“I hope he comes after them,” Grimes said, “because I’ll sure be waiting.”
“He’d be stupid to come after anybody else,” Young said. “If that’s his blood on the floor, my guess is he’ll take off. He’ll try to get so deep in the weeds nobody will ever find him.”
“Maybe,” Grimes said, “or maybe the snakes are starting to eat each other. Wouldn’t surprise me to see the lawyer turn up dead next.”
“That’d be just fine with me,” Young said. “You won’t see me shedding any tears over a dead lawyer.”
Grimes shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe they’ll kill each other,” he said. “Make the world a better place.”
CHAPTER 57
After I hung up the phone, I laid back on the bed and closed my eyes. So much had happened in such a short time, and now it was coming to what I knew would be a violent and terrible conclusion. One of us would not walk away from the clearing in the mountains near Petros. If I died there, I knew Pappy would dispose of my body, and no one would ever know what became of me. If I somehow managed to kill him and survive, I knew where I’d take him; I just didn’t know how I’d get him there. It wouldn’t be as though I could just throw him into the trunk of my car.
The worst thought that struck me, though, was that if I died, how few people would really mourn the loss. My mother was gone, my son was half a world away, my ex-wife hated me, Grace had kicked me out, and I’d distanced myself from nearly everyone I knew. I had no close friends in the legal community, no close friends at all, really. Bob Ridge and I hadn’t spoken since my mother’s death. I knew, as a cop, that he probably had to stay at arm’s length because I was a suspect in the West Virginia murders and the disappearance of Ben Clancy. But even if he’d reached out to me, I would have found a reason to avoid him. The irony of all that had happened was that my best friend was a psychopathic killer, and now, at dawn the next morning, I would meet him in a remote patch of wilderness and try to kill him before he killed me.
At the thought of shooting Pappy to death, my eyes flew open and I got up from the bed. I walked outside, crossed the street, and bought a thirty-two-ounce bottle of water from a convenience store. If I was going to be in a fight for my life in the morning, I didn’t want to have a hangover. On my way back to the room, I stopped by my car and retrieved a small gun-cleaning kit from the trunk. I went back inside and unscrewed the cover of the air vent in the bathroom and took out the pistol. I left the silencer, the box, and two clips of ammunition inside the air vent and replaced the cover. I walked to the desk near the bed, laid out some towels, and began obsessively cleaning and oiling the pistol. I always cleaned and oiled it after I shot it, but I wanted to make absolutely certain it was in pristine condition. I used a product called M Pro 7. It had no odor, so I wasn’t worried about using it in the room. That turned out to be a good thing, because just as I’d finished up and reassembled the pistol, there was a soft knock at the door.
My first thought was that it was Pappy. He could have been lying about being in Cincinnati. He could have driven to Knoxville, but how could he have found me? There was simply no way he could have known where I was staying. I thought back on our conversations over the past few days. Had I told him where I was? No, I hadn’t. Maybe the person who delivered the car to the Flying J for Pappy was following me and knew where I was staying. I ran into the bathroom, unscrewed the vent cover again, grabbed a clip of ammunition, and slid it into the pistol. I set the silencer and the box on the bathroom vanity, popped a round into the chamber, and went back into the room.
Instead of going to the door, I went to the window and pulled back the blinds. Standing outside the door in a long, brown leather coat was Katherine Davis. I had told her where I was staying, although I hadn’t told her which room I was in. But my car was parked right in front of the room. I sighed and walked to the door.
“Surprise,” she said when I opened the door.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m surprised.”
“Can I come in?”
The pistol was in my right hand, which I was hiding behind the door.
“Can you give me one second?” I said. “I was on the phone with a client. Private conversation. It’ll just take me a second.”
I closed the door and stuck the pistol under the mattress. I fixed the bedding back the way it was and went back to the door.
“Come on in,” I said.
She walked in leisurely, smelling of lemon and musk. It was one of the sexiest smells I’d ever breathed. Her hair was flowing, her makeup perfect, her eyes gleaming.
“Did you find a place?” she asked.
I nodded. “Think so. Management company won’t be back in the office until Monday, so I won’t know for sure until then.”
“Where is it?”
“Cherokee Bluff, not too far from the office. They’re apartments. Nice but not outrageous.”
She sat down on the bed and crossed her legs. She was wearing jeans and calf-high boots beneath the coat. “Did I do or say something last night that offended you?”
“No,” I said as I sat down in a chair about ten feet from her. “Everything you did and said last night was almost too good to be true. I’m having a little trouble processing the feelings.”
“You’ve been through a lot lately.”
“Yeah, well, I’m about to go through some more.”
“Really? What’s going on?”
“The police were here earlier. A couple of detectives. You know Dawn Rule or Lawrence Kingman, by any chance?”
She shook her head. “Don’t think so.”
“I thought maybe you’d run across them through the grad program. Anyway, some psycho apparently killed three people in Charleston, West Virginia, this morning, and they think I either had something to do with it or know something about it.”
“Why would they think that?” she asked.
“They’re still holding on to this theory that I killed two guys in West Virginia who supposedly bombed my mom’s house. The killings today were apparently somehow related to that, or at least that’s what they think. They’re grasping at straws; they have nothing but unfounded suspicions.”
“So you talked to them today?”
“Not for long. I’d stopped by a bar earlier and had a couple of drinks and my judgment wasn’t the best, so I opened the door and talked to them for a few minutes. But they were just being cops, trying to trick me into saying something incriminating, so I shut the door on them.”
“Why don’t you come back over to my place, Darren?” she said. “You told me you don’t like it here.”
“Look around. What’s to like?”
“Then come back over. We’ll drink some wine. We’ll get some takeout, whatever you like. And maybe we can exchange gifts again.”
“I’d like to,” I said. “I really would. Thank you for the invitation, but I can’t do it tonight. I just have too much on my mind.”
I couldn’t tell her I had a date with a psychotic killer and that I had to prepare myself mentally for what was coming.