by Sean Black
A cell phone rang close by. The cop tensed. Thea got up, went back into the living room and answered it. She walked back in with it held to her ear. Whatever the person at the other end was saying, she was listening intently.
‘Where?’ she asked.
There was a moment of silence. Byron pressed the barrel of the Glock a little harder into the back of Arlo’s neck. ‘Don’t say a word,’ he told him.
‘Okay,’ Thea said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
She ended the call and put the cell phone on the table. ‘Don’t kill him,’ she said.
Byron nodded, easing the pressure against Arlo’s neck. Arlo let out a sigh of relief.
Thea took another deep drag on her cigarette. Some ash fell onto the floor. ‘It’s not that I think you should live, Arlo,’ said Thea, ‘because I don’t.’
‘So why?’ Byron asked.
‘Because Arlo’s going to tell us why Hank Foley just called me to say that while he was out checking his ranch, helping the sheriff look for you, he found a bunch of dead women and children buried in a shallow grave. Isn’t that right, Arlo?’
Arlo’s head snapped round on a swivel. ‘I don’t know nothing about that.’
The denial was more than a little too sudden. Byron grabbed him and propelled him towards the door.
‘Where are you taking him?’ Thea asked.
‘You want to go out to this ranch and see for yourself, don’t you?’ Byron said to her. ‘Or have I got you all wrong?’
‘I have to put some clothes on first.’
‘We’ll wait for you, won’t we, Arlo?’ Byron told the cop.
Arlo nodded. Byron sensed a fear inside the man that ran deeper than that of being at the wrong end of his weapon. A fear of discovery. Maybe the search for Byron had turned up something far more dangerous than a fugitive.
71
Arlo sat in the driver’s seat of his patrol car. Thea sat next to him. Byron handed her the Glock and kept Arlo’s service weapon for himself.
‘You know how to use one of these things?’ Byron asked, as she took the gun from him.
She glanced back at him, her eyes suggesting she was surprised at the question. ‘We’re in Texas. Of course I know how to use a gun. My daddy took me out hunting while I was still in kindergarten. Got my first real gun when I turned twelve.’
‘Hope your daddy’s proud of you taking one of his officers hostage and helping an escaped killer,’ Arlo piped up. ‘He’s had to put up with all your liberal bullshit up until now, but this, I don’t know what he’s gonna say.’
‘Shut the hell up, Arlo,’ Thea said, lowering the barrel a shade so that it was pointed at Arlo’s groin.
In the back seat, Byron’s head was spinning. ‘Your father’s Sheriff Martin?’
‘Sheriff Martinez,’ Thea corrected. ‘He changed it to Martin as part of his drive to fit in with the good old boys around here. He’s done a pretty good job of it too. Too good probably, but, hey, you don’t choose your family, do you?’
There was no way Byron would have made the connection between the man he’d seen on the posters and Thea. ‘No offense but you must have got your mother’s good looks.’
Thea spun round, the sudden movement making Arlo swallow hard. ‘Careful where you’re pointing that thing.’ He shuffling fractionally towards the window.
‘You might want to take your own advice, Arlo,’ Thea said. She turned back towards Byron. ‘My mother was a beautiful woman, inside in and out. She’d have been ashamed of what’s happened to people around here. Now, Arlo, you know where Hank’s ranch is.’
Arlo nodded.
‘Good. Then you’re going to drive us out there. And if you try anything, I’ll put a bullet in you. You hear me?’
Arlo grunted, put the patrol car into reverse, pulled back, and made a big, looping turn onto the street. Byron lay down on the back seat, out of view of any passing cars.
The patrol-car radio crackled with activity. According to reports called in by concerned citizens, Byron was in at least three other places. It was an ability even he hadn’t realized he possessed.
A call came in for Arlo to give the dispatcher an update.
‘Take it,’ Byron told him.
Arlo relayed his location and left it at that. A smart move.
They continued on through the darkened trees. Occasionally they would pass another patrol car. Thea told Arlo not to slow down, but to keep moving.
