Justice Burning (Darren Street Book 2)

by Scott Pratt

  “I can have a car waiting for you at the Flying J in an hour,” Big Pappy said. “Same ID as last time?”

  “You can get that done, too? That fast?”

  “If you have money and contacts, you can get anything done. I have both.”

  “When are you planning to go to Charleston?” I said.

  “I’ll be there by ten.”

  “Okay, make arrangements for the car. I’ll get on it now.”

  I disconnected the call and immediately sent Katherine a text message: I need a couple of days to sort this out. It’s going too fast. Besides that, I’m representing you in a criminal case and becoming romantically involved with a client is a conflict of interest and a stupid thing to do. Last night was probably the best night of my life, but I need a little time. I hope you’ll understand.

  I sent the text. A couple of minutes later, my phone started ringing. It was Katherine. I ignored it. As soon as it quit ringing, I got a text from her that said, I understand. I’ll be waiting when you’re ready. I looked at the text and smiled. She was too good to be true.

  I dressed, retrieved my pistol and silencer from where I’d hidden them inside an air vent in the bathroom, put them in backpack, and called a cab on my burner phone. I walked two blocks to where I told the driver to pick me up, and told him to take me to the Flying J.

  CHAPTER 50

  Mike “Big Pappy” Donovan tossed his prepaid cell onto the seat beside him and turned the eighteen-wheeler he was driving into the lot of a large warehouse he rented on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio. He hit the button of a remote control he’d pulled out of the console and watched the door slowly raise. Once it was up, he pulled the truck and fifty-foot trailer inside, shut down the engine, hit the remote to close the door, and climbed out of the cab. He walked over and turned on the warehouse lights, then headed toward the small office. Once there, he turned on the coffee maker and sat down behind a metal desk. He needed to think for a minute.

  Darren Street thought he knew some things about Big Pappy Donovan, but pretty much everything Big Pappy had told Street about himself was a lie. Big Pappy had wanted to gain Street’s favor while they were in prison because he wanted Street to work on his appeal and get him out. It had worked, too. Street had done some brilliant work, and the result was that Big Pappy had walked out of federal prison after serving twelve years instead of the thirty-five the government had intended him to serve. But in the meantime, Pappy had told Street some things about himself that weren’t true.

  He’d told Street he grew up in Hawkinsville, Georgia, and that he’d played football there and went on to play at Mercer University. He’d told Street he’d gone back to his high school after earning a degree and had been teaching biology and helping coach football when he was accused by a crooked cop of dealing crack cocaine. He told Street he had snaked the cop’s girlfriend in a bar one night, and that was the reason the cop hated him.

  That was the only thing he’d told Street that was true. He had met the woman, Paisley Grant, in a bar in Hawkinsville, Georgia, one night when he was passing through. He’d wound up having sex with her in his truck in the parking lot. At the time—and Pappy didn’t know this—she was dating a cop named Ronnie Ray. Pappy continued to stop by Hawkinsville now and then and continued to have sex with Miss Grant every time he came to town. Ray, who had been assigned to a federal task force working the drug trade in southern Georgia, set up an elaborate sting—most of which was fabricated—and got Pappy indicted and convicted of selling crack. That’s how Pappy wound up meeting Street at the federal maximum security penitentiary in Rosewood, California.

  What Pappy hadn’t told Street was that he was actually born in Las Vegas, Nevada, to a jazz drummer named Art Donovan and a stripper and hooker named Felicity Bell. Pappy’s father, upon learning of Felicity’s pregnancy, had an attack of conscience and offered to marry the girl. She accepted. But Art Donovan’s passion for jazz was equaled only by his passion for the ladies, and he was soon out the door and on the road. Little Michael was left with his mother. She turned back to the world of stripping, hooking, drinking, and taking drugs. One of Pappy’s earliest and most vivid memories of his childhood was waking up in his mother’s bed one night to find her having sex with a man he’d never seen. His mother was moaning, and he thought the man was hurting her. He climbed off the bed and went to the kitchen to get a knife. The amorous couple didn’t even notice until little Michael plunged the butcher knife into one of the man’s triceps. It was the first of many acts of violence that Michael Donovan would commit.

