The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  The biggest movie poster on Bosko’s wall, the one he woke up to every morning, had had no ticket stub attached…because the movie hadn’t opened yet.

  You don’t suppose …? Surely, a parole-jumper who’d committed three homicides and tried to kill a police officer in the past week wouldn’t be that stupid. But in the words of that great philosopher and theologian Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

  Now, Crock sat in an unmarked car across the street from the ticket booth of the Dynamo Movie Theatre complex in south Harrelton, gnawing on a cinnamon toothpick, scanning the slow-moving line as it inched its way to the ticket booth. He heard a shrill, high-pitched shriek, which either meant somebody nearby was using a “silent” dog whistle or Cher needed to go into the shop for an oil change and a lube job, and Crock was reaching up to pop out the hearing aid when he spotted him. A man wearing a Cincinnati Reds windbreaker, sandwiched between a group of teenagers and a woman holding a sleeping toddler, lifted his head so Crock could see his face. Edgar Wallace Boskowitz. Bosko to his friends.

  Bosko paid his money, the ticket agent slid a ticket under the glass partition, and he disappeared instantly into the crowd flowing in a solid wave through the door.

  Crock sat back and took out another toothpick. Bosko would be here for the next two hours and four minutes—well, a few minutes more counting the previews. He’d be right there, in theater 11—with two hundred civilians and another five or six hundred outside waiting for the next showing. Two hours and ten minutes was how long Crock had to figure out a way to pluck Bosko out of that crowd like a daisy—without damaging so much as a petal on any of the other flowers.

  ******

  Andi went to the door when the shouting began, put her ear to it and listened—not that she needed to do that to hear what they were saying. They were yelling, all three of them, having an awful argument—about her.

  “It’s your fault,” Tattoo Man roared. “You’re the one let her out to go to the bathroom.”

  “We got paid to do a job, and the job’s done,” said Dreadlocks Man. “I didn’t sign on for anything else.”

  “Think you’d like prison, do you?” asked Tattoo Man. “Think you’d enjoy the food, maybe? Or is it the friendly atmosphere where ‘everybody knows your…number?’ I ain’t going back there.”

  “Nobody’s gonna catch us,” said Dreadlock Man. “We dump the kid and bail. We got enough money to stay hid for a long time.”

  “We touch a hair on that leetle one’s head, and they never stop looking for us. Choo know who her daddy is?” Speedy Gonzales said.

  “You idiots just don’t get it, do you?” said Tattoo Man. “They’ll look, sure. They might even find us, but what if they do? They can’t prove nothing, not without a witness. That kid’s seen us. She can identify us. She can identify me.”

  Andi began to get the drift of the conversation and felt cold and sick. Goose bumps pebbled her arms and neck.

  “A reggae bass player and a chicken farmer—the only place there’s a picture of you two is on your drivers’ licenses and in your high school yearbooks. The law’s never gonna find you. You’ll blend back into the scenery and disappear. But I have a record. All that kid’s got to do is describe my arm, and they’ll pull my mug shot out of a database faster’n you can say ‘life sentence.’ And that, my friend, is your fault. If you hadn’t let her get a look at me, I wouldn’t have to do this.”

  “Billy Ray said a bar of gold to babysit a kid for twenty-four hours,” Dreadlocks Man said. “I ain’t gonna hurt a kid.”

  “I don’t leave witnesses behind who can identify me, pick me out of a police lineup and say, ‘That’s him. He’s the man kidnapped me.’ That’s not happening.”

  “Jew can count me out. You’re loco, man.”

  “Fine,” Tattoo Man roared. “Get out, both of you. If you ain’t got the cajones to do what has to be done, leave. I’ll clean up after us all.”

  Andi heard Speedy Gonzales spew out a flood of words in Spanish so fast, she couldn’t follow, heard doors slam and then thought she heard the blue car start up in the driveway. She was about to turn to go to the window to look when the door where she was listening suddenly flew open. She was standing so close, it smashed into her, hit her in the face and knocked her backward onto the floor.

