Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  I had a strong hunch that Dr. Michael Spivey was Pirate. He needed money to pay for his wife’s medical bills, so he sold patients’ personal information to Rent-A-Gem. Patients who were dying, or otherwise unlikely to discover that they had been used. Patients like Everett Spenser. Spivey was a gynecologist, and he probably treated elderly women at the nursing home for one thing or another. It would have been easy enough for him to grab the occasional stray chart and steal whatever information he wanted. I doubted he ever used numbers from his own patients. Those would have been too easily traced back to him if the authorities ever caught on.

  Brittney must have seen something while she was at his house for tennis, the Saturday she ran away from home. That was my guess. She must have stumbled upon something incriminating. Maybe she opened the wrong e-mail on Spivey’s computer, or overheard the wrong phone conversation. It could have been anything. Whatever it was, it had frightened her enough to make her run away from home and take refuge with a pimp.

  Now that I had an idea who Pirate was, and where he lived, it was a matter of going there and taking him down. I didn’t have any real evidence yet, not enough to take to the police and hope it would stick, so I had to play my cards just right.

  But there were a couple of things I wanted to do before dealing Dr. Michael Spivey his final hand.

  I stopped and bought a VHS-C adapter on my way home. I’d found the tape in Brittney’s secret hiding place, with her condoms and cigarettes, so I knew there had to be something on it, something she didn’t want just everyone to see. I hoped it wasn’t something she and Mark Toohey had recorded in the bedroom. I didn’t feel like going back to Toohey’s place and breaking more ribs.

  I made it to Hallows Cove around six o’clock. I drove around the lake a couple times to make sure nobody was following me. My Airstream looked like hell with the plastic over the windows, but I saw no signs of visitors.

  I switched on the air conditioner and scrounged for something to eat. I found half a loaf of bread and an onion and a full jar of peanut butter so I made a peanut butter and onion sandwich and washed it down with a cold beer.

  I slid the videotape into my VCR. I rewound it to the beginning, pushed play on the remote, sat back on the sofa, and watched. I knew it was a long shot, but I was looking for any scrap of evidence that might link Dr. Spivey with the crimes.

  Brittney was on a tennis court practicing serves. A man’s voice off-camera instructed: “Your toss needs to be a little more to the left for the kick serve.” The date at the bottom of the screen was Saturday, the day Brittney had run away. She worked on serves for a while, and then the tape cut to her crosscourt backhands. I fastforwarded through her forehand and volley practices until the tape went to snowy static. I was about to push Stop on the remote when another image appeared. It was a little girl, about two I guessed, lying on a stainless steel examination table. She was naked, and the skin from her chest to her toes was the shade of a ripe tomato. The camera zoomed in on her face. She had an unfortunate dark brown birthmark in the shape of a teardrop near the right side of her mouth. She wasn’t crying but she looked terrified. “Me got burned,” she said. That was it. Back to fuzz. There were no other people on the footage, just the little girl. I rewound and watched the short scene again, this time noticing the date it was taped—a little over three years ago.

  A voice, distant and off camera, said, “We need to get her to the burn unit in Gainesville, stat.” I recognized the voice, a deep southern drawl. No mistake about it. It was Dr. Billingsly, who had treated my gunshot wound in the ER. I called Hallows Cove Memorial and got a number where I could reach him.

  “I need to know if you remember anything about a little girl who came to the ER about three years ago with severe burns on the lower part of her body,” I said.

  “She died,” Billingsly said. “I remember that case. It was heartbreaking. Baby Doe. The ER was packed that night, and somebody left her on a chair wrapped up in a blanket. When we unwrapped her, half the skin on her legs peeled off. I got a helicopter scheduled to transport her to Gainesville, to the burn unit, but it was too late. She died on the way.”

  “How do you think she got burned?”

  “It looked like she was scalded. Bath water too hot, my guess. We see it more often than you’d think. Sometimes it’s an accident, sometimes not.”

  “So you suspected abuse?”

