Last Call for the Living (6 page)

Hicklin took another sip of beer.

“Could I have some water, please?”

Hummingbird straddled Charlie. She ran her fingers through his hair, petting him like she might stroke a kitten. She kissed him. A girlish peck at first.

Then she started to lick his neck.

Charlie begged her to stop.

“That's enough,” Hicklin said.

As if she was used to such orders, Hummingbird unlocked herself from Charlie's lap and returned to the couch. She reached for the pipe. Hicklin gave her a long look. She disappeared, pipe and lighter in hand.

“You have a nickname?” Hicklin said to Charlie.

“A nickname?”

“I never had much use for real names.”

Charlie considered an answer.

“My mother calls me Coma.”

“
Coma
?” Hicklin said. “Because of the way you sleep, right?”

Charlie nodded.

Hicklin mashed his cigarette against the heel of his boot and dropped it to the floor. He reached for the pack and lit another, looking at Charlie as if that was the boy's cue to say something. Hicklin coughed into his hand. Whatever came out he wiped against the front of his jeans. Eventually he spoke.

“What's your last name?”

“Colquitt,” Charlie said.

“I knew a Colquitt once.”

The comment was flat, apathetic, as if small talk pained him no end. Hummingbird giggled from the bedroom.

“This party won't last,” Hicklin said with a sigh of resignation.

They both could hear the songs of Carolina wrens, undercut by a racket of katydids up in the trees. Charlie had got a clear sense of being up in the mountains, near the state line probably. Which state? the better question. The light dimmed, but it felt like dawn was upon them. There was newspaper taped over the windows in the main room. A filthy woodstove. Somewhere a generator hummed.

“Are you going to k-kill me?” he finally asked his captor.

Hicklin turned the bottom of a beer can toward the ceiling.

“Like I did that nigger lady earlier?” he said, a smile pulling to one side of his face. “I'm done granting favors today … but they'll be other days.”

*   *   *

Agent Crews held
Lucy Colquitt's hand. Charlie's mother cried from one eye, dabbing at it with a wad of tissue. The other eye was artificial—porcelain or acrylic—with very little motility. When the good eye moved, the artificial twin stared straight ahead. The effect bothered Crews.

“Do you have anyone you can call?”

Lucy Colquitt shook her head. Still in her nurse's scrubs, she got up to refill her coffee from a percolator on the counter. Didn't offer any more to her guests. When Lucy sat down again she took a drag from the half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Crews had quit smoking, but she wanted one now, Lucy reminding her of how many doctors and nurses and EMTs couldn't kick the habit, simply didn't care, even if they knew better. A cell phone went off and one of the detectives excused himself to answer in another room. His murmur was the loudest sound in an otherwise uncomfortably silent house.

Earlier while Lucy used the bathroom Crews had walked around the home, noting the pictures of Charlie everywhere. The woman kept a clean house, favoring a flea-market country décor not unlike that of the house Crews had been raised in. There was a big braided rug in the living room, tin oval lamps, wall pockets with sunflowers. An old sideboard and a plaid-upholstered queen-size sleeper in the living room. Jelly cupboards in the kitchen. Colquitt had a penchant for roosters, too. Matching salt- and pepper shakers, napkin holders, a suncatcher, ceramic cookie jars. The detectives even drank their coffee from decorative rooster mugs. Little figurines with Scripture on them stood at attention on a shelf in the kitchen. It reminded Crews of her own mother, who'd had a ladybug fetish that turned absurd as the years went by.

“Coma was the nickname I gave him,” Lucy told Crews. “He slept like a angel. You know the kind of sleep that comes from a pure conscience? Deep, undisturbed kind of sleep.”

Lucy had thin lips, a pale complexion only made paler from shock. Her hair was a copper-blond shade, probably dyed from a bottle. She wore her hair parted down the middle and combed over the ears. Eleven years on the job, she'd mentioned. The graveyard shift at the big regional med center. Lucy had the slightly abstracted manner of a caretaker, Crews noted. A brain accustomed to dark rooms and pained faces, to bodily fluids and the smell of sickness.

