The Hanged Man

by T. J. MacGregor

  She had run halfway across the cobbled road when she realized she still wore the latex gloves. She stripped them off, shoved them in her purse, and didn’t stop running until she reached her car.

  As soon as she got inside, she locked the doors and began to shake. A terrible cold licked at her spine. She needed heat. She had to get the fuck out of here.

  Key, ignition, stop shaking, hand, stop shaking. Car moving now, don’t go too fast, wave at the old fart…

  She sped away from the guardhouse and swerved out into the road. When she saw the white van, she heard something shift in her brain, and suddenly she felt better. Not great, not okay, but better.

  She waved at Hood as she flew past.

  Chapter 25

  At noon, the chopper lifted off the pad at a small county airport. Despite his extensive travels, Sheppard didn’t like to fly. But his stomach only lurched once, a compliment to Gerry Young’s skill as a pilot. Young held instructor and instrument ratings for four types of planes. But Sheppard trusted his ability because flying was as necessary to Young’s survival as traveling was to Sheppard’s.

  When the Everglades came into view, it looked like a panorama of incredible blues and greens, a vast and mysterious wilderness. Sheppard felt as if they had discovered a new continent, a new world.

  The chopper hit rough air, his stomach plunged to his toes, he grabbed onto the edges of the seat. “It’s just clear air turbulence,” Young said.

  Yeah, a silent killer, like cholesterol, Sheppard thought. “Are we almost there?”

  “Not much farther. You got that ELF turned on?”

  Sheppard patted his shirt pocket. “It’s on.” And it emitted signals at four to seven cycles per second. He just hoped it was the right frequency.

  Young pointed at the dark stains in the distance that floated like oil spills against the breathtaking blue of Florida Bay. “Ames will be there with a boat.”

  Ames. Yeah, he would believe it when he saw it. He pressed his hand to the nagging ache in his ribs and wished he’d stayed home. No job was worth this shit.

  Young had gotten the scoop on last night’s explosion and it coincided with what Sheppard had suspected. The driver of the sedan had been killed. But the cops didn’t have any idea who he was because they hadn’t found the license plate or any I.D. and there wasn’t enough left of the body to take prints. No one on the ground had been killed and the driver was believed to have been alone in the car.

  Eventually, Sheppard knew, the incident would be written off as one more tragic highway statistic. The only question now was whether Fletcher knew he’d been in the car when it had flown off the bridge.

  They landed on a helipad in the tiny town of Flamingo, an outpost comparable to something out of the old West, except that water surrounded it completely. It hardly qualified as an island; it was more like a Pacific atoll, the result of some geological accident.

  In the late 1800s, it had been the only settlement in the area, occupied by a few hardy pioneers. Now it was the southernmost headquarters for the Everglades National Park and was still occupied by hardy pioneers. So much for history, Sheppard thought.

  Ames waited for them, grinning like a loon as he consumed a bag of sunflower seeds. He cracked the shells incompletely with his teeth, then slobbered as he spat them out. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d make it,” he remarked as they climbed down from the chopper.

  “Why the hell would you wonder that?” Young shot back, putting him in his place.

  “I thought you’d be here earlier,” he replied lamely, and didn’t have much to say after that.

  He’d failed to procure an airboat, Young’s first choice, but seemed mighty proud of the puny skiff with the puny outboard that he’d rented. “For Chrissake’s, Pete,” snapped Young. “The water around here is too shallow for an outboard.”

  “Not with all the rain we’ve gotten. The water’s close to a foot higher than it should be for this time of year.”

  They got into the boat, Ames propped his fat ass near the engine, and they chugged off into a wilderness of blue.

  As soon as Sheppard glimpsed the Bay Pub, he knew it fit Bennet as a hangout. Surrounded entirely by mangroves and water, the shack looked like it had been slapped together with driftwood and spit. Spidery wooden pilings elevated it from the water. The place seemed as forlorn and frail as some of the centenarians that Willard Scott featured with his weather forecasts.

