Hawke's Target

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  Willy Henderson adjusted his seat in the old-school aluminum chair and belched. Because of his blind eye, he turned his head like a chicken to see Jimmy Don on the left. “That ain’t good. I told you to let one of us go. Just drive out there and come straight back. Hauling that much cocaine in a camper don’t make no sense. I coulda done it.”

  “Yeah you did, and you’d’ve probably got caught.” Jimmy Don’s eyes roamed down Willy’s overweight frame, camouflage gimme cap, thick brown beard hanging to his chest, to his Mossy Oak camo shirt, faded jeans and the worn-out hunting shoes on his feet. He avoided looking at the man’s one white, dead eye that almost glowed in the firelight.

  Willy proved himself to Jimmy Don and the family years earlier by shooting Daniel Fredericks behind the ear and dumping the body in the Sabine. Daddy Frank had enough of that meth-head family cooking their shit two miles from his house. It was too close to his own operation, so he’d asked Daniel, the dad, to move or quit. Daniel ordered him off the property and threatened to shoot Daddy Frank if he ever came around again, telling them what to do like he had the right.

  Daddy Frank ordered Willy to set the meth house on fire, to make his point. In response, Fredericks moved a faded, dented house trailer in front of the pile of ashes that was once their home and started his lab back up again.

  On the old man’s new orders, Willy waited one morning out behind the trailer until Daniel Fredericks stepped out back to pee into the ashes. Willy knocked him in the head with a baseball bat, threw the semiconscious man into the bed of his pickup, and drove down to the Sabine bottoms, not far from what they called the fertilizer barn.

  The body never surfaced, probably eaten by the gators drawn by such treats in the past. The remainder of the Fredericks family got the message and moved away.

  “You guys need to understand that the cops are looking for folks like us out there, dressed like you.” Jimmy Don plucked the beer bottle from the holder between his index and middle fingers, took a swallow, and replaced it.

  “It’s them damn meth-heads down in the bottoms that’s bringing all the troubles.” Mike Dillman laid it off on the tweakers who occupied the bottom rung of the drug-using public. He fished a fresh beer from a brown Yeti cooler with a rattle of ice. “Calling attention to country folks just tryin’ to get by.”

  Clifford Raye burst out laughing, flipping his rattail braid out from under his collar. He scratched a mosquito bite on the back of his ear with a hand that was missing the little finger from a logging accident. He’d moved from logging trees to working at the sawmill, a place he considered safer. “That’s funny for you to say. It’s your mama’s side of the family that’s cooking that shit back up on Blackwater Bayou.”

  Mike ducked his head at the truth, licking his buckteeth that tended to dry out against his lips, and lit a fresh cigarette. “Yeah, and I don’t have nothin’ to do with any of ’em. I tried to get ’em to stop, but hell, they make ten times more money a day making crystal than any of ’em ever made workin’ for the Walmart in town.”

  “They’ll get caught pretty soon.” Sammy Saxton smoothed the lush mustache growing like melting wax down to his jawline. He worked at the BranCo refinery northeast of Houston one hundred miles from Gunn, Texas. “They oughta go to making whiskey like God intended before they get crossways with Daddy Frank. At least that’s a product we don’t move much of no more.”

  Everyone laughed, all except for two men sitting with their backs to the creek bottom. One, a rawboned Pentecostal preacher currently going by the name of Curry Holmes, listened silently with large, soft hands resting on his knees. With a worn Bible balanced on one skinny thigh, he was the only one not drinking beer.

  The other man slouched in an aluminum chair with a cowboy hat pulled down low over his eyes so that the only visible feature was his thick brush-pile mustache over a white chin. A badge pinned above his pocket reflected the firelight.

  Sheriff Buck Henderson was in some way related to every one of the men around the fire, and especially closer to Willy. New move-ins laughed when they thought of how nearly everyone in the county was kinfolk, so intertwined by blood that they even had double cousins. The newcomers figured out pretty quick not to talk about anyone, because the conversation would surely reach the wrong ears through the homegrown grapevine that was East Texas behind the Pine Curtain.

