Only the Wicked (33 page)

“Have you tried to find Nancy Burchett?”

“I haven't.”

“But you could if you wanted.”

“And what would it come to, Monk? I end my marriage over hearsay and supposition? Burchett's dead and I can assure you, Rusty Ibers isn't naming names this side of the grave. And why should he? There's nothing beyond Nancy's word tying him to the murders.”

“But I've just found out who Ava really was, and I intend to let it be known.”

“You don't live here, Monk. You aren't going to bear the brunt of your reckless actions. And believe me, it will be your people who will feel it the most in the long run.”

He was tired of white men telling him how careful you had to be about exposing racist crimes. It wasn't as if black folk weren't already bearing the brunt of inaction. It was as if he should just let the wickedness slip by him like newspaper carried on a sudden gust of wind to clog a drain already clogged with weak excuses to let it be. That somehow if you just did nothing, it would all work out on some future unspecified date, when the reality was that history only moved forward when you made conscious effort, and sacrifice, to make it so. Yes, he didn't live here, yes, he could in a sense walk away, and goddamnit, probably nothing would happen to Tigbee. The irony being if there was truly justice in this world, something should happen to the old cracker—something of a violent and painful nature for all that he'd caused to others over the decades.

“The whispered dwell here in Mississippi, Monk. Older than the Natchez, more ancient than our mighty river, or before anyone chopped the first tree here. What has been kept hidden has festered and infected us. We have been among the worst when it came to race relations. I only wanted to see if we could be among the best, too. But it's so hard.”

“Thanks for your candor, Senator.” Monk began to walk away from the man, the joggers and their cozy park.

“You going home, Monk?”

He knew he didn't mean his motel room. “Yes, I am.” He didn't add that he was going to call McClendon before he left and tell him what he'd learned about Ava Green. Monk looked up to see Cassie Bodar coming over the hill. She looked svelte in her coordinated workout sweats and running shoes that matched her husband's. There was a ruddiness in her cheeks which dissipated as she saw Monk.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she all but screamed.

Her eyes became slits and her right hand a shaking fist.

Monk looked through her. Silently, he walked past the woman on the hill, and down toward their house, where he'd parked his car.

Chapter 23

“This is Nancy Burchett. I need to see you.”

Monk sat on the edge of the bed, the phone next to him, the handset in his left hand. “I'm surprised you called me.”

He'd placed his father's .45 close by on the night stand. He'd lubricated the rebuilt parts of the ACP 1911 model late in the afternoon after talking with McClendon and getting a four a.m. flight out of Memphis. The Colt was in cocked-and-locked mode, the hammer pulled back and ready to drop should he have reason to pull the trigger. He'd noticed some pull with the slide assembly shooting at the range a few weeks ago. Therefore, he'd paid close attention to any burrs along the edges of the metal or fatigue in the spring when he'd disassembled and oiled the weapon.

“I gotta talk to you, Mr. Monk. I gotta be done with this.” Her voice had a slight quake in it from apprehension.

“Bodar call you?” Outside, the floorboards of the walkway creaked. Muffled voices floated in to him through the walls.

“He said we couldn't duck this any longer.” There was a resigned quality in her voice. Like she'd reached a boulder in the road blocking her after a long and fruitless journey. There was something else there, too, a suggestion in her tone that one of McClendon's reporters was right about his hints concerning Bodar's crack-up.

“Are you two lovers?”

“What you want to know, mister? You want to know what my daddy told me or you want to be on Jerry Springer?”

“So you decide to call me now at”—he glanced at his watch—“damn near nine-thirty.”

“Shit, mister, I didn't call you up just to hear you be sour. Frankly, I think it does make better sense for me to stay gone.”

It was a chump play, but what if she was for real? He couldn't let a chance at a valuable link in this affair simply slip away. “Come on out to the airport in Memphis.”

“All right,” she agreed, surprising him. “It'll take me a couple of hours from where I'm at. Make it twelve-thirty, tonight, okay?”

“I'll be at the Southwest section. How will I know you?”

“I'll know you.” She severed the line before he could say anything else.