A quick background on Lucy revealed that she paid her bills punctually. She had a little money in an IRA at North Georgia Savings & Loan. Pension waiting for her. Not so much as a speeding ticket or another citation in twenty years.

“… When he was just born, there were times I thought he was dead, he was so still. Could barely make out him breathing. I remember one time I got scared and I held a mirror under his nose. He was two years old and I just stood there hoping he was alive. You know to this day it takes three alarms and a phone call to wake him. Used to be late for school all the time. Just all the time.”

Crews listened, nodding. “What's Charlie like?”

“You think he's still alive?” Lucy said, her voice quavering.

“Yes, I do.”

Lucy took a long drag from her cigarette. Crews couldn't read her face: the false eye, the heavy makeup. She'd expected her response to temper Lucy's fears, instill some hope.
I'm telling you I think Charlie is alive,
she wanted to scream. But Lucy looked oddly detached, almost disappointed.

“Coma, he's such a good boy,” Lucy continued after lighting a Virginia Slim and cradling it in an ashtray. There was an open carton on the kitchen table. “He's my
only
boy. So smart. He's going to be a college graduate. Loves rockets and space and science and such. Nothin' I was ever good at.”

Lucy paused, holding back some emotion. She had one of those expressions. Perpetually on the verge of hysteria.

“I raised him myself,” she said with particular pride. “He was always a bit peculiar, kept to himself, never had friends except for some kids from the rocket club at school. Charlie wants to build rockets and jet planes, work for Lockheed or NASA one day. I sent him to Space Camp over in Huntsville. He loved it. Just
loved
it. But I never did have the nerve to tell him that some things are just beyond the reach of people like us.”

“He's an overachiever?” Crews said.

“Oh yes. It's just the money, and, well, the scholarship he's on is okay, but that college ain't like the schools rocket scientists graduate from.”

Crews mentally added to her impression of her victim from Lucy's explanations. She already felt bad for Charlie. And a little angry. Lucy Colquitt both bored her and made her uneasy. The artificial eye, the quaver in Lucy's drawl, the damn roosters, that half-empty bottle of schnapps next to the microwave. She had all the signs of a functional alcoholic. The functionally unstable.

Crews could spot a badly damaged human being when she saw one. So what was Lucy's real story? No family to speak of. No husband. Probably the product of a broken home. A history of abuse? Alcoholic father? Promiscuity? Drugs? An unwanted pregnancy?

“Did Charlie mention anything about work?” Crews asked. “Any rude or unfriendly customers he must've dealt with? Strangers he noticed hanging around the bank?”

“He never talked about work much when we had our lunch on Saturdays.”

“What
do
you and Charlie talk about?”

“Nothing, really,” Lucy said with a shrug.

There was a pause. The detectives exchanged looks.

“Did Charlie have any enemies? Students at the college he didn't get along with? Or maybe neighbors at his apartment complex? Anyone who knew where he worked?”

Lucy said, “We never really talked … about things such as that.”

“Any family he's close to? His father, maybe?”

Lucy Colquitt took a drag from her cigarette, then leveled her working eye on Crews. Her artificial eye looked off, as if distracted by something over Crews' shoulder. Tears caused recently applied mascara to run. Crews frowned, struck by a particularly mean thought.
You could have put her in a field to scare off crows.
Crews already had a hunch that her last question would be evaded.

Lucy exhaled. Smoke drifted from her mouth like woodsmoke off a hearth. It lingered around her head.

“Long dead,” she said. “Oh, he's long dead.”

*   *   *

I thought ye
might be dead. But I see you're breathing. Used to talk to my celly when he was asleep. Know how I still dream about the inside? It's about all I do dream of. State of Georgia … we had our misunderstandings, sure. Should still be locked up. The things you got to do to survive which ain't legal no prison I know of. Keep your mouth shut after. That got you solitary most of the time. Unless you snitched. That got you a ticket to the dance.

