by Jude Hardin
Massengill got in my face. “You trying to fuck up my collar, or what?”
He was furious, but so was I.
I was about to punch someone and probably get arrested myself when Fleming screeched up in his Lumina. He got out and walked straight to where we were standing.
“Massengill, what are you doing here?”
“Responding to a call for all units, sir.”
“What did I tell you back at the scene in Keystone? You’re on administrative leave pending an Internal Affairs investigation into the shooting. Now get the fuck out of here before I write your ass up.”
“It was a clean shoot, Barry.”
“Just finish your report, and then you’re done till I.A.’s done. Comprende?”
Massengill nodded and walked away. Fleming never even looked at me.
We walked back to Massengill’s truck and drove toward The Parkside motel.
“Have you lost your fucking mind, Colt? What were you thinking, climbing into that car with that guy?”
“You ever heard of pocket forty-seven?” I said.
Massengill missed third gear. “Where did you hear that?”
“Beeler. He said I should have died in the plane crash. Then he said something about pocket forty-seven.”
“It’s nothing. It’s a myth.”
“What myth? My wife and baby daughter died in that crash. My band died. The pilot and copilot died. Is any of that a myth? I was the sole survivor. That’s not a goddamn myth. It’s fucking reality. Tell me what pocket forty-seven means.”
“Jesus, Colt. Take a Valium. It’s nothing. It’s a term flyboys use for an unexplained glitch. A mechanical or electrical gremlin. It’s like an invisible hand comes along and fucks everything up.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s slang. It’s a myth. It originated in World War Two, I think. Supposedly, the flight suits they issued back then had forty-six pockets. The pilots carried all kinds of shit around with them, but all they really wanted was a little luck. Some of them started sewing an extra pocket into their suits. Pocket forty-seven. It was a place to stow a talisman or a picture of a girl or whatever. Some good luck for the mission. If a guy got shot down, everyone would say he didn’t pack pocket forty-seven. Over the years it evolved to mean, like I said, an invisible hand that comes along and fucks things up.”
“So how does Beeler know anything about anything?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
He dropped me at the motel, and I borrowed another roll of gauze for my shot-up arm.
After Massengill drove away, I went to the lobby and logged onto the Internet. I Googled pocket forty-seven. The Wikipedia article echoed what Massengill had told me, along with one startling addition: pocket forty-seven had become common among certain street gangs, used as a verb meaning “to take by surprise in an ambush, or to sabotage.” As in: We fixin’ ta pocket forty-seven dey ass.
Sabotage.
I didn’t know what Beeler meant by what he said, and I didn’t know how or why anyone could have intentionally caused my band’s plane to crash. I clicked off the Internet and walked upstairs, thinking hard about how to find the answers to those questions.
The red light on my room phone was blinking. I called the desk, got the message that my Airstream had been cleared by the FBI. I was free to go home.
I called Joe.
“Think you could give me a ride home?” I said.
I gathered the few things I had in the motel room and put them in a plastic bag.
When we got to the fish camp, around midnight, Joe told me I could borrow his pickup truck until I got my car back.
“Got a gun I can borrow?”
“Never satisfied, are you. What do you want, a pistol?”
“What you got?”
“I have that Remington twelve-gauge.”
“Give me that and a pistol.”
“Isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins?”
Joe drove the ’76 F100 around. The truck, once red, was now a faded and dusty rose color. It was scarred and dented from years of use, and the edges of the rear fenders had rusted through. The windows were tinted black. Joe handed me the key.
“Please, double oh seven, try to give it back in the same condition as you received it.”
“Thanks, Q. I’ll try.”
The feds didn’t trash my house too bad. They even left my jug of Old Fitzgerald alone. I poured a drink, found a roll of duct tape, and fixed the broken windows with plastic trash bags. I was lucky it hadn’t rained in the past few days.
My head ached and my arm was sore, and I probably shouldn’t have been drinking. I felt as though I’d just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl. I was shaken, rattled, and rolled, and happy as hell Massengill had come along and saved my ass.