As they turned a corner and saw a three-car roadblock up ahead, remaining in motion was no longer an option. Byron lowered himself into the rear foot wells, lying on his back, his gun pointed up at the rear window.
‘What you want me to do?’ Arlo asked.
Thea seemed panicked. Arlo had been right about one thing: she was out of her depth. Way out.
‘Stop. Say hi. Tell them you’ve had a call from a rancher and you’re going to check it out,’ Byron told him.
Arlo slowed the patrol car. ‘They’ll want to know why I have her in my car.’
Byron racked his brain for some kind of a credible explanation. Thea got to one before he did. ‘You came to check on me and I was freaked out because I was representing the escapee. I asked to stay with you but you had to go back out on patrol so I came with you,’ she said, reaching down so that she was holding the gun out of sight.
Arlo leaned out to talk to one of his colleagues, a lanky beanpole of a sergeant. ‘Hey, Sarge, you guys having any more luck than I am tonight?’
Byron lay in back and prayed that the sergeant or one of the other officers wouldn’t take a casual peek through the rear window.
The sergeant didn’t answer him. Instead he hunkered down and peered past Arlo at Thea, who was doing her best to look like the front seat of a cop car was exactly where she’d be on a night like this.
‘Hey, Thea. You come out to help us catch a bad guy?’ the sergeant said, sarcasm oozing from every syllable.
‘Something like that, Clay,’ Thea replied.
‘Thea was a little spooked,’ Arlo cut in. ‘She asked me if I could look after her. Ain’t that right, Thea?’
Thea didn’t reply.
The sergeant appeared to chew over Arlo’s explanation. He didn’t seem to buy it, not entirely anyway. ‘Same old story, I guess,’ he said. ‘Cops are all assholes until someone needs us.’
Byron could only imagine the effort involved for Thea not to respond to that one.
‘So where you headed?’ the sergeant asked Arlo, when Thea didn’t take the bait.
‘Out to Hank Foley’s ranch. He called me about something bothering some of his cattle. Probably a coyote, but I thought I’d check it out in any case,’ said Arlo. ‘How about you guys? Any word on our boy?’
For a man with two guns close to him, both held by people who could shoot straight and with good reason to blow him away, Arlo was proving cooler under pressure than Byron would have suspected. Notwithstanding the fact that ‘their boy’ was lying in the back of the car, Byron’s interest had been piqued by the question.
‘Nothing solid yet,’ said the sergeant.
No kidding, thought Byron.
‘But we’ve got some additional resources coming in,’ the sergeant continued. ‘Feds or something. They’re been kind of cagey about it, but it seems like they’ve been looking for this guy for a while.’
Byron froze. He’d known this was coming. He’d been sure it would happen long before now. But it still pulled him up short. He’d hoped he’d at least be out of the county before Washington showed up.
In the front seat, Thea leaned over Arlo to talk to the sergeant. ‘They say what they wanted him for?’
‘I shouldn’t have even told you that much.’
‘Come on, Clay, I could find out easily enough,’ Thea said.
‘Okay, well, you didn’t hear it from me, and they haven’t actually used these words, but the impression I get is that this guy is some kind of terrorist or something. I mean, they won’t even let the FBI
office here handle it. They’re flying down from Washington.’
The sergeant stood back from the window, and hitched his thumbs into his belt. ‘In any case, if we don’t find him, they sure as hell will.’
72
Sheriff Martin put down the phone and looked at the three other men settled into wingback chairs in the main room of the Kelsen County Country Club. Apart from the four of them, the room was empty. A screen in one corner looped silently through a repeat of an old US Open golf tournament.
‘This is gonna be a goddamn shit show,’ said Sheriff Martin, putting his cell phone down on a small mahogany side table next to his chair. ‘I already got a State Department attorney asking why that guy’s alias never showed up anywhere for them. Guy sounded pissed too. Wanted to know if we dropped the ball or whether we’re just a bunch of dumb rednecks.’
