“The court will be hearing our motion to disqualify the public defender from representing both twins later this week,” Hargrave said. “After that, we should be able to make a deal, get past this thing.”
The sheriff glanced at Bobby and Tasha and cleared his throat and said, “It might not hurt to follow up on the Monroe angle. It sounded like Wayne Tatum wanted to finger that joker.” Bobby caught Hargrave and the Reverend’s glare. “Now I know there was no other DNA found—no evidence Monroe was there that night. But if there’s any chance he was involved, we need to question him.”
Carter shot a wide-eyed look to the DA. “I thought y’all were ready to wrap this up in a ribbon?”
Hargrave did not move his angry eyes from Seastrunk. “We are. Sheriff, the investigation’s over. Leave the rest to the prosecutors.”
Bobby looked at Tasha. She did not return his gaze and instead stared at the floor. Then he said, “Look. We need to bring in Monroe, and we need to talk to Robert Duchamp. I have it on good authority Monroe works for him.”
They all stared; the sheriff seemed close to snarling—like an old dog asserting dominance over a rambunctious pup.
Hargrave said, “Deputy, I doubt that’s true. I speak to Congressman Duchamp daily—we go way back. If he knew anything relevant to our investigation, he’d tell me. He’s as eager to see it solved as anyone. Beyond the justice issue, the longer this situation drags out, the darker the tarnish on this community’s reputation. And anyway, in all my years, I’ve seen no evidence that the Congressman has had any contact with that degenerate.”
Bobby flushed. “Wouldn’t hurt to ask, is all.”
“Sure. I’ll do that, son.”
Chapter 25
Mose Carter said grace over the simple supper his wife served—ham sandwiches, potato chips, and leftover beans with Hadassah’s homemade chow-chow on the side. Just the two of them tonight, like most nights.
“I worry over that niece of ours, Hash.”
“I know you do, hon. But you mustn’t. She’s doing well, and we are blessed she chose to come home. So few of the young people do these days.”
“Oh, I know it—and none of our own brood. It’s just, if she was going to move back here, I wish she’d keep better company.”
“Are you referring to her boss, dear?”
“Hmm-mm.” Mose trailed off and looked at his plate and Hadassah took another spoonful of beans from the from the white casserole dish between them. Then the Reverend took a big bite of the thick ham steak on white bread. He dabbed a dollop of mayonnaise from his lip with a paper napkin, and he said, “He’s in Duchamp’s back pocket, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
“You need more tea?”
“No, dear.”
Hadassah poured a glass for herself from the pitcher. Then she said, “I thought you said you were happy with the district attorney’s prosecution of the Bordelon case.”
“Oh, he’s wrapping it up. But I don’t trust him, don’t trust his motives. And I don’t like our niece hanging her future on the likes of him and Duchamp.” He took a sip and leveled his gaze at his wife. “As opposed to our own people.”
“Mm-mm-mm.” Hadassah did not look up from her meal.
“She’s a Republican, you know.”
“Lawsey, what her father must think. But she’s got to follow her own conscience.”
“I don’t think conscience has anything to do with it.”
They shared the rest of their meal in silence. And as Hadassah began clearing the table, Mose went to his library and shut his door prepare for the coming Sunday, and as he turned on his desk lamp he glanced out the window across his broad front lawn and saw, without paying it any mind, a battered black pickup truck rolling down the street and then slowing and then stopping at the curb before his home. He turned off the lamp to cut the glare and in the seconds before the explosion that sent shards to lacerate his old and tired skin, he could see in the glow of the street light a demonic figure in that truck, too emaciated for this life.
Chapter 26
Jimmy Lee rolled his head toward Robert Duchamp’s voice without raising it from the driver’s side headrest. He opened eyes sunken and hollow eyes and around the big black pupils they were yellow and streaked with red like blood in an egg yolk. He smiled and his teeth were brown and rotting and Duchamp could see his grotesque pink tongue peeking through a gap where one had recently gone missing.
“Christ, son, you look like death.”
