The quiet that followed came in a ripple. The men all turned to Harley. The recruits in the pit peered up through the falling drops of sewage.
“GC One Payne, you do not approve?”
Oliver, surprised to hear his name, tried to fake a smile. “Sir, no, sir…I mean, yes, sir, Master General, sir. I approve.”
“You lying to me, boy?”
“No, sir…”
“Bullshit. In the pit, GC One Payne.”
Oliver tried to appear unaffected by Harley’s order. He knew better than to refuse. He started the slow trek down into the rain of shit, stopping only when Harley whistled into the megaphone. Oliver turned to see a large hunting knife flying in his direction. He took a reflexive step back and watched the knife lodge into the ground near his feet.
“That’ll even things up because you’re Kong’s next victim…I mean opponent,” he said with a laugh. The rest of the men roared along with him.
Oliver reluctantly bent down to remove the knife from the sludge, only to be interrupted by an enormous fist to his kidney. He dropped to one knee and groaned from his diaphragm.
Kong circled around him and went for the knife. Oliver had the wherewithal to catch the giant in the ribs with a rabbit punch, and to his pleasant surprise Kong growled out in pain and was knocked off balance.
Oliver took the opportunity to reach for the knife, but caught an elbow in the jaw from Kong. The blow was so hard it popped his ears. Oliver tumbled back and rolled down to the bottom of the pit. Kong followed with the knife in hand.
Scrambling back, Oliver raced through every scenario in his mind that could help him get out of the Shit Pit alive, but nothing came to mind. With Kong almost on top of him, Oliver grabbed hold of a handful of sludge and waited until Kong was close enough before he unleashed it. Neither man knew the handful of muck had a small rock in it, and Oliver brought down Goliath by hitting the giant dead center in the right eye with a small stone.
Oliver didn’t hesitate when he saw he had hurt Kong. He arched up on his back, wrapped his legs around the giant’s neck, and squeezed until Kong went limp.
The men circling the pit screamed and roared and began to chant, “Payne, Payne, Payne.”
Furious, Harley stomped down into the pit, undaunted by the spray of sewage, and approached Payne and the unconscious Kong. He searched the sludge until he spotted the hunting knife. With one last look of disgust thrown at Oliver, Harley grabbed up the knife and immediately thrust it into Kong’s belly. The men fell silent.
To Oliver, Harley said, “We kill weakness, boy.” With that he climbed back out of the pit.
Chapter 39
Dani decided it was time to introduce Otis to the new hire. She was relatively sure he wouldn’t care, but he was technically still the sheriff. A new deputy consultant on the force just seemed like something he should at least be made aware of.
She rapped her knuckles against Laura’s hospital room door and entered without waiting for an invitation to do so. “Otis?” She cut the greeting off when she saw a short woman with a protruding belly standing next to Otis with her hand on his shoulder. The woman’s mountain of hair and cheap yellow polyester dress weren’t nearly as offensive as the thick veil of perfume that brought tears to everyone’s eyes.
“What’re you doing here?” Dani asked with a grunt.
“Now, is that any way to greet your mother?” the woman said with an oblivious grin.
“Your momma come to pay her respects,” Otis said.
“Didn’t know she had any to pay out,” Dani said.
Nola hung back at the doorjamb at the first sound of awkwardness.
“Behave,” Otis said.
Dani’s mother laughed. “Telling this one to behave is like telling a cow to bark. It ain’t gonna happen, brother dear. It ain’t gonna happen.”
“In case you missed it, I’m the law now.”
Her mother sneered. “We’ve been told all about that silliness…”
“Now, Peach,” Otis said. “Dani does a fine job…”
“Don’t feel like you gotta stick up for her, Otis. You’re talking to the girl’s mother. I know the kind of bad she gets herself into.”
This time Dani sneered. “Please. Mother? Aunt Jeannie was my mother…”
Otis whistled to head off the growing argument. “Enough!”
There was a moment of silence before Dani asked, “Your husband make the trip?”
