“What ever happened to Bennie?” I asked, mentioning the only name I could recall at the moment. “I know he went off to school, but I haven’t seen him around town since.”
Wade looked away, measuring the rainclouds for a moment before replying.
“Like a lot of our kids, he got off to the big city and never came back.”
“Yeah, I remember the feeling. I felt like I was trapped on the farm growing up, and surrounded by people who didn’t understand that there was more to life than Friday night football and nursing Saturday morning hangovers.”
“And then you got old,” Mike said, walking up and adding his two cents to the conversation. “Decided the country life was the way to go after all.”
“No, I just realized that I missed the slower pace, and the people,” I replied, then gave a sigh. “I got tired of the rat race, realized it was a treadmill and I was never going to reach the finish line. Plus, living in Houston just had too many memories for me. Heck, I had to drive by the scene of the accident every day getting to my new job there.”
I felt an old familiar hurt in my gut as I started to think about those dark days immediately after the accident. Mike might have heard something in my voice, but my neighbor was the first to speak.
“Hey, you still got that old bullet mold you found at your place?”
Wade was about as subtle as a frying pan to the face, so I tried to play along and got to talking about the reloading I was doing. Changing the subject was a good idea.
“Yeah, I still got it, and the thing works fine. Had to replace the wooden handle, of course. Rotten. Hit it a few times with the sand blaster to clean off the rust in a few places. Turns out six perfectly usable .358 diameter bullets at a time.”
“That’s cool, if you have anything in that caliber,” Wade replied, and Mike laughed.
“Wade, this old man loves his wheel guns,” Mike explained while still chuckling. “You got what, three or four of them just in .357 Magnum?”
I had to stop and think about the question.
“Five,” I confirmed. “You forgot that Dan Wesson I picked up last time we went to Mesquite.”
“Wow, I never realized I had such gun nuts for neighbors,” Wade added, laughing. “If you guys like to shoot so much, how come I never hear you practicing?”
“All Bryan’s fault,” Mike explained. “We are both pretty heavy in what the Brady Bunch called ‘the gun culture’. He didn’t want to set up a shooting range on the property. He said it was too conspicuous. So I went to a range back home to keep in practice and Bryan used one over in Kountze.”
“Did it help? I mean, did practice help when it came down to real shooting? You didn’t take out three men with a revolver, did you?”
The questions seemed to flow out of Wade like a torrent, and I wondered how he’d managed to hold them back this long.
“Yes, practice helped with the accuracy. I should have spent more time on the ‘shoot, move, communicate’ drills with Andy, because I froze up after I shot the first second one. If I hadn’t stumbled when I did, that third shotgun would have parted my hair straight down the middle, starting at my neck. And, no, I was carrying a 9mm pistol that day, so I had a few more rounds to work with.”
“What kind of 9mm?”
“Just an old Smith & Wesson M&P I picked up. Private sale.”
“That’s not going to cause you any trouble, is it?”
I chuckled, shaking my head.
“I bought it from a Plano P.D. officer working security at one of the shows I went to with Mike. No, I just doubt I’ll ever get it back. Once something goes into evidence, good luck getting it returned. Especially with Sheriff Landshire’s sticky fingers.”
“When do you find out what the D.A.’s going to do?” Mike asked, serious again. I’d told him I had a meeting coming up, but I’d skipped the details to get to the meat of the story.
“Butch and I are meeting with Mel at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Butch still says they won’t indict, especially after that Detective Bastrop traced the route these mooks traveled to get here. Seems they killed a pharmacy tech in Daingerfield, then took a customer hostage when they left. The hostage didn’t make it.”
I dropped my voice with the last bit of information. Nobody said what had happened to her prior to her death, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to paint an ugly picture.
Wade nodded along with explanation, clearly thinking hard about what I was saying. He was slow to speak, but I could tell he was focused closely on what he was saying.
