Justice Burning (Darren Street Book 2)

by Scott Pratt

  “You think they were trying to set you up?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “After what I went through a couple of years ago, I wouldn’t put anything past a cop or a prosecutor. But I didn’t kill them, Grace. I swear it. Do you believe me?”

  She nodded her head slowly and looked up into my eyes. “Be careful, Darren. They’re after you. I don’t want them to take you again.”

  CHAPTER 23

  I was leaving Criminal Court Monday afternoon after having my vehicular assault client arraigned when my cell phone rang. Luanne “Granny” Tipton was calling. Granny was the matriarch of the Tipton family, the grandmother of the same James Tipton, who had been both my friend and enemy in the past.

  “Hi, Granny,” I said when I answered the phone.

  “We have a problem, Darren,” she said. “A serious problem. Could you come up here and try to help?”

  “Of course,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s James. He wants to kill himself, and I’m afraid he might do it.”

  I jumped in my car and headed toward Gatlinburg. The Tiptons lived in the mountains a few miles outside the resort town in the Smokies. It took me about forty minutes to get there. I called Grace on my way and left her a message that I was going to visit the Tiptons. I didn’t tell her why. When I pulled up in front of Granny’s white frame house, her son Eugene was sitting on a four-wheeler. He motioned for me to get on behind him. I did so, and we headed up a mountain trail. Ten minutes later, we topped a small ridge and Eugene stopped the four-wheeler and cut the engine.

  “He’s not far from here,” Eugene said. “I don’t want to shake him up any more than he already is. Let’s walk.”

  “Granny said he wants to kill himself,” I said.

  “Looks that way,” Eugene said. “He’s smoking dope and drinking moonshine. My boy was squirrel hunting up here a couple of hours ago and heard him talking to himself. He has a pistol with him.”

  “Is this because of what happened at Clancy’s trial?” I said.

  James had been the federal government’s star witness against Ben Clancy. But he had been destroyed on cross-examination, and Clancy had walked away free and clear.

  “It’s a lot of things, but I think that was the last straw.”

  We rounded a curve, and there they were. Granny and Eugene’s brother, Ronnie, were standing about fifteen feet from James. James was sitting sidesaddle on a four-wheeler. He had a joint in his left hand and a chrome revolver in his right. A mason jar of clear liquid—three-quarters empty—sat on a fender.

  When he recognized me, James said, “Counselor! Welcome to the party.”

  “Doesn’t look like my idea of a party with that gun in your hand,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s a party all right, but it’s about to end.”

  “What’s going on, man?” I said. “Surely this isn’t about Ben Clancy. You’re not going to let that miserable bastard be the cause of you killing yourself, are you?”

  “You don’t know nothing about me, Darren,” James said as he took a deep drag off the joint. “I’ll give you an example. My real name ain’t Tipton. It’s James Crawford. I was dumped on the Tiptons by my mother when I was five years old. She shot and killed my daddy because he raped her two or three times a day, every day. He was a piece of work, my daddy. Me and my brothers and sisters all used to close our eyes or get out of the house when he’d start on her. He’d just rip her clothes off and go at it. Didn’t care who was watching or how she was feeling. She’d cry, and he’d beat her. We were too young to do anything about it.

  “He hated me,” James said. “Don’t really know why other than he was just a miserable, hateful son of a bitch. Used to punch me in the head, kick me. He even shot me one time. I was walking in the woods one morning when I was four. It was a Sunday. When I came out of the tree line, I heard a loud crack and a buzz or a shock wave, and then I realized something had peeled the skin off the side of my head just above my right ear. I walked up to the house to get Momma to take care of the wound, and Daddy was sitting on the porch with a rifle. He looked at me and said, ‘Damn, boy, I thought you was a deer.’”

  “I had a lot of problems with my father, too, James,” I said. “You just get past it and move on.”

