“Oh, I expect I can handle any trouble you got, sonny. I’d offer you cider, but I doubt you’ll be here that long. What’s this about?”
“Sherry Sinclair,” I said, watching her face.
“That girl from TV?” She frowned. “I heard about what happened to her. As I recall, you two were keeping company awhile back. So are you here on police business? Or on your own hook?”
“Both,” I said.
She glanced up at me, her gray eyes as sharp as lasers. “No, I don’t think so. It’s mostly personal, ain’t it.” It wasn’t a question.
“It doesn’t matter what it is,” I said. “I understand you had some kind of dust-up with Sherry. I need to know about that.”
“We had us a few problems,” she admitted. “The girl ambushed me. I’m comin’ out of WalMart with a cartload of groceries. Sherry runs over and shoves a microphone in my face with a cameraman filmin’ the whole thing like I was on COPS TV. Girl had sand, I’ll give her that.”
“What did she want?”
“Same thing you people always want. She’d heard a lot of ugly rumors and gossip—”
“And checked your clan’s police records,” I put in.
“That too, maybe,” Emmaline conceded with a wry smile. “She said she was planning a story on the wood-smoke outlaws.”
“Starring your family?”
“That was the plan.” She shrugged. “You know my boys, LaCrosse. There’s so many Gauthiers in this county, somebody’s always jammed up over some beef or other. Nephews, cousins, shirttail kin. If you go by the numbers, we can look a little shady. That girl had it in her head that wood-smoke country is the Wild West, and I’m Jesse James.”
“More like Calamity Jane,” I said. “What happened?”
“We made a trade, like in the old days.” Emmaline shook her head, smiling at the memory. “I invited her out here to the house for a visit. No cameras, no mikes, just us. She came, too. Girl wasn’t afraid of nothin’. We had us a talk, nose to nose, worked things out.”
“Worked them out how, exactly?”
“The way it usually works. I bought her off.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Everybody’s got a price, young LaCrosse, even you, I expect. The key to a good trade is to figure what that price is. Sherry didn’t care much about money. Robbie Gilchrist was keepin’ her and if I had his money, I’d burn mine.”
“Then what was her price?”
“I offered to swap her a better story.”
“What story?”
She hesitated, reading my eyes. “I wonder how far I can trust you, young LaCrosse?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t.
“I knew your daddy,” she said, resuming her rocking. “He was a handsome man, but a little thick, I always thought. You favor your mother, I believe. There may be hope for you.” Reaching into the pocket of her print apron, she came out with a cellophaned brick of white powder and tossed it to me.
I caught it and hefted it. It felt like a pound. “Sweet Jesus, lady, what—?”
“That’s half a key of crystal meth,” she said calmly. “Pure glass. Ounce for ounce, it’s worth about the same as gold.”
“It’s also worth twenty years for possession.”
“Then it’s a lucky thing I just handed it over to the law, ain’t it?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m making you the same offer I gave your girlfriend, LaCrosse. The state forest is bigger than a lot of countries. Reefer grows wild in the woods, always has. Now and again my boys harvest a few plants, sell a pound or two downstate, like we have for a hundred years.
“But lately we’ve been finding a lot more than reefer out there. They’ve been coming across campers and motor homes stashed in the big timber. They ain’t there on no vacation.”
“Meth labs,” I said.
She nodded. “Crank crews from downstate are moving into our territory. We’ve already had some trouble. The fellas that cooked up that packet you got in your hand took a shot at one of my boys.”
“What happened?”
“I just told you,” she said coolly, “they shot at my boy. What do you think happened? Lucky they were city boys who couldn’t shoot for squat. A bad mistake.”
“How bad?” I asked.
She met my eyes for a moment. Her face showed nothing at all. She didn’t expand. Didn’t have to.
“We found that crystal in their rig after they... departed. But that was just one lab. There’s a half-dozen setups out there, and more on the way unless we do somethin’ about it. It could turn into a shootin’ war. Folks could get killed.”
I suspected they already had, but let it pass.
“You told Sherry about this?” I asked.
“We made a trade. She drops the story about a few wood-smoke boys growin’ weed, goes after the big-city gangs that are cookin’ up poison on state land. She shines a light on ’em, they’ll scatter like the cockroaches they are.”
“Or maybe they break her neck and roll her car down a ravine.”
“I’ve been thinkin’ on that since I heard.” She sighed. “I liked that girl. She was pretty, she had grit. If I thought one of them cookers... But I doubt it was them, Dylan. We hadn’t closed no deal yet. I had the boys make up a map that shows where the labs are now. They move the rigs after every second batch, never stay more than a week or two in one spot. We’ve been keeping tabs on ’em, and they’re all still in place. If they thought they’d been burned—?”
“They’d be in the wind,” I agreed. “I want that map, Emmaline.”
“And I’d dearly love to wake some mornin’ in Brad Pitt’s bunk. We’ll both have to settle for what we can get. I’m offering you the same deal I gave Sherry. The map will aim you straight at them crank labs, but in return, you leave me and mine be for a while. If your people come across a reefer patch in the woods, you blink your eyes and keep right on walkin’. Deal?”
I didn’t say anything.
“It’s the right thing, Dylan. The weed grows wild in the woods. It can soothe your spirit, ease your pain. Meth’s an abomination that rots out your mouth and steals your damned soul. I won’t tolerate it, you understand? You move that scum off my ground, or by God we’ll put ’em under it.”
“Deal,” I said grudgingly. “You give me the map, we’ll cut you some slack. But tell your people to stand down. No more shootouts in the woods. You leave them to the law.”
She spat in her hand, we shook, and that was it. Done deal. No contracts, no lawyers. In wood-smoke country, your word is all that matters. And it damned well better.
“I’m real sorry about that girl, Dylan. Tell her family—”
“She had no family, Miss Emmaline. She was a foster child. Grew up in the system.”
“No family?” she echoed. “Not even...? No people at all?”
Emmaline Gauthier frowned off into the distance, as if searching the hills for answers. Her extended clan was her whole life. I doubt she could even conceive of a world without blood ties.
“My God, Dylan, that’s... godawful sad, ain’t it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It is.”
Driving out of the hills, I sorted through what Miss Emmaline had told me. And what she hadn’t.
She’d lied about one thing. Not all of her clan were Robin Hood back-to-nature types, growing weed, living off the land like their forefathers. Two of her punk nephews had been caught on video downstate, buying up pseudoephedrine, a key element in cooking crank. Some of the Gauthiers were involved in the meth trade, and if they were, she knew about it.
Which made the rest of what she said more likely to be true. She’d given me a map of the sites of the meth labs in the state forest, partly because they were operating on land she considered her personal turf.