  The room swam for a moment, and then Tattoo Man was standing over her.

  “I’m sorry, kid,” he said, but he didn’t sound sorry at all.

  Then he pulled a knife from a scabbard at his waist. It was huge, bigger than the one Daddy used to carve the turkey at Thanksgiving. The blade was shiny, sparkled in the light through the crack in the window. “This is the way it’s got to be.”

  He reached out, grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her head back. The feel of the blade against her throat was cold. Only for a moment, though. After that, Miranda Burke made only one final sound, a wail of terror, “Daddy!”

  ******

  Daniel’s head snapped up like he’d been slapped. Some sound, some…cry…echoed in his mind just outside the range of his hearing. It sounded like Andi.

  “You sure you’re ok, Daniel?” Senator La Hayne asked.

  An image appeared in his mind. Andi on a hospital bed. He could hear the beep, beep, beep of a heart monitor grow slower and slower. Then the beeps stopped. Until Jack called her name—Andi.

  “You don’t have to stay for this, you know,” the senator said.

  But, of course, he did have to stay for this. That was, after all, the only thing left he could do. He had to be here, had to sit unafraid, in utter defiance, right here in the front row of spectators.

  The Senate Judiciary Committee that would decide the fate of Chapman Whitworth’s journey to the full senate for confirmation convened in the Dirksen Building in room 226, three floors down from Senator LaHayne’s fifth-floor office.

  Daniel and the senator had just entered the room through the wide doorway in the center of the back wall, where doors with designs of concentric squares opened by the ornate doorknobs in the center. Facing them on the far wall of the wood-paneled room was a raised platform with a huge semicircular desk that looked a little like the bench where a judge sits in a courtroom. Committee members were already beginning to make their way to seats behind the desk on the platform, arranging papers on the wide desktop.

  A long table was located directly in front of the semicircle where those testifying could face all the committee members to make statements and answer questions. Behind the table were the rows of chairs that constituted the gallery. Though seating there was limited, the proceedings would be broadcast live on the United States Senate Committee Channel.

  A week ago, the gallery for this routine committee hearing would have been virtually empty. Today it was jammed, spectators and the press jockeying for position to watch proceedings nobody’d cared about until the leak Monday about the senator’s “evidence.”

  As chairman of the committee, Senator LaHayne secured Daniel a seat on the front row and then moved to take his place in the center of the semicircle desk behind his nameplate.

  Daniel actually felt rather than saw Whitworth enter the room. Almost against his will, Daniel turned to face him. Whitworth was smiling and glad-handing reporters and committee members as he made his way through the crowd and could not possibly have missed Daniel, seated in the front row of the gallery. But he never acknowledged Daniel’s presence, merely pulled out the chair behind the table, laid a single manila folder on the otherwise clear tabletop, leaned back and opened one of the two water bottles aides had set out on the table and beside the nameplates of each senator. Water beaded on the sides of the bottle. It was still cold.

  As soon as all the seats behind the big desk were filled, LaHayne rapped a gavel, and the room instantly hushed. The press seated behind Daniel leaned forward expectantly.

  LaHayne spoke in a sonorous voice.

  “This is the first meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider t
he president’s nomination of Chapman Wainwright Whitworth as federal judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio to fill the vacancy on the U. S. Supreme Court caused by the death of Justice Alexander Grant.”

  LaHayne looked squarely at Whitworth and asked affably, “Would the nominee like to make any opening remarks before we proceed with our questions?”

  Daniel saw an almost imperceptible squaring of Whitworth’s shoulders. Those not seated close to him saw only a calm, confident exterior, but Daniel could see a big vein in his left temple begin to pulse rapidly.

  His hands were clasped casually in front of him as if he were about to address citizens at a school board meeting or perhaps a group of high school civics students on a tour of the federal building in Cincinnati.

  “Thank you, Senator LaHayne,” he said.

