In the Heart of the Wind Book 1 in the WindTorn Trilogy (22 page)

“
If
we can get either one of them out.”  She turned her fierce gaze on her boyfriend. “Damn it, Virgil Earl, we could get them killed with a plan like this!”

“We’re going to have backup, Ellen,” Kyle explained. “It’s not like I’ll be going into a place where none of you know where I am. We’ll let Sadler in on it and he’ll be able to help.”

“Kyle’s right,” Edna Mae said. “Let’s get everyone together and talk before this deputy comes in. If he’s got anything to tell us we can use, we can get this damned ball rolling! This waiting is starting to cramp my innards.”

“This is wrong,” Ellen said. “Wrong!”

“The longer we wait,” Virgil told the woman he loved, “the deeper under they’re going to put Gabe. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t want anything to happen to him or Kyle,” Ellen protested, close to tears. “This scares me, Virgil!”

“It scares us all,” Edna Mae commented. “But we aren’t helping Gabe with us being here and him down there somewhere.” She looked at Kyle. “Your brother is a strong man. He’s capable of taking care of himself.”

“I don’t see a better plan coming down the pike than this one,” Virgil told them all. “It’s at least worth a try.”

“God help us,” Ellen whispered. Her eyes were wide with fright. “God help us all.”

Deputy Thais
Dupree shook hands with Virgil, Kyle and Dean, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the burly man who had accompanied him to Iowa.

“This here is Galen Whitney. He’s with the Alabama DEA.” Dupree’s accent was pure Cajun and his grin was infectious. His big white teeth gleamed and his coffee brown eyes twinkled. He was a big man—tall, thick set, and with muscles like chiseled rock. He looked more like a pro wrestler than a deputy, but his smile gave him away. It was pure country and soft as a baby’s butt. “Galen’s a friend of Jamie’s, too.”

Agent Whitney’s handshake was like a vice, and at Dean’s grimace of pain, he ducked his head and apologized. “Sorry, little fella. Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

Kyle looked the two men over liking what he saw, feeling comfortable with them, and trusting them immediately. They had about them the look other lawmen recognized and he’d stake his life on these men being honest. Dupree’s next words only solidified that impression.

“Listen here,” he said in a bulldozing directness that brought everyone’s eyes to him. “We were real close to Jamie Tremayne. Real close. Galen worked with him on a couple of cases and I used to live near him in Pensacola. I never worked with him, but I sure as hell respected him. He was a straight shooter, know what I mean?”

Kyle nodded.

“When we heard he was missing, back in ‘86, we thought some drug dealers had snatched him like they had Camerino.” Whitney’s big brown eyes turned grave. “I worked with Camerino, too. When a man just up and disappears like that, you expect the worse and we was afraid it had happened to Jamie.”

Dupree sat forward in his chair. “None of us what knew that boy ever believed all that horse manure about Jamie having a drug problem.”

“Hell, no,” Whitney snarled. “Not Jamie Tremayne! You couldn’t find a straighter arrow.”

“Oh, he had a problem with the booze,” Dupree acknowledged. He looked at Whitney. “A lot of us do.”

“It’s the stress,” Whitney clarified, “that causes it.”

“Yeah,” Dupree agreed. He looked back at Virgil. “But Jamie didn’t drink no more’n the rest of us. Didn’t gamble all that much neither. All that was a bunch of crap.”

“That family of his is meaner than a cornered rattler,” Whitney told them. “I’ve heard the worst one of the bunch is that sister of his.” His frown was ugly across his broad, flat-nosed face. “She’s a real bitch.”

“I heard that,” Dupree concurred. “It was her that came up to The Pavillion to pick up Jamie and take him to Augusta. You ask them at The Pavillion what they think of Miss High-and-Mighty. They’ll have a bug to put in your ear about her!”

“She comes in there,” Whitney explained, his face contorted with remembered anger, “all arrogant and uppity. I was there visiting Jamie, although his family had told them not to allow visitors. I snucked in and was trying to talk to him.” The big man scowled. “He was so doped up I didn’t think he hardly recognized me, but when that bitch of a sister of his come in, he started begging me real pitiful-like not to let her take him nowhere.” Whitney hung his head. “I wished I hadn’t.”

