The Righteous Path

by James D F Hannah

  Carl stared at Matt for what seemed forever. Matt would have sworn he heard a clock ticking away somewhere in the house.

  Carl flipped the gun around, clutched the barrel, and handed it to Matt. Matt took the pistol by the grip. He racked the round out of the chamber and popped out the clip.

  Carl bowed his head like a kid ashamed of his behavior. Matt walked over to him, steadied himself behind Carl’s wheelchair, and pushed him toward the door.

  “You need to lose weight, Carl,” Matt said. “You’re getting fat.”

  “Fuck you, Matt.” There was laughter in the words.

  Chapter 26

  “You see anything?” Matt said.

  “No,” Crash said. “Didn’t see anything three minutes ago when you asked me the same goddamn question.”

  Matt let out a low whistle. They sat in the cab of Crash’s pickup, staring at the driveway to Gary Campbell’s house. Where they had been sitting for hours. Matt parked his car—he had driven home and traded out his cruiser for his Ford Focus—behind the pickup and joined Crash inside the truck two hours earlier. Crash had already been there a few hours. It reflected in her attitude.

  “Grumpy?” Matt said.

  “Tired. And I need to pee.”

  “So go pee.”

  “Where? We’re not out in the middle of the woods, and lest you forget—and I suspect that you do—I can’t just whip it out and let it go the way you can.”

  “I forget sometimes that—”

  “I’m female?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s that happen?”

  “Enough time in uniform, being a cop identifies you more than if you’re a guy or a woman. The army’s the same way. You stop seeing male or female and all you’re left with is the uniform.”

  “Must have made dating difficult.”

  “You learn early on not to shit where you sleep.”

  “Good rule in life.”

  Crash shifted in her seat. She was small, with her deep green eyes and freckles that splattered across her nose. Never any makeup. When she became a deputy, the department had to special order her uniforms since they had nothing close to anything that would have fit her.

  But then he remembered the times he watched her take down men twice her size. Drunks whenever they had to clear out a bar, or angry husbands during domestic calls, or hostile drivers unhappy they had gotten pulled over for speeding, shocked this little thing wasn’t blown away by their charm and rushing to tear up their speeding ticket. The cute little deputy who was a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu could flip an asshole over her shoulder and have zip cuffs on them before they had a second to know what happened.

  Once it was understood Carl wasn’t coming back, it hadn’t been a reluctance by the other deputies knowing that Crash would step into the man’s large shoes. The friendship between Matt and Carl outside the office was known, and they watched Matt struggle in the wake of the shooting. No, the truth was, despite being young and small and seemingly nothing more but a hiring intended to fill a quota, Crash was the best person for the job.

  The thought crossed his mind sometimes. She’s young enough. She could be like his daughter.

  “That’s him right there.”

  Crash’s voice.

  Matt watched as the car passed them and turned up Campbell’s driveway. “Give him a minute, and then we’ll go up.”

  Crash started the truck’s engine. “Fuck that. We’re talking to him now.” She shifted the truck into first and pulled out. “Besides, I still need to pee.”

  The lights were on inside the house as Crash parked her truck behind Campbell’s car.

  They took the steps up onto the front porch. Matt pushed the doorbell. Two seconds later, he pounded on the front door.

  Crash leaned into the door. “I hear him in there.”

  “Not surprising since we saw him walk in.” Matt slammed the side of his fist on the door again. “Campbell! It’s the sheriff’s department! We know you’re in there! Open this door up now! We need to talk!”

  The front door jerked open and Campbell, his face flushed beneath the fading bruises and the bandages, stared at Matt and Crash through the screen door.

  “What the hell is your goddamn problem?” he said. His voice was harsh, his breathing short. “You’ve got no right to—”

  “Where’s Tyson Miller?” Matt said.

  Campbell’s eyebrows shifted backward a little. His face relaxed a fraction, only to change to an expression of panic. A move from offense to defense.

