Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways (35 page)

“I’m g-g-gonna tape your wrists together.”

“No!”

Jack grabbed a handful of Weldon’s longish dark hair. “Look. We can do this the easy way—which is you doing what I tell you—or the hard way, which means I have to shoot you in the hip or through the thigh or something equally messy and bloody and keep on doing that until you cooperate. Me, I don’t like getting splattered with blood. The stains are almost impossible to get out. So I prefer neat and easy to messy and bloody. How about you?”

Weldon sobbed and put his hands behind his back.

Jack duct taped his wrists together, then his knees, then his ankles. That done, he took over the driver seat and put the DeSoto back in motion. He pointed it toward town and kept hammering at Weldon about the three dead folks, his father, and Semelee. Weldon kept stonewalling him. Finally Jack pulled up before the locked gates to the limestone quarry.

“So,” he said. “You don’t know nuttin’ ’bout nuttin’, is that it?”

“Please. I don’t. Really. You’ve got to believe me.”

Jack didn’t.

“This is going to hurt me almost as much as it hurts you.”

With that he gunned the DeSoto and rammed it against the gates. Weldon cried out as the chain snapped and the gates flew back.

“The bumpers! The chrome!”

Jack turned the car left onto the steep grade of the narrow road that ran down into the pit. A rough limestone wall loomed to his left. He didn’t want to do it—he hated himself for doing it—but forced his hands to turn the steering wheel and drag the left side of the car against the stone.

“My God, no!” Weldon cried.

“Sorry.” And he was.

As they reached the bottom of the quarry Jack didn’t quite make the turn, ramming the front end into an outcropping of stone. The impact stopped the car short, hurling Weldon off the seat and into the dashboard. Without a seat belt or his hands to protect him, he hit hard, then flopped back against the seat.

“Whoa,” Jack said. “That must have hurt. But probably just a fraction of what my father felt when that truck clocked his car out on South Road.” He looked around. “Let’s see. We’ve remodeled the left side, let’s see what we can do with the right.”

Between getting a taste of what his dad had gone through that night and realizing what he was doing to this beautiful, classic, innocent car, Jack was having trouble keeping his tone light.

“No, please!” Weldon screamed.

Jack accelerated and rammed the right front end against another outcropping. Once again Weldon went flying forward, this time hard enough to catch his chest on the dashboard and his head against the windshield. He wound up on the floor instead of the seat.

Weldon was sobbing now. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you about it, but you’re not going to believe it.”

“Try me.” Jack threw the on-the-column automatic shift into neutral and set the emergency brake. “You’d be amazed at what I can believe.”

Weldon struggled back into his seat. A blue-black goose egg was swelling under the hair that hung over on his forehead. He held his back-tied hands toward Jack.

“Please?”

Jack pulled out his Spyderco folder and slit the tape. He left the knife open and in hand.

“Don’t get any ideas. Now talk.”

Weldon sagged back. His neck bowed against the top of the backrest as he looked at the ceiling.

“It was just about this time last year that the white-haired woman you mentioned, Semelee, called me with this crazy story, a demand that Gateways make sacrifices to the Everglades. Figuring this was some clumsy sort of local shakedown I asked her what kind of sacrifices. She said…human.”

He glanced at Jack. If he was expecting to see shock or incredulity, he was disappointed. Jack had half expected something like this.

“And you laughed her off.”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you? It was ridiculous. Or so I thought then. But she wouldn’t quit. She kept calling me, at the office, at home, on my cell phone, going on about how Gateways South had encroached too near the ‘lagoon’—I still don’t know what lagoon she was talking about—and that the Everglades was angry and demanded sacrificial victims. Four a year. Ridiculous, right? But she kept after me, saying that I, as head of Gateways, must make the offering. By that she meant, choose the victim. All I had to do was point out a resident and the lagoon would do the rest. If I didn’t, the lagoon would choose one for me—from my own family.”

“And so you caved.”

“No. At least not yet. As soon as she threatened my family, I went to the police. Since I had only a voice on the phone, and couldn’t tell them what she looked like or where she lived, all they could do was keep an eye out for her and do regular patrols past my house.”

“And I take it that didn’t work.”

Weldon shook his head. “That same night, my son was bitten by a brown recluse spider and had to be rushed to the hospital—he was only three and almost lost his arm. And right there, in Kevin’s hospital room, the woman calls me on my cell phone and says this was just a warning. Had I changed my mind? I hung up but she called right back and asked me if my daughter was afraid of snakes. And if not, she should be.” Weldon rubbed a hand over his face. “I’ve got to tell you, that spooked me. I don’t know how she knew about the spider bite, I don’t know how she got a brown recluse close enough to my son to bite him, but I was really spooked.”

Jack couldn’t blame him. He knew how he’d felt when Vicky had been threatened.

“Did you go back to the cops?”

“What for? I couldn’t tell them any more then than before. So I took matters into my own hands. I packed up my wife and both kids and sent them to stay with my in-laws in Woodstock, right outside Atlanta. I figured putting them hundreds of miles away in a different town, a different state, would keep them safe.” He shook his head. “The very first day there Laurie was bitten by a copperhead and almost died. After spending a week up north, waiting for Laurie to be released from the hospital, I finally returned home—alone, because I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing them back here until I’d dealt with this woman.”

“Obviously you didn’t succeed.”

“Not for lack of trying. When I got home I found this young woman with white hair waiting in my backyard. She was sitting with her back to me, holding her hands up to her face, and in an instant I knew who she was. I grabbed the revolver I keep in the top of our bedroom closet and went out to her. I was going to shoot her, so help me, I was, but as soon as I raised the pistol I was attacked by a swarm of bees and—”

“Killer bees?”

