by A. E. Howe
Everyone had started yelling and running once they realized that someone was shooting. There was a second shot and I heard someone shout behind me, but I’d seen the muzzle flash and cued Mac into a canter. The shot had come from some bushes near the intersection where Matt had been posted. As Mac and I got closer, Deputy Edwards came running toward us with a rifle up to his shoulder.
“I think it came from over there!” he shouted, waving behind him. But he didn’t fool me. I’d seen him step out from the very spot I’d seen the muzzle flash.
When he realized I was onto him, he pointed the rifle toward me. His next shot went so close to my head that I heard it go by, causing me to flinch and jerk the reins. Mac stumbled and I rolled over his shoulder and onto the ground.
Back on my feet, I could see Edwards standing in front of a man lying on the street. I started toward them and saw the most amazing tableau I could have imagined. Dad lay in the street, holding his silver 1911 pointed at Edwards, whose rifle was trained on my father. Standing almost on top of Dad was Mauser, with a grim face and curled lip. His eyes were locked on Edwards, his tail stiff and pointing straight up and a growl coming from deep in his throat. The posse surrounded Dad, each of them holding a gun pointed at Edwards. That’s when I realized that I was also holding my gun.
A small crowd was still left, all of them watching the scene play out with their mouths hanging open. For a few moments there was nothing but silence, then my dad’s voice sounded loud and strong.
“Edwards, you better just put that rifle on the ground, slowly, otherwise the fellas at Marshall’s Funeral Home are going to have a hell of a job making your corpse presentable.”
Edwards took his eye off of Dad and seemed to notice everyone else for the first time. Tunnel vision—it’s a thing. He made his decision and gently lowered the rifle to the ground. I walked up to him, pulled his hands behind him and cuffed him. Another deputy took him away.
That’s when I looked over at Dad and noticed that there was blood on his side.
“You’ve been shot,” I said, kneeling down beside him. Mauser tried to lick my face and, when I pushed him away, he laid down next to Dad.
“I’m fine. It just grazed me. It’s my ass that hurts. Go get the horses.”
I found Mac and Finn across the street, both trying to find something edible on a frost-bitten lawn. I took them back to the trailer and left them munching contentedly from a hay bag as if nothing had happened.
Pete was waiting for me when I got back to Dad. There were paramedics swarming all around him since many of them had been in the parade. They cut Dad’s shirt away and tended to his wound while he gave orders to anyone close enough to hear him.
“He’s going to be fine,” Pete told me, dragging me away. “What the hell is going on? Dill told me that you’re holding Matt.”
My heart was hammering in my chest. What had I done?
“Let me go check on Dad and fill him in,” I told Pete.
Dad was trying to get up on his feet, much to the annoyance of the EMT’s.
“I’m fine,” he said, trying to push them away. “Barely even broke the skin. I shouldn’t have fallen off my horse.”
Most of them knew him and realized there was no point in arguing with him. Jamie had the other end of Mauser’s leash again and was trying to get the dog to give Dad room enough to stand.
“I need to talk to you,” I said and he nodded.
“I want to go see Finn and Mac.” He started hobbling toward the trailer. “My damn butt hurts worse than the bullet wound,” he mumbled.
“I’ve done something stupid.”
He looked up at me. “Well, you were right about something happening at the parade.”
“I was wrong about who. I got a call from Eddie, my CI, saying that our mole was going to do something today. I thought it was Matt. So I put him in a holding cell before the parade.”
“You did what?!”
“I—”
“I heard you. You arrested Matt without telling me! Who else knew about this?” He raised his voice loud enough that a few of the folks standing around were looking over at us.
“No one. I did it on my own.”
“Are you crazy? What the hell did you think you were doing?” He held up his hand. “Don’t answer that.”
“I’m going to talk to him now.”
“No, you aren’t,” he stated flatly. “Pete!” he yelled.
Pete hustled his bulk over to us. “Sir!” Pete knew when to be respectful.
“You’re in charge of this investigation. He,” he pointed at me, “is not to be involved.”
“What I did—” I started to explain.
“No, don’t go there. What you did was withhold information from me. By doing that, you took the responsibility for all of this.” He waved his hand around. “But I’m the one who’s ultimately responsible. I am. You don’t have the judgment to make calls like this. Damn it, people could have died.”
Every word he said was true. The only thing I could do was grovel. “Please, just let me sit in on the interviews. I won’t participate in any way. But I need to see how badly I screwed up.”
Dad looked at me, his breathing heavy and his face pained. Whether it was from the shooting, the fall or from the mess I had created for him, I couldn’t tell.
“Okay,” was all he said, waving his hand dismissively.
I turned to Pete. “I’ll unsaddle the horses, get them loaded and meet you at the office.”
“Go on. Bob will help me with the horses,” Dad said, not looking at me.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I tried to explain everything to Pete as we drove to the office. He made sympathetic sounds, but he looked hurt when I told him about our suspicions about Matt… and how long we’d had them.
Dill Kirby looked up when we came in. “What the hell happened?”
