For the next few weeks, in this place governed by routines, all I did was slip into a new, comfortable one—with Mitch Dupree at the center of it.
It was like some kind of weird buddy flick where everyone wore khaki. We played cards at night. During the afternoon, we’d wander out to the bocce court, or head to the gym, or find a movie on TV. We ate our meals together more often than we didn’t.
Mitch seemed to enjoy mentoring me, so I allowed him to. If nothing else, it was improving my financial literacy. He also liked to tell stories, which worked for me, because I liked to listen to them. You never knew when he might spill some useful detail about, say, the best place to hide valuables. I even feigned interest when he talked about golf—and, believe me, there are few things less interesting than listening to a man talk about his struggles to conquer his putting yips.
Whatever he felt like discussing, I was there to listen. I was just good ol’ Pete, the best pal any guy could want, having slid seamlessly into the void that Doc’s departure had created. Mitch and Rob Masri were starting to become friends as well, which was convenient. We were one contented little prison family.
Meanwhile, my family outside prison was struggling. Amanda had proposed that we give up trying to talk every day, because that was leading to nothing but a string of short, futile conversations. Our new thing was that we have a weekly call every Friday afternoon, so we could have a longer, more meaningful dialogue.
Except that wasn’t working either. We’d run through the usual topics—how my cousin Amanda was doing with the baby (fine), how her painting was going (poorly), what she was reading or what movie she and my high school buddy Brock DeAngelis had watched most recently (whatever)—and then we’d run out of steam. I could tell myself it was because we were worried about who was listening, now that I had both the Bureau of Prisons and the Federal Bureau of Investigation potentially eavesdropping on us. But the truth was, neither of us had much to say. There were these long pauses where I could practically feel us becoming more estranged.
I didn’t share my concerns with Masri or anyone else, because I knew they would just tell me to get used to it—and that it would likely get worse. Morgantown was rife with stories of guys who had gone in with what they thought were solid relationships, only to become disabused of that notion.
Jerry Strother was one of them. He made a nasty, offhanded comment one night at poker about his wife. Only later did Mitch provide context. About three months after Jerry arrived, his wife rather unapologetically began cheating on him with his best friend. She told Jerry she had needs, and if she had to go elsewhere to meet them, it was his fault for getting locked up.
Amanda would never do that me. Still, there was no question that if being long-distance was our first true test, we were struggling along with a D-minus.
I was just coming out of another dissatisfying Friday afternoon call when I bumped into Mitch, coming back from the library for the three P.M. count with a stack of books under his arm.
“Damn,” I said, nodding at his collection. “You leave any for the rest of us?”
“Just trying to keep my mind off what I’d normally be doing this weekend.”
“What’s that?” I asked, because my policy since we started becoming friends was that if Mitch ever opened the smallest conversational door, I was going to attempt to enter it.
And then he said something that made me instantly forget my struggles with Amanda.
“A hunting trip with some buddies.”
A hunting trip. The words gave me a tingle. I may not have known much about hunting, but I did know hunters often hunted near their hunting cabins.
Their secluded, illicit-document-laden hunting cabins.
This was what I had been waiting more than a month for; what I had been wheeling and dealing and wheedling to arrange ever since I entered through that split-log fence at the front entrance: for Mitch to mention hunting in my presence.
Without sounding too overenthusiastic, I said, “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, some college buddies and I went every year the weekend before Thanksgiving. We told our wives not to buy turkeys because we might get ourselves one. We drank a lot more Wild Turkey than we ever shot, but whatever. You a hunter?”
“Sure,” I said. Then I modified it with, “A bit.”
I did the so-so shake with my hand. I didn’t want to overcommit, lest I get trapped into a detailed conversation about barrel-twist rates. The closest a kid from Hackensack, New Jersey, came to shooting anything was when we played Big Buck Hunter at the local arcade.
Still, West Virginia Pete would never be antihunting, so I added, “Less so after the kids were born. It just didn’t seem fair to Kelly to leave her on a Saturday or Sunday morning when I had already been working all week.”
“I hear you,” he said.
“What kind of hunting did you do?” I asked, hoping that was the correct formulation of that question.
“Bowhunting. No offense to rifle hunters, but if you ask me, that’s not really much of a sport. That’s practically a trip to the grocery store. With the scopes they got, they can put down a deer at a hundred fifty, two hundred yards. Where’s the sport in that? The animal doesn’t even have a chance to know you’re there. It’s not fair.”
Tommy Jump would have pointed out that hunting would never be truly fair until the animals got rifles, too.
