by Cole, Bobby
“I got an urgent situation. I located the missing person, Jake Crosby. He’s trapped in a drainpipe, but I think I can get him out. But he’s gonna be hypothermic for sure. Have an ambulance meet Trooper Wallace at his twenty. It’s too muddy for the van to get back to where I’m at. I’ll meet ’em at the gate. Make sure they got warm blankets. Over.”
After several long seconds, she responded, “Ten-four, unit Twenty-Two. Copy that. Will advise.”
The warden had another idea. He quickly searched through his hunting gear until he found his tree stand safety harness. When he looked up, they had the winch cable pulled almost all the way out. He inserted the remote control and laid it on the hood, and when he saw they had enough cable, he flipped it from free spool to lock and took off running for the water.
“Okay, look, you’re the thinnest and you look plenty strong,” the warden said to Trance as he took off his belt. “There’s barely enough room in the pipe for him and no way both of you can fit down there at the same time, so I need you to let me lower you down into the pipe by my belt, and then you wrap this safety harness under Jake’s arms, leaving a loop, and we’ll winch you out. Then we’ll drop the cable hook down and catch the loop on the vest so we can slowly winch Jake out. Got it?”
“Got it. I’ll do whatever,” Trance said, shivering.
The warden then turned to the older man. “Ever run a winch?”
Yancey nodded. “I can handle it.”
“The control’s on my hood. Go! When I holler, give me some slack. Okay?”
Yancey started running to the truck. “You got it!”
The warden shined his light into the pipe to analyze the situation one more time. “All right, Jake. Hang on, buddy. We’re comin’ to get you!”
He then turned to Trance and said, “I wish I could see his legs. He could be wedged in some debris down there. I can’t tell anything with that muddy water. The winch is gonna pull him in half if he’s stuck on something down there. So when you get down there, look closely to see if you can tell anything.”
“I understand,” Trance said as he put the belt around his chest and they tightened the winch cable.
“Be careful and hurry up,” the warden said, as they lowered him headfirst into the drainpipe.
CHAPTER 119
THE RAIN ON the windows was the only sound in the house, and the aroma of coffee filled the air. Morgan and Katy had been sitting together in silence on the couch for almost an hour. Since Katy had not answered any of Morgan’s questions, Morgan decided to just sit beside her and hold her. She knew Katy was strong and that she would talk or ask questions on her own terms.
When the phone rang, Morgan jumped and screamed, but before the second ring, she answered it. It was the police chief.
“Morgan, they found Jake. He’s alive, but he needs medical attention.”
“Where is he!”
“They haven’t gotten him out of the woods yet. I called as soon as I heard. I can have the officer outside take you to where the ambulance is waiting, or he can take you straight to Baptist Hospital in Columbus. That’s where they’re gonna take Jake.”
“I wanna go right now! Thank you!”
“Morgan, listen to me—I don’t know anything yet. Keep your cell with you.”
Morgan turned away from Katy and asked in a whisper, “Has he been shot?”
“I honestly don’t know. We only know at this point that he needs medical attention. That’s all I’ve got, but I promise I’ll call you when I know more.”
CHAPTER 120
AS TRANCE WAS slowly winched down into the pipe, he yelled, “Hey, do you know this guy?”
“Yeah, sorta. His name’s Jake Crosby,” the warden yelled back.
“How the hell he get in this pipe?”
“It’s a long story, but this really badass dude has wanted him dead for over a year.”
Once the rescuer got near Jake, he was shocked at how pale he was. His head was still leaned back against the pipe, but the water was now below his shoulders. With both hands shaking, the rescuer held his flashlight in his mouth as he tried to stretch the vest around Jake’s arm. He took the flashlight out of his mouth and with his free hand slapped Jake’s face. His eyes slowly opened.
“Jake, I’m here to get you out. Can you hear me?”
Jake’s eyes were not focusing, and he slowly closed them. His body shivered. The water pouring down around them was increasing.
The warden couldn’t see anything but the rescuer’s back. “How’s he doing?”