  “Right. The forensics nurse on duty that night made a video, but nothing ever came of it. We had no way of identifying the girl, and the parents never came forward.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “If someone has a two-year-old kid, and the kid just suddenly disappears, people notice.”

  “Seems they would. There was a police investigation, but you know how that goes. Shit gets put on the back burner, goes cold after a while.”

  “Thanks for your time,” I said, and hung up. Five minutes later, I was on my way to Michael Spivey’s house.

  The VHS-C tape had been in Brittney’s possession. I’d found it in the lining of her letterman jacket the first day I went to Leitha’s house. She had used it to record her tennis lesson, but on playback she must have seen the footage of the scalded little girl. I was pretty sure she had watched it at Spivey’s house, because Leitha didn’t have the equipment to play the tape. I started getting the idea that this whole thing—Brittney running away and then disappearing a second time from my house, Leitha being tortured and killed, the fire at Duck’s apartment, and the attempt on my life that same night—had to do with Brittney seeing what was on that tape.

  It started raining like a son of a bitch. I slowed to thirty on the interstate, but the tires on Joe’s old truck kept hydroplaning and the tractor trailers kept throwing walls of water on me from the fast lane. I finally had to pull to the shoulder and turn my flashers on.

  It was almost eight o’clock and black as a skillet. Rain drummed hard on the truck’s roof.

  I sat there with nothing to do but think. I tried to smoke, but the cab got too hazy even with the windows cracked open a notch.

  I swallowed a Dilaudid dry and soon faded into a light sleep poisoned with bizarre dreams.

  I ran naked through a jungle, thorny plants all around, purple berries raining from a yellow sky. I stopped, reached into my mouth, and pulled out a tooth the size and shape of a guitar pick. It was brown and rotten and somehow I saw inside my mouth then and my teeth were all jagged and uneven and sharp like broken lightbulbs and my tongue was cracked and swollen and bleeding. I tasted the bitter coppery blood and tried to swallow but couldn’t.

  I saw my wife, Susan, and our baby in the distance and I ran and ran but they kept getting farther away. I fell to the ground. Everything went black and then Susan hovered over me like an angel and she crushed a handful of purple berries and rubbed the juice on my wounds like an ointment and all the tiny cuts from the thorns healed instantly. She was in my arms now and the ground wasn’t thorny anymore but was covered with something like velvet.

  I opened my eyes. Branches of chrome blistered a sky the shade of purple Kool-Aid. The rain had nearly stopped. I started the truck and eased back onto the interstate.

  Automatic sprinkler heads whirred on Spivey’s saturated lawn, and electric lights illuminated the entire perimeter of his house. No penny pinching here, I thought.

  Spivey answered the door himself. He looked surprised.

  “Mr. Colt. Please, come in.”

  I went in. When he turned to say something, I pulled out my pistol and pointed it at his face.

  I thought about what Roy Massengill had asked me, if I could take a life with no immediate threat to my own. The kill switch, he called it.

  But I didn’t need to kill Dr. Spivey. The death sentence was alive and well in Florida, and death row was where he was headed. For the murders of Leitha and Brittney Ryan.

  “Jesus Christ, Colt. What—”

  “Howdy, Pirate. I’m going to have you arrested for first-degree murder, that
’s what. And some other charges. Like selling patients’ personal information to a car theft ring. Like scalding a little girl to death. I haven’t figured that one out yet, but I know it was you. That’s why you went after Brittney, because she found that video.”

  “You got it all wrong, Colt.”

  “Do I? I don’t think so. But I’m sure the DA can work it all out.”

  A deafening boom preceded Michael Spivey’s skull disintegrating before my eyes. I turned, and Corina was there holding a .45 automatic, the kind they once used in the military. She had it pointed at my chest.

  “Drop your gun,” she said.

  Her eyes were glazed. She looked through me instead of at me.

  I threw down my weapon.

  “Take it easy now,” I said. “Let’s just talk for a minute, Corina.”