Weldon nodded. “Only they didn’t sting me enough to kill me. They concentrated on my face and my gun hand and didn’t let up until I’d dropped it. Then she turned and I saw her face for the first time. I was surprised that she was so young. From her white hair I’d assumed she’d be some old witch, but she was young and—”

“Not bad looking. I know.”

“You’ve met her then. How did you—?”

“Let’s stick to you. What did you do then?”

“What could I do? She told me I already had two strikes against me. I still remember her words: ‘Strike three and your wife is out.’ What else could I do? Tell me you would have done any different.”

“My approach to settling problems differs a bit from the average.”

“I don’t know how, but this woman somehow controls snakes, insects, birds, and who knows what else? Don’t you see the position I was in?”

Jack stared at Weldon. No question, the guy had been thrust into an appalling situation: Finger a relative stranger for death or lose a family member. A no-brainer, but also a no-win.

“I see that a man has to put his family before strangers, which is regrettably acceptable. But when one of those strangers is my father, we have a problem.” Jack jabbed the knife blade at Weldon’s face, stopping the point an inch from his nose. “We have even more of a problem when it becomes clear that you took an awful predicament and used it to turn a quick buck.”

“I did no such thing!”

Weldon cowered back, pressing himself against the door as the knife point touched the tip of his nose.

“Now’s not the time for lies, bozo.” Jack was doing his best to check his flaring rage. “I could go along with you doing what you had to if you’d picked out the sickest Gateways folks, the ones with the shortest life expectancy. But you didn’t do that. Instead you picked ones who were not only the healthiest, but were unattached, guaranteeing that their homes would go back on the market years, maybe even a decade or two before their natural time.”

“No!”

“Yes!” The word hissed through Jack’s teeth. “Yes, you son of a bitch! You fingered people whose deaths would turn you a profit! And one of them was my father!”

Weldon’s face crumpled. His eyes squeezed shut and he began to sob.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

“Three innocent people are dead and my father was put in a coma, and that’s all you can say?” He wanted to drop the knife and throttle him. “Get out!”

Weldon looked at him. “What?”

“Get out, you pathetic bastard. Out before I cut you.”

Weldon fumbled behind him for the latch. As the door swung open, Jack raised his right leg and kicked him. Hard.

“Out!”

Weldon fell out the door and landed on his back in the limestone powder and rubble. Without bothering to close the door, Jack threw the DeSoto into gear and hit the gas. He gunned the car into a tire-spinning turn, then raced back toward where Weldon was staggering to his feet. He let him scramble out of the way. Despite Jack’s dark urge to maim, maybe even kill the man, Weldon wasn’t worth the hassle.

He tore up the steep roadway out of the pit and onto the street. He knew Weldon wouldn’t be going to the police about this; he’d fear it would draw a loot of unwanted attention to the deaths at Gateways. Let him find his own way home.

As he passed the trailer park he pulled in. An impulse. He spotted Carl’s junker parked by a mildewed trailer. He got out and checked the door. Locked. He lifted the lid of a garbage can by the steps and found take out containers—KFC, Chinese, Domino’s. He pulled out his wallet as he scoped the area. No one about so he slipped the door latch with his MasterCard. Inside he closed the door behind him and looked around. He wasn’t sure why he was here. Just an urge to know a little more about Carl.

The air conditioner was off and the trailer smelled faintly of old food and sweat. The kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom lay to the left, the main room to the right. He noticed the disassembled remnants of Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing fish, on the kitchen counter, neatly stored in a little box. Jack was struck by how clean the place was. Carl had said he loved his little trailer, and it showed.

In the main room sat a good-size TV. It looked like at least a twenty-seven-incher—pan-o-ramic, one might say. A battered Naugahyde recliner sat before it. The thick Direct TV program guide for September lay open on the seat, marked up with a yellow pen. Jack picked it up and saw that Carl had highlighted
Survivor
,
Fear Factor
,
Boot Camp
,
Big Brother
…secondhand living.

But that seemed good enough for Carl.

Jack shrugged. Whatever gets you through the night…

But nowhere in the trailer was there a sign of who Carl was. No family pictures, no sign that he had a past. Maybe his past wasn’t anything he wanted to remember.

Jack stepped out, locked the door, and drove back toward Gateways. He turned off the road and parked in the trees next to the security fence. He noticed other tire tracks nearby. After wiping down the steering wheel, gearshift, door and window handles, he stepped up on the hood and went over the fence.

Easy. Too easy. Semelee’s clan could do the same with their pickup.

Semelee…As he walked back to his father’s house he ran the Semelee situation back and forth and sideways through his head, looking for a solution.

He agreed with Weldon on one point: Semelee seemed to be able to control the swamp creatures. How, Jack didn’t know, but he’d bet it had something to do with the nexus point at the lagoon. She’d used that power to commit perfect murders—“sacrifices,” as she’d put it to Weldon—in plain view without anyone suspecting that a human agent lay behind the attacks. No question in Jack’s mind that she was behind the palmetto swarm and the alligator attack as well.

She had to be stopped, that much was clear. He had no idea how, but he’d worry about that later. The first thing he had to do was put Carl back in his trailer…his home.

10

“There you are,” Dad said as Jack stepped through the door. He’d obviously awakened from his nap. Looked like he’d showered and shaved too. “Where have you been?”

“Here and there. Did anyone call or come by while I was out?”

He shook his head. “No. All quiet. You’re expecting someone?”

Jack hid his frustration. “Yeah. Sort of.”

“Well, I need to do some grocery shopping. How about driving me down to the Publix so I can stock up?”

“How about I give you the keys and stay here? In case that call comes, or someone shows up.”