“Angie Kelly. Firecracker cake.”
“Who’s talking about firecracker cake on this line?”
Fletch recognized Sheriff Rogers’s gravelly voice. It was more gravelly than usual this morning.
Aetna said, “Mister Fletcher’s on the line, Sheriff.”
The sheriff said, “I sincerely doubt Mister Fletcher is interested in the recipe for firecracker cake.”
Fletch said, “I don’t even know what firecracker cake is. Listen, Sheriff, I have two of them.”
“Cakes?”
“Convicts. Escaped convicts.”
“Where?”
“One of them is dead. We found him in the gully behind my barns. Looks like the snakes got him, and then maybe he drowned.”
“Describe him.”
“Hispanic.”
“I’m prepared to call that a good arrest, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“Describe the other convict to me.”
“Heavyset. Caucasian. None too bright.”
“Okay. Restrain him however you can. We’ll come pick him up.”
“Please, no.”
“No?”
“Carrie is going to drive him out to the intersection of Worthy Road and The Old County Pike. He’ll be penned up in the back of the pickup truck. She’ll pretend she’s run out of gas. As soon as she stops at the intersection there, you guys swarm him.”
“Why you want to do it that way? Why don’t we just come shoot the bastard your place?”
“I don’t particularly want that to happen.”
“Oh, I see. Sorry, Fletch. Your wife. Princess … You don’t want the unpleasantness of a police action your place. Might attract the tourists, uh? Cause the press to reprise the assassination. Is that it?”
“Something like that.” One way and another, Fletch had learned the importance of creating a diversion.
“We do it my way, he’ll be docile. We’re telling him Carrie is helping him escape. He’s a real big guy. He’ll be half asleep. This way, all you need do is step out of the woods, swarm him, and chain him.”
“Sure.” The sheriff was slurring his words, just slightly. “We’ll blow him away wherever you say.”
“Carrie doesn’t particularly need to see anyone blown away, either, here, there, or anywhere.”
“Okay. I understand. We’ve got to protect the ladies.” The sheriff burped. “And their gardens. We’ll tiptoe out of the woods and take him off Carrie’s truck as gently as a potted petunia. Say again where she will be?”
“At the intersection of Worthy Road and Old County Pike. She’ll be there at nine o’clock sharp.”
“Okay. Nine o’clock sharp.”
This rank, nonsensical interference in normal police procedure was proving easier than Fletch had thought.
“Worthy Road and Old County Pike, nine o’clock,” Fletch repeated.
“I’ve got it. We’ll be there. In tennis shoes.”
“By the way, Sheriff, will you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“This morning I’m driving my son and his professor down to the University of North Alabama. In the station wagon. They absolutely have to be there by eleven o’clock. Will you tell your guys and the state troopers please to let us through any roadblocks without delay?”
“Sure. I even recall your vanity license plate. I’ll put that on the radio right away. After what you’ve done: capturin’ those two guys. We’ve been up all night.”
“Sorry. You must be tired.”
“Rain that hard, ordinarily I would have called the hunt off. Sent everybody home. I mean, if we were just huntin’ ornery critters.”
“There will be three of us in the car. And Carrie will meet you at Worthy Road and Old Pike intersection at nine o’clock exactly.”
“This is great!” the sheriff said. “Only one left!”
The line went dead before Fletch could check the sheriff’s arithmetic.
8
Y our name is Carrie?” Not having heard him enter the kitchen, she was leaning over, putting a frying pan in the dishwasher. When she stood up, her tanned face was slightly reddened, not, Jack suspected, from exertion.
“Broom Hilda,” Carrie said. “I’m a witch.”
Jack dropped two paper plates and a plastic knife and fork into the wastebasket by the back door of the kitchen. “That was Kriegel who said that.”
“There’s a difference?” Carrie said.
“Yes,” Jack said. “There’s a difference.”
“He’s soft. Ugly. Sayin’ things that aren’t polite don’t make any more sense than fleas bitin’ a shag rug.”