“We gotta get him outta here quick! He’s out. His breathing’s real shallow, and he’s shaking. He’s dying. And it’s real tight in here.”
“Hurry up!”
Trance was straining. The belt around his chest constricted his breathing, and blood was rushing to his head. His hands shook as he tried to attach the vest around Jake.
Having seen Jake’s face several minutes earlier, the warden also knew that they didn’t have much time. He had dealt with hypothermia before; Jake’s core body temperature would be dangerously low. He hoped that Jake was still just pale, not yet blue and puffy. If they didn’t get his core temperature up, he’d die.
Finally, Trance secured the vest around Jake, but the loop the winch cable needed to hook on kept dropping into the water. It wasn’t visible.
“Jake, can you hold this loop up?” he struggled to ask, trying to put the loop in Jake’s hand. Jake’s eyes cracked open but quickly shut.
“Is it on him!”
“Yeah!” Trance answered with a groan.
The warden rose and yelled at Yancey, by the truck, “Okay…slowly start tightenin’ up! When I drop my hand, that means stop!”
The eight-thousand-pound winch kicked in, and the cable slowly pulled Trance up. The warden dropped his raised arm and assisted the shaking rescuer out of the pipe. Trance quickly unfastened the belt around his chest and looked the warden in the eye as he pulled slack. Even in the pitch-blackness, the warden could tell from his face that he was worried. The warden screamed for slack, and it came to him slowly.
“He looks like he’s given up,” Trance whispered.
“Shit! I was afraid of that!” The warden dropped the winch cable hook into the pipe and started trying to catch the safety vest.
“Dammit! Come on. Come on. Don’t give up on me, Jake! I’m trying!”
The hook hovered in the muddy water where the loop should have been, but after three unsuccessful attempts to hook the loop, the warden was getting frustrated. He heard the radio in his truck announcing that the ambulance had just arrived at the gate.
“Try to the left a bit!” Trance offered. “There! Right there!”
Tightening the cable by hand, the warden felt the hook catch and the weight of Jake’s body.
“I got it! Take up the slack!” the warden screamed, not letting go of the cable. “Okay! Slowly, in short bursts! Start pulling him up!” he screamed.
All three men said silent prayers that Jake’s legs weren’t held too tightly on anything. The winch would easily pull off his legs if they were hung, and they wouldn’t know it until it was too late.
Jake rose out of the water a few inches at a time. His head slumped forward, and it rubbed against the pipe as he was pulled up. As Jake’s waist cleared the water, they could see his wrists zip-tied together.
“Come on, take in more cable!” the warden yelled as Jake’s knees cleared the water, which started draining faster.
The warden was now trying to guide the winch cable, but it was too much to hold. The cable had already cut his hands. They were so cold that he couldn’t feel it.
“Grab him!” the warden yelled to Trance, who had already reached down for the safety vest and started pulling.
“Whoa! Stop the cable!” the warden screamed. Jake was near the top, and the cable was burying into the side of the pipe, threatening to cut into Jake’s shoulder.
“We gotta pull him out from here,” the warden explained
to Trance.
They both pulled with all their strength. Jake’s dead weight, coupled with the awkwardness of kneeling on the muddy beaver dam, made the task all the more difficult. Slowly they freed Jake from the pipe and laid him on his back.
“Oh God!” Trance exclaimed when he saw Jake’s lower leg.
“What!”
The rescuer pointed at the leg bone protruding through Jake’s pants.
The warden saw it and grimaced. Jake’s body was limp—lifeless.
“We gotta get him outta here,” he said, unhooking the winch cable from the vest. “Wind it in!” he yelled to Yancey. “Here, get under one arm. Help me carry him to the truck,” the warden said.
Both men wrapped Jake’s arms around their necks, praying they weren’t carrying a dead man.
“Come on, Jake! Hang in there!”
They slipped a few times in the mud but were almost walking on water by the time they got to the levee and laid Jake down on his back. They were breathing heavily, and giant plumes of vapor could be seen in the truck’s headlights, along with the rain.
