Last of the Dixie Heroes (30 page)

“Help me, Dad.” He was just a little boy.

Vandam stepped out of a mass of blue uniforms, grabbed Rhett, pulled him back, yelled something to his men. The Irregulars kept coming, sprinting now. Peterschmidt and the rest of his squad stepped over the fence, raised their muskets, aimed, fired. Noise and a big puff of smoke, of course, but nothing happened—except what was that? A bloody chunk, torn from Sonny’s shoulder? And where was Lee? No longer at Roy’s side, but lying on the ground, a red stain spreading down one leg of her butternut trousers.

“These guys are good.”

“How do they do that, the blood part?”

Roy’s little boy, and Roy had put him where he was. The gene took over. Roy was almost unaware of what happened next, of slowing down, not quite stopping, but slowing down enough to hold the carbine steady, see Peterschmidt hyperclear in the V, even notice a small mole on his upper lip, and then squeeze the trigger.

The wonderful gun bucked against his shoulder. A red hole appeared in Peterschmidt’s forehead. Peterschmidt’s eyes went blank, just like that. His men gazed at him as he fell, then dropped their weapons as one, turned, and ran.

Applause.

Roy crashed through the fence, Sonny right behind him, making a wild growling noise in his throat. The whole stockade came down. Vandam was backing out the other side, onto the promontory. He held Rhett with one hand, had a pistol in the other. Vandam’s son, drum around his neck, said, “Don’t hurt me.”

The man in the stovepipe hat stepped in their way.

“Maybe you guys should tone it down a little. You’re scaring the kids.”

Sonny looked up at him, blinked a couple of times. Then understanding dawned on his face. He raised his musket, aimed point-blank at the man in the stovepipe hat.

“What are you doing?” Roy said.

“Gonna win it this time, cuz,” said Sonny.

Roy knocked the musket aside just as it went off. The explosion almost smothered the sound of Vandam’s pistol, so that at first Roy thought Sonny fell for no reason. But then he saw that Sonny had a red hole in his forehead too.

Roy dropped his empty weapon, went for Vandam. Vandam aimed the pistol at him, but Roy knew there hadn’t been time to reload. Vandam pulled the trigger anyway, and the pistol surprised Roy by going off. Pistol, not a rifle: of course, they had six-shooters, he knew that. Knew it for sure because of the sharp pain in his chest.

Roy dove at Vandam as he fired again, the bullet passing so close to Roy that he felt its tiny breeze on his cheek. Roy, Vandam, Rhett, fell together, rolling on the hard rock of the promontory. Roy got hold of Vandam’s arm, the one he had around Rhett, bent it back and back until Vandam cried out and let the boy go.

Roy and Vandam kept rolling, locked together, each with a hand on the pistol jammed between them, trying to pull it free. Roy hung on, but Vandam was powerful and Roy’s great strength was suddenly gone. With one last twist, Vandam wrenched the pistol out of Roy’s grasp. Roy didn’t even have enough left to hold on to him, to keep him too close to point the gun. Vandam rolled free, started to rise, the pistol coming up. Started to rise, but one of his feet was already over the edge of the promontory, and Vandam stepped down on air. He tipped and fell backward off Lookout Mountain; falling, falling, turning gold, then vanishing in the cloud.

Roy sat up, tried to. He put his hand to his chest. Blood was coming through the hole in his jacket, the hole he’d inherited. Blood, but not pouring, or even flowing, more like seeping.

“Water, Roy?”

Roy looked up, saw Curtis in his rags, holding out the tin dipper.

Roy drank. “Thank you.”

Curtis nodded.

Roy stood up. Curtis helped him off with his jacket, the two of them moving as one. Roy dropped the jacket over the edge. It disappeared too, in that golden mist.

Roy gathered Rhett to him, held him close.

“Honest Abe thought I was pretending,” Rhett said. “He gave me some candy.”

Roy patted his back. The muscles along Rhett’s spine relaxed. Roy felt another one of those moments of perfect peace, but this one was in the now.

In the now came flashing lights and police cars, one after another. Uniformed men of the present age, with automatic weapons and flak jackets, ran onto the promontory, Marcia and Jesse, his arm in a sling, in their midst.

“I fought good up at the Mountain House, didn’t I, Dad?” Rhett said, his mouth against Roy’s chest, the question vibrating through Roy’s body.

