Last Call for the Living

by Peter Farris

  In her dream they had found Charlie and the man who took him. Her son was coming home a hero, they said. She walked toward him. Charlie wore a flak jacket and looked unharmed, escorted by two police officers. She called out his name, raising her arms to him as if to squeeze the life from his body.

  Just a couple more feet …

  But Charlie and the officers ignored her, walking by, Charlie not even blinking. She pleaded with her stone-faced son, unable to comprehend the blankness in his eyes.

  They helped him into a police cruiser and closed the door.

  She charged the car but was restrained by unseen arms. She could only watch as Charlie was driven away.

  In the dream there were so many things she wanted to say.

  But words jammed in her throat, her mind like a mailbox stuffed with returned letters.

  * * *

  Her head snapped at the sound of an engine in the driveway. She got up quickly, tying her robe and watching the screen door at the end of the hallway. A pickup truck backed into the carport.

  Her heart beat faster. She tilted an ear to the rumbling sound of a muffler going bad.

  They gawd.

  Charlie appeared. He carried two duffel bags and supported a distressed-looking man under the arm.

  Lucy ran to her son, verging on hysteria, her bathrobe falling open. Charlie glimpsed her breasts before Lucy took him in her arms, kissing his cheeks and neck and head.

  “Charlie! Charlie! Charlie! Charlie!”

  He had rarely seen his mother without her artificial eye.

  Hicklin had retreated to a corner, propping himself up with the help of his shotgun.

  “My baby … my baby came home!” she panted.

  Charlie embraced his mother halfheartedly, unable to think of anything appropriate to say. He dragged her to the couch in the living room. Hicklin wavered in the background, peeking through window blinds at the street outside.

  Lucy glanced over her son’s shoulder, turning her single eye on him.

  Charlie’s hand was quick to cover her mouth.

  And stifle the scream in her throat.

  * * *

  They’d been in the pasture near the old pond. It was nearly dried up. Cows grazed randomly around the edges under a bright hot sun, chewing, looking at one another. Switching their tails as if it was the highlight of a long workweek. Lucy laughed and ran from her cousins, going into the barn to hide.

  She wasn’t paying attention as she passed the ladder to the loft with its stored bales of hay and dusty, webbed corners, the black-and-yellow daubers buzzing around. Her uncle was repairing some steps on the ladder and pieces of wood were stacked haphazardly, some with nails sticking out. When Lucy heard her cousins’ voices she turned, but her foot caught on a board at the bottom of the pile.

  They scattered as Lucy fell sideways. Hands instinctively extended, but they couldn’t protect her face. Happened so fast. Lucy felt the nail go into her eye at an angle. She didn’t scream so much as make a terrible noise. A guttural sound. At age eleven she’d had her share of scrapes and bruises but nothing as scary as that.

  It felt like a wasp had stung her right on the eyeball. Lucy yanked her head away and started crying. The sharp point of the nail tore out most of the cornea. She couldn’t believe what was happening. She reached for what looked like pieces of fat on the ground. Hot tears and that terrible pain came next.

  Her cousin Sara found her. Her other cousin, Dirk, ran for his father.

  Lucy had lost something she could never have back. They tried to tell her she would still be pretty and eventually she would forget it had ever happened. And they were wrong. A small nail had redefined who Lucy was, and would forever be.

  * * *

  Sallie Crews smoked her third bummed cigarette, studying a report from the Bureau of Prisons while conferencing with her equivalent at the SBI in North Carolina. Detective Moye ran toward her with a cell phone, sprinting from twenty yards away. She hung up and watched him approach. The kid was in great shape.

  “Agent Crews!”

  “Tell me something worthwhile,” she said.

  Moye gestured with the phone. “Got a positive ID on the pickup. A rookie patrolman on call just saw who he thinks is Charlie Colquitt and the suspect at a house next door to his mother’s. Ninety-seven-sixty-six Tulip Street. Ten minutes from the square. SWAT and hostage are en route.”

  “Ninety-seven—? That’s Lucy Colquitt’s address.”