“Jamie was afraid of her, see?” Dupree interrupted. “I think he knew what she was planning.”

“Which was?” Virgil asked.

“To have him committed,” Dupree said. “And that’s basically what that damned family of his went and done.”

Kyle was watching Whitney’s face. The man was huge—at least six foot five; 265 pounds; a body built like a steam shovel and a face that would have been perfect for a bad ass motorcycle ad. The nose had been smashed repeatedly; the cheeks were rough and pocked; the lower portion of his face was covered with a scraggly beard and his low forehead, disappearing into a thinning crop of nondescript brown hair, was heavily lined.

The man reminded Vittetoe of Randall ‘Tex’ Cobb, the Hollywood character actor who did biker movies, but the words ‘Gentle Giant’ came to mind as he watched the man sitting nervously on a chair that looked too small for him and he was afraid he’d break.

“There’s about five of us you can damned well trust to help you folks looks for Jamie,” Dupree was saying and Kyle turned his full attention to the deputy. “There’s two of us from the Escambia County sheriff’s office and one from the Florida State Patrol.”

“And there’s me and another DEA guy from Louisiana what used to be with the NIS, that’s Naval Intelligence—” Whitney began, but Dupree interrupted him with a snort.

“Ain’t no such thing,” Dupree said and laughed, “as Naval Intelligence. That’s one of them oxymoron things.”

“I heard that,” Whitney agreed. “But Taylor ain’t bad for a squid. He and Jamie was pretty tight.”

“And there’s Badger up in Georgia,” Dupree injected.

“The Badger?” Dean asked.

“His real name’s Dooley. Dooley McBride. He was named after Coach Dooley—you know with the Dawgs?—but we all call him The Badger ‘cause he’s like one of them little critters. Once he gets his teeth into something, he don’t let go until the thing’s either dead or can’t cause nobody no harm,”  Whitney told them.

Dupree nodded. “He works with one of them government groups nobody really knows that much about except they’re mean as hell and twice as bad as that when they’re mad.”

“You don’t
even
want to make The Badger mad at you!”

Whitney nodded. “And he’s mad as Granny’s goat about Jamie being missing and all.”

“The thing with The Badger is he can go places and do things—”

“Get you things,” Whitney added, “that no one else can.”

“You need a tag from Paris, France for your car?” Dupree grinned. “You call The Badger.”

Kyle stood, jammed his hands into his back pocket and faced the men. “We think his family is behind this.”

“We know they are,” Dupree said.

“And we’ve had guys we could trust all over Florida looking for him in them fancy clinics and such, and he ain’t nowhere to be found.” Whitney locked his gaze with Kyle’s. “I’ve been nosing around in Alabama, too, and I ain’t come up with enough spit to shine my boots.”

“The Badger’s had his people up in Georgia doing the same thing, even looking into some of them places the AMA don’t want to know about.” Dupree shook his head. “He ain’t come up with squat.”

“We think he may be in Louisiana,” Virgil told them and saw Dupree’s eyes turn to Whitney.

“See? What’d I tell you?” Whitney asked.

Kyle sat on Virgil’s desk. “We’ve got a plan and we think it may work, but there are a lot of loose ends we haven’t been able to solve yet.”

Whitney stood so fast his chair turned over, but the big man didn’t seem to notice. “You tell us what you need, Mr. Iowa State Trooper, and we’ll tell you when you can have it!”

It was Sunday
, and the patients began gathering at a little past nine, wandering aimlessly down the hall toward the clinic’s small chapel. There was the melodic strains of a twelve-string guitar vibrating in the air as a young man practiced the entrance hymn, “Gather Us In”. Some of the orderlies were already in the chapel, watching their charges file slowly and lethargically through the double pocket doors into what had once been the parlor of the old antebellum house which had been turned into Dr. Bruce Lassiter’s private clinic for the sons and daughters of wealthy, discreet families.