“You mean your father? He did. He’s in the cafeteria.”
Dani felt her heart sink into her stomach. The one man she never wanted to see again in her lifetime was just two floors below her.
“You come in for something specific, Dani?” Otis asked.
Dani pulled her mind out of the images it was forming of her father choking on a sandwich in the cafeteria. “Um, yeah. I did actually. Made a new hire. Temporary.”
Otis responded with as little curiosity as possible. “Okay. I’m sure you chose a good fella.”
“It’s not…” Dani started to explain her hire’s gender and race before deciding it would be easier just to have Nola come in and introduce herself. The deputy turned to the doorway and her request for the new hire to come into the room was halfway out of her mouth when she discovered Nola wasn’t there.
—
Nola hesitated before entering the cafeteria. She had been planning for this moment since her mother’s deathbed confession. She’d put her life on hold while she researched the identity of her mother’s rapist. She interviewed her mother’s friends and acquaintances. She dove deep into New Orleans’s racist past before she found the name of the man, the man she would reluctantly recognize as her biological father.
Nola stepped inside the cafeteria, her eyes on the floor at first. Her heart was racing, and she couldn’t bring herself to lift her head and search for the face of the man she hated most on the planet.
She took a deep breath and exhaled before lifting her chin and letting her eyes jump from table to table. It wasn’t until she gazed into the farthest corner that she spotted him. Her racing heart slowed as she felt a calmness come over her. He was real. She had built him up into a mythical monster in her mind, but there he sat, aged thirty-five years from the mugshot she had seen of him, a mugshot taken at the time of an arrest for another offense. He never saw jail time for raping Nola’s mother. He was a white man of God, and in the eyes of the white Bible-thumpers who ran the city at the time, he hadn’t committed a crime. He’d simply shown a lapse in judgment.
Nola was nearly standing by his table before she realized she had even been walking in that direction. Her mother’s rapist looked up from his plate of collard greens only by chance, and noticed Nola staring at him.
“Wha’cha want, girl?”
Nola didn’t answer; she just stared holes into his pale blue eyes.
“Speak up or be gone.”
Nola didn’t speak up. She felt serenity wash over her as she pictured her hands wrapped around his skinny neck.
“God bless it, girl. You’re annoying the piss out of me.”
Chapter 40
When Spivey sat at Gus’s booth at Pep’s, the partway preacher almost lost his appetite. Almost. He quickly regained his gluttony and gobbled down half a stack of flapjacks in one bite.
“What are you, a fucking snake?” Spivey asked. “Chew your food, Partway.”
“You come all this way to critique my eating habits?”
Tonya made her way over to the booth and put a freshly poured cup of coffee down in front of Spivey. “You gonna be having burnt toast again or just the coffee?”
“I’m not even having the coffee.”
Tonya shrugged and walked away, mumbling, “Suit yourself. Drink the coffee. Don’t drink the coffee. I don’t give a shit.”
Spivey pulled a card out of his pocket and tossed it onto the table. Gus turned his head to the left to get a look at the card, and when he realized what it was, he picked it up. “This is my Gray Rise memb
ership card.”
“It is.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I broke into your office this morning and grabbed it off your desk.”
Gus looked past the card at Spivey, partly angry, but mostly petrified. “Why’d you go and do a thing like that?”
“Someone showed me that logo the other day, and I remembered seeing it before, but I couldn’t remember where. It hit me last night that when I turned over your desk and wrestled that Vinton Pike piece of shit to the floor, that card was lying next to him, along with all the other shit on your desk.”
“Still don’t explain why you didn’t just ask me about it. You didn’t have to break into my office and steal it.”
Spivey shook his head. “I looked through your files, too. Wanted to know more about you and the company you keep.”
Gus swallowed the lump in his throat. “Why you interested in my gun club?”
Spivey shrugged. “Why I’m interested shouldn’t concern you. That I’m interested should. You understand the difference?”
Gus nodded nervously.
“Tell me about it.”
