Moondust Lake

by Davis Bunn

  Jack Helms rose to his feet and gave a tight smile. “All right, that’s enough.”

  Buddy rose as well. He knew his father was planning something more. A counterattack so powerful Jack Helms expected it to crush and overwhelm. But as he stood there, staring across the table, Buddy grew increasingly certain of two things. The first was, he could survive whatever Jack had intended. The second certainty he spoke out loud. “I’m free, Pop. I’m not coming back. Not for a day. Not for an hour. Accept this and move on. Otherwise I’ll bring all this out into the light of day.”

  Jack Helms continued to offer his mirthless smile. “You’re nothing, and you never will be.”

  “You’re wrong about that as well.” He gestured to the attorneys on his side of the table. “We’re done here.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “You should have shared that information before we entered into negotiations,” Stanton Parrish chided.

  “I didn’t have it to share,” Buddy replied.

  “That phone call you received as we were entering?”

  Buddy nodded. “A friend traveled to Hamlin. I didn’t even know she was going.”

  “She should have told you.” But there was no heat to Stanton’s riposte. Indeed, the man seemed positively giddy. “I would have rewritten the morning with that tune. Oh, my, yes. I would have invited the buffoon to disembowel himself so we could feast upon his innards.”

  Melanie coughed discreetly. Stanton gathered himself and took a step back from the drama he had missed. “I do beg your pardon. That was most indiscreet.”

  “I can’t thank you enough,” Buddy replied. “Both of you.”

  “I can still hardly bring myself to believe the man actually went so far as to present falsified documents to an officer of the court.”

  “Falsified and notarized,” Melanie added.

  “And you believed me,” Buddy said.

  “You are our client,” Stanton replied. “It’s our business to accept your word as legitimate.”

  “You went far beyond that.”

  “As we should have.” Stanton inspected his young client. “I would have expected a good deal more satisfaction on your part. You have all but won the day.”

  “There’s no way they’ll take this to court,” Melanie agreed. “I would bring Grady White up on charges before the bar.”

  Buddy shook his head. The court was never the issue. “Pop’s not done here.”

  “What possibly could he do at this point?”

  “I don’t know. But my gut tells me . . .” When he went silent, they waited with the patience of trusting companions. He finished, “When I started working here, Pop often claimed he never lost a fight. He walked away from some. But he never lost.” It was a declaration that had always brought Jack Helms grim joy. Buddy glanced back at the empty boardroom window. “My father won’t walk away from this one. He can’t.”

  “Well, it is my duty as your attorney to announce that Jack Helms has . . .”

  Buddy’s phone rang. He checked the readout, excused himself, and walked over to stand beneath the flapping flags. “Kimberly?”

  “Buddy, oh, Buddy.”

  There was a muffled quality to her voice, as though she was talking around a lump of cotton. All his fear and his worry coagulated into a dagger of ice that plunged deep into his gut. “What’s happened?”

  Kimberly had difficulty shaping the words. “I want to say how much I—”

  There was a squeal of painful protest, a rustling sound. Buddy yelled, “Kimberly!”

  A deep male voice demanded, “Who am I speaking with?”

  “Put Kimberly on the line!”

  “This is Sheriff Hinkle of Hamlin County. I need to know who I’m talking with here.”

  “Buddy. Buddy Helms.”

  “Mr. Helms, your associate here—wait, Jim, give me that ID. Okay. Ms. Kimberly Sturgiss has been involved in a serious road incident. She is being arrested on charges of reckless driving, driving under the influence, and reckless endangerment.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “She struck a sheriff’s car, son. The lady is going down.”

  Buddy glanced back at the building behind him. A shadow drifted across the boardroom windows. There, and then gone with spectral ease.

