By eleven in the morning, gray clouds hung heavy and low over the East Texas pines behind the Wadler house. The wind picked up with even more force in response to a line of building thunderstorms rolling in from the west, sometimes gusting to thirty mph. The forecast was for the storm to intensify as the cooler, drier air clashed with the moist Gulf air.
A dozen grackles winged over the house, heading for cover. A woodpecker hammered somewhere out of sight, seemingly unconcerned by the weather.
“Let me get this straight.” Jimmy Don Wadler prowled his backyard in fury. “Daddy Frank told you to deal with those two agents and your idea was to shoot ’em behind the busiest restaurant in the county!”
Tanner swallowed. Willy stared at his camouflage hunting boots. It was almost too much, and Tanner wanted to bolt, but he couldn’t leave without Shi’Ann and was supposed to meet her later that evening.
“Dad, we had ’em, but then we found out those guys weren’t here to investigate us. They’re railroad agents staked out and waiting on a car that didn’t weigh in right. And I was like . . .” He raised his hands palm up. “And they said yeah, we’re railroad agents and we’re here for that and I was like, really? You didn’t want us to get involved in that, did you?”
“They ain’t railroad agents. They were feds!” Jimmy Don’s face was beet red with rage.
“That’s not what they told us.” Tears welled. Frustrated, Tanner wiped them away with one hand.
“You two beat anything I’ve ever seen.” Jimmy Don stopped pacing and threw up his hands in frustration. He pointed a finger at Willy, who stared at his feet in misery. “Why didn’t you do what you were told? You’re the oldest. Haven’t you learned nothin’? I told y’all to make those guys disappear.” He gestured with both hands to simulate explosion. “That way it would take a few days for things to start happening, and we’d know what to do.”
Before Willy could answer, Tanner cut in. “It’s not his fault. One of ’em pulled a pistol, and we didn’t have no choice.” Tanner squared his shoulders. “I had to make a decision right then and there, and I did. You’re the one who’s always telling me to man up.”
Sheriff Buck Henderson spoke from the shadows on the porch. He’d leaned his cane-bottom chair back on two legs against the house. “Yeah, and now we’re in a mess. I got called in on this after you two stupid idiots went home and crawled into bed last night.”
Tanner and Willy were standing beside two lawn chairs, but both knew it’d be a bad idea to sit down while Jimmy Don stomped a trail in the grass.
Willy looked miserable. “Can’t you steer it away from us, cuz?”
“It ain’t that simple. It’s not just me working on this case. I had to make it look good and assign a couple of deputies to investigate, and here’s the hard truth. There’s already half a dozen DEA agents in town to investigate the murder. Yeah, I said half a dozen, because that’s who you shot and left laying right there instead of makin’ ’em disappear like you was told. I’m gonna be talking with all six of ’em in a little while, but furthermore and all that, one of them sonsabitches you put holes in ain’t dead.”
The yard fell silent, as if even the birds were stunned by the news.
Jimmy Don stopped pacing. “What?”
“Yeah, one named Fontana was dead at the scene, but the other one, Agent Kwan, is still alive. He’s in the hospital. Y’all couldn’t even shoot ’em right. He came around long enough to give a damned good description of you two. You done screwed the pooch, boy.”
Tanner took a deep breath to calm himself. How could anyone survive six point-blank rounds from a. 357 Magnum?
Jimmy Don ran a hand through his short gray hair. “Why didn’t one of you tell me last night? Instead of coming and explaining what happened, y’all just disappeared. Donine called me to see where you were when you wouldn’t answer your phone. She thought y’all were in a bar ditch somewhere. I thought them agents’d killed both of you.”
Tanner shrugged and didn’t answer for several heartbeats. “It shook me up so bad I didn’t want to go home and wake her up.”
“Let me remind you, there’s another phone in your car that you’re supposed to answer, because it’s me on the other end of the line. Boy, I thought I made it clear to you that phone’s one you don’t ignore. So where’n hell were you?”
“Driving, for a while.”
“You just drove around with what you thought was a murder weapon in your car. You still have it?”