  “What are you talking about?” Campbell said.

  “Tyson Miller,” Crash said. “He worked for one of your stores about fifteen years ago and then he vanished.”

  Campbell’s laugh. Mocking and derisive. “Are you serious? You expect me to remember everyone who ever worked for me? Christ, I ran that business for thirty years. I wasn’t out there hiring in the individual stores. The managers hired stock clerks.”

  “Who said he was a stock clerk?” Matt said.

  “I’m assuming—”

  “Don’t assume. Assuming anything right now isn’t your friend. You mind letting us in so we can talk?”

  “I do mind. I’m here to pick up a few things and get back to the hospital.”

  Crash stepped toward Campbell. In that action, she seemed a giant. Campbell drew back as if Crash had raised a fist to him. What force of will could do for a person was a remarkable thing.

  “Was Miller involved when you and Carlton robbed the Guthrie National Bank?” she said.

  Matt groaned. Obviously they were abandoning tact and the element of surprise.

  Crash had that gift for putting everything right there on the table, laying it all out for the world to see. She was a blunt object, a baseball bat through a windshield, a crowbar to the back of the knees. Effective, yes, but she didn’t leave anyone much play with subtlety.

  Campbell said, “If both of you aren’t off of my front porch in one minute and out of my driveway in two, I’ll be on the phone with the state police and have real cops—”

  “Why did you lie to us about the night of the attack?” Matt said.

  Campbell paused. Sucked in some air. He gestured at Matt with a raised finger ready to speak, but the words caught somewhere in his throat and he stood there, letting them roll around without releasing them.

  Matt said, “The security footage only shows two people entering and exiting your house. They look nothing like what you described to us. There’s a reason you lied to us, and we need you to tell us the truth.”

  Campbell shook his head. “Have you lost your mind, Sheriff? This cancer I’ve heard you’ve got, it’s affected your brain. I was in shock that night. Beaten half to death. I have doctors telling me my wife’s going to die, that I have to decide to pull the plug on her life support. And you have the balls to stand there and accuse me of lying to you?”

  Matt nodded. “I do, because you did lie to us. I think you and Carlton and Tyson Miller robbed the Guthrie National Bank, and that’s why you were both attacked, and the way things are going, it will end with the two of you. There’s either other people involved, or the people who attacked you, they’ll keep on pushing you for what it is they want. Which leaves you with two choices: give up and give in to them, or push back. You might not do the former, but I’ll bet you’re willing to try the latter, and you’ll ignore they’re young and brutal and you are an old man waiting out the days he’s got left. Or you can take what’s behind door number three, which is to tell us what happened and let us figure out a way to stop them before anyone else gets hurt.”

  Campbell stared at them. Matt could see all the years lived on the old man’s face, and others accumulated in the past week. Matt wondered about what it meant to be old. To know your days were numbered, and to have to accept that you had fewer ahead of you than you had behind you. He supposed that, looking at life that way, he knew what it meant to be old.


  Campbell said, “Come on inside.”

  Chapter 27

  Campbell offered to make a pot of coffee as Matt and Crash took seats at the kitchen table. Matt declined; accepting hospitality felt like giving in, however minuscule that might seem, and he wanted to keep as much control of the situation as possible.

  Campbell moved in degrees and inches, bit by bit, and he winced in pain as he made his way to his chair. He sat down in a slow, creeping movement, like a car being lowered on a lift. Once his ass hit the seat, he let out a long breath of air as if he were being depressurized. Whatever fight the old man had possessed—the fight that had kept him in business, had made him lie to Matt and Crash, had made him keep trying to win at a game no one else was playing—all left his body. What remained was a bruised and battered shell of a proud man.

  Matt said, “Did you rob the Guthrie National Bank?”

  Campbell said, “Yes. Myself, Peter Carlton, Frank Dodson, Roger Waits, and Tyson Miller.”

