“Benny!” Sherry shouted. “Donnie! This ain’t good sense! We got to get out of here!”
They made it through the door before the cops arrived and ran flat-out to the motel. In the room they laughed and broke out more beer and dope. Except for Carol, who was hurting all over, no one was injured.
“Me and Benny was the only ones throwed a punch,” Sherry said.
“The rest of you all never swung a lick. I tell you one dang thing, it’s a hell of a way to act when we’s on the run!”
In their room Sherry and Benny undressed each other and she told him how proud she was that he had slapped that dogfaced woman for calling her a bitch. He said he’d do anything for his Booger.
“Right smart, you will. Do it all night.”
They found the perfect accommodations for themselves in Ormond Beach, just north of Daytona. It was one of forty condos in a compound grandly named the Garden of New Britain, clustered around a swimming pool and tennis courts, behind a high fence off Chipping-wood Lane. This was on the ocean side of the Intracoastal Waterway, a block and a half from Highway A1A and the beach. Theirs was Number 55. Like all the others, it was painted white with gray wood trim and a sloping red roof, semidetached, two stories, nestled amid attractive landscaping that included lawns and red and yellow hibiscus and palm trees. They could enjoy three bedrooms and a living room, all completely furnished, and a kitchen with built-in appliances and stocked with dishes and pots and pans. The downstairs bedroom, claimed by Benny and Sherry, had sliding glass doors that opened onto a small yard; the upstairs bedrooms came with balconies ideal for sunbathing in the nude.
Even with the Garden of New Britain’s reasonable rent, six hundred a month, it was time to replenish their supply of cash. They began by faking busts of high school students in the tried-and-true method of tracing local dealers; Roger pinpointed other scores through contacts made at two nearby bars, the Pelican Lounge in Daytona and The Barn. Sherry complained that the addicts among them drained off too much of the communal nest egg. Nearly every day, a man driving a taxi dropped by to deliver drugs. While the others got stoned, Benny and Sherry ran and worked out on the beach.
Donnie became hard to handle. His habit had become voracious, up to three and four grams of coke a day and nearly constant marijuana. The stuff would run low, they would have to do another job—and these were penny-ante scores, comparatively speaking. Donnie also spent plenty on women. He was hitting the bars four nights out of five, bringing a different girl home with him every time, bragging and jiving. Sherry considered him deranged, a sex fiend who apparently had to prove himself nightly, and she never knew what might be hanging around the kitchen in the morning, slurping coffee or throwing up in the sink. Going to the beach and swimming in the pool were great, but Sherry was getting her fill of the Sunshine State sooner than she would have thought.
When the boys left on an excursion to Knoxville to do some jobs the fence there had finally set up for them, a reunion with Pat Mason proved an enjoyable break. Sherry and Carol flew to Miami. Pat, tan and looking fit and on top of the world driving a new Mercedes—on loan from her boss—and accompanied by a stunning woman, drove everyone to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate the Fourth of July. That evening they were on their way to the beach to watch the fireworks, cruising the Lauderdale strip in bumper-to-bumper traffic, feeling free and wild away from the men. A single guy pulled up beside them in a convertible and gave them the eye. Sherry, who had had a couple of beers and a joint, lowered the window and began talking to him, saying that there was one girl in their car that thought he was the cutest thing she’d ever seen, and that if he guessed which one of them she was, she’d jump into his car with him. The guy pointed to Carol.
“Go ahead, Chop,” Sherry said. “I dare you.”
Carol hesitated; Sherry double-dared her. Carol was out the door just as the traffic started to move. She ran to the convertible, which was barely creeping ahead, vaulted in beside the startled driver, gave him a kiss, and jumped out to hurry back. Horns honked up and down the line.
“You see?” Sherry teased her. “You might’ve could’ve run off with that boy. See what you’ll do when Straw Boss ain’t a-looking? He’d kill you if he knew. Poor Chop, you ain’t nothing but a slave to love, Lord help you.”
The boys returned on the sixth. Their trip to Tennessee had been only moderately successful, but by the middle of the next week there seemed to be plenty of money to go around again. Sherry was not asking any questions. When she telephoned a friend in Knoxville, however, just to pass the time, saying that she was on a Florida vacation without being more specific than that, she ended up with an earful.
