by Scott Pratt
Eugene was the older and bigger of the two. I believed he was two years older than Ronnie, but I wasn’t certain. Both were muscular and had dark, smooth complexions, black hair, and dark eyes. Their appearances, along with Granny’s near-black eyes, made me wonder whether they were somehow descended from the Cherokee Indians who inhabited Tennessee before the whites either killed them or drove them out. Both men were wearing denim bib overalls over short-sleeve white T-shirts.
Granny was sitting across from me at her kitchen table, her white hair pulled back into a ponytail and a green scarf around her neck. She was sipping on a cup of hot tea. Eugene, Ronnie, and I were all drinking beer. Now that the task of ridding the world of Fraturra had been completed, she’d invited me up to flesh out her idea of putting me in the district attorney’s office.
“I suppose you’d like to know why I want you to run for district attorney in Knox County,” Granny said.
“I have a lot of questions,” I said.
“You might say that law enforcement in Knox County is our enemy right now, but that could change very quickly, couldn’t it?”
“I’m not sure I’m getting you,” I said.
I looked at Eugene and Ronnie, both of whom had smirks on their faces.
“Knox County is as dirty as it gets,” Granny said. “Everybody is on the take, including the district attorney, and there’s plenty for the taking. The sex trade is strong in and around Knoxville, what with all the tourists coming in and out of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. The drug trade is strong and growing every day. Opioids are taking over the country. Heroin is now the drug of choice again in a lot of areas because it’s cheaper than OxyContin. Methamphetamine is everywhere in a bunch of different forms. It’s just wide-open. The feds can sound their trumpets all they want about fighting a war on drugs. They’re losing just like they always have, and they’ll continue to lose until they do something about the root of the problem, which is poverty. But the members of the United States Congress don’t care about helping people get out of poverty. They care about helping their rich friends and donors avoid taxes. They care about helping their rich friends and donors become richer. They care about making themselves richer. So it’s never going to end. Which means there is always money to be made, and lots of it. Knox County is a big market, Darren, and we want in.
“There’s also a ton of gambling. There’s cockfighting, dogfighting, and bare-knuckle fighting, not to mention the run-of-the-mill sports gaming and backroom casinos. We’re talking upward of fifty million a year, just in that county. The district attorney gets a small cut from everything, which doesn’t mean he gets a small amount, and so does the sheriff.”
“Stephen Morris takes dirty money?” I said. I thought about it for a second and decided it didn’t surprise me.
“Do you know where he lives?” Granny said.
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Let’s just say his living conditions have been considerably upgraded since he became the district attorney, and district attorneys don’t make that much. And guess who set it all up originally? I didn’t know this until a few months ago, but it makes sense now that I think back on it.”
“Who?” I said.
“Ben Clancy. The very same man who framed you for murder and who we hanged in our barn and fed to our pigs.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “But Clancy didn’t live an extravagant lifestyle. I mean, I did surveillance on him before we grabbed him up. Are you sure?”
“I have an old friend who operates in Knox County and who Morris has allowed to keep operating in exchange for a little piece of a big pie. She works in the sex trade, runs a big porn store out on the interstate and an escort service. She told me Clancy set things in motion many years ago, he and a sheriff named Joe DuBose. Did you know DuBose? She said he’s dead.”
“Yeah, he and Clancy were pals. I didn’t care much for him. Doesn’t surprise me that he was dirty.”
“Certain people in Knox County are allowed to operate in exchange for money and protection. My friend is one of those people. They watch out for her and the others who have been chosen. If somebody new tries to come in, those who are protected serve them up to the police, the police make their arrests, the prosecutors prosecute them, the judges sentence them to prison, and it appears as though people are doing their jobs. But it’s a selective process. The ones who are allowed to operate without interference get richer and richer. All they have to do is refrain from doing stupid things. They don’t get to kill people, burn down houses, crazy things like that.”
“Why haven’t you gotten in before now?” I said.
“Because somebody beat me to it a long time ago. There’s a man named Roby Penn who controls the gambling. Mean as a striped snake from everything I’ve been told about him. Wears this big, white handlebar mustache and military fatigues. They say he was some kind of Special Forces soldier in Vietnam. He’s also related to the sheriff. He’s got the gambling rackets locked down.”
“How does the money work?” I said.
“That’s set up out of the sheriff’s department. Morris has an assistant who supposedly supervises special investigations, but I don’t know of any special investigations they’ve done. He’s also Morris’s bagman. He collects Morris’s piece from the sheriff, but the sheriff does most of the work. He keeps the accounts and sees to it that the money is collected every month. He makes distributions to Morris and whoever else gets paid. I don’t know the full extent of it, but it’s a big operation.”
“I wonder why the feds aren’t onto them,” I said.
“The feds don’t care about public corruption anymore,” she said. “They’re too busy worrying about terrorists.”
“So it’s the Wild West?”
