Justice Burning (Darren Street Book 2)

by Scott Pratt

  CHAPTER 13

  I left Grace’s apartment at six in the morning, drove to Walmart, and purchased some inexpensive fishing gear and some camping gear. It was all for show. All for the cameras. It was an alibi, albeit a flimsy one, because if everything went right, not a single living soul on this fishing-camping trip would see or talk to me. The drive through the rain to Cowen was miserable. The roads were winding, narrow, and full of potholes. I took the long way, getting off the interstate at Kingsport, Tennessee, and heading up back roads through Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia, because I didn’t want to go through any tollbooths, and the shorter routes involved tollbooths. Tollbooths had cameras.

  At mile marker 41 on Interstate 81, not far from Greeneville, Tennessee, I pulled into a rest stop. I went into the bathroom and closed myself into a stall, carrying a shaving kit that contained the beard, a small mirror, some adhesive, and the glasses I’d bought. I brushed the adhesive on my face, rubbed it around, let it dry, and then carefully placed the beard around my mouth and up to my sideburns. The color matched my hair almost perfectly, and it actually looked extremely realistic. I put the glasses on and walked out of the stall. I looked in the mirror. All I needed was a cap—which I had in the front seat of the car—and nobody would recognize me.

  The drive took almost seven hours, which meant I arrived in the hell-on-earth town known as Cowen, West Virginia, between one thirty and two in the afternoon. The place was full of run-down houses and trailers. There was an auto-parts store, a funeral home, a couple of small convenience stores, several churches, and a smattering of bars and fraternal organizations like the Moose Club and a VFW. It reeked of depression and poverty, and the low, gray skies and drizzling rain only intensified the impression. I drove around, familiarized myself with Sammy’s tavern, and drove by the address Pappy had given me. The green Ford truck he said belonged to Donnie Frazier’s girlfriend was parked in the driveway of the run-down gray trailer. There were trash bags strewn about the yard, along with an old washer and dryer and a rusted-out car sitting on concrete blocks. The trailer sat on a gentle grade. There were trailers within fifty feet on both sides, probably members of Frazier’s girlfriend’s family. I saw no fewer than four Doberman Pinschers running free among the three trailers. If I was going to kill Frazier and Beane—and I had every intention of doing so—it would have to be in the parking lot of the bar.

  After hanging around Cowen for an hour or so, I drove another twenty minutes to Webster Springs and checked into a small hotel there, wearing the ball cap, the beard, and the glasses. Again, I used the fake ID and paid cash for one night. If I wasn’t able to kill Frazier and Beane on Friday night, I’d check in to a different hotel later and kill them on Saturday. The hotel clerk, an elderly woman who I knew would more than likely be shown my photograph—sans the disguise—by the police within a week or so, barely paid attention.

  I went to my room, unpacked my things, and began obsessively cleaning the Beretta. Every time I’d used it at the range, I’d cleaned it before I left. I’d become extremely proficient with the Beretta. At ten to fifteen yards, which is where I guessed my targets would be when I cut loose on them, I could pretty much put a bullet wherever I wanted. I’d practiced moving, and I’d practiced in the rain and wind. I’d practiced in low light but not at night. I’d initially used only the traditional factory sights, but I’d later added Crimson Trace laser sights to the pistol because I’d read they would improve accuracy in darkness and awkward shooting positions. And I wanted to be sure I killed both of those sonsofbitches, no matter what the conditions were.

  Once I was finished cleaning the pistol, I drove a couple of miles down the road and found a fast food restaurant, where I ordered at the drive-through and took the food back to my room. I flipped on the television and ate the greasy burger and fries, and then, out of the blue, I fell sound asleep. I awoke four hours later without even having dreamed. It was the first time in weeks I’d slept for that long without having a nightmare, and I could only believe that it was because I’d found the peace of mind Grace had mentioned the night before. I’d actually traveled several hundred miles to commit two murders, and knowing I was really going to do it made me feel better.

