Pocket-47 (A Nicholas Colt Thriller) (12 page)

Massengill and I headed north on SR 21. He questioned me for his report to Fleming, and then we didn’t say anything for a while.

I finally spoke up. “You all right?”

“You ever kill anyone, Nicholas?” His voice was steady and his eyes stared straight ahead, but I figured he felt it somewhere deep. I figured Massengill would need a few drinks before the night was over.

“I’ve carried a weapon every day since I got my PI license,” I said. “Never had to use it. Lucky, I guess.”

“Think you could do it if you had to?”

“If it was me or him, sure. I don’t think I’d have a problem with it.”

“That’s the thing. I’m a sniper. It’s never a matter of me or him. My life is never the one in immediate danger. I’m far away, looking through a scope, and it’s almost like I become the hand of God. I get to decide if this person lives or dies.”

“Marcus Sharp was a bad man,” I said. “My brain would be all over the Jimmy’s header right now if you hadn’t taken him out. You did what you had to do.”

“Yeah. But it’s never easy. The after part is never easy. You think you could kill somebody like I killed Sharp? You know, with no immediate threat to yourself?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what a kill switch is?”

“Sure,” I said. “Like on a train or a speed boat. It shuts everything down in case of emergency.”

“That’s what I have to do when I have someone in my sights. I have to hit the kill switch on my own humanity. Shut everything down. No feeling, no emotion. I become a machine. A life-taking fucking machine. There’s no way to explain that moment unless you’ve been there.”

We were quiet for a while. I thought about how much Massengill had changed since the days he drove an equipment bus for my band. He’d been as much of a wildass as the rest of us back then, smoking weed and snorting powder and bedding a different groupie every night. Things had changed for me when I married Susan, and I noticed a change in Massengill during that time as well. Maybe we just grew up.

A trooper car with its lights flashing raced by in the opposite direction.

“Tell me something,” I said, “when you saw us leaving Rent-A-Gem, why didn’t you call for backup?”

“All I saw was your Jimmy and a Cadillac leaving the lot. I didn’t know you were in the Caddy’s trunk.”

“So you thought I was doing business with those scumbags?”

“What can I say? You went inside, and you were in there for a long time, and then I saw your Jimmy leaving the lot with the Cadillac. I was just doing my job. Count your blessings.”

Over the radio we heard that a Sheriff’s deputy, unit twenty-seven, was in pursuit of the fugitive Cadillac. A call went out to all units in the area. Massengill put the light on the roof and floored the gas pedal.

We saw the Caddy in Winn-Dixie’s parking lot, surrounded by three cruisers with lights flashing. The short, fat guy had his hands against his car and was being frisked. An ambulance and a fire truck had shown up, and a crowd of onlookers with grocery carts formed a semicircle near the front of the store.

We got out and walked toward the scene, Massengill with his badge raised high. He talked to one of the deputies. The short, fat
guy’s name was Tony Beeler. Massengill climbed into the back of the cruiser, sat beside Beeler, and closed the door. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I stood there holding my sore arm. I was learning what it felt like to be a victim of a violent crime. Nobody was paying any attention to me.

A few minutes later, another deputy knocked on the window and motioned for Massengill to come out. Together they walked to the ambulance where a cluster of officers stood talking. I quietly opened the door and slid in beside the suspect.

“Who hired you guys to shoot at my camper?”

“Fuck you,” Beeler said.

“I’m trying to be civil here. I’m going to ask you nicely one more time. Who hired you guys to shoot at my place?”

“Allow me to rephrase,” Beeler said.
“Fuck you.”

I unwrapped the bloody bandage on my arm and tried to stuff it into Beeler’s mouth. He clenched his teeth, so I reached down and squeezed his balls until he didn’t resist anymore. I broke the toothpick I’d been chewing on, peeled off a splinter and jammed it under his left thumbnail. The bandage muted his scream.

“You talk, I pull it out. Your call.”

Beeler’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he nodded frantically. I pulled the bandage out of his mouth.

“You motherfucker,” Beeler said. “I have rights. I’m going to sue your goddamn—”

The gauze went back in the mouth. I shoved a splinter under the fingernail of his pinky this time. Beeler’s ears turned red and then purple. He started nodding again. I pulled the gauze.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m not a cop, so don’t try any of that ‘my rights are being violated’ shit with me. I don’t give a rat’s ass about any of my lousy personal possessions, so go ahead and sue me if you want to. I’m going to ask you nicely once again. Who hired you guys?”

