TEARS OF RAGE

Chapter 41

After hours of being pelted by rain, swayed by the chug of the train, and steeling himself against the cold weather Swaylo disembarked in an open field.

It was past midnight when he stumbled through a stand of corn, its rows of crops concealing him from the view of random residents.

The landscape was cast in darkness, but the rain had dwindled to a drizzle.

He walked for more than five miles until he came to an abandoned service station.

There was a payphone at the side of the building.

Using the shadows, he made his way to the establishment without drawing attention to himself.

As he began to type in the phone number to the apartment that he shared with Charmaine, Swaylo allowed his gaze to monitor the area around him.

At that hour, there was no one traveling about the streets.

A sign from a billboard, across the road, read that he was in Dade County Georgia.

Advertisements for Lookout Mountain and a collection of area businesses were posted on the billboard.

When Charmaine answered his call after the eighth ring, Swaylo gave a deep sigh of relief.

"Hello," she croaked across the receiver, her voice thick with the drawl of sleep.

"Baby, I need you to wake up."

"Sway? Where are you?"

"I can't explain everything right now, but I need you to get in the car and come get me."

"Where are you?"

"I'm in some county called Dade. It's near Lookout Mountain." Swaylo glanced at the business behind him.

"I'm at this service station called Dudley's," he stated, his gaze surveying the street. Everything was quiet.

"I can't risk being seen by anyone, but I don't want to wait all night, Charmaine... Are you coming?"

Drizzling rain cascade across the road, its swirl captured amidst the illumination of the streetlights.

"Of course I'm coming," she replied, the sound of movement present in the background.

"Just sit tight. I'll find it."

Caught within the matrix of another man's scheme, every second spent in ignorance was a step closer to the cradle of a guillotine.

When the threat of death and adversity began to consume a person's life, only a fool would allow themselves to wait for the attack of an opponent.

A week after being released from Fulton county, Swaylo began to search for his lawyer, Henry Bibbs.

He sent Charmaine to investigate the paperwork, recorded at the jail.

Henry Bibbs was the attorney of record, but the name did not produce any hits of validity.

There was no one with that name registered with the Bar Association. The name was fake.

It took two days, and twenty-five hundred in cash, to track the man down.

He had sent Charmaine to hire a private investigator, as though he had come up missing.

With a make on the vehicle, and guiding the investigator to the service station in which Swaylo had met up with Bibbs, the night he had been released, they were able to get the attorney's license plate.

The video footage from that night had cost him a thousand in cash to get a copy.

No one suspected anything that could tie together the quest to locate some lawyer, with the night Melissa Weatherby had been murdered.