Across from him, Warden Castro massaged his temples with the tips of his fingers. It had been a bad few weeks and it had all started with Martin’s men picking up that vagrant. Castro had known there was something about the guy as soon as he’d laid eyes on him. They should have cut him loose instead of Romero.
‘Did they ask anything about how he managed to escape?’ Castro asked.
‘No,’ said Sheriff Martin. ‘But they will. Everyone’s going to need to come up with some answers.’
Sheriff Martin made a point of taking in Judge Kelsen and his brother, Fidelius Kelsen. Fidelius was, in every respect that mattered, the real power in the room. They were both great-great-grandsons of the man for whom Kelsen County had been named, but Fidelius was a good old boy with an eye for a business opportunity. It was Fidelius who had come up with the idea of the prison and using the inmates as near-zero-cost labor. He’d had other ideas too, and it was those ideas that everyone in the room were concerned with now.
Detaining thousands of people who hadn’t done much wrong was one thing. But what concerned Sheriff Martin was the county policy of turning a blind eye to other illegal activity in return for a share of profits. If the people from Washington started digging around Kelsen County, then everyone in the room would be going to jail for a very long time. And that was if they were lucky, and their business partners didn’t decide to head off the questioning and deal with them first.
Martin, Castro and the judge were all looking at Fidelius now. He’d had all the answers in the past. When they’d hit bumps in the road he had been the one to stay calm and resolve things. Now, more than ever, they needed him to tell them what to do.
Fidelius rested his elbows on a stomach that spilled over the top of his pants. He looked like a slightly gone-to-seed college dean. ‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘did you really think I wouldn’t have planned for this type of eventuality?’
Sheriff Martin saw the others relax a little. He wasn’t so sure, though.
‘Why else have we made campaign contributions to every single politician worth a damn to come out of Texas over the past twenty years?’ Fidelius continued. ‘Insurance for a time such as this. We have done nothing wrong. Not morally. Sure, we may have cut some corners, if you could even call it that. But these people.’ He waved a hand dismissively. ‘They come across the border illegally. They aren’t citizens. Does anyone think that the taxpayer, the people who actually pay these government bureaucrats’ salaries, will care about any of this? Hell, no. I repeat, and I want you all to remember this, we have nothing to be ashamed of. Nothing at all.’
Martin couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. This was the emergency plan? Tell the feds to go take a running jump and call in favors from a bunch of politicians who, when it came to the crunch, would be concerned only with saving their own skins? As for the taxpayers, everyone who lived here loved the low taxes, low crime and everything else that the money paid for. But, like everyone else, they’d feign the same outrage the politicians would when they found out how it was all paid for.
The nature of the general public, as Martin had learned over his years in office, was that when things ran as people liked, they didn’t want to ask any questions. It was only when it all went wrong that they discovered a sense of moral outrage. It was human nature.
Martin didn’t buy what Fidelius was saying. He wasn’t even sure that Fidelius believed it. He probably did have a contingency plan. Guys like him usually did. But it was more likely that it involved tossing everyone else in the room to the lions and distancing himself from them as fast as he could, his brother included.
Sheriff Martin’s cell phone started vibrating, working its way towards the edge of the table. He picked it up. ‘You’d better be calling me with some good news,’ he said to the person at the other end of the line.
The call was brief and the opposite of good news.
‘You know I said this was going to be a shit show?’ Sheriff Martin said, when he’d finished.
Warden Castro had gone over to the unmanned bar to pour himself another shot of bourbon.
‘Well,’ said Sheriff Martin, ‘that doesn’t even begin to cover it.’
‘Will you just tell us what the hell that phone call was?’ Judge Kelsen said.
Sheriff Martin smiled as he looked at the warden. ‘Remember that container with the rotten produce we had to dump? Well, it looks like someone just found the contents.’
Castro chugged the drink he’d just poured straight down his throat, gave up on the glass and tipped the bottle to his lips.
