The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  Inside the car it was quiet enough to hear my own breathing, so when I got on the road, I tried the radio. The first station featured a Spanish-slinging DJ rattling off something in a deep baritone. It was the verbal equivalent of a bullet train. The next two stations had music playing, loud, peppy salsa times that were too boisterous for my dark mood. I stopped surfing when I found an English speaker. It was a talk show where people from all over the South called in to praise Jesus.

  I turned it off when I realized with a creeping sense of alarm that I didn’t recognize any of the scenery. Had I…? Did I miss…? I strained to find a landmark, something to convince myself that I wasn’t totally lost. But when I looked out, it was into a darkness that seemed to extend from the edge of my high beams to forever. Somewhere along the way, I must have missed my turn back to the highway. Back to the lighted highway—that wide road with street lamps and big green direction signs. I didn’t even know if I was going in the right direction. I decided to turn around and try going back the way I’d come. Maybe something would look familiar from the reverse angle.

  I stiffened in my seat and clamped my hands to the steering wheel in the ten o’clock and two o’clock positions, just as they’d taught me in driver’s ed, and pretty soon my face was damp and my chest was tightening because mile after mile went by without a place to turn around. No exits. No U-turns. Just a wide median of grass that sloped into a deep trough, probably to discourage people like me from creating their own turnarounds.

  I was straining just to see through the darkness when I heard the first dull thud on the windshield. Then another. And another, and the rain was no longer coming. It was here, and it was coming down hard. It pummeled the windshield. I looked in all the obvious places for the wiper controls—God knows I hadn’t had to use them so far—and when I finally hit the magic button, I discovered that even though my rental car was equipped with windshield wipers, sadly, they were not the kind that actually functioned.

  My choice was to try to see around the wide, cloudy streaks they left with each creaky pass, or turn them off and try to see through the pounding rain unaided. Some wipers were better than no wipers, I decided, but then I had to scrunch down in my seat to see through the one clear line of sight they provided. I forgot about finding the way back. I had all I could handle keeping my vehicle on the road.

  When I first saw the truck in the rearview, it was a couple of bright, runny specks in my lane, but far behind me. I stayed the course, puttering along at a stately fifty-five miles an hour. When I looked again, the truck was closing fast. He must have been pushing ninety, and he wasn’t changing lanes. I tapped the brakes lightly to make sure he could see me. His headlights got bigger—huge. Over the sound of the rain, I could hear him rattling over the wet road—that and the sound of my own thick breathing. I looked to the right for a place to bail out. If he hit me from behind, I didn’t want to be launched over whatever was out there that I couldn’t see. I made a move to the left lane, the inside lane, thinking I’d rather be down in the median trough than down with the alligators. But no sooner had I committed than he did, too, and there was no way he was going to change course again at that speed. His horn blared into the night as I jerked the wheel hard and skidded back to the right. I went onto the shoulder and ricocheted back, barely holding it in my lane.

  He threw a serious backwash over my windshield, so I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him thundering by my driver’s side door, his wheels inches away from my left shoulder. And I could hear him. They probably could have heard him back in Boston as he laid on the horn, letting it blast out angrily into the night until he was well past me, still going ninety, his red taillights blurring together in my cloudy windshield.

  My insides untwisted, and then shuddered with a dose of adrenaline that I could taste in my mouth. I wanted to stop moving. I wanted to be still for a moment and ponder what had certainly been a near death experience, and savor the fact that I was still breathing, but the rain was still coming down and I was getting farther and farther away from where I wanted to be. Now there was another car behind me, and what the hell did he want because he was almost on top of me. Must have been behind the truck.

  I tapped the brakes. He sped up. I moved to the other lane, making a slow, gradual transition. He stayed right on my tail. I tried to see who was driving. Saw nothing. His lights were up in my eyes. It was a pickup or an SUV, something bigger and more powerful than my Chevy. Probably four-wheel drive. The wipers kept slashing at the rain with a terrible scraping sound, reminding me that I was in a driving rainstorm with limited visibility. There was no way I was going to outrun them, and there was no way I was going to outdrive them. I let the car slow down gradually as I felt around blindly for my backpack. My phone. My phone was inside the pack. There. It’s there. He was honking now and I was pulling out my phone and wrapping my hands around it and flipping it open. No signal. I felt like smashing it against the dashboard.

