By the time Leah Green finished her shift and reached Ray’s house, Raymond had drained half the bottle. He was a giant of a man and had never shown much sign of being drunk until right before he blacked out. There were no slurred words or stumbling to provide any warning. He was a long way from falling over, but the whiskey had washed the weight out of his head.
Ray’s legs were stretched straight and the heels of his boots were anchored into the ground so that the rocking chair was leaned onto the tails of its runners. His hands hung from the fronts of the chair arms and the stub of his cigar glowed at the corner of his mouth. He was motionless, head tilted back, watching her from the bottoms of his eyes as she came across the yard.
“You look about dead sitting there.”
Ray rocked forward and stood. He picked what was left of the Backwoods between his fingers and stomped it out in the dirt. He didn’t respond and she looked puzzled by his silence, but she followed as he turned and headed into the house.
Denny Rattler was just how Ray’d left him. Leah Green’s face twisted in confusion. Denny watched her and she watched him. Over the next few minutes, Ray told Leah what happened and Denny filled in the details where Ray could not. When they finished, her face was pale and she said she needed to sit down. Ray brought her some water and she pressed her wrists against the cool glass, but didn’t drink.
“So are you going to help us?”
“I’m closer to putting the both of you in handcuffs.”
“I don’t know what in the world you’d charge us with.” Ray fished his pocketknife out of his overalls and pinched open the blade. He took a step across the kitchen floor and sliced the rope clean at the back of the chair, the coils falling limp into Denny Rattler’s lap like a pile of snakes. Denny’s wrists and ankles were still bound by zip-ties, but in a split second he was free. “I’d say you need the two of us telling the same story we just told to come up with any charges, me telling on him for conspiracy and him telling on me for kidnapping, and I don’t think that’s the story I’m going to tell. What about you, Denny Rattler? That the story you want to tell?” Ray rested his hand on Denny’s shoulder.
“No, sir. I don’t think it is.”
“Then what exactly is the story the two of you want to tell?”
“Way I remember, Denny come over here and knocked on my front door and told me somebody wanted to pay him to kill me. He didn’t have any more desire to do that than you do, girlie, so we called the law.”
“What you’re missing is the why.”
“What’s that?”
“The why, Raymond. Why would he have been asked to kill you? Some fellow just flipped open a phone book with his eyes closed and ran his finger down the page? I don’t think anybody’s going to buy that. They’re going to figure out pretty quick that if Walter Freeman sent this man over here to kill you, then odds are you’re the one who set him in front of the sheriff’s office the other night, and what happens then?”
“I don’t have a clue why this Walter Freeman fellow would send somebody over here to kill me. Far as I know, I’ve never met him in my life. I guess it had something to do with my son. Maybe Ricky owed him some money or something and this was some sort of payback. That’s the only thing I can figure. Is that what it was, Denny?”
“That sounds about right.”
“And what if all of that falls apart?”
“Then I’ll swallow my pride and take the consequences. But until that happens, girlie, the story I’m telling you is the story I’m sticking with.”
“I need to go outside.” Leah stood from the table and left the room. After a few minutes, she came back. She’d taken off the top of her uniform and had on a white undershirt that fit her loosely. Her hair was down and Ray could tell she was just shy of cracking apart. “I’ll make a phone call to a detective.”
“Is it someone we can trust?”
“Yeah, you make one wrong call and this is all over,” Denny said. “You might as well be signing my death certificate.”
Leah stood there for a second thinking and then reached into her back pocket like she was going to pull out a billfold. There was a business card in her hand. “There’s an agent came into the office yesterday morning from Atlanta. He said if we had any information on Freeman or what happened to give him a call. But before I do, the two of you need to know that once I make that phone call this can only go the one way, and once it starts there’s no off switch. You ride it all the way to the end, whatever that means.”
“Somebody’s got to keep an eye on my sister,” Denny said. “That’s the only way I’m good with this. Anything happens and they catch wind, they’ll kill her within the hour. And I don’t mean this the wrong way, but I’m not leaving her life in the hands of some white man I ain’t ever met.”
“Then what exactly do you propose, Denny, because you and I both know I can’t call anyone with the tribe?”
Denny sat there for a second or two twisting his right hand around his left wrist where the zip-ties had cut into his skin. His brow lowered as an idea seemed to come to him. “There’s one person we can call.”
“All right,” Leah said. “Then I’ll make the call.”
She headed for the door and Ray followed her outside. He could feel the revolver weighing heavy in his pocket, the situation weighing heavy on her mind. “I want you to know I’m sorry about this. I never meant to put any of it on your back.”
“But that’s where it lay. Ain’t that right, Uncle Raymond?”
“I guess it is.”
“And if you’d just been patient and let us do our job in the first place none of this would’ve happened. Instead, you take things into your own hands and this is where it gets us. There’s the right way and the wrong and you were too stubborn to think that anybody might know better than you.”
“This is me trying to do right.”
“Is that what this is?” Leah smirked. “Because you sure as shit fooled me.”
“If I’d done it my way, I’d have dug two holes.”
“Well, you better get to digging, Uncle Raymond, because pretty soon we’re going to need a grave big enough for every last one of us.”