by Sarina Adem
The door opened quickly, and the sheriff appeared. Definitely a beauty. Shame to have to kill her. Mark was about three years younger than Jolene Flannery, but that didn’t stop him or other boys in his grade from trying to hook up with her. He stuttered his proposal one day in the hall at school. He intended to ask her out for dinner on Saturday. Instead, his words all muddled together and she just walked on by, this look on her face . . . this putrid look on her face. As if he disgusted her.
Didn’t matter that he blocked her path, shoved his face in hers until his breath made her sweat, and he practically yelled his invitation to romance. No, she was just a bitch. Now Mark Parker was a man full of new confidence.
This Jolene Flannery, the sheriff of Bluff County, she was just another target. And now that she killed Job Knight, it was Mark Parker’s personal mission to make her suffer.
What boldness, though. That woman just marched right out of that cabin and down those steps, practically dismissing Job’s lifeless body in a pool of dark mud.
Mark glanced at Hickory, but Hickory was already creeping around his tree, gun ready, about to peek through the bushes – when the sheriff raised her Glock and fired through the shrubbery. Hickory’s head popped back and he slumped against the tree.
Then, to Mark’s horror, Jolene aimed her Glock directly at him. Petrified, he couldn’t even raise his shotgun.
Jolene said, “I can see your footprints. You ran, and you should’ve kept running.”
Mark gulped. “What happens now?”
“Now you put your hands in the air, holding that shotgun in one hand, finger off the trigger. Then you march out here where I can see you, and you place that gun slowly on the ground. After that, I’ll decide whether to cuff you or shoot you where you stand.”
Confused, Mark didn’t budge. “You can’t do that. You’re the law.”
Jolene fired. Bark sprayed off the tree, slapping Mark in the face.
Jolene said, “I’m afraid you have mistaken this for a conversation. Now do what I said, or there’s going to be bits of you on that tree there.”
Mark raised his hands slowly like she said. The shotgun held firmly in his left hand above his head. “Alright, alright.” He took a step from cover, followed by one more. A few more paces and he was in the open.
“You don’t even remember me, do you?” he asked.
Jolene studied his face. “Should I?”
Mark laughed, insulted. “I asked you out once in high school.”
“Guess I lucked out.”
“You looked at me like I killed your dog.”
“I put my dog down myself when he got sick. You don’t put that shotgun on the ground and I’ll do the same to you.”
Mark grinned. The girl had fire. Always had. Probably what attracted the men even more than those legs. But maybe the time had come to douse that fire.
Mark hunched over, not in any kind of hurry. Hands over his head, the shotgun coming closer and closer to the earth. He peered up at and down the barrel of that Glock. Glanced over at Job.
Poor Job.
Came back up with that shotgun, slinging it around until the barrel was almost on target. Jolene’s Glock flashed and that’s the last thing Mark Parker ever saw.
Chapter Six
Deputy Garrett Philips started feeling a little edgy. About two hours had passed since Sheriff Jolene Flannery had made contact, assuring the department she was in good health, the traitor Buck Gully was dead, and that C.C. Lily was the new target of interest. Backup had been sent to her house, but no word had come from them either.
Garrett also knew he was being watched. He along with the other two squad cars parked down the road from the Lily Ranch. Some part of him felt like they had come terribly unprepared for this battle. Only three of them. Terrence Pike, Alma Foster, and Garrett himself.
Three deputies versus a cocaine kingpin. Specific instructions were to wait until Jolene’s arrival. She stressed the importance of making the bust herself, but as time dragged on, Garrett worried something insidious had befallen her.
Pike stepped out of his care and pulled his pants up by the belt. Alma followed out of her own car and walked around to meet him. Garrett knew what was coming, so he joined them.
“You radio the sheriff?” Pike asked him.
Garrett said, “Yeah. No answer still. Something’s wrong.”
