Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller)

by Jude Hardin

  The scam was going along fine until Brittney got hold of Doctor Spivey’s copy of the video. She’d taken the tape to the tennis court, and had given it to Kent Clark, the tennis pro, to record her lesson. Then, when she went back to the Spiveys’ house to watch it, the footage with the scalded baby came on. Michael Spivey must have found out that Brittney had seen that footage. There was no way for me to know exactly what happened, or why everyone reacted as they did, but Spivey must have threatened her, or maybe even tried to abduct her at that time. Brittney escaped, and then left the note on Leitha’s car saying that she was running away. She didn’t run away because Leitha grounded her. She was running from Spivey. She was that scared.

  Massengill must have freaked out when Spivey told him Brittney had the tape. In Roy Massengill’s mind, Brittney had become a threat, a potential witness against the Spiveys. If Michael and Corina Spivey had been arrested, they might have disclosed Massengill’s extortion scheme, which then would have led to the car theft ring. Brittney’s knowledge of the scalded baby could have brought down the whole house of cards, and that’s why Massengill needed her dead.

  That was my theory, but theories don’t hold up well in court. Theories don’t sign arrest warrants. I needed evidence, and there simply wasn’t any.

  From a legal standpoint, it was going to be difficult to make a case against Massengill. With Marcus Sharp and the Spiveys dead, there wasn’t a single witness to any of the crimes he’d committed. I was sure all his dealings had been done in cash, so no paper trail. I only had one fact to go on: he was in the ER the night baby Melanie died. Everything else was circumstantial.

  But I decided not to let a minor detail like the law stand in my way.

  Massengill’s car wasn’t in the driveway, no lights on in the house. I parked around the block. I took the flashlight from the glove compartment, a long screwdriver from the toolbox, and the pistol Joe had loaned me. Joe’s 12-gauge Remington was behind the seat, but I didn’t want to be seen walking down the street with it. Neighbors get nervous when they see a guy walking down the street with a big gun.

  In the movies all private investigators have suede carrying cases full of burglar’s tools and they’re all experts at picking locks. I laugh whenever I see that. Like breaking and entering is part of our daily routine.

  I crept around back, wedged the screwdriver between the door and the jamb and muscled the deadbolt away from the frame with one quick jerk. Brass parts from the lock scattered, jangling on the concrete stoop. I was counting on Massengill using the front door and not seeing the mess I’d made. I walked inside and switched on the flashlight. The most recent edition of the Florida Times-Union was spread out on the kitchen table, so I knew he had been there in the past twenty-four hours. It was only a matter of time until he came back home.

  I turned off the flashlight and sat at the table in complete darkness with Joe’s pistol in my right hand. I had the element of surprise on my side. Otherwise, Massengill was superior in every way. He was a third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a much better shooter than me. My only chance was to ambush him and try to force a confession.

  I sat there listening to the kitchen faucet drip until I realized I had made a terrible mistake. I ran out the back door and drove like a madman toward Juliet’s house.

  Massengill’s truck was parked behind the row of crape myrtles that separated Juliet’s front yard from the roadside drainage ditch.

  I saw him running from the garage toward the woods behind the house, but I didn’t fire. I watched him disappear into the pine forest.

  I ran inside and found Juliet on the living room floor, blood pouring from her nose. I knelt down and took her head in my hands.

  “I shot him,” she slurred. “I got hold of his gun, and I shot him. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

  “Where’s the gun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She was hysterical, wild-eyed, in a state of shock. I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom. I wiped her face with a wet washcloth and threw some ice cubes in a Ziploc bag for her to hold on her nose.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “No! Don’t leave me. Please, Nicholas. Oh, my God, please don’t leave me.”

  “I have to find him. I promise, I’ll be right back.”

  I left her there sobbing. Her nose was probably broken, but she didn’t appear to be hurt otherwise. On my way out, I dialed 9-1-1 and left the phone hanging. Juliet’s address would show on the computer, and they would send someone out. I didn’t have time to explain. Massengill was a wounded animal now, even more dangerous than before.

