by Scott Pratt
“How long before we get back to Tennessee?” I said.
“What? You’ve been in my truck for five minutes and you already want to know how long before you get out? That’s a bit ungrateful, don’t you think?”
“I’m sorry . . . Linda? Your name is Linda, right? I’m grateful for everything you’ve done and for everything you’re going to do. I’ll ride around with you for as long as you like. I was just curious.”
She turned around and leered at me.
“Now you’re patronizing me,” she said. “Why is it that men always think they can patronize women just by being polite?”
“I wasn’t trying to . . . I didn’t mean to—”
“You think women aren’t as smart as men, don’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“Name one woman that you think is as smart as men, not including your mother. Be quick about it.”
“Marie Curie.”
“Who?”
“Marie Curie. She was a physicist and chemist, lived in the late eighteen, early nineteen hundreds. She was Polish but wound up moving to France. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. She was as smart as any man who’s ever lived.”
“Right,” Linda said. “What about somebody more recent?”
“Hillary Clinton’s pretty smart. First lady, US senator, secretary of state.”
“That doesn’t mean she’s smart!” Linda’s voice moved up in pitch. “She’s just conniving.”
“So you’re a Republican, then?”
“Yes, I’m a Republican, and I’m proud to be a Republican. It doesn’t make me hateful and it doesn’t make me stupid. What about you? I guess you’re one of those blue dog Democrats.”
“Right now I’m a convicted felon and an escapee. I don’t think anybody’s going to care about my personal political preferences.”
She was quiet for a while after that. I lay in the sleeper cab and watched road signs go by. We headed south on Interstate 5. In the meantime, Linda was listening to the radio for news about the escape. The first story came about an hour after I got into the truck. The reporters were saying that I was last seen heading north from Rosewood in a helicopter. So far, so good, I thought. But within ten minutes of hearing that story, I saw flashing lights ahead at the side of the road.
“Better get on back behind the false wall,” Linda said.
I pulled the latch, lifted the wall, rolled back, and pushed it down. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it against my chest. I could feel my hands shaking, my breath coming in short gasps. I’d been out for only an hour. Would Linda screw up? Would they have dogs? Would they catch me and have me back in the hole at Rosewood by morning?
The truck slowed agonizingly, then it stopped.
“Evening, ma’am,” I heard a male voice say. “License and registration, please? Where you headed?”
“Georgia by way of Nashville,” Linda said.
“Long trip. What are you hauling?”
“Hardwood flooring.”
“Had anything to drink tonight?”
“No, sir. I don’t drink alcohol.”
“My wife wishes I could say the same. Have you heard about the escape?”
“As a matter of fact, I heard something on the radio about an escape just before I saw your lights.”
“A man was plucked out of a federal penitentiary by helicopter. He might switch to some other form of transportation, though. It happened just a short time ago, but we’ve managed to get some flyers out. Would you mind taking a few and spreading them around the next time you pull into a truck stop?”
“I wouldn’t mind at all, sir.”
“Mind if I take a quick look around inside your cab?”
“Go right ahead.”
I shuddered as I lay in the complete darkness, the utter stillness of the false compartment. My heart kept pounding: Th-thump! Th-thump! Th-thump!
An endless thirty seconds passed.
“Okay, ma’am, you have a safe night.”
I heard the truck’s engine roar and felt the rig pull back onto the road and get up to speed.
“Hey, Darren,” I heard Linda say. “You can come out now.”
I pulled the inside latch, lifted the door, and crawled out. Linda tossed a small stack of papers over her shoulder at me.
“The good thing is, you take a nice photograph,” she said. “The bad thing is, they look just like you.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
For five days, I’d ridden across the United States in Linda Lacy’s sleeper. She drove nine hours a day, and at night, we shared a motel room. On the first night, she colored my hair blond, took a picture of me on her cell phone, and texted it to someone.
“For your ID,” she said.
The next morning, rather than follow I-40 straight across the middle of the country, she drove north into Colorado and drove across Kansas and Missouri. It added some extra miles and a day to the trip, but she thought it was prudent, and who was I to argue?
Linda acted like a cross between a mother and a frustrated nymphomaniac. Her man had been in prison for eleven years, and she had apparently been loyal to him with the exception of the various sexual toys she’d used and which she described to me in painful detail. The poor woman was as horny as any I’d ever seen. She talked nonstop and blared country and western music through the cab’s speakers. If I never hear another Merle Haggard song again, it’ll be just fine with me.
She didn’t try to seduce me, though, not that I would have allowed it. Big Pappy had gotten me out of prison. I wouldn’t have repaid him by surreptitiously having sex with his woman. But as much as I hate to, I have to admit I thought about it. She was a lanky, big-breasted Amazon who looked fantastic in a pair of blue jeans and who I’m certain would have given me the ride of my life. Besides, I was fresh out of prison and was as frustrated as she was. I hadn’t touched a woman in two years. I found myself imagining what she’d look like naked on more than one occasion.
