Authors: Lewis Perdue
Jasmine and I sat at the table and drank coffee, silently scanning record after record off Shanker's CD as I scrolled them down my laptop screen.
"I can't believe this," I said.
"You've said that a hundred times. Maybe more."
The CD contained thousands of images of medical records, administrative documents, experimental protocols, maps, diagrams, photos. The first document on the CD was a memo on Jay Shanker's letterhead that explained that all of the documents had been transferred from microfilm to the CD. The microfilm had been salvaged decades before from the vandalized ruins of a once-secret Army medical facility that had operated on the site of a POW camp built near Belzoni. The memo explained that the records had been salvaged by his client Darryl Talmadge, a hunting guide who had scheduled a duck hunt in a nearby slough. The client had been a no-show and Talmadge had passed a morning digging around in the ruins. Beneath a pile of termite-infested beams and flooring, Talmadge had found a safe that had sunk under its own weight through the decaying floor.
Talmadge concealed his find and returned with an oxyacetylene torch, opened the old, rusty safe, and found that leaking water had destroyed most of the contents. He did recover a number of watertight microfilm canisters, which he tossed in his garage, vowing to read them one day.
The microfilm sat untouched in Talmadge's garage for seventeen years.
In his only private conversation with Talmadge before the military took over, Shanker learned of the microfilm and his client's hunch it might be useful.
Jasmine leaned on my shoulder to better read the laptop's screen as we scanned the documents to get an overview of what we had.
"This Frank Harper starts out like a saint and turns into a monster," Jasmine said.
I shook my head. "I think he's the same person. But he got sucked in by his own insatiable curiosity about what makes us human, good, bad… who we are. He was grappling with the big question with some big consequences. I think its clear, early on, he wanted to explore this Phineas Gage thing firsthand." I paused. "I want to go back when I have time and read that essay he wrote about ethics, free will, crime, and punishment. It's pretty deep."
"So he starts out with a charge of pure scientific curiosity, then someone in Washington gets wind of things and dumps a ton of money on him," Jasmine said. "You think that's what made him cross the line? Moved him from fixing up people with head wounds and studying them into creating head wounds to make better warriors? Then the chemicals?"
"Clearly," I agreed.
"It doesn't hurt the rationalization process when your own government says it needs your research."
"Big factor. Really big."
The last document on the CD was a memo on Jay Shanker's letterhead summarizing a second CD dealing exclusively with Clark Braxton. That CD and the location of the original supporting documentation for all the information on both CDs would be made available once two conditions were met: if Vanessa Thompson joined in Talmadge's defense and brought me on board.
"Shanker and Mom agreed you're the only expert who could credibly unravel the data in the files."
"I don't understand why Shanker didn't go to the authorities with it," I said.
"He did."
"He did what?"
"He took it to the judge," Jasmine said. "And within hours, the suits showed up at his door and the threats began. That's when he came to Mama. She found it hard to swallow until the next day when Shanker's office and his house and a mini-storage unit, his RV, and even his duck blind had been ransacked."
"How come they didn't find the microfilm?"
"My understanding is, he'd been freaked out by what he had read and had hidden everything before he went to the judge."
"And we don't know where."
As Jasmine opened her mouth to reply, we heard distant sounds of tires on gravel.
"Quincy coming back?" I asked.
Jasmine frowned. "Not likely."
"Who?"
She shook her head. I rushed to the bedroom then and grabbed my Ruger. Jasmine pulled hers from her purse and clipped the holster to her waistband.
"Come on!" She said, heading for the back door. She unbolted it and lunged into a dense wall of green vines, weeds, and saplings. I followed her in my bare feet.
Jael sat on her haunches, waiting. Her instructor had said she had the patience of a spider. The analogy pleased her.
When she heard the motor vehicle, Jael followed the sound and trained her glasses toward the source. Before she spotted the vehicle, Stone and the lawyer bolted from the rear of the shack and plunged into a green drift of kudzu stretching toward the back porch like stop-action surf. Fog frosted the deep green of the kudzu and feathered it into the surrounding green matrix of lush Delta undergrowth.
The vehicle sounds grew louder. Jael compassed the kudzu, methodically teasing it apart. It was hard to separate the movement of the leaves that might be caused by the wind from that which might be from her targets. As Jael toyed with the idea of pursuing them, an older-model, light blue Chevy pickup appeared out of the fog. A motorcycle sat in the bed, held upright by bright yellow straps.
