The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

  “My brother, Sir Edrard, be he here?” Gentry said, ignoring the doctor rooting around in his leg with a forceps.

  “Yeah, he’s here.”

  “How fareth he? Well or ill?”

  “I can go check on him. Doc, you know I need that slug for evidence.”

  “I know.”

  I figured a little show of goodwill might get Gentry to open up some more, so I left him there with the doctor, and went to check on his friend.

  Turned out I wasn’t going to have any goodwill to offer, because his friend had coded about fifteen minutes before, and they couldn’t resuscitate him.

  Final count for the night: four to the morgue, two to the hospital, and that pretty blond woman crying in a jail cell. I was glad when the U.S. marshals showed up to take it all off our hands.

  CHAPTER 48

  Zee

  In the morning, while I walked Leon up one stretch of Broadway and down the other, I made plans.

  First, I had to get on the straight and narrow as much as I could. I hid the THC drops inside the lamp base in my motel room. That envelope of cash was pretty incriminating, too, so I put some in a new checking account and the rest in a safety-deposit box. They tell you not to store cash in safety-deposit boxes, but you can’t deposit eighty thousand dollars in a bank account without answering a lot of questions, either.

  At Mom’s house, things were worse than they had been. It had rained at some point while I was gone, and the whole front yard was a swamp of ruined furniture, rotting cardboard boxes, garbage, and bloated romance novels.

  Hanging on the front door was a yellow piece of paper from the City of Wichita: a notice of abatement telling Mom she had thirty days to clean up her front yard. Otherwise the city would clean it up and fine her. One of her neighbors must have called out the city inspector. I didn’t blame them for wanting the mess gone, but the date on it was the day after the cops had searched the house. That only gave me three weeks to solve it.

  I took out my phone, looked up dumpster rental companies, and called the first one. I rented the biggest roll-off dumpster they had, knowing Mom would never forgive me. We might make peace someday, but she was never going to get over me parking a twenty-foot dumpster in her driveway.

  “Where have you been?” she said, when I went inside. “I have been absolutely frantic wondering where you were.”

  “You could have called me.” I could have kept my mouth shut.

  “I thought I had the wrong number.”

  “I wrote my number right there on your list. Right there.” I walked across to her phone list and tapped my number. I’d even written Zhorzha instead of Zee. Mom ignored me.

  “I talked to LaReigne yesterday, and she needs help hiring a lawyer. She’s in Arkansas right now, but she’s going to waive extradition so she’ll be closer to home. It’s unbelievable. They’re charging her as an accomplice! She’s been through hell and back, and they have her sitting in a jail cell, instead of letting her come home to her family. It’s criminal. She needs to be with Marcus. With us. And don’t you nag me about my phone bill. You know they only let them call collect.”

  “I know, it’s a scam,” I said. “What did she tell you?”

  “What kind of question is that? You know she can’t talk about anything on those phones.”

  I’d long since memorized Mom’s rant about the Department of Corrections listening in on phone calls, because I’d had to hear it every time she talked to my father. I went to look at the situation in the kitchen: the leaking sink, the garbage disposal, the dead fridge that was blocking the back door. I needed to hire an electrician, a plumber, and a couple guys to throw stuff into the dumpster.

  “Are you listening to me?” Mom yelled. I hadn’t been, but I went into the front room, because if I ignored her for too long she would come into the kitchen, and catch me making plans.

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  My phone rang, but it wasn’t a number I knew, so I didn’t answer.

  “I said she needs a better lawyer than a public defender,” Mom said. “Your father’s lawyer was fresh out of law school. He’d never even been to trial. There has to be something we can do to scrape up a retainer. I’m going to call your aunt Shelly. She’s always complaining about money, but she certainly has more than we do. And I can always take out a second mortgage on the house.”

  I stood behind Mom’s chair, waiting to see if the person calling would leave a message. I wasn’t surprised when the voice-to-text popped up.

  Miss Trego, this is U.S. Marshal Boyd Mansur. Please return my call at your earliest convenience.

  “You need to stop pouting and help me figure out what we’re going to do!” When I didn’t answer, Mom squinted over her shoulder at me. Then she put her hands on the arms of her chair like she was going to stand up. “What are you doing?”

  “What I’m going to do is go to the Goodwill and buy you a couple china hutches and a bookcase. I’ll get some guys to bring them into the house, and you can fill them up. Everything else has to go,” I said.

  “I told you to leave it alone. I’ll get it cleaned up.”

  “Mom, please. We only have three weeks. If we don’t take care of this, the city is going to come, and they are going to throw everything away.”

  “Don’t you worry about it. Come here.”

  When I didn’t do it fast enough, she snapped her fingers at me and held out her arms. I bent down over her, and she put her arms around me. I wasn’t sure if it was a hug or if she wanted me to help her up out of her chair.

  “We have to help your sister. With a decent lawyer, there’s no way she’ll serve time,” Mom said.

  The way she could flip from one subject to another, I knew we were never going to have a real conversation about any of it. Nothing I said was going to sink in.

  “Mom, I know you hope that, but you need to be realistic.”

  “Or at least not much time. Help me up.”

