Bull Mountain

by Brian Panowich

  Clayton thumbed the hammer back. “Bullshit. I had this under control. You killed him to keep him from fingering you.”

  “Fingering me for what? You’re talking crazy.”

  “Am I? He told me Bankey had a federal agent feeding him information on the robbery. He said it was a fed with intimate knowledge about the players moving the money.”

  Holly looked at the bags of cash. “And you think that agent is me?”

  “I know you just killed the only man capable of helping me make that distinction.”

  Holly slowly held the shotgun out with both hands, bent over, and slid it across the floor to Clayton. “Well, that’s insane, but if you want to play out this little fairy tale, so be it. Here . . .” He removed his sidearm and slid that over to Clayton, too. The sheriff stopped it with his boot and kicked it out the back door. He holstered his Colt and picked up the shotgun. “Now let’s take a ride.”

  “I’m your friend, Clayton. You’re making a mistake.”

  “If I am, I’ll apologize, but right now, you and me are going to drive to Waymore and have a chat with the Bureau, and see if I can sort all this out.” He motioned the barrel of the gun toward the front door. Holly started to walk.

  “What about all your money?” he said.

  “It ain’t my money.”

  “So you’re just going to leave it there, sitting in your boy’s blood?”

  “You’re going to pay for that boy’s murder,” Clayton said.

  Holly sighed and turned around to face the sheriff. His eyes were different now. That shark smile was back and every sense of urgency had left him. If anything, Clayton thought he looked disappointed.

  “Why am I the one going to pay?” Holly said. “You’re the one that killed him. You came in here and decided that all the money was better than half the money, so you executed the poor bastard with his own shotgun. That’s pretty brutal, man.”

  “Nobody is going to believe that.”

  “Of course they will. I mean, come on. When Halford found out it was you that ripped him off, he was so pissed he brought his big ass down the mountain personally to kill you. He hasn’t come off the mountain in years. Everyone in that shithole dust farm you live in saw that. They also saw you kill him.”

  “And that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  “Either way would have been fine by me. You kill him. He kills you. If it would’ve worked out the other way, I just would’ve called the big son of a bitch and told him his money was in here with the dipshit Indian that stole it. One way or another, I’d still be standing here, and one of you bags of shit would be standing there.”

  “So everything you said about a bloodless takedown was bullshit.”

  “Nobody bled that didn’t need it comin’.” Holly glanced down at the headless corpse of Deputy Frasier. “Except maybe him.”

  “All this for a couple hundred grand?”

  Holly laughed. “You really are dumber than you look, Clayton.”

  Clayton felt a nerve in his eyelid twitch and gripped the shotgun with white knuckles. “It was all bullshit. You never had anything on Halford. No task force. No knowledge of his operations.”

  “No, some of that was true. There was never any plan to move against your brother, but I do know everything about his empire.” Holly smiled wider and his eyes darkened. “You want to know how I found out?”

  Clayton mashed his teeth.

  “Your brother Buckley told me, before I killed him.”

  “You’re a fucking liar.”

  “Before I set him up to have my team put several hundred bullets in him, I picked him up for a little one-on-one and convinced him to talk to me. After three days of withdrawal from your family’s honeypot, he told me all kinds of shit about Halford, you, this place, this cabin, times, locations, all of it. That idiot knew it all and gave it up just to keep a steady flow of crank in his veins. It sucks having a junkie in the family. There’s no telling what they’ll do to stay high. Believe me, I know. I bet that retard would’ve blown me if I’d wanted him to.”

  “I ought to kill you where you stand.”

  “Well, do it, then, Sheriff Burroughs.” Holly dragged out his words, mocking the title of sheriff. “Stop pretending you’re something you’re not. You’re a piece-of-shit hillbilly gangster like your dead daddy and all your dead brothers, but you know what? You’re the worst of them all because you hide behind that star and think it masks who you really are. Buckley gave you up, too. He told me all about his brother the sheriff, who turned a blind eye to everything going on up here. At least the rest of them admitted to being outlaws. You’re just another criminal who thinks he can dress up like one of the good guys and that washes the stink off him.”