  By the time Michael was four, Felicity’s neighbors had made enough complaints to the Nevada child protection services that Michael was finally removed from his mother’s home. His father obtained a divorce and stayed on the road, and the authorities couldn’t even find him. They placed Michael in a temporary foster home in Las Vegas and started searching for a more permanent solution. They found it in Georgia. Art Donovan’s brother, a trucker named Lucas Donovan, agreed, along with his wife, Desiree, to take in their nephew. Felicity willingly signed away her parental rights to the boy, and he was accompanied by a Nevada child services worker to his new home in Dalton, Georgia.

  Thus began a litany of problems for Lucas and Desiree Donovan, because they had agreed to take in a child who had been ignored, neglected, unloved, and totally undisciplined. They did their best to try to change Michael and make him feel wanted and loved, but nothing worked. He was destructive. He set fires. He abused animals. He refused to take instruction. He had zero interest in school outside of the things he could do to terrorize other children and the teachers. He was far bigger than the other children his age, and he was a remorseless bully. He was given detentions, suspended from schools, expelled from schools.

  His first serious run-in with the law came at the age of thirteen. Michael—who would not earn the nickname “Big Pappy” until he entered federal prison—and two of his delinquent buddies had laid out of school and had been smoking weed. They needed money for more weed around three in the afternoon, and Michael said, “I know what to do.” He walked to his house—his aunt and uncle were both at work—and he retrieved a pellet gun his uncle used to shoot at rats that sometimes came around an outbuilding in back of their house. The pellet gun looked just like a semiautomatic pistol. After Michael retrieved the pellet gun, he went to a telephone booth and called a cab company. He asked the dispatcher to send a cab to pick up him and his two friends. When the driver got there, Michael got into the front seat next to the cabbie while his buddies got into the back. Michael asked the cabbie to take them to Brook Run Park. When the cabbie pulled into the lot to drop the boys off and asked for the fare, Michael pulled the pellet pistol from beneath his shirt and put it to the cabbie’s temple.

  “Gonna need all your cash, man,” Michael said.

  The cabbie was so terrified that he opened the driver’s side door and tried to get out, but he tripped and got hung up on his seat belt. The cab was still in drive and began to roll forward, dragging the driver along. The driver was pulled from the vehicle onto the ground, and the rear tires ran over his legs, breaking both of them between the knees and the ankles. Michael and the boys ran, but within two days the Dunwoody police had found them, using security footage from cameras in the park and near the phone booth where they’d made the call. The cab driver identified Michael, and the other two boys agreed to testify against him in exchange for leniency.

  The juvenile court judge sentenced him to two years in the Youth Detention Center in Atlanta. While he was there, Michael beat two older boys senseless, raped another, and had two more years added onto his sentence. He was scheduled to get out at the age of seventeen, but he continued to fight with other boys and terrorized the guards. Two more assault charges got him the maximum sentence he could get under the juvenile laws of Georgia—they held him until his eighteenth birthday.

  When Michael was released, he went back to Dalton. His uncle Lucas, who felt guilty about
not being able to help the boy, offered him a job with his trucking firm, LDD Trucking. He took Michael, who had grown to six feet six inches and 250 pounds by then, under his wing and taught him how to operate an eighteen-wheeler. He taught him how to maintain the vehicles; turned him into a mechanic and a welder and anything else he needed to be in order to keep a truck on the road.

  Lucas also taught Michael the ins and outs of the freight business. He stressed to Michael how important it was to be friendly and honest with the customers, to put their needs first, and to make sure their freight arrived on time and undamaged. Michael enjoyed the freedom of being on the road, and he quickly saw that he needed to develop a personality—a persona, really—that would help Lucas’s business grow and eventually allow Michael to open and operate his own firm. Michael was disingenuous about kissing people’s asses, but he was good at it. He knew he’d grown into a handsome young man, he knew he had an infectious smile, and he knew his massive size made people want him to like them. He took advantage of all those things, and within two years, by the age of twenty, Michael Donovan had started—with the help of his uncle—Donovan Trucking, based out of the same town as his uncle’s firm.