73
A sickly stench rose from the ground in waves. The smell was accompanied by twisting cords of steam, which Byron had always associated with rotting animal dung, until he’d encountered his first mass grave.
Hank Foley, the rancher who had called Thea, was already waiting for them when they had rolled up in the patrol car. He didn’t seem overly alarmed to see Arlo get out of the vehicle at gunpoint. Nor did he question Byron’s presence. It was as if his own grisly discovery meant that the entire world had somehow morphed into a place where it was perfectly reasonable for the local do-gooder defense attorney to be prodding a cop with a firearm.
The three of them had followed Hank’s truck to the grave. Hank parked next to a stand of live oaks. He got out and hobbled, with the help of a cane, under the trees. Arlo parked the patrol car behind the truck and they followed Hank, the smell hitting them long before they reached the grave.
Hank stopped beyond the trees and pointed with his cane. ‘I had one of my guys preparing the ground here for some new planting. We usually leave this area for cattle. He came running up, screaming about how he’d found some bodies. First I thought he’d taken something, because of how he was babbling like a crazy man. I came down to take a look for myself and there they were.’
Byron walked over to the edge of the grave. He counted twenty or so dead people. Not skeletons. Bodies. Rotting. Buried perhaps a month ago, though that was only a rough estimate.
Some were face up, others face down. A few lay on their side or with limbs hanging over the person next to them. They had been dumped, thrown in and covered as quickly as possible. Probably in the middle of the night, if the rancher hadn’t known anything about it.
Of course, that was assuming he was telling the truth, which was by no means a certainty. It was plenty possible that Hank had known about this shallow grave all along, heard that the feds were on their way down to Kelsen and panicked. Calling Thea wasn’t a bad strategy, if you wanted to cover your ass.
Thea had already dug out her phone and was taking pictures of the grave. Byron had been surprised by her stoicism since they’d arrived. She had gagged, but that was an involuntary physical reaction to the odor. She lowered her phone and turned towards him. ‘What do you think happened?’
Byron had been wondering about that. They’d need a pathologist or coroner to give them any meaningful answers. But they could likely rule out a few things. He knelt down at the edge of the freshly excavated grave. The bodies didn’t show any substantial evidence of violent trauma, such as gunshots or broken bones. They were
pretty much intact, apart from one body at the very end, which had likely been snagged by the digger, lifting it up and snapping the left leg in half. ‘Well, whatever it was,’ he said, ‘it sure as hell wasn’t natural causes. They all died at the same time.’
Arlo was standing alongside them, staring into the trench, his jaw slack. The horror of what they were looking at seemed to have dulled his immediate fear.
‘You know anything about this, Arlo?’ Thea said.
He shook his head.
‘Arlo?’ Byron said. ‘What happened to these folks?’
Arlo’s hands went to his face as it crumpled. His lower lip began to wobble. He started to sob. The rancher shot him a look of pure disgust. Men here weren’t given to naked shows of emotion. Not in front of women. Or other men. Especially not if they were sober. Definitely not if they were a cop.
Thea moved next to Arlo. ‘Arlo, if you know anything about this, you’ll feel a lot better if you get it off your chest.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Arlo said. ‘I didn’t know until it was too late.’
‘Know what?’ Byron and Thea said simultaneously.
‘Arlo!’ Hank barked. ‘Shut your mouth now.’
So he did know. At least, he knew more than he was letting on. Byron raised the gun and leveled it at him. ‘Let him talk,’ he told the rancher.
Hank Foley glared at Byron, but didn’t say any more. Byron waved him off to one side with the gun. Arlo was more likely to open up to Thea than to him. He’d leave her to play the role of confessor. That would give him the opportunity to speak with Hank.
He walked the rancher over to the furthest live oak. ‘We both know that you didn’t just find these people. For a start, what the hell were you about to start planting here? Dirt?’ Byron said to him. ‘You helped bury them, didn’t you? Maybe you did a lot more than that.’
