Blood and Roses

by Douglas Pratt

  “I can’t wait until your truck gets shot up.”

  “Don’t be a baby,” he quipped. “Speaking of which, I might have a lead on Witt.”

  “What about Mitchell?” I asked.

  Leo shrugged, “What about him? Do you have a lead on him?”

  “Not yet,” I answered, “I need to do a bit of digging.”

  Leo eyed me from under the Cardinals hat that he was using to hide the disheveled hair. I was choosing to ignore the unkempt look that he was sporting today. My astute sense of detection leads me to guess that the night he spent with Mama didn’t involve a change of clothes or shower.

  “What kind of digging do you plan to do?” He asked pointedly.

  Glaring at him, I pulled my new phone from my pocket. Thankfully, it was connected to the internet, and I searched the internet for number for the Memphis Daily.

  “Jason, it’s Max,” I said when he answered. “This missing girl might be quite a big story.”

  Through the phone, Jason murmured, “How so?”

  “The lieutenant that you pointed me towards. You know, the great soldier against human traffickers.”

  “Bryant?” He was obviously preoccupied with something on the other end, something that wasn’t me.

  “Yes, he may, in fact, be the puppet master behind some heinous crap around here.”

  The sound of Jason suddenly perking up and devoting all his attention to me was evident through the phone. “Tell me more,” he demanded.

  In under two minutes, the details of what I had been mucking through were shared with him. With some intentional editing, of course. No need to have the demise of Ocansey/McCoy given too much attention. The alleged kidnapping and interrogation of Bandhul Tak also seemed like information that Jason might not need. All he needed was the bullet points. The ones that didn’t involve any illegal activity on my or Leo’s part.

  “You think you can tie this Craig Mitchell to Bryant?” Jason asked when I had finished talking. “If this is a dirty cop story, then we need to have all our ducks in a row. The city attorney will attempt to squash anything with just speculation. You know that.”

  “I can’t prove a connection yet. This story might end up being deeper than a dirty cop.”

  “What do you have?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet. From what Manning implied, Bryant might lead somewhere even bigger.”

  “Like where? An alleged pimp’s implication doesn’t give me anything. Do you at least have an idea who else might be involved?”

  “That I don’t know yet. I have to connect Mitchell to the girl and then to Bryant.”

  “That’s why you are calling me, isn’t it, Sawyer?”

  “I was hoping you can use some of those resources you have to find anything that will get me to Mitchell.”

  Jason was silent for a few seconds. He was thinking, or maybe deciding. I waited with the phone against my ear.

  “Here’s my deal,” Jason finally started talking. “You are going to give me a short piece outlining everything you know so far. I’ll do some research. When and if this starts to come to a head, I want a detailed story, with sources, for publication.”

  “Fair enough,” I responded.

  “Call me around lunch with what you have,” he said.

  “You are starting to sound like my boss again,” I said.

  He groaned. “I don’t ever want to be your boss again. This is freelance, with an emphasis on the “free” part.”

  He hung up.

  “You dig well,” Leo commented. “I need to learn this art of delegation.”

  “Yeah, I don’t get off scot-free,” I said, “he wants an actual news story out of this.”

  “What?” Leo feigned disbelief. “How dare he want something legitimate.”

  “Shut up,” I snapped back at him. “Tell me about your lead with Witt?”

  “My buddy, Barry who put up Witt’s bond gave me a call this morning. Witt’s mother reached out to him, asking some questions about if Barry knew where Witt was. She was asking how much trouble he was in. He said the whole thing was way off-kilter.”

  “And the mother?” I asked. “You think he’s hiding there.”

  “Barry wasn’t sure, but his gut was that he is. He also gave me a bit of info on Skaggs, Witt’s biker cousin. Seems he owns some property around Fayette County. Barry did some digging, and thinks that one of those properties was where Skaggs’ mother lived.”

  “Lived?”

  “She died two years ago. Some kind of cancer. Her sister, Marty Witt, was taking care of her at the time.”

  “Where is this house?”

  “According to Barry, twenty minutes out of town.”

  “Are we just going to waltz up to her house?”

  Leo looked at me. His expression said that we were going to do just that.

  “Can we at least make sure the house is not surrounded by a bunch of Harleys?” I asked. “My head still aches from the last time.”

  “Of course,” he assured me.

  I wasn’t feeling overly assured.

  “Twenty minutes outside of town” was not accurate. Leo could be forgiven for that. He’s fairly new to the area. The property owned by Skaggs was in a rural area in the next county to the east. Passing acres of corn and soybeans, we finally found the turn onto the road Barry gave us. The road leading to the house was only a little better than a gravel one, but it was no more than a one-lane path that was tarred and paved quite a few years back. Leo’s truck lurched over a few gaping potholes left from the spring rains.

