Jack Kerley - A Garden of Vipers

Eastern Mobile County, Alabama, early 2000s

“Are you sure he ran this way? I don’t see anything.”

“Keep your damn voice down. Don’t touch the blood. And just use light when you need it.”

Lucas heard voices in the distance and his eyes snapped open. The world was spinning slowly, like he was caught in a syrupy vortex. Lucas threw his arms out to hold on and felt his fingers touch grass. It was night, but he saw the dark shadows of nearby trees. Comets were spinning between their trunks, blinking on and off: comet, no comet. It smelled fresh here in cometland, like dew and wet leaves. A very peculiar effect, he thought. Also peculiar: a single star straight up in the sky, flashing, like the comets and the star were conversing.

“I see a car! Hidden behind the trees, branches over it. He’s around here.”

“We’ll have to get rid of the car. Fast. Call for a trailer.”

Lucas closed his eyes and took a deep breath of cool air. The solitary star blinked. Another comet flashed across the sky. No, not comets, his clearing mind registered; it was flashlights pressing through fog. He was in a field beside a woods, lying in damp weeds bristling against the sides of his face. Why was he in farmland? Why were there flashlights?

Looking for something.

Looking for him.

What had he done?

The footsteps resumed with the sound of bodies pushing aside branches, stepping on twigs. Flashlight beams swept the weeds and trees. Lucas’s world turned white as a beam crossed him. He made himself lie absolutely still. The light passed by.

But in the moment of illumination he had seen something odd: His hand was red. He stared at his dark fingers, perversely entranced. Then he realized it wasn’t just his hand: His blue pajamas were soaked with blood.

The voices started again. Louder and closer.

“Something’s moving at the base of the microwave tower. It should be to your left. Can you see the tower light blinking above the trees?”

“Be careful. He’s…resourceful.”

A montage of pictures formed in Lucas’s head, recent memories playing like a jittery movie. He started to remember and his gut went cold. He should have figured they’d be coming. He knew too much.

“Shouldn’t the doctor be here, Crandell? Why didn’t you bring him?”

“Shut up. I’ll circle to the far side of the tower. Keep the walkie-talkie low, light off. I’ll tell you when to move in.”

It was black and quiet for several minutes. Lucas wiped the blood from his hands to his pants, flexed fingers, arms, legs. He could move now, escape. He drew himself into an unsteady crouch as the comets started flashing again. His world turned white. Black. He stumbled to his feet, his knees like gimbals, seeming to wobble in every direction. Run! his mind screamed.

“I see him, he’s up.”

“I’m coming in from my side. Get the stunner out.”

Lucas took a deep breath, calculated the angles his pursuers had chosen, figured his way past them. He gathered his energy into his core.

Just as he ran, the world turned white.

“He just ran into a tower support. He’s down and rolling around.”

“Go!”

He heard running feet. Felt bodies fall over him, wrestle him over, his face pressing deep into the wet grass. He felt metal wrap his wrists, pain. He smelled sweat. Aftershave. And a piercing reek of fear, not his own.

“Zap him!”

“He’s not fighting.”

“I told you to-”

There was a shivering blue explosion and the comets returned, each bringing a hundred stars to the party. They whooshed and tumbled and danced. It was beautiful.

In the distance, the voices started up again.

“There’s something all over him. Jesus, Crandell, it’s blood.”

“Get him up and moving. We’ve got to get out of here.”

And then a mouth at his ear, hot and wet. A happy mouth, it seemed, like it had just consumed a delicious meal.

“What did you do, Lucas?” the happy mouth whispered. “What terrible thing have you done this time?”

Present time

A stalled weather front bred thunderstorm cells from New Orleans to Pensacola. Rain dropped in sheets and lightning shredded the sky. Then, as if on a switch, the deluge halted and the air turned sweet and balmy. Ten minutes later, earth and sky were at war again. Mobile, Alabama, was dead center in the conflict.

“What do you think, Carson?” My detective partner, Harry Nautilus, peered through the windshield wipers. “Time to start loading up animals two by two?”

“How about this time we leave the mosquitoes behind?”

It was nine-thirty p.m., the streets almost dead, sane people safe at home. Harry and I were parked near the downtown library. We were working four to midnight, something we did a couple times a week, most bad guys being nocturnal as owls. Not that we’d see much of them tonight; of the five hours we’d been in the car, two were spent against the curb, blinded by rain.

The radio came to life, the signal mangled by nearby lightning.

“DB…Eldredge and…truck driver heading to hosp…ains.”

“Did I hear DB?” Harry said. DB was Dead Body. He grabbed the microphone.

“Nautilus here, Dispatch. You’re breaking up. Repeat.”

“DB…corner of Industrial and Eldredge. Called in by a truck driver. Driver en route to hospital with chest pains.”

We were eight blocks away.

“Nautilus and Ryder confirm message received,” Harry said. “We’re on our way.”

Harry jammed the Crown Vic into gear, roared toward the scene. I figure we left a wake like a speedboat. The radio crackled again. Not Dispatch, but another detective team in the vicinity.

“This is Logan and Shuttles. We’re closer, just five blocks. We’ll take it.”

Harry growled and keyed the mike again. “Nautilus and Ryder have the call.”

“Why’s Logan out at this hour?” I said. “I’ve never seen his lazy ass work past five-thirty.”

The radio crackled with Pace Logan’s voice. “Dispatch, this is Logan. Mark this one ours, we’re almost there.”

I felt the car accelerate. Harry growled, “Negative on that, Dispatch. Carson and me are making the run.”

“Goddamn it, Nautilus, it’s ours,” Pace Logan barked over the radio, no longer using Dispatch as an intermediary.

Harry threw the microphone to the floor. “It’s whoever gets there first,” he muttered, flicking on the lights and screamer and taking a right so fast it about threw me in his lap.

Harry cut another corner hard, skidding toward a line of parked cars barely visible through the rain. I held my breath and braced for an impact that somehow never arrived. We blew through a deserted intersection and I saw a flashing red light paralleling us one block over: Logan and Shuttles. We were three blocks from the scene.

“Jeez, Harry. It’s a drag race.”

“I’m not picking up after Logan again,” he said. “No goddamn way.”

Pace Logan was a disgruntled, hotheaded old-timer waiting to grab his retirement pay, buy a trailer in Florida or Branson, and make life miserable for a succession of lonely women picked up in bowling alley bars. Logan’s twenty-seven-year-old black partner, Tyree Shuttles, was a new-made detective with the misfortune of being chained to a dinosaur.

Six or seven weeks back, Logan’s mishandled evidence in a homicide case almost bought the defense a dismissal. Harry and I got called in at the eleventh hour, eleven forty-five, maybe. It took weeks of twelve-hour-a-day work to retrace Logan’s investigative steps, supplanting tainted evidence with new finds. Harry’d finally nailed it using information Logan had overlooked in his own records.