“I’m offering you and your families use of the range set up behind my house. I’m set up for pistol and rifle, at least out to four hundred yards. You both set for anything longer range than that?”
I pointed my thumb at Mike. “I’m not much good out past two hundred meters, but Mikey can take things out consistently up to what? Six hundred meters? He’s the Hawkeye of the bunch.”
“Dang, son, what are you shooting? A Barrett?”
Mike blushed, pride evident in his eyes as he replied.
“Do I look like I’m made of money? I have a couple of different hunting rifles, but my main one is just an old Remington 700AAC with a nice scope on it.”
I had to laugh at Mike’s posturing before I busted his balls.
“Dude, you paid more for that scope than you did the base rifle, and you had a lot of mods added to that thing that aren’t exactly factory stock.”
“Shhh,” Mike whispered. “Marta asked me how much I paid for the rifle. And I told her. $650 plus tax. That’s all she needs to know.”
“Your wife’s not here,” Wade made a production of glancing in the four cardinal directions before he pointed out the obvious, getting into the silly spirit of the conversation now.
“She has her ways,” Mike confided, again cutting his eyes as he spoke. “I think she might be a witch. I mean, a good witch, but you know what I mean. Marta knows things she shouldn’t.”
I gave my brother a doubting look and he bristled.
“Okay, here’s what I mean. I bought that Russian rifle I told you about, Bryan, that Tokarev SVT-40, at one of the shows about six months ago. I was there by myself and I never saw anybody I recognized, but when I got home that night, Marta asked me if I had enough of the 7.62x54R so she could shoot my new rifle too! And she asked about getting extra magazines!”
Fighting to keep the smirk off my face, I turned to Wade and made the patented circling finger motion next to my head, so Mike couldn’t see.
“What the heck are you guys talking about? I thought a Tokarev was one of those cheap little pistols that came out as exports after the Wall fell. Fired one of those Commie rounds that you can’t get at Walmart.”
I nearly laughed at Wade’s down-and-dirty, but essentially accurate, portrayal of the little semi-automatic pistol most often associated with that name.
“Yeah, there’s that little pop gun too.” Mike agreed, falling back into lecture mode. “But this was the Russian’s first major effort at a semiautomatic rifle, their counter to the M1 Garand, I read somewhere. Fires the same round as their Mosin Nagants, but uses a ten round box magazine. Pretty accurate and reliable as we count things, but the Russians didn’t like it, I guess. Still needed more maintenance than their bolt action ‘peasant’ rifles.”
“But how did Marta find out about it?” Wade asked, a little spooked by the revelation.
“Oh, I called her and gave her the details when I went to the men’s room,” I admitted, finally blowing the gag after all this time. A joke is fine, but I didn’t want Wade worried about the wrong things. Looking at Mike, I gave a little shrug of apology. “Sorry, but you forgot I was there, too.”
“You bastard!” Mike squealed, his face red with anger as the penny finally dropped. I dodged away, and I kept running in circles as my brother tired himself out. Unlike Mike, I’d kept up my cardio and I could still run circles around my lumbering bear of a brother. Wade, for his part, was laughing s
o hard I thought he might fall down.
“You guys!” Wade managed to sputter, his laughter slurring the words.
I knew Mike was pissed, but he was too good of a sport not to get the gag, and frankly, we all needed the release of pressure. A chance to laugh, and to act like kids again for once. Too soon, we would be back to making the adult decisions and living with the consequences.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I met with Butch at my office at 8:15 Tuesday morning, and I was pleased to see Barbara beat us both in that morning and had the coffee going. She’d been shaken up by the events of the week before, having a ringside seat to a shootout and all. Then, she had to endure hours of interrogation at the hands of the detective as he dug for inconsistencies and errors in her answers.
This morning though, she looked chipper and determined, if only a little nervous. I let her bring us our coffee, sexist pig that I am, and then closed the door as Butch gave me some last-minute words of advice. This meeting wasn’t the way the District Attorney normally handled his affairs, but as word of the stymied kidnapping and shootout became common knowledge in town, the seasoned prosecutor knew he needed to handle the case, and me, with kid gloves.
