Pawnbroker: A Thriller (7 page)

Chapter 24

BLUE’S FUNERAL PARLOR

MONTELLO, MISSISSIPPI

“What do you mean, the body’s gone?” Detective Tommy Mitchell said.

“Gone. G-O-N-E. What part of that you having trouble with, officer?”

“Where’d it go?”

“How should I know? I guess it’s gone to the place where all the ‘John Does’ go. Wouldn’t nobody talks to me about how I was gonna get paid, so when somebody showed up and claimed the body, didn’t bother me none to send old Johnny D. on his way.” Milton Blue had a big smile on his face, accented by a gold tooth with a small diamond front and center.

“You better watch your attitude, Blue.”

“Sound a lot like a white po-lice-man threatening a black man to me. Better watch your own self, officer.”

“Come on, Tommy,” Bobby Knight said, “Let’s get out of here. Doesn’t matter.”

“The hell it doesn’t. You listen to me, old man. You’ll produce that body or—”

“Or what?” The voice came from behind them.

Mitchell and Knight turned around to see a hulking man of around thirty, his ripped torso clad in a painted-on white tee. His arms were crossed, his shaved head tilted back and shining.

“Gentlemen, this here is Little Milton, my baby boy. He helps his old daddy out around here.”

“Or what?” Little Milton repeated.

When he got no answer, he said, “That’s what I thought. Why don’t you nice officers be moving along now?”

Chapter 25

Penny and I were brainstorming the case during a slow period at the shop. Of immediate concern was the fact that someone had been able to break into my shop, plant a package of cocaine in my toilet, install a covert video camera disguised as a motion detector, and during all of this activity my burglar alarm didn’t utter a peep. They had done it once and if we couldn’t find out how and plug the hole, there was nothing to stop them from doing it again.

The way we saw it, there were three possibilities. One, someone was skilled enough to bypass my system altogether. Second, my alarm monitoring company was in on it—the alarm actually sent its silent signal and the person at the monitoring station ignored it. Third, the alarm and the monitoring personnel performed as designed, and the police ignored the report.

“Open your alarm control panel,” Penny said.

I found the key, and unlocked and opened the door on the metal cabinet. She booted up her laptop and used a tangle of wires to jack into the main circuit board. I’m good with computers, but this was over my head.

“Good, this is a pretty sophisticated panel. I can check its history.”

Within a minute she had a list of what looked like gibberish scrolling by on her screen. “Here we go...and right in here, and...voila! Your alarm did catch the intrusion. Two-fourteen A.M., night before last. Now let’s see what it did with the information.” Her fingers blurred on the keyboard. “It dialed out just like it was supposed to...and...uh-oh.”

“Uh-oh?”

“Yeah, uh-oh. We missed a possibility.”

“What?”

“Hang on, I’m getting there.”

She rattled the keys. “Okay, here’s the telephone number your panel is programmed to dial.” She pointed at her screen. “That look right to you?”

“That’s an eight-hundred number. My monitoring station is right here in town, a local number.”

“Bingo. Someone dialed into your alarm panel, hacked into just like I’ve done here, and reprogrammed it to send its alarm signals to another number.”

I grabbed a phone and dialed the number from her screen. Got a squealing noise like I hear when my modem is connecting to the internet.

“How can we find out who has that number?” I said.

“Anybody sharp enough to go this route won’t be stupid enough to have that number in their name. It’ll be hidden behind a trail of aliases.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Chapter 26

I called my alarm company and got the correct number, after which Penny reprogrammed my panel to undo the changes wrought by the enemy. She also installed a firewall to prevent any future attacks.

We locked up the shop at five, and I called home and told Abby I’d be late. She pitched a hissy fit, since she had planned on me being there to baby-sit so she could go to some sort of shopping party with her girlfriends. Right.

I suspected she had something other than a shopping party planned, but Homestead took precedence and I didn’t have time to argue. I hung up with her in mid-rant, and for the millionth time in the past few days wondered if I had been this naïve about her true nature for the past eleven years, or if she had radically changed.

Penny crinkled her eyebrows. “You okay?” she said. Try as I did to ignore the situation with Abby and Knight, my face and ears were burning and I knew the fire was showing.

“Ready to go?” I said.

“Let’s do it.”

We took Penny’s ride, a slick little Lexus SUV, and headed out. After enough turns and loops to be confident we weren’t being followed, we hit County Road 1125 and headed north, out of town.

“This is beautiful country,” she said after a few minutes as we worked our way through the curves, up and down the rolling hills, pasture land on either side of the road stretching to the horizon. The days of August are long and the sun was still tall enough to bathe the landscape in light that was just starting to turn from white to gold.

