Slowly, she brought both hands to her neck, and when she gazed at her palms, she saw that blood covered every inch of them. She turned and saw his copper eyes peering at her with intense satisfaction. In his right hand, he held a pearl-handled knife.
“You were golden, Charlotte,” JimBone said. “Just like I knew you would be.”
As her consciousness began to slowly fade, Charlotte slurred. “Wh-wh-why? I . . . I did everything y-y-you asked.”
She saw him nod. “Just putting a loyal dog out of its misery.”
“You c-c-can’t win, y-y-you know,” Charlotte said, collapsing onto the commode as her slit neck continued to bleed out.
He pulled up his pants and clipped his belt. Then, leaning forward until he was just a few inches from her face, he whispered, “This ain’t about winning, Charlotte.”
“A r-r-reckoning,” Charlotte managed, remembering the word she had heard him say over and over again.
“That’s right, darling.”
Charlotte Thompson sucked in one last gasp before her shoulders sagged against the back of the toilet. Her last thoughts before death took her were not of her late husband and daughter. Nor were they of her parents, who had both died years earlier.
She didn’t think of God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit either. She had stopped believing in such things long ago.
Instead, she saw the shadow of a man she had never met before. A man she had only seen through the words of the killer who had just raped and murdered her.
Feeling the blood flowing out of her neck and the oxygen escaping her lungs, she met JimBone’s glare. “You’re sc-scared of him, a-a-aren’t you?”
The killer cocked his head in confusion. “Who?” JimBone asked. To Charlotte, his voice sounded like it was a hundred miles away.
“Mc-Mc-McMurtrie,” she gasped.
She saw his teeth grit and his nostrils flare. “Die, you dumb bitch,” JimBone said, folding his arms.
Just before she followed his final order, Charlotte Thompson smiled. “McMurtrie,” she repeated without any waver in her voice.
8
Thirty minutes later, Manny pulled the Camry into a used-car lot just outside of Eagleville and parked in between a relatively new-looking Ford Fusion and a dilapidated Honda Accord. She clicked off the ignition and slung the keys into the passenger seat. Then she walked toward the double-wide trailer that served as the business office. Inside, she paid for the Camry’s replacement with cash.
Five minutes later, she was leaving the lot behind the wheel of a 2007 silver double-cab Toyota Tundra.
“You like our new wheels?” she asked, speaking without looking behind her.
In the back seat, lying with a blanket covering his body, JimBone Wheeler chuckled. “Perfect, Manny. Absolutely perfect. Did you find the cabin?”
“Sí,” Manny said. “We are all set.”
“And the ammunition?”
“On the way,” Manny said.
“And the money?”
“Half will be delivered tonight. Our benefactor says the other half will be wired to an account in the Caymans when we complete the job.”
Underneath the wool blanket, JimBone smiled. “What about the ambulance driver? The Mexican? Any chance he could spoil anything?”
Manny laughed. “None. Pasco was one of Bully’s illegals. He would just as soon put a bullet into his own head than rat us out. I paid him in cash to drive the ambulance, and he completed the task. He’s gone . . . until we need him again.”
JimBone took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, enjoying the taste of freedom after two years on death row. “Good ’ol Bully,” he said. “Can I ask you something, señorita?”
“Sí, but I may not answer.”
“Was it you who killed Bully last Christmas?”
When she didn’t respond, JimBone added a few details. “Gunned down with a sniper rifle from at least a hundred yards out at the Jasper Country Club. No witnesses. No sign or trace of anything.” He paused. “Sure sounds like my girl Manny.”
She caught his eye in the rearview mirror. “But it wasn’t. I did not kill Mr. Bully Calhoun. I could never have killed him. He was good to me.”
JimBone scratched his chin. “Huh,” he finally said. “Strange. I always figured you did.”
For several seconds, neither spoke. Finally, Manny fired her own question. “Can I ask you something, señor?”
He grinned. “Sí, but I may not answer,” he mimicked.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to kill McMurtrie, Drake, and Haynes without all the others?”