The Catholic priest who presided over the Sunday Mass, was slipping on his chasuble as he spoke in low tones to the patient who was to be his altar boy. One of the nurses helped a young woman of twenty-two seat herself, bending over to admire the doll the woman held up for her to see, a doll she held protectively in her arms as though it were real. The nurse smiled, patted the doll’s head and walked away. Two male patients picked up the hymnals on a small table and began to distribute them through the room, although no one would bother to sing the music Father had chosen, even though it was the same three songs each week.

“Has everyone who is to receive Communion put their wafers in the bowl?” Father Tolbert asked as he looked out over his small congregation. He smiled patiently as several of his flock got up to add their wafers to the small collection on the altar. When they were reseated, he nodded at the guitarist.

“If you’ll turn to page four-forty-nine in your hymnals, we can begin,” the guitarist said and began the first chords of the entrance hymn.

Father Tolbert watched his flock slowly turn the pages of the hymnals and stare at the page with blank, stupefied looks on their faces. He sighed, opened his mouth, and began to sing in a rich, baritone that would have fit perfectly at Carnegie Hall.

The patient in Room 158 heard the beautiful music and lifted his head, his eyes glazing with an inner pain that was pitiful to see. He listened intently to the music, the words having a greater meaning for him than they ever had before.

“Gather us in, the lost and forsaken,

Gather us in, the blind and the lame.”

He hummed to the music, tears filling his wounded eyes. His hands were clasped tightly together as he stared out his barred window at the lush, late-winter day. He tried not to think about the Sunday three weeks earlier when he had tried to attend the Mass in the little chapel down the hall. But even as he tried not to think of it, it leapt up at him to strike at his heart like a viper. Its poison entered his entire being and he could feel it killing his soul.

On that Sunday nearly a month past, Jamie Tremayne had heard the guitar first, becoming aware it wasn’t a radio, but someone in the building strumming carefully but with little expertise. He had immediately recognized the hymn, had listened to the priest’s magnificent voice giving an inflection to the words he had never heard before, and had sat up in the bed, marveling at how strongly the man’s voice carried to him. In his drugged state, detached and purposeless, he imagined the words were being aimed directly at him.

“Here in this place, new light is streaming

“Now is the darkness, vanished away...”

He swung his legs from the bed, thrilled when his feet hit the floor and he did not slide in a heap to the tiles as he had the previous day. It took him a moment to adjust to the wavering of the room and to the detached vibratory undulations of the air. His first step was cautious, but he managed to shuffle barefoot to the foot of the bed while holding on to the railing. He stretched out his hand, reaching for the wall four feet away, and stumbled forward, his head spinning, his knees weak, but somehow finding the strength to gain the door.

It seemed almost a Herculean task to pull open the heavy oak paneled door, but when he did, he felt stronger than he had in over two months. Somehow the small and seemingly simple task of opening a door pushed away some of the fog and his consciousness became aware of what was lurking around it. For the first time in a long, long time, he felt associated with his surroundings.

It had only been three days since they had done away with his restraints. Only a day since they had begun to decrease the massive amounts of medications they were forcing into his system. Five days since they had strapped him to that horrible table and zapped the will from him. He was weak, unsure of himself—painfully so—and awkward as he moved into the hall, furtively looking about him, half-expecting someone to shout at him and drive him back into his room. But no one did and he ventured down the hall sliding his shoulder along the wall, bracing himself to keep his watery legs from buckling beneath him.

The closer he came to the source of the singing, the stronger he became. He had always taken great strength from the religion he had practiced all his life. Whenever there had been turmoil and pain, indecision and worry in his life, he had garnered his courage from his unshakable belief in God. It had always been a source of comfort to him and a need nothing else ever seemed to fully satisfy. Now, as he struggled to make his way to the opened doors of the chapel, to sit and listen to the tenets of his religion spoken, he absorbed a keen vitality that strengthened his legs and whisked away the drug fog like a freshening breeze.