“I say we go in and get C.C. right now.” Alma was dark haired and thin, but her frame was made up of steel rods. “I’ll drag her out and make her tell us what happened to Jolene.”
“We don’t know that anything’s wrong,” said Garrett.
Alma and Pike stared at him, both from behind silver aviator sunglasses.
True, the time to panic about their sheriff had come. And the only lead they had was sitting in a ranch down the road.
“We don’t know what we’re rushing into if we do,” warned Garrett.
“It’s for Jolene, man,” said Pike. “We don’t know if they somehow already sneaked her in there or not. They could be torturing her, or worse. It’s been too long.”
Garrett sighed, but the sound was resolute. “Alright. Let’s storm the castle.”
“This ain’t the end of nothing.”
C.C. Lily assured Warbler and Sparkles of her continued plans to sell in Bluff County, as well as the rest of the state, as they walked along the trail to the small patch in the woods where Jacques could land his chopper and abscond them to safe haven. Minus Sparkles. Sparkles had his own mission to tend to.
Warbler carried the little luggage they packed. C.C. carried Tommy and William walked beside her. Sparkles carried the briefcase full of cash, and upon his superior’s escape, he’d return to burn the whole ranch down.
C.C. said if she couldn’t stay and enjoy it, she’d be damned if the government seized it.
As of that moment, five of Warbler’s other men were standing guard at various points on the estate, each of them aware of Bluff County Sheriff’s Department’s presence.
And about halfway down the trail is when they heard gunfire exchanged.
For a moment, they stopped. The gunfire came to a halt. C.C. listened. No chopper blades yet. Jacques wouldn’t arrive for another twenty minutes, which meant they could still be captured.
Yelling, followed by more gunfire. Ten minutes passed. Leon said, “We need to move.”
Then an unfamiliar voice shouted through the trees, “Bluff County Sheriff! Stay where you are.”
Leon cursed. “One of my boys betrayed us. What do you want to do, C.C.? They’re on the trail now. Jacques still isn’t even in range.”
C.C.’s world suddenly felt like a sheet with a bowling ball dropped in the center of it. “We can’t stay here. My boys. They can’t be around gunplay like this.”
Sparkles spoke up. “Through the woods,” he pointed. “You can make it back to the road from here. Try and set up a different rendezvous with Jacques. I’ll distract the deputies.”
As he headed back down the path, Leon took hold of his shoulder and cleared his throat. “The briefcase, Sparkles.”
Sparkles stopped, his back still to them. He turned around with a smile, and nodded. Leon should have seen it coming. Sparkles came swinging with his revolver, popping two off. One in Leon’s shoulder, the other in his gut. Then he aimed at C.C.
“The kids,” she gasped.
Sparkles didn’t pull the trigger. He watched Leon fall, the broken old solider. A good superior, a terrible personality, but a fool to let Sparkles carry all that cash. Hell, the mistake was telling him what was inside. C.C. knew it was wrong after Leon spilled the beans in the kitchen in their hasty preparation. Should have trusted her gut.
“I’m going this way,” said Sparkles. “Don’t follow.”
Then Sparkles tore off the trail the way he told C.C. to originally take.
All that money. Gone now. Jacques still out of range.
Leon dying at her feet.
Tommy and William both cryi
ng, at a loss to understand this complicated world falling apart around them.
And now boots, swiftly approaching. C.C. set Tommy down next to his brother, tears in her eyes. She held back from sobbing, but this was going to hurt worse than any gunshot.
“Stay here,” C.C. told her boys. “Stay here and I promise you’ll be safe.”
William asked where she was going. All she could tell them was that one day, she would come back for them. Then she lit out after Sparkles.
Seconds later, William and Tommy were staring up at three uniformed individuals who appeared just as bewildered to see them. And the old guy’s dead body.
Chapter Seven
When Jolene set eyes on Troy Ellis again, the guy wore his best charming smile, and though the pain in his eyes was apparent, he also looked relieved to see her standing in the doorway.
