Free Perfect Killer by Lewis Perdue Page B

a second or so later. I had no idea about a Blackberry, but I needed a story to buy time.
"I have it in a safe at my office. I can get it for you."
"No." The laser dot danced again. "No. Give me the combination and I'll get it." The laser dot disappeared again, undoubtedly illuminating some part of my body that I had grown fond of.
Before he could shoot, the Jambalaya pitched forward with a thunderous deceleration that sent her rolling and yawing. My assailant cursed; I heard the deep thump of him colliding with something stationary. I lunged up into the cockpit. Gasoline fumes filled the air. I looked forward toward an epicenter of screams and curses and saw the Jambalaya's bow impaled in a flashy Cigarette boat.
I grabbed my Colt and almost fired at my attacker before my nose stopped me. I lunged topside and jumped overboard. The water geysered all around me as the H&K's slugs stitched into the sea. I dove under the surface just as the full-automatic muzzle blasts ignited the spilled gasoline from the Cigarette boat's ruptured tanks.

CHAPTER 17
    Darryl Talmadge sat up in the hospital bed with its chipped enamel paint and threw back the pilled polyester blanket with its cigarette burns and medicinal smells. He took as deep a breath as his emphysema would allow, then struggled through a coughing fit that rattled through his bone-and-beef-jerky frame.
    The air-conditioning blew hard and chill, cutting through the baggy pajamas he lived in. When the last of his seismic coughs had faded, he swung his legs over the side and stood up, ignoring the battered aluminum walker the Veterans Administration hospital had issued him. He didn't need it, and besides, the damn thing was too short for his rangy six-foot-six frame—just like the bed—but that was the Army for you. He'd told all this to Jay Shanker, his court-assigned lawyer nearly six months ago, the last lime he had been allowed an outside visitor.
    Talmadge craned his head up to the corner of the room and glared at the closedcircuit video camera attached to the wall above the television. He focused right on the camera's little red LED, and despite the arthritis from the partial shoulder separation he'd got at Chosin Reservoir more than half a century before, Talmadge raised his arm with an extended bird finger.
"Fuck you!"
    It pleased him to know the camera captured his unvarnished opinion for posterity and scientific scrutiny. One day, somebody honest would find the tapes. The truth would come out then and heads would roll.
    The truth was why they had jerked Talmadge out of Leflore County Court on the second day of sentencing hearings. Before that, his lame court-appointed lawyer had kept him shut up and drugged out during the murder trial, not even letting him speak up in his own defense. The trial took less than a week and the jury less than an hour to convict him of murder.
    Everybody, especially Talmadge, knew the conviction was a greased rail to the gas chamber, which is why he secretly flushed his medicine down the toilet before the sentencing hearings.
    There, his mind freed from the chemical handcuffs that had kept him silent for so long, he stood up in open court and declared it a frame-up to keep him quiet about Project Enduring Valor and began to rattle off names and dates and places he had mostly forgotten until the seizures started.
    A contingent of Army officers and MPs conveniently in court that day hustled him out of the courtroom in record time, then bundled him off to the mental ward at the VA hospital, where he had remained ever since. The judge sentenced Talmadge to death in the gas chamber at Parchman, then sealed the court records and threatened anyone present with serious jail time if they talked about what had proceeded.
    "Y'all got a tough row to hoe, now don'tcha?" Talmadge addressed the camera. "Y'all want me dead so I can't remem'buh things no mo'." He looked up at the camera and nodded his head for good measure.
    Then he gingerly increased the