He stopped suddenly because the sounds up ahead had ceased.
“Michelle?” he hissed. “Michelle?” He gripped his pistol and swung it in arcs, periodically looking over his shoulder in case Eddie had circled around to rear-flank him.
Up ahead Michelle was staring at a clump of brush with great intensity. She glanced down every so often to see if the tiny red light was dancing across her body. She eased her pistol’s muzzle through a small gap in the wild holly bush she was hidden behind and parted its branches slightly. There was slight movement to her right, but it turned out to be a squirrel.
She heard a noise behind her and whipped around.
“Michelle?”
It was King, about twenty feet away. He’d taken a different path and was separated from her by a wall of bramble.
“Stay back,” she said between clenched teeth. “He’s stopped right up ahead.”
She turned and waited. One lightning flash; that was all she needed. She edged around the bush, backtracked a bit and then slowly made her way down and around with the goal of coming up behind Eddie.
The flash of lightning. She heard the noise to her right. She pivoted and fired in the same instant. There was an explosion in front of her as a spark of red-hot light erupted for an instant and then vanished.
She couldn’t know it, but Eddie had at the same time been circling around her and had fired at the exact same instant as she. Beating odds of probably a billion to one, the two bullets had collided, causing the explosive spark she’d seen.
Eddie hit her low and hard, driving the breath right out of her before drilling her into the dirt almost face-first. It was a textbook tackle. Mud, leaves and twigs were pushed so far into her mouth she could barely breathe. Michelle twisted her body around and tried to kick at him, but he was on top of her pinning her down. He was unbelievably strong; she couldn’t come close to breaking his iron grip with her fingers; it was like a child trying to escape from her daddy. She tried to get up, but she didn’t have nearly the strength to do it with his 220-plus pounds clenched around her.
Damn it. She spit shit out of her mouth. If she could just push him away, she could deliver stunning blows with her feet that might give her a chance. But he was simply too strong. She felt the hand go around her throat while he kept the other one locked on her arms. She thrashed wildly around trying to throw him off, but she had no leverage. She tried to call out but couldn’t. She started to lose focus. Her brain felt heavy, her limbs started to twitch.
Is this it? Is it?
And then everything relaxed. The weight was lifted. She was free, and Michelle knew she’d just died at the hands of Eddie Lee Battle. She turned to see his face peering down at her, smiling at what he’d just done.
Only he wasn’t looking at her. She sat up, scooted away from him and only then saw what he was staring at.
King was standing there. Both hands were around his pistol grips, the weapon pointed directly at Eddie, who was backing away a little. King’s clothes were torn to shreds and his face and hands bloodied from where he’d fought through the bramble to reach them.
“I wouldn’t have killed her, Sean.”
King was trembling with rage. “Yeah, right, you bastard.”
Eddie continued to back away, his hands up.
“Another step, and you get it between the eyes, Eddie.”
Eddie stopped, but he started to lower his hands.
“Keep ’em up,” barked King.
Michelle rose and looked around for her pistol.
“Hey, Sean, just go ahead and shoot,” said Eddie wearily. “Save the state a lot of money housing me on death row.”
“We’re not doing it that way.”
“Just do it, Sean. I’m beat, man. I got nothing left.”
“You’ll make it. Have no fear.”
“You think so?”
“In fact, I’ll bet you—”
“The hell you say, you’re on—”
Eddie leaped, his hand sliding to his back; he pulled the pistol.
Michelle screamed.
The shot was fired.
King walked over and looked down at Battle lying there. He kicked the pistol away with his foot, stared at the blood pouring down from Eddie’s shoulder where the bullet had impacted before exiting out the man’s back.
“I won the bet this time, Eddie.”
Eddie smiled weakly up at him. “Just one tick off, man. One tick off.”
Chapter 99
Eddie Battle pleaded guilty to every murder he’d committed. In return for fully cooperating with the authorities and answering all their questions, and because there was some doubt as to his mental stability, his attorneys were able to broker a deal that would send him to prison without the possibility of ever being free again. There was immediate reaction from all corners. Pro-death-penalty activists marched in the streets of Wrightsburg. There were calls for impeachment of the governor, the prosecutors and the judge assigned to the case. The Battle family—at least what remained of them—was ankle-deep in death threats. It was predicted that whatever maximum security prison he was sent to, Battle would be dead within a month.
King hadn’t followed much of this. After shooting Eddie he’d helped carry him and Sylvia down to the boats where they’d been taken to the hospital. Both had fully recovered, though King doubted Sylvia would ever be the same after her terrifying experience.
Hell, I might never be the same, thought King.
He’d taken long rides on his boat, driving across in the daylight what he’d covered that awful night. He and Michelle had talked about it some but had mostly avoided the subject. They were drained enough. However, she’d been effusive in her thanks for saving her.
She kept shaking her head at the memory of it. “I’ve never felt so helpless like that before, Sean. I’ve never encountered a man that strong before. It was like he was possessed by something not of this world.”