  “I don’t think I really belong here, you know what I mean?” James said. His eyes were glassy, and his voice was becoming monotone. I felt like I needed to do something before he went past the point of no return, so I took a step toward him. The pistol, which was a massive 0.357 Magnum, immediately came up and was aimed directly at my chest. I noticed it was steady.

  “My momma shot him,” James said. “She finally shot him one night. We lived about a mile down the mountain from here. She packed all us kids up in the truck and she dropped me off in Granny’s driveway. I remember crying and telling her I wanted to stay with her, but she pushed me out of the truck and told me Joe and Luanne would take good care of me. They caught her in Nashville and brought her back here for a trial. She died in prison, and my brothers and sister wound up in foster homes. I ain’t seen them since that night.”

  “Don’t do this,” Eugene said. “Granny and Granddaddy took good care of you, didn’t they? And me and Ronnie, we lost our momma and daddy in the car wreck, but we ain’t killing ourselves. We lost Granddaddy Joe, but we ain’t killing ourselves. We’ve always treated you like a brother, haven’t we? Please don’t make us watch this.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come up here,” James said. “If you don’t want to watch, then go back down the mountain.” He looked at Granny and a tear slipped from his eye. “You’ve been good to me, and I thank you. And I’m sorry I’ve never been nothing but a pain in the ass.”

  “This is a coward’s way out, James,” Granny said.

  “I know. All I’ve ever been is a drunk and a drug addict. I’ve always been a coward, and now you won’t have to deal with me anymore. And now I won’t have to think about what a fool I let Ben Clancy make me out to be. I let the man help him put Darren in jail, and then I couldn’t hold up on the witness stand well enough to hold him accountable for what he did. I think about it every day, you know. All the time. I’m tired of it.”

  I watched as the pistol changed position from being pointed at my chest to being shoved into James’s mouth.

  “No!” I yelled as the pistol discharged with a deafening crack, and James Tipton’s brains and skull sprayed onto a mountain laurel bush behind him.

  CHAPTER 24

  Granny Tipton didn’t even bother with a church funeral for James. They just buried him in a small family cemetery about a quarter of a mile from her house on the mountain. A lanky, bespectacled man whom I suspected was probably a preacher said a few words, but he kept it secular and he kept it short.

  Grace came along with me to pay our respects. When it was over, we stopped by Granny’s house. Eugene and Ronnie and their families were there, along with a small group of people I didn’t know. There were fewer than twenty in all. Granny’s kitchen table was covered in food that had been dropped off by friends and neighbors and, I suspected, former business associates. There were flowers all over the house. It smelled like a rose garden.

  Grace and I were standing in the kitchen talking with Eugene when I spotted Granny in the den alone. I excused myself and walked in and stood next to her. She was looking at some framed photos on the wall, old family photos that were hanging above an upright piano.

  “That’s my husband, there,” she said, pointing to a lean, handsome man with an angular face. He was sitting in the seat of a Ford tractor. “That’s also the tractor that killed him,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Granny,” I said.

  “Oh, no, I wasn’t looking for sympathy,” she said. “Just stating a fact.”

  Granny was a brown-eyed, silver-haired woman who was solidly built, even at her age, which I guessed to be around seventy-five. There was no roundness to her shoulders; she stood straight, as though a p
iece of steel rebar ran through her spine. From everything I’d learned about her, all she’d ever known was hard work. She was a no-nonsense woman most of the time, but I’d also found her to be charming and mischievous when the mood struck her. She also had a dangerous air about her at times, and this was one of those times.

  “Are you all right?” I said. “I mean about James?”

  “The boy was so miserable he almost blew his own head off, and I had to stand there and watch it. So, no, I’m not all right about James.”

  “Forgive me. That was insensitive.”

  “Stop apologizing, Darren. It makes you sound weak. That’s what James’s real problem was. He was weak. Too much liquor. Too many drugs. Weakens the mind and the spirit.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I should broach the subject, but I decided to, anyway. “And what about Ben Clancy? How are you feeling about him?”

