The case had earned her a little bit of fame in the Tennessee BATF offices—and had gone a long way, she hoped, at redeeming her name.
Which was about to take a hit again if the three clowns in the break room didn’t knock it off and get back to work.
She closed out the database and decided to check the news digests, since it required less thinking on her part. She pulled her dark red hair back into a ponytail, huffed out a long breath of annoyance and scanned the headlines of the stories selected by someone—she never knew who or where—to distribute to all ATF offices in the state. Usually, the stories she read were not new to her, having set up her news app on her phone to look for even more specifics than those offered in the digests. Today’s collection was mostly low-level stuff, robberies, break-ins.
But one item caught her attention. A suspected drug dealer had been shot and killed, his body found on the banks of a small creek, a tributary of the Tombigbee River, in Lowndes County, Mississippi. In other words, she thought, in the middle of nowhere. Well, drugs belonged to the DEA. Those cowboys could probably figure that one out in about six months or so.
She lifted her coffee cup to her lips. Cold. She sighed, yanked her smart card from the computer and headed to the break room. She’d have to endure the festive boys up close. At least she wasn’t wearing a skirt today.
She elbowed her way past the men, all dressed business casual, sleeves rolled up, service weapons on hips, and moved toward the counter to put her cup under the spigot.
“Hey, Molly, you might appreciate this,” said one of the men behind her. She recognized the voice. Courtney Gaddis. “You like all kinds of odd data.”
She didn’t know whether Gaddis meant it as a compliment, but she didn’t really care, either. “Not if it has to do with how many beer cans you can crush before your hand cramps,” she said.
The other two men snickered as Gaddis rolled his eyes. “You been eavesdropping on us?”
She sipped from her mug, grateful to have a hot refill. “Eavesdropping? I could have heard y’all down on the street.”
Gaddis ignored the comment. “Anyway, you hear about that druggie got shot down in Mississippi?”
“Read something about that just now in the news clips.”
Gaddis nodded. “DEA buddy of mine was telling me the guy was shot twice, in the heart.” He jabbed a finger just under his rib cage. “But get this. The shooter used what they call snake shot, they think. Weird, huh?”
One of the other two, Williams, wrinkled his brow. “Snake shot? You mean that stuff people use to shoot rats with?”
Gaddis nodded, and Molly said, “Snake shot around here. You can buy it at any Walmart. I don’t know if it’s all that weird. Country folks around here shoot snakes all the time, maybe the shooter’s gun just happened to be loaded with it.”
The men nodded. Gaddis took a mug from the counter. “I suppose,” he said.
“Or,” Molly said, “maybe the shooter wanted to make it so ballistics wouldn’t have anything on him. But I’d bet on the first one.”
She stepped past them and back to her desk. Pulled up the dead drug dealer story again. It was weird. Drug dealers don’t accidentally get shot twice in the heart. Which means it was a hit. Which means the shooter meant to use snake shot on the hit.
Strange. And now my Spidey sense is kicking in.
JOHN
He checked his watch and swore at himself. He should have left twenty minutes earlier, when he knew Rhonda would leave her office. By the time he made it over to the courthouse to break the news to her in person, and gently, she had left for the day. And her car wasn’t parked at her house when he’d sped over there.
Now, he was cussing himself and playing a hunch as to her whereabouts. He drove through the downtown streets shaded by oaks and magnolias, past antebellum homes that stood like tired aristocratic old southern ladies, past the huge stone and steel hulk that was once the marble company, but now only an ancient skeletal pile of debris and a roosting place for animals, the homeless, and addicts.
He wheeled through the cemetery gate, turned right on the first gravel path, and saw her standing, her head bowed, arms across her chest. Swearing again, he slowed to a stop.
She turned her head toward him as slammed the door and walked to her.
“Rhonda,” he said as he put his arms around her, and she buried her head in his shoulder. “Hey, I’m sorry.”
She sniffed and wiped tears from her cheeks. “How did you know where to find me?”