  I rolled to a stop but left the engine running and kept the car in gear. The truck pulled in behind me. The driver killed the headlights, and I saw them—two silhouettes, dark shapes visible from the shoulders up. As they sat and talked, I listened to my engine running and to the sound of the rain, which was tapering off to a slow, steady patter. I was breathing, but just barely, in a rhythm that was shallow and quick.

  The driver’s door opened. There was no mistaking the tall, skinny build of the man who stepped out, and I almost did stop breathing. It was Jimmy.

  I bit my lower lip to keep from going numb. I could see that he was about to slam his door shut, and the loud pop still made me jump. He was wearing jeans, a cowboy hat, and a tank top with armholes that reached to his waist. As he approached, I saw that his shirt was oddly bunched on one side, held there by the gun stuck in his belt. I lifted an unsteady foot. He put his hand on the door latch. I jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The car hesitated, lurched, and blasted off the shoulder. The wheels spun on the wet roadway for an agonizing interval. Then the four tires caught hold, slung the car forward like a rocket, and slammed me back against the seat.

  In the rearview, I saw Jimmy scramble back to the truck. I hadn’t planned anything beyond the swift takeoff. All I knew to do was to keep going until something else happened.

  It did. They caught up.

  Jimmy pulled up close and rammed my bumper. My head snapped back. They were next to me. Then they were in front of me, and I had nowhere to go. I had to stop when they did.

  In the seconds it took Jimmy to cover the space between our cars, I searched my car’s interior, the glove box, the floor, for anything to use as a weapon. Jack’s .22 caliber automatic was sounding like a good idea to me right then. Jimmy rattled the handle on my door. When he started to go for the gun I unlocked it. The dome light came on. I felt a hand on the back of my head, then fingers twisting into my hair. I tried to pull away toward the passenger side, but he yanked my head straight back. The rest of my body followed and I spilled out of the car backwards and cracked my head on the pavement.

  It took a few seconds for my vision to clear and my brain to regain focus. This time, both men were out of the car. The passenger stayed in the shadows. I couldn’t see anything but his thick neck and bulky shape. Jimmy stood over me.

  “It’s the Mystery Lady.” He reached down, grabbed me under my armpits, and leaned me up against the car. When I could stand by myself and didn’t feel dizzy, I pushed his hands away. I heard a low rumble, which was not thunder. Jimmy’s pickup truck was parked directly in front of my Lumina, and standing in the back was Bull. His fur was slick from the rain. His glassy eyes were on me. He was hot and panting and when he saw me staring, another vicious rattle worked its way up from his broad, muscled chest. I blinked the rain out of my eyes.

  Jimmy leaned in so his face was close to mine. A stray hair from his ponytail brushed my cheek, and his powerful scent drifted into my sinuses and stayed. It was oily skin and tobacco and dirty clothes and wet dog, and I won
dered if he meant to kill me.

  I tried to turn away, but he clamped a viselike hand on my jaw and held it. “I want you to give Dolan a message for me, and I want you to tell it to him exactly as I say it.”

  When he took his hand from my face, my skin burned where he had touched me. He grabbed my wrist, pulled it chest high, and stuffed something into my palm. It felt like a plastic bag filled with warm milk. He wrapped his fingers over mine and squeezed. Something leaked down my forearm. Bull sniffed the air, twitched, and went into a yelping frenzy. Jimmy told his dog to shut the fuck up. The other man didn’t seem to want to go near the beast.

  “Tell Dolan I am no fucking snitch, and tell him if he doesn’t back off, I’m not going to kill him”—he gave my hand a sharp twist and whatever was trickling went all the way down my arm and dripped off my elbow—“I’m going to kill you, Mystery Lady. Tell him to remember what happens to civilians who get in the way. In my way.”

