Home Grown: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  Somebody found the money we stashed in that shed!

  He scrambled to get out from under the car.

  “ … Karen Davis, the mother of two of the children who found the cash said that unless someone steps forward to claim it, she intends to keep it,” the announcer continued.

  Of course she does! Doodlebug thought. Any fool’d know it was dope money, and what doper was gonna show up at her front door and ask for it back?

  The three men met that night at Doodlebug’s place and spent the first half hour yelling at each other, each blaming the others. Jimmy Dan nearly got into it with Doodlebug. The little man was always spoiling for a fight, but Donnie broke them up. He pushed Doodlebug down on the couch, and shoved Jimmy Dan up against the wall and held him there by his shirt collar.

  “That’s enough, J.D.!” Donnie yelled. “The two of you can beat the crap out of each other but that don’t bring our money back.”

  Donnie leaned on Jimmy Dan, got up in his face and spoke slowly. “Let it go,” he hissed. “Just let it go. It don’t matter now whose fault it was. We gotta stop yelling and start thinking.”

  He turned to Doodlebug. “Are you listenin’ to me?”

  Doodlebug nodded. He hadn’t wanted to fight, was just trying to keep Jimmy Dan from taking a swing at him.

  Jimmy Dan relaxed in Donnie’s grip. “Fine, but I don’t see what we got to talk about. Ain’t no way to get the money back now.”

  “When those kids were on TV this evening, their story didn’t add up,” Donnie said. The WHAS 11 news truck had driven down all the way from Louisville to do a story on the three children.

  Doodlebug had been thinking the same thing. Jimmy Dan hadn’t seen the kids on television. As soon as Donnie called to tell him what had happened, he had roared out past Cade’s Crossing, parked in the woods and sneaked through the trees to the shed. The door was propped open with a rock. There was no gym bag in the loft of that shed, no money, nothing but an old alarm clock laying on the dirt floor by the ladder.

  “What didn’t add up?” Jimmy Dan asked. “What did they say?”

  “They said they found the money in some kind of ammo case by the side of the road,” Donnie said.

  “And they showed the pile of money on TV and the little kids sitting there with it grinning,” Doodlebug said. He and Donnie looked at each other. “The little girl said there was $5,250 in the box.”

  “Five thousand dollars!” Jimmy Dan roared. “What happened to the other 30 grand?”

  “That’s what we gotta figure out,” Doodlebug said.

  They never were able to come up with a plausible explanation for why the kids had said they found the money in a box by the side of the road instead of in the shed. But the other part was easy. Those kids said they found $5,000 because that’s all they turned in. They had kept the rest, the remaining $30,000.

  “Now all we got to figure out,” Donnie said, “is how we’re gonna get it back from ’em.”

  Chapter 14

  They knew they were making history. The one with a beard even said so when the five of them stopped to catch their breath in the brush by a fence that ran alongside KY 93.

  “You know we’re the first ones ever done it,” he said, panting. “There’s been men tried before, but nobody ever made it out of Eddyville, ’til now.”

  “Think they’re gonna put up a plaque on the wall where we come down the side of the building on them extension cords?” Another one sneered. “Maybe build a statue?”

  The biggest one of them sucked in great, heaving gulps of air. Tall, with an enormous beer belly, he was sweating buckets in the mid-July heat, just couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

  “The only plaque I’m ever gonna see … ” He wheezed in a gulp of air. “ … is the headstone over my dead body.” Gasp! “And the inscription’ll say, ‘Here lies an escaped con too stupid to know when to stay put.’”

  “Didn’t nobody put a gun to your head and force you to come along,” the bearded man said. “And they’re gonna be setting that headstone in the dirt pretty dern soon if you don’t get the lead out and git moving. I ain’t waiting. I say we split up now!”

  Without another word, he turned and started running through the brush in the ditch.

  In the distance, the rest heard the sirens start to wail, startling the sparrows perched on the razor wire atop the walls of the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville, the commonwealth’s only maximum security prison. They all jumped up and bolted.

