CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MAY 27
Gray’s back in the parking lot where he spent part of Thursday afternoon. He’s a good distance away from the beat-up Taurus he saw then. The sun hasn’t been up long. He isn’t sure if his prey has a job or not.
The phone rings five times before he hears a croaky voice, full of phlegm and irritation.
“Yeah.”
“I’m trying to get in touch with Bobby Wayne Hill.”
“Who wants him?”
Gray doesn’t give his name. He assumes that it might be familiar to the man he’s talking to.
“I’ve got something of yours, I think. A ring.”
There is a pause, long enough that Gray wonders if Hill has hung up on him.
“I’m not missing any ring. Who is this?”
“The initials on it are JGM. I can talk about it with you, or I can talk about it with the police.”
“You’re crazy, man. I’m goin’ to hang up now. Quit bothering me.”
“OK. But I’d get a good lawyer, if I was you.”
Another pause, and Gray thinks his plan isn’t working.Then:
“What do you want?”
“I told you. We need to talk.”
“You know where I live?”
“Yeah, I know where you live. But we’re not going to talk there.”
Gray gives him the name and address of the breakfast joint next to the hotel where he’s staying.
“Be there in an hour, or I go to the police.”
Bobby Wayne Hill tells him again that he’s crazy, but when Gray reiterates the name of the place, he says he’ll be there.
“Just let me put on some damn clothes. Jesus.”
Gray waits until Hill comes out his front door forty-five minutes later, then follows the Taurus to the Egg Barn. He waits until the man gets out of his car. Hill is just inside the entrance when Gray comes up to his rear.
“Let’s go in,” he says. The man jumps, but then he follows as Gray leads him to the back of the long, narrow eatery that’s just wide enough for an aisle and two sets of booths. Hill doesn’t get a good look at his face until they’re seated.
If anything, Bobby Wayne Hill looks worse than he did yesterday. Whatever charm he might once have possessed no longer is evident. What hair he has left sticks out in unruly wisps from underneath a greasy red baseball cap. His shirt is missing a button. His pants have no belt.
If Hill recognizes the man whose call brought him here, he doesn’t let on.
He looks across the table.
“What happened to your face?” he asks Gray.
“Ran into a door.”
“Maybe the door thought you were bein’ too damn nosy.”
“That’s entirely possible.”
Hill sets his big, bony hands in front of him on the table and looks at Gray straight on with bloodshot eyes.
“Now suppose you tell me what the fuck this is about?”
Gray takes out the ring and sets it on the table. He explains, line by line, what he knows about its journey since the last time he saw it in Annie Lineberger’s possession.
He stops to let the waitress take their orders. When she leaves, he turns back to Hill.
“What the fuck does this have to do with me?” he asks. “I got that ring at a yard sale. Can’t remember when, but it didn’t mean nothin’ to me. Hell, I hadn’t even thought about it. Just left it with all the rest of the junk when Isadora and me split up.”
“That might all be true,” Gray tells him. “But there’s this other thing. You remember Susan Vanhoy?”
“Yeah. She was a stuck-up bitch. Probably still is.”
“Be that as it may, she told me some things about you.”
“And you believed her?”
“She told me about you and Annie Lineberger.”
Bobby Wayne Hill is silent.
Gray tells him what Annie’s old friend said, about how Bobby Wayne was the good-looking star forward on the high school basketball team and Annie was the head cheerleader. About how they went steady, and everybody thought they’d get married someday.
“But it didn’t work out, did it? Annie went on to college, and you stayed behind.”
Hill shrugs his shoulders.
“Puppy love. You get over it.”
“Well, sometimes you do, and sometimes you don’t.”
“Well what the hell do you care? What’s it to you?”
And then the light goes on in Bobby Wayne Hill’s brain.
“I know who you are,” he says, pointing a bony finger at Gray. “You’re the son of a bitch they say killed her. I recognize you now.”
He says it loud enough that the closest patrons, a couple two tables away, look back, then throw some money on the table and leave.
“You’re quite the detective,” Gray tells him.
Hill lowers his voice a little.
“You got a lot of nerve, coming in here and trying to start some shit, when the whole damn world knows you did it.”
“So I guess you’ve been following the case pretty closely.”
Hill looks away.
“Just what’s on TV. It took me awhile to figure where I’d seen you. I can’t believe your ass isn’t locked up. I’m gonna get a lawyer and make sure you don’t come nowhere near me again.”
They grow quiet while the waitress approaches, a little uneasily, Gray thinks, with their food.