“Yeah, I like it here. At least I have until now.”

“There are bad guys everywhere, Gray. And we’re going to nail these. Then you can go back to loving it.” She smiled.

“I hope you’re right. So, what’s it like, working for Lucas?”

“Not bad. Pay’s good, work isn’t too hard and usually not dangerous. Lucas is a shallow, self-absorbed, womanizing prick, but there are some good people that work there too.”

“And he is a good lawyer, right?”

“No, he’s not a good lawyer. He’s an awesome lawyer. Now that he’s committed to your case, he’ll do a great job.”

“And you’re sure he’s committed?”

She chuckled. “He’s not dreaming of putting his marriage at risk. His wife’s maiden name is Sheffield, by the way.”

“What’s the connection?”

“Roy Sheffield is the founding partner. And Mrs. Lucas Benton’s father.” She winked.

“Oh, I see.”

“Right. Our boy Luke is fully onboard. How much farther?”

“Next road to the right.”

She slowed and turned onto the narrow, unmarked road that wound through a thick patch of woods, then broke through into another open area.

“See that big house up on the left?” I said, just as its white columns came into view.

“More like an antebellum mansion. It’s gorgeous.”

“Yeah, pretty nice, huh? Take the second driveway and follow it around to the back.”

The house really was an antebellum mansion, one that had fallen into disrepair and stayed that way for twenty years before the current owner picked it up in an auction and spent years refurbishing it. Tucked away behind the house was a newish metal building, maybe fifty feet square. We pulled up in front of it and got out. I knocked on the door and smiled at the little camera mounted above it. The door lock buzzed and we stepped inside.

Chapter 27

LEE COUNTY COURTHOUSE

TUPELO, MISSISSIPPI

Bobby Knight sat on a bench outside the courtroom, waiting for the call to testify, trying to prepare himself. He just couldn’t focus on it anymore. Hell, he couldn’t focus on anything. The pain was back in the top of his stomach, a weird combination of dull and sharp, and the Pepto had stopped working weeks ago. All it did now was turn his shit black.

Chrissakes, he became a policeman to enforce the law, not break it. He pulled out his wallet and looked at his rookie photo, dressed in his new blue uniform, shining like a new penny and grinning like a school kid. It seemed like another lifetime.

He remembered the day he found out he’d made detective. Man, he was on track then. World by the tail. Good wife. Beautiful baby boy, Robert Matthew Knight, III, carrying on the name, the bloodline, and when he was old enough, the tradition. Just like his father and grandfather.

Now his boy was six years old, snaggle-toothed but still beautiful as all get-out. But exactly what tradition would he be carrying on with his father as an example? Corruption? Graft? Conspiracy? And that wasn’t even touching the mess he’d made of his personal life, the abandonment of his morals, the things he had done and was still doing that hurt others.

Bobby knew that many people had a hard time figuring out how things went so wrong. It’s as if their eyes pop open one day and their world is falling apart with no memory of how they got there. Not Bobby. He knew exactly how he got to this sorry state. Getting partnered with Tommy Mitchell was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Mitchell was a slime, and like a dumbass he’d let himself fall right in with him. Easy money, Mitchell said. Nothing to it. No chance of getting caught and nobody gets hurt. Tell that to Homestead.

He heard an elevator ding from around the corner, then footsteps slapping down the hallway.

“What’d you find—” he was saying when Mitchell walked up, until he looked up and saw him. “Jesus, what happened to you?” Mitchell’s lip was swollen and a large Band-Aid covered his right cheekbone.

“Mark my words, Bobby, I’m gonna kill that nigger.”

“What happened?”

“What the hell you think? I went back to lean on Blue, find out where that body went, and his bouncing baby boy showed up again.”

How the hell had he ever let himself get sucked into a scheme with a dumbass like this? “What now?”

“What what what! Is that the only damn thing you know how to say?”

“Kiss my ass, Tommy. I’ve had enough of your crap. I’m done, with you, with all of this. I’m out.”

“Like hell you are.”

“I’m serious, Tommy.”

“You need to start thinking straight, Bobby Boy. We’ll go get a beer wh—”

“I’m thinking straighter than I have in a long time, Tommy. I’m done.”

