CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The trip to Colesville requires several turns, from the interstate to a US highway and then to a couple of two-lane state roads. The combination of painkillers and the pain itself gives the drive a dream-like quality. A couple of times, Gray isn’t sure exactly where he is for a few seconds.

His route takes him through Chatham. The girl for whom he stops at a crosswalk on the street separating the college from the town looks so much like Annie Lineberger that he feels compelled to pull his car into a no-parking space to collect his thoughts. When he looks in his rearview mirror, the girl is gone.

He finds his way to the courthouse complex. Still in the car, he looks up the number on his iPhone for Marcus Green.

“You’d better get that North Carolina lawyer of yours over to the courthouse right away,” Gray says, and he explains what he’s done and what he’s planning to do. He doesn’t mention the fact that he’s been bleeding a lot and generally is a little worse for the wear.

“Shit, man, this can’t wait until I can get down there?”

“No, it can’t. Now, can you call him, or at least give me the number?”

A sigh.

“I’ll call him. I can get his attention. Now stay there. Don’t say anything to any damn DA, or especially to that judge, before you have a lawyer present.”

Gray laughs.

“If I say something and neither you nor this Flint Massey is there, can you charge me for that?”

“Glad to see you still have your sense of humor.”

Marcus Green hangs up.

Gray is out of his car and walking up the brick walkway leading to the main building when he realizes that he doesn’t even know the judge’s name.

He finds it on the directory inside the building: John Henry Trott. He figures he needs to get to the judge’s office as soon as possible. The makeshift bandage seems to have stemmed the bleeding, but his shirt and pants are a mess, as is his battered face. The first deputy who spies him is liable to stop him from going any closer to the judge’s quarters than he is now.

Gray makes his way to the third floor, thankful that Friday afternoon at the start of a Memorial Day weekend seems to be a rather sleepy time at the Byrd County courthouse.

He walks through the door. The woman sitting at the desk in front of him looks up and stifles a gasp.

“Are you all right, sir?” she asks him. He can see her already reaching for her phone.

Gray explains as quickly as he can that he is fine, that he is Grayson Melvin, out on bond for the murder of Annie Lineberger, and that he has important information for Judge Trott, information that he needs to convey “right damn now.”

She’s nervous as a cat. She asks him to please take a seat while she checks to see if the judge has left for the weekend. She goes into the office behind her desk. He thinks he hears a lock click.

He isn’t surprised, half a minute later, to hear somebody or bodies running down the hall toward where he sits. The door flies open, and a couple of deputies walk in, weapons drawn.

They order him to first put his hands up over his head and then get on the floor. They are in the process of handcuffing his hands behind his back when he hears the inner door open.

“Easy now, fellas,” he hears the judge say. “Don’t hurt him. He seems harmless enough.”

Gray is staring at the judge’s feet and legs. He’s wearing sandals and shorts.

“What are you doing, barging in here and trying to screw up my weekend? Sorry about the handcuffs and all, but you scared the hell out of Lucinda here.”

John Henry Trott walks over and pulls up a chair in front of Gray.

“Now tell me what this is all about.”

Gray asks if he can be allowed to get off the floor. The judge nods, and the deputies help him, somewhat roughly, to his feet. One of them grabs another chair, and now he’s sitting facing the judge.

Trott shakes his head as he looks him over.

“Damn,” he says, “you look like you took an overdose of whip-ass. Please tell me that police brutality wasn’t involved, or at least not from our police.”

Gray assures him that, other than an undeserved speeding ticket, he has not been harmed by any law-enforcement officials.

“Well, go on. Tell it,” the judge says.

So Gray does. He goes back to the call he got eight days ago about his class ring. He takes the judge along the trail that led to Bobby Wayne Hill. He tells Trott about his near-death experience this morning.

Trott asks him why he didn’t call the police after he was shot.

“I’m a little leery of law enforcement right now,” Gray tells him. He sees one of the deputies scowl. “I’m a little leery about being in Byrd County right now, to tell you the truth, but you’re about the only person with any clout who seemed like he might listen to me.”