“I hear you. Anyone can do this,” I said, mimicking a trigger pull.
“Well, exactly. On the other hand, you get a bow with a fifty-pound draw on it, and you know you got to get within thirty yards to get a kill shot, and you better damn well be downwind, and if you so much as think too loud you know that deer is going to take off? Now you’re talking hunting.”
He got a dreamy, far-off look. “Last year when we went out, I was going out to one of my usual spots, making way too much noise, just checking out the property, when I caught sight of this big, mature buck, a twelve-pointer at least, biggest spread I ever saw. I usually don’t go for bucks because we have a rule: You gotta eat what you shoot. A young doe tastes way better. But this guy, he was magnificent. I just had to have him. I’d battle my way through a tough venison steak if it meant having his head on my wall. And I swear when I first saw him, he turned, and he looked at me and he stared me down for a moment, like, ‘Oh yeah? You think you can take me down? It’s on.’
“Then he took off. I tracked him a little bit, and I got the sense of where he had been hanging out. There were some droppings I thought were his. I told the guys I was with, ‘Okay, that one’s mine.’ The next morning, I was up at three A.M. I wanted to get up in a blind while he was still sleeping. So there I was, waiting for him, freezing my nuts off, because you got to stay real still if you’re going to have a chance.”
He set down the books so he could demonstrate the position he was in, as if the story wouldn’t be complete without visuals.
“Well, two hours later, it’s starting to get light, and along comes Mr. Buck. He’s coming down the hill toward me. At that time of the morning, you’re still getting cold air settling from the top of the hill down into the hollows, so he can’t smell me yet. All I’m doing is waiting for him to get a little closer, a little closer, a little closer. He’s so damn big, the last thing I want to do is try to take him from too far out, because if all I did was wound him, that’d be a damn shame for everyone involved. As I’m waiting, the sun is getting closer to the horizon and there’s getting to be this orange glow coming over the next hill, and I know I’m running out of time, because he’s going to bed down again soon. So I draw my bow and I get him lined up. I mean, I’ve got the most perfect shot of the most gorgeous buck I’ve ever seen.”
He cocked his elbow and pulled back an imaginary bowstring while keeping his other arm straight.
“And then,” he said, and I waited for him to narrate the bloody conclusion to this story.
But he just relaxed his arms.
“You didn’t shoot?” I asked.
“I couldn’t. That big boy had been out in those hills for a long time. He was probably a great-great-great-granddaddy, and I just thought, ‘You know, he’s been on one hell of a run.’ I couldn’t bring myself to end it for him. All I did was stand up in the blind and yell, ‘Gotcha!’ Just so he knew who had won.”
“Ha!” I said.
“I swear, he looked up at me, like, ‘Yeah, you got me.’ And then he tore ass off through the brush. Just seeing him run made it all worth it. Magnificent.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“Nope. That was last year. Back then I would have told you I’d be out again this year looking for him. Never knew this was going to happen.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, again trying to be as casual as I could be. “You and your buddies go to the same place every year?”
“Uh-huh. I got a cabin up in Chattahoochee National Forest. Been in my family for a long time.”
“Chattahoochee?” I said, now pouring on the enthusiasm. “Get out! My uncle has a place there. I used to go there as a kid. That’s where I learned to hunt. My dad and I would go out with my uncle. He was a big bowhunter, just like you.”
Because of course he was. Uncle . . . Burt.
Burt Goodrich. Bowhunter. Friend to all. Except deer.
“Huh, small world,” Mitch said.
“Real small,” I said. Then, ever so smoothly, I asked, “Where’s your place, anyhow?”
“We’re way in the eastern part. Up twenty-three, just past Tallulah Falls.”
“Dang! That’s where Uncle Burt’s place is. We weren’t but a few miles from Tallulah Falls.”
“We’re on the east side of twenty-three, maybe a mile or two as the crow flies from the Chattooga River. That’s where they filmed Deliverance, you know. They called it the Cahulawassee in the movie, but everyone up there jokes about it. You see a stranger when you’re out hunting, and you know one of your buddies is going to go, ‘Squeal like a pig, squeal like a pig.’”
He chuckled at this. I wanted to get us away from discussions of classic movies and back into geography.
“Yeah, I think Uncle Burt was right off twenty-three,” I said, like I was now traveling it in my mind’s eye. “It’s been a while, though. I can’t remember the name of the road. I want to say it was a left turn. We’d be coming from up north, so we’d be traveling south.”
