by Scott Pratt
About an hour after I got back to the room, there was a loud knock on the door. I went and looked through the peephole. Detectives Dawn Rule and Lawrence Kingman were standing outside.
“What do you want?” I said through the door.
“Need to talk to you,” Rule’s voice said.
“Not in the mood right now.”
“Open the damned door, Street,” Kingman said.
“Do you have a warrant?” I said.
“There was a bloodbath in Charleston, West Virginia, this morning. Thought you might like to hear about it.”
“Don’t know anybody in Charleston,” I said.
“You know Michael Donovan,” she said. “We think he’s responsible.”
I opened the door but didn’t invite them in. “As you can see, I’m right here, so I couldn’t have had anything to do with anything that happened in Charleston, West Virginia,” I said. “And by the way, how in the hell did you find me?”
“We’ve been keeping an eye on you,” Rule said. “We tend to do that with people who are suspected of committing multiple murders.”
I’d been careful. There was no way they’d been following me. I supposed they could have triangulated my cell phone signal, but that would have required them to get a subpoena from the phone company, and that would have required approval from a judge. I didn’t believe they had enough evidence against me to go to a judge.
“You’re lying,” I said. “I’ll get to the bottom of how you found me eventually, and I’ll sue your asses.”
“Mind if we come in and take a look around?” Kingman said.
“There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell you’re coming in this room without a warrant,” I said.
“Your buddy Big Pappy Donovan killed three people in Charleston a few hours ago,” Rule said.
“First of all, he isn’t my buddy. He was the shot caller on my yard in prison and I helped him with his appeal. Haven’t seen or heard from him since I got out. Secondly, if he killed anybody, I don’t know a thing about it.”
“Heard the name Rex Fairchild?” Rule said.
“I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. Why don’t you guys just get the hell out of here and leave me alone?”
“Fairchild is dead, along with his girlfriend. Donovan killed them at Fairchild’s house. Shot Fairchild’s dog, too, but the dog lived through it. The dog bit him, though, and Donovan’s blood is in the house. Donovan didn’t know Fairchild’s girlfriend had a teenage daughter. She was in the laundry room during the shooting, but she came out when Donovan went out the front door, and she saw him walk across the porch, down the steps, and get into his car. She identified him from photos the Charleston police showed her. They’ll match his DNA up soon, and he’ll be toast. Fairchild’s girlfriend got a shot off from a shotgun. We don’t know if she hit him, but he might be wounded. Oh, and just for good measure, Donovan also killed Fairchild’s brother-in-law, who just happened to be filling in for Fairchild at his car lot in Charleston. Shot them all with a nine-millimeter, same caliber gun that was used on Tommy Frazier and Tommy Beane in Cowen a while back.”
“Why are you telling me this? Since you’re standing here looking at me, it’s obvious I didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“Because this could be a chance for you to help yourself out. Help us find Donovan, and maybe we help the West Virginia State Police pin the killings in Cowen on him, too. Maybe we forget what you did up there and what you did to Ben Clancy. I mean, we could certainly understand why you’d want to kill the men who bombed your mother’s house and why you’d want to get even with a prosecutor who framed you for murder.”
I was half-drunk, which was why I’d opened the door in the first place, but I wasn’t so drunk that I’d become stupid. This was a classic cop trick. A lie to try to get me to make admissions they would later use against me.
“I haven’t done anything to anybody,” I said. “I’ve told you that before, and I’ll tell you again and again. All you’re ever going to hear from me is that I didn’t have anything to do with any of the things you’re talking about. And just out of curiosity, what is your theory of the motive Pappy Donovan would have to kill Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane?”
“Loyalty to the man who got him out of prison,” Kingman said. “They killed your mother; he did you a favor and got some revenge for you.”
“You have absolutely no proof of any of this, of course,” I said.
“We will if you tell us he did it.”
“Not gonna happen,” I said. “Not now, not ever.”
“Where is he?” Kingman said. “You stay in touch with him, don’t you?”
I slammed the door in their faces, turned around, and walked over and sat on the bed. They pounded on the door and yelled for a little while longer, but eventually, they went away.
Once they were gone, I picked up one of my burner phones and dialed Pappy’s number.
“What the fuck do you want?” he barked.
“The cops have already been here. They know it was you who did the killings in Charleston. Three? You had to kill three? What’s the matter with you, man? Have you gone insane? They said you left blood there. Is that true?”
“Fucking dog, man, and Fairchild’s bitch girlfriend blew part of my right ear off. How do they know it was me?”
“Fairchild’s girlfriend had a teenage daughter who was there. I guess you didn’t see her, but she saw you. She identified you from photos.”
“Shit!” Pappy yelled.
“I told you not to go. If you’re headed toward Cowen, I guarantee they’ll be waiting for you.”
“What did you tell them?” he said.
“I told them I haven’t seen you since prison. And then I told them to get the hell out of here.”
“It’s almost over,” Pappy said. “I decided not to go to Cowen. I’ve patched myself up at my place in Cincinnati. I’m going to get some rest, and then I’m heading to Knoxville.”
His tone sounded ominous.
“You’re coming after me?”
