by Attica Locke
“The boy’s father—Bill ‘Big Kill’ King—is an ABT captain doing a twenty-year bid at the Telford Unit up near Texarkana on a slew of drug-related charges. Sales, production, armed robbery, the works.”
Never mind that he’d skated on assault charges in a separate case that had left a black man, a father of two, dead, Darren thought.
“And, lo and behold, in the time he’s been paying his debt to society,” Wilson went on, “his wife takes up with a low-level piece-of-shit hanger-on by the name of Gil Thomason who’s done a few times inside himself, for running cons, mostly. Ponzi schemes and cheating little old ladies out of their bingo money. Word is, Bill King doesn’t want his boy around the guy anymore.”
“You think this is some kind of custody deal?”
“We don’t know,” Wilson said. “But the kid’s been gone since Friday evening.”
“That’s coming on seventy-two hours,” Darren said.
Wilson nodded, both of them knowing this didn’t portend a happy ending. “The father, King,” he said, “he swears he doesn’t know where his kid is. In fact, reports from inside Telford say he’s a mess over it. He’s begging for the sheriff’s office in Jefferson to do something, to not hold the father’s crimes against the son. He even wrote a letter to the governor.” Wilson looked down for the first time at the open file folder on his desk. Sitting on top was a handwritten letter intercepted by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice from Bill King, TDCJ no. 657372212, to the governor. King had addressed it simply to Capitol Hill, Austin. Wilson pushed it across his desk to Darren. The letter had never made it to the governor, and now it rested in his black hands. He didn’t read it, not right away. He let it sit on his lap so as not to smudge the pencil markings. He said, “Seems like a local matter.”
“Officially, yes,” Wilson said. “But I’d be lying if I told you we didn’t see an opportunity here.”
“Opportunity?”
Hearing the word back, Wilson grimaced. He set his hands down hard on his desk and interlaced his thick fingers. “Look,” he said. “A little over a month from now we get a new man in the White House and a brand-new Justice Department, and who knows how the shit will shake out, if their priorities will line up with what we’ve been doing with the feds on this task force for six years. Six years, Ranger, we’ve been trying to take down this terrorist organization.”
Terrorist organization.
He’d never heard his lieutenant describe the ABT that way. And he was vaguely aware that the term was for his benefit, that Wilson was selling something.
“Twelve captains and twenty other Brotherhood rank and file are potentially on the hook in this deal. It’s a good case, Darren. Could be a game changer, the thing that dismantles the Aryan Brotherhood in this state once and for all.”
“What do you need from me?” Darren said.
“What we need is an indictment, sooner rather than later. The feds want this in front of a grand jury before the change of power in Washington. Before a Trump Justice Department mistakes the Aryan Brotherhood for some sort of honor guard. The feds are close, they say, to having enough to make it happen.”
This time, Wilson shoved the entire file across the desk. “Two members of the ABT caught in a pressure cooker of a domestic situation, each man pointing a finger at the other—”
“Is that what’s happening?”
Wilson nodded at the handwritten letter in Darren’s lap, instructing him to read it. “One of the men or the wife might start talking about Brotherhood goings-on they’ve previously been unwilling to discuss, information that could put the final touches on a bill of indictment. The FBI has not been able to attach Bill King to this larger Brotherhood case, mainly because he’s been in lockup for years now and claims he’s changed his ways. But if the wife and the new boyfriend get pissed enough, maybe—”
“You want to use the kid as leverage?”
Wilson winced at the implication. “We want to be delicate in the handling of the investigation, that’s all, so that if any secrets should spill in the course of tracking down that kid’s whereabouts, we might be able to use them.”
“You think he’s still alive?” Darren asked. He wasn’t entirely sure where the question had come from. He hadn’t read the file and knew next to nothing. It just seemed that if this was a domestic deal, the kid would have turned up by now.
The question shook Wilson; his face blanched to a pale gray. “I think it’s been almost three days, and the sooner you get to the sheriff’s office in Marion County, the better,” he said.
“Why me?” Darren asked finally. “For obvious reasons.”