“You didn’t think you’d get a fair shake from Towson Grimes?”

The judge seems to almost smile when he says it.

Gray shakes his head.

“Well, where is this ring, anyhow?”

“It’s in my right-hand pocket.”

The judge tells one of the deputies to fish the ring out. He does, and hands it to the judge.

“Well, it’s a ring all right. And I see it has what you say are your initials on it. But right now all we’ve got is your side of the story. What if you had this ring all along and you’re just making up this cock-and-bull tale?”

Gray assures him that he can get corroboration from Dot Gaines and Isadora Goforth and probably from the fat man at the antiques store.

“And there’s a guy running around loose in a beat-up Ford Taurus who shot me this morning.”

The judge tells the deputies to take off Gray’s handcuffs. Then, as they’re talking, Flint Massey comes bursting through the door, out of breath. One of the deputies reaches for his gun before he sees who it is.

“Don’t say anything,” the lawyer says.

“Too late, Flint,” the judge tells him. “He’s already spilled his guts.”

Then Trott laughs and shakes his head.

“Nah, he didn’t confess to anything, unless confessing for somebody else counts.”

The judge makes a call.

“Hey, Towson. You better get your ass over here. I think your forty-eight-year-old murder case might have run into a little bit of a snag.”

He looks at Gray.

“I probably caught him just before he left for the beach. If you’re going to mess up my weekend, I am not going down alone.”

In the twenty minutes before Towson Grimes joins them in the crowded office, Gray’s North Carolina lawyer tries to counsel his client, stopping once to make a call to Marcus Green for advice.

It’s obvious that Massey thinks he should keep his mouth shut, but Gray tells him that’s not going to happen.

Grimes, whose leisure wear approximates what the judge has on, looks angry and concerned when he joins the party.

“What the hell is going on, John Henry? You’re not going to believe this piece of crap, are you?”

Trott looks up at the district attorney.

“It’s ‘your honor,’ or at least ‘judge,’ if you don’t mind. Now I’ve just been told a rather amazing story. We don’t have time to check it out right now, but I can assure you it will be checked out. And if it does check out, you might wind up looking like an asshole. Which is why I’m going to ask the state police to step in and investigate. No offense, but if we’re going to try to send this man to the gas chamber, I reckon we ought to make sure we’ve got the right guy.”

He asks the DA if anyone has checked hair samples that might be among Annie Lineberger’s bones.

“Why the hell would we do that? We’ve got the guy that did it, the one they knew did it all along. For forty-eight years they’ve known it. He’s sitting right here.”

“That may be so, Towson, but it’s not looking so cut-and-dried from where I sit.”

The DA looks like he’s very close to getting arrested himself. It’s hard for Gray to believe that he’s the same easygoing, slow-talking character he first met a couple of weeks earlier.

“We can handle the investigation, whatever this son of a bitch claims. We can find out if he’s lying.”

The judge shakes his head.

“No, Towson. We’re turning this one over to the state. If you try to go over my head, I can assure you it won’t be pleasant.”

Towson Grimes looks at the judge, then looks at Gray. He seems to know that he’s fighting a losing battle. He turns without another word and stomps out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

“He always was a hothead,” the judge says to Gray as they hear Grimes’s footsteps recede. “He was a few years ahead of me in school, and he was like that then. When he made up his mind, he didn’t want to hear any back talk about it. That works sometimes.”

He turns to Gray.

“Mister, you’ve totally messed up my weekend. You better not be lying about any of this. If you are, I’ll revoke that bail and let you spend the rest of the year as our guest while you wait for your day in court.”

He has Lucinda take Gray’s information, including the make and model of Bobby Wayne Hill’s car.

He looks at Gray’s shirt, taking in all the dried blood like he’s seeing it for the first time.

“In the meantime, while we’re checking all this out, we better get you over to the clinic, if not the county hospital. And we’ll get you a room at the Days Inn, so we can stay in touch while we see if you’re lying or not. We don’t want you leaving town right now.”

