Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) (17 page)

“Wait. What was the cop’s name?”

“I don’t remember his name. He seemed to be interested that the patient was a burn victim, though. He had suffered some burns
himself, in the Army or something. He had some pretty ugly scar tissue on his neck.”

I suddenly felt like the biggest fool who’d ever lived. “Was his name Massengill?” I asked.

“Yeah. That was it. Massengill.”

I walked outside and sat in the truck for a few minutes, thinking about where to start looking for Massengill. I decided to try Kelly’s Pool Hall first. I hoped he was there. If he was there getting drunk, it would give me an immediate edge.

A shiny white Mercedes was in the parking lot at Kelly’s, license tag
GAS MAN
. I walked inside.

Anil was loading a case of Budweiser into the cooler, and his son Philip was lowering a batch of curly fries into hot grease. I found an open stool and sat down. Massengill wasn’t there.

“The usual?” Anil said.

“Just a soda water with lime.”

Anil brought my soda in a collins glass.

“Seen Roy Massengill around?”

“You know, Mr. Massengill hasn’t been in lately. I’m wondering if he is sick.”

“Maybe he found Jesus and quit drinking.”

Anil silently considered the possibility and then sauntered back to his case of Bud.

Kelly’s back room has ten coin-operated pool tables, the kind you can find in any barroom anywhere in the country. Those tables are seven-feet long, three-and-a-half-feet wide, and are fine for your casual recreational player. The real game, though, the only game I’m interested in playing, is played on a Brunswick, nine-feet long. Kelly’s had one such table, upstairs in a private room. My friend Joe and I have it for two hours every Thursday night. I climbed the stairs and saw Dr. Martin Jones practicing bank shots. He was alone.

“You’re pretty good,” I said.

“Thanks. It’s been a while. I was intramural nine-ball champ in college.”

“You like to play for money?”

“Actually, I need to get going. You can have the table.”

“Come on. Play me a game of nine-ball for ten dollars a game.”

He looked at his watch. “All right. But I’ll have to leave after a couple of games.”

“Fine.”

When I play with Joe, or in tournaments, I use a replica Balabushka, a very expensive cue with an Irish linen wrap and a bird’s-eye maple forearm. It was a birthday gift from Papa a few years ago, my one and only prized possession. I had it with me, in a leather satchel behind the seat in Joe’s pickup, but I didn’t figure I’d need it for Dr. Jones.

“Lag for the break?” he said.

“I play on this table all the time. It’ll be more fair if we just flip a coin?”

We flipped, and he won.

I took the wooden triangle from a hook on the wall and racked the balls. Jones lined up at a diagonal and broke hard. It was a nice break, sending the six ball to the far left corner pocket where it dropped in. He made two more shots and then played a safety, leaving me what he figured was an impossible position. I walked around the table, cue in hand, layering on the chalk.

This was no friendly game of pool for me. I didn’t want to win the game, I wanted to beat him. I wanted him to walk away with his head hung low. I hit the cue ball hard, with top English, sent it three rails into the three. The nine ball broke off the rail, and slowly rolled toward the left side pocket. It hung on the lip for a second, dropped in.

“That’s one,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows and gave me a nervous little laugh. It was my break now, and I went at it with no mercy. I ran the table on the next five games while he sat and watched. I could have
hustled him, played below level on purpose, kept the money flowing, but I wasn’t in it for the money. I wanted a slice of his pride, wanted him to see what the game was like against a great player.

“Too good for me,” he said. He handed me a handful of cash, and walked toward the stairs.

“You know a nurse named Juliet Dakila?” I said.

He stopped, turned around, looked me directly in the eyes, and nodded.

“If you ever go near her again, I’ll kill you.”

I left him standing there. I went downstairs and walked outside. The sky was clear now with no moon but plenty of stars. The air felt clean and I took a deep breath of it before climbing into the truck and driving to Roy Massengill’s house. My arm was throbbing like a goddamn disco.