I woke up the next morning in severe pain, my arm red and hot around the bullet wound. I took two Percocets, put some ice on it. An hour later when it hadn’t gotten any better I drove myself to the emergency room at Hallows Cove Memorial.
The triage nurse looked at my arm and then put me on the back burner behind some more serious cases. I waited two hours before they called me back to one of the curtained rooms, then another hour before the doctor came in to see me.
The doctor was young, late twenties or early thirties. He had shoulder-length black hair tied in a ponytail, a piercing in each ear and a nice fisherman’s—or maybe surfer’s—tan. His nametag said J. A. Billingsly, MD, DEPARTMENT OF INTERNAL MEDICINE. He held a metal clipboard with my vitals and medical history and personal information one of the nursing assistants had taken.
“Hi, Mister Colt. I’m Doctor Billingsly.” He spoke with a heavy southern accent, from one of the Carolinas I guessed. “Are you allergic to any medications?”
“They already asked me that.”
“Just want to make sure.”
“None that I know of.”
“Okay. Let’s have a look at that arm. It’s a gunshot wound?”
“Right.”
The doctor unwrapped the bandage the triage nurse had put on. “Was it an accident?”
“You could say that.”
“The reason I asked, we have to report any criminal activity to the police.”
“It’s already been reported.”
Dr. Billingsly looked at the wound, touched the edges with a gloved hand, frowned. “I’m going to order some blood work, just a CBC and a chemistry, and then admit you so we can give you some IV antibiotics for a few days.”
“A few days? Can’t do it, doc. I have too much work to do.”
“If the infection spreads, you could lose the arm. Or, you could die.”
“I can’t stay in the hospital.”
He reached into the pocket of his lab coat, pulled out a pad, and wrote two prescriptions. He handed them to me. “Levaquin for the infection, Dilaudid for pain. If it doesn’t clear up in a few days, you need to get back here right away.”
“I understand.”
“I’ll send in a tech to draw your blood. You can go home after that.”
Dr. Billingsly snapped the curtain open and walked away.
Joe’s truck was low on fuel and I hadn’t checked my mail in a few days so I stopped at the Amoco near the post office and killed two birds. Along with some credit card offers and a couple of bills was, lo and behold, a two-thousand-dollar check from Dana Glass Attorney at Law. Check was in the mail after all. I guess it’s not a lie every time. Now I felt bad for hanging up on Dana’s receptionist. I felt bad all the way to the bank, where I deposited the check in my anemic account.
There was a Walgreens across the street from the bank, so I went in and filled my prescriptions. I browsed the Foster Grant rack while I waited. A little girl, three or four, came bouncing up to the rack. It took her about five seconds to say, “I want these when I get bigger, Mommy, and I want these when I get bigger.” She pranced on, her curly brown hair bouncing in sync with her stride. Her mother stood a few feet away, trying t
o read the small print on a bottle of medicine. I got a little teary thinking about my baby Harmony, all the years and milestones and joyous occasions that had been robbed from her. From us.
It also occurred to me that I didn’t know much about Leitha and Brittney’s history. How had they lost their parents? What had life been like for them growing up? Did they have any family besides each other, anyone to take care of Leitha’s funeral arrangements? I wondered if Brittney was still alive and if she knew about Leitha’s murder.
I found a pair of black wraparounds and paid for them and a bottle of Zephyrhills and my medicine at the pharmacy’s register. On my way out I saw the little girl standing near a cluster of gumball machines, crying because she hadn’t gotten the flavor she wanted. I asked her mom if it was okay, and then gave the girl all the change in my pocket. She smiled and said thank you.
I took one of the painkillers and one of the antibiotic tablets. My arm felt like a snapping turtle had latched on and refused to let go. Joe’s old Ford had a manual transmission, and every time I shifted gears the turtle bit down a little harder.
