Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) (18 page)

Thirty-three years later a furious surge of electricity flowed through me, and I jabbed a thumb into Massengill’s left eye socket. I dug in deep and scooped the delicate orb out like a melon ball. His eye was nothing but a blob of goo resting on his cheek now. He released me and staggered sideways. My own vision was clouded with sweat and blood, and it took me several seconds to locate the pistol. By the time I bent over and picked it up, Massengill had climbed over the bridge railing.

“No,” I shouted, but of course he didn’t listen. Before I could shoot him, he jumped to the black current raging a hundred feet below.

I staggered over and leaned against the rail. No sign of him anywhere. I stood there for a few seconds, and then I must have collapsed. I woke up in the emergency room at Hallows Cove Memorial.

I booked a flight to the West Coast a couple of weeks later. I rented a car at LAX, drove a hundred miles northwest, and checked into the Super 8 Motel in Lompoc. I hadn’t been to California in years, but it was still as beautiful as I remembered.

Brittney Ryan’s ashes were in my suitcase. Her dental records were never located, but the charred body found along with Donald “Duck” Knight at the Westside apartment was presumed to be hers. Several eyewitnesses had seen them enter the building together.

I took the copper urn from my suitcase, left the motel, drove a few miles south to Jalama Beach County Park. Brittney deserved to rest at “the most beautiful place on the planet.”

The Point Conception lighthouse is surrounded by the Jalama Ranch, a huge span of acreage, and isn’t accessible to the public. The dirt road that leads there from the park is secured with a locked gate and an armed security guard.

But I had connections.

I waited at the gate until Carlos Del Rio drove up in his burgundy Jeep Grand Cherokee. We had agreed to meet there at six p.m., and he was right on time. Del Rio instructed the guard to open the locks and let me in. I climbed into the passenger’s seat, and Del Rio made a U-turn while shouting something in Spanish to the guard. We headed down the dirt road, a cloud of dust in our wake.

Brittney had been in contact with Del Rio through e-mail. He was a foreman at the ranch, and had offered her a job in landscape
maintenance. Brittney’s plan was to work there and commute to L.A. for auditions on her days off.

An old friend in forensics had lifted Del Rio’s e-mail address from her computer’s hard drive.

“It’s about five miles to the lighthouse,” Del Rio said. “Sorry the road is so bumpy.”

“Believe me, I’ve been on bumpier,” I said.

“Can you tell me what happened to Senorita Brittney?”

I lowered my visor to block the sun, low in the western sky now. It took us ten minutes to reach the coast, and during that time I told him Brittney’s story.

A single tear rolled down Carlos Del Rio’s cheek.

“Stay as long as you want, señor. Call me at this number, and I will come when you are ready.”

He drove away, leaving me alone on the desolate bluff, the wind kicking and the surf pounding. I gazed toward the vast Pacific and a priceless view of the sunset that no master artist could duplicate.

The lighthouse, completely automated now for several years, blinked to life as the sea went black.

The Chumash Indians, native to the area, consider this westernmost point of their former territory sacred, a holy place linked to the spiritual world. I learned that from a waitress at a hamburger joint called The Jalama Café.

I screwed off the cap from Brittney’s urn, told her goodbye and that I loved her. She had given me a very brief glimpse of what it might be like to be a father.

I scattered her ashes along the rocky shore of Point Conception, sat in the sand and thought about nothing until the lighthouse switched off and it wasn’t the same day anymore.

Seven months later, I was sitting at a bar in St. Augustine, waiting to get some snapshots of a cheating wife and her lover leaving the motel across the street, when I spotted Massengill’s angel tattoo through my telephoto lens. I sprinted out to my Jimmy and followed the bike north.

His body had never been recovered, but a fisherman near Palatka had found his jeans and waterlogged wallet washed up on the riverbank. The pants had a few ragged holes where crabs and other underwater scavengers had chewed through to munch on his decomposing flesh. DNA tests confirmed the bloodstains on the pants were Massengill’s.

That was that, I thought, until April, when a Harley-Davidson Electra Glide stopped in front of The Neon Phoenix and then cruised through beautiful downtown St. Augustine with the same aptly named disposable douche bag of a human being gripping the handlebars. Shaved head, eye patch, gold hoops in both ears. He looked like a pirate for real now.