  She took off at a run with Moye, them leaping across stones at the creek like fugitives themselves. On the ghost road a caravan waited. They followed a local deputy to the highway and headed south, wide open with sirens and light bars.

  These things used to excite her more, Crews realized. Snaking through highway traffic. A confrontation with the hunted, justifying all the hours of work, all the manpower and resources. Not eating enough. Not sleeping enough.

  These things used to excite her.

  This time she had a premonition that it was going to end badly.

  * * *

  “This was a goddamn mistake,” Hicklin said, watching as Charlie eased his mother down onto the couch, trying to reassure her that everything was okay.

  “Don’t you recognize him?” Charlie said needlessly.

  Hicklin just shook his head, glaring around the living room at the stupid knickknacks and collectibles, the country décor. It unsettled him in a way he couldn’t have anticipated.

  He hadn’t trusted his better judgment. The other voice was nagging him.

  Off them both and get the fuck out of here!

  Charlie remained on the couch, soothing his mother with gentle pats and strokes. Lucy clutched him, moaning, rocking. Hicklin peered between curtains, looking up and down the street. He hustled to the kitchen. Drew the blinds. In the living room again he removed the bulletproof tactical vest from his duffel bag and struggled into it. His whole right side felt useless, but the pain was the least of his concerns at the moment. He took out four magazines procured from Lipscomb and secured them in the pockets of the vest. Charlie watched him.

  “Don’t you see, Momma? It’s him,” he said, pleading. “He needs help, Momma. He’s hurt. We’ve got to help him.”

  “Just tell him to take what he wants and get out,” Lucy said.

  “But it’s … Look at him!”

  Lucy framed Charlie’s face with her hands and kissed him gently on the forehead.

  “What happened to you, Coma?”

  “I’ll tell you one day, Momma. Right now we’re a family again. And we need to help him. He’s got a bullet stuck in his back!”

  Lucy refused to look in Hicklin’s direction.

  “You never had a father!” she shrieked, slapping her son with weak and flailing blows. Charlie struggled to get a grip on her wrists.

  “Shut her up,” Hicklin said.

  He shook his head in disbelief.

  “This was a huge motherfuckin’ mistake.”

  Hicklin turned and walked into the kitchen, fingering the blinds so as to see out the window above the sink. Nice quiet street. No traffic. He began to pace.

  Kill these two assholes, the voice said again.

  He raised the shotgun subtly, as if to fire from the hip, aiming it at Charlie from the kitchen. Do it. Do it and bail.

  The boy’s back was to him. Lucy’s one eye filling with tears behind a mess of hair.

  Do them both.

  Then put the goddamn 12-gauge in your mouth.

  Nice little house on a quiet street. For a lot of men it was routine to be in a house like this with a wife and kid. Hicklin shuddered. He didn’t need some epiphany to realize how fucked it all was for him.

  He lowered the shotgun and leaned it against the kitchen table. Lit a cigarette and listened. Lucy halfway down the hole of a breakdown, Charlie trying to reason with her, talk her off the ledge. It was beyond anything Hicklin could have imagined.

  What a homecoming.

  He glanced at the furn
iture, the ceramic collectibles. Photos of Charlie everywhere. The boy was her life, pathetic as that was. Hicklin felt no real connection among the three of them. To that house. Lucy had gone on to make something of her life. Live it as best she knew how. And what had you done?

  So was it really her? His mind was stalled. He could hardly look at her.

  He could only remember Lucy like a character from a long-forgotten TV show. A mental mirror he dusted off, but the reflection remained dull. Himself at twenty, twenty-two. A mean, lost, ugly feeling came over him.

  On the couch Charlie held his mother as Lucy brought her lips to his ear and whispered.

  “I swear before God you never had a father!”

  He pulled back, appalled, eyes plaintive and confused. He looked around for Hicklin, as if to petition him for help. But Hicklin was gone. Limping down the hallway, the keys to the pickup dangling from a finger.

  Charlie heard the screen door to the carport slap shut.

  Then gunfire.

