by Wiley Cash
“Right now, all I know is that your son was murdered, and I want to find out who did it,” Winston said. He’d looked back toward the house, saw that the blinds were parted in the room where the teenaged boy had appeared at the doorway. The boy must have understood that Winston had spotted him, because the blinds closed. “Who’s that boy inside?”
Bellamy had looked back toward the house, the spell of his anger and grief broken for a brief moment.
“His name’s Jay,” he’d said. “He’s Janelle’s little brother. She brought him up from Atlanta.”
“How old is he?” Winston had asked.
“Fourteen. He got into some trouble down there. Her folks didn’t know what to do with him.” He exhaled and put his hands in his pockets. “She and Rodney brought him up here this summer.”
“What kind of trouble did he get into?”
“I don’t know, Sheriff,” Bellamy had said. His gaze turned back to Winston in what could only be perceived as a hard stare. “The kind of trouble boys get into everywhere. I tried telling Rodney not to take him in. I tried telling him how hard it is to—” He had stopped speaking for a moment, had crossed his arms and then raised a hand to cover his mouth. Winston waited. Bellamy crossed his arms again. He looked up at Winston. “I tried telling him how hard it is in this country to raise a Black boy into a man.”
On his way back to the airport, Winston went through the Hardee’s drive-through for coffee. He knew he needed to eat something, but he couldn’t imagine choking down a biscuit, even though he knew that black coffee wasn’t going to be easy on his empty stomach.
When he turned left onto Long Beach Road, he saw the Food Lion sitting up ahead on his left, and he decided to pull into the parking lot. As far as Winston knew, this was the only business that was open twenty-four hours that also sold diapers. If Rodney Bellamy was heading anywhere in the middle of the night, this would’ve been it. Winston drove through the parking lot, his neck craning one way and another, his eyes scanning the horizon toward the southwest for any glimpse of the sky above the airport. He parked Marie’s car at the top of the lot close to the road, and then he climbed out and stood there for a moment, taking sips of the hot, bitter coffee.
From where he stood, he could see the airport’s beacon. It would have been even more visible in the middle of the night with its bright light and the absence of car headlights on the road. If Rodney Bellamy had been standing where Winston was standing now, he would have had an unobstructed view of the aircraft coming in. Winston walked to the middle of the lot and found that he could still see the beacon light, although he could no longer see the entire expanse of airspace over the runway. But the airplane had been loud enough to awaken him and Marie, loud enough to shake their house—or at least to have made them think their house had been shaken—so if Rodney had heard it, perhaps he had run out to the road in time to see it disappear beneath the distant tree line.
And what had taken him out there? The belief that he’d witnessed a plane crash? Winston couldn’t explain it, but he knew Rodney hadn’t been involved in drugs. That didn’t make any sense. He and Janelle had only recently moved back to Southport. Rodney hadn’t had the kind of time it would take to embed himself with an operation like this. But had it been dumb luck that found him standing in this parking lot at the exact moment that the aircraft had come in? Had it been simple curiosity that led him to climb back into his car and go check out what he’d seen and heard? Perhaps, like Winston, he’d expected to find a crash landing, a fiery wreckage, victims strewn along the runway. Instead, someone had shot him in the chest and left him to die, and what had Rodney thought in the seconds before that happened? Winston hated to consider it, but more than that he hated that Ed Bellamy and Rodney’s widow would spend the rest of their lives considering it long after Winston’s role in the investigation was over.
He swallowed the last bit of his coffee and walked back to his car. Since he was heading back to the airport, he figured he’d better have something to say to the news crews, who wouldn’t leave unless he did. He found a pad inside the pocket of his jacket and jotted down a few notes about what he knew, what was safe to say without speculating.
When he got to the airport, he saw Bellamy’s car where it still sat parked, the police tape that now cordoned it off blowing in the breeze. He pulled into an empty space in front of Sweetney’s office. Dorsey’s white Cadillac and Sweetney’s truck sat unmoved from where they’d been parked that morning. There was Kepler’s cruiser and a few other cars in the lot that Winston didn’t recognize. Another news van had joined the other two, and it sat parked on the grass on the edge of the lot. It was a television station from Myrtle Beach.