Granny smiled. She looked at her grandsons and took a sip of her tea. “And it’s about to get wilder. We’ve been wanting to get into Knox County for years, but we’ve been shut out. Now that we have you in the picture, it’s a real possibility. We, along with some powerful friends I happen to have in Knox County, think we can get you elected. In exchange, you let us move in and do business. We don’t care about prostitution and we don’t fight animals, but we are interested in the drug trade and we’d like to open a casino near the county line, maybe two.”
“And all I have to do is leave you alone?” I said.
She nodded. “You tell the sheriff you won’t prosecute us. We’ll stay in the county so the Knoxville city police won’t bother us. If the TBI tries to sting us, you make sure it goes away.”
“What do I do about the others? The cockfighters and the dogfighters and the bare-knuckle fighters and the pimps? What do I do about this Roby Penn you were talking about?”
“As far as Penn goes, we’re going to have to figure out a way to take him out of the picture, and it isn’t going to be easy. Especially since he’s the sheriff’s uncle. The rest of them? I don’t care what you do about them except for my friend. I’ll tell you her name when the time comes. Chances are you won’t have to worry about it, though, because they’ve already made their deals with the sheriff. They’ve been around forever, so I don’t really see anything changing. The sheriff isn’t suddenly going to start bringing you dogfighting and cockfighting cases to prosecute. Your office won’t be deluged with gambling and prostitution cases. The biggest obstacle is that you and the sheriff are going to have to figure out a way to get along. You’re going to have to trust each other.”
“Which means I’ll have to go on the take with that carnival barker. He’s a showboating redneck. I can’t stand him.”
The sheriff of Knox County was the kind of stereotype that I loathed—the big, fat, loud Southern county sheriff. Many local sheriffs in Tennessee operated quietly. They were powerful in their own fiefdoms and served eight-year terms, so their primary focus was usually to get elected and then get under the radar and stay there. Once a sheriff got himself elected in Tennessee, the voters rarely heard from him until he came up for reelec
tion, and if he hadn’t done anything stupid, they’d reelect him.
It was fairly easy to stay out of sight, too, because the truth of the matter was that nobody really cared about the criminal justice system. It was one of the bastard stepchildren of government. Politicians and taxpayers didn’t want to fund it, nobody wanted to think about it unless they had to, and nobody outside the system really cared about the elections of criminal-court judges or sheriffs or district attorneys or public defenders. Sure, there was the prurient interest generated by murders and rape and violence and corruption, but the fact of the matter was that our society—like most societies—didn’t give a tinker’s damn about people who committed crimes. We wanted people who murdered, people who raped and robbed and assaulted other people, people who used or sold drugs, and people who ran whores or gambling operations, removed from society, warehoused, and forgotten. They were nothing more than short-term fodder for the news industry and a source of employment for those—prosecutors and cops and defense lawyers and judges and clerks and probation officers and all the others employed by the criminal justice system—who fooled themselves into believing there was such a thing as justice and wanted to be a part of that system. Once we were all done using the criminals for our own benefit, they became a dirty, forgotten little secret, and nobody really cared.
But the sheriff of Knox County, a larger-than-life, cowboy-hat-wearing, chain-smoking blowhard by the name of Clifford “Tree” Corker, preferred the spotlight. He didn’t toil in silence or in private. There appeared to be nothing cerebral about him. The forty-two-year-old had been sheriff for eight years, having been appointed by the county commission for two years after the previous sheriff fell off a roof and broke his neck, and then having won another six-year term at the polls. He was up for reelection in November, but nobody was opposing him. Corker made sure he strutted onto the stage of every crime scene in the county that attracted a television camera or a news reporter. He held press conferences on a regular basis, touting his department’s latest “drug roundup” or the apprehension of the latest “danger to the good people of Knox County” in a deep Southern bass. He vowed to “enforce the law of the land” and carried two pearl-handled, nickel-plated, ornately engraved .45-caliber Colt Python double-action revolvers in holsters he tied around his massive thighs with strips of rawhide. If the law of the land was broken and he needed to blow somebody full of holes, he was ready.
“Don’t sell Tree Corker short,” Granny said. “He’s powerful, and he appears dangerous. He’s got a boatload of laws that say he can do pretty much anything he wants, the FBI ignores him, and he has a thousand employees. Most of those employees are loyal to him just because he gave them a job. Five hundred of them are armed and trained to use their weapons. He has a jail he’d love to put you in if you cross him.”
“I was in it for a year,” I said. “It was a shithole, and I’m never going back.”
“You’ll have to figure out a way to deal with him,” Granny said. “Telling him you’re willing to turn the other cheek and go on about your business would be my suggestion. But there are some folks who are going to have to leave his county—his uncle, in particular—in order for us to come in, so that’ll have to be worked out. We don’t care if we pay him the same cut his uncle has been giving him, but we’re not paying any more.”
“How do you propose to get this Roby Penn out of the county?” I said.
“By upsetting his applecart,” Granny said. “By making him extremely uncomfortable. He’ll make a mistake when we do that, and we’ll be waiting.”
“Will I be involved in upsetting his applecart?” I said.
“We’re going to run you into it like a Brahma bull,” Granny said.