  The voice. Whitworth had the dimmer switch on the strange power it possessed dialed full bright now, each individual light casting a fierce glow. The force of it felt to Daniel like the blunt trauma of running full speed into a brick wall.

  “I do have a brief statement I would like to make,” he said.

  Showtime.

  CHAPTER 40

  1985

  Fire enveloped the Twin Oaks Nursing Home with a mighty whump sound that was stunning in its ferocity. Jack never dreamed fire could move that fast. One minute he could see a red glow at the end of the hallway, and the next minute yellow flames licked up from the floor at the edge of the atrium with a sound like a pigeon beating its wings. Jack watched in fascinated horror as the blaze ate the hallway walls and ceiling and then burst through to set the whole plank veranda outside aflame.

  With water gushing over his head and down his face, it was hard to see. But Jack heard the wailing of a thousand sirens and could make out through the narrow windows that framed the front door that a collection of firefighters and firefighting equipment had sprung up, like mushrooms after a rain, in the parking lot.

  The firefighters probably hadn’t yet discovered that all the windows and doors had been chained or nailed shut. Maybe they never would. Maybe no one would even attempt a rescue, and the structure would burn all the way down, and they’d find the chains in the ashes. Or maybe the fire would burn so hot the chains would melt, and nobody would ever know they’d been there.

  The Bad Kids had not poured gasoline in the atrium—why not?— and its walls were marble rather than the dry old wood that had ignited like cardboard in the rest of the structure. Only the atrium’s ornate ceiling three floors above was on fire. Smoke began to puddle here, though, like pouring coffee into a cup, and Jack was glad of that. Surely, he’d pass out when he breathed enough of that smoke—he’d already started to cough. Maybe it’d even kill him. Either one was fine—just so he didn’t have to…burn to death.

  Please, kill me now. Don’t let me burn. Please!

  The blazing ceiling would eventually collapse, raining fiery death down into the atrium, and Jack wanted to be long gone before that happened.

  Then the front doors were suddenly blown open by the force of water firefighters had trained on them. A trio of firemen in full masks and gear—the one in the middle carrying a squirting hose—burst into the atrium. The swirling smoke obscured the fountain and Jack, but when they got farther into the atrium they’d spot him, and there was still time to—

  Hope had no chance to bloom in his heart. Seconds after they made it inside, two of the four chains holding the Twin-Oaks-replica chandelier came loose from the burning ceiling and the whole right side of the model broke off and crashed down on top of them, almost like it’d been aimed at them. It hammered two of the firemen and slammed them to the floor, knocking the fire hose out of the middle one’s hands so it snaked around, shooting water randomly. The remaining fireman scrambled to lift the debris of the mangled chandelier off the others. He was only able to free one man, and he grabbed the man’s collar and dragged him out the door and into the spray of water trained on that part of the burning porch from fire hoses out front just as the rest of the chandelier fell. It crushed the fireman still pinned down and blocked the doorway with a pile of rubble that quickly caught fire into a wall of flames.

  No one else would be coming through that door.

  *****

  2011

  Billy Ray was totally unprepared for what Becca did while he was calling his flunkies, telling them to cut the kid loose. One minute, she was standing defiantly in front of him and the next she was rolling around on the ground. Course he figured out quick it was an act. She was puttin’ on. Wasn’t nothing really wrong with her. Was there?

  He came down the porch steps and approached the girl curled up in a ball in the dirt, inspected her like she was a bug on a pin.

  “Shut up that squalling,” he told her.

  She acted like she didn’t hear him. He drew back his foot and kicked her as hard as he could with the blunt toe of his work boot. The boot caught her in the hip. Becca had no meat on her bones, and he was surprised the blow didn’t break something. She kept on screaming.

  “You shut your mouth, girl, or you’re gonna be swallowin' every tooth in it.”

  Still no response. In fact, she had been screaming so fiercely, she was beginning to lose her voice. But she kept on.