  Jimmy Don noticed how quiet Buck had become. He waved a lacy gallinipper out of his face and watched the Newton County sheriff light a fresh cigarette from the short butt held in fingers callused from decades of minor burns.

  “Look, we’re getting close to moving an ass-load of product, and we need Alonzo to get back with that money.” Jimmy Don was starting to get frustrated at the direction the conversation was turning. Daddy Frank was the man in charge, and Jimmy Don was second. “We need that cash and all of us need a payday.”

  “You’re right about that.” Holding the beer with three fingers, Buck drained the bottle and dropped it onto the grass. “Y’all haven’t give me a payday in a month, and I have overhead. Willy, fish me out another’n.”

  Willy opened the cooler between him and Mike and pulled out a dripping Coors yellowboy. He lofted it to Buck, who twisted off the cap, tilted it so the foam wouldn’t get on his jeans, and pitched the cap into the fire.

  Jimmy Don hawked and spat. “What overhead?”

  “I need to grease a few skids to keep the road open in both counties.” The sheriff in Newton County, he also had expenses over in nearby Jasper County. “There’s a couple of ol’ boys in the highway patrol who’ll look the other way ever’ now and then. There’s also some . . . contractors who come in handy to do a little enforcement work, too, when we need ’em, if you get my drift. I want to make sure that road from Beaumont stays clear. I don’t want my boys to get crossways with anybody not on the payroll. You know what’ll have to happen then.”

  “Hallelujah!” Preacher Holmes’s soft voice carried across the yard. “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.”

  “Deuteronomy.” Sheriff Henderson nodded, squinting around the smoke from the cigarette hanging from his lips. The sheriff drew deep, the cherry glowing red in the darkness. He blew smoke from his nose in a long dragon exhalation without taking the cigarette from his mouth. “I got a problem with this pipeline idea of Daddy Frank’s. I can sweep a lot of things under the rug, but if he starts blowing up oil pipelines and a refinery, then it’s gonna get bigger’n me. His camper plan’ll work, especially with this shipment coming in, but we need to talk him out of using that plastic explosive Alonzo’s carrying. He does that, and it’s gonna put us under a microscope.”

  “Well, he’s mad,” Willy said.

  Buck smoothed his mustache. “And that’s what’s gonna get us in trouble.”

  Daddy Frank Wadler was the family elder and well-known as the self-avowed meanest man in Newton County, where Gunn was located. His vision called the Plan came the night he took his most recent bride, an eighteen-year-old black-haired Cajun gal from over in Acadiana Parish named Shi’Ann LeBleu. It was borne in the throes of their wedding night when the Viagra he took reacted with his advanced cardiac disease, sending him into a mild heart attack resulting in a brief glimpse of the white light at the end of the tunnel.

  When responding paramedics shocked him back into this world, Daddy Frank called the clan together in his hospital room and recounted what he’d seen when doctors said he’d died and from there the Camper Plan came into being.

  “Where’s the old man tonight?”

  Jimmy Don adjusted his seat. “He’s across the line in Beauregard Parish with Boone. Scooter got outta line and traded some of our guns to that coonass Thibideaux gang to support his damned habit. Daddy’n’em went over to settle up.”

  Well-known to Louisiana law enforcement, the Thibideaux family had moved from New Orleans after Hurricane K
atrina in 2005. They had long history of shipping crystal meth up and down I-10. Within the last couple of years, they’d shifted their operation to include meth cooked up in trailers and shacks hidden in the woods and swamps on the western side of the state, near DeRidder. They were far too close to the Wadler operation.

  At the mention of Boone’s name, Willy flinched. “Boone’s a creepy sonofabitch.” He swallowed. “Scooter didn’t give ’em the converted rifles, did he?”

  “He damn sure did, and I don’t want the ATF sniffin’ around here wondering where them Thibideauxs got fully automatic weapons.” Sheriff Henderson’s voice, thick and gravelly from a four-pack-a-day habit, ended the conversation. “That river ain’t a wall between us, there’s a bridge, and we ain’t that far away.”