  I stayed in my room all night and until 11:00 a.m., which was checkout time, the next morning. I was extremely careful about what I touched, and I carefully wiped down everything to clear it of fingerprints, just in case. I thought about DNA—hair, sweat, fingernails, flakes of skin—but I decided I’d just have to live with the risk. Even if, by some miracle, the cops managed to track me to that room and got some DNA that matched mine, it still didn’t prove I’d killed anyone. It proved only that I was within twenty miles of the crime scene the night before the murders and earlier that day.

  I’d slept very little and spent most of the time visualizing how I would handle myself when Frazier and Beane came out of the bar. Would I say anything to them? No need, I decided, because within seconds, they would be dead. I thought about justice quite a bit and whether what I was doing was right or wrong, but ultimately I convinced myself that justice was nothing more than a state-sponsored approach to revenge that used laws drafted by politicians to justify their actions. I was simply acting alone, doing what needed to be done without state sponsorship. They would call me a vigilante. I would think of myself as an avenging angel.

  I checked to make sure the beard still looked natural. It was loose in a few spots, so I decided to take it off, shave, and reattach it. When I was finished, it looked perfect. I left the hotel and drove through Cowen two more times that day. It was so small I didn’t want to seem conspicuous. I figured out where I was going to park the Monte Carlo—on the street in front of a NAPA auto-parts store a quarter mile from Sammy’s bar—and then I decided to go into Sammy’s and grab some takeout, just so I could get a look inside the place.

  I parked the car a couple of blocks away and walked to the bar. I checked both the outside and inside for security cameras and was relieved to discover there were none. The place was tiny. There were six stools at the bar. Two of the bar stools were occupied by men. There were three booths against the front wall to the right when you entered through the side of the building—all empty—and there was a pool table, a jukebox, an old-style pinball machine, and a dance floor that would accommodate two couples, as long as nobody was obese.

  I sat down on one of the bar stools and ordered a cheeseburger to go from Sammy himself. He was wearing a name tag and was the only person working. I wondered why he wore the name tag. A bar like that in such a small town? Everybody had to know who he was. I guess it just made him feel important to wear some kind of badge. Sammy took my order and went back into a tiny kitchen area where there was a flattop grill. He cooked the burger himself and brought it back out.

  I paid him in cash and gave him a two-dollar tip, and then I went outside and wandered around the parking lot for a little while. It was gravel, on the right side of the building as you faced it from the road, about fifty feet by seventy feet, and was bordered by the road in the front, an alley to the right, and a creek in the back. There was a drop-off to the creek, and I decided that’s where I would wait. I walked down by the creek, sat down, and ate the cheeseburger. It was surprisingly good.

  The research I’d done told me that I wasn’t up against a quick-reaction force as far as police went. Cowen didn’t even have a public police department, although they did have a police “agency” that consisted of five people employed by a private company, two of whom patrolled the town on occasion. There was no jail in Webster County, which was where Cowen was located, and that meant the sheriff’s department was also very small. The investigation of the two murders I was about to commit would most likely fall to the West Virginia State Police. They would, no doubt, eventually be contacted by the two Knoxville detectives who had originally told me about Frazier and Beane, and then the heat would come. I had a plan for what I would do when that happened. I was, after all, a cr
iminal defense lawyer. I knew how to handle cops.

  After I looked over the parking lot and decided exactly how I would get back to my car after I shot Frazier and Beane, I drove back to Webster Springs and decided to use some of the fishing equipment I’d bought in Knoxville. I passed the afternoon and much of the evening fishing off the bank of the Elk River on the outskirts of the small town. The rain had passed, and while it was chilly, the leaves in the mountains were bright with color, and the sun was shining. It was a good day to exact some revenge.

