In the Blood (22 page)

Three had been found along a stretch of sand, washed over, as if obscured by someone dragging a tarp or blanket down the trail. If the obfuscation had occurred at night – like all else did – it would have been easy to miss a couple prints.

I said, “Let’s say the woman is running from the inside action, bad things. Someone in the house throws the harpoon in defense. Meanwhile
the lady is out the back door with Noelle in hand.”

“She puts the kid in the boat. But something bad happens. Noelle washes out on the tide, floats to Dauphin Island.”

I said, “Is the person in the shack the person who bought the place with cash in a tithe envelope from Scaler’s Circus of Worship, first name Kurt, second name indecipherable?”

“The landlord said the buyer was an older guy in a suit. Smallish in stature. Shades. Hat.”

“The landlord said it was a good suit, right?”

“He said, ‘Man wear good suit, first-class.’”

“Mr Landlord would know,” I said. “Clothes are important to him, part of looking like a business-man and not an itinerant slumlord.”

Harry gave it some thought. “So the man who paid for the cabin using a tithe envelope from Scaler’s church might not be the man found dead inside?”

“Clair said the body inside was a male in his mid twenties to early thirties. The landlord’s description fits an older man, but not Scaler.”

Harry looked grim. “It’s all smoke and mirr—whoops. Train ahead. Looks like we stop a bit.”

Freight-cars were pouring from the pine forest like they were being assembled in the trees and set on the track. The train sounded like it was going somewhere it wanted to go and I got out to watch, Harry following. We left the engine on to keep the AC pouring into the Crown Vic and stepped into
the bright sun. I rolled up my sleeves, and sat on the hood to watch the four-engine freighter highball past, boxcars, tankers, hoppers, container flats – swaying and squealing and rumbling, the sound added to the staccato clanging of the crossing signal, a raucous cacophony of journey and commerce.

On the other side of the crossing, in jittery motion, I saw two motorcycles roll up, with men riding tandem. Outsized silver-studded saddlebags were slung over the tails of the hogs, big-ass Harleys, and I could hear the unmuffled four-strokes over the howling clatter and metallic squeals of the train, the riders gunning the accelerators as if challenging one another to something. They wore full-face racing helmets, which seemed a bit odd. They appeared to be talking to one another, passing time as the train passed.

“The end’s near,” Harry said.

For a split-second my mind heard it as an eschato-logical statement, until I saw the rear of the train a few hundred yards up the tracks. I craned my head farther and saw a black pickup truck moving in on us from behind. Three men inside. Chrome light bar.

Why was it so familiar?

The motorcycles roared louder. The train squealed and shivered the earth. The trestle bells tore holes in the air. I took a final look across the way.

What?

The barrel of a short shotgun swung past the knees of one of the riders. He was off the bike and getting back on, probably grabbed the gun from the saddlebag. He held it close, hidden.

The rear of the train clattered past. I spun to Harry.

“Ambush!” I yelled. “Get in the car!”

The first explosion took out the passenger-side window as I was diving inside. The air filled with cubed glass. I hugged the floor, hearing rounds chunking into the Crown Vic’s chassis, the truckers firing from behind. The rear window crumpled. My legs were still outside and I drew them as close as I could while pulling myself inside with whatever I could grab. Harry had done the same on his side, simultaneously pulling out his weapon. His face was taut and I expected mine was the same. We’d fallen into serious shit.

I stuck my head up, pulled it back. The bikers were crossing the tracks slowly, dodging the trestle gates. They could pull to the side and thump heavy rounds through the Crown Vic’s doors until Harry and I were more metal than meat. But I’d also seen a small gray structure on the far side of the tracks, a deserted gas station or something.

“We’re trapped,” Harry said.

“There’s a building over there,” I yelled. “I’ve got the wheel. Push on the gas.”

Harry’s arm was trapped beneath him, but he jammed an elbow into the accelerator. The car
lurched ahead, Harry’s arm slipping from the gas pedal. The car stopped dead.

“Lay on it, Harry!”

He flopped sideways and pressed his body against the pedal. The car made a grinding sound and roared forward. I felt the vehicle crunch through the crossing gates, felt the downgrade as we slammed over to the far side of the crossing. I jammed the wheel hard to the right, forgetting to tell Harry to roll off the gas. We were still accelerating when we hit the structure. I heard a thunderous crash. The engine roared, died.