He spat in my face. “You should have died a long time ago, bitch. You should have died with the rest of those motherfuckers on that airplane.”

“What the fuck you talking about?”

His eyes bulged and his lips snarled and he whispered hoarsely. “Pocket forty-seven.”

I grabbed him by the throat. “What the fuck are you talking about, you slimeball piece of shit?”

Massengill yanked the door open. He and two uniformed officers pulled me away from Beeler.

Massengill got in my face. “You trying to fuck up my collar, or what?”

He was furious, but so was I.

I was about to punch someone and probably get arrested myself when Fleming screeched up in his Lumina. He got out and walked straight to where we were standing.

“Massengill, what are you doing here?”

“Responding to a call for all units, sir.”

“What did I tell you back at the scene in Keystone? You’re on administrative leave pending an Internal Affairs investigation into the shooting. Now get the fuck out of here before I write your ass up.”

“It was a clean shoot, Barry.”

“Just finish your report, and then you’re done till I.A.’s done.
Comprende?”

Massengill nodded and walked away. Fleming never even looked at me.

We walked back to Massengill’s truck and drove toward The Parkside motel.

“Have you lost your fucking mind, Colt? What were you thinking, climbing into that car with that guy?”

“You ever heard of pocket forty-seven?” I said.

Massengill missed third gear. “Where did you hear that?”

“Beeler. He said I should have died in the plane crash. Then he said something about pocket forty-seven.”

“It’s nothing. It’s a myth.”

“What myth? My wife and baby daughter died in that crash. My band died. The pilot and copilot died. Is any of that a myth? I
was the sole survivor. That’s not a goddamn myth. It’s fucking reality. Tell me what pocket forty-seven means.”

“Jesus, Colt. Take a Valium. It’s nothing. It’s a term flyboys use for an unexplained glitch. A mechanical or electrical gremlin. It’s like an invisible hand comes along and fucks everything up.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s slang. It’s a myth. It originated in World War Two, I think. Supposedly, the flight suits they issued back then had forty-six pockets. The pilots carried all kinds of shit around with them, but all they really wanted was a little luck. Some of them started sewing an extra pocket into their suits. Pocket forty-seven. It was a place to stow a talisman or a picture of a girl or whatever. Some good luck for the mission. If a guy got shot down, everyone would say he didn’t pack pocket forty-seven. Over the years it evolved to mean, like I said, an invisible hand that comes along and fucks things up.”

“So how does Beeler know anything about anything?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

He dropped me at the motel, and I borrowed another roll of gauze for my shot-up arm.

After Massengill drove away, I went to the lobby and logged onto the Internet. I Googled pocket forty-seven. The Wikipedia article echoed what Massengill had told me, along with one startling addition: pocket forty-seven had become common among certain street gangs, used as a verb meaning “to take by surprise in an ambush, or to sabotage.” As in:
We fixin’ ta pocket forty-seven dey ass.

Sabotage.

I didn’t know what Beeler meant by what he said, and I didn’t know how or why anyone could have intentionally caused my band’s plane to crash. I clicked off the Internet and walked upstairs, thinking hard about how to find the answers to those questions.

The red light on my room phone was blinking. I called the desk, got the message that my Airstream had been cleared by the FBI. I was free to go home.

I called Joe.

“Think you could give me a ride home?” I said.

I gathered the few things I had in the motel room and put them in a plastic bag.

When we got to the fish camp, around midnight, Joe told me I could borrow his pickup truck until I got my car back.

“Got a gun I can borrow?”

“Never satisfied, are you. What do you want, a pistol?”

“What you got?”

“I have that Remington twelve-gauge.”

“Give me that and a pistol.”

“Isn’t greed one of the seven deadly sins?”

Joe drove the ’76 F100 around. The truck, once red, was now a faded and dusty rose color. It was scarred and dented from years of use, and the edges of the rear fenders had rusted through. The windows were tinted black. Joe handed me the key.

“Please, double oh seven, try to give it back in the same condition as you received it.”

