THE COURTHOUSE steps were slick with leftover rain, and the clouds overhead had conspired to shut out the sun, blanketing the sky with gray. East Texas decided to give fall a chance this afternoon, and the air had cooled considerably. For the first time since he’d been in Shelby County, Darren felt he ought to be wearing a sport coat or even the windbreaker he kept locked in his truck. He felt a shiver of wind inch its way beneath the thin cotton of his shirt.
He’d been trying to get in to see Geneva, to renew his promise that he was going to get her out of there; he just needed a little more time. But Van Horn had rescinded Darren’s visiting privileges, and he never made it past the deputies on the third floor. He was hurrying to get to his truck and get back to Lark when he saw the Tribune reporter—Chris Wozniak—and Randie stepping out of the reporter’s rental car, which was parked just a few spots from Darren’s pickup in the courthouse parking lot. When she saw him, Randie practically ran from the passenger side of the Buick, breaking away from the reporter. “Darren, what is going on?” She nodded toward Wozniak. “He said Geneva’s been arrested. For Missy. But then they brought in Keith Dale. Does that mean they’re arresting him for Michael?” She was trembling, either from the drop in temperature or a turn of events that both pleased and confused her. She was wearing the cashmere coat again. It was soiled about the shoulders, dirtied after a few days in East Texas.
“I brought in Keith,” Darren said. “But look, there are still some moving parts. We don’t have all the facts at this point.” He was embarrassed by the need to speak to her in the language of a cautious press release. Darren had very nearly offered Keith Dale to her as a promise, as the answer to the question of what had happened to her husband. Keith was the man Darren would bring to justice, ending this nightmare, and it seemed cruel to take that away from Randie when he had nothing to offer in its place. Wozniak hardly acknowledged Darren and walked quickly past both him and Randie on his way to the front doors of the courthouse. Darren called out to stop him. “Wait,” he said. “Before you go in, there are some things you need to understand about what’s going on, Chris. I’d like to get more information before making any comment on the case.”
It was more than he’d said to Randie, and she grabbed his arm roughly when she sensed he was soft-pedaling. “Hey,” she said. But he kept moving toward Wozniak. The man’s pants had dried into a wrinkled mess, and he was clutching the messenger bag at his side as if he honestly believed Darren might snatch it. It was then Darren realized that something had changed between him and Wozniak, who, inches from the courthouse doors, spun around to Darren.
“I’m not dealing with the Rangers on this anymore.”
“What?”
“Let me get this straight…a double homicide with serious racial overtones, a sheriff’s department that initially gave short shrift to the killing of a black man, and the Texas Rangers send in an officer on suspension—”
“I’m not on suspension.” But even as he asserted it, he wasn’t sure it was true. He was currently wearing the badge merely by permission, not by right. His future with the Rangers hung on a grand jury in San Jacinto County.
“You know what I take from that?” Wozniak said. “That the Rangers were never really serious about getting to the bottom of this. You’re no better than the good ol’ boys out here. Actually you’re worse, ’cause you don’t even realize you’re being used.”
His words hit Darren in his gut, a sucker punch that flowered into sickening self-doubt, because he couldn’t say for certain it wasn’t true.
“The Rangers didn’t send me in,” he said. “It was a friend in the Justice Department who tipped me off to the murders in Lark.”
“Greg Heglund. I know,” Wozniak said. “He called me.”
“He called you?”
“I’ll be getting my information from the feds from now on.”
Wozniak paused with his hands on the courthouse door, holding it open for a woman in pantyhose and Keds below the skirt of her suit who stepped outside to light a cigarette. He looked at Randie, who was standing behind Darren. “You coming?” he said. And when she didn’t respond right away, he stormed into the building and let the glass door swing closed behind him.
“What the hell is going on, Darren?”
She’d hardly gotten her seat belt on before he swung into the parking lot of a liquor store a few blocks away, slamming the car into Park. What was Greg doing calling the Tribune reporter? Did he want a professional come-up so badly that he would interfere with what Darren was trying to do out here? He was starting out of the car when Randie said, “What are we doing here?”