  “Mr. Helms, you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “There’s a message I’ve been asked to pass on by some folks down here.” The sheriff spoke with a casual brutality. The voice of a professional interrogator. A man used to being feared. “We take care of our own.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Kimberly touched her lip with her tongue and tasted blood. The left side of her face was painfully swollen where she had struck the car’s side window. Her shoulder was severely bruised but thankfully not dislocated. Her forehead had finally stopped bleeding. Her lip was inflamed and one tooth was loose. Her left eye was almost completely shut. She heard the men move in the jail’s central office, out beyond the electric doors. She knew she should be terrified. These men assumed they held all the cards. They had been allied to the power in this county for so long, they could not even imagine someone threatening their domain. Instead, she felt strangely calm. She hoped it was not some false peace drawn from an undiagnosed concussion. She didn’t think so. But she couldn’t be certain.

  She had been brought straight here from the accident site. Her only visitor had been a pair of men dressed in matching black suits and white shirts. No ties. Their hair was slicked down with so much oil their heads glistened like wavy mirrors. They eyed her with the calmness of reptiles. She knew that gaze. She had endured the same look from Buddy’s father.

  “She don’t look like much,” the one on the right said.

  The sheriff was bulky in the manner of an aging boxer, big and strong, with scarred hands that were settled comfortably atop his broad belt. “She got the wind knocked out of her, that’s for certain.”

  “She seen the doc?”

  “Nah, she don’t need no doctor. Do you, honey?”

  The man on the right must have been the twins’ appointed spokesman. “You’ve seen your share of bad drivers and folks who don’t know better than to fall down stairs. Haven’t you, Sheriff?”

  “I have, and that’s a fact.” The sheriff did not so much take pleasure from her pain as simply not care. “Enough to know when one don’t need the doc.”

  The old man pulled out an old-fashioned pocket watch. “When is Jack due?”

  “He’ll be here sometime this evening.”

  “You sure she called the Helms kid?”

  “She surely did. And she said her bit. Then I spoke to him myself.” The sheriff’s smile was the worst part about him. “Jack’s boy screamed like a stuck pig.”

  “What do you aim on doing with the kid?”

  “Not much. Give him a good look and the choice of doing what his pappy says or watching her pay for his mistakes.” He gestured at the door. “Y’all don’t have to hang around for this.”

  “Yes, we do. Debts like this need to be paid in person.” The man snapped his watch shut. “How long does Jack figure the boy’ll mind him?”

  “The old man only needs him for a while. Got to nail down some deal.” The sheriff shrugged his unconcern. “After that, Jack says the boy can crawl away if he wants. Most times, though, once they’re good and licked, they stay that way. These young folks just don’t have much backbone.”

  The man on the left spoke for the first time. Only when the words emerged in a rattling wheeze did Kimberly notice the scar that ran over his Adam’s apple. “That ain’t the question we need to be asking. What are we gonna do about our leak?”

  “I had myself a good old talk with that pair,” the sheriff replied. “You ain’t gonna hear another peep outta them. They like living too much.”

  “And the documents?”

  The sheriff showed his easy, vacant grin. “What documents are those?”

  Only when they moved away did
Kimberly realize she had been holding her breath.

  The women’s holding pen was a cage that was barred on top as well as sides. Mold-covered plywood walls offered privacy around the washroom. The cage was held inside a larger room that looked like it might once have been an auditorium. The former stage held a glassed-in observation chamber. The men’s area was probably behind a whitewashed wall to the left of her bunk. Four interview rooms with steel doors lined the opposite wall. Kimberly could not look at them without shivering. She did not hear any screams. She did not see any other prisoners. But the solitude offered her no comfort, nor any sense of hope that she might be spared. She thought of Buddy entering into this heartless domain, and enduring his own brand of casual brutality. Tears leaked from her good eye.

  They had laid their trap well. She had just left the Hamlin town limits and her car had not yet reached cruising speed, when the sheriff’s car had emerged from behind a broken-down wall and jumped over the grassy verge. The lone officer had not appeared to be watching her at all. Instead, he spoke into the car’s microphone and scouted in both directions. Then just as she passed, he gunned the motor. Taking aim. At her.

