Between Black and White (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers #2)(63)
For two days he followed this same routine, going up to the unit at 1:30 a.m., eating, bathing, shaving, and sleeping for two hours. The hardest part of staying in the closet all day was using the bathroom, but luckily there were plenty of sand buckets around. He’d fill a bucket of piss daily and then take it up to the condo and dump it out in the toilet.
If he was anything, JimBone Wheeler was a survivor.
On this, the third night of his stay, he knew he’d pressed his luck long enough. Given how nice and fresh everything in the unit was, the owner was a frequent visitor, and Bone couldn’t chance another night. After following his routine, Bone cleaned up his mess and trudged back down the stairs, dressed in a faded khaki hat that said “Destin” in blue letters, black athletic shorts, and another T-shirt. Since the owner didn’t wear the same size shoe, Bone was barefoot. But Bone figured no one would raise an eyebrow at that. After all, this was the Gulf Coast. People walked around barefoot all day.
Opening the storage closet at just past 2:00 a.m., Bone took the other set of keys off the hook and shut the door. There was only one possibility. A crimson Porsche 911 in a space about three rows down from the closet. Carefully and confidently, Bone hit the garage door button and climbed into the sports car.
Straight shift heaven, he thought, backing the Porsche out of the garage. Not one to leave anything to chance, Bone stepped back into the garage and hit the button again. Then he ducked his head under the door as it began to close behind him.
Three minutes later a crimson Porsche 911 pulled onto Highway 98, driven by a clean-shaven man with a cap who looked like a hundred other doctors on vacation. If anyone paid him any attention at all, they’d figure he was making a late-night Krispy Kreme run or . . . maybe going down to AJ’s bar to see if any of the cougars were still on the prowl. Either way he’d fit right in.
Bone rolled the windows down and flipped the radio on, beginning to relax. A news report came on that interested him, so he turned it up.
“Today, in Pulaski, Tennessee a grand jury indicted Bocephus Aurulius Haynes for the murder of prominent businessman and entrepreneur Andrew Davis Walton. Walton, the onetime Imperial Wizard of the Tennessee Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, rose to prominence in the ’80s and ’90s by making a number of investments that landed him on the cover of Newsweek magazine, which proclaimed he was the ‘Warren Buffett of the South.’ Haynes, a noted African American trial attorney, is believed to have murdered Walton out of revenge for the suspected 1966 Klan killing of Haynes’s father. Judge Susan Connelly, a Giles County Circuit Court judge, has been assigned the case and will likely set a trial date at the arraignment Friday. To be sure, when this case goes to trial the eyes of the world will be on Pulaski . . .”
There was more, but Bone turned the knob to a station that played old country. He’d heard all he needed to hear.
Things were about to get good, he knew. Everyone there, including his employer, probably thought he was dead. They wouldn’t be expecting him, and that, Bone knew, was a huge advantage.
He would still collect his paycheck, but as he went over the events of the last year in his mind, he realized that moolah or no, he had grown weary of McMurtrie and Drake. He also owed Bocephus Haynes one from his encounter with the black lawyer last year in Tuscaloosa. Involuntarily, Bone felt a pain in his testicles, which Haynes had squeezed until Bone thought one of them would fall off. “You’re as far from Jesus as you’re ever goin’ be,” Haynes had said when he’d pointed a pistol in Bone’s face and shamed him for bringing “a knife to a gunfight.”
Bone adjusted his balls with his right hand. Then he flipped a switch above him, and the top to the Porsche came down. Feeling the salt air off the Choctawhatchee Bay hit his nostrils as the car ambled across the Mid-Bay Bridge, Bone took a deep breath.
They didn’t get me last year. They literally had me by the balls . . . and they didn’t get me. And they missed this time too. He knew that in some way Destin had been a trap. Someone else had followed Drake, hoping to catch JimBone.
And they almost had. Almost . . .
JimBone Wheeler chuckled, shaking his head. He would take his time. He would pick his spots. But in the end he would take them all.
McMurtrie . . . Drake . . . Haynes.
Bone almost laughed at the irony. In a month, maybe less, there would be a trial in Pulaski meant to determine whether Bocephus Haynes lived or died. A trial that would hinge on a jury’s verdict.
But Bone knew the verdict was already in. Win, lose, or draw at trial, McMurtrie, Drake, and Haynes had been sentenced to death. And not by lethal injection, the gas chamber, or the electric chair.
But by any means necessary . . .
Courtesy of the Bone.
PART FOUR
45
Dr. George Curtis rarely took on new patients. He had been in practice for thirty years and had all the work he could handle. But there were times he made exceptions. And this was one of those times.
The woman had come without an appointment, and George’s longtime receptionist, Dabsey, had told her that Dr. Curtis almost never took on new patients and that she would have to wait for an opening. The woman said she had been referred by an old friend of Dr. Curtis, and that she would wait.
She waited until noon, and after Dabsey had left for her one-hour lunch break, Dr. Curtis ushered her to a patient room. Had the woman not been attractive, George probably would have had Dabsey tell her to leave. But she was attractive in sort of a Midwestern farm girl kind of way. She had long brown hair with brown eyes and was dressed conservatively in an ankle-length navy dress. George figured he could spare five minutes for a pretty woman to tell her story. Besides, there was something familiar about her . . .