  The fat con collapsed from a massive coronary in a field three miles from the 6-by-9-foot cage where he’d spent the last 19 years of his life. He died alone among the corn stalks.

  The bearded man’s taste of freedom lasted less than 24 hours. State police found him hiding in a chicken house on the bank of the Ohio River.

  The other two stole a car and made it across the state line. They killed a convenience store clerk and stole $200 and some black hair dye, switched cars and then tried to bluff their way through a Tennessee State Police roadblock. They ended up shooting one trooper before police opened up on them. One made it, the other didn’t.

  That left only one escapee still at large—Joe Fogerty, the man who’d pleaded guilty to killing Sarabeth Bingham’s father.

  Sonny went to her office to tell her personally.

  “You can’t be here about that parking ticket!” She said as soon as he poked his head into her office. She was on tiptoes, getting her father’s worn copy of the Associated Press Stylebook off the top shelf of the bookcase. “I’ve already worked that out with the judge. I swear, the space wasn’t marked handicapped.”

  “I’m here about this morning’s escape from Eddyville. You might want to sit down.” She didn’t, of course. “One of the fugitives is Joe Fogerty.”

  Then she wanted to sit down.

  “He’s out?”

  “I’ve called in all my off-duty deputies. Inside an hour Callison County will be crawling with state police troopers. And—”

  “Why on earth would Joe Fogerty come here? There’s a whole world out there to get lost in. Why would he turn up where people would recognize him?”

  “Because he’s stupid. But if those guys were smart they wouldn’t be in prison in the first place. People who escape from jail or prison or mental hospitals are all the same. Eighty-five percent of them go home. We’re expecting Joe. If he makes it this far, we’ll be waiting for him.”

  Four days later, Sarabeth’s police scanner went ballistic. Within minutes, she was flying down the road toward Andersonville where the scanner said Joe Fogerty was pinned down behind a fallen tree trunk on a sandbar in the Rolling Fork.

  It wasn’t hard to find the spot. More Kentucky State Police cruisers than she could count and three Callison County Sheriff’s Department cars were parked along the roadside. Sonny spotted Sarabeth and let her through the barricades.

  “As far as we know, he’s not armed, but we’re still going to wait for the KSP canine unit. They’ll send the dogs in after him.”

  Sonny led her down the embankment to the river. She could see the gravel bar where Fogerty was holed up around a bend downstream. Officers were everywhere, behind trees and rocks on both sides of the river. It was an impressive amount of fire power.

  “Do you really need this many officers to capture one unarmed fugitive?”

  “There’s method in the madness. We bring an overwhelming presence of officers to bear on a situation like this—a big boatload of cops—because the sheer magnitude of the opposition is usually enough to get the bad guys to throw in the towel and come out with their hands in the air. And that’s a much better outcome than sending out a couple of cruisers and a handful of officers and an armed gunman decides he might just be able to win a shootout.”

  The sheriff smiled. “I’d rather intimidate a man any day than fight him.”

  There was nothing to do but wait. Sarabeth got her camera ready, fit its telephoto “Jimmy Durante” lens snug in place so per
haps she could capture the actual arrest. Then she sat down on a log behind a huge rock and stared past the flank of police officers at the distant gravel bar.

  Sonny stepped out of the glaring sun into the shade beside her. “You Ok?”

  Before she could answer, the world exploded. It was over in seconds. Fogerty suddenly stood up from behind the tree trunk where he’d been cowering and started to run across the sandbar to the river. Half a dozen officers yelled at him, “Stop! Police!”

  He paused, lifted the small handgun nobody knew he had, and yelled, “I ain’t goin’ back there.”

  “Drop the gun and raise your hands over your head!”

  Fogerty wouldn’t listen. He turned abruptly and pointed the gun at the nearest officer, a good distance away but only partially hidden behind a tree.

  The police opened fire and Fogerty folded up and collapsed in the sand.

  It had been a struggle to focus the huge 500 mm lens on a moving target, but just as Fogerty turned toward the cop, Sarabeth captured him. She instantly screamed, “No!” but it was too late. The gunfire drowned out her voice before she could tell the officers what she could see through the telescope of the lens. The fugitive wasn’t holding a handgun; he was holding a tree root.