Chapter 28

“Doc, meet Penny.” I didn’t dare tell him her last name as long as it was avoidable. Dr. Frankie Jollette is a great guy but he also has the world’s corniest sense of humor—not counting Bill Berner—and doesn’t know when to stop. Penny Lane would have been irresistible. Just inside the door was a small office. Medical journals, newspapers, and hundreds of other books and magazines were stacked everywhere. Desk, floor, chairs, all were buried. The room smelled like an old library. Doc led us out of the office, through a narrow corridor and into the main arena for the evening, a much larger room, dark everywhere except the center, where it was brilliantly lit by an overhead operating-room light.

I don’t know what led me to believe I was going to be ready for this. I’m a pawnbroker. Some of my customers may appear brain dead, but Johnny Homestead was way beyond that. Frankie had him on a long, stainless steel table, naked, eyes as open as they had been when they were looking over the barrel of his gun at me.

Seeing him there like that, with that atrocious hole in his temple, my hole, was not a good moment for me. I had killed a man. This man. Dear God in heaven, what had I done?

And if killing him wasn’t enough, now I was about to stand there and watch this? Had I lost my mind?

“You all right, Gray?” Penny said.

“No.”

“I believe it. You look like hell.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Go in the other room. I’ll assist.”

“You sure?”

“Go.”

Chapter 29

Doc was a retired pathologist who had taught at the Ole Miss medical school for decades. He and I met about ten years ago during a deer hunt up at North Ridge hunting club. I was in a tree stand, had been there for hours, when I heard something coming through the woods. It was very quiet and I assumed it was a deer. (It was late in the season, by which time they become creatures of astounding stealth.) It took me ten minutes to spot the source of the noise, an old codger in extreme camo, painted face and all, about forty yards away, not a millimeter of the required fluorescent orange on his body. I watched him creep through the woods like a ghost. He urinated into a camo container, then quickly sealed it to contain the scent. This old man was serious, I thought.

It took him another hour to cover the distance between us, after which he leaned against my tree and lit up a cigar that every animal in the northern hemisphere could smell. I couldn’t contain myself, and burst out laughing. He jumped, then looked up at me and hissed, “Shut up, you fool, you’ll scare off the deer!”

So began one of my most cherished friendships. I smiled as I thought about all the laughs he had provided through the years.

“Gray, you need to see this,” Penny said, leaning through the door. My stomach had settled, so I pulled myself up from the tattered sofa and headed back into the cutting room.

“Oh, good grief!” I said when I got close enough to see what was going on. They had the poor guy’s chest opened up like a Christmas package, and the top of his skull had been sawn open and plucked off like a beanie cap. Yes, yes, I know this is standard procedure, but this was real, not CSI.

“Exactly what part of all this grossness am I supposed to be looking at?” I said.

“This!” Doc said, beaming.

I guess I was becoming conditioned, because I expected to lurch, but my stomach held. Doc was holding up the brain as if it were a particularly nice cauliflower off the produce rack at Kroger.

“I ask you again, what am I looking at?”

“Come closer.”

I wasn’t excited about this, but I shuffled his way.

“Now look at this,” he said. It was then I noticed he had separated the two halves of the upper part of the brain, the bouncy Jello-looking part. Underneath those parts was what I can only describe as looking like a bunch of interconnected glands.

“See anything wrong with this picture?” he said.

“These parts,” I said, pointing to the gland things underneath and trying not to touch anything in the process, “look sort of...sick.”

“That’s an understatement, Gray. This man’s limbic system is necrotic!”

“And that means...what?”

“See how the edges are turning white?”

I nodded.

“It’s because the tissue is dying. That’s called necrosis.”

“That’s very interesting but I don’t see what it has to do with my shooting him.”

“The limbic system controls behavioral elements, like aggression.”

“You’re saying this guy could’ve been wigged out?”

“I’m not familiar with ‘wigged out,’ but beyond a shadow of a doubt, this man’s behavior would have been dramatically affected.”

I looked over at Penny. “Is this helping us?”

“It’s a piece of a puzzle,” she said. “Johnny was a prick, but he wasn’t a robber and he was definitely not the type to put himself in a position to be killed. He thought way too much of himself.”

“So you think this brain condition caused him to show up in my shop and stick a gun in my face.”

“Doc?” she said. The two of them had obviously chummed up in a hurry.

“A limbic system in this condition could definitely have caused him to do things not in keeping with his normal personality.”

“Okay, he had a brain disease that drove him nuts. I still don’t see how it helps our case,” I said.

“Tell him the rest, Doc.”

“The rest?” I said.

Doc was pacing now, still carrying the brain. “This is not the result of a disease, not in the conventional sense of the word, at least.”

“Then what is it?”

“It sounds almost too crazy to say out loud twice in the same day,” he said.