Lewis Perdue - Perfect killer

"That's insane!"

Silence hung heavy between us.

"Vince? You still there?"

"Still here." He cleared his throat. "If I didn't know you… really know you, I'd probably connect the dots the same way."

"Oh, man," I said quietly. "I agree something's wrong and none of this is coincidence, but it's tied to this Talmadge thing."

"I hope you can make your case… fast."

Jasmine's bag and my duffel thudded into view. I made my way through the crowd toward them.

"Me too."

"Keep in touch."

"Roger that."

Jael St. Clair pulled her rented Ford Explorer into an empty slot in the short-term parking lot at the Jackson airport terminal where she could watch traffic exiting the rentalcar lot. She swept the blond hair from her face with one hand, then stretched her arms and untangled the knots in her back that had accumulated during the flight from Los Angeles. The Citation was an okay corporate jet, she thought, but as a bedroom, it left a lot to be desired.

She reached over to the substantial saddlebag purse on the seat and, without taking her eyes off the rental lot, sorted through the bag's contents. Her fingers quickly found her cell phone, then the Heckler amp; Koch, HK4 semiautomatic pistol with the. 380 ACP barrel and seven-round magazine, the Garmin, and finally the powerful, compact Zeiss binoculars. She pulled the binoculars out, raised them to her eyes, and adjusted the focus.

Bradford Stone made his way toward a white Ford pickup truck in the rental car lot. He had used a credit card for his flight from L.A. to Jackson, his vehicle here, and his hotel in Greenwood. He might as well be wearing a strobe on his head. Stone put his bags in the jump seat of the truck and got into the driver's seat. After several moments of adjusting mirrors and seats, he drove out of the rental lot.

Stone drove past her. Jael waited for a moment, allowing a battered Chevy truck and a midsixties Toronado listing from a broken suspension to pass, then pulled into traffic behind them, heading toward I-20.

Robert Johnson's artfully unadorned guitar notes filled the cab of my rented pickup as I raced north along Highway 49 through the kudzu-smothered hills south of Yazoo City.

The CD had been on sale cheap at the airport gift shop on my stopover. I loved the genius of Johnson's blues guitar and the transcendent depth of the lyrics. Blues masters like Johnson and Mississippi John Hurt had a way of owning my imagination. "There's a hellhound on MY trail too," I thought.

The hellhound had killed Vanessa and laid waste to my life in California. No name to this hound, no breed, no face, all fangs and death without form. In my mind, I walked through the pieces of the puzzle: Mama's funeral, my boat, the attack at home. I ransacked every thought, desperate for some dim, unremembered key to the deadly puzzle placing me as the only logical suspect.

Outside, the kudzu shrouded utility poles, abandoned barns and houses, and everything in between, even the tallest of trees. The trees looked like giant undead mummies trailing their scattered rags slowly over the hills.

I listened to the beginning of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil Blues" and imagined evil making its way through the landscape here. Even though Johnson was a man of the Delta's flatness, his words and music spoke to more universal fears.

It had been decades since the last time I had driven this road, and back then it had been a narrow, two-lane patchwork of cracked, tar-sealed concrete with no shoulder that slashed through the kudzu jungle, abruptly ascending and dropping like a cheap roller coaster as the highway's thick expansion joints thwapped an endless iambic k-dunk, kdunk, k-dunk against the tires.

Highway 49 was four lanes now, bordered by a broad demilitarized zone cleared of the aggressive imported Asian vine that grew up to a foot per day. Kudzu had been widely planted to control soil erosion back in the 1930s and could invade a farm and occupy it in a single growing season. Poet James Dickey called it a "green, mindless, unkillable ghost," and there were legends of unwary farmers found strangled in their beds because they fell asleep with the windows open. I had read once kudzu was actually a useful plant-a source of Asian medicines and a nutritious forage for livestock, which enriched the soil with nitrogen-fixing roots. Many useful things become toxic when transplanted out of their native environments.

All of these characteristics no doubt contributed to the way kudzu had grown into a cultural metaphor for Southern society, although no one agreed on the meaning. Maybe it had to do with manners and sugar-sweet hospitality gone wild or because it proved a relentless adversary much like poverty and racism. Probably these things and a whole lot more. Johnson's raspy voice scratched out "Crossroad Blues," supposedly his lament after selling his soul to the devil in exchange for his supernaturally superb guitar ability.

Mmm, the sun goin' down, boy Dark gon' catch me here

On the southern outskirts of Yazoo City, signs pointed to 49E veering off to the northeast. The bifurcated Highway 49s would almost parallel each other for another eighty miles, describing a long, thin diamond sliver that hounded much of my early life.

Staying on 49 would take me through Midnight, Silver City, and Belzoni to Indianola at the western point of the diamond, where Saints' Rest, one of the Judge's plantations, was located. A little farther on, 49 passed through Ruleville, where my mother's sister had lived and died, and up through Parchman Prison, the Devil's Island of the Delta. Finally, Highway 49 healed itself with 49E up in Tutwiler, north of Summer, where an all-white jury back in the mid-1950s had acquitted the killers of Emmett Till, who had been tortured to death for the crime of being a black teenager. I was about six years old at the time, but I don't remember much specific about all this other than visits from a lot of strangers and hushed conversations behind the closed doors to the breakfast room in the Judge's house in Itta Bena.

Back then, my mother and I lived in a small apartment attached to the main house the Judge had built for us during the first divorce. Mama and Papa divorced and married each other three times before ultimately each marrying someone else for the fourth time. What Papa and I did together was rare and episodic. I went on trips with him to New Orleans exactly four times, twice when he was working and twice to watch Ole Miss win the Sugar Bowl. We went dove hunting three times and once for ducks. I remember those eight events primarily because they were so very special but also because eight things are not hard to keep in mind.

Despite that, I loved Papa deeply whenever I was with him. I can remember to this day how he always smelled of Old Spice and Camels. The cigarettes railroaded him into a series of long, dark, painful, and humiliating final days living mutely with a tracheotomy where the cancer had eaten his lungs away.

I would like to have known my father better, but he died first.

While it never made up for not having Papa to hug, I enjoyed the run of the Judge's big house and yard with the giant sycamores along the street in front, the massive pecan tree out back, the tulips blazing along the driveway in the spring, a pen full of bluetick hounds, and of course Lena Grayson and Al Thompson, who served as cook/housekeeper and chauffeur/gardener. I owed my life to Al Thompson. As the story goes, after going to a cowboy-movie matinee, I decided to hang myself. I took apart the rope swing on the pecan tree, tied a damn good noose for a five-year-old, stood on my tricycle, and nearly choked to death.

Al Thompson observed the entire thing from the screened-in back porch next to the Judge's kitchen. He called Lena out to watch and she told him to stop me. Al waited until I started to choke, "If I stop the boy before he gets a taste for things, he'll just try it again some other time when nobody's watching."