“How are you going to do this, Granny? How are you going to get me elected? You have to tell me.”
“Soon. I’ll tell you soon.”
I looked at Eugene and Ronnie, then back at Granny. I nodded my head. “Fine. I’m in. You folks have put your lives and your freedom on the line for me more than once. You help me get elected district attorney, and I’ll make sure you get to do whatever you want.”
“We won’t kill anybody unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Granny said.
“I suppose I appreciate that. So what’s first?”
“I’m going to make a phone call or two and get you some real help,” Granny said. “I’m talking real money and real advice and assistance. Bankers and legitimate businesspeople buy senators and representatives, not district attorneys and sheriffs. People like me usually put up the money for people like you, but I’ve got something else in mind.”
“I can’t say this surprises me,” I said. “The corruption, I mean. I saw it in prison. The guards were in on almost all the hustles. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it being here, though. I mean, Knox County specifically. And if it’s here, it’s everywhere.”
“All over the world, Darren.”
“That’s depressing when you really think about it,” I said. “What about the district attorney in this county? Do you pay him?”
“He was here last evening, sitting right where you’re sitting now,” Granny said. “Fine man. Think the world of him, and I pay him every month, like clockwork.”
CHAPTER 12
Tree Corker looked down through an opaque window at the large crowd of men in the abandoned warehouse off Heiskell Road in the western part of Knox County. He was looking forward to watching two men do battle. He’d heard they were both good fighters with similar styles and that the odds were nearly even. It was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon outside, but inside, the dark aura of bloodlust hung heavy in the dim light. Corker caught intermittent whiffs of dog and chicken dung, blood, man sweat, and fear. He knew the warehouse had stored many things over the thirty years of its existence: tobacco, car parts, water heaters, weapons, explosives, marijuana, and cocaine. He also knew it was now owned by a corporation formed by the heirs of the late Jess Plummer and leased through the heirs’ lawyer on a month-to-month, handshake agreement to his uncle, a white-supremacist bookmaker, hustler, and maybe even a psychopath named Roby Penn.
Roby was standing ten feet across the room. He was a thin sixty-five-year-old former LRRP—Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol—in the Vietnam War. Roby was wearing short-sleeve khaki military fatigues. His arms were covered in tattoos, his head was shaved, and he sported a thick, white handlebar mustache. A gray scar crossed his nose like a small lightning bolt, the result of an argument with an ex-girlfriend with a bad temper and a beer bottle several years earlier. At least that’s the story Tree had heard. He’d also heard the girlfriend had wound up in a dumpster.
“Should be a good fight,” Corker said. “Who you betting on?”
“The marine,” Penn growled. Roby Penn often didn’t speak like other men. He chose to communicate more like a wild animal, in snorts and growls.
“Word is he’s tough but doesn’t have much experience,” Corker said.
“He did three tours in Afghanistan, got shot four times, took a bunch of shrapnel from an IED, and is still standing. I know Shaker’s a good fighter, but I’ll take the marine anytime. He’s like Sergeant Barnes from that movie Platoon. He ain’t meant to die.”
Corker knew the marine was Gary Brewer. He came from a wealthy family in Knoxville. His father and grandfather had both made fortunes in the insurance business.
“Didn’t the Brewer kid go to college?” Corker said.
“Graduated from Tennessee with a business degree and then enlisted in the marines,” Penn said. “Headed straight for Afghanistan.”
“Why in the hell would he do something like that?”
“Some people just feel the need to serve,” Penn said. There was an edge to his voice. “I felt that need many years ago. I wish I hadn’t done it now, for a lot of reasons. Cost me half my left bicep, then I came home to people calling me a baby killer. Come to find out the whole reason we went into Vietnam was a ruse by the government. But fuck it,
don’t matter now.”
Roby cast a sideways glance at Corker.
“I guess you never got the patriotic itch, did you? Never felt the need to serve your country.”
“Never did,” Corker said, “and I ain’t the least bit ashamed. I never thought it would be a good idea to go to some foreign land and risk getting my ass shot off for a bunch of crooks in Washington.”
Corker exhaled a cloud of smoke from the cigarette he was puffing on. “I don’t see the politicians’ sons going,” he said. “And damned few of our representatives served in the military before they were elected. I always figured it’d be best for me to just stay right here and serve the people of my county.”
“That seems to be working out pretty good for you,” Penn said.
“It has since you and Clancy got me in this job,” Corker said. “Who’s Brewer fighting?”
“I told you earlier. Harley Shaker.”
“Right. The bricklayer from Newport.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen Shaker fight. Ain’t ever seen him lose.”
“Should be interesting,” Penn said.
“The gate looks pretty good today.”
“Be more than thirty thousand dollars. Once we figure up the vig on the bets, we should have a real good day.”
Corker heard footsteps coming up the back stairs and turned to see Stephen Morris, the district attorney, walk into the room. Morris was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt.
“And there stands the last man I expected to see here today,” Corker said. “What brings you out to our little playground?”
“Have you heard about Darren Street?” Morris said.