by Dave Daren
“Well, I just realized how we should talk to Thompson,” I said to push the conversation forward.
Brody’s chair gave another loud creak, and I imagined he’d moved to lean forward.
“And how do you intend to do that?” he asked with a disbelieving edge to his tone. “In case the five-hundred dollar clock debacle escaped your memory, you’re not exactly the sheriff’s favorite lawyer, kid.”
He certainly didn’t need to remind me of that fact. The scar across my knuckles served as a constant reminder of just how much Thompson disliked me.
“We ambush him at his house,” I said without any preamble.
I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before. Thompson couldn’t live at the station, and he had to go home at some point.
Brody took a few long seconds to respond, and his silence filled the space over the line.
“That’s not a bad idea,” he finally admitted with a deep sigh to punctuate his words. “We catch him without any deputies to do his bidding, might even get him off guard.”
“Exactly,” I said in agreement. “It’s not a guarantee, but nothing really is. He could kick us off his property or try to arrest us, but it’s still better odds than heading down to the station where he’s the undisputed king.”
It wasn’t until I said it aloud that I really processed the fact that Thompson could try and arrest us for trespassing if we paid him a house call, but I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. I’d bet my entire life savings that Thomspon was crooked, but I didn’t think he was corrupt enough for something like that.
At least, I prayed he wasn’t.
“Where are you now?” Brody asked as I made a small turn onto the street before the one our office sat on.
“About three minutes out on Mayhaw,” I said as I clicked my turn signal on.
I was sure that Brody could hear the click-click-click of the blinker across the line.
“I can pick you up, and we can make a house call if you aren’t too busy?” I half-asked and half-told him.
I heard Brody shift at his desk again as I waited for traffic to clear and made the turn off Mayhaw onto our street.
“I’ll see you then,” he said simply, and the line went dead.
I dropped my phone back into my lap and returned both my hands to the wheel to drive the last minute to our little parking lot. I threw the car into park but let the engine continue to idle once I’d pulled into my preferred spot.
I debated the merits of sending a text off to Brody to let him know I’d arrived, but before I could do more than think about it, I saw the familiar sight of his cowboy hat bobbing toward me from across the street.
In a few seconds, the passenger side door swung open, and he tipped the brim of his hat toward me in acknowledgement. He looked down at the seat and gave a deep sigh and a shake of his head.
“Does she have to move the seat up so far every single time?” he asked in regards to Evelyn’s car-related habits.
I gave a small laugh and a nod as I watched him press the little lever that sent the seat creeping backwards at roughly the pace of a snail.
“I’m fairly certain she does it just to piss you off,” I admitted with a wide grin on my face at his expense. I thought it was justified given that he’d laughed at me about the clock.
Once the seat was far enough back that he’d actually have room for his legs, Brody lowered himself down into the car and pulled the door shut with a loud thud. He pulled his hat off, set it in his lap, and smoothed out his hair before he looked over at me with a raised eyebrow.
“How’d you get Thompson’s address?” he asked as I picked my phone up from my lap.
“I don’t have it yet,” I admitted but wiggled my phone at him. “But I’m about to.”
It only took me a few keystrokes to pull up the same Whitepages forum I’d used to find Jackson’s address, but as I stared at the blanks that needed to be filled out, I realized I didn’t know Thompson’s first name.
I thought back to the nameplate on his desk from our encounter all those months ago, SHERIFF J. THOMPSON, and tried that.
After a few seconds where a small, buffering dial filled my screen, two addresses popped up on the screen. Both addresses were for the Crowley area, but one was for a Jessica Thompson, and the other was for a Jethro Thompson.
I barked out a surprised laugh. No wonder Thompson only had his first initial on his plaque.
Brody’s eyebrows furrowed as he looked at me and I cleared my throat to regain my composure.
“Did you know that Thompson’s first name was Jethro?” I asked as I pulled the Whitepages address up on my GPS.
The address looked like it was nearly thirty minutes away, which would put it on the very outskirts of town. I tried to parse through my memories of the town map to place what was in the area, but came up blank.
“His name is Jethro?” Brody asked with a snort as his eyebrows shot up. “No wonder he’s such a damn jackass.”
I grinned as I shifted the car back into drive and started out of the parking lot.
“I know it doesn’t change the fact he’s a scumbag, but it does make me feel just a little better,” I admitted.
Brody snorted in what I assumed was agreement as I pulled onto the street and started off in the direction of Thompson’s home address, or at least, I hoped it was Thompson’s home address.
The first few minutes of the drive went by in companionable silence before Brody cleared his throat.
I spared him a quick, curious glance before looking back at the road.
“You figure things out with Clara?” he asked.
Brody was never the sort of man to try and sheepishly beat around the bush. He always just said whatever it was he wanted to say, and I could appreciate that sort of candidness, even when it was at my expense.