  I heard her take in a quick breath at the mention of Clancy’s name. She turned and looked at me. “What do you mean, Darren?”

  I’d been thinking about Clancy obsessively since James’s suicide, very much the way I’d thought about Frazier and Beane before I killed them. I couldn’t bear the thought that Clancy was getting up in the morning, eating meals, reading, listening to music, and living his life as though nothing had happened, while James was being consumed by worms.

  “James may have done too many drugs and he may have drunk too much, but you and I both know Clancy was the cause of this. I’m wondering whether we should do something about him. Maybe I should do something about him.”

  “There was a lot more going on in James’s mind than Ben Clancy,” Granny said, “but you’re right. Clancy made things much worse than they might have been. What do you propose to do about him?”

  “You know my mother was killed a little while back, right?”

  “I heard, and I’m sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral. I don’t really have an excuse. I just don’t like funerals.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I barely remember it. But the reason I ask is that I was told by the police that they had a suspect in my mother’s murder. I asked some old prison friends of mine to confirm it because they have more reliable sources than the police, and it turned out the police were right. This guy named Donnie Frazier and a friend of his, Tommy Beane, put a bunch of dynamite underneath my mother’s house and blew it up and killed her. They thought I was there, but I wasn’t. So I set things right.”

  She raised her eyebrows and said, “You set things right? How?”

  “I went to West Virginia. Those two men won’t be bothering anybody else.”

  She nodded her head slowly and looked back at the wall. “And how are you sleeping?”

  “I haven’t slept well since I went to prison. That hasn’t changed much, but even if I’d been sleeping like a baby all this time, I’d still be sleeping like a baby.”

  “You’re a complicated man, Darren,” she said.

  “You have no idea. But back to Clancy. He sent my uncle to prison for twenty years for a crime he didn’t commit. God knows how many others he convicted by lying and cheating. He set me up using James, and I wound up in prison for two years. He tried to kill James and burned his trailer to the ground. And now he’s gotten away with everything again, and James has committed suicide. Clancy is walking around free as a bird. Something just isn’t right about that. I think I’d like to fix it.”

  “And how would you go about fixing it?”

  “Leave that to me. But I would like to ask you a couple of things.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the wall. “I’m listening.”

  “Do you still have hogs in the pen by the barn? And if you do, can I bring him there?”

  She turned her face back toward mine and nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “Would you like to be there?” I asked.

  “I think I would,” she said quietly, and she turned and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER 25

  When we got back to Grace’s after the funeral, she said she needed to run a couple of errands. As soon as she left, I called Big Pappy on one of my throwaway phones.

  “I’m going to do Ben Clancy,” I said. “An old friend of mine committed suicide because of him a few days ago. He didn’t have to answer for what he did to me or for what he did to my uncle or for what he did to anyone else. It’s time for him to pay up.”

  “I knew it,” Pappy said. “You’ve developed a taste for it.”

  “Maybe. Do you have a laptop with you?”

  “Sure, I’ve got one right here in front of me.”

  “Will you look up Clancy’s home address for me? I don’t want to do it from here in case the cops get their hands on my laptop somehow.”

  “Sure, just one second.” He found the address, and I committed it to memory.

  “Do you need some help?” Pappy said.

  “I’m not sure yet. Let me do some surveillance and I’ll let you know.”

  “Be careful, brother,” he said, and we hung up.

  I put the throwaway back in my closet and went back into the kitchen. I checked my regular cell and noticed there was a call from Katie. She’d left me a voice mail that said she needed to talk to me about Sean, that it was important, and asked me to call her back.

  “Can we meet somewhere?” she said when I got her on the phone.

  “When?”

  “Now? I’m off work today. Are you working?”

  “Had to go to a funeral.”

  “Are you going to be able to pay your child support?”

  I felt heat rising in my chest. Money. With Katie, it was always about money.

  “I can pay my child support, Katie. What do you want to talk about?”

  “I’d rather talk in person. How about we meet at Dead End BBQ in an hour? You know the place, right?”