He stroked her back and stared at the headstone of her son’s grave. “I intended to leave early today and tell you about the…about the guy we pulled out of the river. Before you read about it in the paper or saw it on the news. I went by your office and your house, and when I didn’t see your car, I figured you heard and this is where you would go.”
She looked up at him. “You did?”
“I did.”
“Why did you want to tell me?”
“So this wouldn’t happen. Or even if it did, I just figured you didn’t need to do it alone.”
She stepped back from him and gave him the saddest smile he’d ever seen, one that made his heart sink and leap at the same time.
“That’s what you said at the funeral.”
“What’s that?”
“You told me you came to the funeral because that was something you didn’t want me to have to go through alone.”
“It’s still true. I don’t want to see you alone.”
She heaved a sigh. “Thank you, John.” She turned again to Clifford’s grave.
He fell in beside her and took her hand in his. “You’re welcome. You OK?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Most times, yes. But other times, no, not at all. Even though it’s been a little more than a year, it feels like it was yesterday. I overheard a couple of the clerks in the office talking about…that, and, I don’t know, it all came rushing back, and I felt like I was being crushed from the pain all over again.”
He squeezed her hand and silently chastised himself. “I’m sorry, Rhonda.”
“Don’t blame yourself, John,” she said in a soft voice. “You’re here now, and I’m not alone. That’s all that matters. I haven’t been alone for a year because of you.”
He put his arm around her and held her as the day’s sun bled away into the pines at the edge of the cemetery.
HACK
Rick Munny was a very stupid man.
Despite being trained by the military, the man knew absolutely nothing about security. His number was in the white pages. He made no real effort at discretion, swaggering around town with a woman ten years his junior, a woman with a penchant for drunkenness and running her mouth. And absolutely no morals, if the stories were to be believed. And he had no reason to doubt them. He’d seen the woman—Carla—three nights earlier in a barbecue joint at the edge of town. She wasn’t with Munny, but she wasn’t alone. Or sober. The two leering fools who kept feeding her drinks could barely contain their amusement or their carnal desires, as their hands frequently slid up her bare legs under her skirt. She made no effort to cross her legs or stop them. The brace on her left knee was a convenient excuse not to, he reasoned. He had finished a plate of ribs and fries as he watched the spectacle, which ended only when the trio hustled out to a Dodge in the parking lot.
Tonight, it was Munny who was alone, sitting in the cab of his pickup truck at the end of an unremarkable gravel road in an unremarkable corner of east Mississippi near the Alabama state line. At least the man could follow directions.
He rolled to a stop behind Munny’s truck and killed the engine. He looked over at Dee. The boy’s face was a mask; the insouciance, he knew, was carefully practiced and altogether artificial. He reached for the .32 revolver between them, hefted it, and slid it into a holster under his left arm. Dee’s eyes followed his movements, but he didn’t speak. Didn’t betray a thought or doubt.
“Stay here,” he said.
&n
bsp; Dee raised an eyebrow, nodded. He stared through the windshield.
The day’s heat had broken in the failing light, but the gravel still burned through the soles of his shoes as it crunched underfoot. The wind slithered through the boughs, pushing the humidity away ahead of a storm and turning the pines into whispery schoolgirl gossips. Cicadas and bullfrogs sang from the dark, their melodies sharp and crisp, but brief on the breeze. Sounds would carry a long way on the thick wind tonight.
He took his time, savoring the collapse of another day and the slowing and dimming of life and its sounds, smells, moods, and frenzy. Munny climbed out of the truck as he approached, slammed the door, and put his hands on his hips, a scowl making even uglier an already unhandsome face. Tattoos on the arms sticking out of the T-shirt. Jeans hanging loosely around legs, seemingly too spindly for his bulk. His appearance was not in the least repentant.
He stopped a few feet from Munny and addressed him: “Mr. Munny, it’s good that you are on time. You may call me Hack.”
Munny lowered his head and arched a brow, as if he’d just heard a language he did not understand. “OK,” he said with the slow pace of the uncertain. “I have the money.”
