“I don’t know the name,” Dr. Cain said. “Look in the wallet again. He should have something – maybe a lunch card, maybe a fob for the dorm.”
Alaia looked again. “Maybe this guy pays in cash. Looks like he’s got over twenty, new, one hundred dollar bills to spend.”
Phoenix put his hand out and snapped his fingers. “Throw me the wallet.”
Alaia did as she was asked. Phoenix caught it and said, “Are you sure this was the guy who got bit by the rat?”
“I’m sure of it,” Dr. Cain replied.
Phoenix knelt down and went through man’s other pockets. He found an iPhone in the man’s front right pocket, removed it, and handed it Chief Cobb, who handed it to Alaia.
“Like, I’m everyone’s maid here today?” Alaia asked with her eyes glaring.
Phoenix pressed his lips together and glanced over at Alaia. He leaned over to Chief Cobb and whispered, “And you’re interested in that woman? What were you thinking?”
“What did you just say?” Alaia said, with her chin high and her eyes protruding. “You know, if you got anything to say, you can say it so I can hear it!”
“I told DeAnte’ that we need a printout of every call this guy made or received in the last two days,” Phoenix said with a pinched expression. “That’s all I said, I promise. I just told him you had more than enough to do already. But, if you can handle this, would you?” He then threw the wallet back to her.
“Okay, I got it – but I ain’t your secretary.”
“This Vernon King guy – he’s too old to be here, or nearly too old,” Phoenix said. “No student ID in his wallet, he has a wad of cash, and he’s patient zero. And this guy, who Dr. Cain doesn’t even recognize, just happens to be up in the lab playing with the one rat that nobody needs to be playing with. What are the odds?”
“Another attack by our mystery man,” Alaia said. “This Vernon was sent here.”
The CDC arrived, dragging wheeled containers and carrying packs over their shoulders: twenty people at least; and some of them carried weapons. Behind them came armed National Guardsmen, armed and equipped, who fanned out and began escorting police, reporters, and students away from the scene under the governor’s orders.
Chief Cobb took an incoming call. He nodded and said, “I understand.” He turned to Phoenix and said, “Looks like this is no longer within our jurisdiction. We’ve been ordered out here. The CDC now owns this campus and everything around it. And they’re evacuating everyone.”
Phoenix looked at Alaia, raised his eyebrows, and said, “I guess that’s our cue. Unless you’ve got something else you have to do, what do you say we head over to the office? Do you still have that Krystal’s coupon in your car?”
Chapter 12
Phoenix drove into the parking lot of the Green Lawn Cemetery office just off Thompson Lane, in the suburbs of Berry Hill. He got out of his car at the far end of the parking lot, took a quick look around the monument-covered, gently rolling hills, and popped the lid off his Dr. Pepper. This was one place he hated more than anything. He’d avoided cemeteries ever since he’d been conned into sleeping in one back during a scouting trip, and he hated this one even more.
In this cemetery, on a pine-covered hill overlooking I-440, was a plot he’d purchased for himself and his wife. Though she’d been gone in mind for less than half a year, Phoenix struggled to remember her – the way she carried herself, the way she spoke, the way she laughed. Her ability to teach high school kids – she had been voted National Teacher of the Year before her coma – was nothing short of pure gift; and her skills in reaching even the most closed-minded, obstinate child, extraordinary. And she always had time for her husband, more than he ever seemed to have for her. And that had never occurred to him until the day of her surgery, when the surgeon had come into the waiting room to tell him that his Tracy had slipped into a coma.
Now it was late afternoon, and Phoenix watched for Alaia. He looked impatiently towards the road, then back across the pine-covered hill, and then towards the road again. He saw her pull off the road and into the driveway, and he watched her follow the single lane road up to the cemetery office and park beside his car.
Phoenix, feigning annoyance, opened the door for her and she got out. “You know, that little incident back at the college would never have happened had I not---”
“But you did,” Alaia said. “You just better be glad Cobb likes you. He’s pretending like the syringe never existed.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“I know so, he told me. And I find that really, really odd.”