“I suppose I should have chased after you,” he said.
Jolene shook her head. “I’m no damsel in distress, Mr. Ellis.”
“You ever gonna call me Troy again?”
“We need to get you to a hospital.”
“I’m fine. We should just go get C.C.”
“You’re pale.”
“Bullet barely grazed me.”
“It tore a chunk of flesh off. You’re still bleeding. Now shut up and come on.”
Jolene helped Troy off the bed, although despite her own considerable strength, a man of Troy’s stature relied primarily on his own ability to lift himself. Ahead of them was a long walk through the forest back to her car. She had left her cell phone in the vehicle, not that it would have made a difference in the forest. Not this far out.
The walk was slow. They found another way around the ravine, so it took longer. Troy clung to Jolene’s shoulder, and she suspected it was more because he wanted to than for stability.
As they passed between trees and twigs crunched beneath them, Jolene asked, “Would you like to tell me a little bit more about what you were doing in C.C.’s employ?”
“If I had known I was working for her, I may have gone about all this in a different way.” Troy laughed at himself. “We thought she was a simple rural housewife, unaware she’d been swept up in the largest cocaine operation in Alabama.”
“Was it really that big?”
“Still is. We haven’t put a stop to it yet. No telling if she has precautions in place if she goes down, but I’d be willing to bet it’s something she never anticipated actually happening. Could be lesser hands she has, waiting to step up if she falls. Taking her in is going to hurt her little operation, though.”
Troy staggered beside Jolene with a limp. Blood had completely soaked the roll of paper towels, the entirety of which Troy held tight against his wound. “My right side is starting to go numb,” he said.
“We’re gonna make it,” Jolene assured him. “Stay with me.”
They followed the trail left by their own footprints and the ramshackle path blazed by their dead pursuers. Jolene would have to have all their bodies collected, and the thought occurred to her that Frasier Butler may show up to check on his cabin, for whatever reason, and discover the carnage left there. Knowing Frasier’s notorious reputation, and the theories that stemmed from how the Butlers made their fortune, Jolene was certain it wouldn’t be the first time he had seen men dead from gunshot wounds.
“How did C.C. pinpoint you as a mole?”
Troy grinned and grimaced. “Shortly after you shot Mick, it became quite apparent that C.C. was the one actually in charge. Nothing changed, other than Leon Warbler absorbing Mick’s duties. I think I tipped my own hand. Asked too many questions when I found out the truth. Amateur shit. I should have watched myself better. You spend eight months getting duped, sometimes you just can’t help but stare at something slack-jawed.”
“Why did she bother to keep her authority a secret from you if you worked for her?”
“Job and his mean apparently thought they were working for Mick for a few years before C.C. dropped the curtain. With Mick dead, however, the orders had to come from somewhere or not at all. She doesn’t actually have a lot of bodies in her employ. At least not locally. Works in her favor. I imagine letting her late husband act as the face to those she doesn’t trust worked in her favor, too.”
The afternoon sun blazed through patches in the canopy, but for the most part they only traversed through shade. Somewhere she had lost her hat. Only now did she miss it. Regardless, they had no water. Jolene’s throat was already parched and she knew Troy had to feel drained of more than blood. His pace had slowed. Dark circles formed beneath his eyes.
“That bullet may have done more damage than we thought,” Jolene said, aware that Troy’s feet were trying to stagger away from him.
“No, it’s fine. I’ll be fine . . . But maybe we could rest for a minute.”
Jolene clung to him tighter. “Stay with me, Troy.”
He half-smiled. “You called me Troy.”
Jolene knew better than to stop. It might not have been much better or even easier to carry on, but stopping would almost certainly be Troy’s death sentence. If he sat down, he might pass out, and if he passed out, there was no feasible way for Jolene to carry the man out of the woods by herself.
Still, she feared Troy might pass out anyway.
Conversation. Conversation is what she needed to keep the federal agent aware, or at least semi-aware, of his own plight.