Roy looked down, saw his own blood, just a little of it, reddening that tuft of hair. “You fought good and I’m proud of you,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

THIRTY-ONE

Maybe Roy had no business making that last remark, but for once he got lucky.

First, it was pure luck that he didn’t die before he even had a chance to utter it. For some reason, perhaps Roy turning at the last moment, the bullet entered his chest at a sharp angle, shattering a rib, the pieces of which had to come out, but failing to reach anything vital. He spent a week in the hospital.

Then he was lucky he didn’t go to jail. The Sons of the Confederacy raised enough money to hire the best lawyers, but Roy turned them down, went with a public defender. In the end, prosecutors in two states couldn’t see their way past the kidnapping and self-defense issues. No bullet was ever found up at the National Weather Service station, and its destruction was put down to a lightning strike. Roy pleaded guilty to one count of disturbing the peace, a misdemeanor, and paid a $250 fine, money he didn’t have at the time; the bank had already taken the blackened remains of his house in Atlanta. Lee, not long out of the hospital, lent him the money.

Dibrell served three months for a parole violation, specifically for leaving the state without the permission of his officer. His original conviction had been for shoplifting, although how that related to his fear of DNA evidence wasn’t clear. Roy found all that out in an awkward phone conversation with Gordo, their last.

The investigation of the weather station fire did uncover Ezekiel’s marijuana patch, which was razed to the ground. Ezekiel got fifteen years.

Sonny Junior left no will. As his closest living relative, Roy inherited the old farm with that cantilevered barn of the kind still found in east Tennessee. He sold it to a New York publishing executive and her husband who were getting into fly-fishing. Roy used what remained after paying off the mortgage to hire a good lawyer for Ezekiel’s appeal. Partly because he didn’t like the contrast between fifteen years for marijuana cultivation and a $250 fine for killing two men. But mostly because he and Ezekiel were family, and family was what mattered: Sonny Junior had been right about that.

Globax spun off several small divisions, as Curtis had foretold. Curtis became CEO of one of them, a small company with an office in New Jersey and a patent for a device Roy didn’t understand, but would be shipped by the millions if everything went right. Curtis offered Roy a job as head of shipping, paying more than twice what Roy had ever earned. It meant moving to New Jersey.

Roy took Lee on long walks to help with her rehab. On hot days, she wore a dress. They didn’t talk much, perhaps didn’t have a whole lot to say. Once they came upon a Confederate graveyard. Little battle flags flew here and there; Roy didn’t feel a thing.

“I’m not pregnant,” Lee told him.

Roy didn’t say anything, didn’t know where this was going.

“I actually can’t get pregnant, Roy, meaning it’s not possible.” They were holding hands. She let go. “Are you going to take that job?”

“I want you to come with me,” Roy said.

“To New Jersey?”

“We don’t have to live in New Jersey. New York and Connecticut are close by.”

“I’ll think about it.”

Roy ended up going alone. Marcia had seen to it that Roy lost all but supervised visitation rights. That was good enough for now. On the very first one, Marcia happened to mention how good Roy looked. The supervision part began to drop away in practice.

In the fall, Rhett signed up for Pop Warner and Roy volunteered as an assistant coach. Rhett was growing now, getting bigger and stronger. He played without fear, with no regard for his body, led the team in tackles and made the all-stars.

After the games, they always went to a barbecue place Roy had found. The head cheerleader started coming along, Roy surprised at first that Rhett didn’t discourage her, which just showed that he still had a long way to go when it came to understanding things quick. She thought Rhett’s little tuft of hair was dorky. It was gone the next time Roy saw him.

Lee came for a visit, stayed three extra days. “I need to get used to you,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You. This present you.”

“It’s the only one,” Roy said.

She booked another visit for Thanksgiving. By that time, Roy had already gotten his first raise. It was a good company, with a friendly atmosphere, flexible hours, and a generous health plan. Roy’s inhalers were free.

Also by Peter Abrahams

THE TUTOR*

CRYING WOLF*

A PERFECT CRIME*

THE FAN*

LIGHTS OUT*

REVOLUTION #9*

PRESSURE DROP

HARD RAIN

RED MESSAGE

TONGUES OF FIRE

THE FURY OF RACHEL MONETTE

*Published by Ballantine Books

PRAISE FOR
PETER ABRAHAMS

Last of the Dixie Heroes

“There is plenty of suspense . . . It takes a deft touch to be able to mingle the modern world of Atlanta with glimpses of that bloody past which still haunts the South, and Abrahams has that skill.”