  “If the prosecution can convince a jury that LaReigne was in love with him, the jury’s going to believe that she helped him,” I said. I bent my knees a little deeper and pulled hard enough to get Mom out of her chair. Hard enough that my back and my hip lit up.

  “So what if she helped them? She can’t have been very much help! It’s not like she’s a criminal mastermind.”

  “It doesn’t matter how much. If she helped them at all, that makes her an accomplice to at least two murders.” I didn’t want to be angry at Mom, but I was. She had stood by Dad for so long because she could twist everything around until it fit with what she wanted to believe. Mom still had her arms around me, and it felt like she was trying to hold on to me and push me away at the same time.

  “That wasn’t her fault. She didn’t kill those guards. I just need my baby to come home. I want LaReigne to come home.”

  “I want LaReigne to come home, too,” I said, but it was a lie. “But I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

  “Don’t you say that.” Mom pushed me away, and I was glad to get free. “If you move in, we can use your rent money. That might be enough to hire a better lawyer.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not moving in.” I thought of how Leon was so stubborn, and in my mind, I put my head down and tucked my tail.

  “Can we please not go through all that drama again?” Mom said.

  “I’m not going through any drama, and I’m not moving in. You can call Aunt Shelly, and you can call the bank, but I’m not giving you my rent money.”

  “This is not the time to be selfish! Your sister needs your help, Zhorzha! You owe her that!”

  I thought about that pile of cash in the safety-deposit box. Lawyers ain’t cheap, Uncle Alva had said, and at the time, I’d nodded, but as I walked out of Mom’s house, with her yelling after me, I made up my
mind. I wasn’t going to spend a dime of that money on a lawyer for LaReigne. To get Mom’s yard cleaned up, yes. To hire a family court lawyer to get visitation with Marcus, yes. But for LaReigne, no. I didn’t care if half of it was supposed to be for her. She chose Tague Barnwell. Let him hire her a lawyer.

  I went back to my motel, took Leon around the block, and fed him some real dog food. Then, even though it was only noon, I took a big dose of THC and got in bed. There was a Bewitched marathon on TV, and I laid in bed with Leon next to me, watching Bewitched and making lists on my phone. I’d already made a huge list of things to do for Mom, but I started one for myself, too. I needed a lawyer, a job, a veterinarian, and a place to live with a yard.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, when I was looking at houses for rent, my phone rang again. I let it go to voicemail and a few minutes later, there it was: Miss Trego. Boyd Mansur. We need to talk.

  CHAPTER 49

  Zee

  Mansur’s voicemails started out polite, but I knew he would get around to threatening me eventually. A week later, while I was standing out in Mom’s yard watching the truck driver park the dumpster, I got the message I couldn’t ignore.

  Miss Trego. Boyd Mansur. I would prefer not to issue a warrant for you as a material witness, but if that becomes necessary, I will.

  After I signed for the dumpster, I called Mansur back.

  “So let’s talk,” I said. “I don’t know anything, but I guess you need to hear it from me personally.”

  “Why don’t I come to your mother’s house, so I can talk to you both? Two birds, one stone.”

  “That saying is actually kill two birds with one stone. Are you trying to kill my mother?”

  “Miss Trego, I don’t wish to distress your mother or you, but I do need to talk to you both.”

  I didn’t want to meet him at Mom’s and he wouldn’t talk in public, so I went to his hotel room, which was a lot nicer than mine. He had a suite at the La Quinta on Kellogg, and it even had a little kitchenette and a table, which was where we sat.

  “Before we talk about anything, I have one question,” I said. “Are you going to arrest me? Because I’d need to find somebody to take care of my dog.”

  “No, Miss Trego. Unless you plan to make an unexpected confession to something pretty substantial, I’m not going to arrest you.”

  I knew he was getting ready to lay some shit on me, because he set up his laptop. The first thing he showed me was black-and-white footage from a surveillance camera, showing LaReigne standing outside a door.

  “There’s LaReigne,” Mansur said, and paused the video. “Waiting at the rear door to the education building, where the volunteer ministry meets. Normally this door would have been locked, but your sister’s ministry group got permission from the chaplain to use the yard for part of their . . . ritual. This is just as the riot started and after the first corrections officer was killed in the education building. At that time, a few inmates and the volunteers locked themselves in a classroom. All of the volunteers except Molly Verbansky and LaReigne. I want you to look at the time stamp on it—seven-sixteen P.M.—because here’s footage from a different camera at the same time.”

  He clicked PLAY and the video switched to two people standing at a chain-link fence. A woman, so probably Molly, and a man with something in his hand.

  “That’s Conrad Ligett, using a pair of wire cutters that Molly Verbansky smuggled in—we’re not really sure how.”

  “Is this for real a prison?” I said. “I’m not kidding, my nephew’s grade school is more secure than this.”

  “Normally, the alarm would have been raised by now, but we believe the riot in the main building was part of a diversionary tactic. And the corrections officer who would have raised the alarm about the situation in the education building had just been killed.” Mansur paused the video to give me a minute to feel like shit for joking about a situation where two people ended up murdered.

