'I'll be happy to drive,' Neely said after the car eased onto the gravel shoulder and flung rocks for half a mile.
'Can't.It's illegal,' Mal grunted, suddenly wide awake.
Five minutes later he was fading again. Neely decided conversation might keep him awake.
'Did you bust Jesse?'Neely asked as he tightened his seat belt.
'Naw.The state boys got him.' Mal shifted his weight and reached for a cigarette. There was a story to tell so he limbered up. 'They kicked him off the team at Miami, out of school, barely got out with nojail time, and before long he was back here. Poor guy was hooked on the stuff and couldn't shake it. His family tried everything, rehab, lockdowns,counselors , all that crap.Broke 'em. Hell, it killed his father. The Trapp family once owned two thousand acres of the best farmland around here, now it's all gone. His poor momma lives in that big house with the roof crumblin'.'
'Anyway,' Paul said helpfully from the rear.
'Anyway, he started sellin' the stuff, and of course Jesse could not be content as a small-timer. He had some contacts in Dade County, one thing led to another and before long he had a nice business. Hadhis own organization, with lots of ambition.'
'Didn't someone get killed?' Paul asked.
'I was gettin' to that,' Mal growled at his rearview mirror.
'Just trying to help.'
'I always wanted a banker in my backseat.A real white-collar type.'
'And I always wanted to foreclose on the Sheriff.'
'Truce,' Neely said. 'You were getting to the good part.'
Mal reshifted, his large stomach rubbing the wheel. Onemore harsh glance into his mirror, then, 'The state narcs slowly crept in, as they always do. They nabbed a flunkie, threatened him with thirty years of prison and sodomy,convinced him to flip. He set up a drop with narcs hidin' in the trees and under the rocks. The deal went bad, guns were grabbed,shots went off. A narc took a bullet in the ear and died on the spot. The flunkie got hit, but survived. Jesse was nowhere around, but it was his people. He became a priority, and within a year he was standin' before His Honor receivin' his twenty-eight years, no parole.'
'Twenty-eight years,' Neely repeated.
'Yep.I was in the courtroom, and I actually felt sorry for the scumbag. I mean, here's a guy who had the tools to play in the NFL. Size, speed, mean as hell, plus Rake had drilled him from the time he was fourteen. Rake always said that if Jesse had gone to A&M, he wouldn't have turned bad. Rake was in the courtroom too.'
'How long has he served?'Neely asked.
'Nine, tenyears maybe. I ain't countin'.Y'all hungry?'
'We just ate,' Neely said.
'Surely you can't be hungry again,' Paul said.
'No, but there's this little joint right up here where Miss Armstrong makes pecan fudge.I hate to pass it.'
'Let's keep going,' Neely said. 'Just say no.'
'Take it one day at a time, Mal,' Paul offered from the rear.
* * *
The Buford Detention Facility was in flat treeless farmland at the end of a lonely paved road lined with miles of chain-link fencing. Neely was depressed before any building came into sight.
Mal's phone calls had arranged things properly and they were cleared through the front gates and drove deeper into the prison. They changed vehicles at a checkpoint, swapping the roomy patrol car for the narrow
