by Scott Pratt
“I’m not going back to jail, Pap,” I said. “I’ve always told you that. They’ll have to kill me before they get me back inside.”
“To each his own,” Pappy said. “Me? I’m not interested in either. I’m not ready to die, and I’m not ready to go back to prison.”
“What’s going on?” I said.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “Well, that isn’t true. It’s your fault and it’s my fault. I used a guy who I didn’t know had become a drug addict, and you left a damned eyewitness alive. I told you you should have killed that dude who owned the bar. He’s apparently telling the cops he can identify you now. The guy I used was too damned lazy or too messed up on drugs to do the job himself, so he enlisted an old buddy of his. But it turns out that guy wasn’t healthy enough to do what we needed done so he sent his son-in-law to get the information we needed. The son-in-law did a pretty good job of getting what we needed, but he also likes to drink, and he ran his mouth to a guy up there who turns out to be a paid informant for the West Virginia State Police. It’s a problem, Darren. We have to fix it.”
I was right. He’d used a bunch of dumbasses, and now he wanted me to help him fix it.
“How?” I said.
“We’re going to have to make some people keep their mouths shut.”
“Are you talking intimidation or something more serious?”
“At this point, I think the cop has too much leverage for us to go the intimidation route. I think we’re going to have to go all Michael Corleone on them.”
Michael Corleone? I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first, and then I remembered The Godfather. At the end of the first movie in the trilogy, Michael Corleone, who had taken over his father’s business interests, ordered the assassinations of all the rival New York dons, along with a Las Vegas casino owner named Moe Greene, a double-crossing Corleone family member named Tessio, and his own brother-in-law. All of the killings occurred on the same day, while Michael was attending a christening for his niece.
“How many are we talking about?” I said.
“Five. The bartender, my guy in Charleston, some redneck biker named Skidmore and his son-in-law, Jimmy Baker, and the paid rat. His name is Lester Routh. And before you get your panties in a wad, I’m going to do four of them myself. All I want you to do is take care of the bar owner.”
“Do you have a time frame in mind?” I said.
“We need to do it soon. I don’t want this West Virginia cop gaining any more momentum. We just go up there, kill every damned one of his witnesses and informants, and he has no case.”
“He’ll come after us that much harder if we kill his witnesses,” I said. “And besides, they aren’t really witnesses. None of them saw a damned thing. I was wearing a disguise when the bar owner saw me and talked to me. Even if I wound up getting arrested, they couldn’t convict me.”
“I’ll bet you thought the same thing when they arrested you for the murder you didn’t commit,” Pappy said.
“You’re right about that,” I said reluctantly. “I have to give you that one.”
“Do you really want to take a chance on going to jail again? Do you want to sit in some county jail in West Virginia for a year while they get their act together and try you? You know you won’t get a bond if they arrest you for two murders, and you know it’ll take them close to a year to get you to trial. Do you really want to take a chance on that happening? I don’t, not for a single second.”
I pulled my car into the parking lot of an apartment complex and sat there in silence for a few seconds. If Pappy was right about the cop closing in—and I suspected he was—then I had a serious decision to make. Did I let the investigation play out and take a chance on getting arrested again? Or did I do as Pappy was suggesting and take out the bar owner while he took care of the rest of the witnesses? It certainly wasn’t unheard of or unprecedented. The Mafia, drug cartels, gangs—they’d all done it successfully at one time or another.
“Get some kind of plan together and call me in a couple of days,” I said. “I’ll be thinking about some things myself in the meantime.”
“So you’re good with it? You’ll take care of your end?”
“I’m not going back to jail. I’ll do what I have to do.”
CHAPTER 48
Katherine called me around four in the afternoon and I picked her up at six. We went to one of the older restaurants in town, the Copper Cellar on Kingston Pike. She was wearing red and green and was smiling when she climbed into the car. She was so young, so beautiful, and so positive that I found her intoxicating.
“Tell me about Darren Street,” she said after we got settled in at the restaurant.
“Not much to tell,” I said.
“Not true, and you know it. Where did you grow up?”
“Here. In Knoxville. I went to Farragut and then to UT and then to law school at UT. Same thing you’re going to do.”
“I know about your mother, and again, I’m so sorry. What about your father?”
“I don’t think you want to know about my father,” I said.
“I do,” she said. “I want to get to know you. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but if you do, I’d like to hear it. I’m genuinely interested.”
“My father was a drunk,” I said. “He beat me and my mother on a regular basis until I got old enough to put a stop to it.”
“You put a stop to it?” Katherine said. “How?”