  “I doubt they’ll come lookin’.” Jimmy Don tilted the bottle and drained half. By daylight Scooter was going to be looking at an eternity in a shallow grave, if Daddy Frank was in a good mood, or as gator shit if he wasn’t. “Boone’s gettin’ good at what he’s doing.”

  Boone was the most cold-blooded killer any of them had ever heard of. Daddy Frank first saw the slender, completely hairless man with abnormally long skinny fingers sitting in front of a prefab metal gas station over in Honey Island. Daddy Frank said he first noticed Boone because of the man’s spiderweb tattoo over the entirety of his skull and covering one eye and cheek. A bloodred spider virtually pulsed on the back of his head.

  His arms were covered in scars, and one ran across his throat from ear to ear as if someone had tried to cut it and failed.

  It was Boone’s dead expression that won the old man over. Daddy Frank made small talk, and Boone’s facial features never changed. He didn’t crack a smile or build a frown. The only way Daddy Frank knew the man was interested in their evolving conversation that eventually included wet work that needed to be done was when Boone finally met his gaze without blinking and nodded, once.

  Boone had one look that served all his emotions, a completely blank expression. His lips were a thin line except when he spoke. It was terrifying to think that he completely lacked common emotions, and that proved the truth when Daddy Frank finally found what he’d suspected.

  As far as they knew, Boone’s one true talent was violence.

  The man was like that spider tattooed on the back of his head. He seemed to be completely removed from anything around him until Daddy Frank gave him an order, which he carried out without question.

  Once Daddy Frank understood what he had, he settled Boone in a small shack in the woods at the back of another property in the Sabine River bottoms and provided the strange skinny man with whatever he wanted. That proved simple, because all Boone needed was food and books, both of which he consumed voraciously.

  “Here’s what the old man said.” Jimmy Don drained his beer. “One of y’all to go out and meet Alonzo at the Evening Star RV Park in Comanche. Tell him Daddy Frank said to let you pull the trailer back here. Hearing it came from him, that should light a fire under the slow sonofabitch. You can make it in a day, and then we can get that off our list.”

  Willy raised his hand to volunteer, and Jimmy Don shook his head. “Nope. Hell, I’d pull you over if I was the law, just to see what you’d been up to.” They chuckled and Jimmy Don finished his beer. “Mike, you have enough time built up out there at the refinery you can get off easier’n the rest of us.”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, and Boone’s going with you.”

  Silence dropped like a wet wool blanket on the group at the mention of the man’s name.

  Mike swallowed. “Uh, Jimmy Don . . .”

  “Daddy Frank said.”

  “I’d just as soon take a sack of live cottonmouths in the cab with me as to ride out there with that freak.”

  “I know it.” The crunch of tires on gravel reached them, and Jimmy Don stopped talking.

  Headlights flickered through the trees as a vehicle approached. A whip-poor-will took the night song’s lead as an unfamiliar late-model sedan came into view two hundred yards away, then slowed when it neared the house and parked on the side.

  Sheriff Buck Henderson pushed himself upright and strolled toward a thick cedar growing in the open yard. They’d all visited it at least once that night to pee. He stepped behind the thick bush and waited there with one hand on the butt of his holstered Glock as the driver killed the car’s engine beside the other pickups.

  The porch light snapped on, bathing the trucks in a pool of yellow light. The blinds were still open, and through the single-pane windows, they could see Marshall Wadler, Jimmy Don’s other brother, in his wheelchair inches away from a new sixty-inch flat-panel TV.

  The strange sedan’s driver emerged and stopped halfway between his car and the house. Jimmy Don relaxed when he saw his twenty-year-old son, Tanner. He’d named the boy after the little fighter in the movie The Bad News Bears. Unfortunately, his son turned out to be more of a sensitive, tearful young man who hadn’t measured up to either name, his first, or last.

  The back door to the house opened and Tanner’s very young and pregnant wife, Donine, rushed out with a squeal of excitement and threw her arms around him. She flipped a glowing cigarette butt into the yard. “You bought a new car!” She pronounced it cawr.

  “It’s a lease, but it’s ours.”

  “It’s a Taurus!”

  “Sure is. You can’t beat a Ford. They gave me a good deal and I was like, sure.”

