Pawnbroker: A Thriller (13 page)

Chapter 50

It was evening and I was home when Lucas returned my call. “Yes,” he said, “I believe we can get that overruled and get you in to see your wife, provided she wants to see you.”

“Good, let’s get to work on it,” I said, pacing, tethered by the phone cord. I was still conflicted on how I felt about Abby, but I wouldn’t turn my back on her while she was down.

“Gray, just because we can does not mean we should. In fact, I think it’s best that you stay away.”

“Come again?”

“We have no idea what’s going on in their minds concerning this new angle and it’s safer to stay completely away from the situation.”

I sighed. “I think I look guilty of something if I don’t go see my wife in the hospital.”

“They can’t put you in jail for how you look,” he said. “They can only do that with evidence, and as long as you’re staying away from her and staying away from them, there’s no chance of giving them anything new.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I know you don’t, but you need to trust me.”

“All right. Thanks.” I racked the phone and punched the refrigerator hard enough to leave a dent. Then had to get ice out of that refrigerator to put on my knuckles. Brilliant.

Once the throbbing stopped, I called Dad’s house and talked to the girls for a few minutes, then went to the workout room. It was still a mess from Abby’s apparent tantrum, broken crap all over the place. Something about the mess felt different, but I couldn’t figure out what. I didn’t feel like cleaning it up, but I also didn’t want to look at it while I tried to exercise. An hour later, I was in Bartholomew’s Grotto, well on my way to schnockerdom. It was a weeknight and the place was dead, just me and one other fellow about the size of a Volkswagen. I tried not to stare. Failed. His head was the size of a cinder block. And roughly the same shape.

VW saw me looking, lumbered over and sat on the barstool next to me.

“Jack Docker,” he said, sticking his hand out.

“Gray Bolton.” His hand swallowed mine.

“You look familiar. I seen you before?”

“Not that I know of.” Docker looked and sounded sober. No fun for a drunk to talk to a sober man. Usually no fun in the other direction either, which left me wondering why he wanted to talk to me. I rotated my stool back facing the bar.

“I’ve seen you somewhere before, I’m pretty sure.”

“Jack, no offense, but I’m not in a talking mood.” I dunked the shot of tequila in front of me and looked up to get another hit.

The bartender was just walking through a door into the back room behind the bar. “Be right back,” he said. “Nature.” I nodded.

Then Docker had hold of my right triceps. Squeezing. Hard. I spun toward him and saw that his friendly demeanor had been replaced with a feral snarl.

“Listen here, Bolton. Your little nigger girlfriend’s making calls, asking questions. Stop it. You understand?”

All at once I was as sober as my father, no doubt the judge about whom they coined that hackneyed phrase. And I was livid. Docker suddenly represented everything and everybody that had been conspiring to wreck my life, all compressed into one ugly hulk of a man. As the adrenaline chased away the alcohol, only then did it register that Docker was “a great big sumbitch, damn near seven feet tall.”

I came across hard and fast with a left cross. He ducked at the last moment and I connected with temple instead of jaw, but it still felt a hell of a lot better than pounding the refrigerator. Unlike the icebox, however, Docker was of a mind to fight back. He still had my right triceps in a vise-grip, and he yanked hard, pulling me off the stool. I grabbed him by the neck and pulled him down to the floor with me, and I wound up on top, pounding him in the face.

For some reason unknown to me, there’s a Code of Valor about how men fight. Thou shalt not kick another man in the balls. He was not a subscriber and kneed me hard, at which time I melted off him and onto my back on the cold wood floor. Moaning. Holding them. The bartender had heard the commotion and showed up with a little wooden baseball bat. “Both of you get the hell out of here. Already called the cops.”

Docker pulled himself up to his knees and looked down at me. “If it was up to me, I’d kill you right here, you piece of shit. As it is, I’ll just leave you with a little something.” He pulled a folded envelope from his pocket, reached down, stuck it into my shirt pocket. Then he stood, sucked a hanging glob of snot and blood back into his nose, and left.

Chapter 51

On the way home, I called Penny and told her what happened. Yes, she had been making calls, and was obviously getting close. We decided it would be best to stop for the night.

After a hot shower and a gentle shave, I retrieved ice from the refrigerator once again. I didn’t remember him getting a solid punch in, but he obviously did, given the cut and bruising along my left cheekbone. I put several ice cubes and a bit of water in a Ziploc bag and held it up there. I got really bored holding my hand up after about two minutes and tossed the icepack into the sink.