  Clayton glared at Holly. “Nothing like you, huh?”

  “We’re more alike than you think, Clayton.” Holly reached around into the small of his back.

  Clayton pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  “You rednecks and your long guns. I knew you’d go for the shotgun over that Colt.”

  Clayton tossed the empty shotgun at Holly, but he was ready for it and sidestepped it. He pulled his backup nine-millimeter, but Clayton was on him and grabbed his hand. Holly fired, but the first two shots went into the ceiling—the third through the screen door. Clayton shoved Holly hard into the wall and banged his hand over and over into the wood until the gun fell to the floor with a thud. Holly went for Clayton’s Colt, but the sheriff hooked him around the throat with his forearm and landed a solid blow to Holly’s gut. Holly gasped for air and slid down the wall to his knees. Clayton pulled the Colt and pressed the barrel to the agent’s forehead.

  “Well, go ahead, Sheriff. You’re Gareth Burroughs’s son. Do what you do best.”

  “I should. I should kill you like you did that boy over there, and then I should bury your body in the woods like my deddy would’ve done.” Clayton took two steps back. “But I’m not my deddy. Now get up.”

  Holly slowly rose to his feet. “You better kill me, Sheriff.”

  “You have the right to remain silent.”

  Holly laughed. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  “You’re a joke, Clayton. You’re a perversion of the law.”

  Clayton spun him around and shoved him toward the front door. “Put your hands on your head.”

  “This is not how it’s gonna end, Clayton.”

  Clayton shoved him again, this time pressing the gun between Holly’s shoulder blades, pushing him out onto the porch. “It’s Sheriff Burroughs,” he said. “Now put your hands on your head, or I can start beating on you. Your choice.”

  Holly did as he was told, and both men took the steps down to the gravel.

  “You have the right to an attorney. If you can’t afford one, one will be appointed to you. Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?”

  Holly spit blood into the gravel and kept walking. Clayton limped behind him, nudging him every foot or so with the barrel of the gun. When they reached the middle of the clearing, Holly stopped. “Can I ask you to do something for me, Clayton?”

  “Just keep moving.”

  “Seriously, I just want to know if you’ll send our daddy my regards when you get to hell?”

  “What?”

  “Gun!” Holly yelled, and dropped flat to his belly.

  “What are you . . .” The half-dozen pinpoints of red light hovering on Clayton’s chest caused the rest of his sentence to lodge in his throat.

  He closed his eyes and pictured Kate.

  The first shot from a high-powered rifle hit him in the chest. It pushed him backward but not off his feet. Maybe it was the confusion of the moment or Choctaw’s whiskey dulling his senses, but Clayton didn’t dr
op his gun. Instead, he swung the Colt a half-turn to the left before the second shot hit him right below the first. It hit like a sledgehammer, and Clayton buckled. It was over in seconds. He never stood a chance. Dozens of agents in body armor and blue windbreakers emerged from the tree line, just as Clayton’s body hit the gravel. Holly took his hands from his face, opened his eyes, and crawled over to Clayton’s shaking body. He was still breathing, but blood filled his mouth and streaked down his beard. His eyes were wide.

  “You make sure you tell him this mountain belongs to me now, big brother. You tell him it belongs to Marion’s boy.”

  Clayton choked out a cough that could have been a laugh and looked at the sky.

  “You tell him, brother.” Holly rolled over onto his back. “You tell him . . .”

  Clayton struggled for air and bled into the dirt less than a quarter mile from the buried bones of his great-uncle Riley. He could hear Holly talking but could only see Kate lifting yellow caution tape and walking away.

  Holly gripped a hand over his breast pocket—the pocket that held the tattered photo of him as a boy sitting in the grass with his mother at a small carnival back in Mobile. He closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the amusement park rides. The organ music. He smelled the thick aroma of fried dough in the air mixed with his mother’s lavender perfume. He didn’t remember much more about that day, but he’d committed every detail of the photo to memory. “It’s done, Mama,” he said to himself. “I got every last one of them.”

