Between Black and White (19 page)

44

At exactly 1:30 a.m. the lights in the storage closet for Unit 203 flicked on—just as they had the three previous mornings. As there was no way to see inside the closet from the outside, no one passing by could tell that the lights had been turned on.

No one was up that hour of night anyway. The grounds crew for the condominium left at 5:00 p.m. sharp, and though some of the units were occupied by guests, there wasn’t a huge crowd. Each of the owners in the complex had their very own one-car garage as well as a private storage unit. Though there were several signs on the wall urging the tenants to make sure to close their garage doors each night, sometimes people forgot.

Sometimes teenage girls might go out for a swim through the garage door and forget to close it when they scampered back in. Or perhaps a tired father had gone across the highway for groceries and in the process of trying to load up everything and take it upstairs to his condo, forgot to hit the button for the door.

JimBone Wheeler enjoyed thinking over these scenarios as he recounted his good fortune. He had always been a good swimmer, and the distance from the dock at The Boathouse to the other side of the harbor was about a thousand yards. Ten football fields. Bone had made it across, spending most of his time under the water, in about twenty-five minutes. Literally just seconds before the place was covered with cop cars.

He’d come ashore at a restaurant called Louisiana Lagniappe and had immediately begun walking down the sidewalk of Gulf Shore Drive. He knew he didn’t have much time, so he began to jog. He had managed to keep his cap, so he twisted it on backwards, hoping that a man out for a run at just past midnight wouldn’t cause any alarm. Luckily, he saw no one on the sidewalk.

At first Bone thought he’d steal a car and try to get out of town, but the sounds of the sirens backed him off that plan. He’d have to squat somewhere for a time, so he started looking for a quiet place to do just that. About midway down he saw a white building with tennis courts and a pool out front and, like all the complexes along Holiday Isle, the Gulf of Mexico in the back.

Of greater significance, Bone saw an open garage door.

As nonchalantly as he could manage, he walked through the entrance. Seeing what appeared to be a series of one-car garages side by side, Bone scoured the place, looking for a place to hide. He noticed numbers on a series of doors, and he started trying to open each one of them, hitting pay dirt when he came to Unit 203. Quickly, he stepped inside and locked the door, hiding behind a large orange inflatable boat that covered almost half of the space.

For over twenty-four hours Bone stayed in the storage closet, barely moving, knowing that the owners of the unit could open the door at any moment. However, after a while his body demanded that he move, so he explored the closet, striking pay dirt again. Next to the light switch there were two hooks, each with a set of keys. One set had a keyless entry device attached, so Bone knew it had to open a car. The device had the word “Porsche” etched on the side.

What kind of place was this? Bone wondered, eventually coming to the conclusion that it was a private condominium where only owners were allowed on the premises. Perhaps one of the wealthy owners kept his Porsche down here full-time to ride around town during his trips to the Gulf.

The other set contained three keys that were color coded. Knowing he couldn’t stay in the closet forever, Bone had opened the door on Sunday morning at 1:30 a.m. The garage area was deserted, so Bone turned to the closet and began seeing if any of the color-coded keys fit in the lock. The orange one did.

Heart rate picking up, Bone looked at the door to the closet. It had the number 203 written on it. Then he inspected the other two keys. If one of the keys opened the closet, then one should open the door to the unit. And if no one had opened the storage closet with all the beach toys in over twenty-four hours . . .

. . . they aren’t here,
Bone knew, smiling.

He took the stairs up to the second floor and tried the other two keys in the lock to Unit 203. The purple one wouldn’t fit, but the door swung open when Bone inserted the green one.

Bingo,
Bone thought as he quickly scanned the empty unit. Two bedrooms, two baths, a fridge with some food and beer in it, and a bathroom with a toothbrush, razor, and other essentials. Whoever owned this condo obviously came on a regular basis.

In the master he’d found a drawer full of summer clothes and, in the master bath, a rack of beach caps.

