by Tim Ellis
“Okay.”
He looked at the drugs in the clear-plastic pouches of the medic roll. There was lidocaine, atropine sulfate, epinephrine, etomidate, heparin sodium, midazolam hydrochloride . . . He had to dredge his memory and hoped he was right.
“Pick up a syringe, attach a needle, and fill the syringe with midazolam hydrochloride,” he said to the senator. If he was correct, it was a sedative. “And be real careful what you do with that needle and syringe, because I’m getting slightly nervous now.”
“Twenty mils ought to do it,” Doc said.
“And I’m supposed to take your word for it? You’ll get what you’re given and be thankful that I don’t pump you full of heparin and let you bleed out where you’re lying.”
“I see you know your drugs.”
He ignored the Doc. The last thing he wanted was a conversation with an executioner. “You’re still watching him?” he called to Rae.
“I’m still watching him.”
Once the senator had filled the syringe, Tom said, “Okay, hold the syringe out in front of you with your left hand between the thumb and forefinger.”
He walked the senator back to the Doc.
“Kneel, and inject the full amount into his neck. Take it real easy. I can pull this scalpel across your neck in a heartbeat.”
The senator did as he was told.
“Gently throw the syringe toward the table. Now we wait.”
It didn’t take long for the Doc’s eyes to close.
He pushed the senator in the back of the head. “Lie down.”
“You’ll never get out of here alive.”
“Watch him,” he said to Rae.
The keys to the handcuffs were in the trouser pockets. He reached up and set Rae free. She then unlocked the remaining handcuff on his right wrist.
“Put them on those two.”
She did as he asked.
He struggled into the Doc’s clothes. The jacket was probably two sizes too big, and the trousers were a bit too tight. The shoes were two sizes too small, so he squeezed into the senator’s shoes.
He found a pack of gum in one of the pockets and passed a stick to Rae, who was fashioning something to wear from the clothes that were left, using a pair of scissors and some judicious knots.
“You really know how to show a girl a good time,” she said, taking the gum.
“I’m renowned for it.”
In the jacket pocket, he found a cell and on the floor a Magnum snub-nosed .32 pistol that the Doc must have had in the waistband of his trousers. Unfortunately, the waistband was a bit too tight on him, which he made a mental note to do something about, so he slipped the gun into the right-hand trouser pocket.
He passed the cell to Rae. “Phone Mona.” He reeled off Mona’s number. She keyed it in, and then handed the phone back to him.
“This better be good,” Mona said. “It’s four thirty in the morning, and –”
“Did I ever say you have the right name?”
“Tom! Where the hell are you?”
“That’s a very good question, to which I have no answer. What I can tell you is that I have Senator Raeburn lying naked on the floor in front of me, and he’s the guy who’s been running the child trafficking operation. I’m in a barn somewhere, and I guess there are secret service agents outside who will shoot me if I stick my head out, so Rae and I are going to stay put until you turn up with reinforcements – lots of them.”
“Senator Raeburn! Christ Tom, you really know how to shake those beans up.”
“I’m going to leave this cell on, so that you can get a GPS fix on it. You can do that, right? I remember hearing that from Danny Butler one time.”
“I can’t believe that bastard said something useful for once.”
“I know. Hey, and bring some food. I’m starving.”
“I can tell you what I had for dinner last night, if it’ll help?”
He laughed, but then winced because his hand hurt like hell. Carrie always said he was a big baby when it came to a little bit of pain. A little bit, Carrie! I’m in agony.
Aftermath
They were tidying up the loose ends.
Gretchen Hebb had knocked on his door two days ago.
“I was planning to come and see you,” he said.
“I know, but I thought I’d save you a trip. I came round to say thank you.”
“You didn’t need to. I wish I could have done more.”
“It was enough that they found Mercy’s body. At least I can give her a proper burial. Some people don’t have that closure.”
He nodded. There wasn’t a lot to say. When they searched the grounds of the estate owned by the senator in Palatka on the edge of the Horsehoe Point Conservation Area, they found the shallow graves of ten people – one of which was Mercy Hebb. All of them had been tortured and mutilated.
“Here,” Gretchen said passing him a lumpy brown envelope with his name written on the front of it.
He pursed his lips. “Not more missing children?”
“Open it,” she said.
A pained expression appeared on his face. He glanced at his hand in the cast, which was constrained by a sling. When they’d x-rayed him at the hospital they found he’d jumbled up the carpal bones in his left wrist, torn a few ligaments, and fractured the metacarpals of his thumb and index finger. He needed an operation to straighten it all out, probably a couple of pins in to keep the bones together, they said, so he had to stay there overnight.
“Will I be able to play the piano?” he asked the nurse.
“Yes, I don’t see why not.”
“That’ll be good. I couldn’t play it before.”
She gave him a stern look, as if she’d had her fair share of jokers.
He grinned. The old ones were always the best.
“Where will I go?” Rae said when the nurse had checked him into a room.
“You can go home.”