Or the ghost of one.

His appearance had changed drastically, but the angel tattoo and the scars on his neck cinched it for me. The same Roy Massengill I had watched take an impossible dive from the Shands Bridge into the St. John’s River was now running red lights with a very expensive motorcycle.

I floored the gas pedal and followed him through Green Cove Springs and Penney Farms. We hit a buck twenty at one point, the temperature gauge on my Jimmy creeping toward the red zone.
With no streetlights, and a canopy of live oaks draped with Spanish moss filtering all but an occasional glimpse of the moon, our headlight beams created a tunnel effect as we sped along State Road 16 toward Middleburg.

The miraculously reanimated Massengill hung a sharp left onto an unmarked two-lane. After a series of disorienting back road turns, we ended up on a bumpy dirt road leading to an electric gate on wheels and a guard shack illuminated with floodlights. It looked like the entrance to a military installation, or maybe a prison. I’d lived in north Florida for many years and never knew this place existed. It gave me the creeps, as though I’d suddenly been transported to some hellish dream where drowned murderers stalked the nightscape with stiff legs and glowing red eyes.

I stopped about a hundred feet from the gate. An armed guard waved the motorcycle through. The guard wore a rent-a-cop uniform. Dark blue pants, light blue shirt, patches on both sleeves and a silver badge twinkling in the halogen glare. Black patent leather shoes. He was not a big man. Five ten, one sixty, I guessed. He had a pistol strapped to his hip and what sailors call a “cunt cap” on his head. He was compact and walked with confidence.

A sign on the fence said
CHAIN OF LIGHT RANCH. JESUS LOVES YOU. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

I thought about stomping the gas pedal and chasing the Harley into the complex, but I doubted if trespassers would be prosecuted. More likely they would be shot.

I turned around and found my way back to the highway. I drove back through the tunnel of live oaks. I opened the window and took a deep breath of Springtime, my heart still pounding. A Colt .45 song came on the radio and I turned it off. I didn’t pass any cars for a long time. The roads were deserted.

If Massengill really was the man on the Harley, I knew his location now and the police could easily go in and pick him up. Is that what I wanted? A lengthy trial with defense lawyers working every angle? No, I wanted Massengill dead. He’d once been a
friend and a crewmember for my band, and he’d saved my life when Marcus Sharp had a revolver pressed against my skull. I still wanted him dead. When I’d thought he was chum in the St. John’s, that felt like justice to me. I didn’t want to allow myself to sink to his level, but were the police and a trial and all the crap that went along with it the only rational option? I gave it some thought on the ride home.

When I got to my place on Lake Barkley, I Googled Chain of Light and found their website. The home page featured a picture of an angel with its wings spread, just like the tattoo on Massengill’s arm. It was an androgynous figure, with curly hair and high cheekbones and full lips. It wore a flowing robe and sash, and every feather in its wings had been drawn with painstaking detail. It was barefoot. Maybe all the members had the same tattoo. Maybe the man on the motorcycle wasn’t Massengill after all. Still, I’d caught a glimpse of his scarred neck. At least I thought I had.

A man named Lucius Strychar had founded Chain of Light in 1979, and he seemed to have a solid television and radio ministry now. Lots of money coming in. In addition to the property I’d seen after following the Harley, the organization held real estate near Orlando and Tampa. I browsed the photo gallery. All the pictures were of men, and all the men were white. Lucius Strychar himself was a chubby guy in his mid-fifties. Clean-shaven double chin and puffy pink cheeks, with blue eyes and thinning salt-and-pepper hair. I imagined he drove a high-end automobile and lived in a luxurious home. All paid for with donations from lonely elderly folks on fixed incomes who welcomed him into their home nightly via the miracle of television. All sheltered from government taxes.

I clicked on several links and soon realized this was not your typical, run-of-the-mill fundamentalist Christian outfit. Reverend Strychar’s message was one of paranoia, referring to the Catholic Church as “The Antichrist” and United States government agencies as “The Gestapo.” A quick navigation through the website convinced
me Chain of Light was an extremist organization with a lot of revenue and a dangerous ideology.