  “Notice that Ligett is cutting a hole in a fence next to the parking lot, while your sister stands at this door.” He went back to the video of LaReigne and clicked PLAY. “Conrad Ligett and Molly Verbansky are on the south side of the education building. Barnwell is in the building, about to kill the second guard. What is LaReigne doing?”

  “She doesn’t know what to do,” I said. I hated myself for trying to defend her, but she was looking back and forth in two directions, like she was confused. And if my story was that I didn’t know anything, then I had to pretend I still believed LaReigne was innocent.

  “But it’s obvious what she should be doing. What any sane person would do in this situation is run across the yard to the main building. She could have gotten there easily, but she didn’t. Why not?”

  “Maybe she was scared.”

  “So scared, she stayed there instead of running to get help?”

  “Wasn’t there a riot in the main building?” I said.

  “In one of the cell blocks. Not at the entrance nearest LaReigne. When I look at this, I see LaReigne waiting for Barnwell. Because she was in on their plan. That’s the only reason she wouldn’t have run away. You know what else she did that night?”

  “No.”

  “She left everything in her car. Why would she leave her purse, her phone, even her car keys in her unlocked car in the parking lot of a prison?”

  “It wasn’t unlocked,” I said. “Her car has one of those keypad locks on the door. She always puts her keys and her purse in the trunk.”

  Mansur frowned and then went on like I hadn’t said anything. That’s what they would do in court, too.

  “She knew she was going to need those things later, and she knew she wouldn’t be going back through the security checkpoint when they left the prison. Your sister parked her car on the other side of the fence of the education building, on the opposite end of the parking lot from where she entered the prison. But once Ligett cut the hole in the fence, her car was right there and the keys were in it.”

  “Yeah, except that—”

  “And here she is, running toward that hole in the fence, holding hands with Barnwell.”

  Maybe that’s what the video showed. Or maybe it showed Tague holding her by the wrist and pulling her after him. Or I wanted it to show that. I wanted her to look like she was trying to get away from him, but no matter how much I squinted, she was still running toward the fence with Tague. She wasn’t trying to get away. She wasn’t fighting him. Not the way she fought me. Maybe she hadn’t planned to go with him, but she went with him, and in the end, she stayed with him.

  “Why didn’t you show me this before?” I said.

  “Because we didn’t have all this information yet, and we were still very much in the middle of a manhunt. Would seeing this have changed something for you?”

  I couldn’t answer him, because if I talked too much I was going to cry. And if I cried, I was going to lose control. I’d gotten Edrard killed and Gentry arrested, because I’d trusted LaReigne to be better than me. My whole life looked like a mistake now.

  “Is that all you want?” I said, when I was sure I was calm enough. “For me to admit I was wrong about my sister?”

  “Oh, I’m just curious how it all fits together, and I think you can help me figure that out. For example, the young man who was at your mother’s house with you, the one you insisted didn’t know anything, he managed to locate two fugitives the U.S. Marshals Service couldn’t find. I wonder how he came by his information.”

  “Not from me.”

  “He says the same thing. He says, and I’m quoting—” Mansur opened a file folder and looked at a sheet of paper. “I may not tell thee whence I learned the place the lady LaReigne was kept by these knaves. He really said knaves.”

  “That’s how he talks.”

  “However he talks, he’s been charged with a whole raft of things, including obstruction of j
ustice and three counts of murder.”

  My chest felt so tight, I couldn’t take a breath. I pushed back from the table, trying to get some air. I sucked in enough to say, “Murder? For those assholes?”

  Mansur pulled a photo out of the file folder and slid it over to me. Someone wearing blue plastic gloves was reaching from off camera to force Gentry’s chin up for his mug shot. He had a welt on his forehead, a black eye, and smear of blood across his cheek. I assumed the cops had done that to him.

  “He’s an odd kid,” Mansur said. “But considering what he did to Barnwell and this other man—Paul Scanlon—he’s not a lightweight. Not sure how he’ll fare in the Arkansas penal system, having killed two local white brotherhood types. Probably won’t be easy for him.”

  “You think that’s funny? I bet you’re the kind of creep who laughs at prison rape jokes.” In the last week, I’d chewed my nails down to the quick. The only thing left to chew on was my cuticles.

  “I’m going to be very blunt with you, Miss Trego. I believe you know exactly where his information came from, because you’re the one who gave it to him. What I would like to know is how you—”

  “You think I knew where my sister was, but instead of going to see her, I sent Gentry to fight these Nazi assholes to get her back, even though you also think I knew she helped them escape? How does that make any sense? If I knew she helped them escape, why would I think she needed rescuing?”

  “I admit it doesn’t entirely add up, but you knew something, didn’t you? Because you went to Missouri with Gentry Frank.”

  “I went to Missouri to visit my uncle, and Gentry went with me,” I said.

  “Your uncle, Alva Trego, who has a connection to Craig Van Eck, the ringleader of the White Circle at El Dorado?”

  “Had a connection. My uncle hasn’t had any contact with those people since he was paroled. He’s a law-abiding citizen.”

  “In my experience that’s a pretty rare outcome for someone like your uncle.”