She wore a white robe, her hair was in curlers, and her eyes were the kind of blue that had been chipped off a glacier.
“Hi, sugar. Please come in.” I started to enter and she said, “Uh, I can’t get enough of you. I could just devour you…like a piece of salted caramel.”
I cocked my eyebrow. It was a good thing I’d showered.
“You’re the first one here, darling.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Sorry I’m not dressed. I’m waiting for makeup.”
“That’s fine. You look good in sort of a housewife kind of way.”
“At it again, are we? You do like your games.”
I laughed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. You really do have an imagination.”
“I’m an actor. That tends to be part of the gig.” There was a bouquet of fresh flowers and a tray of fruit on the table. She reached into the fridge, saying, “Have a seat.” I sat on one end of the ultrasuede couch. She tossed me a bottle of Evian. As I opened it, she plopped down next to me, very close.
Her energy filled the trailer, and I felt vulnerable. She undressed me with her eyes.
“I really thought you would break down and call me.”
“Sorry, I don’t have your number.”
“I’ll change that right now.” She fished out her phone.
“You’ve got it bad, don’t you?”
“You’re going to get slapped again if you’re not careful.”
“I’m really glad I came.”
“Hush. Now what’s the number?” I gave it to her, and she mentioned they were going to Savannah soon to film a few scenes.
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