Dorsey must have been waiting for Winston to arrive, because as soon as Winston got out of the car, notepad in hand, Dorsey opened the door to Sweetney’s office and called out to him. He waved for him to come inside. “Come on in here, Columbo,” Dorsey said. He stepped back inside the office and let the door close behind him.
Winston spoke to a couple of the reporters and promised to be with them in a few minutes. Inside the office, he found Sweetney sitting behind his desk and Dorsey standing by the bookshelf full of model airplanes, studying them as if they could reveal something about the abandoned aircraft just outside. Dorsey looked up and nodded at the chair in front of Sweetney’s desk. “Have a seat, Sheriff,” he said.
“No, I need to get back to work out there and talk to those reporters,” Winston said. He felt something in the room change. “Dorsey, I hope you haven’t brought me in here to tell me you’ve already been yapping at them.”
“Hell, no, Winston,” Dorsey said. “I know better than that.” He slipped his hands into his pockets and stared at his feet. Winston could hear his fingers tinkering with keys or loose change. Otherwise the room was quiet. “FBI agents are here,” he finally said.
“I figured they’d be here sooner than later,” Winston said.
“Well, I called them,” Dorsey said. He slipped his hands from his pockets and crossed his arms. “Just wanted you to hear it from me in case they mentioned it.”
“You called them?” Winston said.
Dorsey slid his hands back into his pockets. He rocked back on his heels. “Look, Winston, I know you’re coming up on a reelection, but this thing’s too big for us, for you.”
Winston closed the notepad he’d been holding, slipped it into his back pocket, and walked toward the office door. He pushed it open and stepped outside. Behind him, he heard Dorsey catch the door before it closed. Dorsey caught up with Winston, walked alongside him.
“Now listen, Winston, this is the federal government,” he said. “They can take care of this thing. There ain’t no use in ruffling feathers—” But Winston kept walking, didn’t even turn to look at him.
The first person Winston encountered on the runway was Deputy Kepler. “Sheriff,” Kepler said. He took his hat off and held it in his hands like he was entering a church for a funeral. “I tried to keep them out of the plane until you got back, but they said the investigation is being taken over, and I said—” But Winston didn’t let him finish.
“Stay here,” Winston said. “I’ll be back.”
Winston found the two agents inside the plane, one of them standing in the fuselage, and the other standing in the cockpit, looking down at the black, dusty remnants of Winston’s search for fingerprints. Winston knew them both. He stood in the open cargo doors. He cleared his throat. “Gentlemen,” he said.
Both men looked at him, but only the one standing in the fuselage smiled. Agent Avery Rollins was a few years younger than Winston, but the gray hair and gray beard made him appear older. Winston and Rollins had worked together many times over the years—mostly on cases when drugs had been brought in on boats, smugglers using the waterways and wharfs the same way marauders had used them in earlier times—and their relationship was quiet and easy, both of them understanding that the other had a job to do and knew how to do it. Rollins wore a white golf shi
rt and the clichéd navy blue windbreaker with the FBI badge over the breast and “FBI Special Agent” printed across the back in yellow. He had the agent’s standard SIG Sauer strapped to the leg of his tan cargo pants. The other agent, the one still standing in the cockpit, was outfitted in the exact same garb. He was Josh Rountree, a short, square man with brown hair and a closely trimmed mustache who always held himself out as being distant and aloof. Winston had never seen him smile or say a word that wasn’t tied directly to an investigation at hand. It was too hot for the agents’ jackets, especially inside the plane, but Winston saw it for what it was: a power play to broadcast to anyone who saw them that the federal government was now in charge.
“Winston,” Rollins said. The two men shook hands. “You know Agent Rountree.”
“I do,” Winston said.
Rountree turned his head, and Winston nodded hello. “Your office do this?” Rountree asked. He pointed to the fingerprinting dust that covered the cockpit.
“Yeah,” Winston said. “I did. I was the first on the scene.” Then, feeling as if he were hedging against what might come next, he said something that both surprised and shamed him. “It was dark. Didn’t quite know what we were working with.”