Alaia started to walk to the office, but Phoenix stopped her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Phoenix said.
Alaia nodded. “Albin shot, at headquarters, with your gun. The note in your pocket about your wife. And there are only three of us who knew you’d taken the syringe and---”
“So who told Vernon King – and who paid him?”
“Whoever it was who wanted that virus going viral,” Alaia said smartly. She grabbed Phoenix’s arm and said, “Let’s get moving.”
“You know, the Men’s Clinic has a new You Tube video that’s gone virile,” Phoenix said.
Alaia ignored him.
Phoenix and Alaia headed towards the office, a plain white building, one story, with double glass doors and a black shingle roof. Tulips, red and yellow, bloomed in two large planters on either side of the doors. Phoenix opened one of the doors, looked at Alaia, and said, “After you.”
An old woman, blue-haired and tired, sat hunched over her desk looking into the even bluer screen of her desktop computer. Her right hand was lying flat against her cheek and, with her other, she picked out keys on the keyboard, hitting each one slowly and deliberately.
Phoenix said, “Hello,” and she didn’t respond, and he found the bell on the counter and hit it three times. The woman must have heard it, or maybe she’d seen Alaia waving her hand in the air; but she turned and saw the two visitors and she slowly rose from her seat.
Phoenix went straight to the point. He looked at the woman, straight into her eyes, licked his lips, and said, “We’re looking for Phillip Mercer.”
“Phillip Mercer?” the woman replied. “We have no one here by that name. We have a Bill Turner, and he manages when he can. Would you like to see him?”
Phoenix turned and smiled at Alaia. Then he looked at the woman. “Sure, he’ll have to do.”
The woman turned and walked towards the door to her right, carefully holding onto her chair, then a cabinet, and then the door frame. She disappeared, step by step, into a hallway.
Phoenix pointed up at a picture of man, a younger man with a face that looked like a used car. “That must be Bill,” he said. And he had hardly finished saying “Bill” when Bill came through the door with the old woman behind him.
“What can I help you with?” Bill said.
“We’re looking for interment records for Phillip Mercer,” Phoenix said. “Died about---”
“The name is all I need, Mr.---”
“Mr. Clean, thank you.”
Bill Turner sat down at the desk, made a few key strokes, and wrote down a few numbers. He stood up and handed the paper to Alaia. “Hell of a nice looking secretary,” he said, ogling Alaia.
“No, she’s my mom – and yes, she does clean up after me,” Phoenix said. “She can be yours.”
Alaia shot Phoenix an evil look, a look almost as evil as the one she gave him when they first met.
“Let me print out the interment details for you, Mr. Clean,” the manager said. He paused and, when the printer failed to print, he bent over the desk in a plumberly fashion and tried to resend the information. The copier clicked and whirred into action, like a garbage disposal on the blink.
“Here’s all we have,” the manager said. “Looks like Phillip Mercer was disinterred a week ago and put back the same day. Doesn’t say why, but I would guess you could inquire with the state coroner’s offi
ce. I’m sure they’ll be able to tell you something.” He handed the paper to Alaia, who rolled her eyes and handed it to Phoenix.
“Shouldn’t this document tell us who opened the casket and why?” Phoenix asked.
The manager leaned over and looked at the paper. “Seems like it should, right? But you know how it goes! Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr. Clean?” he asked, with his eyes glued on Alaia.
Phoenix folded up the paper and slipped it into his front pocket. “No, but thanks. We’ll be back, though.”
Phoenix and Alaia left the building and walked towards their cars.
“Maybe we ought to put Phillip Mercer down as a missing corpse,” Alaia said.
“No, we dig him up, tomorrow, with or without a court order.”
“You can’t just walk into a cemetery in broad daylight and---”
“Not in broad daylight,” Phoenix said. “Tomorrow night – and I’ll bring a crew.”
“Are you asking me to break the law?”