“I think he was,” replied King.
All of which brought King to where he was right now, sitting at his desk and wondering what Eddie had meant by his last words while lying bleeding on that hill.
“Just one tick off, man.” The five words beat into his head, and he couldn’t get rid of them. He finally rose from his desk and drove over to the Battles’. Remmy was home, Mason told him.
There were several pieces of luggage stacked in the foyer.
“Someone going on a trip?” asked King.
“Savannah’s taken a job overseas. She’s leaving today.”
Lucky her, thought King as Mason led him down the hallway.
Remmy seemed a very pale version of her former self. She was sipping from her cup of coffee. King felt certain it was actually nine-tenths Mr. Beam.
“I hear Savannah’s moving out,” he said after Mason had left them.
“Yes, but she said she might come back for Christmas,” the mother said hopefully.
Or not, thought King.
“Is Dorothea out of rehab?”
“Yes. She’s back next door. I’m going to help her with her money problems.”
“That’s good to know. No reason not to spread the wealth. And she is family. The police no longer suspect her in Kyle’s death?”
“I don’t think they do. I doubt they’ll ever solve that.”
“You never know.”
Neither said a word about Eddie. What was there to say anyway?
King was anxious to leave, so he decided to just get to it. “Remmy, I came here to ask you one question. It’s about a former employee of yours, Billy Edwards?”
She looked at him sharply. “The mechanic?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s the question?”
“I need the exact date when he left.”
“The payroll records will show that.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He looked at her expectantly.
“Do you want them now?”
“Right now.”
When she returned with them, King had turned to leave but then something made him stop.
He stared down at the meticulously groomed and attired Remington Battle sitting there in a beautiful old chair, the epitome of the aristocratic southern grande dame.
She glanced up. “Is there something else?” she asked him coldly.
“Was it worth it?”
“Was what worth it?”
“Being Bobby Battle’s wife. Was it worth losing both your sons?”
“How dare you!” she said sharply. “Do you realize the hell I’ve been through?”
“Yeah, it’s really been a piece of cake for me too. Why don’t you try answering my question?”
“Why should I?” she retorted.
“Call it a gracious act by a refined and dignified lady.”
“Your sarcasm is absolutely lost on me.”
“Then let me lay it straight out for you. Bobby Jr. was your child. How could you just let him die?”
“It wasn’t like that!” she said, her voice rising. “You think it was an either/or choice? You think I didn’t love my son?”
“Words are easy, it’s the actions that are hard, Remmy. Like standing up to your husband. Like telling him you didn’t give a shit where he got the disease but that your son was getting treatment for it. It’s not like it’s that hard to diagnose, even back then. You put the kid on penicillin and chances are extremely good you’d have both your sons in your life right now. Did you ever think about it in those terms?”
Remmy started to say something and then stopped. She set her cup of coffee down and folded her hands in her lap.
“Maybe I wasn’t as strong back then as I am now.” King saw the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “But I finally did make the right decision. I took Bobby Jr. to all sorts of specialists.”
“But it was too late.”
“Yes,” Remmy said quietly. “And then the cancer came. And he just couldn’t fight it off.” She brushed at her tears, reached for her coffee but then stopped and looked up at him.
“Everyone has to make choices in life, Sean,” she said.
“And lots of people make the wrong choices.”
Remmy seemed about to make some biting comment, but King stopped her cold when he took a photo off the shelf and held it up. It was of Eddie and Bobby Jr. as children. She suddenly put a hand to her mouth as though to stifle a sob. She looked at him, the tears sliding down her cheeks now. “Bobby was a very different man when we first married. Maybe that’s the one I was clinging to, hoping he’d come back.”
King put the photo back. “I think any man who lets his own son die without lifting a hand to save him isn’t a man worth waiting for.”
He walked out and never looked back.
As King came outside, he saw a driver was loading Savannah’s bags into a black sedan. Savannah climbed out of the car and approached King.
She said, “I wanted to see you before I left. I heard some of what you said to my mother. I wasn’t eavesdropping. I was just passing by.”
“Frankly, I don’t know whether to pity or loathe her.”
She stared at the house. “She always wanted to be the matriarch of this great southern family. You know, sort of a dynasty.”
“She didn’t quite make it,” commented King.
Savannah stared at him. “That’s the thing… I think she made herself believe that she had made it. She hated my father in private and yet idolized him in public. She loved her sons and yet sacrificed them to preserve her marriage. It makes no sense. All I know is I’m getting the hell away. I’ll spend the next ten years trying to figure it out. But I’m going to do it from a distance.”
They hugged, and King held the car door for her.
“Best of luck, Savannah.”
“Oh, Sean, please tell Michelle thanks for everything she did.”
“I will.”
“And tell her I took her advice on my tattoo.”
King looked at her quizzically but said nothing. He waved as the car sped off.
