Cross Justice (18 page)

“Fucker,” a man grunted. I caught a flash of shadow on the road a second before the boot caught me in the ribs.

I felt a cracking and gasped in pain.

“Cave his frickin’ skull in and be done with it,” snarled a second male voice behind the headlights.

I kept my head down, forcing myself beyond the pain, looking at the street surface. The second I caught a flicker in the shadows, I backhand-slashed out and up with the crowbar.

I felt it connect before I saw the knee buckling in silhouette. I felt the bat glance off the side of my head. It wasn’t a direct
hit, but it was enough to make me dizzy and uncertain of what was up and what was down.

The guy I hit was yelling and clutching at his knee. He stumbled and fell against the hood of the car, screaming and clawing at his knee now.

Grunting in pain, still fighting for air, I thought:
Two left. Other one with the crowbar. And the driver.

“Shoot him!”

I twisted my head, saw the driver climbing from the car, saw him holding a scoped hunting rifle. As he turned the gun my way, I flung the crowbar at him. It whipped sideways, end over end, and shattered the driver-side window, spraying the gunman with glass.

The rifle went off; the bullet ricocheted off bridge steel.

I heard tires squealing in the distance. Beneath the Impala, I saw headlights coming onto the bridge.

“We’re out of here!” the driver shouted, and he dove into the car.

Fearing he’d run me down as he escaped, I scrambled back toward the sidewalk. The one with the blown knee hopped around the car, jumped into the front seat. The guy with the other crowbar pulled the man I’d dropped into the backseat. I reached the sidewalk, swallowed the pain, and bent my body to get the Ruger from my ankle holster.

Doors slammed. Tires smoked. A pistol came out the window.

I drew mine and fired wildly at the Impala, spiderwebbing the rear passenger window as the car began to accelerate. The guy with the blown knee shot as they passed me. The bullet pinged off steel right by my head.

“Get the fuck out of our town, Cross!” one of them yelled as they sped away. “Or you’ll end up just like your cretin cousin.”

A BLUE DODGE
ram pickup with Florida plates skidded to a stop beside me.

“Alex!” Pinkie yelled as he jumped from the cab.

“Help me up,” I said, gasping. “Get me out of here.”

“There were shots!” he said.

“Which is why you need to get me out of here,” I said, fighting to get to my feet. “I do not want to talk to the Starksville police.”

Powerful hands caught me under the arms. I gritted my teeth at the pain in my ribs and hobbled to the passenger door. Pinkie lifted me into the truck and had us off the bridge before I heard the police sirens.

My cousin flipped off his headlights and turned down a road that paralleled the gorge. We were a quarter of a mile away before I saw distant blue lights go whizzing by, heading toward the bridge.

“Where to?” Pinkie asked.

“Somewhere we can wait them out for a little while,” I said. “Then we’ll circle back to Birney on the Eighth Street bridge.”

My cell phone rang. Bree.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“With Pinkie.”

“Did you hear those shots?”

“Yes,” I said, and I told her what happened.

“Don’t you think you should go to the hospital?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I want to stay under the radar on this.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain when I get home,” I said. “Give me forty-five minutes.”

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, and I love you.”

“I love you too, Alex.”

I hung up.

We’d left the east side of town and were heading down a long, gradual slope on a windy rural road when Pinkie finally turned his headlights back on.

“What the hell were you doing out on the bridge anyway?” he asked.

I started to tell him about my dream but stopped when I realized that wasn’t why I’d gone out there.

“It was something Cliff said about my dad.”

Pinkie shot me a quick glance. “What about your dad?”

“He said there were deep pools below the gorge, and when I said I didn’t know them, he told me my dad used to swim in them.”

“Okay …”

“I don’t know. The conversation just made me want to go to the bridge and look at the river, you know?”

Pinkie said, “I guess I can see that.”

We were almost to the bottom of the hill by then and traveling through deep forest.

“You know where those pools are?” I asked, looking out the side window.

A nearly full moon hung in the sky, throwing the woods into dark blue light.