“We’ll fill you in later,” Pete told him as we went through the inner doors.
We found Matt pacing up and down in the holding cell.
“Look who’s here. The dynamic duo. Did you bring my property?”
“I’ll go get it,” I said sheepishly.
I met Pete and Matt as they were walking back to the interview room. “Let’s talk in here,” Pete said, opening the door.
Once seated, Matt held up his cell phone. “Before we go any further, I need to make a call.”
He dialed and waited for an answer. “Yes. They’ve had me locked up. Apparently he tried to shoot the sheriff. I can? Good.” He put the phone down. “I hope you’re recording this,” he said ominously.
“You know we are.” Pete pointed to the camera mounted on the wall.
Matt leaned forward. “Good. ’Cause you all are going to look like asses.”
“We know that you were near the scenes of the murders.” Pete started in the middle.
“I figured that out myself. My question is, how did you know where I was?”
“The sheriff and Deputy Macklin had reason to be suspicious of your activities and so they had a tracking device installed on your laptop.”
“I see.”
“What were you doing?”
“I’ve been given permission to tell you that for the last month or so I’ve been working as an informant for the DEA.”
“What?!” I blurted out. Both Pete and Matt gave me dirty looks. I held up my hands and sat back in my chair.
“The DEA got a tip that there were some deputies helping the Thompsons import and deal drugs in the county. I’d already gone through the agency’s interview process and they were ready to hire me. But they decided I should stay here a bit longer so I could help them ferret out the bad cops and get the information necessary to pull down the Thompsons,” Matt said with a satisfied smirk on his face. I felt like my head was going to explode.
“No one here at the sheriff’s office knew about this?” Pete asked.
“No. We had no idea which, or even how many, of the deputies were involved. For al
l we knew, the sheriff himself might be implicated.” I felt my face turn red. “It wouldn’t be the first time that a sheriff was involved in illegal activities in his county.”
I couldn’t contain myself. “You couldn’t have told me this this morning?” I yelled.
“What part of being undercover don’t you understand? If you’d let me make a call, I would have tried to get permission to tell you. But you wouldn’t.”
“If you can’t sit there without talking, I’ll have to ask you to leave,” Pete told me. I looked at him, thinking he was kidding. He wasn’t. I clamped my mouth shut and sat back.
“It became pretty obvious that Edwards was involved. He was one of the smartest officers on the force. I figured he must have some reason for staying. Turns out he likes to party. His habit isn’t out of control, at least not physically, but mentally he’s addicted to the thrills.”
“Why didn’t you step in when Nichols killed Ayers?”
“Actually, all of that happened too fast. By the time I realized what Nichols was doing, it was over. I wanted to step in and arrest him for the murders, but the guys at the DEA wanted me to hang back and continue to gather information. They were more interested in cleaning up the sheriff’s office and bringing down the Thompsons. Arresting Nichols might or might not have accomplished those goals.”
“But they’re okay with you telling us all of this now?”
“Yes. They have enough to charge the Thompsons with a laundry list of crimes. With all of this coming out, they’re probably raiding the Thompsons right now.”
I didn’t want to believe it. If what he said was true, then I had to give up everything I thought I’d discovered during the last month. Then something else dawned on me. I took a piece of paper and wrote a question, handing it to Pete.
Pete looked at the note and turned to Matt. “Did you realize that your investigations into the Thompsons were causing them to be hyper-paranoid?”
“I may have been noticed a few times. But paranoia is part of the drug trade. It never hurts to have to them off balance.”
Did you pick up that pearl of wisdom from the DEA? I wanted to spit at him. His monkeying around was the catalyst for everything. I grabbed another piece of paper and started scrawling. I thrust it off to Pete when I was done.
“The reason they killed Ayers and the girl was to make my da… the sheriff look bad, to get him off their backs because they thought that he was putting pressure on them. When in reality you were putting pressure on them.” Pete finished reading the hastily written and grammatically challenged message.
“You can’t blame me for the actions of criminals,” Matt said, looking at me. “And maybe if your dad had focused on them earlier, it wouldn’t have gotten to this point.”
I could see Pete bowing up. “To be fair, the sheriff has tried to take them down several times over the last couple of years, but we know now that they had insider knowledge that kept him from catching them with the goods.”
“And he should have known there were leaks,” Matt said, focusing now on Pete.
Pete went over more details with Matt, but my mind was on fire. I couldn’t concentrate. How could I have gotten everything so wrong? Some things were much clearer now, though. Like that whole weird conversation Matt and I had had about the black man murdered on the street corner.
“So Nichols or Edwards shot the man on the corner that you asked me about?” I said in a calm voice. Matt and Pete both looked at me, but didn’t tell me to shut up.
“I’m pretty sure. But I couldn’t get Dud to identify them.”
“Why’d you ask me about it?”
He shrugged. “Fishing. I wanted to see how you’d react. Honestly, I’d noticed you acting squirrelly the last couple of weeks. I thought there was a chance you were involved,” Matt said matter-of-factly.