Duchamp had told Jimmy Lee they would meet in the usual place, to discuss the payment, to receive the product. He drove the two hundred miles east from Dallas non-stop in the banged up old vehicle he always referred to as his hunting truck, leaving the Hummer and the European sedans and the vintage Mustang behind in the six-car garage. He exited the interstate at the county seat’s only exit but turned away from the main town on the four-lane state highway up to where it crossed a two-lane farm-to-market road, blinking lights at the intersection, red for the two lanes road, yellow for the four. A trailer park and a few battered frame houses, a car wash and a filling station, a boarded up defunct Dairy Queen—an unincorporated hamlet so dead and impoverished and so bereft of charm that no federal grant could save it, lacking even a quaint and shuttered storefront awaiting an urban retiree with a pension or a portfolio to purchase and renovate and in which to open a knick-knack shop to attract other retirees seeking solace in the pines. Just a pathetic and ugly crossroads on the way to capped wells and an idle refinery, neglected and lonesome since the last oil boom.
Duchamp had parked on the cracked asphalt of the Dairy Queen parking lot as always, arriving just past dusk, almost turning back at the sight of the plain Chevrolet but then recognizing Jimmy Lee in the driver’s seat. He flashed his headlights but the boy didn’t budge, so he broke from their normal protocol and left his truck. He donned a pair of black leather gloves. He knocked on the car’s window and Jimmy Lee stirred and grinned and then Duchamp walked around to the passenger side where he now sat.
“What are you on, Jimmy Lee?”
The car reeked of ammonia and cheap cigarettes and bodily fluids like a college-town back alley where feral cats run amuck. Jimmy Lee rasped a near-silent chuckle that devolved into a soft cough and he peered at Duchamp but still did not lift his head. His hair was stiff and clumped like the fur of a dying dog and his skin shined with foul-smelling sweat. Fever blisters crept along his cracked lips to eruptions at the corners of his mouth. His nose was bent and bruised and swollen. In the glow of the car’s dome light Duchamp saw his supplicant’s jeans were stiff and stained the color of rust. And when the dome light faded out and only the sick florescent tubes from the deserted car wash illuminated that death space in the car, Jimmy Lee said: “I took care of it, Speaker, just like you wanted. I done it up right.”
“What, son? What the hell did you do?”
“It’s gonna burn, the piece-of-shit town’s gonna burn, Speaker-deaker hell yeah rock-n-roll, baby these niggers’ll make Compton look like the Cotton Bowl parade.”
He rasped and chuckled and coughed and let out a feeble yodel-like whoop and then he closed his eyes and his breath was hard and heavy and uneven.
Duchamp said, “You’re delirious boy. Now snap to and tell me, where’s the product?”
Jimmy Lee remained still with eyes half lidded as if dozing or entranced. Duchamp watched him and his lip twitched into an involuntary snarl and he thumped Jimmy Lee across his deformed nose. Jimmy Lee jerked forward and screamed and clutched his face and then lashed out toward Duchamp, who grabbed his boney and powerless wrist out of the air as if it were a dumb December moth.
“It’s me son, you’re okay.” Jimmy Lee leaned back with eyes wide. “You’re okay. Did you bring the product.”
Through gasps for air, Jimmy Lee said, “Trunk.”
“Pop it, son.”
The boy groped around with eyes unseeing and Duchamp watched and again the unthinking snarl grew and he grabbe
d the keys from the ignition and got out and opened the trunk himself. Inside, a blanket. He felt the cold cylinder inside. He uncovered it and stared into the yellowish liquid in the weak glow of the trunk light at the aborted—what? Vanguard of a new race? Or just some kind of voodoo medicine the Doctor had perfected over the decades? What are you? Duchamp laughed to himself. Damn, you’re ugly.
The thing’s uncanny humanoid head held vast blue eyes that seemed to gaze upon Duchamp without accusation. He thought of the Prince, of the Group’s rebuff. No matter—he had made it right; the Doctor would set them straight.
He covered the being with the blanket and carried it back to his truck where he unwrapped it and stored it within a metal container he had brought for that purpose. He then returned with the blanket to Jimmy Lee’s Chevrolet and got back into the passenger seat and looked around for the dying man’s cell phone to no avail. Growing impatient in the gathering darkness, he decided the idiot had probably tossed it out the window with a cigarette butt. Even if someone finds it, the data’s all encrypted anyway.
