The Big Finish

by James W. Hall

  A unique flavor, but still hard to track because molecules of those same odors were floating everywhere in this neighborhood. If he’d had to rely solely on this bag of hair, X might easily blunder around for a week without finding her, drawn to an empty field where moist rocks lay hidden in a bed of pennyroyal, or attracted to a house filled with cats where someone was cooking cornbread. He could bat from smell to smell and never locate that particular blend of fragrances in one place.

  However, once he was in close proximity to Cassandra, he knew her scent would guide him the last few steps, but at such a distance, the collection of aromas in her hair didn’t point anywhere in particular.

  Fortunately he didn’t have to rely on her hair alone. There was another scent available, her aromatic signature, a pungent strand of her bodily odor that was as distinct as a ten-carat diamond in a box of river rocks.

  “Can you do it?” Cruz said. “Or do we call for the bloodhounds?”

  “Fuck the dogs,” X said. “She’s been through here in the last hour.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Dobbins said. “He’s pretending he can smell her trail?”

  Cruz said, “X-88 is a fragrance savant. Better than any dog.”

  “Give me a fucking break. This freak?”

  X spun on Dobbins, gripped a handful of his hair, and yanked his head backward, locked him in place with an arm around his throat. He spoke quietly into his right ear.

  “I’m going to give you a free science lesson, redneck, so pay attention, I’ll go slow. My olfactory receptor neurons are as sensitive as a beagle’s. You, if you’re lucky, you got five million receptors, where I’m at something north of two hundred million. Which means, even on a bad day, I can tell whether or not there’s a single drop of human piss in an Olympic swimming pool.

  “But that’s just the start. Because those neurons send messages to my olfactory bulb and it ships those signals to three places at once, the frontal cortex where odors are perceived, the hypothalamus amygdala where the emotional shit is stored, and to the hippocampus that handles odor memory.

  “Normal-size hypothalamus, it’s an almond. Mine’s a lemon. Regular hippocampus is shaped like a sea horse. Supposed to be about an inch long. Mine’s triple that. I’ve been lab tested, X-rayed, and CAT scanned half a dozen times. Reason I had all those tests, it’s because my lemon and my sea horse, they started out big, but this last year, they started growing. They’re double the size they used to be, and they’re still growing. If they don’t stop, in a month or two, maybe less, my skull’s going to crack wide open. So yeah, damn right I’m a freak of nature, but I’m the exact freak you people need at this moment.

  “There it is, hotshot. You don’t believe it, think I’m a joke, a fake, whatever, fine, stand back and watch, then decide if I’m for real. But I’m not taking any more of your bullshit. You got it?”

  Dobbins made a throaty noise that sounded like agreement. X released him, pushed him away, and kept walking through the warren of houses.

  It took a few more minutes before the scent trail led him to a two-story shack. The shack was neater and larger than those around it, with flower boxes, a gleaming tin roof, a fresh coat of white paint.

  X-88 tilted his head back, shut his mouth, and inhaled deeply, and inhaled again. He smiled at Cruz.

  “You got something?”

  “Blood’s a bitch,” he said. “Nails you every time.”

  “What’s that mean? Cassandra’s wounded? She’s bleeding?”

  X-88 held up the Ziploc bag with the vinyl inside.

  “Having her period,” X said. “Squirming on that chair, her blood and sweat soaked in pretty good. Normally vaginas are acidic, and that keeps germs at bay, but blood changes the pH and kick-starts bacteria. At the moment our girl’s got some very nutritious organisms thriving in her crotch.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She was here a while ago, maybe an hour, I don’t know, maybe less.”

  “Which way?”

  “Slow down,” he said. “I need another whiff of the T-shirt.”

  “They’re together? Cassandra and Flynn?”

  “A hit of this, I’ll know for sure.”

  He peeled open the plastic bag, drew in a deep breath, then closed it up again. Turned in a half circle, breathing evenly.

  “In there.” He gestured at the two-story house. “Both of them.”

  “Eddie’s place.” Dobbins sounded chastened, pitching in to help. “They call him Doc. Old-timer, him and his wife, they handle all the colored births.”