I cleared my throat and shifted in my seat.
“We set a time for dinner tomorrow night,” I said in a poor attempt at casualness.
Brody gave a grunt of acknowledgement, and it sounded like he was pleased by my response.
“Good,” he said with another nod, and that was that.
As candid as he was, Brody also wasn’t the type to sit around and gush about feelings, at least in my experience.
“What should we even say to Thompson?” I asked in a clear attempt to change the subject for both of our benefits.
Brody seemed to pick up on my desperation and threw me a bone.
“I was planning on asking you the same thing, kid,” he said with a laugh.
I chuckled and drummed my fingers against the steering wheel as I tried to sort through my cluttered thoughts. There were certainly plenty of things I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t sure where to begin.
“Well,” I mused. “I think asking him about the items on auction that weren’t on the roster on the website would be a good start.”
It was practically a softball question because there were so many explanations that weren’t nefarious.
Maybe they were late additions to the auction, and no one had the thought to add them to the website, or maybe the website could only handle a certain number of items before it threw off the formatting. Even if they were lies, there were still things that Sheriff Thompson could say instead of simply throwing us off his property, and that’s what I had decided to bank on.
Brody gave a slow nod and scratched at his chin as he seemed to be lost in his own thoughts.
“Not a bad idea,” Brody said. “Easy enough of a question that it might keep his defenses down. We should also ask him about what happened with Natalie to see if we can get any more insights into that situation.”
I made a small sound of agreement as I slowed to a stop at a red light. I still couldn’t quite picture where exactly it was that Thompson lived. Save for my extended getaway drive from Knox’s goons months before, I didn’t have much experience on the outskirts of Crowley, and I was beginning to regret that.
“Do you think that Nata
lie was embellishing what happened?” I asked with a quick glance over toward Brody.
I tried to get a read on his expression as I accelerated through the newly green light, but he shifted in his seat and studied the trees by the side of the road, so I couldn’t see his face clearly.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted and then sighed. “I didn’t talk to her, but I was able to hear her while you two discussed the case. Doesn’t she come across as a little… scattered?”
I couldn’t lie and tell Brody that no, Natalie didn’t come across as scattered, because she very clearly did. After I’d spoken with her, I felt like I had just run an entire marathon. But despite her high energy and rapid fire method of holding a conversation, I couldn’t shake my bone-deep conviction that she had told me the truth.
Brody turned to look at me, and he seemed to sense this on my face. He raised his hands up in a show of mock-surrender before he continued on.
“I’m not saying she’s lying,” he amended. “I’m just saying she seems like a bit of a space cadet and might have missed some details we could potentially fill in by talking to Thompson.”
I glanced toward the GPS since it hadn’t spoken in some time, but apparently, we were still on the right road. In fact, we’d been on this winding road for most of the trip, and I realized that I didn’t have a good reason to ignore the question the man next to me had posed.
“So, you’re thinking that if we get Thompson’s side of things, we might be able to connect some dots,” I repeated Brody’s reasoning just to make sure I understood and waited for him to give me a nod before I continued on. “No matter his reaction, we should be able to glean something from it.”
He dusted what appeared to be non-existent specks of dust from the brim of his cowboy hat as it rested in his lap.
“If he doesn’t attempt to shoot us on sight,” said Brody.
It sounded like a joke right up until his words tapered off. I didn’t legitimately think that Thompson would attempt to shoot us, but I wasn’t entirely convinced of that. The daggers he’d been staring at me earlier in the day had made his own opinion of me clear, and I had to admit that visiting an armed man without announcing my plans beforehand wasn’t sounding like such a genius idea.
“What’s our end goal after this conversation, anyhow?” Brody asked.
I opened and closed my mouth as I tried to formulate a reply.
I knew that we needed to talk to Thompson if we wanted answers. The stories we’d heard from the people who had alleged unlawful civil asset forfeiture all tied back to him and his deputies. And then there was his angry reaction when he saw me at the auction. There had been something deeper than just mistrust.
But it all felt like speculation that we couldn’t bring past anecdotal evidence, like a large piece of the puzzle had simply vanished into thin air. I thought that if we could talk to the sheriff, we might have a chance at figuring out where that missing piece had gone.
“We need to figure out why people are having their things taken,” I said. “And we need to figure out if Thompson’s corruption runs any deeper than what we’ve already speculated.”
It was a good starting point, but it still didn’t feel like enough.
“Do you think that Knox still somehow has him under his thumb?” Brody asked. “It seems unlikely given everything, but stranger things have certainly happened.”
I exhaled a breath and took a slow turn. Another car whizzed by us in the other lane, and when I glanced in my rearview mirror, I saw the car cut across our lane as it took the curve too quickly.