We finally made it to Knoxville on the fifth night. I felt a surge of adrenaline as we passed by the University of Tennessee campus and the World’s Fair tower around ten at night. Linda had told me we would be meeting up with a friend of hers at the Strawberry Plains exit. When we got there, she pulled off the road into a parking lot adjacent to a liquor store. Sitting in the lot with its lights on was a Hyundai Elantra that was silver and maybe five years old.
“This is it, baby doll,” Linda said. “You’re on your own from here.”
I slid into the seat next to her.
“Everything you need will be in the car,” she said. “A driver’s license, registration, insurance papers, everything. If you get stopped and the cops run the tag, it’ll come back registered to the name on the license. It’s a clean car. You’ll find money, three prepaid cell phones, more clothes, and a gun in the trunk.”
“I don’t know how to thank you,” I said.
She reached over, grabbed me by the neck, pulled me toward her, and gave me a long kiss on the lips. At the same time, she reached between my legs and gave me a nice little rub.
“Good luck, desperado,” she said. “Maybe Michael and I will see you again sometime.”
“I hope so,” I said, and I turned and climbed down out of the cab and took a deep breath. It was spring in the mountains of East Tennessee. There was a chill in the air, but the sky was clear and the place smelled like heaven. I couldn’t believe I was back. I walked over to the Elantra, which was running, and opened the door. Just then, I noticed a man walk quickly between the car and the cab of the truck. He opened the door and climbed into the same seat I had just vacated. I didn’t get a look at his face.
I got into the Elantra and started driving east on Interstate 40. I got off the interstate at the Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge exit and turned south. Forty-five minutes later, I drove pas
t James Tipton’s driveway. I went back and forth a couple of times before I finally pulled in. It was one of the eeriest sights I’d ever seen. The skulls remained, but James’s trailer was gone. I pulled up close to the spot and could see a pile of black ashes on the ground and the skeleton of his former home. Grace had told me only that James had disappeared. She hadn’t told me his trailer was burned.
I turned the car around and pulled back onto the road, heading up the mountain. After another half mile, I turned the car off the road into a chat driveway that was nearly a half-mile long and led into a hollow at the base of a steep mountain ridge. At the end of the driveway was a small wooden house, neatly kept and painted white, flanked by two cabins. It was the same house where I’d watched the Tipton family dance in the yard. It was the same house where I’d shared their food and their drink and listened to their music and their stories. It was Granny Tipton’s house.
I got out of the car, walked around to the back, and opened the trunk. There was a black duffel bag sitting there, and I began to feel around inside of it. I felt the clothing, the phones, a couple of stacks of money, and, finally, the cold steel of a pistol.
Before I was able to pull the pistol out of the bag, I heard two clicks behind me. They sounded like hammers being pulled back on shotguns.
“What the hell you doin’ up here, boy?” a voice said, and I felt a gun barrel being pressed to the back of my neck.
I saw a flash of bright light, and then there was nothing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Grace walked into Boots Little Honky Tonk on Northside Drive in Knoxville just after eight at night. The cigarette smoke rolling out of the place nearly choked her. A fat, male karaoke singer in a brown cowboy hat was butchering Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying” on a makeshift stage, and the music was loud. As she looked around, a bit stunned, she felt someone take her arm from behind. She turned and found herself standing face to face with Gary DuBose, a DEA agent whom she knew casually and who had called earlier in the day and asked to meet at this most unusual spot.
“I’ve got a booth in the back,” DuBose hollered over the din.
Grace followed him past a red car hood that was hanging on a wall with a huge-breasted image of Dolly Parton painted on it. The place was full and loud and smelled of fried bar food, stale beer, and, of course, cigarettes. As DuBose walked in front of her, Grace took note of his wide shoulders and thick neck. He was wearing blue jeans and a black-and-red flannel shirt along with a pair of boots. His head was covered by a black baseball cap with an orange T above the bill. They settled into the booth. Grace’s back was to the front door and the majority of the crowd, which made her immediately uncomfortable, but her only alternative would have been to slide across and sit next to DuBose, and that wasn’t going to happen.
She noticed DuBose had a Budweiser sitting in front of him. His reputation was that he was honest and hardworking, the son of the former sheriff of Knox County. He had testified during two hearings in which Grace had been involved, and he had given what she believed to be truthful and unexaggerated testimony.
“Beer?” DuBose said as a waitress approached.
Grace nodded. “Sure. Same as yours.”
DuBose pointed at his bottle, held up two fingers, and the waitress went away.
“Okay, I’m intrigued,” Grace said. “What can I do for you?”
DuBose took a sip from his beer.
“What do you hear from Darren Street?”
It had been five days since Darren’s unbelievable escape from the federal penitentiary in California. Every US Marshal and FBI agent within fifty miles had called and asked her the same question.
“Are you kidding me?” Grace said. “You asked me down here to try to drag information about my client out of me?”
