CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I was running the roads until almost midnight, stopping at taverns and liquor stores all over the county. I hit known weed peddlers and compulsive snitches, petty thieves and ex-cons. I drew a blank everywhere I went. I got into bed at one and rolled out at sunup the next morning and started over again, this time inside the city limits. I ground away at it all morning with no better results than the night before. After a quick sandwich for lunch, I decided to drop in on Emmet Zorn at the Pak-a-Sak. When I pulled into the parking lot he was cutting up cardboard boxes and dropping them in the Dumpster beside the building.

When he looked up and saw me, he shook his head in annoyance. “What now?” he asked.

As I drew closer to the man I could see that his face was taut and drawn. “Don’t be that way,” I said cheerfully. “I might have dropped by to tell you that you’re completely off the hook on the Twiller killing.”

“Am I?”

“No.”

“Sheriff, I did not kill that woman!”

“No, but you could have hired it.”

“But what possible reason could I have had?”

“That’s an interesting question, isn’t it?”

He leaned back against the Dumpster and pulled a thin cigarillo from his shirt pocket and lighted it with a fancy gold lighter. When he did, his hand shook just a little and there were worry wrinkles around his eyes.

“You seem a mite nervous,” I said.

“Have you ever had the cops on your ass for something you didn’t do?”

“Don’t believe that I have. By the way, I found out that your buddy Lester Sipes was your silent partner in your business here, but he got out a few months ago. Mind telling me why?”

“He only came on board when I started up to help me get the store rolling. He always intended for me to buy his half.”

I gave him a sympathetic nod. “That was nice of him. I hope you’ve repaid his kindness.”

His eyes narrowed a little at this. “Sheriff, like I asked you the other day, what do you want from me?”

“A confession.”

“But I haven’t done anything.”

“Oh, we’ve all done something.”

“I need to get back inside.”

“You do that,” I said and stood watching as he walked across the parking lot, all the while puffing furiously on his cigarillo. My stop had accomplished one thing. It had told me that stress was eating the man up. I wondered how much longer he could hold it together before he cracked.

*   *   *

I went back to the office with the notion of attending to some pressing paperwork and getting it out of the way as quickly as I could. As soon as I walked in Maylene handed me a dirty scrap of paper with some illegible scribbles on it.

“What in thunder is this?” I asked.

“That’s a hand-delivered note from Lew Feemster. Some kid brought it in and said Lew wants you to meet him at Jeeter’s Tavern at nine this evening.”

Feemster was one of my oldest informants, an ex-con who’d gone down to Huntsville at the tender age of nineteen behind an armed robbery and shooting that he still claimed he hadn’t committed. My dad, who was certainly no fool, maintained that they hung that beef on Lew to get a rich boy from Lufkin off the hook. Whether that’s true or not, it’s a matter of record that he entered the penitentiary as a wet-behind-the-ears kid back in the days when the Texas prison system meant business. When he came out almost two decades later, he was bitter, cynical, and as mean as a rattlesnake. In his view, society had unjustly branded him as a criminal, and a criminal he would be content to remain, though he managed to avoid further incarceration. For the most part he gambled and bootlegged and dealt in corn whisky back when moonshining was a viable business. He was the best dice switcher I ever saw, and what he couldn’t do with a deck of cards could not be done.

In the early years of our relationship, I paid him for information by going easy on his bootlegging activities and overlooking the nighttime crap games he ran in various deserted sharecropper shacks around the county. I did this because the people I nailed through his information were always a far greater threat to society than the drinkers and gamblers. But in the last decade he’d begun to demand cash, and as he grew older he became ever more cantankerous and difficult to deal with.

“Was he expecting an answer?” I asked Maylene.

“No, he just said for you to be there and he’d make you a happy man.”

*   *   *

A little after five I was almost out the door on my way home when a phone call from Hotchkiss brought me back to my desk. “What’s up?” I asked.

“I just thought you might like a little update on Sipes.”

“You thought right. Fire away.”

“As you’ve probably guessed, we’re monitoring his bank transactions pretty closely.”

“Can you do that without him knowing?”

“Sure. It’s so easy now that all this business is computerized. My records, your records, everybody’s records … We just slip in on little cat’s feet and—”

“Spare me, please.”

He laughed, and his laughter was good-natured but a little mocking. “I’m just trying to get even with you for not telling us about that hiding place in Emmet Zorn’s floor.”

“I don’t know about any hiding place,” I said, lying smoothly. “And if there is one, how did you find it?”

He giggled. “Creepy-crawl, creepy-crawl…”

“Hotch, have you been drinking?”

“I may have had a couple.”

“Old Hoover would have your hide for a rug, boy.”

“He probably would, but he’s dead. Anyhow, I called to fill you in on Sipes. As we suspected, he’s been in something of a cash crunch lately, but in the last couple of days he’s hustled around and managed to come up with six hundred thousand dollars, which he deposited in one account. Then it went offshore by wire transfer.”

“Some of that gambling money he’s been hustling.”

“Part of it must have been.”

“That means he must have paid off the boys down in South America,” I said. “You know, if you think about it, we made a damn lucky guess on this one. Based on Arno’s presence here in Sequoya, we assumed that the South Americans were fronting the coke. We were wrong about why he was here, but we were right about the conclusion it led us to.”

“I was thinking about the same thing myself last night.”

“I guess this means Sipes is off the hook with his suppliers, then?”

“Maybe and maybe not. The people he’s dealing with are real animals, and they don’t like screwups. No matter how it shakes down, he’s going to be on thin ice with them.”

“And this is bad?” I asked.

“It could be. He’s not the only rich, high-profile bastard involved in the drug trade.”

“So?”

“We want to send the message that even the mighty can fall. That means we need Lester Sipes on his way to federal prison with plenty of publicity. Not beheaded and dumped in a swamp somewhere.”

“Beheaded?”

“That’s how that bunch he’s dealing with gets rid of people. It’s their signature method of execution.”

“Sounds like he’s running with his own kind. I keep thinking about the guy Sipes and his goons fed to the crabs.”

“Birds of a feather,” he said. “Beheading is supposed to have more emotional impact than shooting.”

“Well, it damn sure makes me perk up and take notice.”

“Me too,” he said, his voice suddenly deadly serious. “Especially since they don’t draw the line at federal agents. Remember when it leaked out to the press last year about those two DEA guys that disappeared down in Colombia? We know about it through informants, but we’ve never found the bodies so the government hasn’t released any official information yet.”

“But they were…”

“Yep, with machetes.”