  Even in the dark I could see how he looked at me, how he wanted me to be scared of him. It was almost as if he needed for me to be scared of him, and I was. But I also had a dim, throbbing thought that if I had something Jimmy needed, I sure as hell shouldn’t give it up. My lungs felt as useful as a couple of big rocks and I could barely stand up, but I locked my jaw tight, forced myself to breathe deeply through my nose, and wondered if that was blood splattering out of my nostrils. I grabbed on to every vicious, angry moment that had ever burned inside me, wrapped them all into one laser stare, and channeled it directly from my eyes into his. Then I snapped my wrist and twisted my hand out of his bony grasp.

  He didn’t seem to know what to make of it.

  “Keep your hands off of me.”

  A couple of cars went by on the other side of the median. The second man, who until then hadn’t said a word, called to Jimmy in Spanish from the far side of the truck. Jimmy didn’t move.

  “Why—” I had to clear the dryness from my throat. “Why don’t you deliver your own messages?”

  “I like this way better.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re afraid of Jack.”

  His smile was quick. “He’s afraid of me. He’s always been afraid of me. You can tell him I said that, too.” The lookout called again and must have pointed, because Jimmy’s head turned. I looked to see where he was looking, at two headlights approaching on our side of the road. As they came closer, the car decelerated as if the driver might be interested in the show. Please, God, please make him interested enough to stop.

  Jimmy leaned down and pretended to be looking at my tire. Bull stared from the truck. He’d caught a scent and was sniffing the air, whining miserably. Jimmy straightened and gave the passing car a friendly wave. They moved on.

  “Deliver the message,” he said. “Tell Dolan to fuck off, you go back to where you came from, and if you’re real lucky you’ll never see me again.”

  He opened his door, slid behind the wheel, and roared out even as his door was closing. Bull slipped against the tailgate, then found his balance and stood in the back of the truck, head raised to the rain, barking.

  I stood for a long time feeling as if I were suspended there in the dark, hanging by the slimmest of threads to something above that held fast and kept me from total collapse. I couldn’t swallow. My muscles wouldn’t respond. I forced myself to breathe. Oxygen began to flow. I began to feel my body again.

  Jimmy had torn out a handful of my hair, but my whole scalp burned from it. Something was trying to bang its way out of my skull, hammering from the inside, mostly in the back where I’d hit the pavement. I closed my eyes. It helped, but neither bending over nor arching my back relieved the sharp pain that followed the path of my spine. My shoulder throbbed. Something was wrenched out of place. I rolled it up, back, and around, trying to work out the soreness. I reached down to my elbow to pull it into a stretch and felt the damp streaks on my arm. Whatever Jimmy had folded into my hand was still there, soft and mushy.

  Like an idiot, or someone who’d been hit on the head recently, I tried to see in the bag, to figure out what it was in the near total darkness by the side of the road. Eventually, it occurred to me to get in the car and use the cabin light.

  I opened the door. The incessant bonging began, a reminder to either close the door or take the keys from the ignition. My automatic response was to reach around the steering column to get them. When I did I saw the bright red streaks, like ribbons flowing across and around the pale skin of my other arm. I opened my hand.

  It was red, it was in a plastic bag, and it was misshapen enough that at first I didn’t recognize what I was holding. My stomach heaved. I tasted bile in my mouth. I was holding a human ear.

  I dropped it as if it were a live scorpion. It fell on my leg. I twitched and convulsed and swatted it away so that no part of it would touch any part of me. It landed in one of the cup holders inches from my thigh. I had to get out, to get air, and I was on my feet, walking quickly away from the car, up the shoulder of the road, shaking out both my hands. The car was still bonging. My head, God my head ached. I turned and walked the other way, toward the car, passing it on the other side and continuing down the shoulder. My hair and the back of my shirt were damp from the rain and sweat and I was shivering. Either that or I was rock steady and the whole world was trembling around me. When I was far enough away, I stood staring at the Lumina from behind. I didn’t see the car. I saw a detached human ear surrounded by a vehicle.

