He paused, and for a long moment all I heard was the man's labored breathing. "Well, this is why I came." He turned, tossed the paper. Then he stomped out of the house, slamming the door so hard it rattled the windows.
Jasmine and I studiously avoided making eye contact as the paper fluttered to the floor. It landed face up, obviously a telephone message. A car started up outside and sprayed gravel in its haste to leave.*****
With the M21 and a Leupold sight for daytime work slung over her shoulder, Jael St. Clair made her way through the underbrush parallel to the road, steadying her gait with a collapsible aluminum walking staff.
She stopped to take a deep breath and cursed silently when she exhaled. She should have driven the new Toyota SUV rental farther along the narrow, rutted lane, but she worried the 4Runner wouldn't be able to handle the terrain.
She looked back, but through the dense fog could barely make out anything more than fifty yards away. Sometimes less. The 100 percent humidity combined with the cold front that had followed the tornadoes and thunderstorms across the Delta the night before had combined to produce pea soup so thick on the highway she couldn't see more than a car length or two in many places. Highway 82 had been littered with accidents. Fortunately Quincy Thompson had driven like her grandmother.
Jael cursed the fog. She'd have to get closer to her targets than she preferred. No matter. The mission had to be completed. She pushed on through the brush, grateful the fog thinned some as the woods grew denser.
Her lungs burned again from the cigarettes, and her head spun bright from a lack of sleep. But the new patch was doing its job. And doubling up on the pills had rounded off most of the jagged edges of her anger and brought the usual rock-steadiness back to her hands, her eyes, and her thoughts. The old doctor who worked for the General had been adjusting her dosage continuously over the past six months and told her that was a natural thing and not to worry about it. She'd have to tell him she needed another adjustment.
Jael made her way across the soggy ground thatched with knee-high grasses and saplings, perfect cover for quail and copperheads. She'd already flushed one covey, but snakes didn't concern her. A symphony of birdsongs, mockingbirds, the screeches of jays, filled the morning. Then the sound of Quincy Thompson's car growing louder again, coming from the cabin area.
She knelt low in the bushes and unslung the M21, flipped open the Leupold's covers, and sighted in. Through the hazy shroud of fog, she made out an angry black face. She tracked the face as it drew abreast, then headed off in the distance.
"Bang," she said softly as she closed the sight covers and reslung the M21. She stopped for a moment and concentrated her mind on hearing. She'd heard faint rustles since leaving her SUV. But it lacked any sort of pattern connected to danger. The woods here were filled with birds, deer, possums, raccoons, and every other manner of woodland creature. That's what she heard now as she filtered through the chatter of the trees and brush. Finally, she opened her eyes and continued on through the woods toward the plot of land and dwelling that had turned up on her Internet search for Quincy Thompson.
CHAPTER 55
Jasmine stood with her back to me, shoulders slumped, staring down at the pink sheet of paper. The fading sound of Quincy's car left us holding on to a brittle silence filled with ancient hurt and modern pain. I wanted to reach out, but Quincy's insults made me second-guess my own motives.
Then, from outside, a mockingbird broke the silence nd the tainted mood. Jasmine leaned down and picked up the slip of paper.
"It's from Jay Shanker," Jasmine said as she stood up, her back still to me. "Talmadge's lawyer."
"I remember."
She squared her shoulders and turned to me. "He wants to meet at his office this morning."
Her voice was all business and her gaze had a distance I had not seen before. Quincy had played the enforcer better than he knew.
"He left a number. Said we had to call at precisely eleven A.M." She paused, and when she spoke again, warmth filtered into her words. "This is weird. The note says under no circumstances should I call his office.
"Strange man." Jasmine shook her head and went into the front room. And why didn't he call my cell?"
I took the occasion to pull an unadorned, navy blue polo shirt from my bag, along with a fresh pair of cargo shorts.
"Damnation," she mumbled. With my back to the door, I tucked the shirt in and zipped up the shorts. "My cell battery's dead."
I turned as she walked back in. She had pulled on a pair of jeans under the Valley State T-shirt.
"Let me check mine." I went over and excavated the plastic hospital bag from beneath a pile of green surgical scrubs on the floor. I rummaged my phone from the bag and pressed the power button.
"Nada." I held it up and looked at her. Anxiety welled up then as I thought of Camilla and wondered if Flowers had called back. "My charger's in my bag."
Jasmine shook her head. "No good. Mom's authenticity, remember? No electricity, no phone."
"Oh, terrific."
We listened to the mockingbird for a moment before Jasmine spoke. "I don't know about you, but I can't take much more of this morning without some coffee. You?"
"Yeah. Me."
"Okay, but like everything else here, you're gonna have to work for it." She tossed me a Mona Lisa smile, then headed into the front room. I followed her, jamming my wallet and the rest of my stuff in my cargo shorts pockets. I found her fiddling around with a black cast-iron stove in the corner.
"There should be some dry wood on the front porch."
I went out front and pulled several split pieces of pine from the pile. I grabbed the smallest pieces I could find and made sure a couple of them had nice globs of hardened resin. Pine made for a dirty flame that fouled flues, but it would give us a quick, hot fire for coffee. I pried off a chunk of dried resin the size of a marble and crushed it under my heel. I scraped up the coarse granules, grabbed a fistful of pine twigs for tinder, and carried them in along with the wood.
When I came back in, Jasmine had filled a battered, old steel coffeepot with bottled water. A Starbucks bag sat on the adjacent counter next to a hand-cranked coffee grinder.
"Sure beats muddy creek water and ground-up chicory," I said as I made my way over to the stove and looked it over. I had never lit a fire in one of these.
"In there." Jasmine pointed. "Lift the cover and put the wood in.
"Mama was a coffee snob. It's one of the things I picked up from her." Jasmine placed a conical paper filter in a funnel holder and put it in a thermos. Then I pulled off a heavy cast-iron disk from the top of the stove and bent over the opening to build a fire. I arranged the resin granules over a small bed of pine twigs, then carefully placed the larger pieces.
"Black men really resent successful black women," Jasmine said evenly as I bent over my task. I resisted looking at her. "They come up with every hang-up imaginable. I think Uncle Quincy knows he's off base, but he's too old to shake it off."
I straightened up to grab a large wooden match from a box next to the stove. I carefully avoided looking at her. I did not want her to stop talking.
"My grandmother really liked you," she said as I scratched the match head on the inside of the stove and held my breath against the fumes. "But she was just a woman, and my grandfather and Uncle Quincy hustled Mama away."
"I'll never forget," I said as I touched the match flame to the resin powder. It caught immediately. I stood up and blew out the match.
"Mama told me she always wanted to see you marching through the door to get her."
"Damn." I swallowed hard against the old painful feelings and took a deep breath."I thought maybe she felt the same way as Quincy and your dad." I shook my head slowly, "I had no idea what to do. Not a clue."