Out of curiosity, I clicked the link for “career opportunities.” One of the job listings was for a guitar player in Reverend Strychar’s music ministry.
Must have experience. Must be a born-again Christian.
“Must have skin the shade of chalk,” I said aloud, although the words weren’t actually on the screen.

I glanced at my old guitar case. Twice, Brittney Ryan had asked me why I quit playing. Twice, I had denied her an answer. I wasn’t sure there was an answer. Maybe, if I hadn’t been a musician, I never would have gotten on that plane and my wife and daughter would still be alive now. It was as if music had betrayed me. I’d gotten fiercely angry at it and divorced it. Something like that. I wished I had at least tried to explain it to Brittney. Now I would never get the chance.

I turned back to the computer. Among the Google hits, I found a man named Bart Harmon who claimed to be a former Chain of Light member. Now he was speaking out against the sect, referring to it as a “brainwashing cult.” I read through most of his website, and then sent him an e-mail asking if he would be willing to talk with me sometime.

The next morning I drove into Green Cove and waited outside Barry Fleming’s office at the courthouse. I sat on a hard wooden bench for over an hour, listening to heels clicking on the terrazzo flooring, cops bitching about how fucked up the system was, lawyers giving sage advice to their clients in hushed tones. A heavily guarded prisoner shuffled by, chains rattling and sneakers squeaking, on his way to one of the courtrooms. He couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, but he wore the expression of an ancient soul completely whipped by a lifetime of rotten circumstances and bad decisions.

Barry finally showed up around ten. To my surprise, he invited me in and offered me a cup of coffee.

“I saw Roy Massengill last night,” I said.

“No you didn’t.”

“I swear to God, Barry, I’m pretty sure it was him.”

Fleming dumped some grounds into the filter basket, poured some water into the reservoir, and started the coffeemaker.

“He’s dead, Colt. He drowned in the St. John’s. Brittney Ryan was incinerated in a Jacksonville apartment building, and Massengill took a dive off the Shands Bridge. They’re gone. You need to accept it and move on.”

“Massengill’s body was never found,” I said.

“So tell me something I don’t know.”

“You ever heard of an outfit called Chain of Light?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Well?”

“Well, what? You thinking about joining? It’s a bunch of right-wing white-supremacist kooks. Jesus freaks and hatemongers who dress up like soldiers and play with guns in the woods. We’ve known about them for a long time.”

“Did you know Massengill was a member?”

“Once again, Massengill’s dead. D-E-A-D. Dead as—”

“Fine. Let’s say Massengill really is dead. Don’t you still think it’s a little bit interesting that a militant religious organization had him as a member? If they let Massengill in, what other kinds of pond scum are they harboring?”

Mr. Coffee started gurgling. Fleming took two Styrofoam cups from a stack and filled them.

“Cream and sugar?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“How do you know Massengill was a member?”

“He had a tattoo. An angel, on his right arm. There’s a picture just like it on Chain of Light’s website.”

“Okay. So what if Massengill was a member? Like I said, we’ve known about Chain of Light for a long time. Actually, they’ve been out there by Penney Farms for thirty-some years now. They’re not doing anything illegal, that we know of, so Massengill being a
member or not being a member is irrelevant. I have a meeting, Colt. Is there anything else you wanted to talk with me about?”

I wanted to talk to him about Tony Beeler, the man I’d interrogated in a police car after Roy Massengill shot Marcus Sharp.

“You never did tell me how that Beeler guy died,” I said.

“Why are you so interested in him?”

“I just am.”

“He asphyxiated himself in his jail cell. Used an entire spool of dental floss, if you can imagine that.”

“Was there an autopsy?” I said.

“I don’t know. Yeah. He committed suicide while he was incarcerated, so there had to have been. It’s protocol. Anyway, I’m really running late, so—”

“Thanks for the coffee.”

We exited his suite. Fleming went left and I went right. Fleming didn’t want to admit the possibility that Roy Massengill was still alive. I couldn’t say I blamed him. The case was closed, as far as the police were concerned. But I knew what I had seen, and I wasn’t ready to give up.

I got on an elevator and pushed B for basement. An old friend of mine worked down in the Medical Examiner’s Office.