  Ames agreed to wait in the boat while Sheppard and Young went inside. Despite the pub’s isolation and the hour of the day, people jammed the place. No stools, no tables—even the open areas along the railing had been claimed. A single, sweeping look told Sheppard everything he wanted to know about the Bay Pub. He had seen hundreds of bars like it in the Caribbean, a harbor for sailors, misfits, and drunks.

  He and Young made their way to the end of the bar and ordered two iced teas and a bowl of you-peel-it-shrimp. When the bartender brought their order, Young showed him the computer printout of Bennet’s mug shot. “Has this guy been here recently?”

  The bartender, a crusty old conch with a white ponytail and starbursts of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, scowled at the printout as though it were some hideous insect that had dared to crawl across his bar. Then he looked up at Young and Sheppard. “Who’s asking?”

  “Long lost friends.” Young flashed his badge.

  The bartender’s attitude didn’t change, but his scowl vanished. “Yeah, he’s been here in the last week.”

  “Alone?” Sheppard asked.

  “Nope. There were two guys with him, one tall and thin, the other bald and big.”

  Vic and Ed? Sheppard wondered. “How often do they come here?”

  “They’re not regulars. Sometimes just one shows up, other times there’s two, sometimes all three.”

  “Any idea where they live?” Young asked.

  “Nope. Excuse me, I’ve got thirsty customers. If you’re fixing to stick around, there’s a table out yonder.” He gestured toward the other side of the room, then moved away before either of them could ask him anything else.

  The table faced the west dock, where the smaller boats tied up. Ames stood down there, yukking it up with another boater and popping sunflower seeds into his mouth. Beyond him, spits of land trailed through the shimmering waters like a string of dark pearls. The color of the water changed where the bay met the Gulf, a clear line of demarcation, like a border between countries.

  “Now what?” Sheppard asked, tracking an airboat that raced into his vision from the north.

  “We enjoy our shrimp,” Young replied, and plucked out one of the plump little suckers and started peeling.

  By the time Hal shoved off, Rae slept peacefully, a drugged sleep brought on by the Darvon he’d sprinkled like an herb in the soup she’d had with lunch.

  He hadn’t given her as much this time. A mistake, maybe, but he didn’t think she would try to escape now, not after last night. For the first time since he’d seen her on the compound lifetimes ago, he believed it was possible that Rae might grow to love him.

  But he still had to do something about her son and about Fletcher. Also, the dream he’d had about that spook Evans nagged at him, demanding that he pay attention. He wondered if Steele’s murder might have brought Evans here, too.

  If Evans had come to Florida in the wake of Steele’s murder, then it meant he somehow intended to extract one more impossible task from him, one more goddamn miracle, one more quick death to even some score in the murky world he inhabited. Well, no thanks, Evans.

  Three miles from the chickee, he exchanged the canoe for the airboat. Then he sped across the open waters of Florida Bay, headed for the pub. Manacas and Indrio probably had a new half-assed plan about how to finish off Fletcher, but its success would depend on Hal’s willingness to go along with it. The Steele plan had depended on that as well, which was how Indrio and Manacas had always worked their best games:
get someone else to do the shit work.

  He tied up at the pub dock and spotted Manacas standing alone at the railing in a fishing cap and sunglasses, bleached-out jeans and a purple and black batik T-shirt. Style had never been his strong point.

  Hal tied up the airboat, trotted up the stairs. “We may have a problem,” Manacas said without preface. “Indrio hasn’t been home since yesterday afternoon. His girlfriend said he was going up to Lauderdale to meet someone. She figured it was me.”

  “Where in Lauderdale?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what worries me. Like I told you on the phone, I tailed Fletcher to the Elbo Room the other day. And then Indrio heads off to Lauderdale and doesn’t come home. It’s the kind of coincidence I don’t like, Hal.”

  Hal laughed and shook his head. “Christ, you’re making something out of nothing. There’s more to Lauderdale than the Elbo Room. Besides, she was there on Monday. Indrio went up there yesterday.”