“You find any good prints?” Rountree asked.
“Not a one,” Winston said.
Rountree sighed and shook his head as if what he saw before him was the most disappointing thing he’d seen in days. Winston looked at Rollins, and Rollins winked and gave him a slight smile as if to encourage Winston to let go of any judgment or disappointment he may be feeling in that moment. Winston appreciated the gesture, and he did his best to smile at Rollins as if only the two of them were in on a joke about Rountree being too serious, but he knew that Rountree’s reaction would stick with him for a while.
Over the years during which he’d worked with the FBI’s local office in Wilmington, Winston had found almost all the agents to be the same, especially agents from the offices in Charlotte and Raleigh. They were outsiders hoping to move on to something bigger and better in the bureau; outsiders who looked down their noses at local law enforcement even more than they looked down their noses at locals. He’d always taken Rountree to be that kind of agent, but Rollins was different. He’d married a woman from Wilmington and had settled down years ago and raised a family.
“I heard you had a night last night,” Rollins said.
“You could say that,” Winston said. “I’ve had quite a morning too.”
“I bet,” Rollins said. He put his hands on his hips and looked around the empty airplane. “I bet.”
In the cockpit, Rountree had opened a small notebook, and he stood there, his back to Winston and Rollins, writing something. Rollins looked at Winston and nodded toward the open cargo doors, and Winston turned and stepped out. Rollins followed. The two men walked a few yards away from the airplane. They stopped on the edge of the runway by the spot where Rodney Bellamy’s body still rested beneath the tarp. The morgue was slow in coming, and Winston was frustrated that Bellamy’s body was still on the scene, especially now that the FBI was there to witness it.
“Look, Winston,” Rollins said, “you know we’re going to—”
“I know,” Winston said. “I know.”
“I imagine you could use a big case before the election, and I think we can work together to—”
“I know,” Winston said again. “I was just hoping that—” But he was embarrassed to say it, to say that he wanted to prove himself in front of his community before they made their decision about his fate. But he couldn’t say it because it was a stupid thing to think, much less to say out loud. “Never mind.”
“Well,” Rollins said. He slipped a pair of aviator sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, and then he shrugged off his windbreaker and folded it and dropped it at his feet. He turned his head to the right and stared down the runway for a moment, and then he looked at the tarp. “Let’s have a look,” he said. He bent at his knees and lifted a corner of the tarp and peered beneath it. Winston looked away. He’d seen all he’d needed to see of Rodney the night before. “What can you tell me?” Rollins asked.
“He’s a local man named Rodney Bellamy,” Winston said. “Black, mid-twenties. His wife said he went out for diapers last night. They got a new baby boy.”
“That’s a shame,” Rollins said.
“Yeah, it is.”
From the corner of his eye, Winston saw Rollins let go of the tarp and pick up his windbreaker. He stood. “How’d he end up out here in the middle of the night? You think he was up to something?” Rollins nodded toward the airplane. “Maybe he was helping unload this aircraft, and then something went sideways?”
“I don’t think so,” Winston said. His gaze had turned back to the tarp, and he recalled seeing Rodney’s face last night in the flashlight’s beam, and then he recalled the faces of Rodney’s father, his widow, and his baby boy that he’d seen just that morning. Winston wanted to tell Rollins that Rodney Bellamy wasn’t just one more Black man taken out with a bullet, but what did that even mean? And why did he feel the need to say it, to even think of saying something like that? “I think he went out for diapers, and I think he saw a plane come in low in the middle of the night. He must’ve come out here to check it out.”
“Any arrests or convictions?”
“No,” Winston said. “He’s clean. Always has been as far as I know. My daughter went to school with him, and I know his daddy. He teaches over at the high school. He’s a good man.”
“A lot of good daddies have bad kids, Winston.”
“Not this one.”
Winston felt the presence of someone behind him, and he turned and found Rountree standing just a few feet away. Rountree still held his open pad, but he clicked his pen closed and slipped it into his breast pocket.
Rountree looked at Rollins. “We’ll send this out on the teletype back at the office,” he said. “This aircraft needs to be processed in a covered hangar, and there’s not one big enough here. Best bet’s Wilmington.”