His afflicted charge, used up now like a bloodied fighting cock, slept without peace.
•
Through his drug and pain and blood loss induced haze, Jimmy Lee sensed the Speaker sitting beside him. His second father did not speak to him but placed a blanket-wrapped gloved hand against his mouth, his nose. Jimmy Lee tried to kiss that hand.
The Speaker pressed the blanket harder to his mouth and his blood and snot caked nostrils, stopping his struggling breath. Jimmy Lee twitched and his eyes fluttered open and as he took in the Speaker’s visage, he resigned himself to death—the Speaker knows best—and he saw that for him death held only darkness.
And in that dying moment, his mind returned to the killing—the chink bitch, who busted his poor nose. The garage man in New Orleans who stood in his way. That Mexican slut, Chica. Maybe a boy in a bar. And then the one that started it all, the black girl on the lake who had the gall to somehow cross the Speaker—as his heart beat its last, he saw again the Tatum boys working her over, whooping it up (Jimmy Lee, you want some of this colored poontang?) while he leaned against his truck smoking a cigarette, the twins without a clue they did their work at the Speaker’s behest.
And yes, we killed her at Speaker’s bidding—the Shadow People, with the Speaker, brought me in. He remembered now for the first time that day at an office park amid the flat North Texas sprawl. The Shadow People were gathered, and they summoned him. He heard the skinny Arab one (the Prince) explain a new technology the Doctor’s scientists had developed. The one they call the Oilman said this was the time to try it out … to plug the leak, he said. And they took him into a room and they … they did something to my mind, filled me with hate and rage at that girl I’d never met.
Jimmy Lee remembered, and the memory brought clarity.
Then the faces of his victims floated before him in the dark, not angry but judging him without love, condemning him, and when at last the cold and brutal enveloping nothingness came, he welcomed it.
Chapter 27
Humanity overwhelmed the town like the water moss in the cypress swamp. They camped in quiet jumbles on the courthouse lawn and lined Main Street from the square to the small but modern hospital on the edge of town, just off the Interstate. They held vigil there, on the grounds of the hospital the old warhorse and conciliator and veteran of his generation’s greatest struggle, the Reverend Mose Carter, lay wounded and bloodied. They sang soft hymns by candle light and they prayed. They were black and white and neither and both and they were of all ages.
They came from Dallas and Houston and Austin, Chicago and Atlanta and New Orleans—greater in number now than even in the days immediately following the Bordelon murder—and they intermingled with the preachers and the television crews from around the globe and the men of the Nation of Islam with their black suits and bow ties. But the townspeople of both races stayed indoors and hoped that the old truce brokered some forty years before, a truce that had solidified with all deliberate speed over the decades, would hold.
The masses could have defeated the town’s tiny police force and the county sheriff’s department had their numbers chosen to riot. The governor sent in Texas Rangers to man the streets in their Stetsons and five-pointed stars hammered from Spanish silver—uniforms more befitting the vast prairies and plains and deserts to the West than this cloistered, moss-draped place. The get-ups instilled no romance in that sultry air, only provocation.
The crowd did not riot, but it churned with a gathering menace.
As he crossed the street from the courthouse, John Seastrunk could smell the adrenaline in the air like ozone preceding a electric storm, and he feared that Tasha Carter’s presence in that old monolith of officialdom—and her uncle’s blessing of him before the explosion—would only hold the people at bay for so long. He did not suspect that many in that crowd were violent by nature. But one hot-head among them could create a spark like a careless ember in the old-growth forest.
•
Bobby joined the sheriff in his office in the courthouse annex, past the circus atmosphere around the square, past the aggrieved and the curious and the profit-driven, past the banners and the drums and the cameras. Inside, Seastrunk took his place behind his desk, a seat of great power in this county but beholden to interests and forces Bobby had understood little of until that week. As the sheriff motioned him to sit, Bobby sensed a foulness from his boss but did not know if that foulness was directed at him. The young deputy sat and prepared for a reaming out. And he readied his own defiance.