I had a theory. Massengill had seen Corina Spivey leaving the little girl on a chair in the ER. He’d somehow tracked Corina down, learned that she was a physician’s wife and that they had plenty of money. Prime candidates for extortion. He contacted them, using the name Pirate, and told them he’d seen Corina abandon the baby. He arranged for cash to be dropped somewhere, and when the cash ran out he extorted personal information from vegetative nursing home patients in its place. He sold that information to Marcus Sharp, to be used on bogus registrations for stolen cars.

The scam was going along fine until Brittney got hold of Doctor Spivey’s copy of the video. She’d taken the tape to the tennis court, and had given it to Kent Clark, the tennis pro, to record her lesson. Then, when she went back to the Spiveys’ house to watch it, the footage with the scalded baby came on. Michael Spivey must have found out that Brittney had seen that footage. There was no way for me to know exactly what happened, or why everyone reacted as they did, but Spivey must have threatened her, or maybe even tried to abduct her at that time. Brittney escaped, and then left the note on Leitha’s car saying that she was running away. She didn’t run away because Leitha grounded her. She was running from Spivey. She was that scared.

Massengill must have freaked out when Spivey told him Brittney had the tape. In Roy Massengill’s mind, Brittney had become a threat, a potential witness against the Spiveys. If Michael and Corina Spivey had been arrested, they might have disclosed Massengill’s extortion scheme, which then would have led to the car theft ring. Brittney’s knowledge of the scalded baby could have brought down the whole house of cards, and that’s why Massengill needed her dead.

That was my theory, but theories don’t hold up well in court. Theories don’t sign arrest warrants. I needed evidence, and there simply wasn’t any.

From a legal standpoint, it was going to be difficult to make a case against Massengill. With Marcus Sharp and the Spiveys dead, there wasn’t a single witness to any of the crimes he’d committed. I was sure all his dealings had been done in cash, so no paper trail. I only had one fact to go on: he was in the ER the night baby Melanie died. Everything else was circumstantial.

But I decided not to let a minor detail like the law stand in my way.

Massengill’s car wasn’t in the driveway, no lights on in the house. I parked around the block. I took the flashlight from the glove compartment, a long screwdriver from the toolbox, and the pistol Joe had loaned me. Joe’s 12-gauge Remington was behind the seat, but I didn’t want to be seen walking down the street with it. Neighbors get nervous when they see a guy walking down the street with a big gun.

In the movies all private investigators have suede carrying cases full of burglar’s tools and they’re all experts at picking locks. I laugh whenever I see that. Like breaking and entering is part of our daily routine.

I crept around back, wedged the screwdriver between the door and the jamb and muscled the deadbolt away from the frame with one quick jerk. Brass parts from the lock scattered, jangling on the concrete stoop. I was counting on Massengill using the front door
and not seeing the mess I’d made. I walked inside and switched on the flashlight. The most recent edition of the
Florida Times-Union
was spread out on the kitchen table, so I knew he had been there in the past twenty-four hours. It was only a matter of time until he came back home.

I turned off the flashlight and sat at the table in complete darkness with Joe’s pistol in my right hand. I had the element of surprise on my side. Otherwise, Massengill was superior in every way. He was a third-degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and a much better shooter than me. My only chance was to ambush him and try to force a confession.

I sat there listening to the kitchen faucet drip until I realized I had made a terrible mistake. I ran out the back door and drove like a madman toward Juliet’s house.

Massengill’s truck was parked behind the row of crape myrtles that separated Juliet’s front yard from the roadside drainage ditch.

I saw him running from the garage toward the woods behind the house, but I didn’t fire. I watched him disappear into the pine forest.

I ran inside and found Juliet on the living room floor, blood pouring from her nose. I knelt down and took her head in my hands.

“I shot him,” she slurred. “I got hold of his gun, and I shot him. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”

“Where’s the gun?”

“I don’t know.”

She was hysterical, wild-eyed, in a state of shock. I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom. I wiped her face with a wet washcloth and threw some ice cubes in a Ziploc bag for her to hold on her nose.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

“No! Don’t leave me. Please, Nicholas. Oh, my God, please don’t leave me.”

“I have to find him. I promise, I’ll be right back.”