—I Love a Mystery
newsletter

“Spellbinding . . . Fast-paced . . . An exciting psychological thriller.”

—
BookBytes.com

“With his diverse settings, quirky characters, and intriguing story lines, Abrahams has set himself up as a master of engrossing, off-the-beaten-track suspense yarns.”

—Publishers Weekly

A Perfect Crime

“Abrahams gets the human dimensions just right. . . . Each stage of this perverse puzzle has been constructed with deadly artistry.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Crying Wolf

“Great suspense . . . Tightly written and full of unexpected but plausible twists . . . Abrahams is among the best at this game.”

—The Denver Post

Please turn the page for a sneak preview of the newest thriller by Peter Abrahams:

THE TUTOR

Coming in hardcover in July 2002 from The Ballantine Publishing Group.

ONE

Linda Marx Gardner awoke from a dream and felt her husband’s erection against her hip. Not nudging it, not demanding; just there. Earlier in her marriage, or maybe more accurately very early, on predawn mornings like this, the bedroom dim and shadowy, Linda would have taken hold of Scott and started something. Those predawn somethings, their bodies still loose and heavy with sleep, would usually turn out pretty good, sometimes better than that.

Linda got out of bed. In her dream she’d been frantically erasing words from sheets of pink paper, but the words themselves were all forgotten. As she went into the bathroom, Scott made a little sound in his sleep, one of those soft grunts that indicate agreement. She had a funny thought, not like her at all: was he erasing something too?

Then she was in the shower, her appointment book opening up in her mind, time blocks dense with her neat writing. There was going to be an overrun on the Skyway account, most of it from the photography screw-up, but not all. Linda tried to figure out where the rest of it came from, letting go of everything but work so completely that she jumped as she caught sight of Scott through the steamy glass, his naked back to her as he stood before the toilet.

She called to him: “Can you wake Brandon?”

Scott said something she didn’t catch because of the shower’s noise, almost a roar—when they’d renovated instead of moving up from West Mill to Old Mill, they’d used nothing but the best, in this case the 10-Jet Tower from Kohler’s Body Spa collection—and when she looked again he wasn’t there. The water, hot and pounding, felt so good she could have stayed there all day. Linda turned off the shower at once.

She got out, reaching for a towel with one hand, flushing the toilet with the other. Scott always forgot, or didn’t bother, or something. Her watch, on the granite sink top—black granite streaked with midnight blue, the nicest feature in the whole house—told her she was running two or three minutes late, nothing to be all tense about. She took a deep breath.

“Bran? Bran? Bran? Bran?”

Over and over. The word penetrated Brandon’s dreams, twisted them out of shape, finally woke him.

“Brandon? You awake, buddy? It’s late.”

Brandon came awake enough to know he had the covers pulled way up, know that he was totally warm, totally fuzzy, totally unable to get up or maybe even move at all. He got one eye open, not much, just enough to peer at his father through gummy lashes. His father: towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream on his face, razor dripping in his hand.

“I’m really not—”

“Forget it, Brandon. You’re going to school.”

“I feel like shit.”

“You’re going. And watch your language.”

Brandon didn’t say anything.

“Show a little life. Sit up or something. Don’t make me come back here.”

“All right, all right,” Brandon said, but the only thing moving was that one eyelid, closing back down.

“And this room is really getting out of hand.”

Brandon, almost asleep, barely caught that last bit. The inner fuzziness repaired itself quickly, knitting up the little hole poked through by his father and then some.

A cut-glass prism dangled in the window of the bedroom across the hall from Brandon, a window that always caught the first light. As Brandon sank back into deep sleep, the sun blinked up through the bare tree limbs out back, sending a ray through the prism. A tiny rainbow instantly printed itself on the calendar hanging on the opposite wall, and not only that, but precisely on a special square, the one with the birthday cake drawn inside, eleven flame-tipped candles burning on top. That rainbow, quivering slightly on her upcoming birthday, was the first thing Ruby saw when she opened her eyes.