For me, I was looking at three counts of manslaughter, since the third bandit, the driver, had succumbed to his wounds over the weekend. As Butch quipped, it saved the county the cost of keeping him in the hospital and later trying him, or going through the trouble of having him extradited back to Morris County for trial. Yes, their murder, kidnapping, and rape charges meant they had first dibs on him anyway.
“Just watch what you say in there,” Butch cautioned. “This is an informal meeting, but you are a lawyer, even if you practice on the squishy side of things. Nothing is really informal or off the record. Plus, I just heard through my sources that the sheriff is going to sit in as well.”
“Well, that should be interesting,” I commented, feeling my stomach turn a little bit. Not only was this a high-profile case, but Butch had made the sheriff, and the district attorney, look bad in the media when he successfully defended Rudy Polinsky against what turned out to be manufactured evidence. Well, not bad. Maybe evil was a better word. Personally, I wondered how Butch managed to keep working after the fallout from that case, but then, he did live in Jasper now, and outside Albany County.
“Oh, you want to know the most interesting part?” Butch asked innocently, batting his eyes like a teenaged schoolgirl. Which for a forty-something bald man with more than a hint of jowls, made for a frightening sight.
“Do I want to know?” I asked, equal parts disturbed and curious.
“Guess who’s been butting heads with the sheriff the last few months? And maybe not-so-secretly pressuring the Texas Rangers to open a corruption investigation into Sheriff Landshire’s less savory connections?”
“Teddy Wallace?” I guessed hesitantly, dreading the answer I was sure to receive.
“Ding, ding, ding!” Butch exclaimed, then lowered his voice. “Seems kind of like an odd coincidence, don’t you think? Sheriff Landshire had all his patrol officers on the other end of the county, and at the same time, someone called in a frantic domestic disturbance call to the city cops on a burner phone ten minutes before the alleged gunmen hit the Urgent Care clinic.”
“Fuck me,” I muttered, fitting the pieces together. The thing about the deputies all being out of pocket was odd, but the carefully-planned distraction of the police department’s small force was something of which I had been unaware up until this point.
“Not on your best day, sweetheart,” Butch shot back, falling back into his joking mode again for a moment. Then he got serious again.
“Do not draw any more attention to yourself, Bryan,” Butch Kaminsky instructed. “I took a lot of heat in this county getting that kid off, but Landshire knows better than to fuck with me. My people have been here too long, and we have too many branches of the family, to start hassling me. You, on the other hand, are just some rich city boy that bought his way into the county. I know that’s not true, but you know how these little towns can be. You didn’t do yourself any favors when you burned all your bridges back home, either.”
“I didn’t burn any bridges so much as let them collapse for lack of maintenance,” I countered, “but I know what you mean. You think the sheriff might hold a grudge, assuming he had a hand in this?”
“Best thing you can do is play dumb. Like you did with the detective, just act like you were in over your head and you’re happy to still be alive.”
I nodded agreement, since that part was just true. I admitted as much to Butch and he chuckled.
“Yeah, that’s why you spent a month of Sundays training with Andy Carstairs in his shoot house,” Butch shot back.
I sat back in my chair at this comment. I knew my shooting instructor hadn’t said anything. Andy was tight-lipped to the point of paranoia about his classes and his students. That could only mean…
“Shit, Butch, I never saw you there.”
Butch, for his part, gave me a polite golf clap.
“I knew you weren’t shy on brains, Hardin. Yes, I was a student there as well,” Butch admitted. “Just coincidence I saw you leaving the building one day when I was getting out of my car. I knew Andy had private lessons blocked out for that time of day, and I knew no one else should be in that particular building otherwise.”
Well, that explained some things. Also added more questions, but they were for a later date.
