Джон Коннолли - The Dirty South

Naylor was the only black man on the scene, which was not an unfamiliar situation to him, but still made him stand out more than he might have wished. He identified himself as a police officer to the state trooper who was approaching him, a statement confirmed by the trooper’s colleague, a sergeant named Ogden who was seeing a woman who lived in Cargill and sometimes drank with her in Boyd’s. Zachry, one of the Burdon County deputies, joined them. He smelled as though he might have puked recently.

‘What the hell happened?’ said Naylor.

‘Someone shot Randall Butcher,’ said Zachry, ‘then a bunch of people started shooting at us from around the farmhouse, and suddenly everyone was shooting at everyone else. It couldn’t have gone on for more than a minute or two, but when the dust cleared we had two men dead and a whole lot more injured.’

‘But why target this place to begin with?’ said Naylor.

‘It’s a meth lab,’ said Zachry, ‘but Jurel said Hollis and Tilon Ward might be in there, too. He thinks they killed those girls.’

‘And did you find the Wards?’

‘No sign. If they were here, they’re gone now, but nobody is talking without a lawyer, so we can’t say for sure.’

Zachry rubbed the butt of his service weapon with the palm of his right hand, as though his skin was itching.

‘I didn’t even fire a shot,’ he said. ‘I was scared shitless.’

Naylor took in the injured, the dying, and the dead.

‘Then maybe they’ll let you keep your job after the investigation,’ he said.

Zachry followed his gaze. When he’d signed up to be a sheriff’s deputy, it wasn’t for this.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I hope they don’t.’

About eighteen months previously, the now-deceased Randall Butcher had been taking an evening stroll through the environs of the Buttrell property when he’d stumbled across a black bear and her five-month-old cub. Black bears are typically solitary animals, and prefer to avoid contact with humans, but sometimes a bear’s preference didn’t enter into it: the black bear population of the state had risen from about fifty in the 1930s to thousands in the present day, and in places like the Ouachita they occasionally bumped up against man. Black bears weren’t large by the standards of other American ursids, but a male could still weigh five hundred pounds, and even a three-hundred-pound female was enough to put the fear of God into a man if he wasn’t anticipating her company.

And if he came between her and her cub – well, that was pretty much a guarantee of pain.

Randall Butcher had backed away, but he could see Momma Bear was contemplating teaching him a lesson, and he didn’t begin to feel safe again until he was back in the farmhouse with the door locked behind him, surrounded by a couple of guns and about $100,000 worth of methamphetamine. Subsequently, Butcher invested in bear traps for the property, although in truth he’d been thinking for a while about adding them as a security precaution against snoopers. He acquired a range of devices, including some old Victor, Triumph, and Newhouse wolf and bear traps that dated from less enlightened times, when the main purpose of said instruments was to inflict maximum pain and damage on prey. The traps were in poor condition, and rusted as all hell, but some TLC and lubricant restored them to reasonable working order. Butcher made sure his people knew where they were located, but as far as anyone else was concerned, he figured they could just take their chances.

It had been Leonard Cresil’s misfortune to lose his footing close to one of those locations, and therefore land with his right knee on the plate of a vintage Kodiak bear trap designed to disable animals up to ten feet tall and weighing as much as 1,500 pounds. The toothed jaws instantly crushed Cresil’s right femur, along with the tibia and fibula in his lower leg. They also tore apart his femoral artery, so that by the time Tilon Ward found him the ground was already soaked with blood and Cresil was dying. Cresil was in so much agony that he probably didn’t realize the imminence of his own demise, which might have explained his next words.

‘Help me,’ he said.

Tilon was carrying a thick length of branch that he’d picked up along the way, just in case Cresil, for all his hollering, proved to be less incapacitated than he sounded. Cresil stretched out his left hand, and Tilon instinctively moved to take it, which was when Cresil brought up his right, a gun still gripped firmly in its fingers. But his movements were sluggish, giving Tilon plenty of time to lash out with the branch, catching Cresil hard on the head and causing his body to twist. There was a final spurt of red from the ruined artery, and Cresil gave a whine of pain, which was the last noise he would ever make. Tilon stood over him, watching him bleed out, and was surprised at how little he felt. When Cresil was dead, Tilon searched his pockets and relieved him of his cell phone, his billfold, and his gun before continuing on his way. He walked for about ten minutes until he came to a pool of standing water, in which he disposed of the branch. After another ten minutes, a signal bar appeared on the phone.

Tilon called his cousin Ernest and asked him to come find him.

Parker had a cuffed and unhappy Harmony Ward in the back of his car when he pulled into the parking lot of the Cargill PD. She hadn’t been working at the Dunk-N-Go that morning, so he’d been forced to confront her at home. She’d been more sad than angry, and hadn’t kicked up too much of a fuss. She was worried about her son, but Parker couldn’t tell her much other than that Chief Griffin was on his way to the scene, and as soon as they heard anything, they’d let her know.

Parker led her to a cell and handed her phone over to Billie Brinton. By then Naylor had returned and informed them that there was no sign of either Hollis or Tilon Ward at the Buttrell place. While none of the men arrested at the scene would either confirm or deny if Tilon had been present, they all claimed never to have seen his father.

‘I’m heading out,’ Parker told Billie when Naylor was done.

‘May I ask where to?’ She heard the aggrieved tone in her own voice, and regulated it for the follow-up. ‘Just in case the chief wants to know.’

‘I’m going to visit Pappy Cade.’

‘Uh-huh? We got a blender in the kitchenette, should you prefer to stick your face in that instead.’

‘It’s tempting,’ said Parker, ‘but I’ll continue with Plan A.’

93

The same dour woman who had haunted the spaces of the Cade residence when Parker last visited now answered the door to him again. He was shown into the same office, where Pappy Cade was once again seated behind the same desk, wearing the same cardigan and what might have been the same shirt and pants. The same clock ticked and the same sad sour smell of bitter old age filled the air. Nothing, it seemed, changed at the Cade house, or nothing of consequence.

‘Take a seat, Mr Parker,’ said Pappy. ‘Your company is most welcome.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because you represent novelty, which means that you’ll suffice as a distraction until you tire of these regions and move on. May I offer you coffee, or hot tea?’

‘No, thank you. I hope my visit will be brief.’

‘I’m surprised to see you here at all, given the morning’s events. A lot of action out in the Ouachita, or so I’m led to believe.’

‘Two dead, and more injured, including a number of sheriff’s deputies. I don’t think the execution of the raid will reflect well on your son.’

Pappy Cade’s shoulders jerked in an approximation of contained mirth.

‘Then you don’t know this county,’ he said. ‘From what I hear, none of those deputies is in any danger of expiring soon, while Jurel and his people, aided by concerned citizens, just took down a meth operation that was contributing to the debilitation of our populace and might have caused Kovas to reconsider its intentions. I don’t see any problems at all with that story. Men have successfully run for office on less.’