Dee nodded, his face solemn. He gave him one furtive glance, then steered the car into the gravel driveway and cut the ignition.
“And when that commerce expands, you get all the credit,” Dee said.
He popped open his door. “Yes, something like that.”
MOLLY
She had to admit, she had a fondness for the free breakfast buffets offered in most hotels these days. Certainly wasn’t something she’d admit to around her mother, but, then, her mother didn’t necessarily need to know.
The waffle iron dinged, and she flipped the handle and knocked the waffle onto her Styrofoam plate with a plastic fork, then grabbed two packages of syrup from the basket and made her way to a table by the faux fireplace. She drank from the coffee cup she’d brought down from her room and shook her head in an attempt to wake herself fully. She’d grabbed a local paper from the front desk, spread it out, and scanned the front page as she prepared to eat. The top story this morning concerned the arrest of a man accused of beating his parents over a fast-food order.
She contemplated going back upstairs and crawling back into bed. Her “vacation” had begun to feel more like what it really was—a self-imposed exile. She’d come up empty at every turn, and had little motivation to keep going. She knew she would eventually, just not today.
She ate slowly, reading the paper as the TV above the fireplace droned—a local morning news show. She neared the end of the fast-food assault story, then heard the anchor’s voice enunciating “gunshot wound.” Her head snapped up, and she stared at the anchor, a very young black man in a blue suit, who was describing an incident from the night before.
“Authorities tell us the bridge was the scene of the shooting,” he said as B-roll appeared over his shoulder—an old, low metal bridge that reached over a small, sluggish-looking brown creek. At both ends of the span sat law enforcement vehicles. Uniformed deputies and state troopers milled about on the bridge, and small orange cones were set at random places, several near a dark spot on the weathered and bowed planks running the length of the bridge. She presumed that spot to be a bloodstain.
“Passersby on nearby Highway 45 said they saw several odd flashes, in the words of one driver, and the police department received three calls reporting it. But because the bridge is in rural part of the county and rarely used anymore, there were no eyewitnesses. One driver, though, heard a series of gunshots between ten p.m. and midnight last night, but it was too hard to tell where the shots were coming from,” the anchorman said. “The Baptist Memorial emergency room reported treating a white man in his thirties for a gunshot wound to the abdomen. The man, whose name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin, died about half an hour after his arrival, at eleven thirty-two p.m. The sheriff’s department declined to discuss the case in any detail, citing an ongoing investigation.”
She dropped her fork into her syrup-covered waffle. A midnight shootout on a bridge. Holy shit.
It was her guy. Had to be. She scooped up the remains of her breakfast, shoved it into a trash can, and headed to the front desk.
The young woman behind the desk looked worn out from her overnight shift, but managed a smile. “Can I help you, ma’am?” she asked.
She smiled back. “Checking out. And can you tell me how to get to the Baptist Memorial Hospital?”
An hour later, she pulled up at the entrance of the emergency room. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, then climbed out of her car. She didn’t look much like a federal agent, in jeans, T-shirt, and hiking boots, but she had her gun and her badge, and that would have to do at the moment.
Inside, the ER was as quiet as a morgue. Definitely not Memphis, she thought as she approached the check-in desk. A small, mousy woman in purple scrubs decorated with pink ponies saw her and peered at her from under her eyebrows. “Help you, ma’am?”
She smiled. “I’m looking for anyone on the staff who attended the shooting victim last night.”
The woman, who looked to be in her forties and sounded as if Marlboro Reds were her brand, didn’t change her expression or move. Her hands remained on her keyboard. “And you are?” she said.
“Oh, sorry.” She fished her badge case from her back pocket. “Special Agent Molly McDonough, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.” She held the badge against the Plexiglas.
The woman’s eyes scanned her ID, her still-neutral expression becoming an annoyance.
“Wait here,” the woman said, finally moving. She stood and left through a door at the rear of her office.
She surveyed the unremarkable waiting room. Three people sat in low plastic chairs, nowhere near each other. One flipped through a National Geographic while the other two watched the news on the flat-screen TV mounted high on the wall to her right. The subtitles informed her of a plane crash near Birmingham, a two-seat single-engine private aircraft. Pilot killed.
“Ma’am?”
She turned to face the Woman with the Marlboro Voice standing next to a fit, bespectacled thirtyish man in the white overcoat and stethoscope of a doctor.
“Dr. Bateman can help you,” Marlboro Voice said.
“Thank you,” she said and smiled. She extended her hand and introduced herself.
“Harold,” Dr. Bateman said. “Let’s step back here to my office.”
After he closed the door in the closet he called an office, she flashed her badge, and they sat at the doctor’s desk while she told him what she’d heard and seen on the TV news. He nodded throughout, his face attentive.
“Yes, he’d been shot in the abdomen by a nine-millimeter weapon, most likely a handgun,” Bateman said. “He’d lost a lot of blood before he even got here. I thought we’d be able to stabilize him, but we weren’t able to. Too much blood loss. He died in the OR.”
“The news said his name was being withheld.”
Bateman nodded. “Yeah, that’s up to the police, as you know.”
“True,” she said. “But can I get it from you?”