  She laughed. The cackling, inappropriate laughter of the insane. She finished with a wheezy cough, and then her expression turned grave.

  “I’m going to rot in hell, right beside my husband.” She spoke slowly and deliberately, with her trademark Xanax slur. I had a feeling she’d taken more than her usual dose. “It was unthinkable, what he did, but he did it for me. For me. He gave me a baby—the most beautiful baby. See, we couldn’t have children of our own. We tried—God, we went to all the fertility specialists—and then, then, when Michael had the opportunity to perform a third-trimester abortion on an unwed teen, well, why should that baby have gone to waste? Why should she?”

  She made gestures with her left hand as she spoke, but my focus was mostly on the trembling gun barrel pointed at my heart. She had the shakes, and it was making me extremely nervous.

  “Put the gun down,” I said.

  She ignored me.

  “We had our own little neonatal ICU set up right here at the house, incubator and everything. Our secret baby. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you that. It wasn’t easy at all, but after a couple of years we had almost everything we needed, almost all the papers for it to look like an overseas adoption when she just wouldn’t stop crying one day, just wouldn’t stop. I ran some water and put her in the tub. I didn’t mean to burn her. I swear to God I didn’t mean to. I just wanted her to stop that goddamn bawling. An ambulance was out of the—I would have gone to prison.”

  She paused and wiped the tears from her eyes. I thought about rushing her and trying to grab the pistol, but her tremors had me spooked. One wrong twitch would put me in tomorrow’s obituaries. I stood frozen while she continued.

  “I took my sweet secret baby, my Melanie, to the emergency room and left her on a chair. I thought they could save her. I really thought they could. Later on the news I heard she died and—oh my God—my heart was broken—and a couple of days after that we were contacted by a man who called himself Pirate, and he had seen me leaving Melanie there in the ER. He blackmailed us. We paid him every time, until I was diagnosed with cancer and the bills piled up and the money ran out—the money ran out, and then he wanted names and social security numbers of Michael’s patients in place of cash. We didn’t know what for, but we had no choice but to give him what he wanted. We had no choice, Mr. Colt. Can’t you see that?”

  “You need help, Corina.”

  She put the barrel of the .45 in her mouth and pulled the trigger. The back of her head opened up and a spray of blood and brain and bone splattered on the wall behind her. She lay crumpled on the floor next to her dead husband.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I drove to a pay phone and made an anonymous call to the police. I believed Corina’s confession. Now I needed to look for the real Pirate, the one who killed Leitha and Brittney.

  After a couple of unproductive calls, I drove to Hallows Cove Memorial and found Dr. Billingsly in the physician’s lounge watching CNN and drinking a Mountain Dew.

  “Think you could help me with something?” I said.

  “I can try. What is it?”

  “The night that little girl with the burns came in. I need to know everybody who was in the ER that night. Patients, family members, staff, everybody. Is that something you can help me with?”

  “That’s going to be tricky. With all the privacy laws, it’s tough these days to get hold of medical records. And there were probably hundreds of people in and out of the ER that night. It could literally take months to track them all down, if it’s even possible.” His pager squealed. He took it out of his pocket and read the message. “Shit. I have to run. Maybe we can talk later.”

  “Just one thing before you go,” I said. “Can you remember the names of the people who were in the examining room that night with you?”

  He walked to the sink and washed his hands. “Let’s see—there was Kelly Reynolds, one of the ER nurses. The forensics nurse, Jane Woods. There was an off-duty cop working—”

  “Wait. What was the cop’s name?”

  “I don’t remember his name. He seemed to be interested that the patient was a burn victim, though. He had suffered some burns himself, in the Army or something. He had some pretty ugly scar tissue on his neck.”

  I suddenly felt like the biggest fool who’d ever lived. “Was his name Massengill?” I asked.

  “Yeah. That was it. Massengill.”

  I walked outside and sat in the truck for a few minutes, thinking about where to start looking for Massengill. I decided to try Kelly’s Pool Hall first. I hoped he was there. If he was there getting drunk, it would give me an immediate edge.