Bone knew that the owner could show up at any moment, but he doubted he or she would come at two in the morning. Turning as few lights on as possible, Bone began to go about his work.

First he took scissors and began to cut his hair. When he had all of the chunky parts off, he took the razor and shampoo and shaved his head. The entire process took an hour. Then after a quick shower, he applied the scissors to his beard. Then the razor. When he was done, he looked like Mr. Clean. He put on a pair of loose-fitting athletic shorts he’d found in the clothes drawer and an extralarge T-shirt that read “The Back Porch.” Then, heading into the kitchen, Bone made himself two peanut butter sandwiches and wolfed them down in less than three minutes. He cleaned up his mess and then went into the bedroom and allowed himself to sleep for two hours on the bed. Before the sun started to rise, he locked the unit back up and returned to the storage closet.

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 . . .

Once in the patient room the woman didn’t mince words, and George immediately knew why she looked familiar.

“You . . . should . . . not be here,” he said, pacing the floor in front of her, agitated almost beyond words. “Our mutual friend should know better than to pull a stunt like this. The cops have been passing your picture around town. They are
onto
you. He should have called.”

“Our mutual friend said that no one here would have any idea who I was. He said that wasn’t possible, and besides, even if someone here did know me, there was no other way to get his message to you. He lost his phone.”

Dr. Curtis stopped pacing and placed his hands on his hips. “Well, they are onto you, sweetheart. I don’t know how, but they are.” He sighed. “What’s the message?”

“That he is alive and ready to finish the game.”

“That’s it?” Curtis said.

“Yes. He said you would be pleased.”

Curtis brushed a lock of silver hair out of his eyes and began to pace again. “I am . . . I guess.” He stopped abruptly and closed his eyes. Thinking of something, George quickly walked to the front of the office. When he saw the visitor list, he put his face in his hands. “You gave her your name!” George screamed, finally coming undone. “How stupid are you? You gave her your goddamn name!”

“Like I said”—the woman did not raise her voice—“our friend told me that no one here would have any idea who I was.”

George surveyed the visitor’s list. “Martha Booher” was written in Dabsey’s hand about midway down. Dabsey always insisted on writing the guest names herself so that she’d be able to read them when she called visitors back to see George.

Damnit,
George thought. Dabsey wasn’t the sharpest tack in the box, so maybe she wouldn’t pick up on it. Or maybe she already had . . .

“How did you get here?” George asked.

“The bus. I took a bus from Ethridge at eight this morning.”

George looked at his watch. It was twelve thirty. Dabsey would be back in a half hour.

“I was planning to take the bus back to Ethridge at five,” Martha offered.

“That’s too risky,” George said, pulling his keys out of his pocket. “If no one recognized you walking from the bus station to here, they might when you walk back.”

He led her by the arm to the front of the office and looked through the blinds, seeing no one coming and no cars on the roadway. There were also no cars in any of the nearby driveways, except the dentist office that was caddy-corner, and he doubted any of the patients there would take notice. Quickly, he thrust the keys into Martha’s hand. “Listen, my house is two doors down from the office on the same side of the road. 1404 is the house number. As casual as you can, I want you to walk to my house and use this key”—he pointed to a large gold one—“to open my front door. Got it?”

She nodded.

“Lock the door behind you and don’t turn on any lights. Feel free to eat whatever you like from the fridge. Just don’t do anything that would draw attention to the house. OK?”

Again, Martha nodded.

“I should be over there a little after six, and we can come up with a plan for getting you home then. Got it?”

“Yes, I—”

“Go,” George said, pushing her toward the front door.

George watched Martha walk down the sidewalk and up the front walk to his home, his heart racing the entire time. Once she was inside, he slowly exhaled. Then he grabbed the phone and dialed the number.

Before the person on the other end of the line could even say hello, George was talking into the receiver, making no effort to hide the panic in his voice.

“We have a problem.”