He ignored the question as he climbed out of the truck.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and he was still in uniform, the button-down, boots, and badge, but the black lady behind the counter didn’t bat an eye when he set down a twenty and a five for a bottle of Jim Beam, which was about the best he was going to get his hands on in this backwater. He had the plastic off the cap by the time he slid back into the front seat of the Chevy. Randie looked at him like she’d never seen him before, as if a stranger had stumbled into the wrong truck. As he uncapped the bottle and bit off two fingers, enjoying the burn as it went down, the flush that crept across his jaw and throat, she said, “I’m not comfortable with you drinking and driving.”
He unceremoniously tossed her the keys, then got out of the truck, walking around to the passenger side while Randie slid across the front seat to drive.
By the time they were back on Highway 59, he made a show of capping the bottle, of the fact that it was just a little something he needed, that it didn’t signify a problem so much as an itch for which the slightest scratch would do.
Randie had her hands gripped at ten and two on the steering wheel. She had not adjusted the seat for her height and was perched on the very edge so that her feet would meet the gas pedal and the brake. She didn’t say anything until they got about a mile outside Lark. “They’ve got Keith in custody, and what? Now you suddenly don’t think he did it?” she said. Darren, flush from the bourbon, rolled down his window to let in a noisy crack of air. It whistled by his ear and swirled around the truck’s cab. He sat with that for a minute, his tongue slowed by the liquor, his heart weakened by a fear that he was letting this woman down.
As they pulled into the north end of town, they came on the icehouse first. Darren asked her twice to pull over, and when she didn’t, he reached for the wheel himself. She shoved him back but eventually turned the truck into the icehouse’s gravel parking lot and shut off the engine. It clicked as it cooled, and for a moment that was the only sound in the cab save for the distant thrum of drums and guitar, the warm twang of country music playing inside the bar.
Finally she spoke. “You better tell me what in the hell is going on right now,” she said, reaching for the bottle of bourbon between them on the seat and tossing it into the cab’s tiny backseat. “Don’t you dare fall apart on me.”
“There may be someone else involved.”
It came out as a confession—or a plea for understanding, at least. He felt terribly insecure about the halt he’d put on Keith’s arrest. What if I’m wrong?
“How?” But what she really meant was why. Why did he think there was someone else? He told her about the car, the missing BMW, Keith’s tale of returning to the scene and finding both it and Michael gone, as if they’d simply vanished, as if the night had swallowed them whole. But Randie seemed less than impressed by this. It was the mention of the Aryan Brotherhood as a wealth of potential accomplices, the fact that a handful of them were as comfortable inside Wally’s icehouse as they were in their own living rooms, that got Randie’s attention, that made her nod her head several times and gave him the faith to trust his instincts. There was more to this story, he knew. “I can smell the liquor on your breath,” she said. His pulse quickened at the thought that she was close enough to smell anything on his breath. It was a stirring he didn’t want to name, so he blamed it on the bourbon. As he reached for a water bottle in the glove box, downing half of it, she said, “I don’t think you should go in there.”
“Trust me: word has spread by now that Keith Dale is in lockup. The Brotherhood is going to be itching to retaliate. I’m not interested in sitting around waiting on another shoot-out to happen when I can walk in there and lay down a message right now. It’s not going down like that. Not on my watch.”
The liquor had made him bold—or foolhardy.
Time was about to tell.
Randie waited in the truck.
Darren had made her turn the Chevy around so that it faced away from the bar; that way she would see any car that pulled into the parking lot. First sign of trouble, she was to honk the horn and hold it, a siren call. In the rearview mirror, she watched Darren step on to the porch and open the door to the bar.