  Sarabeth was glad Sonny hadn’t been among the officers who’d fired. He’d find out Fogerty had committed suicide by cop soon enough, though. He’d bolted toward the downed man as she sank back onto the log.

  She was still fiddling with the catch on the lens, trying to remove the Jimmy Durante nose from her camera when a deputy raced toward her, shouting, “Sheriff Tackett sent me to get you. Hurry!”

  The deputy led her through the crowd of officers to Sonny, who was down on his knees beside Fogerty. The old man was still alive.

  “Someone give me a t-shirt,” Sonny said. “Where are the EMTs with that stretcher?”

  A deputy ripped off the shirt of his brown uniform and quickly removed the undershirt beneath. He handed it to Sonny, who wadded it into a ball and pressed it against Fogerty’s bloody belly.

  The bottom part of the old man’s shirt was soaked crimson and there was a bullet hole in the right side of his chest, too. Blood bubbled out of it every time he took a breath.

  When Sonny spotted Sarabeth, he motioned for her to kneel beside him and told her bluntly, “You need to hear this. He’s saying he didn’t do it, that he didn’t kill your father.”

  Sarabeth gasped. The old man’s eyes shifted to her at the word “father,” and recognition dawned on his face. He remembered her from the sentencing hearing and he struggled to speak, but blood ran out of his mouth every time he tried. She leaned closer. Still, she could barely catch his words.

  “ … dying … know it … wouldn’t lie now … ” he croaked, then coughed out a spray of blood that splattered on Sarabeth’s face and clothes. He reached out, like he was trying to grab her hand, but couldn’t manage it, so she took his.

  He summoned the strength again to speak. “It come back to me. I remember that night, what happened. I didn’t shoot nobody!” He said the last part so forcefully it set off a barrage of coughing that spewed blood all over Sarabeth and the sheriff. “He put the gun in my pocket. I seen him … with the hat.” His breathing became hitching gasps for air and his eyes grew wide.

  “Who put the gun in your pocket?” Sonny demanded. “Joe, who did you see?”

  A final breath sighed out, bubbling blood on his lips, and then Joe Fogerty sank back into the sand and was still.

  Sarabeth straightened up slowly from where she’d been leaning over the old man and sat back on her heels. A drip of Fogerty’s blood ran down her cheek. She looked at Sonny.

  “If he didn’t kill Daddy … who did?”

  • • • • •

  Doodlebug and Jimmy Dan watched the kids for three months, while Donnie cooled his heels in the Callison County Jail. He’d tied one on a couple of days after the kids found the money, went tearing down KY 55, weaving all over the road, got pulled over and busted for DUI. It was his second offense and the judge gave him 90 days.

  The other two took turns tracking the children so they wouldn’t be obvious. They watched them with their classmates in the school playground. And after school let out for the summer, they watched them playing with each other in Adam and Maggie Mae’s back yard and behind Eddie’s house around the barn. They watched Eddie, his mother, step-father, and two little brothers go to church in Cade’s Crossing on Sunday. Adam and Maggie Mae’s mother didn’t take them to church.

  They had plenty of time to plan, with Donnie locked up until the middle of August, plenty of time to figure out the very best place to snatch the children. What they were planning wouldn’t be kidnapping because they weren’t going to keep the kids or ask for a ransom. Donnie’d said if you didn’t keep ’em, it didn’t count. Besides, those kids were never going to rat out the men who made them return money they hadn’t told anybody they had.

  The three men had stayed up all night after Donnie and Doodlebug watched the kids on television, discussing what they should do and how. Once they’d calmed down and got to thinking about it, getting the money back didn’t look like it was going to be all that hard after all.

  “When we get through scaring those kids, they ain’t gonna say nothing about us to nobody,” Jimmy Dan had said.

  “We ain’t gonna hurt ’em!” Doodlebug’s voice had been low and threatening. It took a lot to get a rise out of the fat man, but he’d have fought Jimmy Dan over that. “I ain’t gonna let you hurt them little kids.” Doodlebug loved kids.