JimBone’s grin widened. “Easier? Yes. Satisfying? No. I want to see them suffer. I . . . especially want to see the old man reap the whirlwind of his actions.”
“You know he is very sick,” Manny said. “Cancer. What if he dies before we can kill him?”
“He won’t,” JimBone said, his voice stone cold and the grin gone. Gritting his teeth as he pondered the possibility of cancer cheating him out of balancing the scales, he repeated himself. “He won’t.”
For over an hour, silence filled the truck as it rumbled through the southern Tennessee towns of Lewisburg, Cornersville and, finally, Pulaski. I’ll see you soon, JimBone thought, peeking over the blanket and through the windshield at the Giles County Courthouse in downtown Pulaski, wondering if General Helen Lewis was inside.
Twenty minutes later, after crossing the Elk River, JimBone leaned his hands against the driver’s seat until he felt Manny’s back pressing against him. As the Tundra passed a green-and-white sign saying “Welcome to Alabama the Beautiful,” JimBone whispered, “Are you ready for this, Manny?”
“Sí,” she said without hesitation. “Everything is in place.”
“Good,” JimBone said, pulling the blanket back over him. “We’ll rest and prepare tonight.” He paused and licked his lips. “But given the old man’s health, there’s no time to waste. In less than twenty-four hours, we’re gonna declare war.”
9
At 9:30 a.m. on the morning of December 4, 2013, four hours after JimBone Wheeler escaped custody at Nashville General Hospital, Steve Cook and Cindy Minkhos pulled off Highway 31A at a nondescript gas station on the outskirts of Triune, Tennessee. Steve and Cindy were high school sweethearts from Lewisburg who were in their first semester at Vanderbilt. Before the car had even come to a complete stop, Cindy opened the passenger-side door and hopped out. Frantically, she ran inside the store and asked for the key to the ladies’ bathroom.
The clerk turned behind him and saw an empty hook where the key typically rested. He had a vague memory of a woman coming inside a few hours earlier for the key. Bitch must not have brought it back, he thought, looking over his shoulder at the teenager. “Should be open,” he said, pointing at the empty hook. “The last person didn’t return the key.”
Hustling out of the store, Cindy ran back around to the bathroom. She was battling a horrific case of diarrhea and was about to bust. Otherwise, there was no way she would have insisted that Steve stop at such a rathole. She grabbed the knob and sighed with relief as it gave and she entered the restroom. She shut the door but was too anxious that she was going to soil herself to lock it. She ran to the first stall and almost slipped on the blood that had leaked into it from the adjacent enclosure. “Oh my . . .”
Her chest constricted when she noticed the blood, and she forgot about her need to use the toilet. Slowly, she opened the door to the far stall.
When she saw the woman, a scream caught in her throat for half a second. Then two heartbeats later, as her lungs filled with air and her bowels released, she screamed until her vocal cords finally couldn’t take the pressure.
“What is it?” Steve asked, barreling into the bathroom. “Are you—holy Christ!”
The woman in the stall was naked and had been propped against the commode. There was a reddish-purple gash all the way around her neck where she had been slit with a sharp-edged knife. But the woman’s ruined neck and nudity were not what made S
teve Cook’s mouth hang open or Cindy Minkhos defecate in her pants.
Along the dead woman’s abdomen were nine letters that had been written into her skin with the tip of a blade.
“M . . . C . . . M . . . U . . . R . . . T . . . R . . . I . . . E.” Steve said each letter out loud before doing the honors of reading what they formed.
“McMurtrie,” he whispered as Cindy let out another bloodcurdling scream.
PART TWO
10
On the northern tip of Alabama, just a few miles south of the Tennessee state line, sits a tiny hamlet called Hazel Green. There are conflicting stories about how the town got its name. Some say that the early settlers were impressed with the green hazelnut trees in the area. Another report indicates that the town was named after the wife of its first store owner and postmaster. There’s even a rumor that General Andrew Jackson, on his way to fight the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, described the region as hazel and green in color, and that’s how the name came to be.
