Last Call for the Living (10 page)

Moments later they watched Lang and Crews leave. Del looked over and grinned at Flock like he'd just eaten a big bowl of shit. The jukebox kicked in, as if it'd been waiting for the Sheriff to go, Waylon Jennings sang “Anita, You're Dreaming.”

Lipscomb lit a cigarette. He smoked slowly. A weird ecstasy burned onto his face.

“That there was better than any sex I ever had, son.”

*   *   *

Lang drove his
cruiser slowly along the row of parked vehicles, stopping at Nathan Flock's Chevy.

“What did you make of those two?” Crews said.

“I've learned not to be judgmental about prison tattoos.”

“Want to run the Chevy's plates?”

“It's Floyd County. Where they said they was from.” Lang paused, straining to see inside the truck's cab. “I'd still like to get a look in there,” he said.

“Probable cause?”

“None. Just a bad case of SDLR. Let's eat.”

Lang pulled out of the parking lot, spraying gravel as the Crown Vic sped down the highway.

*   *   *

“Mostly locals in
there the last few nights, according to that queer bartender,” Crews said, finishing a cheeseburger. “Nobody throwing money around, asking for girls or drugs or gambling heavy … no one bragging about all the jail time they've done.”

She sighed. Lang thought it to be the first time he'd seen Crews express frustration. He drove north toward Route 20, a stretch of lonely-looking land with not even a road sign for company. They left the foothills, passing barns and tree farms and the wood-processing plant. An abandoned development with empty lots, a few foreclosed homes, signs from a dozen Realtors. He turned right onto the highway, eventually passing the North Georgia Savings & Loan. Crews turned her head but said nothing. Plastic sealed the broken front doors, police tape crisscrossing the threshold. The bank had hired security guards to patrol the branch until it could reopen, which Lang figured with any corporation that only cared about the bottom line would be sooner rather than later.

Hopefully, they'll wait for the blood to dry first.

He and Crews were quiet for a while, the police band radio the only sound. The inside of the cruiser smelled of fast food. He cracked a window and lit a cigarette. It didn't seem to bother her.

“And how about those two graduates of Felony U. shooting pool?” she said.

“They had a nice story.”

“What does ‘SDLR' stand for?”

“‘Something Don't Look Right,'” Lang said.

“Seems like you know KB's pretty well, Sheriff.”

“I used to,” he said. “Not anymore.”

Little else was said, Crews realizing regrettably that her last comment might have been a conversation killer. She worked her mobile instead, pressing for results from the state's notoriously slow Northeastern Lab.

There was a clapboard church ahead, passionflowers in bloom throughout the small property. Picnickers gathered in a brush arbor. Lang raised his hand in greeting, but no one waved back.

He broke the ice again, wanting to put the sour memory of KB's behind. Topics mostly professional, but hints of a personal life peppered their conversation. He mentioned his ex-wife. Crews mentioned a separation. Odd hours, bad coffee, lack of sleep.

“The occupational hazards of anyone in law enforcement,” she said.

She elaborated on the case, speaking of how ruthless and organized prison gangs were. She told him in confidence that more than a dozen other banks in the Southeast had been hit in the past sixteen months. Usually two or three men who had precise knowledge of security features, floor plans and cash delivery schedules. Crews was convinced the heists were being planned in prisons.

Lang tried to focus on what she had to say. He wished the road wouldn't end.

But the same thoughts kept repeating.

Why me? Why here? And why now?

*   *   *

Newspapers still covered
the windows. Charlie tried to distinguish day from night by watching Hicklin and Hummingbird. She cleaned the kitchen often, even when there was nothing to clean. She'd also taken to organizing little things in the living room. Old magazines, packs of cigarettes, matchbooks. Her rolled-up Baggies filled with crystalline powder. She folded dirty clothes in front of him as if he needed to be taught how.

Charlie figured these activities for morning.

Hummingbird was obsessive. She scrubbed and dried and stacked dishes in a way that suggested guilt or remorse. Then she would shrink to some corner of the cottage, that odor of chemical smoke not far behind.