If Brittney was still in town, and still alive, I figured she was being held against her will. Leitha’s murder was all over the news and, if Brittney was able, I knew she’d come forward. I thought the car theft ring probably had something to do with the recent horrors, and the only person I could think of who might have connections to those characters was Duck the pimp. Was he pissed off enough about me taking Brittney to kill Leitha and kidnap Brittney back? That’s what I needed to find out.
I drove north on Blanding Boulevard, traffic heavy but moving at a steady pace. The brakes on Joe’s pickup were a hair short of tip-top. I thought about how fragile the human spinal cord is for a minute and then pulled into the T-Mobile store where I’d gotten the phone yesterday. The pain in my arm had eased up some, but my legs felt like I was wading in knee-deep water. I stepped to the counter and told the lady my predicament. She gave me a new phone for eighty plus tax.
I called my home phone to see if I had any messages. There were five: three from Juliet telling me she’d heard about Leitha and how sorry she was about everything and could we please try to work it out; one from Dr. Michael Spivey, asking me to call him as soon as possible; one from an old friend, a retired police officer I call Papa. All Papa’s message said was, “Let’s go fishing.” He uses a bamboo fly rod he made himself and at seventy-three can still cast into an area the size of a hubcap.
I called Dr. Spivey first. A woman answered.
“Mrs. Spivey?” I said.
“May I ask who is calling?” She had an eastern European accent, Russian or maybe Romanian.
I told her my name and reason for calling.
“Doctor Spivey is not available at the moment. May I take a message?”
“Can I talk to Mrs. Spivey?” I said.
“Hold please.”
I listened to nothingness for a few seconds. Mrs. Spivey picked up.
“Is this Nicholas Colt?” she said.
“Yes. Your husband left a message for me to call.”
“It’s about Brittney, of course.” From the sound of her voice, I could only imagine the assortment of chemicals coursing through her veins. Xanax, Prozac, possibly a martini or two. “Michael’s making rounds at the nursing home right now. I’ll give you his pager number.”
She told me the number. Her voice was like the Mojave Desert at midnight. Flat and dry, cold and hopelessly distant and dark. I thanked her, hung up, and paged Dr. Spivey. Five minutes later, he called.
“Mister Colt, would it be possible for us to meet somewhere? We’re very upset about everything that’s happened, of course. Poor Leitha. My God. She told me that she’d hired you to find Brittney.”
“That’s right.”
“I know the police and FBI are involved now, but would you be willing to stay on the case as well? My wife and I love Brittney dearly. Now that Leitha’s gone, well, we want to adopt her. Are you available? Leitha said good things about you. I’ll pay you, of course.”
“When did you want to meet?” I said. I had personal reasons for wanting to find Brittney, but I wasn’t above taking a paycheck for my efforts. Especially from someone who could afford a Russian maid.
“Could you come to my house this evening? I’ll be home around six. You can have dinner with us and—”
“Can’t make it tonight. How about tomorrow?” If Papa wanted to go fishing then, by God, that’s what we would do. As determined as I was to find Brittney Ryan, family always came first. Papa and Joe Crawford were all I had.
“Tomorrow’s fine. Around eleven in the morning if you could make it.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. He gave me directions.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I drove to Green Cove Springs. Papa and I have the kind of relationship where you don’t have to call, you just come. He was sitting on the porch reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I’ve known Papa for twenty years, and he always has his ragged old copy of that book nearby. Like it’s his bible or something. He swears it’s the only piece of fiction that ever mattered. He looked up and smiled.
“Nicholas. Have a seat, young man.”
“Thanks, Papa. Not feeling too young these days.”
“It’s all relative,” he said. “When you’re my age, you’ll wish you were forty-five again. Enjoy it while you can. You thirsty? You want a beer?”
“I’ll get it. You ready for another one?” A sweaty can of Pabst was on the table beside his chair, along with a jar of Planters. Huck Finn was Papa’s scripture, Pabst Blue Ribbon and greasy peanuts his communion. He drained the can, crushed it and threw it behind him, answering my question.