He wondered who she'd talked to, but would go with the flow. Monk finished packing and, having settled his bill with his credit card, exited the room. He put his bags in the back of the pickup truck and got out on Highway 61, heading north. He'd wait around at the airport to see if the woman would actually show. As he drove through Gator, a stationwagon pulled out from an access road behind him. The car remained steady on him and Monk periodically kept watch on the vehicle in his rearview mirror. Crossing the state line, the wagon's driver put on his turn signal, and went east. The rest of the drive was uneventful.

He returned the truck at the National stall set aside for after-hours dropoffs. The shuttle took him to his terminal. He was walking in just as a kid with long stringy hair, a baseball cap emblazoned by a silver AC/DC logo jammed on his head, came toward him. The teenager had been standing in the recess of the automatic doorway. He was sniffling like he had a head cold, and had passed Monk before he spoke.

“This is for you.”

Monk whirled, dropping his bags as his right hand went for the belt holster beneath his jean jacket. The kid wasn't facing him and was trotting away across the lanes toward the parking structure. Near where he'd been was a six-by-nine manila envelope on the ground.

Inside the envelope was a single Polaroid. The woman sitting in the chair in the shot had her top ripped off, in shards about her waist. Her mouth and eyes were covered over by duct tape. A gloved hand was grabbing one of her breasts in her plain bra, the fingers sunk deep in the ample flesh. The arm extended into the frame of the close shot, the face, of course, not seen, but he didn't think this was Nancy Burchett's idea of fun. He went inside.

He was being paged to a courtesy phone over the PA system.

“She gets butt-fucked with my shotgun, then her brains will be blown out, nigger boy,” the voice on the other end of the line gleefully informed him after he'd picked up. “You got an hour.”

“I turned in my truck.” Monk was calculating how long it would take him to convince the cops to believe him.

“You got fifty-nine minutes, Snowball,” the voice advised. “Go back south on Sixty-One.”

Monk got back to the rental stall and shot the lock off the strong box holding the keys. He took off in the pickup truck. Back below the border the same station wagon that had been behind him earlier—a '70s-era LTD Country Squire with numerous rust spots and peeling fake wood grain—got close and zoomed ahead of him. It was a moonless night, and the lights along this stretch of the road were spaced far apart. The wagon took a turn onto a gravel road barely discernible among the maples and poplars, and Monk followed.

The car went deep into the woods, passing an occasional mail box staked at various intervals along the edge of the single-lane pathway. The wagon made a sharp left and the route took them deeper into the gloomy topiary. Monk bounced along not too far behind. They were heading west, in the direction of the Arkansas border. The wagon took another turn and came to a stop at a series of low buildings spaced at numerous angles to each other. A halogen light was on over one of the buildings in the center of the yard. Several tractors, a grader, a combine harvester, a manure-spreader and a tandem-disk harrow were also about. Another car, its lights off, had pulled in behind the pickup truck. It was the cream-colored Taurus Monk had seen several days earlier at his motel. Grinding the clutch's throw-out bearing, Monk forcefully reversed the Dodge's gears, violently plowing into the Taurus. The grill and upper hood crumpled as that car's front end went under the truck's higher bumper.

“Fuck,” someone yelled over the grinding of metal and molded plastic.

Simultaneously, Monk tumbled out of the truck on the passenger's side, two lit flares in his hands that he'd retrieved from the highway kit in the truck's bed before leaving the rental depot. The pickup truck's windshield exploded from a shotgun blast. He threw the flaming sticks over the roof of the truck at the driver's side of the Taurus. Then he pivoted and cranked off two shots at the wagon.

“Get down,” the voice screamed again.

Monk ran and dove beside the manure-spreader, which was positioned near the right rear of the Ram pickup.

“Blast his monkey ass,” the voice bellowed.

Three more shots in rapid succession from Monk's .45 rang out, and the halogen light was extinguished. Blackness caressed the area, the buildings and farm machinery becoming murky forms seemingly strewn about by a capricious baby titan.

“Scared, nigger?” one of the men from the wagon taunted evilly, crouching near the vehicle on the passenger's side.

“Shut up,” the wagon's driver hissed, also crouching down.