He tells the deputy to drive him to the clinic, reminding him that Gray is not under arrest and shouldn’t be treated as if he were. The deputy nods, grim-faced.

The clinic is only two blocks away. The deputy never says a word to him, then drives off as soon as Gray leaves the car.

The nurse there takes care of the wound to his arm and asks him if he’s had his nose looked at.

Gray tells her he has. He doesn’t mention the ribs.

He walks the two blocks back to his car. The judge has arranged for him to stay at the motel “compliments of the county” while they vet his story. He drives there and checks in. It’s almost dark, and there doesn’t seem to be anything open that would serve food in the general area. Gray treats himself to a pack of Nabs, a candy bar, and a Coke from the vending machine down the hall.

He gets a call from Marcus Green as he’s about to succumb to the latest round of pain pills.

“My associate says you weren’t terribly cooperative today,” Green says by way of greeting.

“He and I have a different idea about my defense strategy,” Gray tells him. He thinks he might have said “stragedy.”

“Well you ought to listen to the experts. That’s what you’re paying us for.”

Gray tells him what he told the judge earlier.

“Damn, man,” his lawyer says. “That took a lot of stones, going right to the judge’s office. You’re lucky they didn’t shoot your ass.”

Gray reminds him that it wouldn’t be the first time his ass has been shot at today, and that he’s kind of getting used to it.

Green laughs.

“Well, rest assured, I will be down there tomorrow. Hell, I’ve got all summer to go to the beach. My tan ain’t going to get any better. You’re better entertainment than watching the tide roll in.”

Gray tells him he’s glad to be the source of such apparent revelry.

While he was on the phone with his Richmond lawyer, he sees that he got another call.

He returns it.

“Holy shit,” Corrine Manzi says by way of greeting. “You’ve been a busy boy. I just saw a clip on the news about a shooting over in Lexington. They described the guy who they said got shot and left the scene, and they’ve managed to get the shooter’s name. And I recognized it. That was you, right? The shootee, I mean. Are you OK?”

Corrine tells him that they haven’t caught Bobby Wayne Hill yet, but they’re pretty sure Bobby Wayne won’t be that hard to round up.

“Where the hell are you?”

He tells her where he’s staying, and why.

“Damn. I think I’m going to come up there. I think this might be the best story we’ve had all year.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’? You’re retired, remember?”

She laughs.

“Reporters are like marines,” she says. “There’s no such thing as former reporters. Not the real ones anyhow.”

“So I’m just a story now? Something to hang one last byline on?”

“Aw, it’s not like that, Gray. I never thought you did it, and I didn’t do enough to help you back when I could’ve.

“But, I gotta say, this will be one hell of a story.”

He makes her promise not to come to Colesville in the middle of the night.

He makes one last call and tells Betsy Fordyce about his interesting morning and afternoon.

“I’m getting in the car in about fifteen minutes,” she tells him, “and I don’t want to hear any more bullshit about it. You’ve played Lone Ranger long enough.”

He tells her he loves her, something he knows he doesn’t do often enough. He asks about Josh, and Betsy tells him the boy is starting at second base for his Little League team.

“Maybe,” he tells her, “we ought to get married.”

After a short silence, she says, “Wow. Those painkillers must be something. Talk to me when they wear off.”

He gives her the name and location of the Days Inn and his room number. He warns her that he probably won’t even hear her knocking if she starts out right now and bangs on his door at two in the morning.

“Well, then, I’ll get another room and wake you up bright and early tomorrow.”

“Betsy.”

“What?”

“I’m not worth it.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

She hangs up and leaves Gray to a restless sleep.

When his cell phone buzzes again, he is dead to the world, only waking as the phone goes silent.

Blurry-minded, he checks the call. It’s a number he doesn’t recognize. The clock reads nine forty-five p.m.

Then the phone buzzes again.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“You know who it is.”

Even half asleep, he recognizes the voice.