  “We’re not gonna hurt anybody,” Donnie’d said soothingly. “We’ll just make ’em think we’re gonna shoot ’em or something and they’ll be begging us to take the money back and leave ’em be.”

  This time, when they came up with a plan, the vote was unanimous. The plan was simple enough. They figured the best time to snatch the children was when they were waiting for the bus in the morning, after school started back up the second week of August. They were all in one place by themselves and close to the road where they’d be easy to grab. And they were always out there for a few minutes before Bus 29 came around the bend in the road. There was plenty of time.

  They’d grab all three of them and make one of them go get the money while they kept the other two. Then they’d take ’em into Brewster and let them out behind that old house down from the elementary school. If the kids cooperated quick, they might not even be late for school, and if they were, they’d just have to say they missed the bus.

  The men had talked it all through over and over. The plan was foolproof. Even so, when they got together the morning of the snatch, they were nervous. Doodlebug had borrowed the white cargo van with “Burkett Brothers Garage” painted on the side. It didn’t have any windows in the back.

  Donnie was driving, Jimmy Dan was in the back and Doodlebug was up front, ’cause he was good with kids. When they pulled around the bend in the road, Doodlebug was sort of hoping the kids wouldn’t be there. But all three were standing right where they’d been every morning that week, with their books and backpacks.

  Donnie pulled off the road just a little past the kids and Doodlebug got out of the front and waddled over to talk to them.

  “You kids know anybody wants a puppy?”

  “What kinda puppy?” Adam asked.

  “I got three of them in the back of the van,” Doodlebug said. “Black labs, six weeks old. Cutest things you ever seen. I gotta find a home for ’em or I’m gonna have to take ’em down to the river and drown ’em.”

  “You can’t drown puppies!” Maggie Mae cried.

  Eddie loved dogs. “You wouldn’t really drown ’em, would you mister?”

  “Wouldn’t want to but I ain’t got no choice!” Doodlebug did a real good job of looking upset about it. “You can take a look at them if you want to. You never seen no cuter puppies. If you can’t take ’em, maybe you know somebody who could.”

  The children f
ollowed him to the back of the van like sheep to the slaughter. He opened one of the back doors and climbed in. Jimmy Dan was sitting beside a cardboard box at the far end of the van, up by the front seats, and Doodlebug pointed to it.

  “They’re in that box,” he said and all three kids hopped up into the van to have a look. It was that simple. Doodlebug reached out, grabbed the back door and slammed it shut, and Donnie buried his foot in the accelerator. The van fishtailed in the gravel, shooting dirt and rocks out behind, before it bumped back onto the road and sped away.

  • • • • •

  When the van lurched forward, it caught all three children off balance and they fell backward into the door and slid down it in a heap on top of each other in the floor.

  Maggie Mae started to wail. They weren’t crocodile tears, either. Adam knew that cry. Maggie Mae was terrified. So was he.

  “You shut up, you hear me?” the skinny guy by the box told her. “Shut up!”

  His command did absolutely no good. Maggie Mae kept shrieking in that piercingly high voice she had sometimes that was so shrill it actually hurt your ears.

  Eddie’s lower lip turned down and tears began streaming down his face, too.

  “What do you want with us?” Adam asked. His own voice sounded strange in his ears, all hollow and shaking.

  Eddie continued to cry. His nose ran now, too, down his lip and chin, wetting his face along with his tears.

  “We want our money back, that’s what, and you’re going to give it to us or you’re never gonna see your mama or daddy again,” the skinny man snarled.

  Adam’s heart froze in his chest. The money they’d found in the shed belonged to these guys!

  His mouth was so dry he could barely get the words out. “We don’t have the money anymore. We gave it to our parents and they called the police. The police took it away.”

  By the time they’d counted all the money, laid it out in stacks on the floor of the horse stall in Eddie’s barn, Adam had known they were going to have to turn it in. Maggie Mae had been acting like a 3-year-old, hopping up and down, babbling about the Barbie doll house she was going to buy with her share.