Perfect Killer (29 page)

Tyrone Freedman lived in a battered single-wide trailer perched drunkenly on cracked and broken cinder blocks. Blue tarps sagged from the roof. A drunken old hay barn squatted nearby, one corner touching the ground, the rest cleared for storage and garage space.

The Yalobusha River levee rose steeply beyond a grove of pecan trees. "Damn," I said softly.
"I've seen worse," Jasmine said as she steered us into a cleared space in the old

barn. "Some people can't afford tarps."
I shook my head, turning to keep the trailer in view.
As Jasmine turned off the ignition, I spotted a utility pole next to the trailer with

the usual phone and electrical wires and at the top, an oval, open-grid dish. "Check it out," I pointed, "Wireless broadband."
Jasmine laughed. "Looks like something from the old
Max Headroom
series, you

know, the weird old couple with the television studio in that decrepit bus." "I haven't thought about
Max Headroom
in years," I said.
"I loved it."
"Me too."
We looked at each other for a moment, grew uncomfortable way too fast. I bailed

Jasmine's door opened as I picked my way through the barn's clutter, located the rusted old Allis-Chalmers tractor, and found the trailer key on top of its engine block right where Tyrone had told me it would be.

Inside the trailer, the floor sagged from piles of books. Tarps draped from the ceiling made it feel like a tent. It was cool inside; the compressors of at least two window air conditioners thrummed unseen. I turned on the lights.

"Check it out." I pointed to a computer in the corner of what passed for the trailer's living room. Behind the computer, which had no cover, a router and a hub sprouted Cat-5 cable in cable-tied bundles stretching to the ceiling and along the trailer's long hallway.

I walked to the computer and pressed the monitor's power button. Instants later the screen gave me a homemade screen saver with logos for Red Hat Fedora Linux and Apache Web server software. A quick look at the hardware showed the computer had been cobbled together from components others had discarded as obsolete.

Jasmine and I followed the overhead cables to another book-jammed room, this one crammed with file cabinets, medical books, and another home-brewed computer. I followed Tyrone's instructions and turned it on. It was another Linux machine.

"It always amazes me how much some people can do with so little." Then she covered her mouth as a broad yawn made its way across her face.
"Oh! Sorry."
"Don't be. We need to get some sleep before we leave tonight."
"What time do we need to leave?"
"About eleven thirty, get to Itta Bena around midnight."
"Why so early? We're meeting Shanker at three a.m."
"Gives us time to make plans in case something goes wrong."
"Going wrong. What a cheery thought."
"Prepare for the worst; pray for the best."
"Uh-hmmmm."
"Three hours seems like a long time, but once we're there, it'll go faster than greased lightning."
As the computer booted, I looked around the room and spotted Arthur Guyton's classic human anatomy book I had used in medical school. One of the keenest intellects on the planet, Guyton had chosen to live in Jackson, taught at the med school there, and mentored too many new physicians to name, me included.
I pulled the text and showed it to Jasmine. "He helped turn my life around."
I opened the book and flipped through the pages. As Jasmine moved closer to see, she rested her left arm on my shoulder. The firmness of her touch warmed my skin.
"If it hadn't been for him …."
I remembered Dr. Guyton's kindness and knew I had never thanked him enough.
On the monitor the command line appeared and demanded a password and user name.
"Here goes." I put Guyton's textbook down and entered the account data Tyrone had given me.
"ArrOwcaTCHer666homeINtHEwoods," I mumbled to myself as I entered the characters precisely.
"That's awfully long."
The longer the sequence the harder it is to crack."
I concentrated even harder on the password: 5149VmB9a65P7baDhOmbreNOtXarb.
Instants after hitting the enter key, the KDE graphical user interface appeared, customized with my name and a link, which I clicked.
A long note from Tyrone appeared in OpenOffice.
"There's an alert at the hospital for maximum staffing. It's about you. They think you're one bad dude and they want us ready for casualties. There's even a Life Flight chopper stationed on the roof. What the hell did you do before med school?
"Anyway, because of this, I'll be camping out in the imaging lab. All hell's broken loose. Feds and Army everywhere. John Myers came in to have his shoulder looked at. The paramedics who brought him in looked like they had had a near-death experience.
"The blond kid with the really pink skin and all the freckles looked even whiter than ever, which is hard to believe. A really creepy guy in SWAT gear stood in the emergency room the whole time. John didn't say a word to me the whole time I worked on John's shoulder. If you click here you'll see why John was so damned quiet. We debrided things and the paramedics gave him a ride home."
I clicked on the hyperlink that took me to a plain IP address: 216.226.157.157, no domain name, just a twelve-digit IP address that clearly was not Tyrone's server.
"Oh, hell!" Jasmine reacted when a page of thumbnail photos came up. She pointed to one showing an Army Blackhawk helicopter. We skipped over John's documentation of the sniper and shooting scene we had witnessed firsthand and went to images of Humvees, Suburbans, troops, and SWAT-clad Feds.
The photos were the typical low-resolution images produced by a camera phone, but the detail was sufficient to show us what had happened. Finally, we read John's text messages Tyrone had posted on the Web page.
I closed Mozilla and immediately a dialogue box appeared: "Please wait: WEBsweeper is permanently removing all cache and history data and permanently sanitizing all associated disc sectors in accordance with NSA and DOD data security standards."
Moments later the box disappeared and we continued reading.
"I've edited the hospital server's access logs to delete my tracks in uploading this Web page. It and the photos are on a server outside the U.S. and outside its sphere of influence. The path to the servers are totally hidden using a second-generation onion routing system called Tor.
"If you need it, lift the carpet in the hallway directly underneath the furnace's air return and you'll find my firearms. To open the combination to the lock, take the password from this machine. Count backward and pull out the first four digits. There's a little range I set up out back by the levee in case you want to kill some time.
"Good news: Lashonna's conscious and doing better than expected."
"Thank you, God," Jasmine said softly. Then she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "And thank you, Doctor."
Her kiss cheered me for a fleeting instant, then I read the next paragraph.
"I wish I had better news for you regarding Camilla, but you should probably click here to check out the new images. The files are on the hospital's server, but don't worry, a series of proxies accessed through dark IP addresses sanitizes the access."
My admiration for Tyrone's technical prowess in covering his tracks and hiding Myers's evidence slipped beneath the darkness in my soul that gathered as I paged through the images.
Camilla had died when I wasn't looking.
I cried.