When she leaves, Gray leans forward a little.
“So you want me to believe that you and Annie broke up. Susan says it was Annie who broke it off, and you didn’t take it well. And then she disappears. And then the ring she had with her that night, my ring, somehow winds up at a yard sale, and you, of all people, buy it?”
“Man,” Hill says, “all that shit’s ancient history. You don’t know nothing.”
He reaches toward the ring that Gray has laid on the table between them.
“Let me see that thing,” he says, but Gray snatches it away.
Hill leans closer.
“I’ll tell you all about it, if you really want to know. But you’ll have to come back to the apartment with me. I’ll show you something.”
Gray shakes his head.
“Not going to happen.”
Hill smiles for the first time, showing a mouth full of dental neglect.
“You think I’m goin’ to hurt your pussy ass? Is that it?”
“Yeah. That’s about it.”
“Tell you what. I can tell you something that might make you change your mind. Look, I don’t know nothing about who killed Annie Lineberger. She was a high school crush, didn’t mean shit much to me after she left Monroe. Just come out to the car with me.”
Gray leaves a twenty-dollar bill on the table.
“OK,” he says as he painfully eases his body out of the booth. “Show me.”
Gray figures he’s safe in the open parking lot. Still he keeps a few feet between them.
Hill goes around to the trunk. He fishes his keys out of his pants pocket and opens it.
“This is gonna change your mind about everything,” he says, leaning into the trunk.
When he rises up again, he is holding a big-ass pistol with both hands, like he’s used it before.
“Get in,” he orders. “We’re going for a little ride.”
They are no more than a hundred feet from a four-lane highway, and the Egg Barn, half full of customers, is closer than that. It doesn’t seem to matter to Bobby Wayne Hill.
Gray knows he can’t run. Hell, he can barely walk. But he’s damned if he’s going to let himself be taken somewhere more private by a man with a gun.
More or less out of options, he falls to the ground and begins hollering for help. He is able to crawl between two trucks, but Hill is right behind him.
“You son of a bitch,” Hill says quietly as the sound of the gun going off makes Gray’s ears ring. He’s sprayed with pieces of asphalt, but he hasn’t been hit.
Adrenaline overrules his pain, and he’s able to scurry around the back of the delivery truck closest to him. He’s half on his feet when the second shot is fired. He feels a burning sensation in his right arm and tumbles head-first to the pavement.
He lies there, waiting for what comes next, pondering the wisdom of going it alone. He hears a click, but he feels nothing. Then he hears the sounds of footsteps, one set running away, others coming toward him. He opens his eyes and sees two younger men in uniforms with “Carpet? You bet!” stitched across the front looking down at him.
“Damn. You OK, buddy?” one of them asks.
The other one looks up and says, “Hey! Hey! Stop!”
He hears a car, no doubt an aged Ford Taurus, squeal away.
“Call 911,” the first one says to his partner. Then: “Hey, you’re bleeding.”
So he is, Gray realizes, but he figures the second shot must have only grazed him. Either that, or he’s in shock.
They walk him over to his car while one of them calls the emergency number.
“I’m OK,” he tells his rescuers as he opens the driver’s side door. “Just let me sit here a minute.”
And when they step away from the car and wait for the police, he starts the engine and drives off.
They try to stop him, but he locks the doors and assures them, through the glass, that he’s fine, that he’s just going to go somewhere and get a bandage. A handful of the breakfast joint’s patrons come outside to take in the morning’s excitement.
He’s a block away, headed out of town, when the first police car, and then the EMT vehicle, go screaming past in the other direction.
He wonders if the two Good Samaritans who saved him had wits enough to get his license number. He hopes they didn’t. He promises himself that he’ll look them up later and thank them.
He pulls into a Walmart parking lot two miles away and checks his arm. As he thought, he’s only nicked, but he has managed to bleed an alarming amount all over the car seat and his shirt and pants. And, yeah, he’s in a little additional pain. He has made the discovery that he can only really concentrate on one form of discomfort at a time, so he’s not that much worse off than he was before Bobby Wayne Hill shot him.
He figures Hill must have piss-poor aim, his proper stance when firing notwithstanding. He’s grateful for small favors. He opens the car trunk, takes out the T-shirt he wore the last two days, and wraps it around his right arm at the elbow, just above the place on his forearm that looks more like a bad scrape than a bullet wound.
He stops once at a convenience store, for a bottled water with which to wash down the painkillers. He draws mercifully little attention from the young female African American clerk.
Then he checks his road map and heads north.