  What in hell was I doing out here in the middle of Florida with a severed human ear in my car? This was so far away from my real life. I felt like crying. I almost laughed. What was I doing?

  I paced the width of the car back and forth a few times. I decided that on my tenth round-trip I would continue walking to the open door. I stood outside looking at the smeary red Baggie. I reached across, opened the glove box, and found the free map that comes with all rental cars. I laid it out on the passenger seat. Then with two fingers, I lifted the dripping bag of horror by one corner, laid it on the paper, and folded it up. I put the whole package on the floorboard on the passenger side. Only then did I feel comfortable enough to get back in the car and close the door.

  I started the car and drove directly across the road, down into the grassy trough of a median. The car rattled and bounced, the tires spun in the mud, and it was a struggle to get up the other side. But I made it, and I found my way and I drove all the way back into town with the dome light on.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  ​Jack opened the door and all I could think was thank God he was home. He was there and I was safe and I didn’t want to but I couldn’t help it and I cried. He reached out for me and I walked into him and held on and wept into his shoulder. The darkness and the rain and being lost and the way Jimmy had touched me and the way he had smelled; the way my own fear smelled; the ear in my hand—that small flap of cartilage and tissue through a warm, slick Baggie membrane. And then the thought of being in the hangar in the swamp with the corpse of a dead airplane and all the ghosts inside; the dog and the rat and the petrifying panic and the tension and the smell of blood and bones and bodies. A ring… a diamond ring torn from a dead woman’s finger and slipped onto mine. It all came up and out with so much force—it was like a catapult that had been loaded up and loaded up and loaded up and finally launched and, once loosed, could not be called back.

  I cried and cried and it was very possible I would never have let go if Jack hadn’t disengaged to close the door. When he turned around I grabbed him again and he held on to me until I stopped shaking. I was still damp down to my bone marrow and I was getting him wet, too. I don’t know how long it was before he gently took my arms and pushed me out far enough that he could check me over.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No.”

  He took my left wrist and turned my hand palm up. “You have blood all over you.”

  “It’s not my blood.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “I don’t know.�
��

  He looked at me, waiting for an explanation that I didn’t think I could blubber out in any comprehensible manner. Instead, I handed over my car keys. “Go look on the floorboard on the passenger side of the car.”

  He took the keys. “Is it a surprise?”

  I wiped my eyes. “It was for me.”

  Jack came over to the kitchen table and handed me my tea. I wrapped both hands around the cup, lifted it up, and felt the steam condensing on my face, which was still hot and thick from my crying. But at least I wasn’t damp and cold anymore. I had taken a long, long, long hot shower and Jack had given me a sweat suit to put on. I sat at his kitchen table with my feet pulled up under me and a blanket wrapped around my shoulders.

  The ear was there. Sitting on his kitchen table in the middle of the map-wrapping, it looked like some exotic specialty that had come straight from the butcher. Every time I looked at it I cringed. Jack reached over and pulled the blanket tighter around me.

  “Tell me again,” he said, “exactly what Jimmy said.”

  “That civilians sometimes die when they get in the way, in… no, in his way. Especially when they get in his way. That you should remember what happens then.” I wasn’t being terribly articulate, but it was coming out the way it had lodged in my head. “He said he’s no fucking snitch and if you don’t stop saying so, he’s not going to kill you, he’s going to kill me. And he said you’re afraid of him, that you’ve always been afraid of him.”

  He nodded, then leaned down and poked at the bag until the severed appendage was lying flat.

  “He said to give you that ear.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? Do you know whose it is?”

  “No, but that’s not the point. It’s part of the message. There were guys in Vietnam who liked to cut off ears to show how many people they’d killed. Jimmy liked to do that. We had a few discussions about it.” He went back to the sink and twisted a couple of ice trays and dumped the frozen contents into an aluminum mixing bowl. I heard the cubes sliding around on the bottom. “He used to string them together and keep them in a little pouch.”