Face numb with fear, Tanner pointed at his car. “It’s under the seat.”
Jimmy Don spat off to the side in disgust as Buck’s chair thumped down on the boards at the news. He walked down the steps and crossed the yard to Tanner’s Taurus. The wind almost took his hat, and he set it tighter on his head. Buck used a handkerchief to open the door and knelt inside, standing moments later with the Python in the handkerchief.
Watching the sheriff lay the blue-black pistol on his cruiser’s hood, Jimmy Don’s voice quieted. “What the hell, Willy? Why didn’t you call me?”
Willy absently fingered the thick scar under his dead eye. “It didn’t cross my mind.” He turned toward Tanner, his face lined with worry. “I thought you was gonna tell him when you come home.”
At a loss for words, and even more terrified now that Willy had thrown him under the bus, Tanner could do nothing but spread his hands in explanation.
Buck opened his trunk and took out a pair of white cotton gloves, came back around, and opened the pistol’s cylinder. “Been fired six times.” He squinted at the fat cartridges. “All Magnum rounds.”
Tanner swallowed.
Jimmy Don spun back to his son. “The doctors told Buck they took one .38 from Kwan’s chest. You missed with all six shots. Did you even try to hit those guys, or did you just shoot to make it look like you were trying to kill ’em?”
Tanner couldn’t have been more shocked by his dad’s accusation that he intentionally let Willy do the killing.
“Jimmy Don,” Willy said. “They was close. It was dark, and them guys come out with hideout guns after we disarmed ’em.”
“But you hit ’em both.”
“I was closer.”
“How come?”
Tanner and Willy went silent.
Jimmy Don ignored Willy, turning his attention once more to Tanner. “So you screwed up, didn’t shoot a thing but the air and a tree or two, then screwed up again by disappearing and driving around with the gun in your car while I tried to call you.”
Tanner saw a ray of hope. “Well, even if I’d got pulled over, the gun won’t match the bullets.”
“You know what’s wrong with you, boy?”
The “boy” ignited a rage in the young man that washed over good sense. He saw himself almost out of there, free and clear with Shi’Ann while the laws closed in and took everyone else to jail. Oppressed and fearful for most of his life, the comment cut him free. Tanner squared his shoulders. “You know, I’ve been wondering exactly what my problem’s been for years. Why don’t you tell me?”
Jimmy Don’s own frustration and fury boiled over. He slapped Tanner, rocking him back. With a rage bordering on insanity, he followed the slap with a left cross that caught his son full on the jaw. Tanner stumbled back, and then Jimmy Don was on him, throwing punches into his only son’s face as if he were trying to kill him.
Powered by arms worked iron hard by a lifetime of physical labor, each blow landed with the force of a lead pipe. Already knocked almost senseless, Tanner staggered as the world spun into a blur, fighting to stay conscious. After the first punch, his face went numb, and he didn’t feel the others as much. The idea of fighting back against his dad never crossed his mind. Hands up to ward off the blows, he fell back as Jimmy Don pressed in, face twisted in rage.
Ears ringing and eyes flashing, the blows split his lips, but it was as if his whole face was full of Novocain. Tanner finally tripped and his knees buckled. He held up a hand, a feeble attempt to stop
the onslaught.
Any other time Jimmy Don would have followed someone to the ground and finished them there. That’s what the old man taught him. Continue the attack until the opponent was dead or, at the very least, rendered unconscious. But despite his fury and Tanner’s failure, the young man was still his son. He stepped back, breathing hard as the barely conscious twenty-year-old rolled onto his side, spitting blood.
A gasp from the porch broke the moment. “Stop it!” Donine rushed down the stairs as fast as her huge belly would allow and ran to Tanner. She knelt, crying. “He don’t deserve this!”
Jimmy Don rubbed his knuckles and backed up a step. “Can you hear me, boy?”
Groaning, Tanner nodded and struggled to sit up.
“Good. You’re my son, and I love you, but you cain’t fail me now. I know there’s more to this story than you told me, from beginning to end.” He pointed. “You’re lyin’ to me about something. Willy here’s gonna tell me all he knows, and then I’m gonna decide what to do about this. You hear me?”