  “Let’s take ’er for a spin!”

  Tanner released Donine. “In a minute. I need to talk to Daddy, and then we’ll go.”

  Jimmy Don drained the bottle. “A car, and a lease, too. That boy ain’t got the sense God give a goose.”

  “Ain’t that the truth?” Mike had been leaning forward, as if that would help him see the unfamiliar car better. “Hey, Jimmy Don. What if Alonzo don’t want to let us take over and drive his rig home?”

  Jimmy Don met Mike’s eyes across the fire. “Make him.”

  Chapter 11

  It was daylight at the Big Texan motel when I threw my bag into the Dodge’s back seat. My phone rang. “Hello.”

  “Sonny Hawke? This is Sheriff Cates here in Amarillo. Got some news for you.”

  I swallowed the last of the in-room coffee that tasted slightly of mildew and dropped the paper cup into the holder. “Shoot.”

  “They’re working a murder down in Dimmitt that fits your man to a T, except it’s off the Interstate. Small highways. So his MO is the same for murder but not for travel.”

  I grinned at the contradiction. “I was just guessing that he’d travel down I-40. It looks like he’s decided to go a different way.”

  “Looks that way to me. Call Sheriff Davis in Dimmitt.” He gave me a phone number and the directions to a parolee’s house at the edge of town. “He’ll be waiting there for you.”

  “Thanks. I’m on my way.”

  It wasn’t long before I was on State Highway 60. The divided four-lane ran straight south through the wide-open Caprock country. Retracing my route went against my grain, and I couldn’t help but regret that I hadn’t decided to stop in the small town sixty miles south of Amarillo. I wanted to slap my forehead.

  The guy was maddening. After Albuquerque, he’d decided to take less-traveled roads. There were a couple of problems with that, in my opinion. Killing folks in larger cities like Amarillo gave you an easier way out, with folks less likely to recognize you as a visitor. It gave me the notion that he didn’t care if anyone saw him now. Less caution meant he might become even more volatile.

  A couple of miles passed while I studied on that idea, and then it hit me. He wasn’t from a city. Maybe he was more comfortable in small towns because that’s where he grew up. My tires ate up the miles as my mind wandered. If you were on the road, what did you need?

  Hotels or motels. Cafés or restaurants. No one would remember seeing strangers there. Convenience stores and gas stations. The same anonymity. Was he traveling on the cheap
or spending big bucks? How would we find him? Was there some common denominator in these towns that he might need, but on a smaller scale?

  I was rolling at the posted seventy-five miles an hour and caught up with an RV cruising twenty miles under the speed limit. The road was clear so I blew around him like he was sitting still. The gray-haired driver waved as I passed.

  Texas friendly.

  I picked up my cell phone and called Yolanda Rodriguez, my go-to gal when it comes to computers or shooting things up. Apparently there was a cell tower close by. Sometimes service can be spotty out in the Big Empty. She answered on the first ring. “Yessir.”

  “This guy’s changing his MO.”

  “Good morning to you, too. Perry Hale, you want to tell Sonny good morning, too?”

  I heard his voice through the speaker. “Mornin’, boss.”

  My SRT couple was already up and running. “Oh. I was just driving and thinking.”

  “I get it.” The lilt in Yolanda’s voice told me she was kidding, but I felt bad because I’d done the same thing to the Major a few days earlier. “What’s up?”

  “Well, good morning.” She had me derailed, and I had to think. “It looks like this guy I was telling y’all about before I left is off the interstates now. I got a call from the sheriff in Amarillo, who said our target might have killed a parolee named Eric Lang down in Dimmitt. Since he’s off our original pattern, see what you can find out about other recent murders in the area within the last couple of days. And while you’re at it, see how many fairly recent parolees are scattered around the state.”

  “That’s a big job.”

  “I know it, but I’ve been driving and thinking.”

  The girl was a champ. “I’ll see what we can come up with. I’ll call when I know something. Perry Hale, tell Sonny bye.”

  “Bye!”

  I sighed. “I get it. You two keep your minds on the job.”

  Perry Hale’s voice came in loud and clear. “We can, now.”