  When I got outside I heard his truck start and saw the headlights come on. He fishtailed out of the driveway and headed south.

  Joe’s pickup and Juliet’s car both had flat tires, courtesy of a knife or some other puncture tool. I thought I was going to have to hang back and wait for the cops until I noticed that annoying little dirt bike parked in the neighbor’s garage. I didn’t see anyone around and I didn’t have time to seek permission so I hopped on and fired it up and left the driveway with the throttle pegged.

  The bike was a Suzuki 125 with a steel plate where the headlight should have been. It had absolutely no business on the street, especially at night. Being invisible was good, because Massengill couldn’t see me in his rearview mirror; being invisible was bad, because nobody else could see me either. If a car pulled from a side street to cross the highway, I would most likely end up skewered on an oak branch or doubled over and fried on a power line.

  Massengill’s taillights shone half a mile in front of me, and the gap was widening. I couldn’t keep up. I thought I was going to lose him until his brake lights flared and he slowed down and stopped in the middle of the Shands Bridge.

  I didn’t want him to hear me coming, so I cut the engine and abandoned the bike and ran as fast as I could.

  Massengill threw something over the railing to the river a hundred feet below. He didn’t notice me until I stepped up and clocked his jaw with a right hook. While he went down on one knee, I pulled the .25 and pressed the barrel firmly between his eyes. He coughed and spit out a tooth.

  I was panting, my lungs rattling like a diesel.

  “You’re one low-life motherfucker,” I said. “Tell me why you killed those girls.” I pressed the gun harder against his forehead. “Tell me!”

  In a single sweeping motion, he pushed the gun away and somehow managed to swivel and kick me in the throat. I went down. I still had the .25, and I got a single round off before he was on top of me. It grazed the top of his head, and blood trickled down both sides of his face. He grabbed my right arm and hammered it against the pavement. The gun skittered away.

  “You’re dead, bitch,” he said.

  I managed to dodge a punch to my head, and I heard something crack like a walnut when his knuckles met the blacktop. He stood, infuriated with pain. I got up and took one step toward the gun before he had me in a choke hold.

  Flashes of bright orange exploded in my head, and my arms went numb for a second. I tried to move toward the pistol, the inches like miles.

  A whiskey aura surrounded Massengill, as though he had bathed in a barrel of it. He had been drinking, his side was bleeding from Juliet’s shot, my bullet had furrowed through the top of his skull, and he had shattered his hand on the road. He must have been in severe pain, but his physical strength didn’t seem diminished. All that Navy SEAL training was paying off for him now, and I was huffing like a blown radiator. Like a forty-five-year-old chain smoker who didn’t exercise enough.

  Massengill’s giant forearm clamped tighter on my throat. I struggled to free myself, but it was no use. I was fading.

  “I need that goddamn video,” he said. His voice sounded muffled and faraway, as though he were speaking through a cardboard tube.

  “Fuck you,” I grunted.

  “That’s what Leitha Ryan said just before I put a cigar out on her clit. Her death could have been a
lot less painful if she’d been more cooperative.”

  I managed to croak out a few words. “You’re going straight to hell. You started that fire, too, didn’t you? You killed Leitha, and then you killed Brittney.”

  “You think you’re so fucking smart, Colt. You don’t know shit.”

  It was something my stepfather had said one time when I was twelve. You don’t know shit. I’d ridden off on my bicycle after school one day to see a girl, intending to make it back home in time to mow the grass. I was late, and it was dark, and he greeted me inside with a section of Hot Wheels track. I’d expected a beating, but he was way out of control this time. He lashed me with the orange strip of plastic again and again, on the legs and butt where the welts wouldn’t show for school. I couldn’t take it anymore. I cracked him in the nose with a left jab and drew blood. He had been sitting at the TV, eating a plate of pork chops, and he grabbed the steak knife on his tray and buried it in my gut. On the way to the hospital he said, “When they ask you how this happened, you don’t know shit, you understand? You were running with the knife, and you slipped and fell.”