  The country lane was mostly lined by some cultivated fields of crops and tracts of forests. There was only a small horse farm on the road before we reached Skagg’s property. He had very few neighbors.

  Leo drove past the house once just to satiate my nervous curiosity. There were no motorcycles parked around the little red-bricked home. A four-cylinder, two-doored Mazda pick-up truck sat under a metal awning.

  “Thoughts?” Leo asked me. He said that as if he already had a thought that he wanted to pursue.

  “Seems quiet.”

  He turned the truck around in an empty field.

  “Here’s what I think,” he said. “I’ll do the approach. You go around back. That way if he decides to come out shooting, he’ll come face to face with me.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think he’ll come out the front unless he has an army in there. In which case, we are in trouble. Why don’t you jump out here and work your way around to the back? I’ll do the main approach.”

  Convincing Leo that he should sneak through the woods was a lot like asking a kid if they wanted a piece of candy. He agreed and stopped the truck. Before I could get behind the wheel, the former Marine disappeared into the green.

  When two minutes passed, I shifted the gear indicator to “D” letting the truck start forward slowly. The long limestone gravel driveway had seen worse days than the one-lane road. Tire ruts and rainwater runoff had created ditches and cuts across it. I stopped the truck behind the little Mazda.

  Leo was nowhere to be seen. He was there though. As I said, the man is invisible.

  The weather-worn wooden steps screamed as I stepped on each one. The door opened when I had rapped the door frame three times with my knuckles.

  “Can I help you?” a voice asked behind the screen door. The gaunt face staring back must have been Marty Witt. Weariness had etched its mark on her. A sadness emanated from her. The kind of despair that occurs when one surrenders to life as if they were fated for their particular lot.

  “Hello,” I said cheerily. “I’m with the county. We are going to be doing some road work over the next few months. Before we start, we want to check with some of the neighbors about, what might be, issues that will arise.”

  “What kind of issues?”

  “The main one will be traffic. If we get to your road here, you might find it difficult to get to and from your home.”

  Marty Witt gre
w agitated. “Look, you can’t block me from my house.”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “We want to avoid that if at all possible. That’s why we want some information.”

  A scuffling sounded behind her. A shadow moved in a room behind her.

  “What kind of information?” she asked.

  “We want to try and minimize the problem. When do you find yourself coming and going from home?”

  She shrugged. “Depends. I usually work the dinner shift.”

  “What about your son?” I asked. “When does he work?”

  She stared at me for a second. “I didn’t…” Then she cursed aloud and shouted, “Phillip!”

  Grabbing the screen door handle, I pulled it open as she stepped to the side. The door smacked into my face as Phillip Witt burst past his mother into the door. Stumbling backward, I had no balance as Witt drove his shoulder into me. The wind rushed out of me when my back crashed to the ground. A cloud of dust billowed around me, and the earthy taste filled my mouth and nose as I gasped for air.

  Witt’s feet were pounding across the cracked, grassless yard. Rolling to my side, I watched him fire a gun wildly toward the truck. The little Mazda fired up and jumped forward through the yard.

  “Max, you good,” I heard Leo shout. My hand waved him after Witt.

  A loud “bam” resounded as Leo slammed his fist on the hood of his truck. Pulling myself up, I saw what frustrated him. Witt’s wild shot had been well-aimed, leaving a hole in the grill with steam whistling out of the radiator. The truck wouldn’t make it across the pot-holed road before overheating.

  Marty Witt slammed the door.

  “Ms. Witt, we don’t want to hurt Phillip, but he’s in a lot of trouble.”

  The door stayed closed. Surprising.

  Leo walked over and gave me a hand to pull me up.

  “I swear the other day that you told me this was going to be easy,” I said.

  “He’s a computer nerd,” Leo said. “How did you let him get past you. It should have been a piece of cake.”

  “He took me by surprise. I thought he would bolt out the back,” I replied sardonically.

  “I mean, who told you he would go out the front?” Leo questioned.

  “He must have seen you out the back?” I asked.

  Leo shook his head.

  “Could it be that he’s smart enough to figure out that we had someone in the back?”

  “But not smart enough to not go hide at his mommy’s?”

  Shrugging, I said, “Even smart people do dumb things. Maybe he needs help to make a run for it.”

  “He embezzled 15 million dollars,” Leo said. “He could buy all sorts of help.”

  “Except,” I pointed out, “that money was probably electronically deposited in an overseas account. Something he can’t just access.”

  “He’d need to get out of the country first,” Leo concluded.

  “That might be difficult.”

  Leo stated, “If I were him, I’d drive that little truck as far south as it would take me.”