For the first time, Bateman looked puzzled. “Excuse me, but I have to ask what this is in connection with? I don’t doubt your credentials, but this is highly unusual.”
She smiled. “Certainly, Doctor. I’m investigating, have been for a while, a series of murders that I believe are connected. Perpetrated by the man who shot your victim. He likes to shoot people at close range.”
Bateman nodded, apparently satisfied. He reached into a stack of file folders on his desk and pulled a slim one onto a marked-up coffee-stained desktop calendar.
“The victim was Delmer Blackburn,” he said, reading from the folder. “Mississippi driver’s license. Columbus address.”
“Who brought him in?”
The doctor leaned back in his chair. “Deputy sheriff, but he wasn’t in uniform. Musclebound black guy, probably in his midforties. Very short hair, wearing a gun, which I chewed his ass about.”
“I’m wearing a gun.”
“We’re not in the ER trying to save a man’s life,” Bateman said. “Ma’am.”
“He say how it happened?”
Bateman looked skeptical. “Yeah, he said it was a drug deal gone bad, and that’s all I needed to know.”
“You got a name on this deputy?”
“Sure,” Bateman said and opened a desk drawer. Pulled out a thin hanging folder. “John Carver. He introduced himself when the sheriff showed up.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m confused. The sheriff?”
Bateman frowned, puzzled. “Yeah, Sheriff Harper came in a few minutes later. The victim had already expired, actually.”
“And what did he say?”
“Same thing as the deputy. The deceased had been engaged in an illegal drug transaction and had gotten shot, that it was under investigation, and that he’d have to notify the next of kin.”
“I see. You said the deputy was not in uniform. What about the sheriff?”
The doctor snorted. “You’re not from around here, are you? Sher
iff Harper hardly ever wears a uniform, unless you call a badge and a gun and an attitude like one of them ol’-timey Texas Rangers without the hat a uniform.”
“Anything strike you as unusual about this incident?”
“No, other than the fact that the deputy had a lot of blood on his clothes, and Harper had a look in his eyes.”
“A look?”
“A look like he didn’t want to be trifled with. But neither did I. I’d just had a patient bleed out in the other room. He told me the circumstances were none of my business.”
She put her notebook away. “Thank you for time, Dr. Bateman.”
“Happy to help.”
COLT
He took a beer from Delmer’s refrigerator and opened on it on the back porch. Sat on the wooden steps leading to the overgrown grass and drank it half down.
The screen door groaned behind him, and he knew it was John without having to look. He and John could have entire conversations without having to talk, but he knew that this was not one of those occasions.
John had his own beer, the bottle sweating in his hand. He stepped off the back porch into the dazzling, relentless sun and stared at the unruly yard. He raised his bottle and took a long pull.
“You know,” John said. “This shit ain’t your fault.”
He squinted at John’s back and took a drink. “Easy for you to say.”
John kept staring across the yard into a stand of trees about forty yards distant. “The hell it is. I was there, remember? You had no way of knowing how that was going to go down.”
“Yeah, well. You know sometimes shit goes sideways in ways you could never guess. And I hope to God you didn’t come out to give me the ‘I told you so’ treatment.”
“No,” John said, “I didn’t. But I do think this guy is trouble. “He ain’t no redneck drunk. And he wasn’t scared of you at all. He had that stone-cold killer feel about him.”
“I noticed. I also noticed had he tried to pull on me I’da dropped him like a rock.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll have to wait and see on that, thanks to that little banger he had with him.”
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He wanted to ignore it because it was only a matter of time before the local press put two and two together and came looking.
He didn’t recognize the number, but the area code—9-0-1—was Memphis. He didn’t know anybody in Memphis. Hadn’t been there in years.
“Harper.”
“Excuse me, did you say Harper?” Woman’s voice. He shot John a “What the fuck?” look.
“I did. Who’s this?”
“You first.”
“Ma’am, I don’t have time for this.”
“Oh, you’ve got time, Sheriff Harper.” This broad, whoever she was, had an attitude. “You’ve got time to explain to me how you were involved in a shooting on a bridge last night.”
He stood, dusted the seat of his pants. John followed him up and stood like a totem next to him.
“Are you a reporter?”
“No, I’m Special Agent Molly McDonough of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. And you still haven’t answered my question.”
He squinted his eyes shut and sighed. He looked at John and mouthed, “A-T-F.” John mouthed back, “Fuck.”
“Well, Special Agent McDonough, you know all I got to do is hang up.”
“Go ahead. I’ll meet you at your office?”
He shook his head and stared off into the glare, thinking of chaos and butterflies.
“What do you want?”
“For starters, an explanation of what happened last night.”
“That’s a local matter, Agent McDonough. No need for the feds to be involved.”
Silence. That got her stumped.
“Sheriff, we need to talk,” McDonough said.
“Where are you?”
“Standing on the bridge where Delmer Blackburn got shot. You remember that bridge, right?”
For fuck’s sake.
John was already shaking his head. He shrugged. Looked at his watch.
“Meet me at Sam’s Smokehouse in an hour.”
“OK, where is it?”