“No, I’m hiring you.” Phoenix reached into his pocket and pulled out ten, crisp, new one hundred dollar bills. He held it up in front of Alaia. “Put this into your son’s college savings, or don’t. I don’t care. Or spend it on some clothes. I’m tired of seeing you in that masculine-looking NPD stuff. Maybe you should get a halter top, or something – then I won’t have to go to the Men’s Clinic.”
Alaia’s mouth fell open when Phoenix slipped the cash into her waistband. “You didn’t take that, did you?”
“Cobb took the other half, so don’t look so surprised. If he wasn’t on the take, he’d have thrown my butt in jail after I – I mean, you – shot Albin back at the lab.”
Alaia pulled the bills out from her waistband, heard them crinkling, fresh and new, and she counted them.
“I was just kidding about taking the money from that kid back at the campus,” Phoenix said. “Or maybe I’m not.”
Alaia folded up the money and put it into her hip pocket, then she looked around.
“We’ve had enough for one day,” Phoenix said. “Go home, get cleaned up, and get ready for the Schermerhorn tonight. Oh, and bring your son – what’s his name again?”
“Darkeem.”
Phoenix scratched his head and smiled. “How did I forget that?”
Alaia smiled back. “Are you picking me up?”
Phoenix’s smile faded at her words, like a light going out on the front porch of a country cottage, and he laughed a little laugh and looked down at his penny loafers.
“It’ll save me some gas money, that’s all,” Alaia said. “And I hate getting back home late.”
“Six it is, then,” Phoenix said. “And think formal.”
“Then I’ll be formal.”
Phoenix jumped into his car and drove away, following Alaia as she headed towards the interstate. He turned on the radio, always WLAV, and caught the hourly news update. A news alert, something about contaminated water, advised people in and around Nashville to avoid water from the public utilities.
The beautifully clear day had turned to dark and drizzle by the time Phoenix, Alaia, and Darkeem reached the Schermerhorn. Phoenix pulled up close to the entrance, right up to the sidewalk leading to a set of steps, and he reached under his seat, brushing Alaia’s thigh accidentally, and pulled out a small, black umbrella.
Alaia took the umbrella, opened the door, and stepped out. She raised the front seat and Darkeem, a rather tall boy for his age, with close cut hair and a quick smile, climbed out. His eyes widened with anticipation when he hit the sidewalk, trying to take in the site of the building; and he giggled when he looked up at the symphony hall’s four tall columns and richly decorated roof line. Alaia popped the umbrella; but Darkeem was off, running across the walk and up the steps, dodging others carefully making their way up to the symphony hall beneath their umbrellas, and he reached the shelter of the building within seconds.
Phoenix drove away.
Alaia, with Darkeem by her side, waited for Phoenix just inside the front lobby. She turned abruptly back towards the door, realizing she held only two tickets; and a sudden panic set in, making her feel like someone about to miss a flight because they’d arrived late and at the wrong gate.
She waited impatiently for Phoenix until she glanced at her watch and saw that only two minutes remained before the program started. She walked towards the hall, showed her two tickets to the attendant, and she and Darkeem were escorted to a table.
Phoenix never returned.
Chapter 13
Phoenix parked his Ford Focus in the parking lot of a vacant, neglected building across from Green Lawn Cemetery. The traffic, past rush hour, looked unusually heavy and slow on Thompson Lane. The glow of the headlights bouncing up from the wet asphalt blinded him for a second. The drizzle, coming down lightly only forty-five minutes earlier, had turned into a cold, steady rain swept sideways by boisterous winds. He saw a maroon Ford F-150 parked at the end of the lot with its parking lights on. Those were his guys, two men, a couple of good old boys from Woodbury, Tennessee, two grave-digging brothers who knew dirt and heavy machinery. He pulled out his Oblivium and took a hit.
Another car pulled into the parking lot, a white Toyota Camry, more dent than drive. Bill Turner, the manager of Green Lawn Cemetery, stepped out of the car with a set of keys dangling from his fingers.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Bill Turner said. “It’s raining, so dig quick, do what you have to do, and fill in the hole even quicker.”
Phoenix handed Bill an envelope. “You’ll want to check it.”