  Thirty-three years later a furious surge of electricity flowed through me, and I jabbed a thumb into Massengill’s left eye socket. I dug in deep and scooped the delicate orb out like a melon ball. His eye was nothing but a blob of goo resting on his cheek now. He released me and staggered sideways. My own vision was clouded with sweat and blood, and it took me several seconds to locate the pistol. By the time I bent over and picked it up, Massengill had climbed over the bridge railing.

  “No,” I shouted, but of course he didn’t listen. Before I could shoot him, he jumped to the black current raging a hundred feet below.

  I staggered over and leaned against the rail. No sign of him anywhere. I stood there for a few seconds, and then I must have collapsed. I woke up in the emergency room at Hallows Cove Memorial.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I booked a flight to the West Coast a couple of weeks later. I rented a car at LAX, drove a hundred miles northwest, and checked into the Super 8 Motel in Lompoc. I hadn’t been to California in years, but it was still as beautiful as I remembered.

  Brittney Ryan’s ashes were in my suitcase. Her dental records were never located, but the charred body found along with Donald “Duck” Knight at the Westside apartment was presumed to be hers. Several eyewitnesses had seen them enter the building together.

  I took the copper urn from my suitcase, left the motel, drove a few miles south to Jalama Beach County Park. Brittney deserved to rest at “the most beautiful place on the planet.”

  The Point Conception lighthouse is surrounded by the Jalama Ranch, a huge span of acreage, and isn’t accessible to the public. The dirt road that leads there from the park is secured with a locked gate and an armed security guard.

  But I had connections.

  I waited at the gate until Carlos Del Rio drove up in his burgundy Jeep Grand Cherokee. We had agreed to meet there at six p.m., and he was right on time. Del Rio instructed the guard to open the locks and let me in. I climbed into the passenger’s seat, and Del Rio made a U-turn while shouting something in Spanish to the guard. We headed down the dirt road, a cloud of dust in our wake.

  Brittney had been in contact with Del Rio through e-mail. He was a foreman at the ranch, and had offered her a job in landscape maintenance. Brittney’s plan was to work there and commute to L.A. for auditions on her days off.

  An old friend in forensics had lifted Del Rio’s e-mail address from her computer’s hard drive.

  “It’s about five miles to the lighthouse,” Del Rio said. “Sorry the road is so bumpy.”

  “Believe me, I’ve been on bumpier,” I said.

  “Can you tell me what happened to Senorita Brittney?”

  I lowered my visor to block the sun, low in the western sky now. It took us ten minutes to reach the coast, and during that time I told him Brittney’s story.

  A single tear rolled down Carlos Del Rio’s cheek.

  “Stay as long as you want, señor. Call me at this number, and I will come when you are ready.”

  He drove away, leaving me alone on the desolate bluff, the wind kicking and the surf pounding. I gazed toward the vast Pacific and a priceless view of the sunset that no master artist could duplicate.

  The lighthouse, completely automated now for several years, blinked to life as the sea went black.

  The Chumash Indians, native to the area, consider this westernmost point of their former territory sacred, a holy place linked to the spiritual world. I learned that from a waitress at a hamburger joint called The Jalama Café.

  I screwed off the cap from Brittney’s urn, told her goodbye and that I loved her. She had given me a very brief glimpse of what it might be like to be a father.

  I scattered her ashes along the rocky shore of Point Conception, sat in the sand and thought about nothing until the lighthouse switched off and it wasn’t the same day anymore.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Seven months later, I was sitting at a bar in St. Augustine, waiting to get some snapshots of a cheating wife and her lover leaving the motel across the street, when I spotted Massengill’s angel tattoo through my telephoto lens. I sprinted out to my Jimmy and followed the bike north.

  His body had never been recovered, but a fisherman near Palatka had found his jeans and waterlogged wallet washed up on the riverbank. The pants had a few ragged holes where crabs and other underwater scavengers had chewed through to munch on his decomposing flesh. DNA tests confirmed the bloodstains on the pants were Massengill’s.