“So how exactly did C.C. discover your true identity?”
“. . . I told you. Too curious. Warbler understood my initial shock, but then I started asking prying questions. How long she had actually been charge? How many hits had she personally called? How did she come to be the head? I should have left it at, ‘Huh, that explains everything.’ Instead, I wanted specifics.”
Jolene’s shoulders started to ache. Troy’s massive frame depended more and more on her slim physique the longer they pressed on. Daily running, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and the occasional brawl with unruly prisoners kept her prepared for an unexpected situation like this. But time wore on her muscles, already tired from the night before, the initial trek through the forest, then the gunfight, and now half of Troy Ellis’s weight sunk around her. His body was like a tree she had to drag through the forest.
She began to think the bullet didn’t pass through him at all. Instead the wound only appeared that way, but in fact the bullet remained lodged somewhere in his body. She knew it was possible. A highway arrest went sour once and Jolene was forced to pull on a crazed gunman. She shot him, he died. The hole was in his chest, but they found the bullet in his right hip. Strange how the human body can act like a tin can.
Troy teetered on the verge of passing out when Jolene heard them. Voices. More of C.C.’s men. She couldn’t see them, but they were close. Swiftly closing in on them from the road. Against her better judgment, she stopped. Troy’s legs finally gave out. One last wobble and he nearly took Jolene down with him. She tried to hold on but he was too heavy.
The boots cracked dry leaves, pine straw, and dirt. Jolene drew her Glock.
Troy stared absently up at the clouds lethargically drifting by.
Then, “Sheriff!”
Jolene and Troy suddenly found themselves surrounded by uniformed deputies of Bluff County. One of them, Byron Hawks, lowered his own gun and holstered it. “We were on the way to your home, sheriff. Found your car and another in the middle of the road. Been searching the woods for nearly an hour.”
No time. Jolene pointed at Troy and said, “This man needs to get to a hospital.”
Chapter Eight
Leon Warbler taught C.C. Lily how to survive in any scenario, if it came to it. Not only that, he taught her how to track. The man he called Sparkles, however, knew how to hide his trail.
But he had C.C.’s money. Her only money. Her accounts were undoubtedly already frozen or would be. No physical cash existed back on her estate, and all the money she and Mick had stashed around the county was with the few associa
tes she trusted. She also trusted them to keep it for themselves once they learned she had been exposed as the cocaine queen of Bluff County.
C.C. could hear the deputies for a time behind her. A shame that the local sheriff’s department couldn’t spare more men. By nightfall, they might. The entire forest would be marched through in an attempt to arrest her. She planned to be gone by that time. Reunited with her money and in another county, perhaps even out of the state.
Sparkles moved lightly, barely leaving a footprint or a mark of any kind. Broken branches and crushed pinecones signaled a fresh path, and the closer C.C came to the road, the more careless Sparkles became.
Yet once she reached the road, the trail went cold. No Sparkles. No lead. Her money was gone. She wondered how it all came to this. How a lifetime of planning, grooming, and operating could lead to such a sudden demise?
C.C.’s father was Trent King. Trent King was literally the cocaine king of Bluff County, and it was no coincidence that his daughter grew up to take over the trade. Trent wanted his daughter to be friends with Jolene Flannery, the sheriff’s daughter, and that was no mistake either. C.C. didn’t realize it until she was a teenager and her father started giving her responsibilities. He was grooming her to fend for herself, to manage her own financial well-being. By selling snow.
Mick didn’t have a problem with it. How could he? C.C. tracked him down at his college, knowing from high school that his plans were to return home one day and become the town’s foremost banker. He’d be key to depositing vast amounts of money in vaults without question.
Now all that was done. C.C. ducked back into the woods. Found a log and sat down against it. Pulled her cell phone out and stared at the dark screen.
She could continue trying to hunt down Sparkles, but in the end that might turn out to be a waste of time. No, she still had one card of value left to play.