The warden pointed at Yancey, who was almost finished rewinding the winch cable. “Turn the heater in my truck on high! Let’s get these wet clothes off him fast.”
They started pulling off Jake’s jacket and shirt. He had no color, and the warden touched his neck to feel for a pulse. When he couldn’t find one, he almost panicked, but he caught himself.
“Here, use this knife to cut his pants off,” the warden said, handing the knife to Trance before running to his truck. He had an emergency blanket in his tool box. When he returned, he was dismayed to see Jake’s legs. They were black, and his calves and ankles were swollen so badly they couldn’t see the zip ties buried in his pants and flesh. He noticed something appeared odd but didn’t take the time to look closely. He had to get Jake to the ambulance.
“What’s caused this?” Trance asked in shock.
The warden started wrapping Jake’s wet, nude body in the blanket. Then he took the knife and carefully cut off the zip ties binding Jake’s wrists.
“I’m guessing that the suction in the pipe has sucked all the blood in his body down into his legs. That’s a really bad thing. Open that truck door!” he said as he picked Jake up without hesitation.
After laying Jake down on the passenger’s side, he instructed the others to climb into the bed. The truck had only a single bench seat.
“An ambulance is on the way. It oughta be at the gate when we get there. We’ll get y’all dry blankets there. Hang on!” he said as he jumped in and punched the gas, spinning the truck around.
Once he was pointed out, he stood on the gas pedal and picked up his radio’s microphone. “This is unit Twenty-Two to county dispatch, come in!”
“Go ahead, Twenty-Two,” she immediately responded.
“I got Jake Crosby in my truck! Advise medics he’s unconscious and severely hypothermic, and he’s got an open, compound fracture of his left leg! My ETA is five minutes! Out!”
“Ten-four, Twenty-Two. Copy that.”
The game warden threw the microphone down, reached across, and put his hand on Jake’s chest as the truck bounced in the ruts, saying, “Hang on, brother! I’m gettin’ you outta here!”
CHAPTER 121
THE STATE TROOPER assisted the two medics in loading Moon Pie into the ambulance. They were rushing to get their patient to the hospital. One asked if the handcuffs were necessary.
“I ain’t taking ’em off,” the state trooper explained.
Moon Pie was a bloody mess lying on the white sheets of the gurney. It was obvious he had lost a great deal of blood, and nobody thought much of his survival chances.
“What’s he done?” the female medic asked as she stowed some gear.
The state trooper nodded toward their new patient. “That’s Ethan ‘Moon Pie’ Daniels. He’s violent, a world-class poacher, a con man, we suspect he’s beginning to dabble in Internet scams, we know that he’s a drug runner, and he’s basically just a worthless piece of crap who would do anything for easy money…and sometimes just for the hell of it. You should consider him very dangerous.”
Suddenly the paramedics seemed to have lost their urgency.
“Well, we’ll keep him cuffed even though the hospital hates having their patients handcuffed. We’ll tell ’em about this dude.”
“I promise you, cuffed is the only way to travel with this guy.”
“Gotcha. You’re comin’ with us, aren’t you?” she asked, feeling uncomfortable about being in the back with such a notorious criminal.
“Yeah, I guess so. I sure hate leaving my buddy out there, but I gotta follow protocol,” the trooper answered.
The trooper explained the situation to a young deputy who had just arrived and then asked him to keep an eye on his cruiser until he returned.
Before loading Moon Pie into the ambulance, the state trooper bent to his face and said, “Hey, Moon Pie? Can you hear me? Can you open your eyes?”
Moon Pie didn’t move. The two medics and the deputy watched curiously.
“Moon? Open your eyes!”
Moon Pie barely opened them, and the state trooper leaned in until the front brim of his hat almost touched Moon Pie’s face. He said, “I got your sorry, gutshot ass, and I’m gonna stay right beside you.”
As the trooper stood, blocking the view of the medics, he put his hand on Moon Pie’s wound and squeezed. “Is that where it hurts?”