I left her there sobbing. Her nose was probably broken, but she didn’t appear to be hurt otherwise. On my way out, I dialed 9-1-1 and left the phone hanging. Juliet’s address would show on the computer, and they would send someone out. I didn’t have time to explain. Massengill was a wounded animal now, even more dangerous than before.

When I got outside I heard his truck start and saw the headlights come on. He fishtailed out of the driveway and headed south.

Joe’s pickup and Juliet’s car both had flat tires, courtesy of a knife or some other puncture tool. I thought I was going to have to hang back and wait for the cops until I noticed that annoying little dirt bike parked in the neighbor’s garage. I didn’t see anyone around and I didn’t have time to seek permission so I hopped on and fired it up and left the driveway with the throttle pegged.

The bike was a Suzuki 125 with a steel plate where the headlight should have been. It had absolutely no business on the street, especially at night. Being invisible was good, because Massengill couldn’t see me in his rearview mirror; being invisible was bad, because nobody else could see me either. If a car pulled from a side street to cross the highway, I would most likely end up skewered on an oak branch or doubled over and fried on a power line.

Massengill’s taillights shone half a mile in front of me, and the gap was widening. I couldn’t keep up. I thought I was going to lose him until his brake lights flared and he slowed down and stopped in the middle of the Shands Bridge.

I didn’t want him to hear me coming, so I cut the engine and abandoned the bike and ran as fast as I could.

Massengill threw something over the railing to the river a hundred feet below. He didn’t notice me until I stepped up and clocked his jaw with a right hook. While he went down on one knee, I pulled the .25 and pressed the barrel firmly between his eyes. He coughed and spit out a tooth.

I was panting, my lungs rattling like a diesel.

“You’re one low-life motherfucker,” I said. “Tell me why you killed those girls.” I pressed the gun harder against his forehead. “Tell me!”

In a single sweeping motion, he pushed the gun away and somehow managed to swivel and kick me in the throat. I went down. I still had the .25, and I got a single round off before he was on top of me. It grazed the top of his head, and blood trickled down both sides of his face. He grabbed my right arm and hammered it against the pavement. The gun skittered away.

“You’re dead, bitch,” he said.

I managed to dodge a punch to my head, and I heard something crack like a walnut when his knuckles met the blacktop. He stood, infuriated with pain. I got up and took one step toward the gun before he had me in a choke hold.

Flashes of bright orange exploded in my head, and my arms went numb for a second. I tried to move toward the pistol, the inches like miles.

A whiskey aura surrounded Massengill, as though he had bathed in a barrel of it. He had been drinking, his side was bleeding from Juliet’s shot, my bullet had furrowed through the top of his skull, and he had shattered his hand on the road. He must have been in severe pain, but his physical strength didn’t seem diminished. All that Navy SEAL training was paying off for him now, and I was huffing like a blown radiator. Like a forty-five-year-old chain smoker who didn’t exercise enough.

Massengill’s giant forearm clamped tighter on my throat. I struggled to free myself, but it was no use. I was fading.

“I need that goddamn video,” he said. His voice sounded muffled and faraway, as though he were speaking through a cardboard tube.

“Fuck you,” I grunted.

“That’s what Leitha Ryan said just before I put a cigar out on her clit. Her death could have been a lot less painful if she’d been more cooperative.”

I managed to croak out a few words. “You’re going straight to
hell. You started that fire, too, didn’t you? You killed Leitha, and then you killed Brittney.”

“You think you’re so fucking smart, Colt. You don’t know shit.”

It was something my stepfather had said one time when I was twelve.
You don’t know shit.
I’d ridden off on my bicycle after school one day to see a girl, intending to make it back home in time to mow the grass. I was late, and it was dark, and he greeted me inside with a section of Hot Wheels track. I’d expected a beating, but he was way out of control this time. He lashed me with the orange strip of plastic again and again, on the legs and butt where the welts wouldn’t show for school. I couldn’t take it anymore. I cracked him in the nose with a left jab and drew blood. He had been sitting at the TV, eating a plate of pork chops, and he grabbed the steak knife on his tray and buried it in my gut. On the way to the hospital he said, “When they ask you how this happened, you don’t know shit, you understand? You were running with the knife, and you slipped and fell.”