Pinkie was quiet, but he slowed the truck and said, “Sure.”

A minute later, he stopped and gestured at a muddy lane that left the pavement. “That will take you in there.”

“Your truck make it?” I asked.

Pinkie hesitated, but then he turned us into a two-track that cut across a wooded pine flat. I could see by the ruts that the road was well used, but the forest pressed in from both sides, and thorny vines and branches scratched at the side of the truck.

Ten minutes later, we pulled into a turnaround. Pinkie stopped the truck, shut off the headlights. Here, where the trees opened up, the moon threw an even brighter light.

“Where are the pools?” I asked.

My cousin pointed at a gravel trail. “They’re not far. Lot of people go swimming here.”

“Got a flashlight?” I asked.

“What do you think you’re looking for, Alex?”

“I don’t know. I just want to see the pools.”

Pinkie paused before he asked, “You sure you’re up to it?”

“You give me a hand over anything rough, I think so.”

He sighed, said, “Suit yourself.”

My cousin came around to my side, opened the door, and helped me out. He fished in a toolbox in the bed of the truck and came up with a portable spotlight. He flicked it on. The shadows fled.

Moving slowly, guarding my ribs, I followed him down the gravel path to a grassy flat area by the banks of the Stark River. Moonlight bathed the place, which featured two large pools almost bisected by an outcropping of granite that looked like a chess bishop laid on its side.

Pinkie turned off the spotlight after we walked out on the ledge. Where the channel narrowed and flowed around the round knob of the outcropping, the current was swift. But in the pools, it was much stiller, and the moon reflected off them brightly. A quarter mile upriver you could make out the wall of the ridge and hear the roar of the water spilling out the mouth of the gorge.

“You ever hear of anyone falling into the gorge and surviving?” I asked.

Pinkie said nothing for several beats before replying, “They got kayakers in there all the time nowadays.”

“I meant a swimmer. Have you ever heard of someone swimming out of the gorge after falling from the arched bridge?”

Pinkie didn’t reply for several long moments. I turned and looked at him in the moonlight. He was staring at the water.

“Only one, Alex,” he said quietly. “Your dad.”

WITH THE PAIN
in my ribs and the shot I’d taken to the head earlier in the night, I was sure I’d misheard him.

“Did you say my dad?”

Pinkie still wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded.

My stomach fluttered. I tasted bile. I saw dots glistening in front of my eyes and felt like I was going to pass out. Then an irrational anger seized control of me. I grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Pinkie said, sounding guilty. “Uncle Cliff swore me to secrecy about it years ago.”

I stared at my cousin in disbelief. “You’re saying my father didn’t die that night? He made it through the gorge?”

“Crawled out somewhere right around here,” Pinkie said. “Cliff found him passed out on this ledge long before dawn and long before the police came looking for his body. Your father was seriously busted up.

“Cliff got him out of here, took him to his fishing cabin up on the lake,” my cousin went on. “He nursed him back to health.”

“And told no one?” I asked incredulously.

“Just me,” Pinkie said.

“Why you?”

“Years later, we were up at his cabin. I was probably eighteen. Cliff was away from Aunt Hattie and drinking sour mash. A lot of it. He started getting all sad. And then he started crying, and then he started talking. Once he did, it was like a dam bursting. It all came out.”

Uncle Cliff told Pinkie about finding my dad and getting him to the cabin. He told him how my father had decided it was best if no one but Cliff ever knew he was alive. Nana Mama wasn’t to know. Me and my brothers weren’t to know.

“Why?” I asked, still bewildered and unsure of my emotions, which kept surging all over the place.

“I guess because he did kill your mother,” Pinkie said. “It was an act of mercy, but he killed her, suffocated her. No matter how you looked at it, though, in rural North Carolina, all those years ago, your father was facing a murder charge. Once he healed up, he decided to head south, disappear into a whole other life.”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Yes,” Pinkie replied.

My heart started to hammer in my chest. My father? Alive?

“Where did Uncle Cliff say he went?”

“Florida.”

“Where in Florida?”