“Not sure I follow,” Wilson said.
Darren hated when white folks did that, when they acted like race was something they hadn’t even considered until you brought it up. He guessed they’d been taught it was polite or something, like not mentioning you have a fleck of black pepper between your teeth. But Darren’s only takeaway was the discomfiting realization that the person sitting across from him hadn’t seen the real him for the past fifteen minutes. It was an invisibility that infuriated him. He thought he and Wilson were past all that. “Come on,” he said to his lieutenant. “You sending me into a Brotherhood mess, least you can do is tell me why.”
Wilson’s face became pinched, like he was preparing to pass a particularly difficult kidney stone. He let out a little puff of air and conceded that, yes, there were reports of a lot of racial strife in the area where the kid was from, a small lakeside community called Hopetown, fifteen miles or so from Jefferson.
“I’ve never seen a Hopetown on any Texas map,” Darren said.
“I don’t think it’s been on a map in twenty, maybe thirty years. It’s a dying little town out there, and trouble’s been stirred up by newcomers clashing with folks that’s been living there for, hell, I don’t even know how many years. Anybody wading in this thing’s gon’ need to talk to as many witnesses as he can, and they ain’t all gon’ look and talk like Brotherhood folk, if you get me.”
“There are black folks in Hopetown,” Darren said, cutting to it.
“A few, yes.”
Darren agreed to do it before he knew how he would explain this to his wife.
“There’ll be a Marion County deputy to escort you.”
“Believe I can find my way around East Texas.”
“It’s for your own protection.”
“I don’t really think it’s necessary—”
“It wasn’t a suggestion,” Wilson said, his final words on it.
“Anything in particular I should be looking for?” Darren asked.
“Any piece of paper or witness statement that can tie Bill King to Brotherhood operations, we’ll take it,” Wilson said. “It’s Hail Mary time.”
Darren stood up holding the file folder, Bill King’s letter tucked safely inside, and slid his Stetson on his head. He was due for a haircut, but there would be no time for that now. He got all the way to the door before Wilson called for him to halt. “Oh, and, Mathews,” he said, a knowing expression on his face. “No more break-ins, huh? I just got you back where I want you. Let’s don’t fuck it up.”
Darren gave his lieutenant a tight smile.
Then he tipped his hat and left.
Only to walk back in two seconds later. “Speaking of the task force,” he said, throwing it away like an afterthought, going for nonchalance. “You ever think to let San Jacinto County know that Ronnie Malvo was a snitch?”
Wilson knitted his brow. “And compromise a federal investigation?”
“Or get the DA out there to do what he should have done before Malvo was in the ground—consider other suspects.”
It wasn’t like Darren hadn’t thought of it before. The Aryan Brotherhood of Texas didn’t let snitches sing and live to tell about it. They’d just as soon cut out your tongue and make you eat it. In theory, anyone in their gang could have put a hit out on Malvo. Days Darren sat before pages and pages of Brotherhood misde
eds—ABT members suspected of everything from drug dealing to assault to straight-up murder—and he sometimes thought of how easy it would be to pluck out a name, like reaching into a bingo cage and coming out with a winning number. It scared him, how simple it would be to slap on Frank Vaughn’s desk a mug shot of a tatted-up member of the Brotherhood and say it was Ronnie Malvo’s killer, which would take the heat off Mack as the killer and off Darren as a potential accessory after the fact. He felt the disapproval of his late uncle William, who’d been a Texas Ranger too, a man Darren revered for his integrity, for the blind faith he held in the rule of law. But Darren wasn’t sure anymore that the law could withstand blindness. He’d protected Mack out of instinct, because his own read of history told him a black man should have a right to his own fear. Otherwise, he would forever be dying because of someone else’s. It’s us or them, isn’t it? The belief felt like a heavy brick in his chest, chipping away at the bones in his rib cage each time he took a breath, breaking him from the inside out. But did that make it any less true? Had anything in the weeks since the election proved his cynicism wrong? Maybe the rules had to be different. Maybe justice was no more a fixed concept than love was, and poets and bluesmen knew the rules better than we did. He remembered an old Lightnin’ Hopkins record, a song his uncle William never cared for but that William’s twin brother, Clayton, would hum with a wry smile. Yeah, I’m black and I’m evil, but this black man did not make hisself. To Clayton, justice was always relative.