She held her breath. This was proof of God’s existence. That was her first thought. She’d barely begun to deal with it, and its backpack—that’s how some thoughts were, they carried backpacks—that God took a personal interest in her, Aruba Nicole Marx Gardner, before her mind got going with the facts: sun, east window, prism, a rainbow that had to land somewhere, coincidence. That was the way Sherlock Holmes would see it, and she respected Sherlock Holmes more than anyone on earth. Didn’t love him—Dr. Watson was the lovable one—but respected him.

Still, coincidence could be tricky. Take that time she’d been eating a baloney sandwich and reading a story about a frog, she must have been four, when she’d suddenly puked all over the place, including on Brandon beside her in the backseat, frog and baloney getting all mixed up in some way. That was how she saw it, and hadn’t touched baloney since. But she could hear Sherlock Holmes: “A long car trip and a winding road? One could produce the same result with peanut butter and a penguin.” Elementary, my dear Ruby.

The rainbow moved on, sliding off her birthday, off the calendar, ballooning along the wall, warping around the corner of her open closet, vanishing in the shadows within. The spinning earth did that, stuck the rainbow in her closet. There would be lots of backpacks to that thought, but Ruby didn’t get to them. Some commotion kicked up down the hall, only the sharp notes getting though her door, like when one earphone conks out.

“Scott? Didn’t I ask you to get Brandon up?”

Muffle, muffle.

“Well he isn’t, as usual, and it’s five after seven. Brandon, get up now.”

Muffle.

Then came sounds of movement, and Bran yelled, “Fuck. Don’t fuckin’ do that,” in that deep new voice of his, ragged at the edges, that vibrated the walls, and Ruby knew that Mom had ripped the covers off him, which always worked.

The sounds that followed—Bran getting up, banging around in his room, crossing the hall to the bathroom they shared, turning on the shower—faded as Ruby took
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
off her bedside table and found her place: “The Speckled Band.” Just from the title, she knew she was going to like it.

Speckled.
A word she’d never spoken. She tried it out loud for the first time. “Speckled. Speckled.” Her stuffed animals watched in silence from their perches on bookshelves. A strange word, with a kind of power, if that made sense, and maybe not power completely for the good.
Freckled
was on the good side,
heckled
a bit nasty,
speckled
different in some way she didn’t know. The garage door opened under her room and her dad’s old Triumph rumbled out, sounds that were far, far away.

I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis, with which he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him.

Yes, that was it, what was so special about him. As Ruby read, her room went still, began to lose its physical properties, became less solid. The bachelor lodgings at 221-B Baker Street went the other way. Ruby could almost hear the crackle of the fire Mrs. Hudson had had the good sense to light, could almost—

“Ruby! Ruby! Ruby, for God’s sake!”

“What?”

“I called you six times.” Mom, probably dressed for work, probably standing at the top of the stairs, that impatient look on her face, when the up-and-down line between her eyebrows appeared. “Are you up?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t forget tennis after school, sweetheart.” Just from the change of tone, Ruby knew the up-and-down line had smoothed itself out. “See you tonight.” Mom’s voice trailed away as she went down the stairs.

“Bye, Mom.”

Maybe not loud enough, because there was no reply. Then Mom was backing out of the garage, lurching just a bit as usual, tires squeaking on the cement floor. The garage door closed—a long whine ending in a thump—and the sound of the Jeep Grand Cherokee, smoother than the Triumph and much less interesting, faded and faded to nothing. Sherlock Holmes deduced from seven spatters of mud that the terrified young lady in his sitting room had had a rough ride in a dogcart. A car honked on the street—Brandon’s ride. The terrified young lady was going mad from fear.

Linda was dictating a memo about the Skyway account into her digital organizer when her cell rang. Deborah, her sister-in-law, married to Scott’s brother, Tom—Linda always caught her breath for a moment when Deborah called. She was excited about something. Linda could hear it just in the way she said, “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Are you at work yet?”

“Stuck in traffic.”

“Me too.” Pause, but not a long one. “Did you get Brandon’s results?”

“What results?”

“The SAT.”

“I thought they weren’t coming till next week.”

“That’s if you wait for the mail,” Deborah said. “There’s a number to call as of seven this morning. You just need a credit card and patience—it took me twenty minutes to get through.”

Linda’s dashboard clock read 7:32.

“So you got Sam’s results?” she said. Sam, Brandon’s first cousin, same age.