“All Cliff knew was that he lived somewhere around Belle Glade, that he worked in agriculture, and that he belonged to a church for a while,” Pinkie said.

“So you’re saying he’s alive?” I asked.

Pinkie sighed and shook his head. “I’m not saying that at all. I’m sorry, Alex. From what I understand, he committed suicide two years after he left Starksville.”

That hit me harder than the kick I’d taken earlier in the evening. One second I was letting the fantasy of actually finding my father build a strange kind of hope in my heart, and the next second I was a grief-stricken boy all over again.

Suicide?

“Thirty-three years ago?” I said, aware of the bitterness in my voice.

Pinkie nodded. “Uncle Cliff said he got a call one night from a woman. She said she’d found Uncle Cliff’s phone number among the effects of a man named Paul Brown who’d committed suicide behind her church. Uncle Cliff said he asked her where she was and she said Belle Glade.”

“What was her name?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Pinkie said. “I don’t know if Uncle Cliff even knew. He was just torn up at your dad killing himself after everything he’d been through.”

I suddenly felt weak and reached out for Pinkie. He grabbed me under the arm, said, “You okay?”

“Not really.”

“Kind of a lot to absorb,” Pinkie said.

“It is,” I said.

“Let’s get you home, have a look at those ribs.”

“Probably a good idea.”

But as I followed him off the ledge, I kept pausing to look at the moon shining on the surface of the upstream pool, and I felt hollow and robbed of something I hadn’t even known I’d had.

“
TIME FOR BATH
and bed, pumpkin,” he said, wiping chocolate frosting from the corners of the little girl’s mouth.

“Tell me a story, Grandfather?” she asked.

“A good one, Lizzie,” he promised. “You go to Grandma and take your bath. After you get in your jammies, Grandfather will tuck you in and tell you the best story you ever heard.”

“About magical princesses?” She beamed, clasping her hands. “And fairies?”

“What else?”

She kissed her grandfather on the cheek and scampered out of his office and down the hallway. Was there anything better than these moments? Could there be a stronger bond? He thought not. They were more father and daughter than grandfather and granddaughter. It was like they were emotionally welded together in a way that sometimes shocked him.

A phone rang in one of the drawers, broke into his thoughts.

He retrieved the phone, answered, said, “Wait.”

He went to the doorway and heard giggling voices and running water in the bathroom down the hall. Shutting the door, he said, “Talk.”

“They had Cross dead to rights, and they let him get away.”

Lizzie’s grandfather rubbed at his brow, wanted to break something.

“Idiots,” he said. “How difficult can it be?”

“He’s tough.”

“Cross is a goddamned threat to everything we’ve built.”

“Agreed.”

He thought several moments, said, “We need to go professional.”

“You got a player in mind?”

“Contact that woman we used last year. She’ll get it done right.”

“She’s expensive.”

“There’s a reason. Let me know.”

Lizzie’s grandfather broke the burn phone and threw it in the trash. Then he left the office and padded down the hall toward the bathroom. With every step, he turned his thoughts toward magical princesses and fairies.

EARLY THE NEXT
morning, Detective Sergeant Pete Drummond drove an unmarked vehicle to the west side of the county, far from the megamansions and the deep blue sea.

Detective Richard S. Johnson looked out the window as they passed what used to be a hospital, and what used to be a grocery store, and a boarded-up shop that used to sell clothes. Some blocks, there were so many abandoned, windowless buildings pocked with bullet holes, it looked like parts of Afghanistan Johnson had seen serving in the Marine Corps.

They crossed a canal and took the Torry Island Road out into agricultural fields south of Pelican Bay on Lake Okeechobee, cane mostly, and corn, and celery. Johnson could see people out there picking in the infernal heat.

Drummond took a left onto a spur road. A sheriff’s cruiser was parked in the turnaround ahead, lights flashing. The county medical examiner’s van was parked beyond it. The sergeant climbed out of the rig, and Johnson followed him.

Deputy Gabrielle Holland got out of her cruiser, said, “Got her all taped off for you, Sarge. We’re just lucky a gator didn’t get to her before I did.”