“Was he north or south of Tallulah Falls?”
“North,” I said, gambling. “What about you?”
“Same thing. Jeez, what are the chances?” he said, getting excited. “He’s not on Camp Creek Road, is he?”
“No, that’s not it,” I said, because the last thing I needed was to get pinned down on the exact location of my fictional uncle’s fictional cabin. I deflected the question back at him with: “That’s where your place is?”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “We’d be traveling north, so it was a right turn for us. Just past Tallulah Falls.”
“Camp Creek Road,” I said. “I feel like I’ve seen the sign. Are you directly on Camp Creek Road? I’ll have to tell Uncle Burt. He goes down to his cabin all the time and he’s always rambling around the back roads. Maybe he’s passed your place?”
“I doubt it. We’re one of the turns off Camp Creek Road, maybe a mile or so down. It’s just a little dirt road, and it’s got a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign, so people tend not to go down it unless they know it.”
“If you want, I could tell Uncle Burt to check out your place, make sure it’s holding up okay.”
I held my breath, silently praying I’d hear, Sure, that’d be nice. Let me give you the address.
What I got was: “That’s real kind of you. We got neighbors who check on it. There are only a few houses up our road, and we’re all part-timers. We kind of all keep an eye on each other’s places.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” I said.
I didn’t want to push my questioning—or my luck—too much further, lest it raise any alarm bells. This had to seem natural. I could always have “Uncle Burt,” aka Danny Ruiz, just happen to be down that way, then ask more questions based on specific knowledge. I was only one month in. With five months to go, I could be patient.
So I lobbed out a breezy, “Sure is beautiful in those parts.”
“God’s country. We have five acres that back up against US Forest Service land, so you feel like you own the whole world.”
“That sounds just like Uncle Burt’s place,” I said. “He’s got this little stream running through it. We used to catch crawfish in there. Just heaven.”
“Mmm. One of the first things I’m going to do when I get out of here is go back up there for a visit,” he said. “Maybe you can come by if you’re out too. I’ll teach you to bowhunt for real.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Then, as gracefully as I could, I extricated myself from the conversation.
I couldn’t wait to get to a phone.
I didn’t reach Danny on any of my first three attempts, but on the fourth he answered with a testy, “I’m in a meeting. Would you stop blowing up my phone?”
“This is worth ducking out of a meeting,” I said.
“You better not just be calling me because you’ve gone through all that fish.”
“No. But I do need a favor. A buddy of mine here needs someone to check in on his family’s hunting cabin.”
“Really?” he said, and from the way his voice was climbing the ladder, I knew he understood what I was really saying.
“Yeah. He’s worried about it being empty now that he’s here.”
“I got you,” Danny said. “What’s the address?”
“It’s not that simple. My buddy doesn’t know the actual address. He said he always got there by feel. But based on what he told me about it, I think maybe you can find it.”
Then I talked him through what I knew: Chattahoochee National Forest. North of Tallulah Falls. Off Route 23. Down Camp Creek Road. After a mile look for a dirt road guarded by a PRIVATE PROPERTY sign. The parcel in question would be roughly five acres and back up against USFS land.
“Okay. Let me start digging. Call back in two hours.”
Over the next two hours, I entered the fantasy where Danny found that property . . . obtained a search warrant . . . uncovered those documents.
And the whole thing would take, what, a few days? A week, max?
I wasn’t sure what I was more excited about: collecting the money, returning to normalcy with Amanda, or not having to share a roof with ninety criminals every night.
To burn off extra energy, I went to the gym and tossed the medicine balls around for a while. Then I pounded the track. As I washed off the sweat afterward, I was already counting the remaining number of times I’d have to use that soap-scum-encrusted shower.
They would start calling dinner at five o’clock. But Danny’s two-hour deadline was just before that. So with ten minutes to spare, I called him.
“Hey, got anything?” I asked hurriedly, after the recording that informed him he was receiving a call from a federal correctional institution.
“We think so,” Danny said. “We used satellite imagery to find a dirt road that fit your buddy’s description. This is the high-quality USGS stuff, not the junk you get from Google Maps. Then we matched it with local property tax records. There are six properties down that road. Four of them were smaller than five acres. Of the two remaining, one is registered to a guy from South Carolina. The other is registered to a family trust. It looks like the place: five point one acres backing up against US Forest Service land.”
There was no one milling near the phones, so I punched the air a couple of times in celebration.
“How soon do you think you can check it out?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a funny coincidence. I just so happen to be going down to Georgia this weekend.”