by Scott Pratt
Contents
Blood Money
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part III
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Thank You
About the Author
Blood Money
By Scott Pratt
This book, along with every book I’ve written and every book I’ll write, is dedicated to my darling Kristy, to her unconquerable spirit and her inspirational courage. I loved her before I was born and I’ll love her after I’m long gone.
PROLOGUE
1931
Carter County, Tennessee
THE moon was full, a liquid, orange ball rising steadily over the mountains to the east, when Hack Barnes heard the first rumblings of the trucks coming toward him. He gazed upward and wondered about the omen. His coon hound had howled earlier, before the moon appeared. Hack was smart but uneducated; he believed in many of the suspicions handed down by his ancestors. One of them was: “If a dog howls before the moon rises, someone is going to die.”
As he sat waiting, listening to the sounds of the forest that surrounded him – the yelp of a coyote, the screech of an owl, the breath of the wind – Hack couldn’t shake the feeling that he was about to become a part of something mysterious, something dangerous. He was no stranger to lawlessness, no stranger to the dark side of life, but something was making him uneasy. Hack ran a calloused hand across his thick beard, leaned his Winchester rifle against the side of the barn, spit out a long stream of tobacco juice and stretched his neck toward the sound of the trucks. Through the leaves, he could make out the dappled beams of headlights coming over the ridge to the southeast, less than half-a-mile away. The beams bounced wildly as the trucks made their way across the potholes and washed out crevices in what passed for a county road that led to Hack’s place – five hundred acres of rugged, East Tennessee mountain land that had been handed down through three generations.
A few minutes later, the trucks rattled up near him and the engines went silent. Hack could make out the figures of two men in the first truck. One of them was familiar. Carmine Russo, head of the Russo family and the most notorious gangster in Philadelphia, was in the passenger seat, while the other was a stranger, most likely a bodyguard. The passenger door opened and Russo stepped out. He was wearing suspenders over a long-sleeved white shirt that was rolled up to the elbows, dark slacks and dress shoes. A black fedora sat at an angle atop his head. A leather shoulder holster was wrapped around his thick torso, the butt of a pistol visible beneath his arm.
“Hack,” Russo said, extending a beefy hand. The gangster was a couple of inches taller than Hack and at least fifty pounds heavier. His face was as round as the full moon above, his eyes like black, shiny marbles.
“Mr. Russo.”
The bodyguard climbed out of the other side of the truck and positioned himself at the back. Another man Hack had never seen got out from behind the wheel of the second truck and stood next to the bed. Both of them were carrying Thompson sub-machine guns. Introductions were neither offered nor desired.
“Ready?” Russo asked.
“I reckon,” Hack said.
“Anybody else know?”
“Nobody.”
“Good man.” Russo clapped Hack on the shoulder. “I knew I could count on you. Let’s get it unloaded.”
The trucks were Ford Model AA flatbeds. Large, canvas tarps had been tied down over the beds, and the two bodyguards set about untying knots and pulling rope through grommets. Each truck carried five stacks of thin, wooden crates, five to a stack. Twenty-five crates on each truck, fifty in all.
“Where do you want it, Hack?” Russo asked.
“In the barn.”
Hack and the bodyguards began unloading the crates. Each had two rope handles. They were heavy. Russo stood by and watched, chewing on a cigar and surveying the surrounding darkness. The crates were carried into an empty stall in the barn and stacked neatly. It took them nearly an hour. When the last crate was in the stall, Hack began to re-cover them with the canvas.
“What are you going to do with them?” Russo asked. He was standing inside the stall now. Two hanging oil lanterns cast flickering shadows across his face.
“I’ll load them on the mules and start hauling them up the mountain at first light,” Hack said. “Looks like it’s going to take me a couple of days.”
“You’ve got a good place to hide them?”
“Won’t nobody bother ‘em.”
“Would you like to see what you’re keeping for me? Hey boys! Come on in here. Let’s show Hack what we brought.”
“Don’t much care what it is,” Hack said. “You asked me for a favor and I said I’d do it. I’ll keep my word.”
“Did ya hear that?” Russo turned to his bodyguards. “Now that’s a man I can trust. How long we been doing business, Hack? Ten years?”
“A while, I reckon.”
“Ten years,” Russo said. The bodyguards had retrieved their Thompsons. They were holding them loosely, the barrels pointing at the barn floor. “Hack and me have moved thousands of gallons of liquor up the roads and the rails. Never a disagreement over a single dime. We could have moved a lot more, too, but Hack cares about quality. And he cares about secrecy. This is a man who knows how to keep his mouth shut.”