  “Can I suggest we get a tow truck out here before Ms. Witt decides to call her nephew and his friends?”

  Leo sighed. He held his phone up to show a blinking icon indicating he had no service. My phone showed the same icon.

  “I don’t suppose we could ask to borrow her phone?” I asked.

  20

  Despite our pleas, Marty Witt was not kind enough to let us borrow her phone. In fact, she refused to come back outside. With no other options, Leo hiked down the road to the small horse farm we passed earlier to borrow a phone. I waited in the bed of the truck with both the .45 and the 12 gauge shotgun that Leo kept hidden behind the back seat. On the off chance that Witt was able to get any reinforcements to return and swiss-cheese Leo’s truck like mine, I was on guard duty. At least, I used the free time to write the article for Jason.

  “We need a car,” Leo pointed out when the tow truck left us at the garage. The mechanic on duty promised that he could have a new radiator installed by the next day. The part had to be couriered from the supply warehouse.

  “Should we call Malcolm?” I asked.

  “He’s still sitting on Bryant. Unless you want to pull him off.”

  I let out an exasperated sigh. “No, we need to keep on Bryant. Guess I will try to get another rental.”

  “Might want to get the insurance,” he said. “Given our latest run of luck.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I should make you get it. I’m going to be lucky if they give me the car.”

  He grinned and said, “No can do. My credit card is maxed out.”

  The rental company was more forgiving than I thought it would be. Of course, this rental was costing me three times what the Hyundai did.

  We sat on the curb in front of the mechanics. While we waited on the rental company to bring us another car, I emailed Jason everything I had written up so far. He responded with an address and short police file on Craig Mitchell. He had two arrests for statutory rape. No convictions on either count. The first was ten years earlier. The victim was Mitchell’s 15-year-old girlfriend. At the time of his arrest, he was 19. The charges were dropped by the girl’s parents. The second count, only three years ago, was a 16-year-old girl. The details in the file were slim. The girl’s name was Madison Forley. The report showed the arresting officer as Carlos Bryant. Bryant noted that the girl’s story didn’t have enough evidence to proceed with charges.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” I whispered.

  “What did he send you?” Leo asked.

  “Seems Craig Mitchell can definitely connect to Bryant. He arrested Mitchell a few years ago. Looks like the case Bryant had against him wasn’t strong enough to charge him. Wonder if that was true, or did he let Mitchell do some of his dirty work in exchange for not arresting him.”

  Shaking his head, Leo said, “Why do people have to be douchebags?”

  “I think it’s a genetic deficiency that the human race has.”

  We sat on the curb in the sun. Leo rocked gently on the heels of his feet.

  “Ever notice that the douchebags are always men,” Leo pondered. “I know, we’ve seen some nefarious women doing some very shitty things, but really, it’s alway men behind it all. Why is that?”

  Looking at the clear blue sky, I considered his point. “Maybe it’s the millennium of men being in charge that leaves us entitled. These levels of douchebaggery aren’t new. There are instances of douchebags going back before biblical times where men raped and pillaged their way through the rest of the world. That should have been in the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not be a douchebag.’ Might could have covered several of the other commandments in that one.”

  Leo stared off at the single cloud wisp sliding across the sky. He asked, “Want to know why I joined the Marines?”

  I cocked my head to give him my full attention. One of the few things that Leo doesn’t seem to like to talk about is his time in the Marines. In the time that I have known him, the most he has ever said was in reference to something one of the men in his unit might have done or said. All anecdotal for the purpose of humor. Any real glimpse into that side of his life interested me.

  He continued, “My grandfather.”

  I nodded along with him.

  “Not like you think,” he said. “I didn’t join up because he was a Marine or anything noble at all.

  “I’ve heard you talk about your parents. I never got to know my father. He died early on. I was eight, Rhiannon was three. The only real father I ever knew after that was my grandfather, and he was a real asshole. I figure, he was trying, but then, does that actually mean that much.

  “He was a racist,” he said. “Not like a regular racist. He was a damned white supremacist. Went to meetings. If he hadn’t fought in France, the man would have had a swastika tattooed on his chest.

  “When I was 15, there was a kid, black kid, at my school that was killed. Gossip in town was that he had raped a white girl, b
ut most of us knew that was shit. They were running around together in secret. Even in the ’90s that was frowned upon in rural Missouri. They were caught together, and a few days later, he was found floating in a creek.”

  I listened to him continue. His eyes still looked off into the atmosphere as he recalled the past.

  “My grandfather ranted about how this kid got what was coming to him.” He added, “I’m certain that his little club of old, angry white men got together and drowned that kid. Tony. His name was Tony.”