She entered with me at her heels. Slezak stood, his eyes sizzling with anger. “I want you both out, now!”
We strode past him like he was furniture and went the mirror. Bobby Lee Crayline was rolling his head like it was on gimbals. His mouth opened in a howl but nothing transmitted through the glass.
“Doctor Neddles touched something painful,” Wainwright said.
“You’re risking a lawsuit,” the lawyer barked. “I’ll have your …”
Slezak’s voice tapered off as Crayline howled loud enough to hear. His body began to spasm. His fists were clenching and releasing. “Crayline’s too deep,” Wainwright said. “God knows what he’s re-living.”
Another cold and quivering howl pierced the glass. I slipped my hand to the switch on the wall, snapped the speakers on.
“I KILLED THEM WRONG!” Bobby Lee howled. “THEY’RE STUCK THERE FOREVER!”
Neddles looked confused; the words made no sense. Bobby Lee began leaping as if to touch the ceiling with his head. Great pumping leaps in time with his howls, like the floor was on fire. He’d compact himself, leap, repeat. Bridges was beside Crayline, trying to get an arm around the man’s neck.
One of Crayline’s arms flew wide, chain whipping through the air. My heart froze. Crayline had summoned a demonic reserve of strength and torn the ring from the floor.
“He’s loose,” I yelled.
I watched in horror as the madman head-butted Neddles, who collapsed like deflated skin. Bridges aimed a kick at Crayline’s groin. He took it on his thigh, ducked, and shoulder-rammed Bridges into the wall, dropping him. Bobby Lee turned and stared into the mirror, his eyes radiating the rabid-wolf look I’d seen before.
He lowered like a bull preparing to charge.
“Oh Jesus,” Wainwright whispered. I pulled her aside as Crayline exploded through the glass like a missile launched from hell. I dove for his shoulders, tried to snake an arm around his phone-pole neck. Doc Wainwright was screaming for the guards. Crayline bucked like a rodeo bull, sending me spinning across the room. When I spun back to the tumult, Crayline had Slezak’s head under his arm, trying to snap the man’s neck. I grabbed Crayline’s arms, his biceps like living cannonballs.
Emergency horns blared. Guards exploded through the door. Stun guns sizzled. A final howl from the subject, his voice a high tremolo, like a child sucked down a drain.
The hypnosis of Bobby Lee Crayline was over.
Wainwright and I stood in the bright Alabama sun and waited for a heavily restrained Crayline to return to the prison van. He was belted to a gurney, not allowed to stand. I’d fixed Mix-up’s leash to his collar and kept him to my side.
Bridges stood a dozen feet away, humiliated by the man he’d been charged with controlling. Dr Neddles probably had a mild concussion, but was coherent and expected to do fine. The medics were putting a restraint collar on Slezak’s neck. His face was ashen, like he’d looked into a grave and realized it was his.
“Coming through,” the younger of the guards yelled, rolling Bobby Lee Crayline to the van. Crayline was grinning again, as if the gurney was a sedan chair and he was being borne aloft through adoring throngs. Mix-up lunged toward Crayline, like the man smelled of raw meat. I pulled my dog tighter against my leg and saw Bridges’s knuckles turn white as Crayline rolled nearer. Bridges strode to the restrained Crayline and stared down at him. Uh-oh, I thought, tensing.
Bridges cleared his throat deep and spat thickly in Crayline’s face. Said, “Try my oysters, faggot.”
“Get back from him, now,” the guard growled, shouldering Bridges aside as the gurney clattered to the van.
“How much inbreeding did it take to make you, Crayline?” Bridges yelled at the retreating prisoner. “How many generations of retards fucking their retarded sisters?”
Wainwright strode to Bridges, grabbed his arm. “Bridges! That’s enough!”
But Bridges wasn’t finished. “How was your childhood, Crayline?” he railed. “Bet you got used like a girl by all the men in your family. Bet you put on lipstick and begged for more.”
The grin on Crayline’s face was replaced by a blank screen. His head twisted back as he was hustled across the asphalt, his voice no longer giggly but rasping, the sound of a henchman’s axe on the grindstone.
“You best move to another planet, girly,” he hissed. “Bobby Lee’s gonna fry your guts for his supper.”
“Fuck you, you genetic moron,” Bridges snarled. He strode to his Corvette and roared away. Neddles and Slezak limped to the Benz and followed. A minute later, the van with Crayline pulled away.
Wainwright and I watched the vehicle pass the check-points, then swerve on to the road a half-mile distant to become a brown speck against green fields. Wainwright fumbled in her purse and produced a rumpled pack of cigarettes, lit one.
“Didn’t figure you for a smoker, Doc,” I said.
“I have two cigarettes a week, Detective. I’m having them both now.”
“I fully understand,” I said.
“I owe you for coming up here,” Wainwright said, exhaling a blue plume of smoke. “I know there’s nothing I can do for you, but if ever there is …”
I waved her promise away and we stood quietly for a couple minutes to watch a jet pull a slender contrail from the west to the east. Wainwright lit her second cigarette from the first, squinted over my shoulder. Frowned at something. My eyes followed to a black rope of smoke rising into the sky perhaps five miles away. I knew there was nothing in that direction but cotton fields and pasture.
“What do you think it is?” Doc Wainwright said.
“Nothing good.” I told her to call the local cops, then sprinted to my truck with my dog at my side.
From a quarter-mile away, the scene sent ice cubes clattering through my belly. The Holman van lay on its side in a ditch, orange flames licking from the windows and turning to smoke the color of raw petroleum. I saw a green tractor in the middle of the road and wondered if the vehicles had collided.
I pulled to the side of the road, jumped out, hearing the distant whine of approaching sirens. Mix-up followed, keeping a wary eye on the fire. The tractor was a John Deere with a trailer behind, piled high with hay bales. A farmer in blue overalls and work shirt knelt above the young guard, severely burned, his clothing smoldering. His face was pocked with shotgun pellets.
The farmer turned to me, his face a mask of terror. “I was in the field, saw smoke, drove over on my tractor. I pulled this man from the van. There’s another man in there, a driver. I couldn’t get to him, the flames …”
I looked into the fully engulfed van. A lost cause. I saw Mix-up in the corner of my eye, grubbing in the hay atop the trailer. The farmer started to touch the man, give comfort, but his hands couldn’t cross the distance to the dying guard. He looked at me, helpless, almost in tears.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Help’s coming,” I said, hearing the sirens, loud now.
Months passed with no new details added to Crayline’s escape, save that the farmer mentioned hearing a motorcycle racing away in the distance as he arrived. It was theorized that a motorcyclist passed the lumbering Holman van and fired a shotgun into the windows. The speed limit on the stretch of road was