“ But one of them didn’t. She’s a perfectly normal little girl and it’s all ’cause a you, so stop beating yourself over the head about the dead one. It wasn’t your fault. An’ don’t beat yourself up over this either. You did what you had to do. You did good. Now let’s just go in there an’ see what kind of hornet’s nest we stirred up.”
The one grabbing for the ceiling couldn’t be more than seventeen or eighteen, and it struck Earl that the man Jackson had hit the other day wasn’t much older.
“ Johnny Lee Tyler,” Earl said.
“ Yes, sir,” the kid answered.
“ What are ya’ll up to here?”
“ Just loading up some things for his dad,” the boy nodded toward the body.
“ Who is he?” Earl asked.
“ Darren Johnson, new kid. He lives with his dad, they only been in town a month.” The boy’s hands, still above his head, were shaking like palm trees in a hurricane.
“ And you hooked right up with ’em?”
“ Guess so.”
“ What ‘cha got in all the boxes?”
“ CDs. The new Rolling Stones mostly.”
“ Counterfeit?” Earl asked.
“’ Spect so,” the boy answered.
“ And over there?” Earl pointed to the back wall.
“ Porno videos, the kind you can’t get at the store. You know, the kind with kids in ’em.”
“ Shit, Johnny Lee, I know your daddy, we go hunting. He didn’t raise you like this.”
The boy dropped his hands, then he dropped his eyes to the cement floor. The room was quiet for a few seconds that seem like forever. Johnny Lee appeared to be studying a brown beetle as it scurried toward the cracks made between several stacks of the cardboard boxes.
“ All right, Johnny Lee, what did ya’ll pick up from that plane?”
“ Two kilos of coke and a briefcase.”
“ Lordy, Johnny Lee, sex, drugs an’ rock ‘n’ roll. You boys was into it all.”
“ Not me, honest. It’s Darren’s dad. I just sorta fell into it.”
“ Was it the drugs?” Earl said.
The boy nodded.
“ Where’s the briefcase and what’s in it?”
“ It’s in the car, in the back. I don’t know what’s in it. That’s the honest truth.”
“ You wanna get it.”
“ Sure, Sheriff,” the kid said, and he hustled to the car.
“ You know, Jackson,” Earl said. “The hardest thing for a police officer to do is tell a man that his wife just died in an accident or that you’ve locked up his boy for killing a man. You steel yourself against it, but when you go up those steps and ring that bell, you’re quaking inside, like a pup that just shit on the rug and knows he’s in for it.”
“ I can imagine,” Jackson said.
“ I’m sure not looking forward to seeing Billy Ray Tyler this evening,” Earl said.
“ And Darren’s father,” Jackson said. Earl saw him looking at the boy’s eyes, wide open in death. Looking at the trickle of blood dripping from a lip that must have been cut in the fall. Looking at the scar under the chin. Looking at the close cropped hair, the white tee shirt, the faded Levi’s, the hundred dollar running shoes. Looking at a life that wouldn’t be lived.
“ Far as I’m concerned, that boy’s daddy killed him, not you. I’m ashamed to say it, but it will give me a kind of pleasure telling the man that his boy’s dead and that it’s his fault. The man sold child porn and drugs. You wanna be there when I take him down. ’Cause that’s one arrest that’s not gonna go by the book.”
Jackson nodded. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
Earl looked around the warehouse. Not large, thirty by sixty maybe, but it was stuffed full of cartons, mostly compact discs, but quite a few of the video tapes. Darren’s dad was in a lot of trouble. Earl didn’t think he’d be going to his boy’s funeral. He didn’t think the man would be too mobile for a while. Not after he got through with him.
He turned his eyes away from the cardboard boxes and the dead body and watched as Johnny Lee Tyler opened the back door to the Chevy and fished out the briefcase. He brought it inside, laying it on top of a stack of boxes. He smiled up at Earl, like a hound dog eager to please.
“ Open it,” Earl said, and the kid fumbled with the latches.
“ Can’t, it’s locked,” he said.
“ But you could get it open fast enough if you really wanted to, couldn’t you, lad?”
“ Yes, sir.”
“ Then do it.”
The boy reached behind his neck, under the back of his shirt, and pulled out a large hunting knife.
“ Where’d you learn how to hide a knife like that?” Jackson asked.
“ Darren’s dad,” the kid said, then he pried the tip of the knife under the latches and popped them off the briefcase and opened it.
“ Look at all that money,” the sheriff said, whistling under his breath.
“ Lots of money,” Jackson said.
“ Way I see it, we got no choice,” Earl said.
“ No choice,” Jackson said.
And Earl shot Johnny Lee through the heart with his friend’s gun. The cannon sound of the forty-five roared through the small warehouse like the sound of an exploding jet engine. One second Johnny Lee was filling Earl with those trusting eyes and the next he was flying across the room. But Earl never got to see where he landed because something slammed into the back of his head and the lights went out.
Chapter Three
Maria lost her balance, stumbled and reached out for the seatback behind the prime minister, but she grabbed a fistful of his shirt instead. He pulled her into him, burying her face against his chest, clawing at her, fighting to hold her. She smelled the sweat from under his arms, felt his muscles strain as he fought to keep her from tumbling down the aisle.
She heard someone scream as she wrapped her arms around his chest, straining and struggling to hold on. His knee came up into her stomach, knocking her breath away. She gasped for air, but she was wedged in tightly against the prime minister, her mouth pulled into his clothes. She moaned and felt him relax his hold on her. Then she saw the orange oxygen mask as he wormed it between her face and his chest. She inhaled, quick short breaths, and in seconds she had her wind back.
The noise was deafening, louder than the cranked up volume of any of the Texas honky tonks that Earl liked to take her to, louder than the giant speakers at the Weezer and the Wallflowers concerts she went to with her sister last year, louder than the dragsters at the Southern Texas Speedway, louder than God.
She battled with the prime minister as he tried to turn her around. In her normal, rational mind, she knew what he was doing, but she couldn’t help herself, she fought against him, afraid he was going to take the oxygen away. She pushed against his chest, fighting to get up and out of his lap. Then the plane lurched again, as if a giant boy had a giant fist wrapped around his giant airplane toy, and he was shaking it.
She stopped resisting and squirmed around so that she was sitting in his lap, but she lost the mask as she came around. She offered no resistance as he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in close, grabbing his hands onto his elbows in an effort to form a locking ring around her waist. She felt herself getting light, then heavy, then light again as the plane plunged toward the ground, lurched itself level, then plunged downward again. She grabbed onto the seatback in front of her for added support. Shivers zapped her body, but she fought to control her shaking. Something was smacking her in the head and she reached up and grabbed it. It was the oxygen mask.