Funny how they put you away for breakin' the law and all ye do inside is break the law again, over and over. Them niggers and beaners, the baton-happy prison guards. They will push and if ye ain't inclined to push back then there's no helpin' ye. I was never one to be pushed, and when I was I pushed back harder and meaner. Should still be there. But I'm an anomaly. I learned that word. It means slippery. Means I ain't been a snitch or just some dumb piece of meat.

I miss the games we played with the warden. Them gangbuster screws thought they was smart. Thought they deciphered our code and could catch all the drugs and contraband. Yeah. Well, Nature finds a way.

We used to throw cereal in the drain, let it ferment for a couple days with some water and then eat it. Enough to get drunk. I wouldn't wish that taste on anyone. Take fruit from the kitchen, little bag with water. Apples mainly. Bananas. We called it Pruno. Prison wine. It's just rotten is all. But it did the trick. Anything to make time move quicker. Made a small fortune selling stuff that made time disappear. Heroin, speed, OxyContin, cough syrup. Warden might say drugs are a problem, but it's isolated. Yeah. Hardly.

Drugs ran the show inside. And we were the show.

But they are a-comin'. Friends of mine are comin'.

This room we're in, no different than what I'm used to. Playing by my own rules and look what it gets me. Right back in another room. With no windows I care to look out of. Brothers will come lookin' for me because I jumped on this one. Got greedy. Ye don't just walk away from jumpin' a score. It was supposed to be three men.

Reckon how many of us ye see here, Coma?

Sometimes I wish I never got out. Maybe that's why I took ye alive? I'm still trying to figure that one out.

I know how to play the games, though. I know the angles. You're just one of many. Do ye feel like an angle? I do. I guess eventually we all do. Something playin' us. Workin' us over. We're all marks, I suppose. I'd like to know who's in charge. Because this life is just one big score. All of it.

Been a long time since I had a cooler full of cold ones. I might just puke tonight. Then we might have somethin' in common after all. Ain't that right, Charlie Colquitt?

*   *   *

Hicklin took short
pulls from his beer, eyeing Charlie with a mixture of curiosity and resentment. Charlie's head had drooped forward again.
Damned if the boy didn't look dead,
Hicklin observed.
Has a face that might've been trapped under ice and drowned.

He felt the alcohol buzz from his fingertips to his sternum. And right between his throbbing temples. He'd been lighting one cigarette after another, thinking on what his next move should be, but answers seemed in short supply.

Hicklin rose and walked to the radio in the corner where a long orange extension cord disappeared out a cracked window. Newspaper kept most of the light out. Could have been any time of day. He didn't care what time it was. Just like he was used to.

He turned up the volume and returned to his chair, feeling thoroughly drunk when he sat down. A traffic report from Chattanooga crackled in and out. He heard Hummingbird talking to herself. She was in the bedroom, rummaging around, looking for something. She was always looking for something, real or imaginary.
That woman is no earthly use to anybody,
he told himself. She was slowly killing herself anyway.

A goddamn shame, too.

An impulse struck him.
Walk in thar and stick her. You'd be doing her a favor.

Hicklin reached inside his boot for a three-and-a-half-inch folding knife. He locked it and ran the tip of his thumb along the black edge of the drop-point blade. He knew anatomy. It was one of his prison hobbies, sizing a man up, looking for the weak spots. Another hobby was to know when to act on these impulses, when to put them aside.

But the impulse grew stronger. Hicklin pressed the edge of the blade against his forearm until it sliced the flesh. Blood appeared, thin as a paper cut. Yet cutting himself quelled the awful notion his mind was entertaining. He folded the blade and put it on the coffee table. Looked around instead for where he'd put his beer.

The night dragged on. Hicklin found himself humming along to a tune from the radio. Charlie slept, his head down, lifting gently as he snored. Otherwise, he was like a statue in a courthouse square. Something you'd just walk past and never notice. Hicklin looked around the living room, stopping to watch moths as they fluttered behind a lamp in the corner. The light had a weak saffron-colored pulse, like it was keeping time, counting down the minutes.

This party won't last.

He stared at Charlie for long stretches. Thought about waking him, maybe with a slap. He could free the boy, drop him facedown across the coffee table, pull down his pants.