Wilson gave him a funny look, then said, “My understanding is that Frank Vaughn lost a pretty solid circumstantial case in a hang-’em-high county—” Something about the image he’d painted for Darren made Wilson go red, as if he’d unexpectedly passed gas in an elevator. He cleared his throat and continued. “Vaughn had his day, he had his grand jury, and he couldn’t get an indictment. That ought to make him think twice about trying again anytime soon.”
“Or it might make him try harder.”
Wilson seemed to contemplate this for a second, then repeated his earlier directive: “Don’t fuck this up, Mathews. I’m serious. Mack ain’t your problem. That murder case ain’t your problem.” Darren couldn’t tell Wilson that he was dead wrong—not without opening up the whole sordid story of the gun and his double-dealing mama. And no way he was doing that. He simply nodded dutifully when his lieutenant told him to get to Jefferson as fast as he could.
4.
HE CALLED Lisa from the road, left two messages for her, in fact, before he reached the freeway. Her secretary promised Lisa would call back as he nosed his Chevy through the last trickle of morning rush hour, making his way through the concrete city to Highway 59, the road that would take him out of Houston and into the heart of East Texas. He drove north, toward Jefferson, a town of a little over two thousand near the Louisiana border. The case file lay open on the passenger seat of the Chevy’s cab, while the letter from Bill King rested against the steering wheel as he drove. He read it in snatches, pulling his eyes from the road for only a few seconds at a time. After he got past the town of Humble and George Bush’s airport, the task grew easier, as the buildings and strip malls, tractor dealerships and fireworks stands gave way to naked countryside—thick groves of pine trees on both sides of the highway—and the traffic thinned.
Bill King opened by quoting Deuteronomy.
He knew God wanted him to be strong and courageous, to not give in to fear, because the Lord would not forsake him. He knew this. But he reckoned God had soldiers of grace on earth, and he needed someone to find his boy. He begged the governor, addressing him by his first name, to press the sheriff of Marion County to take seriously reports of his son Levi being missing.
Darren looked up, slowing as he realized he’d inched too close to the back of the semi in front of him. He wondered just how these reports of Levi being missing had found their way to Bill King in lockup. The letter had been written Sunday—or at least, that’s when it had been put in the mail system at Telford Unit, where Bill King had served six years of a twenty-year sentence. In the letter, he admitted to being a less than Christian influence on the world and admitted to being a shitty father. The word shitty had then been scratched out and replaced with bad. But as the governor knew by now, Bill wrote—again in an odd, overly familiar tone—he was paying his debt to society and was in the process of surrendering his life to God and his faith. It would kill him to think that the government—in the form of local law enforcement—would punish his child for something Bill was already making restitution for. He hoped to leave prison soon—a word he underlined—to start a new life with his son, who was a victim not only of Bill’s bad choices but also of the man his ex-wife had living in her house, a low-life who he feared had harmed Levi either directly or through utter neglect. His ex, Marnie, and the boyfriend, Gil, had some bad dudes hanging around their house. He should know. I used to be one of those bad dudes. He went on to urge the governor to warn the sheriff against taking anything he heard out of his ex-wife’s mouth at face value, the lies she would tell on him and his family. He believed his son was in danger and that every second counted. I’m begging you, sir. Find my boy.
Darren folded the letter and set it inside the case file next to him.
It sat like a stone in his gut, the letter did.
He didn’t have kids, maybe never would at this rate. He and Lisa had talked about it a lot in the beginning, that first year when they were trying to decide whether to buy a ranch house sitting on a few acres of former prairie land in a sparsely populated subdivision northwest of the city, which Darren had wanted, or a loft in a newly revitalized downtown Houston, close to Lisa’s office and countless bars and restaurants, concert halls and art galleries, and a yoga studio she loved but rarely had time for. Lisa won, and Darren guessed it was fine they didn’t have a scratch of grass to call their own—no place for a kid to learn to ride a bike, let alone a gelding, of which Darren had two, though they resided with Mack—because after Lisa won her first big tort litigation case, talk of having a kid faded away. Darren was not a father, no, but he’d been a nine-year-old boy once, and like Levi King, it had been during a time of significant domestic strife.