“You going to fly it?” Winston asked. He’d meant for it to be a joke, but the words came out tinged with the anger he still felt after Rountree’s dig at him over the fingerprints.
“No,” Rountree said. His face portrayed neither humor nor amusement. “But we’ll find somebody who can.” He nodded toward Rodney’s body. “And we’ll find out what happened to him.”
Winston followed Rountree’s eyes down to the tarp at Rollins’s feet. And that was when he saw it, when they all saw it. Perhaps the angle of the sunlight was perfect, or perhaps no one’s eyes had come to rest on that exact spot just yet. Whatever the reason, all three men spotted the shell casing at the same moment. It rested in the grass only a few feet off the runway, but Rountree was the first to move toward it. He pulled the pen from his pocket and bent toward the ground and slipped the tip of the pen into the empty casing. He stood and held it up as if he were pinching a tick between a pair of tweezers. No one said a word until Rountree’s gaze moved from the casing on the tip of his pen to Winston’s face.
“I thought your office processed this scene, Sheriff,” Rountree said.
“I thought we did too,” Winston said.
Rollins stepped forward, lifted his sunglasses from his eyes. “Looks like a nine-millimeter,” he said.
“It is,” Rountree said. He took a baggie from his pocket, snapped it open, and dropped the casing down inside. “Maybe I can actually get us a fingerprint after all.”
Winston and Rollins were quiet as they watched Rountree seal the bag and slip his pen back into his breast pocket. Winston looked at the two agents, and he understood that if he was going to have a role in this investigation then he was going to have to take it.
“I’d like to run point with the media on this,” Winston said. “And I’d like to keep a deputy out here twenty-four hours a day until the plane’s gone.” Winston’s office was already stretched thin, and keeping somebody out
here on the runway around the clock to guard an airplane that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon was only going to stretch them thinner. But he’d already suggested it, and it was too late to take it back.
“I’m fine with that,” Rollins said. “It’s better you than me when it comes to reporters. And I appreciate the offer to keep eyes on the aircraft.”
“It’d better not be the same officers who were supposed to be looking for shell casings,” Rountree said.
Rollins sighed as if he wished that Rountree hadn’t said what he’d just said. He looked at Winston. “That’s fine with me,” Rollins said. “It would help us out until we can get this thing moved. I’ll give you a shout as soon as we know something about how that’s going to happen.”
Winston nodded at Rollins. “Let me speak to these reporters so they’ll leave,” he said.
He left the agents on the runway and headed back toward the parking lot. Winston stopped where Kepler stood and asked him to follow.
“Just stand beside me and look smart when I start talking,” Winston said.
Kepler shrugged. “I’ll do my best.”
As the two men walked, an ambulance from Dosher Memorial drove through the parking lot. The gathered members of the press parted for a moment, and the ambulance passed through the open gate and rolled onto the runway. It slowed when the driver spotted Winston and Kepler in their uniforms, but Winston gestured for it to continue on and pointed toward the spot where the agents still stood by Bellamy’s body at the end of the runway. He watched the ambulance for a moment, neither he nor Kepler saying a word, and then he turned back toward the parking lot, where the reporters—microphones, tape recorders, and cameras at the ready—were waiting for him.
He felt something familiar, something he had felt more often over the past couple of years; it was the knowledge that he could walk away from this job right now and go on about his life. After the shock of the decision, no one would begrudge him leaving the job, retiring, especially with Marie trying to recover and everything that had happened to Colleen. Winston knew it would be easy—perhaps practical—to give in to that urge. He felt like he was holding his breath instead of breathing, and he wondered why he was doing something he didn’t want to do. But what would happen if he walked away? If he literally walked away from the reporters and the investigation and Kepler and simply climbed into Marie’s car and drove home? They wouldn’t have insurance, for one. They wouldn’t have a steady paycheck. It would quickly become clear that Winston’s big decision to walk away from the stress of his job would introduce untold stress into the remaining parts of his life. Best to keep things how they were, at least until the election was over and any choice Winston could make in this moment would have been made for him.