He raised a hand. “We’ll get to that. Though, I have to admit, I’m surprised that you were able to come up with the required sum in this amount of time. You do have it all, correct?”
Munny sighed. “No. I do not have it all, Mr…Hack. I have some of it. I’d say I have most of it.”
He clasped his hands behind his back. “I see. Well, as I said, we’ll get to that.”
Munny snorted through a disgusted look. “Look, I’ll get the rest of it; that’s not the problem.”
“Oh? That’s not the problem, Mr. Munny? Please enlighten me as to what you believe to be the problem.”
Munny crossed his arms over his belly and glared at him. “The problem is that shithead who stole my money. What are we doing—what are you doing about that?” He spat into the darkness creeping into the road.
The arrogance of the man might have been impressive under different circumstances, he thought. But different circumstances these were not, and Rick Munny’s arrogance, compounded by his stupidity, only raised in him a sort of clinical curiosity, as if he were watching him from afar or through the glass in a laboratory.
“Excuse me, Mr. Munny?” he said. “Your money? Clearly your grasp of the organizational structure that employs you is lacking. As is your ability to understand your role in it. The money that was stolen wasn’t your money. It belonged to someone else. It would be more accurate to say that you lost someone else’s money. Furthermore, the person who stole it—and what I am going to do about that—are none of your concern. None of your concern at all. Do you understand that, Mr. Munny?”
Even in the flat gloom of evening, he could see Munny’s face darken. He drew the .32 and shot Munny through his right eye before he could speak. The shot echoed through the woods, borne away on the wind. He walked to the now supine Munny, studied the mutilated face and pulsing blood like a sculptor, and shot him through the left eye. Again, the report of the bullet caromed through the pines.
He holstered the weapon, then fished Munny’s keys from his pocket. He took a small gym bag from the front seat—“most” of the money.
Dee stared at him through the driver’s side window, his face registering only a hint more interest than before. “You didn’t say you was gone shoot the guy.”
He smiled. “You didn’t ask. Here. Drive his truck back to his apartment and park it. I’ll pick you up at the 7-Eleven on the corner. Don’t speed, and don’t do anything stupid.” He tossed the keys across the seat. Dee slid out the other side without a word.
COLT
He headed down Old 82 toward Lake Lowndes, and the susurrus of the tires on the hot asphalt and the familiarity of the route caused an ache that reminded him he’d never enjoy the ride to the lake the way he had most of his life. Not since the day he drove to the spillway to find Rhonda’s only child, Clifford, facedown in the rushing water, half his head shot away. He hadn’t been back since.
He wouldn’t have come out today had it not been for Becky’s insistence that he make an appearance as “the incumbent, and, more importantly, the man the people of the county trust to keep them safe.” He wasn’t sure if he was really trusted—nor was he sure he was keeping anybody safe.
But since Becky had told everybody who had anything to do with the big fish fry the Lions Club was putting on, he had no choice but to put in an appearance.
He pulled to a stop near the main boat landing and bait shop, grateful he was as far away from the spillway as possible. To the left, on the slope that led down to the small, weathered fishing pier, a crowd of about fifty men and women mingled around a line of grills fashioned from fifty-five-gallon drums. The charred grates were loaded with fillets and whole fish beneath heavy clouds of greasy smoke. He pocketed his cell phone, walked toward the crowd, and put on his best Sheriff Smile.
Sweaty grins from the men met his own, and he noticed more than a few come-hither looks from the women, who, even in the late-afternoon heat and grill smoke, managed to look poised and as coquettish as forty-something wives of Lions Club members could be.
He nodded and grinned his way through the gauntlet of outstretched hands and “Hey, Sheriff, good luck in that election” wishes until he stopped at the metal washtub full of ice and longneck beers at the end of the grill line. He figured he’d accept a little off-duty hospitality from his constituents, and he didn’t have to wait more than twenty seconds before Larry Wilkerson put an ice-cold bottle in his hand.
“Sheriff,” Wilkerson said. “Thank you for taking the time to come by. We know you’re a busy man, and this means a lot.”