“And I am …” Jack stood, the light in the opened back door behind him, in the coolness of the kitchen. “… What?”
Arms akimbo, Carrie said, “What are you? Only God and you know that, and I suspect you’re confused.”
“Confused?” Jack seemed to consider the question. “Maybe. I don’t think so. Maybe I’m not what you think I am.”
“Not Fletch’s son?”
“I’m Fletch’s son. You said yourself we look alike. Have the same bodies. Builds. Whatever you said.”
“You surely do favor him. You’re standin’ there fifteen feet away from me, head down a little bit, starin’ at me half-solemn, half-humorous, hands at your sides, all-neat and all-gangly at the same time just the way Fletch did before we ever touched each other. And a million times since.” Carrie asked, “Are you comin’ on to me, boy?”
“No, ma’am. I’m surely not.”
“You speak Southern pretty good, too, when you want to. I had to teach Fletch, and he never will get it right.”
“You must love him,” Jack said.
“Because I teach him Southern ways?”
“Because you’re putting up with our being here.” He grinned. “Because you haven’t shot any of us yet. ‘Course, I haven’t seen Kriegel lately.”
“He’s sleepin’ the sleep of the unjust. Does it surprise you, our puttin’ up with you all the way we’re doin’?”
“No. It’s what I expected. From him. He has a reputation for being curious.”
“Peculiar, you mean. We’re not at all afraid of you bunch, you know.”
“Clearly not.”
“Should we be?”
“Not of me.” Jack glanced through the windows. Outside, on the grassy slope, Leary slept. “As for the others, for a reason I’ve just recently figured out, they seem peculiarly weary this morning. Weak. Or dead. They spent the night in a gully fighting off snakes, rushing water, and God knows what else.”
Across the kitchen, Jack and Carrie gave each other a smile as brief as a glance.
“What does puzzle me,” Jack said, “is your manners. The manners of both of you.”
“Come again?”
“Neither one of you has said to me, simply, ‘Hello. How are you?’”
Carrie asked, “Did you or did you not arrive here out of a storm in the middle of the night, carryin’ three desperadoes with you?”
“Still…”
“I didn’t hear that you exactly knocked politely on the front door and came in all full of smiles sayin’, ‘Hello, I’m your son, Jack. How are you?’ Did you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Besides,” Carrie answered in a milder tone, “generally, Fletch doesn’t hold much stock in simple questions. He says, when you ask a question all you get is an answer to the question, not the truth. He says, to get the truth it’s best to wait and watch and listen.”
“Oh, yes,” Jack said. “I have heard that about him.”
“From your mother?”
“Yes. And others.”
“Did your mother love Fletch?”
“Yes.”
“Does she still?”
“Yes. And me.”
“What does she say about your bein’ put in prison? I’ll bet she’s proud.”
Jack turned his face away from her. “I’ll bet she i
s.”
“Well.” Carrie sighed. “One thing is sure about Mister Fletch. We’re goin’ to understand all this before we’re done, or die tryin’. And that includes you.”
Jack asked, “Why don’t you ask me how I feel?”
“About what?”
Jack lifted his arms from his sides. “About everything.”
“Oh, yes,” Carrie said. “Fletch calls you the tactile generation. For short, he calls you the scabpickers. What you know, what you do isn’t important, only what you feel. Well, let me tell you somethin’, boy: what you feel is important, all right, but there isn’t enough time on earth to know or care about all that you feel.”
Jack stared at her. “Suppress feelings?”
“No, of course not,” Carrie said. “Take a potshot at a woman cop because you feel like it. Maybe you’ll get to go on a teevee talk show so you can talk about your feelin’s. For fifteen minutes some people will say, ‘Poor you,’ and you’ll still end up in the jailhouse.” More gently, she said, “So how do you feel?”
“Weird,” Jack said. “I just met my father for the first time. I just met you. I see this place where you live.” He waved one arm. “You’ve got horses that sneak up behind you in the dark of the night and try to nibble the hair off your head! You’ve got goddamned oil paintings on the walls of your kitchen!”