Grace started to get up to leave, but DuBose placed a hand on her forearm.
“Please, don’t go,” he said. “It was just a joke. I want to talk to you about something important. It might help you and it might help your client.”
Grace sat back down and folded her arms.
“I’ll listen, but not for long,” she said.
“You have to understand this is hard for me, Miss Alexander,” DuBose said. “I’m a law enforcement guy. I’m part of a fraternity. My father was a sheriff. He and Ben Clancy were friends for a long time, although I have to admit toward the end, before my father fell off the roof and was killed, he’d told me he was starting to worry about some of the things Clancy was doing and had done in the past. I think his conscience was starting to bother him.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Grace said.
“Because my conscience has been bothering me, too,” DuBose said. “Especially since your client has been back in the news, back in everyone’s faces. I’ve thought about it and prayed about it and thought about it and prayed about it some more. My father always taught me to try to do the right thing, even when it was difficult. Well, like I said, this is really difficult.”
The waitress arrived with two beers. DuBose gave her a ten-dollar bill and told her to keep the change.
“Did you call me the night before the trial?” Grace said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Somebody called me the night before the trial started and told me Darren was innocent. Was it you?”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Grace studied his face, trying to read whether he was lying. His expression didn’t change a bit, and she decided he was telling the truth.
“And you say this has something to do with Darren Street?”
DuBose nodded. “James Tipton lied at the trial, Miss Alexander. I don’t know everything he lied about and I don’t know exactly why, but he lied. And Ben Clancy knew he was lying and let him do it. He may even have put him up to it.”
Grace felt her back stiffen and her pulse quicken. She told herself to stay calm, go slowly, think clearly. This could be nothing, or this could be everything. Think like a lawyer. Don’t be emotional. Be analytical.
“What specifically did he lie about at trial and how do you know it?” Grace said.
“He lied when you asked him if he’d been offered anything by the government in return for his testimony. I wasn’t at the trial, but I read it in the paper. The paper said you made a big deal out of him being offered something, but he kept saying the only reason he was there was because they’d found that gun and traced it back to him and were trying to pin the murder on him. That they weren’t offering him anything.”
“Do you know exactly what James Tipton had been offered?”
“I know his drug case disappeared completely. I was working the case myself. We were close to indicting him. If we’d done it and he’d been convicted, he would have gone away for thirty years.”
“What else can you tell me?” Grace said, ignoring the beer.
“This is how it happened, Miss Alexander, to the best of my knowledge. I’m sure your client has told you he initially tried to hire James Tipton to kill Jalen Jordan, since he testified to it publicly at the trial. I’d been to see Tipton not too long before that to tell him we were about to indict him and to find out whether I could squeeze information about his suppliers in Florida out of him. Initially, he wouldn’t help me so I just kept working the case like normal. But then one night, out of the blue, Tipton calls me and tells me about this encounter with Darren Street. He says Street came to his house and tried to hire him, that a child killer might possibly be involved, and asked whether I would be willing to make a deal for that kind of information. I tell him I might, and I immediately call Ben Clancy because of Clancy’s longtime relationship with my father and because Darren Street had said some pretty nasty things about my father before he died. Thinking back on it, I probably shouldn’t have gone to Clancy, but then again, who else would I go to? If I’d gone to my boss, he’d have gone to Clancy. If I’
d gone to the FBI, they’d have gone to Clancy. If I’d gone to Clancy’s boss, he would’ve turned it over to Clancy.
“So anyway, I meet Clancy the next morning and tell him that Street has tried to hire a hit man and has already paid fifty thousand in cash. Clancy doesn’t set up stings or start assigning agents as you would expect. He tells me he wants to handle the whole thing himself, and because of the bad blood between him and Street, I can sort of understand it. He has me set up a meet with Tipton at a safe house, and from then on, I don’t see Tipton again. Clancy does come to my boss later on, about a month after Jalen Jordan was shot, and asks him bury the drug case on Tipton so he can get a conviction on Darren. He convinces my boss Darren is guilty of murder and that Tipton is his best witness, and my boss agrees to lose the paperwork and the computer files. Poof! No more drug case.”
“You realize that this is enough to get Darren a new trial, maybe even a dismissal?” Grace said.
“I do, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about it sooner. Like I said, I worried about it and prayed about it so much that I thought I’d lose my mind. I finally was able to block it out, but lately, now that Street has escaped and has been all over the news, it’s been on my mind again. And I’ll tell you something else, Miss Alexander. I don’t think Darren Street killed Jalen Jordan at all. I think Tipton did it, and I think Ben Clancy put him up to it so he could frame Street.”
“Can you prove that?”
“No, ma’am. I can’t. But that’s what I think, for what it’s worth.”
“Would you be willing to sign a sworn statement repeating what you’ve just told me?”
“At this point, yes, ma’am, I would. It’ll probably cost me my job, but I can’t live with this kind of guilt any more. My daddy would be ashamed of me.”