I walked inside to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and got the beers. He had at least a case lined up on the bottom shelf. I went back out on the porch.
“What happened to your arm?” An edge of white gauze extended beyond my shirt sleeve.
“Gunshot wound,” I said.
“You been doing some real work?”
“Don’t you ever watch the news?”
Papa opened his beer and took a long pull. “You know I don’t watch that shit. Too fucking depressing. I already know something terrible happened somewhere today. Why do I need some punk wearing makeup to tell me the details. Same shit, different day. I could plug in a tape from twenty years ago and it would be the same damn—”
“Don’t you care about what’s going on in the world?” I said.
“Fuck the world. I know there’s a war somewhere. I know someone got raped, robbed, stabbed, kidnapped, or murdered. If it didn’t happen on this here porch, I ain’t going to dwell on it. It’s too loud, and I’m too old. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. Anyway, you want to hear about the case I been working on?”
“I was a beat cop most of my life. A grunt. Strong back, weak mind. I damn near—”
“Don’t give me that ‘strong back, weak mind’ shit,” I said. “You could have gone as far as you wanted to in the department.”
“Maybe. Just never wanted to play their fucking games. Once I made sergeant, knew I’d get a good pension, that was enough for me. I’m glad I’m out of it.”
“Is that why you stayed on ten years past your retirement date? Face it, Papa. You loved being on the job.”
He laughed. “You know me too well, Nicholas. Can’t hustle a hustler, I guess. So tell me how you got your arm all shot up.”
I yawned. My arm hurt, but I knew I’d probably fall asleep right there on the porch if I took another pain pill. “You still want to go fishing?” I said.
“Maybe when the sun goes down. Or maybe we could just sit here on our asses and drink beer all night. You going to tell me about the arm, or you want to play twenty questions or what?”
I told Papa everything that had happened.
“Something sure as hell pissed someone off,” Papa said, “for Leitha to be tortured and murdered like that. You don’t see t
hat kind of shit every day.”
“Thank God.”
“And you think that Duck character was involved? You think he was mixed up with the car theft ring?”
“Maybe. He’s definitely a criminal, and I imagine payback was on his mind the minute I left his apartment.”
“Meaning you think he got Brittney back.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. If he does have her, he’s going to be expecting me this time.”
“You’ll have to tail him,” Papa said. “Wait for the right time. If you go in like Rambo again, you’re going to get your ass waxed.”
“Precisely,” I said.
Papa grinned. He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I know you better than to tell you to just let the cops handle it. Here’s the deal. You’re going to need someone inside, someone close to this Duck character, a confidential informant, a snitch.”
“Maybe I could pay one of his whores to rat him out.”
“That might work. I never had much luck with whores, though. Especially the street bitches. They go one way, then the other. What about that club he works at? What did you say, The Tumble Inn?”
“Yeah, aka The Stumble Out. Think I should try that?”
“Be your best bet.”
“Bartender?”
“Best snitches in the world.”
“Thing is, they’ve seen me at the club.”
“They haven’t seen me,” Papa said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Papa and I drank all the beer in the refrigerator. I overslept and didn’t make it to the Spiveys’ house in Ponte Vedre until about one fifteen Sunday afternoon. I’d called and left a message on voice mail, hoping my tardiness wouldn’t be an issue. The house was stucco, painted khaki with a red tile roof. From the looks of the exterior, I figured the closets were as big as my Airstream. The driveway circled around a fountain, with half a dozen high-end automobiles parked at various angles. I eased Joe’s old Ford in between a Jaguar and a Porsche. I put the pistol Joe had loaned me in the glove compartment, which was empty except for an old green metal flashlight and a dozen or so vintage moist towelettes from KFC. Joe’s shotgun was behind the seat, along with a small box of tools and my replica Balabushka pool cue. It was an odd assortment of items to carry around in the cab of a pickup truck, but you never know when you might need to make a quick repair, play a game of nine-ball, blast someone to kingdom come, and wipe yourself off in the dark.