I held my tongue, but I would have paid someone a thousand dollars for the privilege of slugging him in the face.
“And when we called in the FDLE?” I asked, grinding my teeth.
“The DEA pulled rank on them,” Matt said smugly. Great, I thought, the FDLE agents knew when they were collecting the files that they weren’t going to do anything with them.
Finally the interview was done. As he was walking out the door, Matt stopped. “You can tell your father that he’ll have my resignation Monday morning.”
Oh, the irony!
Pete’s phone rang. After some back and forth he hung up. “They’ve processed Edwards. I told them to bring him up here to the interrogation room. Technically, I should probably call Maxwell, since I’m going to try and cover some of the Nichols murder too. But to hell with him.”
There was a knock on the door ten minutes later and two deputies who regularly worked the jail led Edwards in. It was odd. He didn’t look like the Edwards I’d known. Clearly it was him, but something seemed different. How much of it was real change and how much of it was my perception of him, I’m not sure. He still wore his uniform, but someone had removed all of the rank, patches and insignia from his shirt. The two deputies pushed him down into the chair and fastened his handcuffs through a bar on the table. No one spoke.
“If you all don’t mind waiting outside,” Pete said.
Pete took a minute to look Edwards over. Then he said, “We were friends. If you were in trouble, you could have come to us. Everyone here liked you.”
“I guess,” Edwards said, looking down at the table. “Do you even know anything about me?” he asked, looking at both of us.
“I do,” Pete said. “I know you went to college at Florida State. You’ve had girlfriends, but never married. You write the best reports in the whole department. I also know that I invited you over to my house at least a dozen times during the last five years, and you never came over once.”
“They were parties. You invited everyone.”
“That’s how you get to know people. So why don’t you tell me about yourself? What was this all about?”
“I want a lawyer,” Edwards spat out petulantly.
“No, you don’t,” Pete told him.
“I do.”
“No. If you wanted a lawyer, you wouldn’t have even started this conversation. You want to tell us why you did this. Otherwise, the word’s going to go around the county that you’re just another nut job working for Justin Thompson.”
“I’m not working for him.”
“He’s not paying you?”
Silence from Edwards.
“Drugs, gambling, women?”
More silence.
“Fine.” Pete stood up and started gathering his papers together. “But if you think you’re going to get any protection or reward from the Thompsons, you should know that the DEA is in the process of raiding their homes, businesses and offices right now. And your opportunity to look cooperative is fading fast.”
Pete paused to give Edwards a chance to answer. I didn’t think he was going to, but just as Pete was turning to me, Edwards looked up.
“You know I can’t get a real deal.”
“If by ‘real deal’ you mean a deal where you walk or you do ten years, yeah, you’re right. But maybe you can get a deal where you do twenty or twenty-five rather than life or life-plus.”
“I want to see something in writing. Oh, yeah, any deal has to include federal charges. The DEA ought to be interested in what I can tell them concerning drugs and the Thompsons.” Edwards looked at us with dead eyes.
“You talk to us first. We need to know what you’re selling.”
“In writing first.” He made writing motions with his fingers.
Pete tried to pry him open, but he kept getting the same response.
“We’ll see what we can do,” Pete told him, then threw in, “Wait here,” to goad him a little.
“I want to call my lawyer too. He’ll need to look over the deal,” Edwards shouted as Pete and I walked out the door.
Chapter Thirty
An hour later we had a deal in writing, of sorts. Pr
omises to only prosecute certain charges and to combine others. It was tricky because of Florida’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Personally, I would have been glad to see him go to prison for the rest of his life, but if we wanted to clean out all the dirty cupboards we’d have to shoot him a straight deal. He was too savvy when it came to the law to be fooled.
At last everything was signed, sealed and delivered. We were once again sitting in the interrogation room with Edwards, only now we were joined by his lawyer, Chief Maxwell and Matt’s supervisor from the DEA.
We were given the first crack at him. After the preliminaries of when and how he started working for the Thompsons, Pete moved on to the murders.
“You said you just craved a more exciting lifestyle, which included drugs, gambling and women. After you were substantially in debt to the Thompsons, they approached you.”
“That’s right. I started doing security on their drug runs and covering stuff up at the department, as well as informing them of any stings or ongoing investigations.”
“When did Nichols get involved?”
“A year ago, maybe a little longer. I needed help. I was afraid I was going to get caught if I didn’t have someone else in the department. Having him on board allowed us to cover for each other.”
“Did you recruit him?” Pete asked.
Edwards laughed. “It wasn’t hard. He was born to it. As soon as I took him to a couple of parties, he wanted more and more. At that point I just explained how it would work and he jumped onto the train. He wanted it all.”
“What led up to the murder of Angie Maitland and Jeffrey Ayers?”
“All I can tell you is that the Thompsons started getting screwier than usual. Particularly paranoid when it came to Sheriff Macklin.”
“Did you know that Matt Greene was working for the DEA and investigating the Thompsons?”