“It was the night before Thanksgiving when I was thirteen years old. He was drunker than hell. He always wanted spaghetti the night before Thanksgiving, so that’s what my mother made for him. He started cursing her and threw some of it in her face. Then he reached down and started unbuckling his belt, which meant he was going to start beating her with it. I knew it was coming because of the way he’d been acting that week, so I’d stashed an aluminum baseball bat near the refrigerator in the kitchen. When he started taking off the belt, I told him to stop, that he wasn’t going to be hitting anyone in our house ever again. He turned his attention to me, which is what I wanted, and I grabbed that bat and I broke several of his ribs with it. Then I took his belt away from him and beat him senseless. I wound up dragging him through the house, out the front door, and down the porch steps into the yard. I told him to leave and to never come back. I told him if I ever saw his face around there again I’d kill him, and I meant it. So after a little while, he crawled out to the garage in back, got in his car, and left. He never even came back to get his clothes or anything else. I guess he moved in with his girlfriend; I didn’t really care. A couple of years after that, he got drunk and ran his car into a tree. And that was the end of Billy Street. I didn’t even go his funeral.”
“I’m sorry, Darren,” she said. “It was incredibly selfish of me to ask you to talk about that, to bring up that kind of memory and that kind of pain. It must have been awful. And here we are, together on Christmas, about to enjoy a meal, and I ask you to talk about something so terrible. I truly am sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said as the waiter approached and took our drink orders. Katherine asked for red wine; I ordered a beer. “It was a long time ago, and I don’t regret what I did.”
“But you have to regret that your father was an abusive drunk,” she said.
“I don’t think about him, and I try not to regret anything. If I spent my time dwelling on things I’ve done or things that have happened to me during my life, I’d be institutionalized by now or I would have offed myself.”
“Speaking of things that have happened to you, did Ben Clancy really frame you for murder?”
“He did, and he did it very effectively. I have to give him credit. He was very good at being a very bad man.”
“So you did two years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. And then you escaped in a helicopter, of all things, made your way back here, and got yourself exonerated. That was quite a story. I was finishing up my undergrad work while all that was going on. It wa
s fascinating, and every time I saw your picture in the paper or some kind of footage on the news, I always thought, ‘Wow, that guy is cute. I’d like to get to know him.’”
“Well, here we are,” I said. “Getting to know each other, although all we’ve talked about is me so far. How about a little quid pro quo?”
The waiter appeared again, and we ordered dinner. Katherine asked for some spinach artichoke dip as an appetizer and ordered a seafood salad as an entrée. I ordered grilled teriyaki chicken.
“You’re far more interesting than I am,” she said when the waiter left. “Do you mind telling me about some of your experiences in prison?”
“Talking about prison is far worse than talking about my father. I’d just as soon skip it if it’s okay with you.”
“It’s fine,” she said, her eyes sparkling in the candlelight.
“Listen, Katherine,” I said, “before this goes any further, there are some things you should know. Did you hear about two men getting killed in West Virginia who were suspected of bombing my mother’s house?”
She nodded. “Of course. I’m a criminal justice major. I pay attention to things like that. It was in the newspaper.”
“I’m the prime suspect in those murders,” I said. “The police think I did it. They also think I had something to do with Ben Clancy’s disappearance.”
She shoved her fork around in her salad and looked down. “Should I even ask you whether you had anything to do with those things?”
“Would it matter to you one way or the other?”
She looked up at me with those incredible sapphire eyes and said, “No, after everything you’ve been through, I don’t think it would. After everything you’ve been through, I can’t believe you’re still able to function.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, “but just to put your mind at ease, I didn’t have anything to do with any murders anywhere. I have no idea what happened to Clancy, and I didn’t go to West Virginia and kill anyone.”
“Have the police questioned you?” she said.
“I won’t let them. I’m a lawyer. I know my rights. And besides, I was railroaded into prison by the FBI and a corrupt prosecutor once. I’m not going to give them a chance to do it again.”
“Good for you,” she said. “What are your plans after dinner?”
“I don’t really have any. I figured I’d drop you off and go back to the motel. I need to find a place tomorrow. I don’t like sleeping at the motel. I don’t like anything about it, to tell you the truth.”
“I don’t have any plans, either,” she said. “Would you consider coming to my apartment and keeping me company for a little while?”
“Sure,” I said, “I’d like that.” I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was feeling a little adventurous.
“If things go well,” she said, “maybe you won’t have to sleep at the motel. Maybe we can even exchange gifts.”
CHAPTER 49
I can only describe Christmas night with Katherine as ethereal. My entire plan of protecting myself from trauma by refusing to feel was shot to hell. Katherine was perfect in a way I’d never, ever experienced. Everything with her was natural and easy, and when I left the next morning, all I could think about was that I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay with her; I wanted to drink her in, to look at her, to smile with her, to laugh, to touch her. I hadn’t felt that way about anyone or anything in my entire life. I had no idea I was even capable of it.
Even with Grace, whom I thought I loved, it was different. I’d thought about Grace several times over the past few days, and I’d begun to wonder if perhaps she might have been one of the triggers Dr. Benton had spoken to me about during my one and only abbreviated therapy session at her house. Grace had been my lawyer through one of the worst periods of my life. Even though she had been an important part of getting me out of prison and getting the murder charge against me dismissed, looking at her each and every day had to remind me of those terrible times. I was beginning to believe that Grace was both a blessing and a curse, and even if my mother hadn’t been killed, we would never have made it. Eventually, I would have pushed her away because she was—unintentionally, of course—a constant reminder of the two years when my life spiraled completely out of control, two years during which I’d endured being beaten, strip-searched, dieseled, stabbed, and constantly humiliated by people who had authority over me because I was a prisoner.