“E=MC2!” Carrie expostulated. “Don’t you swear in front of me!”
“Swear! He had me put my ‘traveling companions,’ as he calls them, in a gully in a raging storm. He killed one and beat up the other two as surely as if he took a bat to them, and he never lifted a finger. My father!”
“Scared?” Carrie asked.
Jack took a deep breath. “I knew what I was thinking when I headed this way.”
“Well,” Carrie said, “I surely don’t, but I’ve had enough of you and your feelings for now. We’ve got things to do.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. “Clothes.”
“There’s a pair of huge overalls somewhere there in the back closet, left here by a hired hand the whole county couldn’t afford to feed. Sent him to Kansas. Maybe if we split them down the sides we can make them fit that nasty-lookin’ thing asleep on the grass outside feedin’ the ticks and fleas.”
Jack looked through the window. “He’s not feedin’ anything.”
“Oh, yes he is.”
“He said something about a suit for Kriegel. Shirt. Necktie.”
“I’ll take care of that,” Carrie said. “I’ll go wake Kriegel up. I look forward to givin’ him his breakfast. How’d you like that country ham you had for breakfast?”
“Salty.”
“You want some more?”
“Not just now, thanks.”
“Okay,” Carrie said. “You can tell me how you feel about that ham later.”
9
B y golly, Ms. Carrie,” Fletch said, bounding into the dining room where Professor The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel breakfasted in state. “We’ve never had house-guests so plumb worn out in the mornings before, I do declare!”
In a white shirt, purple necktie, dark trousers, Kriegel sat at the head of the long, highly polished dining table. On his place mat was a full china breakfast setting, silver cutlery. At almost full attention, Jack stood beside, a little behind him.
“More ham?” Carrie asked the rotund little man.
“Please.” His pale blue eyes gazed over the saddle-shaped birthmark over the bridge of his nose. “It is most delicious.”
Carrie heaped more of the ham on his plate.
“All three hundred and fifty pounds of white and naked flab you all call Leary is dead to the world out on the back lawn,” Fletch said. “I swear, if we drag him down to the roadside, the slaughter truck will pick him up for the glue factory without even stopping to ask which nature of beast he is.”
“Speaking of dead,” Kriegel began.
“By the way,” Fletch said to Carrie, ignoring him, “I forgot to tell you Aetna says Angie Kelly has that recipe for firecracker cake you want.”
Carrie’s lips twitched. She knew Fletch had made his arrangements with the sheriffs department.
Jack glanced from one to the other. Clearly he knew some message had just passed subtly between them.
He did not ask.
Kriegel cleared his throat. “Speaking of dead,” he began again.
“Yes?” Fletch asked.
Frowning as if at an underling, Kriegel said to Fletch, “You may have deprived me—you have deprived us—of a very important source of revenue.”
“Us?” Fletch asked. “You mean me, too?”
“The late Juan Moreno, or so he was known in this country—”
“Yes,” Fletch said. “John Brown. Go on.”
“—is lamented principally for the cash he was going to provide us.”
“Is a-moldering in the ditch,” said Fletch.
“He was indebted to us, you see, for our allowing him to escape with us the confines of the federal penitentiary. He was to pay us from his considerable funds deposited in various Florida banks. Now that he is dead, these funds may be harder for us, even impossible, to tap.”
“The snakes got him,” Fletch said simply.
Kriegel placed his cloth napkin on the table. “That,” he announced, “was the worst night of my entire life. Whose idea was it to conceal me in that raging river filled with barbed wire, old washtubs, and enormous snakes floating down on us in squadrons so thick they were actually entangled with each other?” His voice broke.
“Mine,” Fletch said.
Kriegel was trying to glare with his watery blue eyes. “I barely survived the experience. Only my call saved me.”
“Your cowl?”
“My calling!”
“Exactly,” Fletch said. “The cops didn’t cotch you. In fact, they did look everywhere else.”