  “Suppose Fletcher knew Indrio was going to be there and was scoping out the place?”

  “How the hell would she know that?”

  “Christ, who knows. With Fletcher, anything’s possible.”

  “You’re worrying about nothing.”

  Manacas whipped off his shades. The fierceness in his eyes matched what Hal imagined had been there when he’d raped and murdered the woman whose death had put him in prison. “Let’s get something straight, man. Anything that involves Fletcher is important. We were ready to help you with Steele. You knew that. The only reason you took care of him yourself was because you wouldn’t have been able to nab Steele’s wife with us around.”

  “So what? The bottom line is that you guys got what you wanted without the hazards. I told you I’d help you waste Fletcher, but you can forget the snake bullshit, Ed. You want to kill her, we do it right.”

  Hal’s bluntness seemed to mollify Manacas. He laughed and shook his head. “Same ol’ Hal, always going his own way and fuck the rest of us. Let’s get something to eat.”

  As they made their way through the crowd to the west side of the pub, Hal sensed a wrongness in the air, something clearly out of whack. But what? He stopped, looked around slowly.

  At least a hundred people crowded the pub today, too many for him to get a fix on whatever it was that felt so wrong. He flung part of his awareness out over the crowd like a net, but a loud, irritating babble filled his skull, a buzzing human static that made his head pound. He dismissed the wrongness as paranoia.

  But as he hurried after Manacas, the skin at the back of his prickled and itched. He couldn’t shake the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Sheppard crossed the pub, headed for the rest room, when a waitress with a pitcher of beer bumped into him. Beer spilled down the front of his shirt; he leaped back and she rushed forward, thrusting napkins at him, apologizing.

  The crowd parted like the Red Sea to accommodate them, a corridor lined by legs and shoes. At the end of it sat two men who looked like a couple of tourists whiling away the afternoon until they sailed off into a tequila sunset.

  But at precisely the moment that Sheppard saw them, the larger of the two men removed his fishing cap, exposing the pale curve of his bald head and a face that belonged to Kojak. Sheppard’s heart literally leaped into his throat; he hastened back to Young.

  “Kojak’s here with Bennet,” he said softly, tilting his head toward them. “Table at the railing, in the corner. Bennet’s mine.”

  Young stood. “I’ll circle and come up behind Kojak.”

  They moved into the crowd. Floodgates had slammed open inside of Sheppard, adrenaline coursed through him, a metallic taste coated his tongue. His muscles had tightened like cords, his body literally hummed. He could see the back of the other man’s head now, the pale hairs that curled against his neck.

  The attack lasts about thirty seconds to a minute. If it continues for another three to five minutes, you begin to bleed internally. Or maybe your intestines rupture. Vic’s words swarmed inside of him like angry bees; he slipped the ELF out of his shirt pocket, clipped it to his belt.

  Sheppard saw the man’s hand, kneading the muscles in the back of his neck. He stood close enough to see the freckles on the back of Bennet’s hand.

  This one’s for Mira, fucker.

  The man’s head snapped around, almost as if he heard Sheppard’s thought, and suddenly everything assumed a weird, hallucinogenic quality. The noise in the pub dimmed to a dull, pounding ache in his ears, his peripheral vision melted away, his arm rose too slowly, as if trapped in molasses. Then the inside of his skull went ballistic. Bright, blinding explosions of light seared through the depths of his brain, short-circuited synapses, and scorched a pathway to the very center of pain.

  Wrong frequency, wrong wrong wrong.

  This thought slammed through his head with a pain so extreme that language alone could never describe it. Beyond migraine, beyond agony, beyond torture, beyond anything he had ever experienced or imagined. It drove him, shrieking, to his knees, his arms wrapped around his head, his reasoning mind wiped out.

  Instinct seized him. He rolled to put distance between himself and Bennet. But panic had broken out in the pub and people scrambled over him. He couldn’t reach the ELF to adjust the frequency, the pain was too extreme. Blood poured out of his nose. The horror in his skull had stolen most of his vision. He raised up on his hands and knees and shook his head like some wild, wounded animal, trying to clear his vision, vanquish the agony, trying to breathe.