“Harry?” I yelled. “You all right?”

I heard a grunt. “I can’t move, Carson.”

If the bikers made a concerted run, Harry and I would be easy targets on the floor, deer in the headlights. Rounds started slapping the upper compartment, not the lower doors. I kicked open the door, slipped out, dropped. Another slug whanged off the roof of the Crown Vic.

We’d landed in a defunct local station, slamming the wooden wall at enough speed to crash three-quarters through to the inside, dropping half the roof at the rear of the Crown Vic, a pile of four-by-four timbers that were keeping the first couple feet of airspace free of slugs. I heard Harry struggling in the car, smelled gasoline, burned rubber.

A concentrated burst of fire tore into the broken wood around me. I fired from beside the lumber pile, no idea where the rounds went. I saw one of
the bikes readying a run at us, the gunner thumbing red shells into the tubular magazine. The driver cranked the accelerator.

I flattened on the concrete as the duo roared closer, the bike weaving to screw up my aim. A blast from the shotgun tore through shingles two feet from my head, filling the air with asphalt dust and wood chips. The gunner on the other bike was fast-firing a pistol.

It was an insult, like the bastards had singled me out for all this bullshit. Every damn day was a fresh challenge from a new enemy. The guy on the bike fired until his magazine emptied, and I saw the driver skid-spin away as the shooter reloaded.

I heard drums thunder in my head and felt an anger so hot it made my skin glow and my heart was roaring so loud it drowned out everything else in my world. I stood from behind the cover, the crap impeding my aim. I flicked the clip from the butt of the Glock, pulled another from my belt, heard a bullet tumble past my ear as the rider and shooter turned for another charge. The shot gunner pulled a blast high and to the side.

“Carson!”

I turned and saw Harry. He’d gotten out the car. I waved, turned back to the action.

The Harley bore in, the shooter grinning as they approached, waving the muzzle side to side. I heard a puff at my right ear, then my left. I raised
my Glock. I saw the shooter grin, he figured he had me.

I pulled the trigger three times. As if in slow motion, I saw the guy in back touch at his side. He panicked and grabbed the driver’s arm, jerking the handlebars and sending the machine down. I saw sparks as pedals ground into concrete.

I heard firing from behind me. Harry.

A guy in the truck unloaded with everything he had, cover fire. Two others lifted the gunshot guy into the bed, one of them yelling, “It’s all right. I got you. You’ll be all right. Hang in there, brother.”

The driver of the fallen bike was muscling it up, the passenger on the other bike racking the shotgun. I heard Harry laying out shots, glass breaking, a ricochet. Someone out front yelled,
“Go!”

The firing stopped. I heard tires squeal and engines roaring in retreat.

I turned to see Harry, gun by his side, his jacket ripped half off, the lining hanging to his knees.

“You all right?” I said. “You hit? You said you couldn’t move.”

“My jacket got caught on the goddamn pedal, couldn’t tear loose.”

He wavered, looked around at the shattered station, black smoke, totaled Crown Vic, crossing gates like shattered candy canes, the ground littered with shotgun shells and bright brass casings aglint in the sunlight.

Then he looked at me for an uncomfortably long time.

“You walked straight into them.”

“Seemed the thing to do,” I said.

“Yeah,” I heard Harry say into his cell, talking to the State Police. “Carson put a round in one of the perps.”

“I caught him in the lower right abdomen,” I called to Harry. “Punched through intestine. I expect he’ll make it if he gets to a hospital, has everything cleaned and sewed and gets pumped full of juice to ward off peritonitis.”

Harry passed the info on. The Staties would check the hospitals and clinics stat. Plus visit physicians’ offices in the area, making sure no one was being forced into playing emergency room for a gunshot victim.

The State Police did themselves proud, arriving in four minutes, the tech squad rolling the big traveling lab down the road a few minutes later. The ranking officer from the Staties was Sergeant Waylon J. Plummer, a black guy in his early forties. It had always mystified us why he bore the name of one of the South’s preeminent country stars, Waylon Jennings.

One day, unable to take it any more, we’d asked. Turned out Waylon’s mama was white and she’d decided that eleven hours in labor outweighed the ten minutes Daddy had invested in the whole process, giving her naming rights, and she’d chosen to honor her favorite singer in the whole world.