  He smashed her front left fender and the driver’s door. He gunned his motor, allowing her momentum to carry them both off the road. Kimberly was rammed nose-first into the drainage ditch.

  She must have blacked out, because the next thing she knew, the sheriff was reaching across her, pulling out her purse. The move had made no sense. Her brain felt as matted as her hair and as inflamed as her face. The sheriff didn’t even glance her way until she moaned out what she hoped was a plea for help. “You just hold your horses, missy. I’ll be getting to you soon enough.”

  Then he pulled out her phone, plucked a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, punched in a number, waited a second, then held the phone to her ear and said, “You just tell the Helms boy he needs to come and get it.”

  CHAPTER 37

  They gathered at Beth’s apartment. Buddy wanted to race off, play the Don Quixote of San Luis Obispo, tilt his meager lance at all the windmills. But despite his rage, he remained clearheaded enough to name his goals. He was not after chivalry in solitary battle. He was after bringing his lady home.

  Yet the waves of rage continued to crash inside him. So he set his headquarters up where a woman who had spent years maintaining an impossible peace in the face of intolerable storms could calm his spirit and focus his mind.

  He placed the calls. He reached out to those he could trust, and asked for the help that a life depended upon. Actually, two lives.

  Stanton Parrish and Melanie Evans made a valiant tactical team. Buddy listened to them plot and phone and talk and plead, and knew they were doing all that was possible on that score. Which meant he was ready when the call he had been waiting for came through. He waved as Cliff Hazzard rose from his Rolls, and turned away. “This is Buddy.”

  “Grady White here, old buddy. How you doing?”

  “What do you want, Grady?”

  “I’m just calling, you know, to ask if you could do the right thing here.”

  The rage surged and roiled, but he held it down tight. “ ‘The right thing.’”

  “Sure. The future of your father’s company is on the line here.”

  “That’s right, Grady. It is.”

  “Your own father. Shouldn’t you at least give him—”

  “What are the terms?”

  “Same as before. Nothing’s changed. He wants you back. Isn’t that what matters here? You’ve still got a home at the Helms Group.”

  The longer he clamped down on everything he had spent a lifetime not saying, the easier his rage resided, down deep where it could not dominate. Down where it crystallized his thinking, kept him from raging at a flaccid little messenger boy. “I am going to counter.”

  “You . . . What?”

  “I need some time to work things through.” Buddy checked his watch. “It’s just turned six. I’ll phone you by nine. Give me a number where I can reach you.”

  “Buddy, man, I’m not sure—”

  “Give me a number, Grady.”

  Buddy listened to the attorney rattle off a number, but did not bother to write it down. He just said, “Three hours.” And hung up.

  Cliff Hazzard observed the exchange with a slit-eyed smile. “Jack Helms ain’t waiting any three hours.”

  “No.”

  “So, what are you going to do?”

  “The only thing I can do,” Buddy replied. “Hurry.”

  Cliff kissed Beth’s cheek. “What on earth are you doing, Miss Beth, living in this rat hole?”

  “This is where I am meant to be, Cliff. And it suits me just fine.”

  Cliff Hazzard studied her intently. Buddy saw what the older man did. His mother did not look good. Cliff demanded, “What does Jack have to say about your new digs?”

  “I did not ask his opinion.”

  “Bet he didn’t like being kept out of that loop, not one tiny bit.”

  “I did not ask him that, either,” Beth replied. “Coffee?”

  Their numbers grew with exponential swiftness. Preston arrived two minutes after Cliff. He was accompanied by the senior pastor, Ross Burridge. Buddy had waited for them to arrive to detail his idea. But telling them directly ran the risk of his plan being sidelined. Preston’s fury was just begging for a reason to explode. And Cliff Hazzard had started talking about taking in an army before he even knew what the target was.

  So Buddy called the one man not present who was crucial to his plan. By then, their numbers had grown to where they spilled out over the patio’s edges and down into the lawn. Buddy raised his voice to where they could all hear, then had to explain to Mark Weathers why he was yelling. The CEO of the Santa Barbara software group took it in, and demanded, “Cliff Hazzard is there?”