Hicklin disappeared for hours. Occasionally he opened the front door, appearing with food and ice from risky missions to procure more beer. Charlie was shocked to feel relief when Hicklin returned from these late-night excursions. The air swelling with the sounds of crickets and treehoppers. Chirps. The wind. Thunder. Darkness.

Other times Charlie would close his eyes and listen to the sounds of the cottage. Hicklin exercising. A fourth set of leg lifts. Then crunches. Push-ups.

The sound of a match flaring against the tip of a cigarette. The whine of the filter.

That burnt plastic smell.

The binges of sleep continued.

He had terrible nightmares. One in particular where all of his veins broke free through his skin. Charlie screaming as a branchwork of blue-green twisted from his forearms and sprayed the cottage with blood. Veins near his ankles and feet, in his neck, burrowing through the flesh like earthworms after a sun shower. It was as if his entire vascular system was making a run for it. He'd never had dreams so violent, so vivid. Not before. Not ever.

When he woke, his muscles ached. Pain shot across the middle of his back, under his breastbone and down across both thighs. He had to urinate. After he asked a couple times Hummingbird untied him. She went with him into the bathroom and as before watched him. Only this time with a covetous smile.

There were hours of interrupted sleep where Charlie grew disoriented. Could have been day or night. For reasons unknown to him Hicklin put a hood over his head. Charlie remembered screaming. Then he felt Hummingbird's hands on his shoulders, her cotton-drawl whispers, offering promises and favors. He shook violently, knowing he wanted to kill her. He wanted to kill them both.

Her laughter haunted him. As did Hicklin's silence.

Charlie dreamed of rockets slicing through the sky. Tools and parts spread across a blanket, a salmon-tinted sunset, a breeze … he worked heartily, attaching a tapered swept fin to a Bulldog FS-500. When he looked off into the distance he saw dark figures shimmer before the dream turned over and he was now back at the bank … during those lulls when the lobby was empty. He would pass the time entering customer account numbers. On the computer in a flash were several months' worth of check card purchases and withdrawals. He thought of it as financial voyeurism, knowing what people spent their money on. Sex videos and bar tabs and motel rooms and gas and fast food. The patterns and pathologies of people amused Charlie, as though he were spying on an alien race.

A species contrary to his own.

His mind became like a movie screen—his best and only company—complete with reel changes, jump cuts, dissolves. The bank lobby again. Charlie faced a line that never shrank, yet there was his mother, like a stranger, patiently waiting. He greeted her, but there was something different about Lucy Colquitt.
Her eye! She never left the house without her glass eye!
She presented a check for Charlie to cash. He scanned it once, twice, but his equipment would not read the magnetic ink of the check's MICR line. He looked across the teller window at his mother, into a small half-moon socket that was her left eye, accompanied by a look of indifference. And across the lobby, a hooded figure appeared and raised his weapon.

*   *   *

The bedroom was
silent and dark. Charlie's head and neck ached. Just opening his eyes induced nausea. But something had moved on the floor. At first he thought it was a toy car rolling by his foot, a big black toy car with six legs. When his vision cleared he realized the object was in fact a wood beetle. Oily and sleek-looking in the sparse light, it took a few cautious steps, the beetle's antennae slanting toward Charlie as if it meant to lend him an ear.

The insect made it to the wall and started to climb, then fell. Dull black wing covers fluttered. It righted itself and met the wall again. This time the beetle climbed higher before falling again.

A tenacious insect, the beetle kept this up for a good twenty minutes. Charlie watched, wiggling his own toes and fingers, wincing from a pulled muscle in his lower back. He felt as if we were rooting for the beetle at a ball game, as though the beetle's success would somehow translate to his own. And the bug was steadily improving. Two, three, then five feet up the wall. The ceiling within reach.

Then the beetle seemed to hesitate, those wings fluttering again, but it dropped to the floor, landing with a small thud. Charlie extended his leg. Nudged the insect with a big toe. It couldn't even right itself with his help.

He stared for a long time, watching the legs quiver and bend. He finally kicked it away with a foot, out of sight, the bug crackling across the floor like a peanut shell.

*   *   *

“Charlie Colquitt … but
they call you Coma.”