“Son, I owe you an apology.”
The sheriff did not continue but stared into his deputy’s eyes with his hands clasped before him on the desk. Bobby rubbed his neck and averted his gaze. He had come prepared to stand up for his honor, to offer his resignation if necessary. He could take what he knew to Waltz and Solis—maybe the P.I. would take him on as a junior partner. But even if not, he would work this case with them for free if they would have him, to unravel this inscrutable conspiracy. To prove to the world that the myopic media were wrong, that the murder of Dalia did involve something beyond a pair of murderous redneck throwbacks. To prove that he was not a redneck throwback himself.
Bobby reestablished eye contact, and then he said, “Nossir.”
“Yes, Bobby, I do.” Seastrunk did not alter his expression or his posture. “Hell, I don’t know if that son-of-a-bitch Duchamp is mixed up in this mess the way you seem to think. But there are enough question marks that somebody ought to be digging around.”
Bobby relaxed, comfortable now that it seemed his boss had called him in here to do some real police work. “How certain are we Jimmy Lee Monroe bombed the Reverend’s house?”
“Pretty damn sure. Forensics found traces of ammonium-nitrate in his car and on his body—same chemicals used in the bomb. Neighbor says he saw a Chevy sedan like the one we found Monroe’s body in pulling away from the house just before the explosion. The same car, by the way, registered as a rental to Waltz down in New Orleans.”
“It’s all tying together. Not to mention ol’ Wayne Tatum blurting out Monroe’s name under pressure.”
“There are dots, I’ll give you that. And I can see where lines could be drawn to make some pretty interesting constellations. But I’m not ready to draw those lines quite yet.”
Bobby opened his mouth, hesitated, held back. Then he said, “Do we know Monroe’s cause of death?” The deputy knew only that the owner of a crapped-out carwash at a crossroads between here and nowhere had found Jimmy Lee stiff as a board in the Chevy.
“Autopsy shows he was hopped up on meth and booze. He was cut up pretty good—in the groin area, and his nose was broken, but those injuries predated his death by a couple of days. Official COD is cardiac arrest, maybe brought on by asphyxiation. It’s possible somebody suffocated him. Or he could have just stopped breathing. We didn’t get any other prints from the car.” The sheriff scratched his neck.
“Staying just in this room, the coroner wants to rule it natural causes. I’ve asked him to hold off just for a bit.”
Bobby paused, nodded, considered. “Well. Just tell me what I need to do.”
“Ain’t that simple, son. This is where politics come in.”
Feeling his hands clench on the arm rests of his chair, Bobby sighed. It almost came out as a growl.
“Calm down, deputy. Let me back up.” The paternalistic gaze. “Seemed like you were getting pretty tight with Ms. Tasha Carter.”
“That was … before.” He crossed his arms before him. “Anyway, what does that have to do with—”
“Because Hargrave’s gonna bury anything that could slow down them closing the book on the Tatum boys. You remember I raised the issue once of bringing in Monroe for questioning. The DA wouldn’t have none of it.”
“But that was before Jimmy Lee blew up the Rev.”
“Dammit, son. You think that’s gonna make it more likely the Hargrave’ll want to dig up bones? With Duchamp breathing down his neck? And have you seen the mob out there? Like they’re fixing to riot? Tell you one thing—Hargrave’s not gonna poke that nest. And anyway I got no pull in that office. That’s why I ask if you’re close to Tasha.”
Bobby willed himself to tamp down any pride he might feel that the sheriff needed his connections. “We’re hardly talking.”
“Turned on you like everyone else, huh?”
“Yessir. We had a big row while I was furloughed. Spoke by phone since then. Agreed to be professional for the sake of this case. But, hell, I got no pull either. And, well …”
“What?”
“Tasha Carter’s got her own agenda. She’d be no help. She’s tight with Hargrave and Duchamp. Sees them as her way up and out. Politics-wise.” He spat the word.
The sheriff puffed his cheeks in a look of comic incredulity. “Signing on with Duchamp? And as a Republican? Yee-law, that must hurt her uncle more than getting bombed.”
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