  * * *

  The tactical responders compartmentalized the house by corners and then by window. The Peacekeeper showed up. It took twenty minutes once the call came over the radio. The eight-man tactical unit hurried down side streets. Gear next to the bed or in the trunk of a cruiser.

  Honey, I’ve got to go and I can’t say why.

  The first four grouped up and made a decision to engage. They made a positive ID as Hicklin stepped out into the carport and tried to enter a pickup truck. The suspect fired twice from the carport and took cover back inside the residence. Then from compartment 1-1 three more shots were fired. Suspect was accurate. He hit one member of the tac team. The body armor saved him.

  Return fire.

  It terrorized the whole neighborhood. More units arrived. People were urged to go back inside their homes. The neighbors retreated reluctantly, disappointed, as if they wanted to watch a ball game from the pitcher’s mound.

  More units arrived. Inner and outer perimeters were established. The command bus was en route. The APV sat idling. Another twenty minutes passed. A quiet street turned into a live-fire training ground. It turned into a circus.

  Explosive entry experts consulted with their squad leader. Armor-plated vehicles were parked strategically along the perimeter.

  State and Federal were fifteen minutes out.

  The street was overtaken by law enforcement. Some asshole had already called the local affiliates. Sport-utilities and cruisers arrived in a spectacle of flashing lights. A helo’s blades thrummed the air above. Someone said he killed a Sheriff up in Jubilation County. Raped a kid. Burned down a church. There were two hostages inside.

  The state and federal agents in charge of the investigation were five minutes out.

  A tense hour passed.

  By then the hostages were walking out.

  Unharmed.

  And the boy was yelling, imploring them not to kill the man still inside.

  * * *

  I could of told Charlie a lot of things I didn’t. Like who his granddaddy was. His grandmamma. Could of told him how Lucy and I met and how I was just a big bad asshole back then. But there was some normal shit going on. Downright picturesque at times. Could of taken the boy fishing. Knew so many good holes around the house up-country. Raised in a double-wide with no mailbox. Maybe take him out with a couple .22s and hunt squirrel. Teach him how to fry ’em up real nice. I could have filled him in on why I did what I did, and why it put me in prison. And then why I did what I did there, and so on …

  * * *

  “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  He looked out a window. Hicklin seemed satisfied, at peace. The phone rang. He ignored it.

  “It’s her,” he acknowledged after a moment. “But she don’t want to remember me.”

  Hicklin reloaded the 12-gauge. Charlie could tell he was in a lot of pain.

  Hicklin looked up at him and smiled.

  “Now it’s time to say good-bye, Charlie Colquitt.” His intentions registered immediately.

  “You’re crazy!” Charlie said. “Why not make a deal with them? Don’t you want to live? Just give up.”

  “I am giving up. My own way.”

  There was no more arguing. Hicklin raised the shotgun and pointed it at Charlie.

  “Gather up your mother, Son. Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Another firefight ensued, Hicklin burning up the shotgun, the SWAT returning fire. He was lucky to survive the barrage. A salvo of rounds shredded the windows and blinds, the frame house getting thoroughly ventilated. He momentarily thought about packing it in, thinking about what he was up against.

  They stared down iron sights of G36 assault rifles, firing controlled bursts.

  Beautiful weapons.

  Glass popped above and around him. He glimpsed little black helmets shaped around the ears, body armor, big yellow letters identifying them as not to be fucked with.

  He ducked into the bedroom. The bathroom. Put a large bath towel in the sink and soaked it. He saw Lucy’s artificial eye bobbing in a bowl on the counter. The water in the bowl shimmered to the vibrations from the helicopter blades overhead. The whole house shook.

  Thankfully Charlie was outside and safe. To Hicklin that was what mattered most. Saving himself seemed a dim possibility. Hardly necessary.

  He crawled below the window frames, staying out of sight. Cuts from the broken glass were unavoidable, his body already bruised and wracked with fever. To the front door and down the hall to the living room. He flipped the coffee table over and summoned enough strength to drag the couch around the corner to the carport entrance, forming a makeshift barricade. He worked the pump of the shotgun. Could feel warm blood and sweat soaking through his shirt, through the vest. He took a look inside the kitchen. Fired through the bay windows.

