Stephen Cannell - Final Victim

"How're we gonna find Tampa? That road could lead anywhere."

"I don't know," he said. "Let's go, we'll do the best we can."

Karen Dawson had driven in two NASCAR. stock car races. She was a natural hot shoe with a God-given gift for driving. She slammed her foot down. Mud shot into the air. The truck leaped toward the shell road at the low end of the yard. By the time she got to it she was totally focused, her hands on the wheel at ten past ten. Her vision was searching the road just beyond the headlights, where she could occasionally see the startled eyes of swamp creatures reflected in the yellow light, just before they scurried away to escape the churning tires.

In the back of the truck, Lockwood hung on desperately, trying to support Malavida while they jounced along the uneven road. He managed to remove his jacket and put it under Malavida's head.

They had traveled half a mile when Karen hit the first deep and unavoidable pothole. In the back of the truck, Malavida and Lockwood bounced hard. When he landed, Malavida groaned, opened his eyes, and looked up at Lockwood. He said nothing, but his dark eyes pleaded. Lockwood reached over, found his hand, and grasped it. Malavida held on to it in desperation as the truck rattled and banged down the rain-rutted road.

Karen knew she had to keep the truck from bouncing. A short distance in front of her, the headlights were swallowed by the swamp's hollow darkness. She was trying to spot the potholes in the shell road before she hit them, maneuvering and down-shifting to get around them without losing time. After ten minutes, she came to the first fork in the road. She wasn't sure where she was or even what direction she was heading. She slowed and stopped. "Go right," Lockwood said. But Karen ignored him and jumped out of the cab to look up at the stars. "What're you doing?" he yelled as she scanned the starlit horizon. It was a clear night, and the starscape glittered like pinholes shot through black velvet.

"Goddamn it, he's dying! Let's go, whatta you doing?" Lockwood shouted.

"Looking for the Orion constellation."

"Get the fuck out of here," he said, amazed. "This isn't a Girl Scout camping trip. Get in! Go right!"

Karen spun on him and glowered. "You heard that guy back at the dock. These shell roads could go anywhere. This one's been wandering right and left. I don't even know which way I'm going. I want to go west, that's where Tampa is. Orion is at nearly zero declination. It rises to the southeast. The coordinates on the celestial sphere are analogous to latitude and longitude on the earth." He was looking at her with flat-faced wonder, but she missed the expression because she was again looking up at the sky. "I'll find it for you, and you keep pointing me in the right direction. I won't be able to see it from the cab, it'll be too high overhead." Then she pointed up in the sky. "Okay, see that line of stars? Right there," she continued, "those three little stars? They're called Orion's Belt. The nebula is below them. The kinda reddish one, not as bright, it's called the Jewel of the Sword. You see it?"

He looked up at the sky, trying to find the stars she was pointing at, feeling utterly ridiculous.

"I… I'm not…"

"Find the North Star. It's at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper. You know that one? Go forty-five degrees right and across, the first one you come to."

"Okay… yeah, I guess…"

"That's the Jewel. It's due west. Keep pointing me that way." She jumped back into the cab and turned left on the shell road, heading in the general direction of the nebula.

"Celestial navigation," Lockwood muttered under his breath. "Gimme a fucking break."

Each time they came to a fork in the road, he looked for the constellation, tried to spot the tiny star in Orion's Sword, and then yelled to her which way to go. At least, he finally admitted to himself, it was giving them a consistent course. He hoped they didn't end up in the middle of a Florida swamp. Fifteen minutes later, they hit a paved road with a sign that said TAMPA.

Karen found Interstate 75 and headed north. The first hospital sign they saw was for the University Community Hospital, on South Hillsborough Road.

Karen pulled the truck up to the emergency entrance and Lockwood leapt out of the back. He banged through the double doors and grabbed a trauma nurse in the ER. "I've got a Code Blue out here!" he said, pulling the startled woman toward the truck.

Lockwood and two ER nurses loaded Malavida onto a gurney. There was a moment before they wheeled him inside when Lockwood was looking down at the badly wounded Chicano… then Malavida opened his eyes. "It's on you now, Hoss," Lockwood said softly. "We got you here, now paddle. Catch a ride, we'll be on the beach waiting." Karen moved up and looked down at Malavida. Their eyes held each other. She was still looking at him when they wheeled Malavida inside.

Karen had removed the vehicle registration from the glove compartment. She handed it to Lockwood and he pulled the registration slip out of its yellow, faded plastic holder.

"Leonard Land, Twenty-two Hundred Little Manatee Road, near Tampa," he read. "This guy is going down," he promised softly.

Tampa Detective Grady Raynor had a complexion like lunar lava. His pockmarked face and close-set, steel-gray eyes accurately forecast a cold, uneven personality. He entered the hospital cafeteria with Dr. Susan McCaffrey from the trauma ward. She pointed out Karen Dawson and John Lockwood to him. They were just throwing away coffee cups and moving toward the door. Grady blocked their exit and held up his badge in its leather case.

"Grady Raynor, detective, Tampa Major Crimes. You brought in the Mexican kid who got caught in the explosion?"

"He's not a kid," Karen said.

Lockwood caught her protective tone, but went on, "We called you an hour and a half ago… where you been?"

"You ain't the only clambake on the beach, Buckwheat. Let's go somewhere a little more private."

He led them out into the corridor… Dr. McCaffrey took them down to the Doctors' Lounge and opened the door, but remained outside as they entered.

"Okay, let's have a little ID, folks," Raynor said as soon as they were in the colorless lounge. Karen pulled out her Customs ID and handed it to him.

"Doctor of Criminal Profiling, U. S. Customs. What's that mean, exactly?" he said, his gray eyes crawling over her like sewer bugs.

"What it means, Detective, is I do criminal profiles for U. S. Customs… just like it says."

"And you, Mr. Lockwood… whatta you do?"

"I'm the food critic for the Tampa News."

"This kid you brought in is critical. Somebody blew him open like a can a'corn. Now, you can stand there and crack wise with me, or you can come to the dance. I don't fuckin' care. Get cute and I'm gonna hang you by your thumbs until you start makin' kissin' sounds. Now this kid has prn art on him. He's done time in somebody's brickhouse. So either I print all a you an' waste a few hours of everybody's time, or you* can bring me up to date now, an' save us all a lotta grief an' pain."

"His name is Carlos `Malavida' Chacone. He's a Federal convict who was released from Lompoc prn to work a case," Lockwood said. "Yeah? How does that work?"

"I'm a SAC with U. S. Customs, retired. It's my case. He was released to my custody."

"Retired? You got a badge? Got any prn paperwork on this kid?" "Left it in the boat out in the swamp."

"You wanna show me where that is?"

Lockwood had seen his share of Grady Raynors. They muscled their way through police work, passing out negative attitude like Halloween candy. They were dick-measurers. Police power was their job perk. Lockwood wanted to go back out to the house in the swamp alone and set up his own crime scene investigation, maybe call in a few Miami lab techs he was friendly with to see what they could pull out of the ashes. The truck might still have trace evidence, but he knew they'd contaminated it by using it to bring Malavida here. The main target, however, was the rusting barge: It was the heart of his investigation. He wanted to do a vacuum-bag and forensic sweep of the inside. He had a hunch that locked freezer wasn't going to be full of TV dinners. The computers in the rusting barge needed to be downloaded. If he got lucky, the whole case could be in there.