“Me and you are two badass motherfuckers,” Red hollered.
“Fuckin-A!” Barrel replied.
“That bitch was just the beginning! We’re gonna be the next Murder Incorporated. Hit men, by God! I always wanted to be a hit man. Fuck this Mickey Mouse shit we been doing! We’re going big-time, baby!”
“Keep your voice down, Red! People can hear you.”
“I don’t give a shit!”
Red rose from his chair and raised both fists into the air.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil,” he yelled, “for I’m the baddest motherfucker in the valley!”
It took less than a week for word to reach the officers. Inquiries had been made, meetings held. And now Red found himself in a barn in Unicoi County, tied securely to a metal chair, surrounded by men he thought were his friends. Barrel was next to him, whimpering like a child.
Red watched the man circling him. He was known as Bear, the president of Satan’s Soldiers. He was six feet tall and thick as an Angus bull. Muscles rippled beneath the tight black tank top he was wearing. Everything on him was covered with thick black hair-his head, face, shoulders, back, and chest-and he was wearing the gang’s signature black bandanna. The rest of the officers were leaning against a stall about ten feet away, watching as he toyed with a length of braided rawhide and the knot at its end. They were known as Turtle, Rain Man, and Mountain.
“Know why you’re here?” Bear asked.
“We ain’t done nothing,” Red said.
The knotted piece of rawhide smashed into his temple. Red saw a bright flash as pain shot through his head and down his spine.
“Don’t lie to me, Red. It’ll go a lot easier on you. That girl you killed worked for the DA. You think they’re gonna stop looking for her, you damned fool? Now we gotta clean up the mess you made.”
“Ain’t no mess,” Red said. “Ain’t nobody gonna find nothing.”
“We got rules. You break the rules, it affects us all. What the hell were you thinking? Going on your own. And a girl! She hadn’t done a damned thing to us. And now, all this heat.”
“There won’t be no heat. They ain’t gonna find nothing.”
“Won’t be no heat? How do you think we found out about it? Because you’re too goddamned dumb to keep your mouth shut. You and this fat lump of shit next to you.”
“We won’t say nothing, Bear,” Barrel cried. “I swear to God we won’t say a word.”
Red heard the whiz of the rawhide and the dull thump as it struck his cousin. Barrel screamed.
“Shut your mouth, lard ass!” Bear yelled. “Now, I’ve known the two of you long enough to know that ol’ Barrel here doesn’t have brains enough to get in out of the rain. So you must have been the one who set it up. Right, Red?”
Red nodded his head and closed his eyes. He listened as Bear’s boots crunched the dirt floor as he continued to circle.
“Who paid you?”
“Some Mexican down in Morristown.”
“What Mexican? How’d he get in touch with you?”
“Don’t know his name. I found out about the contract from another Mexican dude I party with. I told him I might be interested, so he gave me a number to call. I set up a meet and went to Morristown.”
“How much? How much did it take to get you to betray us?”
“I didn’t betray y’all, man. All I did was a job. It put fifteen grand in my pocket and didn’t cause nobody no harm. Like I said, they ain’t gonna find her.”
“What’d you do with her?”
The interrogation lasted another fifteen minutes. The more Red talked, the less hostile Bear’s voice became. Red told him everything: how they’d cased her place, how they’d killed her, where they’d put the body, what they’d done after the murder.
Bear squatted down in front of Red and put his hands on Red’s knees.
“Anything else you can think of?”
“No, man. I told you everything.”
“Good.”
Bear stood up and turned around.
“Rain Man, you and Psycho hook the chipper up to the pickup and haul it down to the pigpen. I want you to shoot these two pieces of shit, then shred ’em. The pigs will take care of what’s left.”
41
Thirty-six hours after a judge is found dead and twenty-four hours after Hannah Mills is discovered missing-two of the biggest mysteries I can remember in the district-I find myself on the outside.
Fired. Sacked. Terminated.
Caroline says she isn’t surprised. She’s tells me she’s never much cared for Mooney, something she’s kept to herself since I made the decision to go to work for him. He leers at her, she says, and even made a drunken pass at her at last year’s office holiday party. She didn’t mention it to me for the simple reason that she believed I might do something rash, like kick his sorry ass. She was right about that.
Mooney’s public relations campaign against me was anything but subtle. The afternoon he fired me, all of the local television channels featured me front and center on the evening news. Mooney refused interviews, but Rita Jones called me a couple of hours after I left the office and told me Mooney had faxed to the media a press release he’d drafted himself.
The TV news reporters showed up at my house immediately. They parked in the driveway and tried to get me to come out and talk to them, but I just opened the back door and turned Rio loose. They scattered like so many frightened geese. That evening, they did a mini-history of my career as a defense attorney and then as a prosecutor. Aside from the phone’s ringing off the hook, it really wasn’t that bad. The next morning’s newspaper carried a front-page story with the headline “Prosecutor Dismissed for Insubordination,” but outside of the fact that I’d been fired, they didn’t have anything negative to say.
A week later, there was another round of press when Tanner Jarrett went into court and announced that the district attorney’s office was dismissing all charges against Rafael Ramirez. Mooney told the media that my prosecution of Ramirez was “overzealous.” He actually apologized to Ramirez on the evening news. It made me so angry, I threw a shoe at the television and cracked the screen.
Another week quickly passes. I fall back into the same routines I had before I went to work for the district attorney’s office. Caroline and I drive to Nashville to watch Jack play baseball. I piddle around the house. I run, work out, and play with Rio.
I talk with Bates daily, but nothing has developed with Hannah Mills/Katie Dean. It’s the same with Judge Green’s murder. Silence. I’ve tried several times to call Anita White to ask whether they indicted Tommy Miller, but she refuses to speak with me. There hasn’t been a word about it in the news, though, which makes me think Mooney didn’t go through with it. Someone would have leaked the information to the press. A cop, a prosecutor, a grand juror-a piece of news that juicy would have hit the streets in banner headlines.
Then, on Thursday evening, I’m walking back up to the house from a run along the trail by the lake with Rio when I see a car in the driveway. It’s dusk, and I can see an outline of a figure leaning against the car. It looks just like one of those cowboy cutouts people put on their lawns. Rio begins to bark and strains against the leash, but as I get closer, I recognize who it is. It’s Bates, wearing his cowboy hat and his boots and leaning against his confiscated BMW.
“Didn’t think you’d want to be seen with me.” Rio takes a quick sniff of Bates, calms down, and I let him off the leash.
“I don’t, at least not in public. That’s why I came all the way out here.”