  Let’s just shake things up outside, shall we? Keep them piggies off-balance.

  Hicklin quickly ducked and withdrew into the living room. Here it comes, he thought. And it did come. A barrage of .223 loads, some frangible rounds mixed in, breaking apart as they struck the fridge and cupboard. Followed by a salvo of jacketed rounds that tore ass through everything. He hit the floor and covered his head, sensing the house coming apart all around him.

  It finally went quiet.

  He glimpsed a command bus rolling beyond the first perimeter of vehicles, hoping that Charlie was okay in all that mess.

  Hicklin squatted where the couch used to be and lit a cigarette. Blood dripped from an elbow, but he didn’t feel a thing. Adrenaline had him jacked up. He could have sawn off his own leg and probably not felt it. Figured he could just go on and try and kill as many law officers as possible. They had the best hand, although he’d absorbed enough tear gas in prison to be able to handle it now. Had plenty of tolerance for the stuff, built up like antibiotics in his system.

  No choice but to wait for them. Their firepower was superior. He couldn’t compete with assault rifles and flash bangs.

  He smoked, watching the now-silent television. Chanced upon the remote on the floor and changed the channel a couple times. Stopping for a Western. Gary Cooper was talking to a beautiful blonde. The actor looked mean and hard and angry.

  A bullhorn voice from outside.

  Hicklin got up gingerly and walked to the nearest window, admiring the pandemonium he was responsible for.

  The phone rang.

  * * *

  Charlie yelled at Hicklin, demanding to remain with him inside the house. Lucy pulled at her son’s arm like she would at a child having a temper tantrum. Hicklin pushed them out, jabbing with the muzzle of the shotgun.

  Once they were in the front yard Hicklin retreated, standing on the threshold, shotgun still trained on Charlie and Lucy. He wrestled free of his mother as armed responders approached. He faced Hicklin, who shook his head, then cracked a weak smile and kicked the front door shut.

  Officers grabbed Charlie and ran with him across the street. He was hustled between vehicles, f
ollowed by paramedics and police. Everyone had a gun drawn.

  Charlie puked. Someone put a blanket around him. A woman spoke gently to him. He couldn’t understand her above the noise and shouting. He didn’t know where they had taken his mother. He wiped his mouth on the blanket and looked back at the house, eyes stinging from tears.

  * * *

  Sallie Crews and her convoy arrived, adding to the jam on Tulip Street, the growing chaos. She opened the door of the Bureau sport-utility and sprinted to the command bus. The Lieutenant briefed her. Hostages were safe. A lone gunman remained. Three tactical teams in place, the APV on standby. A negotiator in the bus was trying to make contact.

  Crews looked at Hicklin’s file on a computer screen.

  H. Hicklin, the H for Hobe.

  She looked at the Lieutenant, who nodded.

  This one wasn’t coming out alive.

  * * *

  Hicklin answered the phone.

  Who’s this?

  My name is Larry Schoenbaum. I’m with the Crisis Negotiation Unit. How are you, Hobe?

  How the hell ye think I am?

  I see your point, Hobe. Hobe? That’s an interesting name.

  Not if your family’s from Jubilation County. Reckon you’re the Crisis Negotiator?

  Yes.

  Because this here probably qualifies as a crisis.

  It’s what you’re willing to make of it, Hobe. Just call it a situation that can be resolved with no harm done. Can we talk?

  Sure.

  I like that. You can’t imagine how badly these deals usually start. I feel like we’re having a drink together.

  I could go for a beer myself.

  It’s against protocol, Hobe, but if I could I’d grab a six-pack and come in. We could talk, Hobe. Minus that 12-gauge, of course.

  Every time you call me by my name, I just get all weepy and want to be loved.

  What are you thinking about right now?

  Well, Larry. I’m thinking ’bout killin’ as many of y’all as I can before I get killed. Pure and simple, wouldn’t you say?