In the bathroom, still newborn naked, I checked for other injuries and discovered that, for the first time in my life, I really had Blue Balls. And they ached a lot worse than they ever did from the other variety of that affliction. There were several other tender marks that were obviously going to be nasty bruises, but that’s about it. All in all, I was in pretty good shape.

I was in the process of emptying my pockets before taking my clothes to the laundry room, when the envelope fell out of my shirt pocket. I had forgotten it. I unfolded it and looked it over. No writing, no marks, and sealed. I tore it open and retrieved the single sheet of paper from inside. When I unfolded the sheet, the world around me receded into some other dimension.

Chapter 52

I
nside the sheet was a single photograph of my father’s house, with him and Mandy and Julie walking from the house toward Dad’s car.

After a good thirty rings, Dad still hadn’t answered. It was past eleven. He never went out that late when he was home by himself, much less when he had the girls. Something was wrong. I was getting into my car when Penny pulled into the driveway. Rather than waste time getting her to move her car back out so I could get out, I jumped in with her and pointed. “Go that way!”

To my relief, she backed out and launched the Lexus in the right direction before asking what was going on. I filled her in. “Oh, no,” she said, and hit the gas a little harder.

I was in full-fledged panic and she didn’t say idiotic things like, “Calm down.” She just drove fast and well as I gave directions. “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” I said, over and over. She reached over and patted me on the shoulder.

“What did the guy in the bar look like?”

“Big, bulked-up, face looked like something his neck puked up. I bet he’s the shooter who shot Mitchell. Said his name was Jack Docker.”

“Scar over his left eye?”

“Now that you mention it, yeah. Why? Take your next left.”

Penny slid through the turn at forty and recovered nicely. “That’s his name. He’s a hired goon, works mostly out of Memphis.”

“Can we talk about this after we find my girls?”

“Sure, sorry.”

“The big house on the corner there...pull in...” She irked the car to a stop and I bailed out. The grass was wet and I slipped, fell on my butt, discovered I was already getting sore from my romp in the Grotto.

I got up and sprinted for the back of the house. No outside lights were on. No inside lights either as far as I could tell. At the back door, I ran my hand over the top of the door jamb and came down with a key, cursing my father for being predictable and careless. I unlocked the door, opened it, stepped inside. Started screaming, “Dad! Julie! Mandy! Dad! Julie! Mandy!”

The staircase shook as I pounded my way up it, three steps at a time. I spun around the corner of the balustrade at the top landing. “Dad! Julie! Mandy! Dad—” Suddenly I was blinded by light.

“Grayson? What in God’s name are you doing?” My father had stepped out of his bedroom into the hall, and had flipped the hall lights on.

“Dad, the girls, where are they?”

“Well, they were asleep, but I suspect they’re awake and terrified about now.” He shuffled on down the hallway toward their room, me right behind him, Penny behind me.

“Hurry up, Dad!”

He turned around and gave me that roll of the Judge’s eyes, the one I hated down to the marrow of my soul. I moved him aside, shoved the door open, and turned the light on. Julie and Mandy were in the same bed, clutched tightly to each other, eyes wide with fear.

Chapter 53

“Dad, do not pull your hard-ass routine right now, please!”

“What ‘hard-ass’ routine would you be referring to, Grayson? The fact that I don’t believe in running? That I believe in standing my own ground in my own home?”

“You don’t understand the kind of people we’re dealing with!”

“I understand them perfectly. I deal with criminals every day, have for thirty-four years. I haven’t ever let them drive me out of my house with their threats and I see no need to start now.”

He was standing there, arms folded across his chest, head tilted back, jaw set like he was John Damn Wayne. And I’d run out of patience to deal with the stubborn old bird.

“Fine, Dad. You stay here. I’m getting my children out of here, though.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Grayson. How will you run your business? You’re going to have some mighty big legal bills rolling in from your Memphis lawyer.” That was Memphis, emphasis added for effect just as he cut his eyes briefly at Penny.

I pulled the picture out of my pocket and slapped it down on the table. “Look at that. Look at it!”

“How dare you come into my own house and—”

“Penny, will you help me get the girls, please,” I said as I started up the stairs. She didn’t answer but she did fall in behind me.