Hack saw Russo’s right hand move in a blur. He saw the pistol, heard the sound of the hammer cocking.
“It’s a shame I can’t say the same about you,” Russo said. The stall exploded with noise and light. Two shots. The bodyguards fell to the ground in a heap. Hack didn’t move. The night had gone silent, save for the sound of Russo’s breathing. The acrid smell of gunpowder filled the stall. Russo turned his face slowly toward Hack. Hack looked into the dark eyes, uncertain of whether he would take another breath.
“My trial starts in two weeks, which means I might be back in a couple of months,” Russo said. “But if I end up going to prison, it might be five years or more. When I get out, my business in Philly will be gone, but with the help of what’s in these crates, I’ll get it back in a hurry. If it isn’t here when I get out…”
Hack held Russo’s cold gaze. “It’ll be here,” he said. “All of it.”
“It better be, my friend. Because somebody will always be watching. Remember that. Somebody will always be watching.”
PART I
Present Day
Chapter 1
MY name is Joe Dillard, and the young woman sitting across from me was lovely. Her name was Charleston Story, but everyone called her Charlie. Her hair was long and auburn, her eyes sapphire-blue and intelligent. Her skin was smooth and tanned, her smile perfect and easy. She was around twenty-five, fresh out of law school. I’d known her – not well, but casually – since she was a small child because I’d unsuccessfully defended her father on a marijuana production charge after the feds raided his farm over in Carter County more than twenty years earlier. It was one of my first cases as a defense lawyer in federal court and left me with a sour taste in my mouth. The girl’s father, a young man named Luke Story, had been drafted into the army, sent to Vietnam, and had lost a part of an arm to a Viet Cong grenade before he was eventually caught growing dope. The federal judge who sentenced him was unsympathetic regarding the military service. He sentenced Luke to twenty-five years in prison for growing fifty marijuana plants.
“So what can I do for you?” I said after Charlie and I finished the obligatory small talk.
“I need a job,” she said with a slight Tennessee lilt. “I finished at the top of my class in law school and interviewed with some of the best firms in the state, but as soon as they found out about Daddy being in prison, they all thanked me politely and showed me the door. I have to work under the supervision of a licensed attorney until I pass the bar and nobody else seems to want to give me a chance. I hate to spring this on you, Mr. Dillard, because I’ve heard about your wife and I know you don’t take a lot of cases these days. It’s probably asking too much, but is there any way you could help me out?”
“How is your dad?” I said, taken off guard by her directness and needing a moment to think. “How much longer are they going to keep him?”
“He gets out in a couple of months,” Charlie said. “He has to spend six months in a halfway house in Knoxville after that, which means he won’t be home for good until early spring, but at least we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
I’d always admired people who were direct and got right to the point, but what Charlie was asking of me was something I’d never considered. With the exception of a few years I spent in the district attorney’s office prosecuting criminal cases, I’d always practiced law alone. I’d never had an associate or a partner and didn’t want one now. My wife was battling metastatic breast cancer and I was spending as much time with her as possible. My case load was light; I turned down far more cases than I accepted. I was renting a space in Jonesborough near the courthouse that consisted of a tiny waiting room, a half-bathroom, my office and two other rooms, one of which occasionally served as a conference room and another that was empty. I had no secretary, no paralegal, and no investigator, although I did have my son, Jack, who was home for the summer following his first year of law school at Vanderbilt. He’d set up shop in the conference room and was calling himself my law clerk, although I had no real need for a law clerk. Just as I was about to explain all of those things to Charlie, Jack’s muscular frame materialized in the doorway.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but can I speak to you in private for just a minute? It’s important.”
“Excuse me,” I said to Charlie, “I’ll be right back.”
I got up and walked out of the office and down the short hallway to the conference room. Jack closed the door.
“You have to help that girl out,” he said in a whisper.
“What? You were eavesdropping?”
“The walls are thin. But yeah, I was eavesdropping. You have to say yes.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s obviously bright. She said she finished at the top of her class. And it isn’t fair that she’s being blackballed because of her father. You’re all about justice, Dad. It’s unjust, an injustice, a travesty of justice, that that tremendously beautiful young lady in there can’t break into the legal profession because her father is in jail.”
“‘Tremendously beautiful’ being the key phrase, I suppose.”
“I could learn a lot from her,” he said. “We’re about the same age. I think we’ll become good friends.”
“Inter-office romances are unhealthy and unwise—”
“Who said anything about romance?”
“So you’re not planning to ask her out?”
“Of course not. Well, it might have crossed my mind, but maybe she already has a boyfriend.”