  “You’re sure?” Cruz asked X.

  “In there,” he said again.

  “Dobbins.” Cruz waved at the near corner of the house. “Around back. Nobody gets out of here. Nobody.”

  When Dobbins was set, X shouldered open the front door. The living room was shadowy and was crowded with black men in dress shirts and dark trousers, at least a dozen, shoulder to shoulder, some with hammers in hand, others holding knives, a couple with long-handled axes, all of them bristling with anger.

  From her waistband Cruz drew her Glock.

  “You break into my house, wave a gun, I’m within my rights to defend myself any way I see fit.” The man was bald with a fringe of white hair.

  “Are you Doc Eddie?”

  The man gave a curt nod.

  “We’re on the trail of a terrorist,” she said. “We have reason to believe he’s hiding in this dwelling.”

  “What reason you have to believe that?”

  “Because I can smell him,” X said, pointing. “He’s back there.”

  “You can smell him?” one of the men said, and a few others chuckled.

  Cruz stepped forward, prodded the weapon at the crowd to clear a path.

  Eddie said, “It’s okay, boys, let ’em look. They won’t find no terrorist in this house.”

  Grumbling, the group parted, opening a narrow lane to the kitchen. X-88 said nothing, kept his head tipped back to scoop up the scent and passed through the kitchen, following the trail into a cramped room where a dryer was stacked atop a washing machine.

  “So your terrorist, he’s hiding in the washer?” one man said.

  X-88 pulled open the door of the washing machine and reached inside and dragged out a white bedsheet soiled with bloodstains.

  X wadded up the cotton sheet and pressed his face against it and closed his eyes. After a few seconds he dropped the sheet on the floor.

  “Been staying here the whole time,” X said to Cruz. “Lying on those sheets, bleeding, sweating, feverish, infected, couldn’t control his bowels. He didn’t leave more than an hour ago.”

  Cruz turned to face the men, who’d crowded into the kitchen and were watching her with hair-trigger hostility.

  “I’m not going to ask you where Flynn Moss went, because you people have proven yourselves to be deceitful. But mark my words, gentlemen, you’ll be paying dearly for this treachery. I’ll leave it up to Sheriff Burkhart and Mr. Dobbins to decide how best to execute the punishment. But you will pay.”

  They exited through the rear door, gathered Dobbins, then went a few yards east of Eddie’s house before X-88 picked up the scent again.

  “This’ll be easier now,” X said. “Those sheets, there was more than blood on them.”

  In the lead, X-88 was striding past an open field where dogs lay sunning.

  “What else?” Dobbins moved alongside Cruz and X.

  “Mortuary workers call it tissue gas.”

  Cruz stopped. They’d reached the edge of a stand of trees.

  “Explain,” she said.

  “A bacteria you’ve smelled before, everybody has. Spoiled meat, decaying vegetation, marine sediment, the stink of low tide at the beach.”

  “I don’t get it,” Dobbins said.

  “Don’t know the full Latin name,” X said, looking off at the woods. “But the genus is Clostridium. It was stinking up the sheets. Even a yokel like you, Dobbins, once you’ve smelled it, you neve
r forget.”

  “Spoiled meat?”

  “You could call it that,” said X. “Yeah, spoiled meat.”

  THIRTY

  THORN FOLLOWED EMMA UP A long, steep plywood ramp fixed to the front steps. The cabin wasn’t grand but it had a gracious, stately feel with a stone chimney, shake roof, chinks filled with cement, big windows across the front, a wide wraparound porch.

  The great room’s cathedral ceiling swam upward into shadows, the furniture covers done in deep greens and russets and rich golds. The glossy varnish on the knotty pine walls had yellowed with age. Big bass and rainbow trout and a good-size sailfish were mounted on the walls of the large room. Racks of vintage fishing rods with heavy reels filled the wall space between built-in bookshelves that were crammed with old leatherbound books and paperbacks.