  That was that, I thought, until April, when a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide stopped in front of The Neon Phoenix and then cruised through beautiful downtown St. Augustine with the same aptly named disposable douche bag of a human being gripping the handlebars. Shaved head, eye patch, gold hoops in both ears. He looked like a pirate for real now.

  Or the ghost of one.

  His appearance had changed drastically, but the angel tattoo and the scars on his neck cinched it for me. The same Roy Massengill I had watched take an impossible dive from the Shands Bridge into the St. John’s River was now running red lights with a very expensive motorcycle.

  I floored the gas pedal and followed him through Green Cove Springs and Penney Farms. We hit a buck twenty at one point, the temperature gauge on my Jimmy creeping toward the red zone. With no streetlights, and a canopy of live oaks draped with Spanish moss filtering all but an occasional glimpse of the moon, our headlight beams created a tunnel effect as we sped along State Road 16 toward Middleburg.

  The miraculously reanimated Massengill hung a sharp left onto an unmarked two-lane. After a series of disorienting back road turns, we ended up on a bumpy dirt road leading to an electric gate on wheels and a guard shack illuminated with floodlights. It looked like the entrance to a military installation, or maybe a prison. I’d lived in north Florida for many years and never knew this place existed. It gave me the creeps, as though I’d suddenly been transported to some hellish dream where drowned murderers stalked the nightscape with stiff legs and glowing red eyes.

  I stopped about a hundred feet from the gate. An armed guard waved the motorcycle through. The guard wore a rent-a-cop uniform. Dark blue pants, light blue shirt, patches on both sleeves and a silver badge twinkling in the halogen glare. Black patent leather shoes. He was not a big man. Five ten, one sixty, I guessed. He had a pistol strapped to his hip and what sailors call a “cunt cap” on his head. He was compact and walked with confidence.

  A sign on the fence said CHAIN OF LIGHT RANCH. JESUS LOVES YOU. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

  I thought about stomping the gas pedal and chasing the Harley into the complex, but I doubted if trespassers would be prosecuted. More likely they would be shot.

  I turned around and found my way back to the highway. I drove back through the tunnel of live oaks. I opened the window and took a deep breath of Springtime, my heart still poun
ding. A Colt .45 song came on the radio and I turned it off. I didn’t pass any cars for a long time. The roads were deserted.

  If Massengill really was the man on the Harley, I knew his location now and the police could easily go in and pick him up. Is that what I wanted? A lengthy trial with defense lawyers working every angle? No, I wanted Massengill dead. He’d once been a friend and a crewmember for my band, and he’d saved my life when Marcus Sharp had a revolver pressed against my skull. I still wanted him dead. When I’d thought he was chum in the St. John’s, that felt like justice to me. I didn’t want to allow myself to sink to his level, but were the police and a trial and all the crap that went along with it the only rational option? I gave it some thought on the ride home.

  When I got to my place on Lake Barkley, I Googled Chain of Light and found their website. The home page featured a picture of an angel with its wings spread, just like the tattoo on Massengill’s arm. It was an androgynous figure, with curly hair and high cheekbones and full lips. It wore a flowing robe and sash, and every feather in its wings had been drawn with painstaking detail. It was barefoot. Maybe all the members had the same tattoo. Maybe the man on the motorcycle wasn’t Massengill after all. Still, I’d caught a glimpse of his scarred neck. At least I thought I had.

  A man named Lucius Strychar had founded Chain of Light in 1979, and he seemed to have a solid television and radio ministry now. Lots of money coming in. In addition to the property I’d seen after following the Harley, the organization held real estate near Orlando and Tampa. I browsed the photo gallery. All the pictures were of men, and all the men were white. Lucius Strychar himself was a chubby guy in his mid-fifties. Clean-shaven double chin and puffy pink cheeks, with blue eyes and thinning salt-and-pepper hair. I imagined he drove a high-end automobile and lived in a luxurious home. All paid for with donations from lonely elderly folks on fixed incomes who welcomed him into their home nightly via the miracle of television. All sheltered from government taxes.