“Yeah.” Tanner spit out a tooth along with a mouthful of blood. “But I done told you the truth.”
“I’m gonna get it all from him, so you cough up the rest. Where was you when I was callin’?”
Tanner felt his broken nose with trembling fingers. His whole life was literally on the line at that moment. He inhaled, gagging on the mix of blood and mucus from the beating.
“I went down and parked on the river and fell asleep behind the wheel.” An ocean of emotions rose and he choked down a sob of pain and embarrassment at what had happened in front of his wife and the other two men. “All that business took so much out of me I felt like I was in a coma. I didn’t hear nothin’.”
“Whereabouts on the river?” Jimmy Don wasn’t finished, not by a long shot. The 510-mile Sabine River snaked through the pine forests of East Texas before it emptied into the bayou country near the Gulf Coast. Wide, deep, muddy, and unpredictable in rainy weather, there were thousands of access points, from deer trails to sand bars to shacks built with cast-off materials and inhabited by people hiding from Life itself. “Where’d you go?”
Tanner swallowed. He hadn’t expected to be questioned so much. His thoughts were fuzzy. “Under the old iron bridge where we used to fish.”
Decades of locals driving the old dirt road to the abandoned railroad bridge and parking on the bank kept the area clear enough that some folks launched flat-bottom boats from the shallow bank. Teenagers often went parking there, hidden by the piney woods, and more than one baby was conceived in the darkness overlooking the river, including Tanner’s own. In the summertime, it wasn’t unusual for people to camp in the open space in good weather.
Jimmy Don stared at his son. “So what do you think I’m gonna do with you two?”
“I know what I’m gonna do.” Buck pitched the .357 to Willy, who caught it and held the pistol like it was a dead possum. “First off, get rid of this. What went with your pistol?”
Willy slipped the empty revolver into the front pocket of his overalls and reached for a can of Copenhagen in the other and slapped it against his palm. “In my trailer.”
“Anyone see you there?”
“Naw.”
“Good.” Buck stripped off the cotton gloves. “Take and carry that pistol home with you and throw ’em both in the bayou somewhere. I’m not too worried about that one, but it was your gun that killed Fontana and wounded that Korean.”
Willy forced a grin. “I thought he was Chinese. I can’t tell none of them Celestials apart.”
The sheriff grunted. “Willy, you sure have a way with words.” He pointed at the young man lying on the ground with his head in Donine’s lap. “Did you ride out here with Tanner?”
“Yeah.”
“Get in the car. I’ll carry you back. These two need to talk, and Tanner, I suggest you straighten up and fly right before some housewife calls to tell me where you were.” The look he gave Donine was explanation enough.
“You going to meet with them agents?” Jimmy Don turned his back on the young couple.
“Yep. I’ll see how they’re handling things and point ’em the other way.” He nodded at Willy getting into the front seat of his car.
Eyes dead, Jimmy Don nodded back.
Buck opened his door and paused with one hand on the top and a foot resting on the floorboard. “But Jimmy Don, you better get a handle on this one. We’re too close to blowing this whole thing, and I don’t intend to go to Huntsville. If I’s you, I’d put everything on hold until all these agents are gone.”
“Cain’t do it. We got a buy on Friday. Big one we can’t back out on, because them folks we’re dealing with’re meaner than we are. Daddy Frank said.”
“Well, then don’t set no charges on that pipeline. Just leave it alone for right now.”
“Daddy Frank . . .”
“Yeah, I know. Daddy Frank said.” Buck slammed the cruiser’s door, dropped behind the wheel, and spun the tires as he left.
It was silent in the yard except for the wind whistling around the eaves and soughing in the trees. A blue jay cried in the woods. Jimmy Don turned back to his bloody boy and the daughter-in-law holding him in her arms. “Son, I gotta tell Daddy Frank about what happened. I can’t keep you on the sugar tit with this one.”
Beaten and semiconscious, Tanner felt the bottom fall out of his stomach. “Is he gonna be here for sure today?”