Though he thought the story about Old Hickory was likely a tall tale spread by his father, it was the one that Thomas Jackson McMurtrie enjoyed the most. Sitting on the back porch of the redbrick house that he and his dad had built with their bare hands, Tom took a sip of Coca-Cola from a straw and gazed out at the one hundred acres of land that had been in his family since just before World War II. At the edge of the yard, where grass turned to barren rows of farmland—this year’s cotton had already been harvested and next year’s crop wouldn’t be planted until spring—Tom noticed that his English bulldog, Lee Roy, was chasing a butterfly and becoming frustrated with the endeavor. The dog, whose coat was a mixture of brown and white, turned in a circle and occasionally snapped at the air, flapping his huge jowls. But he was too slow to catch the insect. Now weighing in at close to seventy pounds, Lee Roy Jordan McMurtrie was not as agile and fast as his legendary namesake. Tom couldn’t help but smile as he watched the scene play out.
“Which version of how the town was named do you believe, Papa?” Jackson asked, also taking a sip of Coke, though he was drinking his straight from the can. The boy was thirteen years old and had a mop of light-brown hair on his head that was covered by a New York Yankees baseball cap. He peered at Tom with eyes that burned with curiosity. Tom had told the different stories of how his birthplace got its name on many occasions, and he was grateful that his grandson hadn’t grown tired of them. Or maybe he’s just being nice and placating an old fool. Either way, Tom was thankful for the company and loved this time that he was able to spend with Jackson. If there was a silver lining to being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, it was that he got to see his grandchildren a lot.
“Probably the one about the storekeeper’s wife, Forty-Nine.” Tom ruffled the boy’s hair. Jackson’s jersey number in baseball was forty-nine, and Tom enjoyed calling him by it. Tom had worn that same number when he played defensive end on Alabama’s 1961 National Championship football team. “But your great-grandpa really believed that General Jackson had marched his troops through here and proclaimed the place ‘Hazel Green.’ I wish that version was true.” Tom paused and felt heat behind his eyes. It was funny how your emotions changed over time. For the first seventy years of his life, Tom had always thought of himself as being rather stoic. He cried when his wife, Julie, had died of breast cancer six years ago. And he had cried when his parents died. And he’d had to pull his car off the interstate on January 26, 1983, when a news reporter had interrupted the song that was playing and announced that Coach Paul William “Bear” Bryant had died at Druid City Hospital, in Tuscaloosa, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-nine. He had laid his head against the steering wheel and cried for his mentor, who had taught him so much about the game of football and life. But those were all big events. Now, at seventy-three years old and almost fourteen months into a terminal cancer diagnosis, he could barely get through any story without feeling his eyes beginning to moisten.
“Me too,” Jackson said. Then, smiling wide, he asked, “Papa, can you tell me the story about how Darwin Holt broke that player for Georgia Tech’s jaw again?”
Tom laughed. “Will do, but I need to take a break, OK? Why don’t you go inside and finish up that math homework you were telling me about and let Papa rest his eyes?”
The boy sighed and reluctantly stood from his chair. “Yes, sir.”
He began to walk away, and Tom grabbed him by the arm. “You’re really growing, you know it? Flex that bicep for me.”
Jackson did, and Tom felt the muscle. “Strong as a bull. Has basketball started yet?”
“We’ve been practicing for a couple weeks, and my first game is tomorrow night.” Jackson’s eyes widened. “Do you think . . . ? I mean, if you feel up to it—”
“I’ll try,” Tom said. “I have my scans tomorrow and that’s an all-day thing, but . . . I’ll sure give it a try.”
Jackson hugged Tom’s neck. “Happy birthday, Papa. Love you.”
“Love you too, Forty-Nine.” As the boy started to run off, Tom implored, “Finish that homework now. That’s the most important thing.”
“Yes, sir,” Jackson said as he walked inside.