“From where you are, get back on 45 North and stay on it through town. Go past the turnoff for the air force base. You’ll see it.”
She said something, but he didn’t hear it as he broke the connection. John crossed his arms. “Dammit, Colt,” he said. “What does that agent want?”
“I’m going to find out.”
“You want me to come with you?”
“No, I got this one.”
A half hour later, he wheeled into the nearly deserted parking lot that clung to the highway and parked near the front door of Sam’s.
Inside the place reminded him of a barn, with one central rough-hewn room and some sort of crazy-quilt plywood construction—walls, counters, ceiling, all a wild pattern of raw plywood.
He walked past several wooden tables covered in pink plastic sheets to the long counter festooned with Coke ads. The aroma of barbecue seemed to emanate from behind the counter that ran the width of the room and the tan, busty woman in a red tank top behind the register. Her wild brown hair, no doubt frizzed out by the humidity, was bunched up on top of her head and held in place with a bright red hairband. She smiled as she spoke into the phone held between her ear and a hunched shoulder. She saw him walk up and nodded. He nodded back and let her finish.
Overhead, a ceiling fan worked overtime at cooling the cavernous room and blowing the barbecue smell over the half dozen diners at various tables. Fluorescent lights hummed, even with plenty of sunlight coming in from the bank of windows on the front wall of the dining room.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, hon,” the register woman said as she set down the phone.
He smiled and ordered a plate of ribs, grabbed a beer from the cooler to the right of the register, and took a seat near the wall facing the door. To his right, a couple—sixties, married, most likely—chewed silently without giving him a second glance.
The register woman came to his table all smiles and damp hair and cleavage, carrying his plate. “Here you go, hon,” she said, huffing a wisp of hair from her face. “Anything else I can get you?”
He smiled up at her, saw the look in her eyes, and shook his head. “No, thank you. I think I’m good.”
“Mmmhmmm,” she said. “Well, if you need something, give me a holler.”
“Will do,” he said to her already twitching behind as she retreated to the counter.
He was halfway through his ribs when she walked in. And she didn’t look much like a federal agent: not very tall, dark-red ponytail, jeans, oversized blue T-shirt—probably hiding a sidearm—and hiking boots. G-Shock watch. Fit, probably a runner.
She saw him at the same time and nodded. She looked as if she were giving him a similar appraisal. It was a unique and curious sensation.
She walked straight to him, green eyes boring into his own. She stopped behind the chair opposite him and slid her hands into her pockets. Up close, he could see she was far more attractive than he’d thought.
“Sheriff Harper?” she asked, her voice low. He grabbed a paper napkin from the dispenser and nodded.
“I am,” he said and nodded at the chair. “Have a seat. Unless you’re going to order something to eat. I can recommend the ribs.”
She cocked her head toward the counter. The busty woman stared back at her. “I do like ribs,” she said. She walked to the counter, placed an order, then sat across from him with her own bottle of beer. She slid a flat leather case across the table. He lifted one corner, saw the gold badge, slid it back.
“OK,” he said. “You’re bona fide.” He reached into his back pocket and slid his own badge case toward her. She mimicked his inspection and nodded.
“So are you,” she said.
He pocketed the badge and took a pull from his longneck. “So what brings you to Mississippi, Special Agent McDonough? All the way from Memp
his, I presume.”
She drank from her own bottle, made a face. “Boy, that’s good,” she said. The waitress arrived, put her plate in front of her and left without a word. If McDonough noticed the snub, she didn’t let on. She waited a beat, then said, “Let’s say I’m on vacation.”
He laughed. “Vacation? You always carry a gun when you’re on vacation?”
“Do you?” Her eyebrows rose. “I’m not much for cute little conversations, especially when we both know it’s bullshit.”
He grinned. “Do tell. Then get to it.”
“I know your deputy brought Delmer Blackburn to the ER last night, and he was gutshot. And you showed up shortly after, and told the doctor he’d been in some kind of illegal drug activity. I have a feeling you were there when Blackburn got shot, which makes you at the very least a material witness to a homicide, if not a suspect. At least at this point—especially since your behavior at the ER could be called shady.”
He sat back in his chair. OK, she was smart. Hard-nosed. But what the fuck was she doing here? “Suspect?” he said. “Seriously? And where do you get off calling me shady when I was doing my job as the duly elected sheriff of this county? You’re a little far from Memphis, aren’t you? As in, out of your jurisdiction.”
She leaned toward him, elbows also on the table, green eyes flashing. To the other tables, they could have been a couple having a fight. “I am a federal agent. My jurisdiction is everywhere. Look, I know you didn’t kill Blackburn, but I called you a suspect just because you’re belligerent. I think the guy who killed him has been executing drug dealers—low-level ones—in this area, probably hired by someone to punish them and send a message. And he might be a serial killer. I think I can connect him to the death of a woman in Knoxville.”
She took a bite of the ribs on her plate and chewed. Clearly, she enjoyed them.
“Then why haven’t you? Connected him, I mean,” he said. “And why just you? Where’s your big ol’ team of feds and SUVs?”
He watched her expression flicker, just a heartbeat, from neutral to angry and back again, and it dawned on him.
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