  4.

  “Are you all right, Simon?” Agent Jessup asked, and helped Holly to his feet.

  “Yeah, I am, now. None of this blood is mine. It belongs to the poor bastard inside. The good sheriff here blew his head off with the shotgun you’ll find inside the cabin.”

  Jessup looked down at the field medics assessing Clayton’s wounds. “Nothing worse than a dirty cop,” he said.

  Holly agreed.

  CHAPTER

  25

  OSCAR WILCOMBE

  JACKSONVILLE, FLORIDA

  2015

  Full black was beginning to give way to pinhole stars and flashes of light from the corners of Oscar Wilcombe’s eyes. His head was pounding, a crushing throb in time with his revved-up heart rate. Thick blood and dehydration—it felt like waking up after a night of heavy drinking. He tried to lift his arms to rub the dry sleep from his eyes, but they were made of wet sand. All his efforts resulted in a small shrug of his shoulder. He could hear the chatter of other people around him, but it came in waves crashing over his returning senses. He was trying to think—to remember. He’d been sitting at his desk, going over Bianca’s ledger. He remembered her leaving, and then a sharp pain in his neck—a needle, maybe—then nothing. He’d been drugged. That had to be it. His awareness was flooding back and he made another attempt to reach up and probe his neck. He couldn’t move. It wasn’t just whatever he was injected with, though. His arms were stuck on something—stuck in something. Someone had taken him from his office, drugged him, and put him in something.

  “Wake up.” There was a blurred outline of someone in front of him. A flash of intense heat stung his face, and his sight sharpened. His face didn’t burn. It wasn’t heat. It was water. Ice water. He shook his head, crushed his eyes shut, and opened them again.

  “Bracken? Bracken, is that you? What’s the meaning of this? Where am I?”

  “Welcome back, Oscar.” Bracken stood in front of his captive, holding a lit cigarette in one hand, and a now empty Big Gulp cup in the other. He took a long drag on the butt as Wilcombe took in his surroundings.

  “Bracken, what is going on here?” He swiveled his head back and forth, freed from his temporary blindness to see the huge tin-framed facade of Warehouse One. He knew the place well. He had had it built. The warehouse was a place the club used to do the kind of business that needed seclusion. Business Wilcombe never did himself. Primer-gray Harley frames in various degrees of disrepair and stacks of used tires in all shapes and sizes were scattered about the yard. Everything was rusted and choked out by overgrown grass and weeds. It had been a long time since this place had been used. Behind Bracken and the other members of the Jacksonville Jackals’ inner circle loomed a massive airbrushed club insignia painted on the side of the building: an eight-foot cartoon jackal wearing crisscross bandoliers, holding twin .45s, under a scrolling banner spelling out the MC’s name in Old English.

  “We need to have a conversation,” Bracken said.

  “Whatever this is about, Bracken, I demand you untie me and get me out of whatever this is you have me in.”

  Bracken crushed his cigarette out on Wilcombe’s cheek. The pain shot through him like a blade. He screamed. He was wide awake now.

  “You don’t make demands, Oscar. Not anymore.”

  “Jesus, Bracken,” the old man shouted, frantically shaking from side to side, struggling to free himself. “Let me out of here this instant,” he said.

  “We had a couple of the prospects come out here a few years back and bolt together a couple stacks of truck tires for situations like this one. We had to take two of them off of the one you’re in, just so I could talk to you face-to-face.”

  Wilcombe shook about, slightly rocking the steel-belted cocoon back and forth.

  “It took Moe nearly an hour to break off the rusted bolts to get it to fit a tiny little man your size.” Bracken called back over his shoulder, “What do you say, Moe? About an hour?”

  Moe looked up from the concrete picnic table he was sitting on and nodded. “Yup, about that.”