  Billy Ray felt suddenly uneasy. What if she really was crazy? He’d spent years planning in minute detail exactly which one of her bones he intended to break for every year he’d been locked up. Wouldn’t nobody hear her scream where he was gonna take her. Just like didn’t nobody hear Isaac Washington when Billy Ray took to him with a chain saw.

  But wouldn’t do no good to hurt her if she didn’t even know you’s doing it. What if this wasn’t no act? Well, he’d by golly find out. He grabbed a handful of her blond hair, cut as short as a boy's instead of long and pretty like it used to be. He dragged her across the yard to the car she’d parked in the driveway and dropped her beside the passenger side door. She was all curled up in a ball. He leaned the .22 against the car, pulled her left hand loose and uncurled her fist so her index finger was extended.

  “You listen here to me,” he said. “You stop that hollering. Stop it now.” He reached over, opened the car door and placed her finger on the frame of the door opening. “You’re gonna wish you’d shut up.”

  Then Billy Ray slammed the car door on her finger.

  No response. She continued screaming as she had been, making no sound at all now, screaming in silence.

  Crying out in the dark, but there’s no sound. His voice is gone—not from screaming on and on but from one explosive scream so powerful it shreds his vocal cords. The ugly red glow is everywhere…

  Billy Ray trembled. Why’d he keep remembering that dream? Why couldn’t he forget it?

  He shook his head violently. Then he opened the car door and released Becca’s finger. She slumped forward and curled up in the dirt again, her hand with the smashed finger balled into a fist as it had been before. He picked up the rifle and stood looking down on her, trying to figure out—

  A silver car, a Mercedes, suddenly shot up his driveway and ground to a stop, throwing rocks and gravel in every direction.

  Out the passenger door come none other than Theresa Washington! The fat old crone come waddling fast as she could to where Becca lay, knelt on the ground beside her and started patting her on the back and saying soothing things, like you’d say to a scared kid. Never even acknowledged Billy Ray was standing there.

  The man in the suit did, though. He got out of the car more slowly, came around it into the yard. He barely even looked at Becca. The man never took his eyes off the rifle in Billy Ray’s hands.

  ******

  1985

  Sheriff William Cunningham got out of his cruiser in the parking lot of the Twin Oaks Nursing Home. The heat from the blaze felt like standing next to the forge in the Hazelwood Works, the Pittsburgh steel mill where he was a crane follower as a teenager. He got it now. He understood that the massacre of the anim
als on Black Tuesday, the snakes in Christopher Grant’s casket and the desecration of the cemetery—all that had been the silence his grandmother’d talked about after a buzz bomb’s engine cut off, the silence as some great evil hanging over the community fell out of the sky.

  The Twin Oaks fire was the explosion.

  Someone had set this fire on purpose—used gasoline or some other accelerant. Even old wood didn’t catch fire this quickly on its own. Fires that ignited naturally started somewhere and spread; this fire was everywhere at once. And the sheriff had known the moment he pulled off the highway that nothing short of dumping a lake of water on the building would extinguish a blaze like this.

  Then he heard the cries for help.

  Looking up, he could see them. All the windows were shut, with faces pressed against the glass. In a room on the end on the second floor, someone had broken out the window glass—why not just open it?—and he could see arms waving through the wrought iron grating, hear voices crying out in terror. Glass had been broken in three windows on the third floor, too, the people there trying desperately to squeeze their bodies through the grates so that arms and legs hung out. But even the smallest resident would have been unable to fit between iron bars set six inches apart.

  The cries from the old people trapped on the upper floors sparked feverish effort among the firefighters, so frenzied it was almost insectile. The fire chief only paused for a moment beside the sheriff’s cruiser to tell him that the sunroom doors were chained shut, then he and two other firemen made an unsuccessful attempt to get inside the building through the open front doors. One fireman was killed, and the front doorway was blocked with flaming debris.

  The crowd that police was trying to keep at bay stretched along the road and deep into the woods on the other side. The onlookers weren’t merely rubberneckers. They were the friends and family members of the people inside the burning building, hysterical with horror as they watched loved ones die in flames before their eyes.