  Michael had one truck, and that was the way he wanted to keep it, because he had no intention of doing things the traditional way. Michael had worked hard at learning the business, but he also still liked to get out on the weekends, and he knew there was a huge amount of money to be made in the cocaine business. His truck was a perfect form of distribution; he simply had to become a little creative. The feds had declared war on drugs, and the wide-open cowboy days of the early eighties were gone by the time Michael got into the coke business. But there was still a huge demand out there, and the profit margins made the risk more palatable. He found a supplier in Atlanta through a kid named Randy Hayes. He’d done a couple of years with Hayes in Atlanta juvy, and Hayes had talked about his family connections in the cocaine trade. Once Michael had a supplier, he needed distributors for his product, and he wasted no time procuring them all along the eastern US seaboard.

  Michael’s truck hauled legitimate loads of everything from clothing to lawn furniture to car parts to kitchen appliances. He procured freight customers in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware. His drug business started when he was fronted one kilogram of coke by one of Randy Hayes’s cousins. Michael broke the kilogram down into thirty-five ounces and stuck them into a sealed piece of PVC pipe, which he then placed inside a tubular axle on his trailer. He paid $16,000 for the kilo, and over the next two weeks, he sold the thirty-five ounces for $2,000 apiece, which meant he made $54,000 on one kilo in two weeks.

  Over the next five years, he built the cocaine business to the point where he was hauling fifteen kilos a month—all of it in the axle of his trailer—and netting nearly $1 million each trip. He had become rich, cautious, and ruthless. He trusted no one. He had the brains to find lawyers and accountants who were willing, for a healthy sum of cash, to help him launder and hide his money offshore. Two attempts had been made on his life—one in Dayton, Ohio, and one in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both of them had ended with him killing the person who was trying to rob and kill him.

  And then, at the age of twenty-eight, the crooked cop who had become infuriated because Michael had had sex with the cop’s girlfriend set Michael up and packed him off to prison for what was supposed to be thirty-five years. Before they sent him off, Michael conned a woman named Linda Lacy into believing he loved her, and he used to her to keep his trucking and cocaine business running—although on a smaller scale—while he was inside. He spent eleven years stomping guards, taking over hustles, and ruling yards as a shot caller when he wasn’t locked down in a hole for what he’d done to the guards. He made millions off his prison hustles, all of which he smuggled out to Linda through corrupt guards. Darren Street came along in his eleventh year, and by year twelve, he was out, thanks in large part to the work Darren had done. Six months after he got out, he caught Linda cheating on him with an old inmate buddy of his whom he’d given a job. He shot them both, cut them up and bagged them, and took them to yet another buddy who ran a huge junkyard near Lexington, Kentucky. Linda and her lover wound up in a car compactor, and later in a smelter.

  So when Darren called him for help in finding the men responsible for murdering Darren’s mother, Michael—who had become Big Pappy by then—was glad to help. He didn’t really think Darren would have the stones to clip those two crackers, but Darren had surprised him. The problem was, he’d left an eyewitness, and now things were getting out of hand. Cops in West Virginia and Knoxville were sniffing around, a paid informant had popped up out of nowhere, and his old buddy Rex Fairchild had turned out to be a pathetic, unreliable druggie.

  Even Darren was suspect now. His mother had been killed, his son taken away, and his girlfriend had dumped him right before Christmas. He sounded unsure of himself over the phone. Pappy wondered, if it ever came down to it and the cops managed to arrest Darren and get him back into jail, whether he would roll on Pappy to get himself a lighter sentence. Maybe he would even tell them Pappy had taken it upon himself to seek revenge for his old friend. Darren might tell them that Pappy had committed the murders.

  Pappy shook his head and pushed himself up from the chair in which he’d been sitting. Thinking time was over. He walked to a locked cabinet in a corner of the office, opened it, and gazed over his choices. The cabinet contained an arsenal of weapons: pistols, rifles, shotguns, assault weapons—all of them untraceable—along with boxes upon boxes of ammunition and a selection of knives, holsters, and body armor. There were even some flashbang and antipersonnel grenades. The cabinet also contained several changes of clothing and a selection of fake beards, mustaches and wigs, hats, and fake identification cards.