“Grayson.”

Three steps at a time.

“Grayson.”

Top landing.

He was following us. “Grayson.”

Almost there.

“Very well, Grayson.” A big sigh from behind me. “Where do you suggest we go?”

Chapter 54

Over the years and generations in which the Ballards have ruled Pontocola County, there has evolved a presence about them, a sense of self-importance one would only expect to find among royalty or major heads of state. This smugness was fully developed, genetically mature in Ricky Ballard; it oozed from him as he strode into my shop, unannounced and alone.

He was a pudgy fireplug of a man, five-elevenish, the athletic build of his youth long buried. His hair was Elvis-black, straight from a bottle. He wore khakis and a crisply starched short-sleeved white shirt with epaulets on the shoulders. Just above the shirt pocket was an old but polished star-shaped badge that said (I’m not kidding): I AM THE LAW. (Local legend is that the badge was hand-made for Ricky’s grandfather, Critch, shortly after he became sheriff.) Finishing off the outfit was a SigSauer in a molded leather holster on his right hip. Mr. Law Enforcement Man, right there in one shiny package.

“What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

“We need to talk.”

This was the first time I had been this close to Ballard since the incident downtown. Come to think of it, though I had seen him countless times, this was the only time I’d ever been up close other than the aforementioned occasion. I’m good at reading people. It’s what I do all day, every day, in the shop. It’s a sense, an automatic reading and assimilation of numerous factors into an impression.

I had long known Ballard was of poor character, disgusting, corrupt, and greedy. But standing there, I mean right there, three feet away, I instantly and fervently knew that it went deeper, much deeper. This man was bad, a man without a heart, a man with a black soul. Evil.

“Talk to my lawyer.” I slid one of Lucas Benton’s cards across the counter.

I could hear him sucking air through his nose as he stood there staring. His eyes narrowed slightly and one side of his mouth turned up in a sneering, crooked little half-smile, as if he found it amusing that someone dared to rebuff him. “You’d do well not to piss on me, Bolton.”

“And you’d do well to get off my property, Mr. Ballard,” I said without a blink.

“That’s Sheriff Ballard.”

I stared at him without answering. He stared back, his mouth drawing up into an angry pucker. This went on for thirty seconds, after which I said, “Get out. Now.”

He turned and walked away, but just as he reached the door, he turned around, arranged his hand into a mock gun, index finger pointing, thumb serving as the hammer. He aimed his “hand gun,” cocked it, fired, then pulled it down and blew the smoke away from its muzzle. “Be seeing you again.” He winked and stepped through the door.

Penny gave a low whistle. “This mess is rotten and the stench is growing, Gray. It might not be a bad idea for you to get out of sight yourself. If they manage to trump up another arrest warrant, I doubt the judge will go along with bail.”

“I won’t run.”

“Well gee, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that before?”

“It’s not the same thing, Penny.”

“Yes, Gray. It’s exactly the same thing. You’re letting the stubborn gene cloud your thinking.”

“Hold on, Missy. I am not like my father.”

She shot me a look fit to kill, and I figured the “missy” had touched some feminist nerve, and then she burst out laughing. Laughed so hard that tears rolled.

“You want to share the joke?”

She finally caught her breath, wiped her eyes. “You. You’re like a clone of your father, and here you are, ‘I’m not like him.’” She did the last part in her version of a deep booming voice.

I didn’t see the humor.

“And Gray, I don’t think being like him is a bad thing. He seems like a good man. You’re a good man. You’re a good father. I bet he was, too.”

“He was a dictator, a merciless tyrant, King Grayson the First.”

“Oh really? Give me an example.”

“How about, when I was in high school, I had to be home by eleven o’clock on weekends.”

“Ha! I had to be home at ten and could only go somewhere one night per week. Try again.”

That blew me away. I was sure I’d had the earliest curfew known to mankind. “I got a speeding ticket and he grounded me from my car for three months.”

“You had a car?”

This tit for tat went on for another five minutes before I gave up. Maybe I had carried a few misconceptions for a while. “Okay, maybe I’ve had some misconceptions.”

“I’d say. Now, back to the point.”

I let out a big sigh. “Where do you suggest I go, Penny?”

“Get a room in Tupelo. We can work from there, quietly.”

“We?”

“You don’t want me to go?”

“Of course I do.”