That was the year he’d lost his uncle William for the first time, the year his uncle finally married Naomi—after a painfully long engagement—and started a family of his own, the year William and his twin brother, Clayton, stopped speaking to each other. The men had raised Darren after his father died in Vietnam and his mother proved to be less than equipped to look after anything small and needy, and Darren was confused and wrenched to pieces over the brothers’ breakup. Clayton, who’d been in love with Naomi for years, banned his brother from the family home in Camilla, and Darren didn’t see his uncle William for almost a year. It was the first time he’d ever truly felt like a bastard, like a boy without a family, at least not the kind of families he’d seen in movies and picture books: a mom and a dad and a couple of kids. It was just Darren and Clayton all of a sudden, and the house, his entire childhood, actually, felt empty without his beloved uncle William—the man who’d taught him how to fish, how to shoot a twelve-gauge, and how to grow tomatoes as firm and sweet as apples. Darren had always resented Clayton for sending William away, for robbing him of the other father figure in his life. It would be years before he understood the particulars of the love triangle that had destroyed his family, the lack of innocence on the part of both Naomi and William. The facts couldn’t be plainer: William had stolen Clayton’s girl right out from under him.
Clayton was a senior at Prairie View A&M when he’d first seen Naomi, a freshman in pedal pushers and a sweater set, her hair freshly pressed and curled. She was so pretty, dark brown hair and smoky, almond-shaped eyes, he would have tripped on his loose shoelace if she hadn’t slowed on the quad to point it out to him. Their eyes met, and Clayton was done for. Prairie View was the premier college for colored folks in Texas, but he almost hadn’t gone there, had almost broken Mathews tradition and enrolle
d in Wiley College in Marshall for the chance not to be known as William Mathews’s twin brother—for a few years, at least. But the moment he laid eyes on Naomi Cortland, he knew he would be grateful for the rest of his life that he’d chosen to be a PV man. William was an ROTC student at the same school, majoring in math and history, and seemed wholly indifferent to Naomi when he first met her, even calling her “scrawny” in private. He was caught up at the time with an education major from Lufkin. A few months into his courtship of Naomi, Clayton was already thinking marriage, but he didn’t want to buy a ring until he’d paid for law school. During Clayton’s third year at Texas Southern’s law school in Houston, William completed his first voluntary tour in Vietnam and returned to PV to finish his degree. William and Naomi got to talking, more than just a few passing words in the hallway of Clayton’s dormitory. There were long conversations about the war and why William had gone. He suffered from a patriotism that pulled him along by the navel, he said; it was a feeling he was always trying to catch up to, was always scratching at the heels of a love for the country he wanted America to be. He was willing to fight for the ideal, believed that duty and service could get him there. At the time, Naomi wanted to be a nurse and she understood a life of service, understood wading through blood and shit on the hope that you could fix what was broken. It’s the fight, William often said. The nobility is in the fight. Clayton, head in a law book somewhere all the way down to Houston, seemed distant to both of them, and at the dinner following Clayton’s graduation ceremony, William and Naomi sat him down in a quiet corner to tell him they were engaged. Clayton called William a cheat and Naomi a fool; she’d be a war widow by Christmas, he said, William taking a bullet for a country that would never love him back. They were words he never did take back, not even as he stood at his twin brother’s graveside after William was killed in the line of duty as a Texas Ranger.
Darren sometimes wondered if the brothers’ deep differences, the divide between the two sides of the law they represented—William, the Texas Ranger, and Clayton, the former criminal defense attorney—was colored as much by matters of the heart as by a true ideological disagreement. Later in life now, Darren could see how trying to straddle the line between the two men’s belief systems—the impulse to police crimes against black life and to protect black life from police—had gotten him into all this trouble with Mack and the Malvo murder.