“Fifteen forty.” The volume of Deborah’s voice went way up, almost an explosion, like some spike caused by a change in atmospheric conditions. Linda held the phone away from her ear.

“Is that good?”

“Have you forgotten? It’s out of sixteen hundred, Linda. Sam’s in the ninety-ninth percentile.”

Somehow she had forgotten; now it all came back. “That’s great,” Linda said, stop-and-go on the exit ramp. The homeless guy who worked this spot stared through her window, rattling his Dunkin’ Donuts cup. It all came back, including her own score, and she added, “Wow.”

“Thanks,” said Deborah. “We kind of expected something good because of his PSAT—they track pretty closely—but still. Some kids do get sixteen hundred, of course, but we probably won’t have him retake it. With his tennis and community ser—” She stopped herself. “Anyway, here’s the number. Good luck.”

Linda tried the number. Busy, and it stayed busy until she was about to enter the parking garage under the building, a cellular dead zone. That was when she got through. Linda pulled over to the side, her foot on the brake, the car in gear. Someone honked. Linda followed the automated menu on the other end, her heart suddenly racing. She needed Brandon’s social security number, which she had in her organizer, and a Visa or MasterCard number and expiration date, which she had in her head. It cost thirteen dollars. There was a pause, a long one, during which she found she’d actually broken into a sweat, and then the digital voice uttered Brandon’s numbers: “Verbal—five hundred ten. Math—five hundred eighty.”

Linda clicked off and, as soon as she had done so, began to doubt she’d heard right. Five hundred ten? Five hundred eighty? That would be what—1090 on the SAT? Impossible. Brandon was a good student, almost always got A’s and B’s. Those digital voices were sometimes hard to understand—they tended not to emphasize the syllables a normal human being would. Maybe it had been 610 and 680. That would be 1290, the exact score she’d had years before. She didn’t think of herself as smarter than Brandon. It must have been 1290.

Linda tried the number again. Busy. The clock now read eight on the button. She was going to be late. No one up there cared about five minutes or even ten, but Linda had never been late, not in the three years she’d been on the job. She let up on the brake, eased the car back into the long-term check-in lane, hit redial. And connected. As she entered the garage, she went through the social security and credit card routine again, paying another thirteen dollars, waited for the long pause. While what? While some computer matched the social security number with the credit card number and activated a voice program. How long could it take? She stuck her parking card in the slot, jammed it in, really, and went through the raised gate as the digital voice said: “Verbal—”

And lost contact, now in the dead zone.

On the elevator, Linda tried once more. The building was seven stories, her office on six. Linda got through to the PSAT number as she passed three, repeated the social security and credit card numbers as she was getting out, paying thirteen dollars yet again, listened to the long pause as she walked down the corridor. She opened the office door and saw to her surprise that everyone was gathered around the conference table for a meeting. They all turned to look at her. The digital voice spoke once more: “Five hundred ten. Five hundred eighty.” This time she caught the percentile too: “Seventy-fifth.”

Brandon got into Dewey’s car.

“Hey.”

“How’s it goin’?”

“I feel like shit.”

“Tell me about it.”

Dewey, the first of Brandon’s friends to get his license, had a joint going, which sometimes happened on the ride home but never in the morning. He passed it to Brandon. Brandon didn’t want to go to school fucked up, didn’t want to go to school at all, but shit. He didn’t take it any further than that, just hit off the joint, passed it back.

“Could use some gas money,” Dewey said.

Brandon handed Dewey three ones.

“Am I driving a lawnmower and I don’t know it?”

Brandon handed over two more, noticing that the fuel gauge read full. But so what? Dewey pulled away from the curb, squealing the tires just a bit. He switched on a CD, some rap about “fuck you, good as new, all we do, then it’s through” that Brandon hadn’t heard before. Not too bad.

“School sucks,” Dewey said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m thinking about dropping out.”

“You mean before senior year?”

“I mean like now.”

“But what about baseball?” Dewey had been captain of the freshman team and had started a few games for the varsity last spring.

“I’m not going to be eligible anyway,” Dewey said. “I’m flunking two courses.”

“Still time to get them up.”

Dewey took a big hit off the joint, breathed out slow. “Right,” he said.

Fuck you, good as new, all we do, then it’s through.

Not too bad? It was great.

“Who’s this?”

“You don’t know who this is? Unka Death.”