That was a coincidence that Sherry was in Florida, the friend said. Was she anywhere near Palm Beach? Not that she knew of, Sherry said. She had never been near the place. Well, the friend said, the Knoxville paper had a story that morning about Moon Mullins. Did Sherry remember him? No, Sherry said, but she had heard of him, Carol’s old pal. What was up?
“He’s dead. They think he was murdered. It says right here, murdered in his house at West Palm Beach. Says he might’ve known the person, or else he left his door unlocked. ‘No signs of forced entry,’ the paper says.”
“Read me that,” Sherry said, her mind awhirl.
Paul “Moon” Mullins, a former Clinton and Knoxville businessman, had been found dead, “an obvious homicide victim.” His house had been ransacked and several items of jewelry had been taken. His body had been discovered on Tuesday evening by a neighbor. Mullins had been tied to a chair and apparently strangled. Rumors were that one finger, on which Mullins was said to have worn a large diamond ring, had been severed, but the police refused to confirm this detail.
A Kentucky native who had also been involved in the coal business, Mullins had developed several shopping centers and had founded Mullins Carpet and Upholstery, a store now operated by his ex-wife. “He started out on a shoestring and made it,” Dimples Mullins was quoted as saying.
Shoestrings aside, Sherry knew that Moon Mullins had been a fairly big-time dope dealer. He had suffered from narcolepsy, a condition that caused him to fall asleep suddenly, and Carol had at one time been his caretaker, as someone had phrased it, driving him around and performing other services for him. Roger knew about that. Mullins’s name had cropped up several times in conversation since they had come to Florida—something about his Las Vegas connections. He was supposed to have been rolling in dough.
“I guess you never know when your time is up,” Sherry said. “I got to go now.”
Better not to speculate, Sherry decided. The important thing was that Benny would never strangle anyone, let alone cut off a finger to get at some damn ring. It would take a real sicko hombre to do something like that.
Whoever had killed Moon Mullins, it had not been Benny. That was what mattered, Sherry told herself. And as for Mullins, from what she understood, it would be a small funeral.
“We got to get that dude a full-time woman,” Sherry said to Benny one day. Donnie’s escapades had become intolerable. He was playing Don Juan twenty-four hours a day, whether he had to pay for it or not. When he wasn’t picking them up at night, he was after women on the beach during the day. He and Roger bought remote-control model cars, big ones that you could send out a hundred yards or more. Donnie would direct one over the sand to where some girl lay sunning herself, make it bump into her, and call it back. The girl would follow the machine with her eyes until she saw Donnie grinning at her. What an introduction. Sometimes he’d attach a note: “Put your bra in this car and meet the man of your dreams,” or “Ride me on the highway to heaven.”
Sherry did not know which was more disgusting, Donnie or the inexhaustible number of dimwit women willing to play with him. To her, he had the sex appeal of a chimpanzee. A neighbor had complained about the late-night shoutings and carryings-on; the manager had been by to see them. And with all the dope he had been consuming, he could not be trusted not to shoot off his mou
th. There wasn’t a better way to have a prostitution or a narcotics charge against you dropped than to tip off the cops to some thieving addict.
Sherry suggested to him that he import his ex-wife to Florida. But when Donnie telephoned the ex, he blabbed that they would soon set sail for Bimini and she, still pregnant, declined the offer, worried about whether there were doctors on the island. Sherry got on the line to try to convince her: “If they has babies, I reckon they has doctors. They ain’t cannibals out there.” But the woman would not be persuaded.
When Sherry overheard Donnie sweet-talking Rebecca Hannah on the phone one afternoon, she got another idea. Bartley was hooked on Rebecca; that had been obvious since Six Flags. Sherry did not think Becky was as pretty as Donnie thought she was, or as she thought she was—"beef to the heels like a Tennessee heifer,” was Sherry’s analysis—but she did have a pretty sort of a dishface and, in Sherry’s view, cared about a good time and a fast dollar. Sherry asked Benny to sound Donnie out about bringing Becky down. It might be the one way to calm his hormones, or to channel them.