Charlie opened his eyes at the sound of Hicklin's voice. He looked around the cottage, figuring it for day three, maybe day four. Easier to lose track of time than he'd thought possible. Hummingbird sat on the couch in a daze, absently scratching her forearms.

Hicklin reached into the cooler and retrieved a beer. Empty cans were stacked in pairs atop the coffee table. Charlie wriggled, finding the ropes looser than before. He managed to raise a hand and rub his chin, feeling patches of stubble, a tender bruise that ran the length of one side of his jaw. He sucked his teeth. They felt mossy, complementing the rotten taste in his mouth.

It hadn't sounded like a question, but Charlie nodded anyway. He watched Hicklin drop a cigarette in an empty can. It hissed when it hit the bottom.

“It's a great nickname,” Hicklin continued. “Nicknames all I know. They sum you up better than any tax return or driver's license or C file. Course I called it like I saw it inside 'less I knowed 'em, meaning you was either a nigger, a wetback or a bitch. Funny I never had me no nickname inside. One celly called me Chef on account I was a pretty good buck master.”

Charlie's face dimmed with confusion.

“Made alcohol in prison,” Hicklin explained. “Gate time round my cut could get like happy hour. Wasn't no Pabst, but my moonshine did the trick.”

Hicklin raised the beer as if to propose a toast, better times replaying behind his eyes.

“You want a beer, Charlie?” he said after a moment.

“No.”

“Ever had one?” he asked, holding a can out for Charlie.

Charlie shook his head at first. He was thirsty, though. The can of beer looked ice-cold, water dripping from the sides. He finally reached out and took it.

“Got any water?” Charlie said.

“They's water in that beer you're holding.”

Charlie opened the beer and looked over at Hummingbird, remembering her visit from the night before, the way she put her hands on him. Tonight her eyes were glazed, the pupils as big as buttons. Wherever she was, Charlie hoped she stayed there.

He took a sip, the beer tasting sudsy and peculiar. But it was cold and that's all that mattered. He took another sip—and another—before holding the can against his aching jaw. He looked across the room at Hicklin, as if seeing him clearly for the first time. He focused on a greenish-black swastika tattooed on Hicklin's chest.

“You're a Nazi?” Charlie said.

“Thank you.”

It was the only thing Hicklin thought to say.

*   *   *

The boy—Hicklin
could think of him in no other terms—had been a curious hostage. Hicklin had considered ways of disposing of Charlie since arriving at the safe house. But something had kept him from doing the kid in. Hicklin wanted more from Charlie. He needed more.

*   *   *

“So you hate
black people?” Charlie said after a minute of silence.

“You done had a heart check, huh? No, son. I hate
niggers,
” Hicklin said sharply.

Charlie flinched at the word. The
N-Word.
He'd heard his mother use it all his life but had never grown accustomed to it. Hicklin finished his beer and lit a cigarette. An odd, satisfied look on his face.

“You know what a
nigger
is, Coma?” he said.

“An African-American person?” Charlie answered. The beer can in his hand was almost empty. His head had begun to swim.

Hicklin laughed loudly, political correctness not a popular concept inside the Georgia penal system.

Hummingbird giggled, too. She sat Indian-style, chewing on a fingernail. Hicklin gave her a look. She took her finger out of her mouth, repentant as a scolded child.

He said, “A nigger is
anyone
who acts like a fool. A loud, obnoxious fool. I respected many Negroes and Hispanics. A man stands tall and walks hard and I'll respect him.”

“But n-nobody has a choice,” Charlie said, stammering, trying to inflect a challenging tone. “To be born white. Why hate people because they're different?”

Hicklin rose and stretched, fetched another beer from the cooler. He began to pace, tiger-walking as if the cottage were a cage. The muscles in Hicklin's forearms and shoulders seemed to pop and writhe with every movement. Charlie watched him, noticing Hicklin's tattoos in greater detail, a few so intricate they seemed like a picture show on flesh, a righteous hatred in the details. He found Hicklin's gait strange. The man walked with a swagger, guarded, like a lion stalking the fringes of a pride area.