“Honestly, there ain’t much to tell.”
“You should let me be the judge of that.”
“What I mean is, I ain’t been to a meeting in about two years. I only joined for the networking. You ain’t into guns around here, folks don’t trust you. Folks don’t trust you, they don’t throw legal business your way.”
“Tell me about these meetings.”
“Mostly it was about a dozen fellas getting drunk at a strip club. We didn’t talk guns much. There was dues, but didn’t nobody pay them. It was loose run. Just a bunch of us having a good time.”
Spivey sat back and considered what Gus had said.
“Of course, Pikes got involved and things took a serious turn. That’s when I stopped going to meetings.”
Spivey cocked an eyebrow.
“It’s one thing sitting around a strip club, getting lap dances and drinking beer, but when they moved things to a church and started talking about raising money enough to buy land for a place to train and whatnot…well, I’d just as soon not get too deep into that sort of nonsense.”
“Train? Train for what?”
“I don’t know, and I didn’t never ask. I just eased on out of the meetings, and I was done with it.”
“No one came around asking for your dues?”
“They got a sponsor. Dues was cut out.”
“What sponsor?”
“That national gun association, the one…you know, the big one? Can’t remember what they call themselves. First Second…something.”
“Patriots for the Second First,” Spivey said.
Gus snapped his fingers. “That’s it. Them folks must be well funded because the Gray Rise has done good for themselves, from what I hear.”
“And what exactly have you heard?”
“The whole lot of them gets their expenses paid for weekend get-togethers. They travel from gun show to gun show. They’re kinda like spokesmen aimed at the redneck community. Kind of like Nike pays them basketball fellas to wear their shoes. The Patriots for the Second First pay the Gray Rise to talk ’em up with other gun enthusiasts.”
Spivey stood and snatched the Gray Rise card out of Gus’s hand. “We didn’t talk.”
“Well,” Gus said, clearing his throat. “You’ll excuse me for saying so, but my not talking fee is twice my talking fee when it comes to my legal services.”
Spivey reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. He peeled off a few hundreds and dropped them onto the table in front of Gus. “There’s enough in there for us to not talk for the rest of the day.”
Gus smiled and stuffed the money into his pocket. “We can not talk all you want, Mr. Spivey.”
Chapter 41
The words rumbled around in her head unspoken the whole way from the hospital to the sheriff’s office. Dani had questions for Nola. They were questions she both knew the answers to and didn’t want to know the answers to, not officially anyway. By not having the conversation with Nola, she allowed herself the luxury of holding on to a sliver of a doubt that her father, the good reverend Daniel Savage, was Nola’s father, and her mother’s rapist.
For her part, Nola didn’t offer up any explanation. She sat grim and stone-faced, picking at the fabric of her pants at the thigh, tapping her left foot compulsively.
When they pulled into the station, Nola was out of the cruiser before Dani could so much as clear her throat. Once inside the station, she made her way to the women’s bathroom and locked the door behind her.
Dani stood at the door for a short while, contemplating the right thing to do. Let Nola churn in her hatred, or offer the woman who was most likely her half-sister a shoulder to cry on. In the end, the easy thing for Dani trumped what she thought was the right thing, and the deputy eased away from the door and headed for Otis’s office, stopping when she saw Friar at his desk, more asleep than awake. His feet on the nearby filing cabinet, and his fingers laced together over his belly.
“County don’t pay you to sleep on the job, Friar,” Dani said.
“County don’t pay hardly nothing at all. Naps’re my French benefits.”
Dani snorted out a chuckle. “I think you mean fringe benefits, Deputy.”
He lifted his heavy eyelids. “Whatever they’re called.” He struggled to reach for a piece of paper on his desk. “That Wanda Carson called.”
Dani turned to him with a mildly shocked expression. “About?”
“About an hour ago?”
“No…What did she call about?”