As Dan Gabriel steered his rental car north on Highway 101 north of Paso Robles, his cell phone rang.
"Gabriel," he answered.
"You stopping at the In-N-Out Burger down the road?" Jack Kilgore's voice asked.
"How'd you know where I am?"
"You've got a new wireless phone, with the GPS locator."
"Oh, I forgot.... So, did you learn anything?"
"A lot," Kilgore said. "Stone's a real mensch. Plus he's a natural twopercenter, highly lethal, capable, always under control. Back then, if you wanted somebody—or multiple somebodies—dead, you sent Stone. Then he got religion or something, requested and got training for paramedical rescue. Saved a lot of lives. Then he left and becomes a hot-shit doctor."
"Not the kind of person I want to terminate," Gabriel said
"Roger that. Makes me question the General more than I ever have before."
Silence filled the connection with unspoken doubt.
"And a lot of freaky stuff's going down in Mississippi, not far from the old prisoncamp hospital the General was in. I've got some of my guys keeping an eye on things. I structured it as an exercise to assess the operational competence of the Homeland Security screwups driving the show there.
"A troop of Cub Scouts could do a better job at radio discipline. Operational security's full of holes. It's the usual bullshit in a china shop thing, not surprising since Brown and his Customs bozos are running things. They're the ones who nailed all those innocent Muslims' butts to a tree after 9/11 just to make bureaucratic brownie points. They've now circulated photos of Stone and Jasmine Thompson as wanted fugitives."
"Charged with?"
"Murder and drug running out of L.A."
"Marvelous,"
"And, Dan?"
"Yeah?"
"Brown's been calling Clark Braxton's cell phone an awfully lot."

I have no clear idea how long I walked the levee. I know I walked out of Tyrone Freedman's trailer, but I don't remember what or whether I said anything to Jasmine at the time. Camilla's death blew the center out of me like a ton of lead shot through a paper bag, and I walked the two-tracked gravel path atop the levee down to the striped metal barrier across the road padlocked to a metal post set in concrete.