  A shiny white Mercedes was in the parking lot at Kelly’s, license tag GAS MAN. I walked inside.

  Anil was loading a case of Budweiser into the cooler, and his son Philip was lowering a batch of curly fries into hot grease. I found an open stool and sat down. Massengill wasn’t there.

  “The usual?” Anil said.

  “Just a soda water with lime.”

  Anil brought my soda in a collins glass.

  “Seen Roy Massengill around?”

  “You know, Mr. Massengill hasn’t been in lately. I’m wondering if he is sick.”

  “Maybe he found Jesus and quit drinking.”

  Anil silently considered the possibility and then sauntered back to his case of Bud.

  Kelly’s back room has ten coin-operated pool tables, the kind you can find in any barroom anywhere in the country. Those tables are seven-feet long, three-and-a-half-feet wide, and are fine for your casual recreational player. The real game, though, the only game I’m interested in playing, is played on a Brunswick, nine-feet long. Kelly’s had one such table, upstairs in a private room. My friend Joe and I have it for two hours every Thursday night. I climbed the stairs and saw Dr. Martin Jones practicing bank shots. He was alone.

  “You’re pretty good,” I said.

  “Thanks. It’s been a while. I was intramural nine-ball champ in college.”

  “You like to play for money?”

  “Actually, I need to get going. You can have the table.”

  “Come on. Play me a game of nine-ball for ten dollars a game.”

  He looked at his watch. “All right. But I’ll have to leave after a couple of games.”

  “Fine.”

  When I play with Joe, or in tournaments, I use a replica Balabushka, a very expensive cue with an Irish linen wrap and a bird’s-eye maple forearm. It was a birthday gift from Papa a few years ago, my one and only prized possession. I had it with me, in a leather satchel behind the seat in Joe’s pickup, but I didn’t figure I’d need it for Dr. Jones.

  “Lag for the break?” he said.

  “I play on this table all the time. It’ll be more fair if we just flip a coin?”

  We flipped, and he won.

  I took the wooden triangle from a hook on the wall and racked the balls. Jones lined up at a diagonal and broke hard. It was a nice break, sending the six ball to the far left corner pocket where it dropped in. He made two more shots and then played a safety, leaving me what he figured was an impossible position. I walked around the table, cue in hand, layering on the chalk.
/>   This was no friendly game of pool for me. I didn’t want to win the game, I wanted to beat him. I wanted him to walk away with his head hung low. I hit the cue ball hard, with top English, sent it three rails into the three. The nine ball broke off the rail, and slowly rolled toward the left side pocket. It hung on the lip for a second, dropped in.

  “That’s one,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows and gave me a nervous little laugh. It was my break now, and I went at it with no mercy. I ran the table on the next five games while he sat and watched. I could have hustled him, played below level on purpose, kept the money flowing, but I wasn’t in it for the money. I wanted a slice of his pride, wanted him to see what the game was like against a great player.

  “Too good for me,” he said. He handed me a handful of cash, and walked toward the stairs.

  “You know a nurse named Juliet Dakila?” I said.

  He stopped, turned around, looked me directly in the eyes, and nodded.

  “If you ever go near her again, I’ll kill you.”

  I left him standing there. I went downstairs and walked outside. The sky was clear now with no moon but plenty of stars. The air felt clean and I took a deep breath of it before climbing into the truck and driving to Roy Massengill’s house. My arm was throbbing like a goddamn disco.

  I had a theory. Massengill had seen Corina Spivey leaving the little girl on a chair in the ER. He’d somehow tracked Corina down, learned that she was a physician’s wife and that they had plenty of money. Prime candidates for extortion. He contacted them, using the name Pirate, and told them he’d seen Corina abandon the baby. He arranged for cash to be dropped somewhere, and when the cash ran out he extorted personal information from vegetative nursing home patients in its place. He sold that information to Marcus Sharp, to be used on bogus registrations for stolen cars.