  Pappy made his selections and walked back out into the warehouse. He lifted the door on the trailer, pulled a ramp down, and then climbed inside the trailer. He backed a 2013 silver Ford Focus sedan out onto the floor of the warehouse and placed his weapons, clothing, and disguise in the trunk.

  He walked to the cab of the truck, climbed up, and grabbed the remote control for the warehouse door. He pushed the button on the remote and folded his huge frame into the Focus. He pulled out of the warehouse, onto the road, and headed east.

  It was a little more than three hours from Cincinnati to Charleston, West Virginia. Depending on where and when Pappy found him, Rex Fairchild didn’t have long to live.

  CHAPTER 51

  Katherine Davis walked into the house on Clinton Avenue, removed her coat, and sat down on the couch in the living room. Her aunt, Detective Dawn Rule of the Knoxville Police Department, came in shortly thereafter and handed her a cup of coffee.

  “You sounded pretty upset on the phone,” Dawn said.

  “Where’s Uncle Jim?” Katherine said. “He might be interested in this.”

  “He got called out to some shooting in Sevierville. A policeman was involved, so the TBI has to look into it. What’s going on?”

  “Something is happening,” Katherine said. “I mean, one minute Darren is telling me he wants me to go apartment hunting with him today, and the next he sends me a text and says we’re going too fast, he needs some time. Have you talked to the trooper in West Virginia? What’s his name? Grimes?”

  “Not in a week or so. It’s the holidays, Katherine. I take some time off during the holidays.”

  “I didn’t take any time off,” Katherine said. “I thought I had him hooked. He spent last night at my place.”

  Dawn Rule set her coffee down and stared at her niece. “When I first proposed this . . . this . . . idea to you, I didn’t expect you to have sex with him. We set up the DUI charge, you went into his office and sold him on your damsel-in-distress act, and everything was going fine. All you were supposed to do was get to know him, see if you could get him talking about his mother, maybe make
an admission to you that he was involved in the murders in West Virginia or the disappearance of Ben Clancy. I didn’t expect you to jump in the sack with him.”

  “You’re judging me. I’m a big girl, Aunt Dawn. I can jump in the sack with whomever I please. And besides, he’s excellent between the sheets. A little tentative at first, but—”

  “Spare me the details, please.”

  “I actually like Darren,” Katherine said. “The things he’s been through? Unbelievable. Most people would have put a bullet in their head or gone completely insane by now. Did you know he and his girlfriend have broken up? You might want to go at her again. Something obviously changed.”

  “No, I didn’t know that, but it makes me feel a little better knowing you weren’t sleeping with him while he was engaged to someone else. A jury would love you for that.”

  “Stop,” Katherine said. “You told me on the front end this would be dirty. It’s the kind of thing I want to do. I want to catch bad guys doing bad things and make them pay for it.”

  “I thought you just said you liked the guy.”

  “I do. I really do, and I feel sorry for him. But if he killed two men in West Virginia and maybe another here, then he has to pay for that. I mean, that’s what a lot of people in this family have been all about. Dad was an FBI agent until he had the aneurysm. Mom’s still a prosecutor, Uncle Jim is a TBI agent, you’re a detective. I’m about to go to law school, and I’m going to be either an FBI agent or a prosecutor, maybe both before it’s over. I can’t let personal feelings get in the way of doing the job, right?”

  “It isn’t a good idea to have sex with people you’re investigating, Katherine.”

  “First of all, I like having sex. Men practically throw themselves at me, and I’ve learned to take advantage of it. If that makes me a bad person, so be it, but I don’t feel badly about myself. Secondly, I’m not really investigating him, am I? I’m not a cop. I’m not on your payroll. I’m not even a paid informant. I’m just a girl who got charged—falsely, I might add—with driving under the influence of an Ambien pill so I could get close to Darren Street and use the tools I have to get an admission out of him. Now you’re criticizing me for doing exactly what you thought I might do. And when you get right down to it, you’ve probably broken more laws than Darren Street setting up the phony charge. You didn’t kill anybody, but we’re splitting hairs, aren’t we? You’re being hypocritical.”