I stood for a moment.
Humidity smothered my face as the sun burned it. Sweat dripped everywhere. Around me, the land wobbled and swayed, warped by undead water rising from the soil to haunt the Delta with another day of mildew and humidity which would eventually give life to more thunderstorms.
Horseflies bit at my bare legs, and mosquitoes heavy with someone else's blood blanketed me. My hands moved with a frantic palsy that barely interrupted their bloodlust. Finally, I set off at a dead run toward Tyrone's trailer, leaving the insects behind; guilt, anger, and sorrow paced me relentlessly.
It took me almost fifteen minutes to reach Tyrone's cabin, meaning I had walked two, maybe two and a half miles. As I stumbled down the steep levee bank, I heard the syncopated, guitar-slapping rhythm of Robert Johnson's "Preaching Blues, Up Jumped the Devil" coming from the trailer.
The lyrics reached out for me and I followed them. Despite the heat, the front door was open and I walked in.
"Jasmine?" I called, and when I got no answer, I closed the door.
The desperate urgency of this song set it apart from Johnson's usual cool nasality. So much of Johnson's work moved me to introspection with its sanguine acknowledgment of the evil dogging our lives. But "Preaching Blues" always ripped at me like a scream. I stood at the window and parted the curtains, hoping to catch a glimpse of Jasmine walking back from the SUV.
Johnson's frantic raw emotions cut right through to my own as I listened to the familiar lyrics. The blues behind blues music ate people like heart disease. Hopelessness was the ultimate hell.
When Johnson finished, his vice and guitar trailed off like the last notes of rain after a storm. Then the silence filled with the surf of my heart and the distant drone of a crop duster. A moment later the floor creaked behind me, followed by Jasmine's fragrance, spicy, earthy, welcome, warm.
"How did you know?" When I turned around, her gaze froze me in place. The wisteria hues of her eyes seemed limitless in their depth and beauty. "The music, I mean?"
In the background, Johnson began "Love in Vain" and my ear recognized this was the same
Hellhound on My Trail
CD from Indigo Recordings I had left in the rental truck.
"I don't know," Jasmine said. "I just knew when I saw it next to Tyrone's stereo." Jasmine and I moved toward each other and embraced in the middle of the living room.
"You okay?"
"Yes," I lied. "No. No, I'm not. Camilla in the middle of all this is… "
"Too much?"
"No," I said truthfully. "But damned close."
She put her head on my shoulder I folded her in my arms and basked in her comfort for a time that stretched comfortably beyond the moment. So much death, so much loss. I wanted the moment to last.
Then, as if a switch had been thrown somewhere far beyond thought and decisions, we held each other tighter, somewhere between desperation and love. The sensuous press of her breasts instantly aroused me. When Jasmine thrust her hips against me, a seismic passion sucker-punched me with feelings forgotten in the past six years.
Then everything fast-forwarded. Suddenly we were naked from the waist up and hastening with the rest. Jasmine's elegant abundance of curves beneath the soft, burnished luminosity of her skin stunned me and banished every thought beyond this remarkable moment to a distant and irrelevant horizon.
Then alarms sounded in my head.
Pure, undiluted passion—whether from lust, hate, anger, or fear—terrified me. I'd seen it leave battlefields littered with the bodies of innocent people and derail young lives with unwanted children. Prison cells held legions of basically decent people who'd let passion dump their lives into an endless pit of regret.
As a teenager I ran with a rough crowd, always ready with fists, a phallus, and fast cars. But over the course of less than a year, they all fell by the wayside, snared by police, parents, and unplanned parenthood.
Through their mistakes, I realized that unbridled passion could generate an irresistible black hole of unsatisfied regret from which there was no escape. I feared the way it blinded us to consequences and erased everything but the singular urge for release. It was the devil's deal where we traded the future for a blinding spasm of release that always left us hungrier than ever
Urgent warnings gripped my heart as Jasmine's hands made their way across my chest and down my belly. As I bent low to kiss her, she slipped her right hand down the front of my partly unzipped shorts. With an effort much like that needed to awaken from particularly horrific nightmares, I struggled back.
Jasmine was startled, astounded. I stood back from her, burning with regret like a death in the family. Perplexity sifted across her face.
"What's wrong?" she said finally. Her voice was husky and tempting.
I wanted to say I needed her more than I had words to express.
"Is it me?" Her face gave me a look of dismay. Then she crossed her arms to hide her breasts.
My heart fell. "No. It's definitely not you."
I wanted to say it was all too common for two people in danger to misinterpret the hormones of fear circulating in their veins for those of love. There was also the issue of Camilla's body, not yet cold.
"So what's the problem?"
I wanted to say the looks and comments from her uncle and the black LAPD detective made me second-guess my own motivations. I also wanted to express unspeakable things like AIDS, condoms, and whether we really wanted to do this without a commitment, marriage whether in the eyes of God or the law. But for reasons I don't understand, I didn't say any of it.
"Oh, yes," I said. "I do so much like you." My voice broke. I cleared my throat. "Jasmine, I ... I more than like you." I looked at her eyes, her face, and I connected with the most valuable words I knew. "I love you."
The confusion swirled in her eyes.
"Oh, Brad. I love you too." She gave her head a little shake. "But why-"
There were all those things I wanted to say. In the end, I lacked the courage and she began to cry. I stepped forward to give her a hug. When she turned away, it broke my heart.
As she dressed with her back turned toward me, I pulled on my shirt and zipped up my shorts. I prayed for her hurt to go away and hoped this hadn't jinxed our relationship. My brain told me any relationship unable to survive the intelligent exercise of good judgment would not last, but my heart disagreed.
After what seemed like the passing of geological time, Jasmine turned and wiped the remains of a tear from her right cheek. When her face offered me her trademark enigmatic smile, I knew it was going to be all right. She accepted my hug this time and gave me one in return.
"That
was
a smart move," she said. "Damn you. One of these days, you'll tell me about it." It wasn't a question.
"Uh-huh," Jasmine said. "Yes, you will. And you know what? I believe you love me. Otherwise you wouldn't have done that. And I love you too."
Fatigue rushed into the calm moment, filling the vacuum left by passion and leaving us desperate for rest. We extended the sofa bed in Tyrone Freedman's makeshift living room. I set the alarm on my watch and we fell asleep in each other's arms.