“Nah,” Bill said. “Just put the backhoe back where you found it. And don’t worry about the grass because there isn’t any. You’ll be fine – that is, unless the security guard catches you.”
“Security guard?” Phoenix asked.
“He’s good for a hundred – just wave it at him.”
“He’ll be taking it out of your stack. A deal’s a deal.”
“Fifty-fifty.”
Phoenix put his hand out. Bill took out his wallet, removed a fifty, and handed it to him.
“Good doing business with you. Mr. Clean,” Bill said. He smiled, jumped back into the Toyota, and backfired out of the parking lot.
Phoenix watched Bill drive away and he shrugged. The guy seemed awfully pleased with the thin wad of cash he’d just gotten. Two hundred dollars. He probably couldn’t have done better working overtime. Just another corporate pawn content to live in a single bedroom apartment on the edge of Antioch. He probably had a great cable TV package, no doubt Netflix B – and that made his life heaven.
The two grave diggers kept out of sight until the cemetery manager left. They extinguished their cigarettes and got out. They both matched. Two pairs of badly worn overalls holding in way too much stomach filled with too many pounds of cornbread and pinto beans. And they could pass. Phoenix had heard them before. Loud and bi-labially fricative, complete with imagined or real skid marks they let their wives swoon over when laundry time came around. They wore large, oversized work boots and Farmer’s Co-op caps tilted back over the tops of their heads.
“Do you guys call each other up and talk about what you’re going to wear for the day?” Phoenix asked.
Marvin, tall, skinny everywhere except at the gut, smiled and said, “Yep!” He reached into his front pocket, pulled out a half-eaten bag of Redman chewing tobacco, and took out a plug. He handed it to Walt, a fatter guy in every direction, and he spit on the ground. “We don’t have all night, so let’s get to it. You’re paying us by the hour.”
“What’s the hurry?” Phoenix asked.
“Got five graves to dig tomorrow,” Marvin said. “Mass murder. Over on McCrary – you know, by the hardware store. Kid just gets up in the middle of the night and kills everyone. Gets his brother, his sister, his mom, who’s sleeping on the couch, and then his dad, who’s sleeping with his wife’s sister. Hell of a mess. Bites ‘em is what I heard.”
�
�Between you and me? It’s going to get worse. Let’s go.”
Phoenix, dressed in a dark green poncho, headed for the grave of Phillip Mercer. He led the backhoe in the dark across the soft, wet ground. The weather came out of the south, probably a low pressure front in Louisiana, and the rain descended steadily, softer at times than at others. The ground felt soft, and Phoenix could feel his shoes sinking into it with every step he took. He finally got tired of walking in the blackness and waved for the backhoe to stop. He asked Marvin to turn on the lights, assuring him it wouldn’t matter. More than likely, the guard, if he’d bothered to show up at all, probably had his feet propped up on the secretary’s desk back at the office. He’d be drinking coffee, watching cable, enjoying a cigarette. Nobody in their right mind would be out on a night like this.
Ten minutes later, and after a couple of wrong turns and one stone knocked over, Phoenix found the grave of Phillip Mercer. Not because he’d found the headstone, but because he came upon a fresh pile of rain-soaked dirt in the right row. Now muddy, with rivulets running over it and down it, the dirt pile sat elevated above the actual grave itself. It seemed nobody had bothered to tamp it down.
Marvin went to work with the backhoe, scooping away the soft, wet earth from the top of the grave and piling it neatly on the opposite side, right on top of someone else’s grave. Walt stood off to the side holding a large flashlight making sure Marvin didn’t make a larger mess than what had already been made by the last diggers. After an hour’s worth of careful work, Walt turned towards Marvin, held up his palm and yelled, “Stop!” He grabbed his shovel, climbed down into the grave, and landed on top of the vault with a thump. He cleared the loose, but still dry, dirt away from around the vault – another half hour’s work – and then he ran the cables around vault itself. He attached the cables to the bucket of the backhoe and climbed out covered in red Tennessee mud.
Time Clock Hero Page 9