“But only, I understand, Mister Fletcher, because you provided them with the use of your four-wheel-drive Jeep to search for us!”
“Certainly,” said Fletch. “I always cooperate with the coppers. They’re my friends. They do their best to keep murdering loonies like you locked up.”
“Mister Fletcher.” Despite his agitation, Fletch could see Kriegel was having difficulty keeping his eyes open. “I happen to be apolitical figure of international significance, and require that I be treated as such, with all due respect.”
Carrie cut her eyes at Fletch. Personages of genuine international political significance had sat at that table many times. None had required particular respect, even during one or two memorable bread fights.
“I am of such significance that your American authorities, in their wisdom, decided it their best course of action to imprison me on perfectly irrelevant criminal charges.”
“I know,” Fletch said in a sympathetic tone. “Both that whore who strangled herself on your bed and that chambermaid who walked in on you and saw what had happened were government agents. They’re everywhere, they are. You don’t need to tell me.”
“I said, ‘irrelevant.’”
“I understand,” Fletch said. “The strangled whore was irrelevant to your call.”
“Exactly.”
Carrie said, “The whore had a calling, too.”
“What difference did the life of a whore make considering the scope of my mission?”
“What’s your mission?” Fletch asked.
“At the moment, my mission is to get to my people who await me.” Tiredly, Kriegel stood up.
“More ham?” Carrie asked.
“Thank you, no.”
“We’ve got that all worked out.” Fletch pulled a torn road map from his back pocket. He spread it on the dining table. “We have to split you up. There are roadblocks everywhere looking for you three. Four. Pretending to drive my son, Jack, to the University of North Alabama, you, Jack, and I, in the station wagon, will take this road into Alabama, you see? and then turn east to Tolliver.”
Carrie was watching Fletch’s
fingers on the map.
Bleary from exhaustion, Kriegel was not focusing successfully. “What of my bodyguard?” Kriegel asked. “What of Mister Leary?
“Ah,” Fletch said. “That’s the beauty of the plan. Mister Leary will be going in the pickup truck with Ms. Carrie. She is going to pretend to be delivering a little cow. Dressed as a farm worker, he will ride on the back of the truck with the little cow. She will take these back roads in an arc, you see? and meet us in Tolliver. That way we won’t all be traveling together.”
Kriegel looked at Carrie’s 123 pounds on a five-foot-five frame. “I see. But I do not wish to be separated from my bodyguard.”
“Come, come,” Fletch said. “Jack and I will be with you. What have you to fear? You know Jack is a karate expert. And I? Don’t even ask. Never have I met man or beast to make me tremble in nose or lip.”
“Will you be armed?” Kriegel asked in a high voice.
“Indeed not,” Fletch answered. “The worst thing we could do would be to carry arms.” He had already put the .32 he had given Jack (which Fletch found under the afghan on the study’s divan), properly loaded, and the cellular phone under the driver’s seat of the station wagon. He had put the loaded .38 under the driver’s seat of the truck. “We’ll be going through roadblocks. Cops find weapons on us they’ll nab us for sure. They’d have you back in Tomaston before lunch. Pity if you escaped prison just for a zoological experience in a ditch.”
Kriegel wished to be armed against the authorities.
Fletch wished himself and Carrie to be armed against Kriegel and Leary.
If biff came to bang, Fletch would be interested to see what John Fletcher Faoni would do.
Kriegel said, “I want my own bodyguard with me.”
“What?” Fletch asked. “Are you saying you don’t trust Jack?”
“It’s not that,” Kriegel said. “I need my bodyguard.”
“You’re not grasping the beauty of this plan,” Fletch said.
“What’s the beauty?” Kriegel rubbed his face.
“Leary,” Fletch said. “Leary is the beauty.”
“Leary is a beauty?” asked Kriegel.
“Oh, yes.” Fletch said: “Bait.”
“Bait!” Kriegel said.
“If the cops should happen to catch him over here”—
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