“Thanks, Q. I’ll try.”

The feds didn’t trash my house too bad. They even left my jug of Old Fitzgerald alone. I poured a drink, found a roll of duct tape, and fixed the broken windows with plastic trash bags. I was lucky it hadn’t rained in the past few days.

My head ached and my arm was sore, and I probably shouldn’t have been drinking. I felt as though I’d just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl. I was shaken, rattled, and rolled, and happy as hell Massengill had come along and saved my ass.

I woke up the next morning in severe pain, my arm red and hot around the bullet wound. I took two Percocets, put some ice on it. An hour later when it hadn’t gotten any better I drove myself to the emergency room at Hallows Cove Memorial.

The triage nurse looked at my arm and then put me on the back burner behind some more serious cases. I waited two hours before
they called me back to one of the curtained rooms, then another hour before the doctor came in to see me.

The doctor was young, late twenties or early thirties. He had shoulder-length black hair tied in a ponytail, a piercing in each ear and a nice fisherman’s—or maybe surfer’s—tan. His nametag said J. A. Billingsly,
MD, DEPARTMENT OF INTERNAL MEDICINE
. He held a metal clipboard with my vitals and medical history and personal information one of the nursing assistants had taken.

“Hi, Mister Colt. I’m Doctor Billingsly.” He spoke with a heavy southern accent, from one of the Carolinas I guessed. “Are you allergic to any medications?”

“They already asked me that.”

“Just want to make sure.”

“None that I know of.”

“Okay. Let’s have a look at that arm. It’s a gunshot wound?”

“Right.”

The doctor unwrapped the bandage the triage nurse had put on. “Was it an accident?”

“You could say that.”

“The reason I asked, we have to report any criminal activity to the police.”

“It’s already been reported.”

Dr. Billingsly looked at the wound, touched the edges with a gloved hand, frowned. “I’m going to order some blood work, just a CBC and a chemistry, and then admit you so we can give you some IV antibiotics for a few days.”

“A few days? Can’t do it, doc. I have too much work to do.”

“If the infection spreads, you could lose the arm. Or, you could die.”

“I can’t stay in the hospital.”

He reached into the pocket of his lab coat, pulled out a pad, and wrote two prescriptions. He handed them to me. “Levaquin for the infection, Dilaudid for pain. If it doesn’t clear up in a few days, you need to get back here right away.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll send in a tech to draw your blood. You can go home after that.”

Dr. Billingsly snapped the curtain open and walked away.

Joe’s truck was low on fuel and I hadn’t checked my mail in a few days so I stopped at the Amoco near the post office and killed two birds. Along with some credit card offers and a couple of bills was, lo and behold, a two-thousand-dollar check from Dana Glass Attorney at Law. Check was in the mail after all. I guess it’s not a lie every time. Now I felt bad for hanging up on Dana’s receptionist. I felt bad all the way to the bank, where I deposited the check in my anemic account.

There was a Walgreens across the street from the bank, so I went in and filled my prescriptions. I browsed the Foster Grant rack while I waited. A little girl, three or four, came bouncing up to the rack. It took her about five seconds to say, “I want these when I get bigger, Mommy, and I want these when I get bigger.” She pranced on, her curly brown hair bouncing in sync with her stride. Her mother stood a few feet away, trying to read the small print on a bottle of medicine. I got a little teary thinking about my baby Harmony, all the years and milestones and joyous occasions that had been robbed from her. From us.

It also occurred to me that I didn’t know much about Leitha and Brittney’s history. How had they lost their parents? What had life been like for them growing up? Did they have any family besides each other, anyone to take care of Leitha’s funeral arrangements? I wondered if Brittney was still alive and if she knew about Leitha’s murder.

I found a pair of black wraparounds and paid for them and a bottle of Zephyrhills and my medicine at the pharmacy’s register. On my way out I saw the little girl standing near a cluster of gumball machines, crying because she hadn’t gotten the flavor she wanted. I asked her mom if it was okay, and then gave the girl all the change in my pocket. She smiled and said thank you.

I took one of the painkillers and one of the antibiotic tablets. My arm felt like a snapping turtle had latched on and refused to let go. Joe’s old Ford had a manual transmission, and every time I shifted gears the turtle bit down a little harder.