Inside, he went to the jukebox first. He bent down and pulled the thick black cord from the wall. The music vanished, and the click of balls roaming the pool table was the only sound inside the icehouse. The faces on the TVs, tuned to Fox News and the Food Network in daylight hours, were mute witnesses to Darren Mathews lifting the Colt .45 from his waist. He held the piece at his side as he instructed the room to gather ’round. This time of day, it wasn’t but five people in the place: Lynn behind the bar; two men at the pool table, both well past retirement age, Wranglers baggy where their backsides had faded with time; a man sitting alone at the bar, hunched over a bowl of chili, his T-shirt straining against the spare tire around his waist; and Brady, who quickly ascertained that he was without worthwhile backup and reached for the cell phone clipped to his waist.
Darren said, “Put it down.”
He gestured the man forward, using the Colt as a punctuation mark on his repeated request. “Gather ’round,” he said again. He ordered Brady and the woman out from behind the bar. Lynn didn’t move until Brady did. And he only came forward after knocking the white boy at the bar on the back of the head and pushing him off his stool. He was the only other white man in the icehouse under the age of seventy, and Brady told him, “Wake the fuck up.” He and the fat boy inched forward. Darren positioned himself so that his back was neither to the front door nor to the kitchen. He had no choice but to trust Lynn when she said no one else was back there. Leaving the room would give Brady time and the chance to do God knows what. That he hadn’t grabbed the twelve-gauge behind the bar the second Darren walked in the door told him that the other men in here weren’t part of Brady’s clan. Otherwise he’d have already made a move, trusting that his ABT brothers would back any play, no matter how violent. It meant there was a chance Darren would get out of this alive. Brady crossed his meaty arms, the tattoos like flags crossed in the wind. Lynn was chewing on a corner of her bottom lip. The skin around her mouth was pink and red and crusted where she’d broken the skin, a festering wound she’d been working at for days. The older men had laid down their pool cues. Fat boy was looking longingly toward his chili.
One of the older men held up his hands, as if this were a stickup, as if he couldn’t see or understand the five-point star on Darren’s shirt. “We don’t want no kind of trouble around here,” he said. His billiards opponent nodded.
Darren directed everything he needed to say to Brady, the man who would spread the word to his brethren that Geneva’s cafe was not to be touched, that any man who came near Randie or Darren with so much as a mean look would be shot on sight. “I hear about any kind of trouble for black folks anywhere in this town, I’m going to walk back in here and shoot the first cracker I see and say you had a gun. Hell, I’ll put one in your hand. And a couple of bags of whatever in hell you got going on back in that office.”
He was breaking about three different laws just talking like this.
But he didn’t care.
He wanted them to feel the same gut punch of fear he had when Brady had him cornered behind the icehouse, when Darren thought he might die.
“Now that we got that out of the way,” he said.
“Goddamn it, Brady, just tell him about Keith,” Lynn said. “He don’t care about none of the rest of it.”
“Shut your mouth,” Brady said.
“I got kids, man. I can’t get locked up.”
“I know about Keith,” Darren said. “Who else?”
Brady shot her a look, and whatever she was thinking she swallowed whole. “Wednesday night,” Darren went on. “You said a bunch of folks didn’t like seeing Missy and Michael talking. Who didn’t like seeing them together?”
“Wasn’t anybody in particular,” she said. “I just meant this ain’t the kind of place for that sort of thing.” She looked at Brady, wanting to see whether that met with his approval. He gave her a tiny nod, and she smiled. Her hair was styled in a braid that ran down the side of her face, and she’d painted her nails blue, tiny pools of color set against cuticles that were torn and peeling. She smelled of grape gum and a body odor Darren couldn’t quite call bad, but it sure as hell wasn’t good.
“Keith came to pick up Missy,” Darren said. “Somebody must have told him where she was, who she’d left with. So who did Keith talk to that night?”
Lynn opened her mouth to speak, but Brady put a hand on her arm.