  My mother crossed my mind several times while I was fishing the river. I thought about her attempting to protect me from my drunken and abusive father when I was young, how she would deflect beatings for me onto herself. I thought about how he caused her to lose most of her faith in God, and I thought about the day when I had grown enough to beat him to a bloody pulp and throw him out of the house. My mother was sad that day, but she was proud of me. I thought about how she was with my son, Sean, so patient and kind and understanding. I thought about how she’d sacrificed for me and worked her fingers to the bone so I could go to college and get a law degree. I remembered the look of pride and satisfaction on her face when they hooded me at the law school graduation ceremony. I thought about how she’d stuck by me when I was falsely accused of murdering Jalen Jordan and was held without bail for a year awaiting trial. She stuck by me when they convicted me and carted me off to federal prison. She’d fought for visitation rights with my son, Sean, and was eventually able to see him, which meant I was eventually able to speak with him on the telephone from prison. She helped me keep from losing hope, and when I was released, she helped me get back on my feet.

  Her reward?

  She was blown to bits while she slept, by two murderous cowards. I kept trying to picture her face, but as time passed, her features had faded. I didn’t have a single photograph of her. Everything in the house had been obliterated or burned. The memories were still there, but they were like flames flickering with the passage of time, getting smaller and cooler with each passing day. I wondered several times where she was. One minute, she was lying in her bed asleep, and the next, she was gone. But where? Was her soul floating around somewhere? If so, I hadn’t felt it. Was she in another dimension of time and space? Was she in some paradise, playing a harp and floating on a cloud? That seemed as ridiculous as imagining her burning in an eternal fire beneath the surface of the earth. But where was she? She was gone so quickly. It was so surreal and made so little sense. The fact that she’d been blown up in her sleep was so random that I wondered whether anything had any real purpose, whether everything was random, and whether any form of life making it to the natural end of the biological clock was nothing more than pure luck. As darkness fell and I packed up the small tackle box and climbed the bank to get back into my car, I was certain of only one thing.

  Donnie Frazier’s and Tommy Beane’s biological clocks were about to stop ticking.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 14

  Ninety minutes after the shootings

  The rest area was deserted, and I’d done my research and knew there weren’t any cameras, but I needed to get out of there quickly. I looked at the blood on my face for a few more seconds, and then I pulled the gloves and the glasses and stocking cap off, removed the beard, and stuck everything into the backpack. I turned on the water and let it run to warm up.

  I did it. I killed those bastards.

  I stared at myself in the mirror, wondering if I was looking at the same person I’d looked at in the mirror that morning. Of course I wasn’t. I couldn’t be looking at the same person, because the person I was looking at had recently committed two extremely brutal murders. I was now outside of the law. The question was whether I could remain outside of the penitentiary. I thought about the looks on Donnie Frazier’s and Tommy Beane’s faces, how they’d changed from redneck-aggressive to genuine surprise to primal fear to lifeless. Screw those guys, I thought. I didn’t regret a thing.

  I wet my hands and began rubbing my face. I rubbed until all the dried blood I could see was gone. I pulled paper towels from the dispenser, dried my face, and stuck the towels in the backpack. As I picked up the backpack and started out of the restroom, all fifteen shots I’d fired played back in my head in slow motion. Explosions roared, bodies jerked, and pink mist floated.

  By the time I got back to the car and opened the door, I was smiling.

  Three hours after the shootings

  Special Agent Will Grimes stifled a yawn as he stood next to Sammy Raft outside Sammy’s Bar and Grill and watched as a wood-paneled station wagon sped past him into the parking lot and skidded to a stop in the gravel. Dr. Larry Rogers, otherwise known as “the Crusty Coroner,” had arrived.

  Grimes had gotten the call pretty quickly. It had been relayed from the bar owner to the county sheriff to the state police detachment in Webster Springs to the state police headquarters in Elkins, West Virginia, which was where Grimes was stationed. Cowen was on the fringe of the large area his troop covered, so Grimes had to drive almost two hours to get to Sammy’s bar in the tiny town. Two troopers from Webster Springs had already secured the crime scene. The local sheriff hadn’t even bothered to show up.