  “As you can see, we went through a lot of trouble to accommodate you, so I’m hoping to have an open, honest discussion here. Can we do that, Oscar?”

  The gravity of the situation crushed down on Wilcombe as hard as the dry-rotted rubber prison, so he played the only card he had available.

  “Of course we can, Bracken, we’re family. We can talk about anything. Whatever it is, I’m sure we can straighten it out.”

  “Family,” Bracken said, dragging out the word.

  “Of course we are. Our fathers—”

  “Our fathers are dead,” Bracken said, finishing Wilcombe’s sentence. “And I would say tonight, I’m glad of it. If they could see what a spineless-rat piece of shit you turned out to be, they both would have died out of sheer disappointment.”

  “Bracken, listen to me.” Sweat formed on Wilcombe’s bald scalp, dripping salt into his eyes and the fresh cigarette burn on his face. He let the tears come to reinforce his play at sympathy. “Whatever you think you know has to be a mistake. Someone is telling you lies. I would never turn on you, or this club. My father helped build this club.”

  “You sold me out to those hillbillies in Georgia, Oscar. You talked to the feds and gave up the route. I guess you thought we’d all be killed or locked up, but it didn’t go down that way, and here we are.”

  Wilcombe scanned the crowd of bikers. “Bracken, you’ve got it all wrong,” he said, doing his best to look surprised. “I lost a lot of money and a lucrative business partner after that hijacking went down.”

  Bracken hammered a left jab to the old man’s jaw. He thought he heard bones break. “The feds shut you down, and you fed them me and my boys plus two hundred thousand in bonus cash to save your own ass.”

  “No, Bracken, that isn’t what happened. I swear to you.” Blood covered Wilcombe’s teeth and dripped from his split lip. Bracken tapped out another cigarette and lit it with a flick from a silver Zippo. He held the Marlboro up with two fingers. “Maybe you need a matching reminder on the other side of your face not to lie to me.”

  “No. Wait.” Wilcombe paused for dramatic effect. “I thought your man, the Latin one . . .”

  “Romeo?” Moe said from the picnic table.

  “Yes, that’s it. Romeo. I thought he went AWOL once you got home? I thought he was the one wor
king with the police. I can help you find him. I can hire someone to find him.”

  “You would do that?”

  “Of course I would. We are family.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bracken said, and scratched his head. “You mean this guy?” The bay door of the warehouse slid open and two more members of the Jackals dragged a broken and bloodied Romeo out into the yard. They dropped the barely conscious biker at Bracken’s feet and stood with him.

  Bracken rested a leather boot on Romeo’s swollen face and pointed down. “This the piece of shit you’re talking about?”

  They weren’t supposed to find him, Wilcombe thought. After he used Romeo to keep Bracken and his men safe during the hijacking, Wilcombe set him up with everything he needed to disappear. A new name, a new ID, money, even a few acres of cattle ranch in South Texas.

  “As you can see, Oscar, we already found him.” Bracken ground his boot down on Romeo’s head, causing more blood to ebb down the sides of his beaten face. “You want to know how we found him?”

  Wilcombe said nothing.

  “I got a call from a friend of yours. A federal agent named Holly. Turns out he hates your guts. He told me exactly what he did to you and how you gave us up inside of two minutes. Then he told me right where to find this wetback sack of shit, who basically organized the whole thing. So tell me again, just one more time, that I got it wrong. Tell me why you shouldn’t die tonight.”

  Wilcombe spoke softly and without hope. “Because we are family. And family forgives.”

  “No. This is what my family does.” He pointed a gloved hand at Moe, who stood up, walked over, produced a small-caliber pistol, and shot Romeo in the side of the head. Then he sat back down and resumed cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife.

  Bracken pointed again, this time to one of the elder statesmen of the club. A man named Pinkerton Sayles. The rail-thin ex-barkeep had come out of retirement just for tonight’s festivities. He reached down next to a brick barbecue pit and produced a rusted metal gas can.