  “I know the place. I’ll see you there.”

  I called Grace and told her Katie wanted to meet, and I drove to the restaurant an hour later and sat in a corner in the bar. It was midafternoon, and there were fewer than ten people in the dining area. Katie walked in, wearing casual clothing—jeans and a simple, pink, button-down blouse, but I knew it was all designer and expensive. And she made everything she wore look even better than the designer intended. She could easily have been a fashion runway model. She was five feet eleven inches tall—two inches taller than I was—and had a lean, athletic build. Her sandy-blonde hair was long and wavy, her face perfectly structured, and her eyes emerald green. I’d always felt like she was far too good-looking for me, but when we’d been in college we’d had a certain sexual chemistry that had kept us together for a good while, and then Sean came along. I’d discovered she was having an affair with an older man just before I was arrested and sent off to prison, and she’d wasted no time divorcing me.

  I said hello, and she sat down. She ordered a salad and a glass of water, and I ordered a beer.

  “Drinking a lot these days, are we?” she said.

  I was hoping the conversation would at least be civil, but that wasn’t apparently in the cards. “Drinking very rarely, actually. But then I’m not around you very often.”

  She snorted in that snotty little way of hers. “There’s no point in making small talk with you because I just don’t like you. But I thought I should tell you in person. Leonard and I are getting married.”

  Leonard was Leonard Bright, a man from Lexington who was fifteen years older than Katie and the man she’d been having an affair with prior to my arrest and conviction.

  “Congratulations,” I said, “but I fail to see why you felt the need to tell me that in person.”

  “Leonard has sold his Mercedes dealership and his development company,” Katie said. “We’ll be moving to Honolulu, Hawaii, in a month.”

  It took me a second to process the information. Hawaii? Thousands of miles and half a Pacific Ocean away? The waiter set my beer and her salad on the table as I pondered the implications of what she’d ju
st said.

  “What about Sean?” I said stupidly.

  “What do you mean, what about Sean? He’s coming with us.”

  “You can’t take my son and pack up and move to Hawaii,” I said. “I won’t let you.”

  “Why, Darren? You rarely spend time with him, and when you do, you’re distracted, and from what he says, you pretty much dump him on Grace.”

  “That isn’t . . . he didn’t—”

  “Yes, he did. Besides, I’ve already talked to my lawyer about it. There isn’t anything you can do. It’ll be in Sean’s best interests. He’ll be going to the Punahou School. It’s one of the best private schools in the world. When we first started talking about this last year, I called the school and asked about admission. His test scores are off the charts, his teachers all wrote him glowing recommendations, and he did great in the interview. He’s in, starting in January.”

  I knew they’d been to Hawaii on vacation, but Sean hadn’t said anything to me about interviewing at a school. He hadn’t said a word to me about Katie considering a move to Honolulu.

  “He’ll have opportunities that he would never have here, Darren. Don’t be selfish about this.”

  “Did you tell him to hide this from me?”

  “I told him there wasn’t any reason to upset you until we were certain it was going to happen. Now that we’re certain, I’m telling you in person.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a document. She shoved it across the table at me. “This is the written notice that’s required by law. You have thirty days to file a petition in court if you want to oppose, but I hope you won’t waste your time or money, because you’ll lose.”

  “But he won’t be with his father. He needs me. I need him.”

  “He wasn’t with his father when you were in jail. And from what I’m hearing, you might be on your way back. You’re a suspect in a double murder. How do you think the judge who decides whether Sean can go—if you try to stop me—will feel about that?”

  “Who told you I’m a suspect in a double murder?”

  “A couple of cops. Rule and Kingman? I believe you know them. Very nice people. They came and talked to me, just wanted to know if maybe you’d let something slip to Sean or to me. I was surprised when you didn’t give me more trouble when I kept Sean in Gatlinburg that weekend. Now I know why. You went off to West Virginia and killed the two men who killed your mother.”