As the truck grew closer she raised the binoculars and concentrated on the lightskinned black man behind the wheel, noting that he wore the uniform of some law enforcement agency.
"Fuck," she muttered. All she needed was for some county mountie to make an arrest.
Patience, Jael counseled herself. Were more cops on the way? Why had this one come in a civilian vehicle? The truck turned to the far side of the shack and disappeared from view. Jael decided she was too far away from the action to make a good decision. She grabbed the M21, gave a reassuring touch to her HK4, and prepared to shift to a better position. Then Stone and the lawyer emerged from the kudzu. The lawyer kept on moving; Stone stopped. Just like a good target.
Jael knelt, steadied the M21 on the aluminum pole, and settled the crosshairs on Stone's head. The lawyer shouted something that reached Jael's ears too faintly to comprehend. Jael took a breath, let it out, and took up the trigger slack.
"John!" Jasmine ran toward the pickup without hesitation. I hung back, stock-still with indecision.
"Come on!" Jasmine urged me out "It's okay."
Considering that my only other choice was to run away in my bare feet, I hurried to catch up with Jasmine as she made her way around the corner of the shack.
Jael sucked in a breath through clenched teeth as she eased off the trigger. She closed her eyes and shook her head against the anger boiling up. Shit. Now there were two vehicles to cover. And another armed man.
Jael opened her eyes and tried to hang on to the virtues of patience as she pulled the aluminum staff from the ground and made her way counterclockwise through the underbrush for a better angle.
I shoved Lashonna's Ruger .357 magnum in the deep pocket of my cargo shorts and hung a step behind Jasmine as we approached Myers's pickup. He got out, his face heavy and serious.
"I came to warn you," he looked at me, then back to Jasmine. "The warrants have been sworn out."
"Warrants?" Jasmine said. "Like in more than one?"
Myers's face looked as if he had bad indigestion. "Uh-huh. Like for both of you."
We stood for a long moment, listening to the birds. An odd sound from the woods in front of the cabin caught my attention. I turned in that direction and concentrated. It took me a moment to realize I hadn't noticed a sound, but the lack of one. Birds were not singing there.
"Brad?" Jasmine looked at me.
Then the birds were singing again. I shook my head.
"Thought I heard something," I said. "Probably a deer."
Jasmine looked at Myers. "Coffee?"
"No time," Myers said. "Neither do you."
"We better think real hard now so we make the best use of the time we don't have; don't you think?" Jasmine countered. "The coffee's made." She walked toward the back porch. Myers hesitated for a split second as his mouth worked up a reply. Then his lips went still as he set out behind her. I brought up the rear, lagging behind long enough to give the woods a good scan.
I followed John and Jasmine through the back door. Myers took in the rumpled bed scattered with my clothes and Jasmine's. In the front room, I watched him look at the unslept-in bed there. I braced myself for a replay of the Darius and Quincy show, which did not come.
"The local warrant is for the murder of two fiber-optic cable contractors at the EZSleep," Myers said. He sat at the table with the stiffness of a man with sore muscles… or a sore life that had been exercised a mile too much. I stood uneasily across the table from him. Jasmine set her Ruger on the rough cabinet that served as a counter as she got Myers's coffee.
He looked at Jasmine. "There's a warrant for you because your Mercedes was spotted at the EZ-Sleep." He looked at me. "And for you because you had a room there. The detectives also think they have hair evidence linking you."
"Hell."
"Wait." He shook his head. "There's more."
Jasmine filled a cup with coffee and brought it to him. He took a sip and smiled.
"There are federal warrants out of California for both of you." He took a sip of coffee and looked at me. His red eyes and sagging lids begged for sleep.
"They're saying you were part of a drug-smuggling operation."
"Do what?"
"I don't believe a damn thing," Myers said.
"But—"
"No time." Myers closed his eyes and shook his head. "I don't need to hear what you have to say." He opened his eyes and looked at Jasmine and me in turn. "But you two need to hear me out because what I can tell you might keep you alive and out of jail long enough to get the truth out."
"Fire away," I said, then walked over to the stove and split the last of the coffee with Jasmine.
Myers's fantastic story took the wind from my sails. I sat down as he told a plausible fairy tale, cleverly crafted to fit the attack on the J
ambalaya.
When he got to the part about my alleged complicity in Chris Nellis's death, it stunned me speechless.