Tom turned his eyes back to the farm and noticed that Lee Roy was now lying flat on his stomach on the grass, a defeated look on his face as the butterfly fluttered above him. Chuckling, Tom reached for the blanket that lay in a clump at his feet. He set his Coke on a table beside him and then pulled the warm fabric over his bony shoulders. The wind had begun to blow, and though it felt fresh and pleasant on his face, it came with a chill. Nowadays, Tom noticed the cold a lot more often. He figured it was due to the weight loss. Before the diagnosis, he had weighed approximately 220 pounds. At six feet three inches tall, that was a proportionate number for him. But since Dr. Bill Davis had told him he had lung cancer in October of last year, he had lost almost 50 pounds and was now barely hovering over 170. None of his old clothes fit, so his daughter-in-law had bought him several pairs of light sweatpants and pullovers. He’d never worn a medium anything in his life, but all of the clothes had “M” on the tag, and even they were a bit loose.
Tom heard the sound of a car pulling up the driveway and saw Lee Roy bolt to his feet. The dog grunted and then took off toward the front of the house, barking to announce his presence. Figuring that visitors were beginning to show up for the party his son and daughter-in-law were throwing for him, Tom closed his eyes. Truth be known, though he appreciated the effort, he was dreading this get-together. He never felt hungry anymore, and he knew there would be hurt feelings when he barely touched the cake Nancy had made for him. Tom sighed and tried to adjust his back in the chair to lessen the pain. Happy birthday to me.
“Papa.”
Tom opened his eyes and turned his head toward the familiar voice. His daughter-in-law stood in the doorway to the house, holding a baby on her hip.
“Yes?” Tom asked.
Before Nancy could respond, a six-year-old girl with blond hair pushed in front of her. The girl twirled a set of beads in her hand and had a mischievous smile on her face. “Your girlfriend’s here, Papa,” she said, speaking in a singsong voice before giggling.
“Jenny, get back in the house,” Nancy scolded, and the girl scurried away, waving at Tom as she went. “I’m sorry,” Nancy said, shaking her head. “General Lewis is here. Do you want me to send her out, or did you want to come in? The others should be here soon.”
Tom, conscious of the blanket over his shoulders, said, “Send her out.”
“Are you sure?” Nancy asked. “You look cold. Do you need—?”
“I’m fine, Nancy. Just have Helen come out here.”
Tom could tell by his daughter-in-law’s thin smile that she wanted to protest, but she held her tongue. “OK.”
A few seconds later, Tom saw Helen emerge from the door wearing her customary black suit and heels. She smiled and Tom waved her forward. As the points of her shoes clicked on the wooden deck, Tom noticed the
worry lines on her forehead.
She hovered over him for a second and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you,” Tom said. “Wasn’t sure I’d live to see this one. I guess seventy-three is better than dead, right?”
Ignoring his weak attempt at humor, Helen ran her fingers over the stubble on top of his head. “Your hair is growing,” she said, and her voice sounded wan and far off, as if she were observing him on a television screen instead of in person.
“They say it comes back curly after chemo,” Tom said, subconsciously swatting a hand over the stubble. “That’ll take some getting used to. I’ve always liked my hair cut the same way I drink Kentucky bourbon.” He smirked. “Neat and straight.”
Helen laughed, but it sounded forced. She took the seat that Jackson had just vacated and leaned forward, holding her hands in her lap. It had been a while since Tom had seen Helen in her full courtroom garb. When she visited the farm, she typically wore jeans and a blouse, and he would have expected her to dress casual for the birthday party. It struck him as odd that she hadn’t changed before coming. “So, General, have you been dishing out ass whippings today?”
In the state of Tennessee, the head prosecutor of a county was typically addressed as “General,” and Tom had always thought the military designation to be the perfect fit for Helen Evangeline Lewis, who commanded respect with every word from her mouth and movement of her body.
Helen gave a tight smile but didn’t look at him. She peered at the deck and spoke in a quiet voice. “I need to tell you something.”
Tom felt a chill on his arms that had nothing to do with the temperature and squeezed the blanket tight against his chest. He had never seen Helen exhibit even the slightest hint of fear, but he could hear the trepidation in her voice. She’s scared to death, he thought, scooting forward in his chair. “OK,” he said.
The Final Reckoning (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers Book 4) Page 4