  Comfortable couches, ancient leather chairs, oak and mahogany side tables, a far wall covered with photos of family gatherings. THE JOHANSSON TRIBE was inscribed on a plaque above the wall of photographs. Emma and Millie were members of a blond dynasty, Nordic pioneers, tough and serious. Generations of them were on the wall. Dressed in antique garb, sitting atop buggies, leaning against jalopies, saddled on fine-looking horses. Men in vests and hats holding up strings of fish, women in wide-brimmed hats with babies in their arms, towheaded children wearing white Sunday clothes standing stiffly on the stone stairs that led into this lodge.

  Emma rolled deeper into the house, aiming down a hallway where the honeyed late-day sun was slanting in from rooms on the west side, Emma continuing to the end of the hallway where voices were speaking low.

  “He’s here,” she announced and rolled into the room. “It’s Thorn.”

  Thorn’s eyes landed on Millie first, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, standing stiffly in a corner of the room, the harsh late day’s sun making her squint as she told him hello, her voice quiet, tense.

  Cassandra, seated in a straight-backed chair by the head of the bed, was holding Flynn’s hand. The sheets were pulled halfway up his naked chest. Flynn’s face had dwindled since he’d seen him last. His cheeks sunken and his flesh so pale it had the translucent luster of ice. His damp hair was plastered against his skull. The blue of his eyes was a hazy facsimile of the color they’d been, his eyes red rimmed and swollen as if he’d been distance swimming in an overchlorinated pool. From the little Thorn could see of his body, Flynn appeared to be thirty pounds lighter than a year ago. A fit young man before, emaciated now.

  Only his smile seemed as lively as ever.

  Before Thorn could speak, Flynn said, “Isn’t it a great house? Reminds me of your place, Thorn. Not as spartan as yours, but the same genre, rustic, authentic, tough.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “See all those trophies, those antique rods and reels? What a collection, all still functional, Millie says. Emma’s granddad was a fishing guide. He took anglers deep-sea fishing out of Wilmington, and he fly-fished the streams around here. He sounds like a great guy. Somebody you’d respect.”

  “He does.”

  His delivery was breathless and rushed, the words mushy in his mouth.

  “I’m doing fine,” Flynn said. “Don’t look so worried. I’m fine, really I am. We’re all together, that’s good. But the others, Jellyroll, Billy Jack, Caitlin, my friends, goddamn it, they were gunned down. All my doing. I set up the lookout post too close to the camp. You wouldn’t have done that, Thorn. You would’ve picked the right spot. Those bastards caught me napping. Burkhart and Dobbins, that’s who it was. I saw them, then I ran, blowing the whistle too damn late. They got me in the legs, the back. Eddie dug most of the lead out of me. He’s good, Eddie’s a good man.”

  “Calm down, Flynn. Relax.”

  “I knew you’d come. I didn’t know how it would happen, but I knew it. I told Eddie and Earlene, his wife, about you. I told them you’d come, then yesterday Eddie walked in and told me you were here, that you’d arrived. He’d given you his car to use. What a wonderful coincidence, huh? He was amazed, but I knew it was going to happen all along. It’s just like you to figure things out.”

  “Are we safe here?” Thorn asked Millie.

  “I don’t know. Probably for a while.”

  With a long sigh, the dog lay down in the hallway just beyond the door. His gaze focused on Emma.

  “I’m going,” Cassandra said. “Now you’re here, Thorn, I can leave.”

  “You should go,” Flynn said. “You should go while there’s time.”

  “Best case,” she said, “Cruz and her people will chase after me, leave the rest of you alone.”

  “Cruz is only one piece of this,” Thorn said.

  “You need to go, Cassandra,” Flynn said. “There’s other fights that need you. Go on, spread the word, we’ll be fine.”

  She squeezed his hand in both of hers, leaned forward, and pressed her forehead against his chest. After a moment, she raised up, her eyes wet.

  “I fucked up,” she said. “I told Dobbins you had a copy of the video.”

  “There’s no copy,” said Flynn.

  “But I told him there was and you had it. I only did it to stay alive, to make myself a bargaining chip he could trade for you. I put him on your trail, Flynn. I made everything worse.”