"That's such a load of crap," Jasmine said. Her words carried a passion that went beyond the outrage of a disinterested third party. I picked up on that. Myers did too.
"I understand," he said gently. "But you've got to know what you're up against and maybe you can find a weak spot."
"Why are you doing this?" I asked. "Aren't you putting yourself in danger for helping us?"
Myers's eyes turned inward at my remark and he laughed at something he saw there. His gaze worked my eyes for a very long time. The birds stopped singing again out front.
"Because its the right thing," he said. "Because I owe it to Vanessa, what she stood for, what she did." He looked at Jasmine. "And because we need Jasmine to carry that on."
He dipped his head for a moment and studied his coffee mug. He took a sip, then looked at me.
"This case has smelled to high heaven from the very first day it fell on my desk," Myers said finally. "It was always too clean, which made me look twice at things. It didn't take me long to conclude Talmadge was being railroaded."
He looked at me. "Here I am, an ole country deputy out in the middle of nowhere when a couple of fancy guys in expensive suits drop a thick file on my desk. Hate-crime cold cases make good headlines these days. Good publicity for everybody. Feel good. Justice wins." He shook his head. "They brought it to me because I'd nailed an old Ku Kluxer a couple of years ago.
"But the case they brought me was too airtight. It had no holes. That simply doesn't happen unless somebody's done some creative evidence gathering like that Nathan Bedford Forrest Brigade BS. No such organization. It existed on some paper in the file they handed me and nowhere else." He sighed and drained his coffee.
"I can make more," Jasmine offered.
"Uh-uh." He stood up and looked out the side window toward his truck. "The higher-ups took this and ran with it. I wanted to look deeper. They said no; they wanted the conviction and the publicity." He turned toward us. "I held my nose until the Feds stopped the trial, then I sat down and wrote a letter to Vanessa Thompson describing everything I thought was rotten with the case."
"'Fourteen pages' worth," Jasmine said. "Single-spaced."
I whistled.
He waved his arm in dismissal. "It was just an opinion. Mine. Didn't count for a damn thing." He walked to the front window.
"You're going to need something other than your fire engine to drive," he said. "They're looking for it." He turned around and looked at me. "Your rental's at the impound."
He caught my questioning look.
"In the back of my truck," he said "A bike. Plain, good on gas, easy to
conceal." He looked at his watch, then stood up and moved toward the front door and opened it.
"I've got a ramp. Help me get it out."
Jasmine and I caught up with him as he opened the passenger side of his truck and pulled out a plastic grocery bag and handed it to me. Inside were two deli sandwiches in white paper, two cartons of chocolate milk, and two cell phones.
"Can't run if you get hungry," he said. "Phones are prepaid, untraceable. Already activated. Drug dealers love them. The Feds are camped out on your old cell numbers waiting for you to make a call."
"You're a helluva guy" I said.
Jasmine gave him a hug.
From the edge of the clearing, about where the road entered it, Jael crawled flat on her belly in the grass. The trees had given way to scrubby underbrush way short of the distance she needed to see them well through the fog. She moved, stopped, listened. The shack's door creaked open, voices leaked out. Slowly, she raised her head and watched the black sheriff cross the porch toward his truck.
She stepped forward, then a pair of quail came racing through the grass and stopped inches from her face. Jael froze and held her breath. The moment stretched out. In a morning as quiet as this one, if the birds took to wing, they'd set up a racket pointing right at her. Quail didn't like to fly; they walked unless threatened. She assumed Stone knew that.
Then came a rustling, a bang and rattle that sounded like a tailgate opening. Jael was ready to charge when the quail turned and scurried away through the grass.
She raised up for a look. Tufts of fog drifted across the clearing, offering first a clear shot, then no shot at all. She moved forward with the fog and hunkered down when it cleared, watching the three of them at the back of the truck positioning a ramp for the bike.
The view now was consistently good enough for a shot. The three of them concentrated on the bike, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to her. They moved back and forth, almost in unison with Stone in the middle. Jael decided to make him her first shot. She quickly sat up, one leg under her, the other bent, knee-up in front of her. She steadied the M21 with her elbow on her knee. With the crosshairs centered between the lower part of Stone's shoulder blades—in a position to blow the tatters of his heart right out the front—she took a breath, exhaled, held it, took up the trigger slack, and squeezed off the first round.