  Someone yanked him to his feet and he swayed, the pub tilting to one side, people slamming into him from behind. Then, just like that, the pain snapped away from him, he could see again, and thought poured back into his head. He spun, searching the frantic, undulating sea of faces for Bennet, the bald man, Young.

  He must have looked like some wild primitive, blood staining his face and the front of the shirt, because people leaped out of his way. He made it to the railing and glimpsed Bennet charging down the east dock, where the airboats and larger vessels were tied. Sheppard vaulted over the railing and moved, hand over hand, along the outer edge so he wouldn’t have to fight the panicked crowd.

  He jumped the final yard, his ribs squealing, and landed on his feet like a cat. He tore straight down the middle of the dock, shoving people out of his way. Bennet had leaped onto an airboat when Sheppard tackled him from behind. He fell face forward into the water, taking Sheppard with him.

  They sank, locked together like mismatched lovers. Sheppard was taller and weighed more than Bennet, but Bennet was faster and imbued with the shocking strength of a man desperate to remain free. His knee sank into Sheppard’s groin, air rushed from Sheppard’s lungs, his hands slipped, and Bennet shot away from him.

  When Sheppard’s head broke through the surface, the roar of the airboat’s engine deafened him. It sped away from the dock, spewing a curtain of water behind it, racing ahead of the other boats that were fleeing the chaos.

  Sheppard made it to the dock, heaved himself over the side, and couldn’t get up. Whatever reserves of energy he’d been drawing on were now exhausted. His head felt like it might U off his shoulders in the next breath of wind. He just lay there, watching the airboat as it shrank to a pinprick of glinting metal in the distance.

  Hal didn’t slow down until he reached the mangroves where he’d hidden his canoe. He pulled into the dense shadows beneath the sagging branches and killed the engine. Fast, he thought, got to move fast. He expected to hear the chatter of a helicopter within minutes and he wanted to be hidden deep in the maze of channels by then.

  He paused long enough to cover the airboat with a dull green tarp and tossed fallen branches over it. Then he threw his pack into the canoe, shoved off, and leaped inside. He paddled hard and fast, a man possessed by the demons of his past. Manacas, Indrio, Fletcher, Steele, the names charged through him, screeching like a pack of hyenas.

  Several times he heard a chopp
er sweeping in low over the mangroves. Its shadow seemed to fall across the water and trees like some mythical cloud of doom. He couldn’t be sure it belonged to the cops, but he wasn’t about to risk being seen. It chilled him to think how close he’d come to being caught.

  The only thing they knew was that he’d headed north. Even if they’d caught Manacas, he couldn’t tell them where Hal lived because he didn’t know. He had the number for Hal’s cell phone, but that wouldn’t be of much use to them once he ditched it. For now, he was safe.

  And tomorrow? Would he still be safe tomorrow?

  When he’d reached into Sheppard, in the moment or two before he had begun to squeeze, he’d found Indrio’s face floating in a sea of other confusing, disconnected images. Now he pulled those images closer and scrutinized them, chewed at them, and started to piece them together.

  He likened it to sketching, a slow act of creation, except that it wasn’t done in any particular sequence. It was nothing as simple as the shape of the face, the beauty of an eye, the perfection of a mouth. It hurt to scoop the information out of himself, hurt when he understood that the image of the exploding car was how Indrio had ended up, hurt most of all because he knew that Indrio had betrayed him.

  But it didn’t surprise him.

  How much had he told Sheppard? Enough, at any rate, so that Sheppard knew about the Bay Pub.

  What else did you tell him, you fucking creep? About Rae? Did you tell him about her?

  Sure, why not? Why would he withhold something like that? Indrio’s point had been to give Sheppard enough to track him down. All this because he’d taken Rae when the only thing he was supposed to be doing was killing Steele. Indrio hadn’t trusted him since he’d turned down his girlfriend’s offer for a new identity all those years ago and gone his own way.