“I’m just happy Mama wasn’t big on Dolly Parton’s ex partner,” Plummer explained. “Imagine being a black guy and everyone yellin’, ‘Hey, Porter!’”

We leaned against an ASP cruiser and did the overview thing as Waylon took notes and his partner Hugh Tandy walked the roadside looking for evidence.

“Got blood here,” a junior tech a young redheaded woman with Asian-esque features, said. She knelt and took a sample, set a marker down. The photographer whisked in and documented the find.

I said, “That’s probably from when they lifted the wounded guy into the pickup bed. Your blood trail probably ends…”

“Right about here,” Tandy said. “Nice recollection for a guy getting half an armory dumped in his direction.”

“What were you doing while Kid Carson was fighting the Indians, Harry?” Waylon asked.

“I was stuck to the floor of the Vic, the brake pedal caught in my jacket’s lining. I finally tore loose.”

Harry reached to the ground, picked up the
jacket, one purple sleeve waving disconsolately in the breeze. It looked like a deflated elephant.

“A two-hundred-buck jacket and a seventy-five-buck replacement allowance,” Harry lamented.

“That thing’s bright enough for any three jackets, Harry,” Waylon advised. “Submit in triplicate.”

“I’ve tried before. The bean counters only pay in monotone.”

Waylon turned my way. “You didn’t see any features, Carson?”

I put my hands in front of my eyes as if holding binoculars. “They were all wearing those full-face helmets used in racing. Gloves. Shades. Hell, I couldn’t tell you if they were white or black. Didn’t see an inch of skin.”

“Plates?”

“Taped. Duct tape. I noticed it when the bike dropped, filed it away. I did manage to note body types. I had a well-built guy as one of the drivers – the bike that stayed up – maybe six to six two. Wide shoulders, slim waist. He had a heavier, shorter passenger, leaning to fat, maybe why I hit him in the love handle. The other two bikers were pretty large, six two to six four. Shaded to the slender side. The passenger on the first bike, not the injured guy, had a ponytail out the back of the helmet. Brown and greasy, like a foot of dirty rope.”

I saw the picture in my head, but it was like I wasn’t there.

“Nice memory, Carson, and the description’s
pure poetry,” Waylon said, writing in a neat little leather notebook. “How about the guys in the truck?”

“The guys in the truck weren’t roaring at me. Grubby clothes, medium builds. That’s about all I recall of them.”

Waylon nodded, wrote a couple lines.

“Anything from the local hospitals?” I asked, figuring the wounded guy would at least be dropped in the parking lot of a clinic or hospital by his accomplices. Maybe they’d simply taken him somewhere to die. But that was at odds with the guy who’d been boosting him into the truck.

Waylon said, “Nada. At least so far.”

I leaned against Waylon’s cruiser and replayed the action with a clear head. It had been planned by someone with both intelligence and a penchant for detail. I figured the gunners had planned to blow twin barrels of double-ought through our windscreen, one guy targeting Harry, the other one me. The Harleys would roar away just as the truck zoomed up from behind, ready to handle any clean-up chores, like if Harry or I were still breathing through our headless necks.

The only fly in the planner’s ointment had been the intervening freighter. Had Harry and I not been train aficionados, I never would have looked through the freight-cars, noticed the shotguns coming out. The oncoming bikers and the shooters in the following pickup would have blown us apart in ten seconds and been on their merry way.

I heard a squeal of metal over metal as the Crown Vic was pulled from the wreckage of the old train station. It would be winched on to a platform tow truck and taken to forensics for a full inspection. There were no windows remaining and the panels were pocked with holes, thankfully most of them on the trunk side with only a couple of holes in the upper quadrant of the door panels.

Harry stood beside me and watched as a worker ran up and sprayed a still-smoldering tire with a fire extinguisher. A door fell off as the winch groaned the car backward.

My hand started shaking. I jammed it in my pocket.

Dr Matthias sat down at his laptop, entering data. He’d spent the whole day inside, re-reading texts he’d already perused a half-dozen times. But one had to be sure. The texts were always interesting, dealing with the migration of early human tribes. There was a great deal of information on the measurement of nucleotides contained in DNA, the haplotypes. The diversity of the genetic variations decreased with distance from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This had been discovered within the incredible amount of work accomplished on the Human Genome Project, a project that Matthias had been instrumental in organizing, at least in its early days.