  “Come on, let’s cut the guilt,” Flynn said, smiling. “It was already worse. As worse as it gets.” He started to chuckle but it turned into a cough and his body shook, the loose pieces in his chest rattled, and he fought for breath.

  Thorn came to his side, pressed a solid hand against Flynn’s shoulder, feeling helpless but keeping his hand there until Flynn finished riding out the cough. There was a smell hanging around his son. A bad smell. The more he breathed it the worse it got.

  Flynn gave Thorn an exhausted look and smiled again.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Really.”

  He patted Thorn’s hand, then he closed his eyes and sank away. In a sudden panic Thorn searched for a pulse, finding a slow bump in his wasted neck.

  “He’s been doing that,” Millie said. “Swooning in and out.”

  “He’s not fine,” Emma said. “He says he is, but he’s not.”

  Cassandra came to her feet and drew aside the sheet covering his legs. Eyes still closed, Flynn didn’t stir.

  On the toes of both feet the blisters were green, the flesh split open from the swelling, and both grotesquely puffed ankles were shiny black as if he’d been wading to his shins through hot tar. Scattered from his calves to his thighs were a half dozen bloody lesions the size of silver dollars.

  “It’s called gangrene,” Emma said.

  “Eddie did the best he could,” said Millie. “But this place, the hog manure, it’s everywhere. Soil-borne, airborne staph bacteria resistant to antibiotics. They pump so many drugs in those pigs superbugs develop, new kinds of pneumonia, MRSA, and other things. We fight it every day around here. Even a small infection can get out of control fast. Flynn, jumping into the river after he was first wounded, that’s probably how it started.”

  “We need to get him to a hospital,” Thorn said. “Right now.”

  “No hospital,” Flynn said, opening his eyes halfway. “No way.”

  “You’ve got a car, Millie?”

  “I do.”

  “Stop it,” Flynn said. “I’m not going to any damn hospital. They’ll patch me up and send me straight to prison. I’ll spend the next twenty years wishing I were dead. Living like those pigs crowded in their death chambers. I’d rather die here, in this nice house, with those fishing rods and those old reels. This is an excellent place to leave from.”

  “He was fussing like this the whole time he was at Eddie’s,” said Millie. “Eddie wanted to take him to Goldsboro, the regional medical center, but Flynn said the same thing he said just now. He wouldn’t hear of it.”

  Thorn said, “Have you killed anyone, Flynn?”

  Flynn’s face seized up and he looked stricken.

  “Hell no.”

  �
�Well, good. You can plea-bargain, hand Dobbins over to the law, his drug operation, that should reduce your sentence. The crimes you’ve done, that thing in Marsh Fork and the others, those are property crimes, they won’t add up to more than a year or two. If that. We’ll get you the best defense people there are. You haven’t hurt anyone, that’s what matters.”

  “It should be what matters,” Flynn said. “But it isn’t. Tell him, Cass.”

  “Twenty years is the going rate,” she said. “We’ve got friends serving longer for doing less than we’ve done. It’s a fucked-up system, stacked against us. We’re lumped with Islamic terrorists because we attack corporate big shots. Twenty to thirty years. That’s how it is, Thorn. By the time he got out, Flynn would be almost as old as you.”

  “Yeah,” Flynn said. “A damn geriatric.”

  He began to chuckle again but caught himself, face glossy with sweat.

  Cassandra leaned down and kissed Flynn on the forehead. She cradled his cheek in her hand and stared into his eyes for several seconds, then drew her hand away and moved to the doorway. She patted Emma’s shoulder.

  “Thorn, your son is a stubborn shit,” she said. “Once he makes up his mind, forget about changing it. I should be going. I need to be a long way down that river before it gets too dark to paddle.”

  “Go,” Flynn said. “But stay in touch, okay?”

  Cassandra worked her mouth into a reassuring smile, gave Flynn a wink and a thumbs-up. Glanced at Thorn, desolation in her eyes, and left the room.

  “Come on, Emma,” Millie said. “They need their privacy.”

  “He’ll get better, right? Gangrene, it’s not cancer or anything. Right?”

  “We’ll talk about it. Now come on, tomorrow’s a school day.”