She thought about it a second and said, “Actually, I didn’t see Keith at all that night.” It was delivered like a line from a script she’d recalled in the nick of time. Darren could see the relief on her face. It was Brady she was playing to, the one she wanted to please. She was as changeable as the weather, and right now the storm was coming from Brady’s direction. She was more scared of him than she was of the distant idea that she might go to jail on drug charges she correctly guessed Darren didn’t give a damn about. He was getting nowhere with this.
They drove around for more than an hour after that, searching every square inch of farmland and thicket wide enough to drive a car through. Darren nosed the Chevy up and down farm roads in Lark, mere dirt paths that cut through weedy fields. Twice he got out of the truck to poke around in abandoned buildings: a horse shed made of graying wood, whole planks of which had retired from their responsibilities and lay rotting in a choke of ryegrass on the ground; and an empty barn, its roof torn off by some Gulf-driven storm, something strong and mean enough to chart its wrath all the way from Houston. By the light of the graying sky, Darren checked for tire tracks in the dirt. There was nothing that time hadn’t already done away with.
He got back in the truck without saying a word, and he drove.
He crossed the line into Nacogdoches County, poking around tiny Garrison, where they’d spent last night. Again he drove up and down back roads and through fields of tall grass, looking for the BMW, before doubling back and checking the same roads all over again. By the time he led them back to Highway 59 and they passed the juke joint, Randie said she felt sick. She remembered the dead animal and the blood and could smell it on her clothes, she said. She could smell it in every corner of the truck’s cab. She pulled at her coat, unbuckling her seat belt so she could yank it off her. She rolled down the passenger-side window and stuck her face into the coming night with a kind of desperate hunger for air. She was gray and clammy, sweat breaking across her forehead.
“You’re never going to find that car.”
“I have to look,” he said.
“You’re not going to find the car. Because it’s gone. Because it doesn’t matter.” Her words were nearly swallowed in the rush of wind through the window, and he worried she truly wasn’t well. She wasn’t making sense.
“If I don’t at least look—”
“Keith is in jail, Darren. Why can’t that be enough for you?”
She rolled up the window, and the suck of wind from the cab seemed to vacuum-seal them inside, and he, too, could smell the faint traces of animal rot.
She twisted around so far in her seat that she was facing him head-on.
“I’m tired, Darren,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “I want to go home. I want to get Michael in Dallas, and then I want to take him home.”
“I’m not convinced it was Keith.”
“I don’t care.”
“You want an innocent man charged with this?”
“He’s not innocent.”
Her voice was rubbed raw at the edges by an anger that was crawling up the inside of her throat. “He beat Michael, then he left him out there. Left him out there to die, for all we know. That’s enough for me, Darren. You’re never going to get anything better out of this redneck justice out here. So I want to take what I can get, and I want to take Michael home. You’ve got a man in lockup right now. Keith Dale is enough for me. I want an arrest, and then I want to go home.” The grief was at her back door, scratching at the screen. It was coming for her, and she wanted so badly to break down in private that she was willing to take less than the truth to get out of this town, this county, this state, to get away from all this. It was selfish and shortsighted. For a Ranger, anything less than the truth was never going to be enough, and he told her so.
“This isn’t about you.” She nearly spit the words at him.
“Yes, it is,” he said. “I made a promise to you, and whether he knew it or not, I made a promise to Michael from the time I pinned this badge to my chest.”
“You made a promise to Geneva Sweet, too,” she said. “But you’re driving around in circles rather than face her people and tell them you’re the reason she’s not coming home tonight.” With that she turned around and didn’t look at him again, nor did she say a word when she lifted the bottle of Jim Beam from the backseat and took a large gulp of it herself. It must have stung going down, because her eyes watered, and then before he knew it, she was crying for real, the sound like a wounded animal trying to scratch its way out of her insides, a rain of tears and streams of snot streaking down her face. She heaved for air a couple of times, and Darren finally pulled off onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped the car. Before he could undo his seat belt, she fell across the seat into his arms, laying her head on his chest as she wept and wept and wept.