the window once again.
We landed at Tri-Cities Airport shortly after four o’clock. Since we had not planned on staying a week, we had packed for only a few days. Luckily for Sandy, when she packed for a few days she had enough for a week. I, on the other hand, had had to do some laundry at the hotel. I carried my bag off the plane and went to get the Pathfinder while Sandy went to baggage claim to claim the wheeled suitcase that I jokingly called the moving van. I picked her up at curbside and we rode in silence back to Mountain Center.
I parked in front of her building. We took the elevator to her third floor unit and I wheeled Sandy’s suitcase to her front door while she searched for her keys. She opened the door, wheeled in the suitcase and stood in the doorway. She took a step forward and put her arms around me and buried her head in my chest. I held her for what seemed like an eternity. Finally she let go and stepped back.
“I had a great time,” she said. “I’ll talk to you before I leave.” She turned and went inside and closed the door.
I stood there for a few moments and looked at her condo door with a sense of utter confusion. I turned reluctantly and went back to the Pathfinder and drove to my own parking space. I went inside and called Billy and told him I was back. In a few minutes he showed up with Jake, who did his welcome home dance for me.
“How was New Orleans?” Billy asked.
“Great!”
“Learn anything?”
“Hard to tell.”
I filled him in on my conversation with Hoffman.
“So he’s suspicious but he can’t put his finger on anything,” Billy said.
“That’s about it, Chief. What have you been up to?”
“I checked all the limo services and private cars in the area to see if I could turn up a lead. Nothing.”
“I had another idea on the plane back,” I said. “Private charters or rentals. Check all the small airports. We might get lucky.”
“No luck involved,” Billy smiled. “Crack investigating.”
“I’ve got to go to the gym,” I said, heading to the bedroom to change. “I think I ate half of New Orleans. Want to join me?”
Billy and I were in Moto’s for almost an hour before we uttered another word toward each other. We had finished with the weights and were in the side room with the speed bag and the heavy bag. Billy was holding the heavy bag for me and I was pounding away. I normally worked on the speed bag because the heavy bag hurt my wrists, but tonight I felt like hitting something substantial. I was working hard and the sweat was pouring. Anger and frustration were flowing through my punches. I had been at it for a while grunting and groaning but I couldn’t stop. I had to let it all out.
“Something bothering you?” Billy asked.
“No,” I said and kept swinging.
“Bullshit,” said Billy.
After a few more minutes of all-out assault I stopped, mainly because my arms were about to fall off. Sweating profusely and breathing heavily, I grabbed my towel and my water bottle and sat down. Billy joined me. He was quiet and I knew he was waiting for me to say something. I told him Sandy was leaving. I told him how I felt or at least how I thought I felt. I told him I was very confused.
“What should I do, Chief?”
“Giving advice is bad medicine,” he said, trying to be serious.
“Oh, cut the Indian crap,” I snapped.
We sat there for some time toweling off and drinking water. No words were spoken. My breathing was returning to normal. Billy motioned to the heavy bag and I went and held it for him as he went through his routine. When he had finished we sat down again saying nothing and drank more water. Finally Billy broke the silence.
“I’m done,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and added, “You’ll work it out, Blood. You always do.”
He left me sitting there alone with my thoughts. I tried to let my mind go blank and almost succeeded until Marlene Long skipped through the back of it. From time to time thoughts of Marlene popped into my head at the most unlikely moments and for no explainable reason. I wondered if the spectre of Marlene Long was keeping me from saying to Sandy all the things that needed to be said. I hadn’t seen Marlene since the summer of my senior year, but I could not purge that one magical moment from my memory. Ecstasy’s curse. I pushed Marlene Long back into my subconscious and concluded that I couldn’t spend the night at Moto’s. I got up to leave. As I left the side room I glanced to the right and spotted Sandy at the far end of the gym hard at work on an exercise bike. She had her head down buried in a book. We were so much alike in so many ways, I thought. Feeling the same anger and frustration that I was feeling, she had come to the gym to deal with it the same way I had. She did not see me and I slipped quietly out to the front desk where Moto was ogling female body-beautifuls in the latest Muscle magazine. He looked up.
“Does she know I’m here?” I asked, tilting my head toward Sandy.
“Don’t think so. I was in back office when she came in. Did not talk to her.”
“Do not mention that I was here,” I said slowly for emphasis.
Moto nodded grandly with a bow of his head. “Everything okay between you two?”
“No, it’s not,” I muttered as I walked out into the cool darkness.
The time had come to visit again with T. Elbert. My mentor, friend, and ex-TBI agent, T. Elbert Brown, was now confined to a wheelchair thanks to a drug dealer’s bullet five years ago. T. Elbert lived in an old turn-of-the-century two-story on Olivia Drive. The house was immaculately kept inside and out.
A few years after I moved back to Mountain Center, I met T. Elbert at an accident scene Billy was photographing. It was soon after I had been granted a private investigator’s license by the State of Tennessee. T. Elbert had been chasing a suspected drug dealer who had lost control of his car, hit a tree, and instantly ended his drug-dealing career. T. Elbert was searching the car for drugs and I was standing around waiting on Billy to finish photographing the scene. I asked if I could help and he said I could. He was dismantling the outside of the car so I went to work inside. I was about to cut into the driver’s side seat when I got a faint whiff of coffee. Further sniffing led me to the passenger-side headrest.
“Think I got something,” I said, removing the headrest.
I tossed it out of the car and T. Elbert cut it open. Coffee poured out and then a Ziploc bag of white powder. T. Elbert did the wet-finger test.
“Cocaine,” he said. “Good find.”
One backseat headrest was also loaded with coffee and cocaine. We continued to tear the car apart but found nothing else. By that time the scene was crawling with TBI agents. When we were finished he gave me his card and told me if I ever needed a favor to give him a call. I called him a couple of weeks later to run a license tag for me. Someone was parking illegally at the condo complex where I lived and the manager had asked me if I could find out who it was.
T. Elbert ran the plate and asked me out to lunch and that started our friendship. We talked sports, women, cops and robbers, and life in general. T. Elbert was my senior by fifteen years and had many stories to tell. He was a year from retirement when he caught the bullet.
In the early morning hours I always knew I could find T. Elbert on his front porch in his rocking chair. T. Elbert was about five feet eight inches tall with light brown hair flecked with gray. He was a slight man who always had a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. T. Elbert told his tales with great humor that always made me laugh and he delighted in telling them. He was a disarming man with great insight and I was certain those qualities