“Do you want me to ask her for you? Better yet, why don’t you go in there and ask her yourself?”
“Come on, Dad, please. She’s a freakin’ knockout. Even if we don’t wind up dating, she’s so easy on the eyes it’ll make my summer much more pleasant. But don’t do it for me, do it for her, or better yet, do it for justice. Nah, never mind that. Do it for me.”
“You’re a pain in the butt sometimes, you know that?” I said, and I turned and walked out.
“Sorry,” I said as I sat back down behind my desk. “Do you have a boyfriend, Charlie?”
She blinked a few times. “What? Why?”
“Because my son seems to be quite enamored with you.”
She smiled and her eyes twinkled.
“He’s cute,” she said.
“Great,” I said. “He thinks you’re cute and you think he’s cute. A perfect basis on which to make a sound decision and go forward in building a professional relationship.”
“Wait,” she said, “I didn’t mean to—”
I held up my hand. “I was kidding, Charlie, but I can’t give you a job. It doesn’t have anything to do with your father. I just don’t have a job to give. I don’t take in enough work these days to be able to pay you a salary, and I don’t have room for another lawyer here.”
“You don’t have to pay me a salary,” she said. “I already have someone who is willing to pay me five thousand dollars to represent him. That should be enough to get me through until I pass the bar. I still live at home on Buck Mountain with my uncle so I don’t have a lot of expenses. And as far as having a place to work, I have a cell phone and a laptop so I don’t really need an office. I can work anywhere.”
“You need somewhere to meet with clients,” I said.
“What I need is someone to show me the ropes. The one thing they don’t teach you in law school is how to actually practice law.”
“You’re right about that,” I said, remembering how utterly helpless I often felt when I got out of law school and hung out my shingle. “If it hadn’t been for the older lawyers around here when I was getting started, I would have wound up getting sued for malpractice every time I turned around. They really helped me out.”
“Maybe it’s your turn,” she said as the smile returned to her face. “A little karma. What goes around comes around.”
“Let me tell you a little about how this profession works,” I said. “You start at the bottom of the totem pole. You have to take cases no one else will take, chase windmills no one else will chase. In a town this size, if you manage to stay with it, work hard, find a niche, and avoid all the pitfalls of substance abuse and greed that seem to plague lawyers, after ten years or so you’ll be able to make a decent living. After twenty years, if you’ve managed to live within your means, you’ll become somewhat comfortable, at least financially. After thirty years, you can start thinking about retirement, but you won’t want to retire because you’ve worked so hard to achieve and maintain your station in the profession. After forty years, you’ll be managing the health and personal problems created by constant stress and emotional turmoil. Sometime after that, you’ll drop dead of a heart attack or a stroke and will soon be forgotten.”
“I’ll go ahead and slit my wrists now if you’d like,” she said. “Do you have a razor I can borrow?”
I leaned back in my chair and
couldn’t help smiling back at her. She was so pleasant, and Jack was right about her being easy on the eyes.
“Where did you live in Knoxville while you were in school?” I said. “I spent three years down there. Both of my kids were born there.”
“I didn’t live in Knoxville. I commuted.”
“You what? From Buck Mountain?”
“Five days a week for three years,” she said. “I have a 75,000-mile law degree. My grandmother was sick and I didn’t want to leave her alone, so I decided to make the drive every day. I’d leave at five-thirty in the morning and get back around six in the evening.”
“And you still managed to finish at the top of the class?”
“I wasn’t the valedictorian, but I was close.”
The fact that she was so determined to become a lawyer that she was willing to drive roughly two-hundred and fifty miles round-trip every day to earn her degree impressed me. I changed my mind and decided right then to take her on board.
“What’s the case?” I said. “The one that involves someone paying you five thousand dollars. Is it a criminal case?”
“No, it’s civil. The client is a neighbor of mine named Roscoe Barnes. He’s an elderly man and his son is trying to have him involuntarily committed to a mental institution. Roscoe is old, but he isn’t crazy and he’s in pretty good health.”
“Is Roscoe wealthy?”
“I don’t think so. He taught English at Cloudland High School for thirty-five years and his wife was a math teacher before she died fifteen years ago. He owns several hundred acres of land up on the mountain, but a lot of it is exposed rock. I don’t see how it could be worth a lot of money, but Roscoe mentioned that his son – his name is Zane – wants his land. I get the sense that Roscoe isn’t telling me everything, but he’s mentally competent and he isn’t a danger to himself or anyone else. That’s the legal standard for involuntary commitment, isn’t it?”
I nodded and said, “Has the son hired a lawyer?”