“Bro,” Benny said to Donnie at the pool. Benny had taken to calling him that lately because, Benny said, “Donnie walks, talks, acts, and fucks like a nigger.” “Bro,” Benny said to him, “how’d you like to have some full-time butt?”
Donnie was for it. He knew Becky was nuts for him, he said. She had been hanging around his sister, exercising with her every damn day just to have the excuse to talk about him. She was polishing his motorcycle, from what he had heard.
As it happened, Carol’s daughter’s fifth birthday was the eighteenth. Carol could see her child, Sherry would visit with Renee, and they would bring back Becky Hannah with them. Sherry was uneasy about leaving Benny on his own for a few days—as far as she knew, he had been faithful to her for more than two months—but she could not pass up the chance to see Renee and her parents.
On July 18 Rebecca Hannah met Sherry and Carol at the Knoxville airport and drove them in her Datsun sports car to a pizza parlor on Kingston Pike, where Carol’s father, mother, and daughter joined them to celebrate. Show Biz Pizza, which featured balloons and popcorn and an actual clown and relentless repetitions of “Happy Birthday,” was designed to entertain and placate a child whose parents’ work schedule, style of life, or other commitments rendered more demanding observances, such as a party at home, inconvenient. It was extra-special day care, where clashing cymbals and fake calliope toots made conversation avoidable.
After that Becky drove Sherry and Carol to Harriman, where they took Renee out to dinner. They spent the night at the same Kingston motel where Sherry had first hidden Benny and Donnie after the retreat from Rome.
They left early the next morning for Kentucky, taking advantage of Becky’s car, which was presumably unknown to the police, so Sherry and Carol could retrieve belongings left with Harold Clontz and the Mt. Vernon couple. They were lunching on corn dogs at a drive-in restaurant near London when two men, one wearing a sports jacket and the other casual clothes, approached the car from either side and displayed FBI badges.
“Let me do the talking,” Sherry said under her breath. She was in the passenger seat, Carol in the rear.
Sherry showed her license.
“Are you also known as Sherry Hodge?” an agent asked. Sherry said yes but that Wong was her true, legal name, because she was married to but separated from a Chinese. She had lived with Benny Hodge until recently and had from time to time assumed his name. They had shared a house on Route 5 in Harriman, but she was now living with her parents and did not know where Hodge had gone.
The agent showed her photographs of Benny and Donnie; she identified both of them. She knew that they were fugitives and that assisting them could lead to charges against her.
It would probably be a good idea to take a full statement from her, the agent said. Would the ladies agree to follow him to the local KSP post, where they could conduct an interview in more private surroundings? Of course, Sherry said. To tell the truth, she had begun to hope that the FBI would find Benny, if they could capture him without hurting him. The strain of not knowing where he was had begun to take its toll on her.
On the short drive to the station Sherry wondered aloud how the FBI had found them. They must have been following Becky after all, knowing of her connection to Bartley. Becky had been present with Donnie’s sister when the FBI had questioned Sharon about her brother’s whereabouts. Or had the manager of the Kingston motel recognized the name Wong from Sherry’s previous registration and tipped off the FBI? It had probably been a mistake to have stayed there again.
Four FBI agents took turns asking Sherry questions at the London KSP post, a modern glass structure on an island at the juncture of 1-75 and Highway 80. They isolated her in a room away from Becky and Carol, in whom they displayed less interest.
Sherry spoke of how she had met Benny at Brushy. She said that she loved him with all her heart and was lost without him. She repeated word for word what she had told Agent Cloninger in Gene Foust’s presence—the fight on May 27, her speculation that Benny might have gone to his mother or to one of his wives, his professed determination to kill himself rather than return to prison. Her purpose in being in Kentucky now, she said through tears, was to try to contact acquaintances of Benny’s in a desperate attempt to locate him. She had persuaded Becky and Carol to come with her because she was afraid.
Where had Sherry spent the previous night? With her parents, Sherry responded. The agents suggested that they had information that conflicted with that idea. Perhaps she would care to correct herself? No, Sherry said. Whoever claimed that she had not been at her parents’ house was a liar.