He clinked bottles with Wilkerson. “Thanks, Larry. Glad I could make it. ’Preciate your support.”
Wilkerson, originally from up around Tupelo, had taken a small inheritance from his father—a soybean farmer—and turned it into a small but profitable sheet-metal company with a plant out near the airport. Divorced, remarried to Cindy McPherson. Wilkerson played the part of a local mogul to the hilt: country club tan, stylish haircut for his still-thick salt-and-pepper mane, just-right YMCA gym physique, all wrapped up in ostrich skin boots, chinos, and an expensive blue dress shirt, tailored, of course. Not a drop of sweat on him.
“Read the paper about that fella y’all pulled out of the Lux,” Wilkerson said. “Terrible thing.”
He nodded. “Even for a drug dealer.”
Wilkerson cleared his throat. “Uh, yes, I suppose. I was just saying reckon that’ll keep y’all busy for a while.”
“Yes, it will.” He wondered if Wilkerson meant he would be too busy to look into whether his son was still selling weed to his buddies, but he let it go.
Cindy appeared at Wilkerson’s side, her own country club tan highlighted by a pale yellow sundress that seemed to serve as a reminder that she was still fit and curvaceous. Her auburn hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon, and she smiled at him with both her prim mouth and her blue eyes, just as she had when they’d gone to high school together.
“Well, hey, Colt,” she said. “Thought I saw you walk up.”
He saw her husband cut his eyes at her.
“Hey, Cindy,” he said. “I’m just stopping by to say hi, shake some hands.”
“Well, all right, then,” she said. “You got my vote, you know that.”
He tipped his bottle. “And I thank you.”
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and as he produced it, he held up a hand to the Wilkersons. “Y’all excuse me?”
Larry all but twirled his wife away and into the crowd.
“Yeah, John, what’s up?” he said as he gazed at the sparkling blue surface of the lake.
“Got another body, Colt,” John said. Just a little bit of excitement in his voice.
“Where?”
“Somewhere off 182, Old 82, as you call it. Becky said Bishop’s B
ottom or something like that.”
“Yeah,” he said, already walking back to his car. “I know where it is. Where are you?”
“Headed south on 12 about a mile from the city limits.”
“Meet me at South Lehmberg and Old 82, right there at the city line. You can follow me from there.”
Twenty minutes later, John’s car followed his off the highway onto a gravel road he knew by heart, one he’d first driven as a teenager. Bishop’s Bottom was a dark, spooky fen with a gravel road shortcut between the highway and the road to New Hope. It also had a reputation for being haunted, with mysterious noises and sounds and boogeyman sightings going on for years, mostly by teenage boys in an attempt to frighten their dates into their arms. It rarely worked, he recalled.
He flew down the narrow trail and over a low rickety wooden bridge that spanned a tiny, sluggish creek and stopped short of a deputy’s marked car and a green Ford pickup. A uniform stood with two men, who seemed to be telling a story with their hands while the deputy took notes.
John ran up to him as he stepped out of his car.
“Goddamn, Colt, you trying to get me killed?” John said, running a hand through his hair. “You driving this narrow-ass road like you a bootlegger running from the feds.”
He was already walking toward the deputy. “Take it easy, John, I know this road like the back of my hand.”
“Of course you do,” John said, louder than necessary. “But I don’t.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He pointed. “Go check that out. I’m going on up ahead.”
The deputy had already cordoned off the scene with crime tape about ten yards beyond the two vehicles.
The body of Rick Munny lay supine on a dirt turnout nearly invisible from the main gravel road. He ducked under the tape and approached the corpse. Two sets of tire tracks. Different vehicles. Munny’s arms were outstretched, hands empty. No gun in sight. His face looked like a grotesque jack o’lantern, both eyes gone and replaced by black, bloody holes. Flies buzzed around the edges of the flesh. He knelt and examined the eyes. Gunshot, no doubt. He looked at the black dirt around the body, but saw no brass. He considered turning the body over, but thought better of it without Freddie Mac there.
Outside the Law Page 6