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THE MEXICAN HAD FIGURED that I knew how to tie a hangman's noose. And I did. I knew how to tie all sorts of complicated knots. I had been in the Navy SEALs. Of course, I knew knots—all kinds of knots. Knots have many different uses. Some of them are the kind of uses that most people don’t think about. Once I had dated a local girl from Japan. She liked knots. She liked them a lot. She had told me, “The usefulness of a Navy man is his ability to tie a knot.” She was a lot of fun. But this wasn’t the time to be thinking about her.
In order to tie a fake hangman’s knot, you have to tie a hangman’s noose but lengthen the short end and swap it as the long end. The sliding end has to be hidden inside the coil, so there’s no risk of the noose tightening. The surrounding coil has to be loose enough to ensure it can be pulled free. To the casual observer, it will all look the same. I had tied the trick knot, but if the Mexican had turned on the overhead lights, he might’ve seen this. He might have lived longer.
He came in close to me to check to see if I was breathing. I wasn’t. Then he waited for a long minute to make sure I was dead. It appeared that I was. That was when he lowered his gun and turned his back on me—his mistake.
I squinted, barely opening my eyes, and peeked out. I saw his back turned, opened my eyes all the way, and peered up. I reached up, grabbed the pipe overhead, lifted my body upward, and slid my neck out of the noose. It throbbed and ached from the fall when my neck had dropped and was caught by the cord, but my trick knot had worked. Any greater a drop and my neck might’ve broken, and I would be dead, but I wasn’t. I was alive.
I dropped silently to the floor. I was barefoot, so staying quiet wasn’t hard. I tiptoed in a low crouch, the floor hard and cold under my bare feet. I snuck up behind the guy.
He had fallen for my hoax, but he was no amateur. He must’ve sensed me behind him because he flipped around fast, gun ready to fire. He fired blindly once into the darkness, and the bullet whizzed past me. I heard it hit the opposite wall. The guy saw me in the muzzle flash, but it was too late.
I had never played baseball in my life, but I had always liked the sport. I had always respected the high-speed throws of major-league pitchers. I was fascinated at how many miles per hour some of their fastballs could fly. A hundred miles an hour was fast, faster than most people had ever driven their cars. Faster than they were allowed to drive their cars.
I couldn’t hit a fastball like that, much less pitch one, but I was fast and strong and powerful, stronger than most guys, that was for damn sure. I swung a vicious right hook through the air so fast and so hard that it knocked the guy off his feet. It may not have been as fast as a major-league fastball, but I doubted that a fastball would’ve knocked the guy’s head clean off. I hadn’t knocked it off either, but I had come damn close. I heard him hit the wall on the other side of the hallway about a second after my punch connected. I had felt the vibrations of breaking bones and snapping teeth through my knuckles. The guy hit the wall hard, hard enough that if the force of the punch hadn’t killed him, the solid surface of the wall would have.
I asked, “YOU ARE THE ASSHOLE WHO SHOT MY MOM?”
I picked up the flashlight.
He had dropped it, and it had rolled and stopped against my feet. In its beam, I could see that one of the guy’s shoes was still laced up and on the ground where he had been standing. The gun had flown back a few feet and landed in the center of the hallway. I moved the beam up to the guy, so I could get some answers, which I wouldn’t get. Not from him. Because not only was his head still attached, but it had turned around a little farther than it was meant to like it had been screwed on wrong. Either my punch had broken his neck, or it had broken when he bounced off the wall. I wasn’t sure which. Regardless, the guy was dead.
I picked up the gun and pointed it at the open door at the end of the hall in case he hadn’t been alone. No one rushed in after him. No one came to see what the loud noise had been. No backup checked on his progress.
I bent down and checked the guy’s pockets. I found his wallet and IDs and sifted through them—all totally phony. A silenced Heckler & Koch P30L, gloves, nice clothes, clean cut, able to make his way into the stationhouse and steal the keys to the cell, and the fake IDs were good. This guy was a professional hitman. No question.
Who the hell sent you? And why did you kill my mom? Who sent you?
There was far more to Faye Matlind’s disappearance than a clan of Mississippi rednecks.