She volunteered that she had a “close personal friend” with the Oak Ridge Police Department whom she would contact if and when Benny chose to surrender. She trusted this friend and believed he would not hurt Benny. If Benny ended up dead, maybe killing himself, she did not wish to be responsible. The honest truth was, she said, she was as anxious to find him as the FBI was. If he did contact her, she would try to talk him into giving himself up.
The agents let the women go; they drove back to Tennessee. From what Sherry could determine, the FBI had believed her, except possibly about where she had spent the previous night—but it would not be unusual for someone to try to conceal having stayed in a motel close to her hometown. For safety’s sake she slept that night with her parents, fending off their questions and trying to ignore their warnings that she was ruining her life for a lost cause. She told them nothing about where she had been and said only that she would be returning to Benny and would stay in touch. Her father was wheezing so heavily that she could not sleep, thinking of the anxiety she was causing him and wondering if she would ever see him again.
The next day she had Becky drive her to Lake City, where Sherry confronted the fence and demanded money from him that she said he owed Benny. The fence responded by pulling a gun and threatening to blow her head off. Sherry instructed Becky to head straight to the Lake City Police Department, where Sherry telephoned Burl Cloninger and said that she was terrified. She was being stalked by one of Benny’s acquaintences, who was threatening her over some money Benny supposedly owed. She had never seen nor heard of the man before in her life.
What was she to do, being hounded by the FBI and now some crazed gunman? Was there some way she could be given police protection? She should relax, Cloninger told her. If she was not harboring Benny, did not know where he was, and did not owe money to criminals herself, she had nothing to worry about. He would be grateful if she stayed in touch. She said she certainly would. It was a tough world out there.
The women took three days to travel to Ormond Beach, driving only at night. Sherry was confident that they were not being followed. Even the FBI had to sleep, and they had better things to do than to trail women around the country.
Becky Hannah was delighted with the accomodations at the condo and spent hours each day running and walking on the beac
h, enjoying her first experience of the ocean. Sherry was pleased to see that Becky’s presence had the desired effect on Donnie, who was after her day and night. “Those two is going to croak of heart attacks,” Sherry predicted.
Soon the men plunged into preparations for what Roger began referring to as the million-dollar lick. It was just a phrase, Sherry suspected, typical of Roger’s bullshit. They would probably be better off robbing one bank and getting out. The target Roger had chosen was no secret: he studied a map of Kentucky and marked in a booklet obtained from Radio Shack the police frequencies for the Eastern Kentucky region. Sherry bought Benny a nondescript summer suit, altered it for him as she always had, and asked few questions.
Early on Sunday morning, August 4th, she kissed her outlaw good-bye and asked him to be back by Friday, which was his thirty-fourth birthday. Benny said he would make every effort.
18
THEY DROVE THE OLDS STRAIGHT THROUGH from Ormond Beach to Hazard, where Donnie and Benny registered at the Mountain View Motel as Snapper and Shane Hall. They timed the journey at nearly fourteen hours.
On Monday they made a quick run to Fleming-Neon, checking on the route and the doctor’s house. Returning through Whitesburg, Roger stopped at Maloney’s department store, which specialized in automotive and sporting supplies, to buy a box of Remington .45 automatic shells. That evening they drove to Viper, a village hidden in a hollow about eight miles south of Hazard, to pay a call on Sonny Spencer, whom Roger had known since they had been kids together. Sonny, Roger said, was blessed with a special talent, of which they could make very good use.
Sonny Spencer had not seen Roger for more than a year and a half. A wiry, taciturn fellow, Sonny had been in jail during that time; he greeted his old pal with something short of effusiveness. He led the men into his kitchen and offered them beer. He did not have any dope, he said; he was trying to stay clean on probation. He had managed to get hold of a bulldozer to do some stripping on the land he had inherited and was planning to rely on that and on the odd jobs he could pick up as a carpenter. He was just thanking his stars to be out of prison. Actually he had Lester Burns to thank. He would have been inside for twice as long, and convicted on other charges, if it hadn’t been for Lester.
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