“Smart bastard,” the one who had driven the Taurus summed-up quietly. “We can't see him, but he can't see us clearly neither,” the wagon's passenger said unnecessarily.

“Find him,” the quiet-voiced one commanded. “He can't be allowed to say anything to anybody.”

“Who in fuck put you in charge?”

“Who do you think?” came the assured reply.

Cicadas made their whines and frogs did their croaks. Nothing human talked nor moved for several moments. There was no gravel or leaves in the clearing and the footfalls of the killers would be hard to discern, if at all.

Monk had moved off from the manure-spreader, belly crawling across the moist ground. He'd noticed tall poplars among the heavy undergrowth bordering the clearing on its eastern end as he'd driven in behind the wagon. He made for their relative safety, and came to rest beside a tree. The automatic was in his hand, shells stuffed into the front pockets of his Levi's. He got his breathing under control in an attempt to hear the men.

Was it three hitters? Or was there a fourth like the ones who'd done the girls decades ago? One to watch out, two to hold the young women, their callused hands gripping them hard, gags tied excruciatingly tight around their mouths. And the last one to do the cutting. Burchett must have been the knifer, proud to do his bloody duty for the cause.

A flashlight's beam probed the dark, some yards from where Monk had kneeled down. The owner of the flashlight was moving about tentatively, aware his light could also pinpoint his existence. Monk obliged and clipped two off at the point of origin.

“Goddamnit,” the man yelled, clicking the light off.

“I told you not to use it,” the other one snickered from the other side of the yard. Monk recognized that voice—Kanner, from the riverboat.

Monk went flat again, scratching his face and hands as he burrowed through some low shrubbery. Absently he wondered if the stuff was poison ivy. He needed to draw the one nearest him closer. The fact that his eyes had adjusted to the dark mattered little. Everything was hulks and amorphous blobs, the night sky only slightly darker than his surroundings.

He could hear footsteps in the brush, legs sweeping past the calf-deep foliage covering the floor of the wooded area he was in. Monk felt about him and closed on a loose branch. It was a hefty piece of wood and he tried to snap it by leveraging it against the soft earth, bending it in his left hand. The bough wouldn't break. The footsteps were now moving away from him. He didn't want the men regrouping.

Hurriedly he put the gun under his chin, holding it there propped against his upper chest. He got in a position on one knee, making too much sound. He snapped the branch and squirmed away to his left, the opposite direction he guessed the man with the flashlight to be. A shotgun blast boomed, wide and way off target to where he'd been. He could hear some of the shot hit a tree.

Monk moaned loudly, cupping a hand to his mouth.

“I bagged that nigger,” the shot-gunner declared proudly, clicking on the flashlight.

“Idiot,” his friend warned.

Monk, both hands supporting his handgun shooting-range style, sent two toward the light, higher and to his right. The man would be holding the flashlight in his left, the gun in his right. The clip was now expended, and he didn't bother bringing the hammer down on an empty chamber. The light had fallen into the broad expanse of leaves and plants, its owner down.

He could hear the wounded man sucking in air. “Fuck, fuck,” the man he'd shot gasped. “Help me, Grainey.”

Grainey either wasn't that good a friend or that kind of fool. Monk took a chance and, crouching and scuttling, made for the point where the flashlight partially shone through the underbrush, the sounds of the fallen man coming from close to the beam.

Monk got there as the man, holding both hands over his stomach, suddenly focused on the figure before him.

“Nigger shit,” he screamed. He made an attempt to reach for his shotgun, a Browning with walnut stock Monk could see in the cast-off light coming through the brush. The substantial weapon was lying across the man's lower legs, but when he removed one of his hands, viscous fluids seeped from around his fingers. He quickly put his hand back, doing his best to press his intestines, or what was left of them, back into place.

The man rocked back and forth and from side to side, wailing and writhing and cursing black people, God for making black people, and some woman named Linda who'd left him. Monk scooped up the Browning, and took shells for the weapon out of the man's Army jacket pocket. He tried to grab at Monk's arm, yelling for Grainey to come. Monk knocked the weakened hand away. The shotgun-wielder wouldn't last an hour like he was without medical attention. But an hour right now might as well be forever.