Jack looks a lot like me. He just turned nineteen and is tall and muscular, with dark hair and brooding eyes that are nearly black. Jack is a top student and a highly competitive athlete whose goal is to play professional baseball, and he works at it with the intensity of a fanatic. He and I have spent countless hours together practicing on a baseball field.
He’ll hit until his hands blister, throw until his arm aches, lift weights until his muscles burn, and run until his legs give out. The work paid off in the form of a scholarship to Vanderbilt, but the scholarship paid only half his tuition. I still had to come up with twenty thousand dollars a year.
When the waiter brought me a piece of chocolate cake, Caroline reached into her purse and produced a candle. She stuck it in the cake and lit it.
”Make a wish,” she said.
”And don’t tell us what it is,” Lilly said. She says that every year.
I made a silent wish for an innocent client. And the sooner the better.
Jack reached under the table and pulled out a small, flat, gift-wrapped box.
”This is from all of us,” he said.
I opened the card. There was a message, in Caroline’s handwriting: ”Follow your heart. Follow your dreams. We’ll all be there, wherever it leads. We love you.” She’s as eager as I am to get me out of the legal profession. She thinks my work keeps me at war with myself-she’s told me more than once that she’s never seen anybody so conflicted. She’s been encouraging me to go to night school and get certified as a high school teacher and a coach.
Inside the package were box seat tickets to an Atlanta Braves game in July.
”I cleared your calendar,” Caroline said. ”We’re all going. Don’t you dare schedule anything for that weekend.”
”Not a chance,” I said. It was perfect.
We finished dessert and drove back home around nine. As I pulled into the driveway, the headlights swept over the front porch about thirty feet to the left of the garage. I saw something move. We lived on ten isolated acres on a bluff overlooking Boone Lake. We’d left Rio in the house when we went to the restaurant. I stopped just outside the garage and got out of the car. I could hear Rio raising hell inside.
”I’ll go in and turn on the porch light,” I said to Caroline. ”You guys stay in the car.”
”No way,” Jack said as he got out of the backseat.
I walked around the corner towards the front with Jack right beside me. Someone stood on the porch.
”Who’s there?” I said.
Silence. And then the porch light came on. Standing next to the porch swing in a pair of ratty khaki shorts and a green T-shirt that read, ”Do me, I’m Irish,” was my sister, Sarah.
April 12
2:00 p.m.
By the time Landers returned to his office, the Johnson City dicks had managed to gather more information on the murder victim. John Paul Tester was a widower with one grown kid, a son who was a deputy sheriff and a chaplain at the Cocke County sheriff’s department. Tester had come up to Johnson City to preach at a revival at a little church near Boone’s Creek. He delivered the sermon, collected almost three hundred dollars from the offering plate for his trouble, and left the church around nine. Nobody had seen him since. His bank records showed that he withdrew two hundred dollars in cash from an automatic teller machine at eleven forty-five p.m. The machine was at the Mouse’s Tail. If Tester ran through three hundred dollars there and needed more money around midnight, the Barlowe woman had to have noticed him.
The bitch lied.
Landers spent the afternoon drafting an affidavit for a search warrant and running down a judge. All he had to do was tell the judge that the owner of the club where the murder victim was last seen had lied and was refusing to cooperate. The warrant the judge signed authorized the TBI to search the Mouse’s Tail for any evidence relevant to the murder of John Paul Tester. And since it was a strip club, the judge didn’t have any qualms about Landers executing the warrant during business hours.
Landers planned the raid himself. About an hour before the SWAT guys were supposed to hit the front door, he’d go in to check things out, and then at the appointed time he’d signal the start of the raid. Landers was looking forward to it, especially the part about checking things out.
A little after nine, he stopped by his place to shower and change. He put on a pair of jeans, a collared black pullover, and a jacket. He stuck his.38
in an ankle holster, and drove out to the Mouse’s Tail around ten fifteen. It was a tacky joint, built of concrete block and painted powder blue. The front entrance was covered by a bright blue awning trimmed in black. A big gray mouse, grinning from ear to ear and with a tail that curled up into what looked like an erect penis, had been air-brushed on the side of the building that faced the road.
There were twenty or thirty cars in the parking lot out front. Landers had to pay a ten-dollar cover to get past the blonde in the foyer. She looked like a high-end hooker, in elaborate makeup and black spandex. Huge tits. The ATM the murder victim withdrew the money from was sitting right beside the counter in front.
Blondie buzzed Landers through into the main part of the club. It was a large, open room, about a hundred feet long and forty feet wide. On each side of the main room were what appeared to be small anterooms, the entrances covered by black curtains.
There were three stages, each about the size of a boxing ring, set in a triangle and complete with brass poles. Each stage was framed by mirrors and occupied by a naked, gyrating lady. Cigarette smoke hung in a cloud about ten feet off the floor, and a mirror ball was throwing light around the room. The music was loud. Landers had heard the bass buzzing off the walls from the parking lot. He didn’t recognize the song that was playing, but it was by one of those dumbass black rappers.
Landers did a quick head count. There were six people, all men, at the bar to his right and another thirty or so sitting at counters and tables around the stages. Besides the dancers and two waitresses, who were wearing extremely attractive tight white nurse’s outfits, there wasn’t a woman in the place. Landers didn’t see Erlene Barlowe anywhere.
He took a seat at a table towards the back. The redhead onstage was magnificent. She had a gorgeous face and she kept throwing her head around and making her hair fly. Her legs were long, her ass was tight, her tits were small and firm, and she could move. Landers was sitting there fantasizing about his balls slapping off of her ass when one of the nurses stopped by the table. Her little top was a zip-up that hadn’t been zipped up very far. Her tits were falling out all over the place.
”What can I get you, honey?” she said.
”Club soda. Twist of lime.” The nurse gave Landers a shitty look when he ordered the club soda. He would much rather have had a whiskey, but he never knew what might happen in a raid. He needed to stay sharp.
Nurse Betty brought his club soda a couple of minutes later. Cost him five-fifty. She gave him an even shittier look when he didn’t give her a tip. Landers called Jimmy Brown at ten forty-five. The raid was supposed to start at eleven straight up. Landers could barely hear him over the fucking music. Brown said they were just pulling off the interstate. They’d be in position in five minutes.
That’s when he saw Erlene Barlowe, still wearing the leather pants and cheetah top. She was standing by the bar. Nurse Betty was talking in her ear and pointing in Landers’s direction. The music had stopped and the disc jockey was telling the customers that touching the girls wasn’t allowed. Erlene spotted Landers and headed straight for him.
”Are you here to arrest me, handsome?” she said when she got to the table. ”Or are you just a bad boy looking for a good time?”
”You remember the guy I was asking you about?
The dead guy who wasn’t here? He withdrew some money out of your ATM out there in the lobby last night.”