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.

4

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 checkpoints, 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.

5

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 thirty-five miles per hour. No matter what the van did when the driver lost control, the chances were Bobby Lee – strapped in from several angles – wouldn’t get hurt too badly. I always pictured him laughing as his rescuer pulled him from the broken vehicle, like a guy getting off a roller-coaster.

It was a brilliant plan, probably hatched in Holman when Crayline discovered his upcoming trip to the Institute. Prisons had “alumni associations”, and someone with the demonic charisma of a Bobby Lee Crayline would have outside connections, men who’d risk their lives to say they’d helped him escape.

In the meantime, people in Mobile were bludgeoned, stabbed, poisoned, shot and, in one memorable case, vacuumed to death. Harry and I investigated, putting in a lot of eighteen-hour days. Then, good news. Financial stimulus funds reached the understaffed Mobile Police Department and sparked the hiring of new officers. This allowed the promotion to detective of several deserving uniformed men and women. The workload decreased.

I was thinking about taking some time off, when my supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason walked to my desk. Tom had been trying to get me to take a lengthy vacation for years. I’d get close, but the caseload would balloon and I’d truncate my plans to a long weekend getaway. At least that’s what I told myself. My partner muttered that I was an investigation addict afraid of missing a fix, but he muttered a fair amount.

But in truth, even I felt increasingly frazzled. Cases were becoming less a rush than a drudge. The slackening of pressure had me thinking it was finally time to take a break and get my edge sharpened.

“You and Harry have had a tough year,” Tom said. “He got his head banged like a gong. You put in eighty-hour weeks on that case with Sandhill. Not to mention this current crop of madness.”

“The point being, Tom?”

“The Department owes you forty-three days of accumulated vacation, Carson. Now, I can’t order you to take time off, but I think it would be good if you gave it some thought and …”