King drove to the Wrightsburg Gazette and unwittingly sat at the same microfiche machine that Eddie had when he broke in that night.
King raced through the spool of back issues until he found the date he was looking for, the day Edwards had been let go. He didn’t find what he was searching for. Then it occurred to him that it might have happened too late to make the next day’s edition. He forwarded to the day after that. He didn’t have to read far. It was front-page news. He read the story carefully, sat back and then finally laid his head down on the desk as his mind began to creep into areas that were truly unthinkable.
When he rose back up, he noted the wall Eddie had written on. It had been cleaned off, but there were still traces of the word he’d written there.
TEAT
A few days before, he’d played with various combinations of the word: tent, test, text. Nothing seemed to work. Yet he didn’t believe Eddie would have written that word if it wasn’t important.
King pulled the cipher disk out of his pocket and played with it. He had taken to carrying it around for some reason. Long ago it was discovered that frequency analysis could break an encryption of fair length. The method was straightforward. Some letters of the alphabet occur far more frequently than others. And the letter that occurs far more often than all others is the letter e. This discovery had put the code-breakers on top for quite some time until the encryption folks once more got the upper hand centuries later.
King spun the outer ring of the cipher disk around until the letter e was lined up with the letter a. One tick off. He looked at the wall and in his mind’s eye changed one letter, e for an a. Now it read:
TEET
That made no sense either. What was a teet? As a long shot he left and went back to his office, went to a search engine on the Internet and typed in the word teet, and for the hell of it, the word crime. He didn’t expect to find anything. However, a long list came up. Probably all garbage, he thought. And yet when he looked at the very first listing, he suddenly sat up.
“Oh, my God,” he said. He read all that was there and sat back. He felt his forehead: it was damp with sweat, his whole body was. “Oh, my God,” he said again.
He stood slowly. He was glad Michelle was out. He couldn’t have faced her. Not right now.
King had some things to track down, just to make sure. And then he was going to have to just face it. He knew it would be one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.
Chapter 100
Two days later King pulled up into the parking lot and got out of his car. He went inside the office building, asked for Sylvia and was directed back to her office.
She was at her desk in her medical office, her left arm in a sling. She looked up and smiled, then came around and gave him a hug.
“Do you feel halfway human yet?” she asked.
“I’m getting there,” he said quietly. “How’s the arm?”
“Almost as good as new.”
He sat down across from her while she perched on the edge of her desk.
“I haven’t seen much of you lately.”
“I’ve been kind of busy,” he answered.
“I’ve got tickets to a play in D.C. for next Saturday. Would it be too forward to ask if you’d like to join me? Separate hotel rooms, of course. You’ll be perfectly safe.”
King glanced over at the coatrack. The woman’s coat, sweater and shoes were neatly arranged either on or next to the rack.
“Is something wrong, Sean?”
He looked back at her. “Sylvia, why do you think Eddie came after us?”
Her demeanor instantly changed. “He’s crazy. We helped bring him down. Or at least you did. He hated you for it.”
“But he let me go. And he kept you. He had you bent over a tree stump, about to cut your head off. Like an executioner.”
Her face twisted angrily. “Sean, the man had killed nine people already, most at random.”
He took a piece of p
aper out of his pocket and handed it to her. She sat back behind her desk and slowly read it.
She looked up. “It’s the newspaper article about my husband’s death.”
“He was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, case was never solved.”
“I’m well aware of that,” she said coldly, sliding the paper back across. “So?”
“So the same night George Diaz was killed Bobby Battle’s Rolls-Royce was damaged. The next day the Rolls was gone, and so was the mechanic who looked after Bobby’s collection.”
“Are you saying this mechanic person killed my husband?”
“No, I’m saying Bobby Battle did.”
She looked at him, stunned. “Why in the hell would he do that?”
“Because he was avenging you. He was avenging the woman he loved.”
Sylvia rose, her fingers digging into her desktop. “What the hell are you trying to do here?”
Now King’s demeanor changed. He sat forward. “Sit down, Sylvia, I have a lot more to say.”
“I—”
“Sit!”
She slowly sank back into her chair, without ever taking her gaze off him.
“You told me once that you’d seen Lulu Oxley at the gynecologist you both used. You intimated she’d changed docs. But she didn’t change docs. You did.”
“So is that a crime?”
“I’m getting to that. I got the name of your new ob-gyn from your old doctor, and then I went to see your new gynecologist. She was way up in D.C. Why so far away, Sylvia?”
“That’s none of your damn business.”
“When you had your surgery three and a half years ago, your husband performed it. He was the best, you said. Only he had another agenda when he opened you up. I’ve discovered after talking to a surgeon friend of mine that the procedure to correct a ruptured diverticulum is one of the very few that would allow the surgeon to do something ‘extra’ in the pelvic region that most likely wouldn’t be noticed by anyone assisting him.”
“Would you please get to the point!” she exclaimed.
“I know, Sylvia.”
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