Some part of me knew this was inevitable after I’d refused to do the bartender in Cowen. You just didn’t say no to Big Pappy Donovan. It was an insult, a sign of disrespect, and I knew the penalty for disrespect could be death.
“You’re a smart guy.”
“What the hell, Pappy? Why me?”
“You’re the one that got me into this in the first place. I helped you out, did you a huge favor, and you repay me by dragging me into a pile of shit. If you’d killed the bartender like you should have, we would have been okay, but you didn’t, so I wound up getting shot and bit by a dog at Fairchild’s place. They’re going to match up my blood through DNA, and then they’re going to come after me. But before they do, I’m going to take care of the man that got me into this.”
“You didn’t have to do a thing. You didn’t have to help me, and you damned sure didn’t have to go to Charleston. I told you not to. You made your own choices.”
“And you made yours. You’re about to find out that when you deal with the devil, you pay the consequences.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I could hear the resolve in his voice. He was coming. I was a little afraid, but I knew I wouldn’t back down from him. I’d been in dangerous situations before, had been afraid, and had found the courage to do what I had to do. “Are we going to do this like men, or are you going to sneak up and bushwhack me like some bitch?”
“Did you just call me a bitch?” Calling a man a bitch was another unforgivable insult in prison.
“I asked you a question. What’s it going to be? I think I’ve earned enough respect for you to tell me when you’re coming. All I’m asking for is a fighting chance.”
“Tomorrow,” Pappy said. “You pick the time and the place. I’ll even let you pick the weapons. Guns or knives?”
“Are you serious? You think I’m going to do some kind of O.K. Corral shootout with you?”
�
�You can rat me out and call the cops. You can try to set me up and have an army of police waiting. Or you can be a man and live up to the consequences of the choices you’ve made. And that means me and you, a fight to the death. Old school. A duel. Just the two of us. No seconds, no doctors. I’ve always thought I was born way too late, anyway.”
He was like a runaway train headed straight for me, and there was nothing I could do to derail him. The tone in his voice told me he’d crossed over the edge into a psychopathic state. I had, unfortunately, visited that same state of mind myself. There was no reasoning with him at this point. I could have easily called the police, and they would have set up an ambush. They would have either arrested him or killed him. I suspected they would have killed him because he would have started shooting as soon as he smelled a cop. And even in my semidrunken state—I’d sobered up considerably, given the content of the conversation—I knew part of what he was saying was right. I’d known that he was a killer when I called him, the day Dawn Rule and Lawrence Kingman first told me about Donnie Frazier. I’d known he’d killed his girlfriend and her lover, and probably more. I’d known he was a drug dealer on a large scale. I’d known I was throwing my lot in with a dangerous and perhaps even psychotic individual. Now that things had blown up, was I going to turn tail and head to the police? Or was I, as he said, going to be a man and live up to the consequences of the choices I’d made?
“There’s a place outside of Petros,” I said. “It’s where I went to practice shooting before I killed Frazier and Beane. It’s in the middle of nowhere. We can do it there. I’ll text you directions. It isn’t hard to find the gravel road that leads to the range. Once you get on the road, you drive exactly one and one-tenth of a mile. You’ll top a rise, and the range will be on your left.”
“Time?” Pappy said.
“If we’re going all old school, we might as well do it tomorrow at dawn. I’m assuming you can get here by then.”
“I’ll be early. Weapon?”
He was a massive, tremendously strong man, and he probably had some experience with knives. I had none. I was strong, too, but nothing like him. I was probably quicker than he was, but the only way to cut him with a knife would be to get close to him, and if I got close to him, he might get his hands on me. If he did that, I knew it would be over.
“Pistols,” I said. “No rifles, no assault weapons, just pistols.”
“Sounds perfect,” Pappy said. “We do it just like they did back in the day. We start with our backs to each other. We walk five paces, we turn, we aim the pistols in the air, we count to ten, and then we lower them and start shooting.”
Five paces each would put us about thirty feet from each other. Ten yards. He wouldn’t miss from that distance, and I hoped I wouldn’t, either. I’d become very proficient with the 0.22, but I wasn’t sure how I’d do when I was looking down the barrel of a gun. He’d already told me he was wounded, though, and maybe, just maybe, he would have lost enough blood to give me some small advantage. Maybe his hands would be shaky. Maybe his vision would be blurred just a bit.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you at dawn.”
“There will be no quarter given,” he said.
“None expected,” I said, and I disconnected the call.
CHAPTER 56
Will Grimes looked around the mobile home. He was standing about five feet from where Rex Fairchild had been shot. The bodies had already been removed, and the Charleston Police Department’s forensics examiners were still going over the place. There was an occasional pop and flash as the investigators took photographs. Sergeant Eric Young, the officer who had helped Grimes squeeze Rex Fairchild, was standing next to him.
“I assume the crusty coroner has already been here,” Grimes said.
“Yeah,” Young said. “He’s a piece of work.”
“What was his opinion?”
“He said they’re dead. Trauma caused by gunshot wounds.”
“He’s always so insightful,” Grimes said. “How’d you find them?” He’d received a call from Young at around eleven-thirty that morning and had driven back down from Elkins.