  Grimes was forty, an eighteen-year veteran of the West Virginia State Police. He’d started as a trooper and worked his way up through the patrol ranks, eventually switching over to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation ten years earlier. He was now a sergeant and an experienced criminal investigator. What he’d seen inside Sammy’s bar was either an anger killing, a revenge killing, or someone was making an example of those boys. They’d been shot all to hell. Sammy had told him who they were and given him some background information on them. Grimes wasn’t really surprised they’d wound up dead. It was the manner in which they’d been killed that bothered him. They’d been executed, pure and simple. Whoever killed them had walked straight up to the booth they were sitting in and just started blasting away. Both of the victims had pistols in their belts, but neither had had a chance to even get a hand on one. It was a killing as cold-blooded as any Grimes had ever witnessed.

  Another thing that was bothering him was the story the bar owner, Sammy Raft, was offering. Sammy told Grimes he’d gone into the bathroom around eight o’clock to relieve himself. Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane, the two victims, had been the only two people in the bar at the time. Sammy said while he was standing at the urinal, all hell broke loose. He said the gunshots were deafening and just kept coming and coming and coming. He couldn’t say for sure, but he guessed ten, maybe as many as eighteen or twenty, shots had been fired.

  The thing that bothered Grimes was that there weren’t any windows in the bar. It was just a concrete block building. You came through the door at the front-left side of the building and couldn’t see who was there until you got all the way inside. That meant the killer would have had no way of knowing for sure that Sammy wouldn’t be standing behind the bar. Was this guy that ballsy, that lucky, or was Sammy lying about the way it had really happened? And if he was lying, why?

  A sixtysomething man got out of the 1968 Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon. Grimes recognized him immediately but forced himself not to smile. He’d worked with Rogers many times and knew that he’d driven his “baby girl,” which Rogers affectionately called the antique wagon, over from Charleston. Rogers was a gruff, eccentric man, but he was good at what he did. He was small, maybe five feet five inches tall and 130 pounds. He had pale-blue eyes that were always encircled by oval, wire-framed glasses, and the top of his head was bald. The sides and back were covered by long, unruly gray hair, and his chin sported a bushy Vandyke. He covered several counties in West Virginia, just as Grimes did.

  “Why ain’t your people here yet?” Rogers said to Grimes as he approached. He didn’t say hello, didn’t offer a hand.

  “They’re on the way,” Grimes said. “Had to gather everybody up, load the gear, and then drive from Elkins. Takes a little while.�
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  “Think this state will ever make it into the twentieth century?” Rogers said.

  “I believe this is the twenty-first century, Larry.”

  “Exactly.”

  Rogers brushed past Grimes and Sammy Raft and entered the bar. He came out a few minutes later and stood with his hands on his hips a few feet from Grimes. Then he loaded his left jaw with a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco.

  “Well,” Rogers said as he spit a long stream of tobacco juice into the gravel, “they’re dead.”

  “Yes,” Grimes said. “Very astute of you, Larry.”

  “My guess is that the cause of death is going to be various trauma caused by a shitload of gunshot wounds.”

  “Appreciate that.”

  Rogers spit into the gravel again. “Have your boys haul ’em to our lab in Charleston. Got everything I need there for the autopsies. Preliminary report in four, five days. Final in about a month.”

  “Okay,” Grimes said. “We’ll bring them up.”

  “For what it’s worth, looks to me like a revenge killing. These boys did something to somebody. They got paid back in spades.”

  Grimes nodded. “I always respect your opinion.”

  “Brownnoser,” he heard Rogers mutter under his breath as he began to amble back toward his wagon. “Only opinion you respect is yours.”

  “Quite a guy,” Grimes told Sammy as they watched the station wagon tear out of the lot, throwing gravel in its wake.

  “Looks a little crazy to me,” Sammy offered.

  “We’re all a little crazy, I suspect,” Grimes said. “Listen, Sammy, I have some more work to do, and the forensics team will be inside the bar for most of the night. So you can go on home now. But I’m going to come pick you up at ten in the morning.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want a written statement from you. We’re going to take a ride up to my headquarters in Elkins.”