“I don’t think so.”
“They won’t come after you now, but if you’re worried you could go back to my place for tonight.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll stay here.”
“Where?”
She pointed to an easy chair in the corner of the room. “There.”
“Don’t be crazy. You’ll want a shower, some proper clothes, something to eat, and a good night’s sleep.”
“I can get those things here.”
When he woke up at three in the morning after the operation, the nurse said, “Your daughter’s sleeping on the chair.”
He looked in the corner. Rae had her mouth open like the eighteenth hole on a golf course. She’d had a shower, and was wearing doctor’s blue scrubs. On the floor was an empty plate and mug. He didn’t bother trying to explain that she wasn’t his daughter, because in a way – she was.
“She’s made herself at home then.”
“I’ll say.”
“Yeah, she does that.”
He grimaced like a martyr.
“Would you like some morphine?”
He was pitiful. “If you think I should, nurse.”
Gretchen Hebb took the envelope back off him. “I’ll do it, shall I?.” She ripped the brown paper apart, and bundles of hundred dollar bills held together with elastic bands spilled onto the coffee table. “There’s ten thousand dollars there.”
“I said I didn’t want your money.”
“It’s not my money. It was Mercy’s, and she’d already written your name on it.”
“I still don’t want it.”
She stood up. “I’ll leave it with you anyway. She left me money and a letter, as well. I think she knew she wasn’t going to be coming home. If you don’t want it, give it to a charity, but I know she wanted you to have it.”
“I didn’t find those missing children.”
“You found Mercy – and three of the children – that’s a start.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Use the money to find the rest of them.”
***
Within hours of Senator Raeburn and Ben ‘Doc’ Ratchett being put in lock-up both were dead. Nobody could explain how it had happened, and no one was held accountable. What Tom wanted to know, was who had given the order for their executions?
When he and Rae got back to the hotel, all the ‘evidence’ they’d collected during the investigation was gone. Tom did some checking around, and discovered that a couple of men in suits had been seen on the second floor veranda near his room. Nobody saw anybody enter his room, and the descriptions he was able to get of the two men matched a third of the male population in America.
Oscar Gibson disappeared. He would have been arrested and charged with possession of illegal images and videos of children, but the FBI couldn’t find him. His wife and two children – Tangerine and Nectarine – went to stay at her parents’ house after someone spray-painted obscenities on their primrose yellow house.
Gibson’s second bank account was found to have seventeen dollars in it. The bank manager had laughed when it was suggested by the FBI special agent that the account had previously held $17 million dollars. There was no evidence to support the allegation, and no justification to investigate further.
Henry Appling shot his family and then himself. The FBI found the hole beneath the basement, and DNA evidence was matched to Sally Stackhouse and two other girls. However, although they did discover a purchase receipt for £35,000 for a painting called Pastiche in Purple at the farmhouse, there was no evidence that it was anything more than what it was. They did find a painting in purple by an unknown artist in the basement, but the FBI agents thought it was so bad that it couldn’t possibly be the right painting.
The FBI discovered little Sally’s body where Appling had buried it, but the bodies of the two other girls were never found. There was no evidence that Appling had shot his neighbor Hank Giffey – or set fire to the man’s house and barn.
In effect, it was concluded that Henry Appling was definitely a pedophile of the worst kind, but that he had been working alone. There was certainly no evidence of a child trafficking operation in Florida – or, America, per se. Children went missing, that’s just the way it was.
The staff at the Antonio de Natali Gallery denied all knowledge of any involvement in a child trafficking operation and threatened legal action if such an inflammatory and disgusting accusation was ever repeated. No camp beds or children’s clothing were found in any room of the basement, and an examination of their accounts found only normal income and expenditures relating to the business of buying and selling art.
All the emails between Oscar Gibson and his customers didn’t amount to a pile of beans. There were coded words in the coded text, but as the emails were all obtained through illegal means, they couldn’t be considered as ‘evidence’. Also, there was no key to the numbers. In effect, they didn’t mean anything, and couldn’t be linked to any individual – except number 15 might have been Oscar Gibson, but even that was doubtful.
When the FBI checked for limbo.net, they couldn’t find any reference to it. Mail servers came and went, and limbo.net had shut down its server.
***
“How come you never said you had a car?”
She grinned. “You never asked, and the way you wreck cars, I’m glad I didn’t.”
They were on their way up the I-95 to East Arlington in Jacksonville to see Jimmy Seraphin and Rebekah Snellenberger. They’d planned to stay overnight, so had packed bags. Rae was driving, mainly because of Tom’s cast, and he didn’t have another vehicle yet. The Firebird had gone back, so he was reliant on handouts. He was, however, in negotiation with the insurance company about a replacement for his Dodge, and he was feeling optimistic.
“We could have done the stake-out in this instead of Allegre’s old truck.”
“If you recall, that truck ended up in the junkyard. This prize-winning vehickle would have cost you at least $5,000 to replace.”