“Oh.” Friar leaned forward and started pushing the clutter on his desk around. “She wanted to know if she could come pick up Parnell’s belongings.” He found a gallon-sized plastic evidence bag and threw it to Dani. “I told her I didn’t see why not. Case’s been closed, right?”
Dani held up the bag and looked at the contents. “More or less.” There was a cigarette, wallet, condom, and pocket knife.
“There ain’t no money or credit cards of no kind in the wallet,” Friar said.
“I know. I processed the evidence.”
“Oh,” Friar said, closing his eyes.
“It’s just stuffed with receipts,” Dani said. “Can’t say why he saved him. It ain’t like he was one to write things off on his taxes.”
“They’re for notes,” Friar said without opening his eyes.
“Excuse me?”
“Notes. My daddy used to do the same thing. He’d save every receipt he had and stuffed them in his wallet just in case an occasion would come where he’d need to write something down. Something most old-school farmers and shit do.”
Dani mulled over Friar’s explanation, and then hurriedly opened the bag, dumping the contents onto the closest desk. Her hands were practically shaking when she pulled the lump of receipts from Parnell’s wallet. She started to peel the top receipt from the stack and managed to drop all of them in the process. They splashed to the floor and scattered in every direction.
“Shit,” she said, falling to her knees.
Friar opened one eye. “Fella can’t hardly get no sleep with all that racket you’re making…”
“What the fuck?” Dani said as she plucked a receipt off of the floor with a faded handwritten note. She squinted to read the message. “My. Bitch. Cove.”
Friar took it from her and read the message for himself. “Cave. My bitch cave.” He leaned in closer and studied the message. “There’s a bunch of numbers scattered about, too.” He looked at Dani. “What do you reckon this is?”
Dani fell back onto the floor and reluctantly said, “I reckon it could be a clue.”
Chapter 42
The house was red. Spivey hated red houses. He thought them garish. Houses should be white or a muted yellow. A neutral color, or what he considered a neutral color, anyway. Red screamed, “LOOK AT ME.”
Gus knocked on the front door of th
e loud, red house, picking away at something caught between his teeth. “Don’t know what I et that’s wedged up in there, but damned if it ain’t driving me crazy.”
“You wanna tell me why we’re here?”
“This is Poon Docket’s house.” He placed his tongue where he thought the morsel of annoyance was lodged and sucked.
“Who the fuck is Poon Docket?”
“I swear it’s, like, stringy. I didn’t have nothing that was stringy.”
“Partway,” Spivey said, snapping his fingers. “Concentrate. Who’s Poon Docket?”
“He’s the one that started up the Gray Rise gun club. ’Bout ten-year ago. Was president up till the Pikes took over.”
The door opened and a hunched-over man in his seventies stood clinging to the doorknob. His pants were hiked up so high that the long, slender waddle from his neck nearly rubbed up against his belt buckle as it flapped about underneath his chin. “Lawyer-man Gus? Wha’cha doing here, boy?”
“Hey, Poon, looking good. You working out?”
Spivey raised an eyebrow at this notion as it looked like opening the front door to his house was about the only exercise that Poon Docket got.
Poon laughed. “Fuck you, fat boy. Who’s this fella?”
“Friend of mine,” Gus said. “Name’s Spivey. Jack Spivey.”
Spivey didn’t offer a greeting.
“He’s a talkative fella,” Poon said.
Gus shrugged. “Count yourself lucky. When he does talk, it’s usually hurtful.”
Poon stepped back and let the two men enter. “What brings you and Jack Spivey my way?”
“The Gray Rise,” Spivey said.
Poon hesitated before asking, “You a fed?”
“Why would you ask me that?”
“ ’Cause ain’t but two kinds of folks that wanna know about the Gray Rise: feds and hard-ups. You don’t look hard up to me, so that leaves the feds.”
“I’m not a fed.”
“He ain’t,” Gus said. “I can vouch for him on that.”
Poon looked Spivey up and down. “That means a third kind of folk got tossed into the mix, which means those dumbasses must’ve turned things up a notch or two.”
Savage Rising Page 20