Katherine was an incredible, passionate lover, and she put me at ease. After we made love a couple of times, I actually slept for several hours without having a nightmare. That was something that usually happened only if I drank myself into a stupor.
I woke up at five thirty and slipped out of bed. Part of me wanted to awaken Katherine and drink her in again, but another part of me was telling me to leave, that I needed to slow down. I got dressed in the dark and walked quietly out the door as Katherine slept.
As I drove along toward the motel, I began to wonder whether maybe I should do as Laura Benton had suggested—start over. I could shut down my law practice, and get some menial job while I went to school to become something besides a lawyer. I still had the problem in West Virginia I had to address, but once I got past that, maybe, just maybe, I could start down the road to some kind of normal life with Katherine. I knew it was ridiculous to be thinking in those terms so early in the relationship, but I simply couldn’t help it—I couldn’t get her out of my mind. And the thoughts I was thinking were optimistic. They were about the future and what it might hold for Katherine and me. They were positive. It was a 180-degree turn from the thoughts I’d been having since I got out of prison, since I’d gone back to practicing law, since my mom had been killed, and since I’d done what I’d done in West Virginia.
Less than ten minutes after I left her place, I got a text from Katherine. It said, Please tell me you went to get us some breakfast and you’re coming back.
I pulled into a parking lot and wrote back: Gotta find a place today. See you tonight?
She wrote: Can’t wait that long. Can I help you look?
Don’t see why not, I wrote. Let me take a quick shower and I’ll call you.
Need someone to scrub your back? was the reply.
You’re killing me, I wrote. I’ll call you as soon as I’m ready to go.
I drove to the motel and took a shower. As soon as I got out, my burner phone, which was lying on the nightstand next to my regular cell, began to ring.
“What’s up, Pappy?” I asked.
“We’re going to have to step it up in West Virginia,” he said. “I just got a call from my guy Fairchild. He got popped Christmas Eve with an ounce of coke on him. That state trooper, Grimes, set him up. Then Grimes came into his cell yesterday and tried to get him to roll on us again. He said he didn’t tell the cop anything, so the cop said he was going to put the word out that Fairchild had ratted us out and made a deal. He figured Fairchild would be so scared of us that he’d roll, but Fairchild says he didn’t. He says if I hear he’s ratted us out, it’s a lie. He’s going to eat the charge and go back to prison if he has to.”
“Was he out? He didn’t call you from a phone at the jail, did he?”
“No, a magistrate set him a bond after Grimes left and his dad paid the bondsman. He said it took them until after midnight to process him out and he called me first thing this morning.”
“Do you believe what he said about eating the charge and going back to prison?” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. He’s too much of a risk either way now. He might have been recording the call, but I didn’t say anything they could use against me. The fact that the magistrate set a bond on Christmas makes me suspicious, though. We need to go up there now.”
“Today?” I said. I wondered to myself what day it was. Wednesday. It was the day after Christmas, and murder was in the air.
“No sense in putting it off. You know your guy will be at his bar tonight. People get out and drink at Christmas. They get their fill of be
ing around their families, and they head out to the bars. Catch him when he comes out to his car at closing and take him out. Do you have a clean gun?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I have something.”
“Good. I’ll take care of my end.”
“You don’t need to kill anybody,” I said. “If I take out their only eyewitness, it’s over. All they’d have left to use in court is three rednecks: your boy Fairchild, who’s a drug addict, the guy Skidmore, and his stepson. The informant won’t be able to testify because he didn’t see or hear anything from either of us. All of his information is hearsay, stuff he heard from Baker. The only thing the state could prove is that Baker asked around about Frazier, found out about Beane, and then passed the information along to Skidmore. Skidmore could say he passed it along to Fairchild, and Fairchild could say he passed it to you. You didn’t tell him I was going to go up there and kill those guys, did you?”
“I didn’t tell him shit. I just asked him to find out if Frazier was bragging about doing a bombing in Tennessee.”
“So they can’t prove anything. Just let me go up there and take care of my guy and that should be the end of it.”
“I’m doing Fairchild and I’m doing the informant. I hate rats, Darren. Do you know how many guys I ran off the yard in prison because I found out they’d ratted people out to the feds or the cops? Dozens of them. They’re the scum of the earth. And Fairchild is a loose cannon, man. I can’t have him walking around anymore. The rat in Cowen? Lester Routh? I’m going to kill him just on principle. I might wait awhile, but he has to go. The other two rednecks, Skidmore and Baker, I’ll let them be if it makes you feel better.”
“I just think you’re taking an unnecessary risk,” I said.
“Then we’re going to agree to disagree,” he said. “How soon can you get up there?”
“Probably be best if I leave as soon as possible. Can you get me a car so I can leave mine here at the motel? They check every night and list the license plate numbers of the cars in the lot. I want mine to be here.”