“Somebody went into the car lot and found the brother-in-law and called 9-1-1. Around the same time, Fairchild’s girlfriend’s daughter called dispatch. They found Fairchild on the couch right there. He’d taken two in the chest and one in the head. The girlfriend was over there in the hall. Same gunshot wounds, two in the chest and one in the head. He shot their Rottweiler, too, but not before the dog took a chunk out of him. We’ve got blood samples from the carpet that will confirm who the shooter was.”
“Dog dead?”
Young shook his head. “The dog was the only one that made it, outside of the daughter and the shooter,” he said. “The dog took one to the chest, but from what I’ve heard, he’ll live. The girlfriend also got off a shot from a shotgun. Forensics picked some pieces of what they think is an ear out of the wall right there. We should have plenty of DNA.”
“So Big Pappy Donovan is wounded and on the loose. He won’t know about the daughter, so he won’t know we’re already onto him. I assume you’ve put out an APB on him?”
“We have, but the girl couldn’t tell us much about the car. Just that she thought it was silver and small. We’re checking around the car lot to see if we can find it on some security camera footage.”
“Did you get anything out of Fairchild yesterday when you talked to him at the jail?” Young said.
“Nothing. He was terrified of Donovan. I guess he had a good reason to be.”
“Does this shut down your case against the lawyer?”
“Didn’t have much of one in the first place. I haven’t been able to get the district attorney to take it to a grand jury. Fairchild was my only direct link to Big Pappy Donovan, and Donovan is the only link to the lawyer. So I guess this pretty much shuts me down.”
“Do you think this Donovan is finished, or do you think he’ll go after your other witnesses?”
“I hope he comes after them,” Grimes said, “because I’ll sure be waiting.”
“He’d be stupid to come after anybody else,” Young said. “If that’s his blood on the floor, my guess is he’ll take off. He’ll try to get so deep in the weeds nobody will ever find him.”
“Maybe,” Grimes said, “or maybe the snakes are starting to eat each other. Wouldn’t surprise me to see the lawyer turn up dead next.”
“That’d be just fine with me,” Young said. “You won’t see me shedding any tears over a dead lawyer.”
Grimes shrugged his shoulders.
“Maybe they’ll kill each other,” he said. “Make the world a better place.”
CHAPTER 57
After I hung up the phone, I laid back on the bed and closed my eyes. So much had happened in such a short time, and now it was coming to what I knew would be a violent and terrible conclusion. One of us would not walk away from the clearing in the mountains near Petros. If I died there, I knew Pappy would dispose of my body, and no one would ever know what became of me. If I somehow managed to kill him and survive, I knew where I’d take him; I just didn’t know how I’d get him there. It wouldn’t be as though I could just throw him into the trunk of my car.
The worst thought that struck me, though, was that if I died, how few people would really mourn the loss. My mother was gone, my son was half a world away, my ex-wife hated me, Grace had kicked me out, and I’d distanced myself from nearly everyone I knew. I had no close friends in the legal community, no close friends at all, really. Bob Ridge and I hadn’t spoken since my mother’s death. I knew, as a cop, that he probably had to stay at arm’s length because I was a suspect in the West Virginia murders and the disappearance of Ben Clancy. But even if he’d reached out to me, I would have found a reason to avoid him. The irony of all that had happened was that my best friend was a psychopathic killer, and now, at dawn the next morning, I would meet him in a remote patch of wilderness and try to kill him before he killed me.
At the thought of shooting Pappy to death, my eyes flew open and I got up from the bed. I walked outside, crossed the street, and bought a thirty-two-ounce bottle of water from a convenience store. If I was going to be in a fight for my life in the morning, I didn’t want to have a hangover. On my way back to the room, I stopped by my car and retrieved a small gun-cleaning kit from the trunk. I went back inside and unscrewed the cover of the air vent in the bathroom and took out the pistol. I left the silencer, the box, and two clips of ammunition inside the air vent and replaced the cover. I walked to the desk near the bed, laid out some towels, and began obsessively cleaning and oiling the pistol. I always cleaned and oiled it after I shot it, but I wanted to make absolutely certain it was in pristine condition. I used a product called M Pro 7. It had no odor, so I wasn’t worried about using it in the room. That turned out to be a good thing, because just as I’d finished up and reassembled the pistol, there was a soft knock at the door.
My first thought was that it was Pappy. He could have been lying about being in Cincinnati. He could have driven to Knoxville, but how could he have found me? There was simply no way he could have known where I was staying. I thought back on our conversations over the past few days. Had I told him where I was? No, I hadn’t. Maybe the person who delivered the car to the Flying J for Pappy was following me and knew where I was staying. I ran into the bathroom, unscrewed the vent cover again, grabbed a clip of ammunition, and slid it into the pistol. I set the silencer and the box on the bathroom vanity, popped a round into the chamber, and went back into the room.
Instead of going to the door, I went to the window and pulled back the blinds. Standing outside the door in a long, brown leather coat was Katherine Davis. I had told her where I was staying, although I hadn’t told her which room I was in. But my car was parked right in front of the room. I sighed and walked to the door.