He laughed. “Five hundred more like. And I’m being generous, little lady. This is in worse condition than Allegre’s old truck.”
She had a dark-blue 1975 Volkswagon Beetle that someone had tried to customize, but had gotten bored with the project a quarter of the way through. There was rust on the hood, the trunk, and the wheel arches. In fact, there was more rust than car. The front wheels were new, but the back wheels were the original ones without the wheel trims. Nothing had been done to the inside, except there was a load of metal junk on the back-seat.
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you about my baby. And not only that, I doubt we would have survived in this. I think that Allegre’s truck saved us.”
His face creased up. “You’re probably right.”
“You know those three addresses that were highlighted in Mercy Hebb’s address book?”
“Yes.”
“When we were checking everything the day before we got kidnapped, I found something.”
“Oh?”
“I didn’t say anything at the time because I thought it was just a fluke, but it wasn’t – Mercy left us a message.”
He waited.
“Do you want to know what that message was?”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“The case has ended, and you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“Maybe I won’t now.”
“You will. I think I’m getting to know . . .”
“The initials spelled DEACON, my father’s first name: Dulcie Carrick, Ophelia Andrews, and Elly Nolan. Do you think if I’d said anything it would have changed . . .”
“No. If you had said something, I would have looked at it and said it was a coincidence.”
“You don’t believe in coincidences.”
“Except, sometimes they do occur.”
“What are you going to call yourself?”
“It may have escaped your notice, but I do have a name.”
“You know what I mean. Maybe: ‘Top Cat Detective,’ or ‘We Seek Them Everywhere,’ or ‘We’ll Get ‘Em For Ya’ . . .”
“It’s a good job you’re not choosing the name.”
“Why not? You want something original, something that stands out, something . . .”
“Like you, you mean?”
“Exactly. You’re just going to be a boring old fossil – and have a boring old name, aren’t you?”
“I was thinking of ‘TC Investigations”.”
“Yeah – boring. ‘TC’ doesn’t mean ‘Top Cat,’ does it? It means ‘Tom and Carrie,’ doesn’t it?”
“Am I that predictable?”
“You betcha.”
“I’ll have to give it some more thought, I suppose.”
“That’s no good. You’ll just come up with something even more boring. We’ll have to give it some more thought. You need my input if ya don’t want to disappear without trace into the river of obscurity.”
He sighed.
They knew he and Rae were coming. He’d rung Mrs. Stackhouse and arranged the visit, asked her to get Jimmy and Rebekah there because he had a message from Sally.
First off, he had to convince Mrs. Stackhouse that he really could see and converse with the dead, and he showed them newspaper cuttings that he’d collected.
Tears gushed from her eyes, and Sally’s Uncle Ben comforted her. “You saw my Sally then?”
“She came to tell me two things. She said that she released you, Jimmy, from all your promises to her. She said you could marry Rebekah and give her as many babies as you want.”
Both Jimmy and Rebekah were crying and holding hands.
“Sally was always the girl for me, Mister. I loved her good and proper.”
“We both loved her, Jimmy,” Rebekah said.
“Yeah we did, Bekah. I’m gonna really mi
ss her though. She was one of those girls you can’t get outta your head no matter how much you shake it.”
“When we have a baby girl, we’ll call her Sally,” Bekah said.
“You betcha, Bekah. That’ll be the way to remember her forever.”
“What was the other thing?” Sally’s mother asked.
“She came to tell me who had killed her, and you know that he’s dead as well?”
Mrs. Stackhouse nodded. FBI agents had already de-briefed them on what they’d found and what they thought had happened.
“Now, the dead aren’t allowed to tell the living the truth, otherwise there’d be no end of chaos. Sally knew that, and she also knew she’d be punished if she broke the rules, but she did it anyway –.”
Jimmy grinned through his tears. “That was Sally all right, Mister. She’d just go right ahead and do it anyway. Sally didn’t care about no rules, that was for sure.”
Everybody nodded in agreement.
“My wife, who’s also dead by the way, said that Sally’s fine, but I haven’t seen Sally since that day.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Mrs Stackhouse said,.”my Sally will be running Heaven before too long. Sometimes, I could have swung for her, but God I loved that girl more than life itself. If she wanted to do something, she was gonna do it, come what may.” She sobbed into Ben’s shoulder. “And now my Sally’s gone.”
There wasn’t anything else to say. He’d done what little Sally had asked him to do. They stood – and left everyone to grieve for little Sally.
“She must have been some kid,” Rae said.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
***
“How come you live in a hotel, Mister?”
He opened his eyes and smiled. It was quarter to six in the morning, and it wasn’t even light outside. Carrie was whispering to Mabel by the window, and Mabel was answering back.
He smiled. “Hello, Sally. I’m glad to see you’re okay.”
“Well, I suppose I’m okay. I’m still dead, but I’m okay. They let me off. You know . . . for breakin’ the rules. Said I wasn’t to do it again, otherwise there’d be consulquences . . .”