After finishing our coffee, Butch and I made the short walk down the street to the courthouse in the spitting rain. After shaking out our umbrellas and passing through the metal detectors, Butch led the way to the District Attorney’s office on the first floor of the courthouse.
Unlike the sheriff’s shiny new offices, which were located in the Justice Center Annex on the other side of the street from the courthouse square, these cramped, sixties-style cubbyholes might lack in space, but made up for it with immediate access to the judges and their staffs. I’d never done the criminal side, either prosecution or defense, but I knew well the advantages such a setup gave the prosecutor and his assistants.
We barely paused at the D.A. office before one of the secretary’s directed us to the conference room upstairs and across the hall. Calling it a conference room might have been a polite fiction, since this was clearly a jury deliberation room, but I didn’t even raise an eyebrow.
I let Butch lead the way and I hung back, my reluctance not faked in any way. I hadn’t had so much as a speeding ticket in the last five years, and now I was faced with three homicides, even if the language I’d seen only discussed manslaughter. Those were still big-time felonies. At least I hadn’t been formally arrested at this point, since that too was something that went on your permanent record even if you were later released and never went to trial. Yes, that is not something they teach you in civics class, but does get covered in law school.
“Mr. Hardin, thank you for agreeing to meet this morning,” Mel Fellows intoned, his deep voice in conflict with his almost frog-like features. That wasn’t a jab at the man, but simply the truth. He had bulbous, slightly protruding eyes, a liver-spotted bald head that unlike Butch, was sporting a white fringe around the edges, and which looked too large for his thin neck and narrow shoulders. In short, as we used to say when I was a kid, Melvin Fellows had a face made for radio.
Seated at his side was a man in a light brown-colored uniform, cut to accentuate his broad shoulders and minimize the beer gut that threatened to defeat the best intentions of his wide, Sam Brown duty belt. Unlike Mr. Fellows, Sheriff Landshire remained seated, but he gave us a two fingered salute to acknowledge our appearance.
The Sheriff was fifty-two years old, with nearly thirty of those spent in law enforcement. He looked on with what others might consider a bored expression, but I’d seen that face before in courtrooms. Sheriff Landshire might have been many things, but I’d wager he made for a poor poker player. I could read the frustration and
anger in his eyes after just a quick glance. If Butch hadn’t mentioned the tie-in with Teddy Wallace’s niece, I would never have made the connection, or the reason for the sheriff’s anger. However, this was the district attorney’s show, and he made the most of it.
D.A. Fellows had a lot to say as he recited the facts of the matter, but the gist of it was the grand jury found no grounds to issue an indictment and I was free to go. Butch made a quick motion to expunge the arrest from my record, only to be informed that given the circumstances, I’d never been formally taken into custody and thus, no felony arrest to wipe from the slate.
Butch acted like he was unaware of that fact, even though we’d previously discussed it in private. He was building a record, even if this was an ‘off-the-record’ meeting. I sat there and didn’t say a word, except to thank Mr. Fellows and shake his hand when we were done. The sheriff, for his part, didn’t offer a handshake and I didn’t acknowledge the slight as Butch and I left the room.
We maintained an unhurried pace as we exited the courthouse building, and Butch kept his silence until we’d crossed the street.
“That answers one question,” Butch finally murmured, his voice so soft I barely heard it from four feet away.
“What?”
“I was right. You saw the sheriff. He was pissed and trying hard to hide it.”
“So you think…”
“Yeah, I do,” Butch interrupted, cutting his eyes as he did. I saw no one else around, but then I figured it wouldn’t do to say the words aloud. Somehow, the sheriff had engineered the whole attack in an effort to get leverage over a political opponent.
“What do I do now?”
“Write me a check, then get back to work. Oh, and watch your back. Even if you are completely ignorant of what was going on, the man is vindictive as hell.”
Again, he didn’t say aloud who he meant, and I didn’t need him to draw me a map. If I wasn’t before, now I was most certainly on the sheriff’s radar. Joy.
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