“He’ll call before long. Right now he’s worried that the feds are on to Alonzo, too. That dumb-ass brother of mine could be leading them right to us, and that can’t happen. You need to understand something though, son. I’ll explain what you told me as best I can, but if he tells me to do something, I’m gonna have to do it. It’ll be me on his side of the line, and you on th’ other’n. If he wants Boone to settle up with you when he gets back, I cain’t do nothing, even though you’re family. You understand what I’m saying?”
Unable to answer and suddenly more alone than any other time in his life, despite Donine’s presence, Tanner nodded and wiped blood from his face.
“All right, then. Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“Nossir.”
Jimmy Don studied the couple. “What a pair.”
Tanner laid back in his wife’s lap, his head against their unborn baby, and cried over not only the pain, but the shackles that held him right there where he was.
He couldn’t tell them Daddy Frank’s young wife Shi’Ann LeBleu had phoned him right after they left the supposedly dead agents behind the Swamp and told Tanner that the Old Man and Preacher Curry Holmes were gone to Beaumont to seal a deal on an incoming shipment that originated in Colombia.
It was the best news he’d heard in days, giving them the whole of last night to themselves. The things she knew how to do released all the fear and tension from Tanner’s encounter with the two agents.
The thought of her lying naked on top of the sheets as he called the Comanche sheriff that morning didn’t help him now. He was on his own, and right then decided to be completely finished with the family and the Business.
By tomorrow the both of them would be shed of Newton County, Texas.
Chapter 25
Northwest of the Comanche campground, an angry line of roiling clouds heralding the cold front had finally arrived. With a rush of chilly air, the grass and sage that had been leaning toward the north reversed direction. A light shower passed through, signaling what was to come.
Thunder vibrated the air and made the few glass dishes in the trailer’s cabinets rattle. Back from town and the bank, Alonzo finished rolling the canopy back in, anticipating the storm. He’d mailed the paperwork, some cash, and the safety deposit box key to Tanner. That’d be a kick when the kid unlocked the bank box for the first time.
Two cardboard boxes that once contained copy paper but were now full of wrapped hundred-dollar bills rested on the back floorboard. A bin full of Semtex plastic explosive was strapped into the
passenger seat, lest it jostle the little surprise he had in there.
He slid the aluminum lawn chair into the cargo hold and settled down to sit in the doorway. From the time he was a boy Alonzo enjoyed storms, and despite the pain in his gut and the love of his life now lying cold and still in the back seat of his truck, he was looking forward to the change in the weather.
He felt better now that he’d decided to drive straight through the day to meet the family in the fertilizer barn. The time crunch played hell with his extermination plan to put a few more felons in the ground before he got home, but hey, if he could take out just one more before sending his grandfather to hell, Life would be fulfilled, what there was left of it.
If.
If was the problem. If he ate all of his pain pills before he got there, they’d numb the badger in his stomach enough to finish the job. If the old man was where he needed to be, it was the perfect solution that would work out well for Tanner, Donine, and their unborn baby.
But now he saw a problem heading his direction, set to unravel everything. Alonzo learned the hard way a long time ago to trust his instincts by watching Daddy Frank reign over the Wadler family and most of the people living in Newton County.
So when a pickup drove down the state park’s blacktop road and he recognized the man riding alone in the cab, the hair prickled on the back of his neck. Something was wrong.
The truck almost passed, but at the last minute Mike Dillman saw Alonzo sitting in the trailer’s doorway. He pulled off the road and parked in the empty campsite beside the trailer.
Mike’s eyes locked with Alonzo’s as he lipped a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket and stepped out of the truck. “Hey, Alonzo.”
Coming around the front fender, he bloused his untucked oversize shirt, tentatively pulling at the tail with his fingertips. That nervous action was a dead giveaway that the man wore a weapon hidden underneath. Alonzo’s chest tightened. It took a moment to get his head in the game with the arrival of his third cousin from Gunn.
Mike stopped a few feet away, shirt flapping in the cooling wind. “Bet you didn’t expect to see us, did you, but you know why I’m here.”
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