  “Who’s Roger Waits?” Crash said.

  “The secretary for the Benevolent Order of the Everlasting Knights.”

  “The group from the picture in the living room?” Matt said.

  Campbell nodded. “Peter, Roger, Frank, and myself, we all belonged. Not Miller, though. The Order, they’d have never let in someone like him. The rest of us, we were all businessmen. Peter owned the construction company, I owned the stores, Frank had the corner of the floral market for the county, and Roger did the books for most of the businesses in Serenity. Miller wasn’t what the Order was looking for.”

  “Because he had been a criminal.”

  “If you’re looking to be blunt about it, then yes.”

  “You haven’t seen blunt yet. Was it you four who came to him to rob the banks?”

  “We did. The world was changing. We were all struggling. The chains moved in and they stayed open all night, with grocery stores and clothing and they’d change the oil in your car and sell you tires, all under one roof. One of those big box stores was larger than three of my markets combined, and they undercut my prices. It hit us all there toward the end of the Nineties, as the coal mines were either laying people off or closing operations down whole. Machines could pull the coal it used to take ten or twenty men to pull, so they needed fewer people. Everyone had less money, so they shopped somewhere else. My stores had been there since my father opened the first one back in 1952, and we made sure to know everyone who came through the door. None of that mattered when people just had fewer dollars to spend. You can’t begrudge anyone for doing the best thing for their families.”

  “Then try telling us how robbing a bank would fix your problem,” Crash said. Her words cut in a bitter and brash tone.

  Bad cop, Matt thought.

  “You don’t understand, Deputy,” Campbell said. “I wanted to fight it. I planned to renovate the stores, expand them and shine them up, and I thought maybe that would encourage people to come back to what they knew. I added delis and a floral department. I looked around and tried to see what people wanted.”

  “You couldn’t renovate enough to change what had already been changed, though,” Matt said.

  The old man’s body slumped in a sense of remembered defeat. “I found that out late down the road. At first, I dug into my pockets and spent what I had. Then I went to the banks, but they turned me down. Said it wasn’t a good risk. Decades in business meant nothing. The remodels were half-finished, and there was no money to finish things. Roger told me he knew investors out of Clarksburg who might help me. I sat down with them and we talked. Roger left out the part about the investors being with the mob.”

  Crash ran her hands through her hair. “Are you telling us you borrowed money from the mafia? Where has that ever been a good idea?”

  Campbell raised his chin in the air. Tried to look proud and defiant. “Tomorrow, go out and talk to people about those stores. Ask around. I’ll bet at one time or another you had a family member without food in their house—maybe they’d lost their job, or the dad drank his paycheck, or whatever the reason—and they talked to me and left with the groceries to feed their children that night. When they could, they gave it back. Not always, but almost always. If the marching band needed new uniforms, I bought them. Plenty of my profits paid for school trips and events for children who wouldn’t have gone otherwise. Go to a big box store today and see what happens. I won’t pretend what I did was a good idea, but I refused to let all of that fade away into nothing, and I won’t apologize for it.”

  Matt cleared his throat. “Enough. What happened after you spoke to the mob guys?”

  Campbell shrugged. “We talked and I got the money, finished the work on the stores, and then nothing. There was a little spark for a few months. Classic false hope, I guess. I hired new people. Put up new signs. Ads on TV and radio. But the tide, it’d already turned, and the next quarter, things were worse, and I was even deeper in debt. I was neck deep in with men who wanted their money back, and I had nothing to give them. Pete didn’t borrow money, but he struggled also because no money coming into the county meant no one built anything. Hell, his company did the store renovations, and I owed him for that work. Businesses closed and left Roger without books to balance. Frank realized no one buys bouquets of roses when the rest of the world is falling apart. There we all were, sitting with what everyone said was the American dream, and we were all choking to death on it.”

  “Who came up with the idea of the bank robbery?”