  “Standing right beside me.”

  “Will he confirm that he agrees with your offer?”

  Cliff Hazzard took the phone and said, “I agree with everything young Helms just said, including the parts I don’t understand. Do this deal, and Buddy and his group will run the first year of your marketing campaign for cost.”

  Cliff listened a moment longer, then said, “Because if we had it my way, we’d be heading off to war. And that won’t do us any good at all, unless we were out to ruin some young lives, including the lady they got holed up in the Hamlin jail.” He grinned at Buddy and added, “Besides which, I’ve taken a shine to young Helms here. To sign him onto my team, I’ve got to make this work. And I’m coming to trust the boy with a lot more than promo copy.”

  Buddy took back the phone and tried to find some way to thank Cliff. But all he could think of was the team of watchful faces. Trusting him to make the right move. Waiting for him to point the way. His team.

  Cliff said, “The man is waiting.”

  Buddy turned to Preston. “You agree with this?”

  “Personally, I’d like to take your father hostage and offer them a trade,” Preston said.

  “Won’t work.”

  “Then I’d go for unlocking Mr. Hazzard’s gun cabinet and waking up the world.”

  “Tempting,” Buddy said. “But it would doom your cousin.”

  Preston shrugged. “Then I agree.”

  Buddy lifted the phone and asked Mark Weathers, “Are you in?”

  “You’re certain there’s no way I can up Hazzard’s offer and have you come join our team?”

  “I am grateful,” Buddy replied. “But no.”

  The software executive accepted the news with a sigh. “Give me a call in an hour. We’ll try and have something mapped out by then.”

  As they loaded up, the senior pastor was the last to leave the veranda. Buddy assumed he was having second thoughts over becoming further involved. But when he approached Ross Burridge, Buddy realized the man was arguing into his phone. He heard the pastor say, “Because we’ve spent too long being afraid of this man. Because what he has condoned is not merely
illegal, it is against God’s law. Because we have to make a stand. Because we have to take our position on the side of right and truth! Does that answer your question?” Ross Burridge slapped the phone shut. “I’ve been waiting years to say that. Too long.”

  Beth asked, “Are they coming?”

  “That’s between them and their God.”

  Buddy braced for an argument and turned to his mother. But before he could insist that she not come along, Beth announced, “Carey and I will stay here.”

  He noticed for the first time the way his sister’s gaze had become inwardly focused, as though she had already removed herself from the fray. He saw the two women exchange a glance, and resisted the urge to ask what was going on. He hugged them both, and breathed one strong breath with each. All the words just had to wait.

  They made for a motley armada. Stanton Parrish drove Cliff Hazzard’s Rolls, both men working the phones before they pulled from the drive. The pastor and his team drove a Lincoln. Buddy’s group from work was there in full force, right down to the secretaries, crammed into a boxy Ion and two Ford Escapes. As Buddy started toward Preston’s vintage Mercedes, the old man called from the patio, “Son!”

  “Sir?”

  Josiah motioned with one arthritic hand. Reluctantly Buddy climbed the stairs again. When Buddy closed the distance, the old man said, “I marched with Martin Luther King. I crossed two states on my feet. Fighting the good fight. Standing up for them who were too afraid or been silenced too long. Reminding them what it meant to have a voice.”

  Buddy had no idea what to say to that.

  The old man nodded his approval to Buddy’s response. “You go take your stand with open hands, boy. Know there’s a rightness to answering their weapons with nothing but a message of peace. Their day is over. They just don’t know it yet.” His nods were strong enough to set the rocker to creaking. “Your mother and I’ll be here waiting when the battle’s won.”

  CHAPTER 38

  It could have been a hard journey for Beth and Carey both, pushing through the night on a mission most would have called hopeless from the start. But Beth was filled with a remarkable sense of peace, as though they served as divine messengers. Even here, in the midst of man-made chaos, there was a unique rightness to each breath.