Moon Pie let out a quick whimper and then passed out.
“We really should go,” the female medic said awkwardly.
She and her partner loaded the gurney into the ambulance, and the decorated Mississippi state trooper climbed in too.
The trooper had a deep satisfaction, knowing that, most likely, the last thing the racist, white-trash thug would ever see was a black state trooper smiling down at him.
CHAPTER 122
MORGAN AND KATY rode in the backseat of a black-and-white West Point police cruiser, its blue lights flashing as they sped east on Highway 50. Morgan held Katy’s hand. Katy still hadn’t uttered a word for the last two hours. Tears were steadily pouring down their cheeks.
When they heard the game warden alerting county dispatch that he had Jake, Morgan’s heart jumped for joy, but then hearing that Jake was unconscious scared her. She cradled Katy and prayed for Jake.
Morgan noticed that the young officer driving had both hands on the steering wheel, so she raised her head enough to see the speedometer read eighty. On the bridge, high over the Tombigbee River, she glanced out the window to see a barge pushing downriver with its powerful spotlight like a giant white laser cutting the fog over the black water.
The young officer nervously cleared his throat. “They found your husband up the river…a few miles that way,” he said with a tilt of his head to the left, never taking his hands from the steering wheel or his eyes from the road.
Morgan looked into the gloomy, drizzly darkness. She could see the outline of the wilderness—giant skeletons of dead trees standing in the flooded sloughs like huge, silent witnesses to hundreds of years of life and death in the swamp.
“How long until we get there?”
“Ten, maybe twelve minutes at the outside. I’m drivin’ as fast as I can. The roads are really slick.”
Morgan considered what she was about to see. She wondered what Jake had been through and about its toll on him. She considered how to protect Katy from seeing her dad, if his injuries were visible. Morgan tried to be strong as she tightly squeezed Katy and again silently prayed for their small but growing family.
CHAPTER 123
THE GAME WARDEN drove like a bat out of hell down the muddy road. The truck’s heater was blasting on high, and the windows were fogging quicker than he could wipe them off.
“Hang in there, Jake…you oughta be feeling warmer soon!” he commented as he wiped the windshield.
“Unit Twenty-Two to base. What’s the ETA of my ambulance?�
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“Stand by, Twenty-Two,” she responded immediately. “Unit Twenty-Two, they report four minutes.”
“Roger that.”
He could not imagine what Jake had been through tonight. Jake’s legs scared him. He had never seen skin so dark from blood and wondered how any could have been left for his brain to function. He feared the worst.
When his truck rounded the last curve on the remote property before the gate, he could see Jake’s truck’s lights and several other vehicles. Knowing there were others to help was a huge relief. He passed Jake’s truck in the road and slid to a stop just outside the gate, where multiple police cars were parked, with lights flashing. Before he could open his door, five officers were there to help.
“The ambulance will be here any minute!” one shouted.
“What can we do?” another asked.
He looked at Jake, still unconscious, and said, “I need dry blankets!”
The two deputies immediately sprinted to their cars.
The warden wiped sweat from his face and then turned to look in the back of his truck at the two wet rescuers, who were now trying to stand. He could see them shivering.
The warden got out of his truck and yelled, “I need to get these guys warm and dry too!” He heard the ambulance. It cut its siren when it got close. He grabbed a deputy and said, “Get those guys warmed up, but don’t let ’em out of your sight. I’ve got a lot of questions for them, and I don’t want to lose ’em.”
“Do I need to cuff ’em?” asked the deputy.
The warden looked at the two men who had just risked their own lives to save Jake. They were hiding something, but he didn’t think they were a threat at this point. They were sitting opposite one another on the wheel wells, their heads in their hands, shaking.
“No. But watch ’em,” he said, only loud enough for the deputy to hear.
The warden turned to Trance and Yancey. “Look, guys, I don’t know who y’all are yet, or even why you were back there in the first place, but I wanna thank you for what y’all did. You saved that man’s life, and that means a lot to me.”