  “Roger. He said Guthrie National received a large deposit every Monday morning after the businesses from the mall dumped everything in the night deposit over the weekend. They processed the deposits, and an armored truck came by right at ten in the morning. He said with the four of us, plus another guy, we could swoop in, grab the money before the truck got there, and vanish.”

  Matt caught himself staring at Campbell. He hoped his mouth wasn’t open, with the look people get when someone’s telling them an idea that seems so stupid, you wonder how it had been allowed to even form, how it got there, how the person sitting in front of you had gotten this far in life without somehow jabbing a fork in their eye or falling down an open manhole, if they believed what they had described was a good idea.

  Crash interrupted Matt’s thoughts by saying, “Waits thought this up?”

  “He did,” Campbell said.

  “And you and the others tagged along with it?”

  “No one else had any other ideas. The men in Clarksburg wouldn’t take no for an answer when they came looking for their money.”

  “Was this guy Waits nothing but a bad idea factory?”

  Campbell lowered his head. “We found out later he had a huge coke problem. He owed twenty grand to a dealer out of Pittsburgh, and the dealer wanted his money back also.”

  “Where’s Waits at now?” Matt said.

  “Dead. Massive heart attack a year after everything happened. Idiot wouldn’t stop shoving everything up his nose, and it caught up with him.”

  “Okay, so you morons decided you wanted to rob banks,” Crash said. “How’d Tyson Miller get involved?”

  “Miller worked at the store here in Serenity. Everyone knows the Millers; they’re not worth the paper it’d take to wipe their asses, but Tyson, he said he wanted to end that cycle and wanted to clean up his life. He had a kid coming, he told Rich Watson—he was the store manager back then—that he needed something regular and steady, and with his reputation most places wouldn’t take the chance on him, but Rich said he seemed so sincere.”

  Crash blew air out of her nose. “This guy looking for a second chance, and you saw a stooge.”

  “I saw a guy without much to lose. He worked at the store, but how long do you suppose it would have lasted? Guys like Miller don’t stick to anything respectable for long.”

  “I’d watch throwing aspersions around people when you’re in the middle of admitting to bank robberies.”
/>
  Campbell shrugged. “We hired certain types to stock shelves and bag groceries. High school kids, retirees, the occasional retard, but most of what we got were ones who get hired anywhere else. We knew we needed someone with some criminal experience, so I flipped through the employment files and found Tyson, and I caught him as he came out of the store at the end of a shift, asked him to meet us all at a bar over in Madison, in Guthrie County. Roger, Pete, Tyson, Frank, and me. We told him what the plan was. He hedged off at first. He was nervous about the whole thing. All he’d done prior was penny ante things like shoplifting, breaking into cars—small-time things. Robbing a bank is federal prison time. He wasn’t sure about it.”

  “What about you?” Crash said. “Your family? Your business? None of that crossed your mind?”

  “They were all I thought about, Deputy. Which was why I chose to go through with it. My family would have nothing if I didn’t. We all knew we were in the same boat and that we didn’t have another choice.”

  “Except Miller,” Matt said. “Miller could have walked away and been fine.”

  “Was your job being devil’s advocate?” Crash said. “Tell him what he’d be able to give the kid he had coming? All the stuff a guy like him never imagined his kid having?”

  Campbell looked down at his hands. He kept on talking.

  “We decided on a day to do it. We met multiple times to plan things out. Usually at Miller’s house. It’d be Roger driving, with Pete, Tyson, Frank, and myself in the bank. Tyson stole a car for us to use, and he got us the guns. We figured out the layout of the bank and the quickest ways in and out. Then—” He took a deep breath. “We did it.”

  “And got away with it,” Matt said.

  “We did. None of us understood how. Like how you see it in the movies. No one gave us any problems. Smooth and clean and neat.”

  “You came out on the other end seven hundred grand richer.”

  “Enough to pay back what I owed, with some left to split.”