“I’m not sure,” I admitted with a sigh. “But I can’t imagine that’s the case. Ever since the EPA shut down the petrochemical plant, Knox has steered clear of Crowley. If anything, I think part of Thompson’s vendetta against me is because he’s no longer getting his pockets filled.”
I chewed at my lower lip as I continued to brainstorm how we needed to approach the situation with the sheriff.
Money was obviously a strong motivator, but was whatever they were making off the monthly auctions enough to make the entire department turn against me, or was that just because they were loyal to Thompson?
I had too many questions and not nearly enough answers.
How deep did all of this run? It felt like we were trying to tread water in the middle of the ocean, as if we’d just scratched the barest surface of what was actually going on in our town.
Brody and I lapsed into another silence as we were left to our own thoughts on the matter. I could practically feel him shuffling through all the same thoughts that occupied my mind.
Were the police raids unfounded? Did they generate enough revenue from occasional auctions to really sustain whatever racket they were after, and what racket were they even after? Was Thompson back on someone’s payroll?
He strutted around town like he was judge, jury, executioner, and a god to boot. That sort of confidence had to come from somewhere, and I didn’t think it was just a badge.
Before I could give Thompson’s apparent god complex much more thought, I turned onto the road the GPS indicated was his street. My breath caught in my throat as I caught sight of the singular house that sat along the stretch of Palmer Grove Road.
To my left, I heard the same sort of sound escape Brody, and the man sat up in his seat so quickly that he nearly knocked his cowboy hat from his lap.
“There’s no way this can be the right house, can it?” Brody asked in obvious disbelief.
I couldn’t even find the words I wanted to say aloud, because in front of us sat the largest mansion I’d ever seen in person.
Chapter 9
The house was massive, larger than anything else we’d passed on our way here. It looked like the sort of home someone would purchase if they wanted everyone to know exactly how fat their bank account was.
House wasn’t even the correct term for what it was, and I found myself wanting to call it a mansion, but that didn’t feel quite accurate, either.
Mansions always conjured images of the genteel South and old money in my mind, but this place was something that only someone new to wealth purchased, the sort of house built in a handful of years and outdated in just as many.
The yard was nearly the length of a football field, and a massive wrought-iron fence wrapped around the property. An ostentatious iron gate sat open at the mouth of the long, winding driveway.
The grass was the sort of vibrant green I thought only existed in commercials for retirement communities or lawn care advertisements. Despite the dry spell Crowley had recently experienced, there wasn’t a square inch of grass that was less than perfect.
That, I realized, might have had something to do with the lawn crew spread out across the sprawling patch of land. It had taken me a moment to even notice the dozen or so men dressed in tan coveralls like the sort I’d expect to see a mechanic wearing.
From our position on the road, I could barely make out the men nearest to the house. They were no more than specks thanks to the sheer length of the driveway.
I glanced over at Brody and noticed that his eyebrows had risen all the way up to his hairline, and I’m sure I looked equally as shocked as I took in the monstrosity at the other end of the drive.
“Should we...?” I asked and trailed off as I looked back to the open gate again.
The iron curled and swooped in graceful arcs along the width of the gates themselves while the rest of the fence swooped up to decorative spikes every foot or so.
It’s not like we’d be breaking in, after all, because the gate was wide-open.
Brody didn’t offer a response, which I took to be a go-ahead, and so I flipped on my blinker and waited to make sure there wasn’t any traffic coming from behind me on the deserted street before I turned into the mouth of the Thompson residence.
The driveway itself was made of packed-down gravel that felt a bit at odds with the glamour of the rest of the property, but I supposed something had to be deemed unimportant when it
came to landscaping. I barely broke five miles an hour as I drove the length of the drive up toward the wide expanse of asphalt where I assumed the Thompsons’ parked their vehicles, given I didn’t see a garage of any sort in the area.
“Have you ever hired a landscaper?” I asked as I glanced out my window toward a man who was pushing a lawn mower that looked impossibly familiar.
Brody gave a hearty laugh before he realized I wasn’t joking.
“No,” he said with a shake of his head as he peered out his own window. “Too expensive, and it’s not like I can’t mow my own damn yard.”
Brody had that level of pride in his lawn care abilities that seemed to come preset as soon as you became a father.
I gave a small nod and chewed at the inside of my cheek.
“And you’re a lawyer,” I stated the obvious.
Brody tore his attention away from the lawn and looked back at me with a raised eyebrow, as if to remind me that he was aware of his profession.
I looked back at Brody as I slowed the car into the driveway outlet and started to follow the circle of the asphalt so I’d face the road in case we needed to make some sort of speedy getaway.
“So do you think that a small county sheriff should be able to afford over a dozen gardners?” I asked him with a raised eyebrow.
A look of realization flashed across Brody’s face as he looked back at the men that prowled across the landscape, and then he swore softly under his breath.
Fortunately, there weren’t any other cars in the driveway outlet, so we had a clear path to the gate if we needed it. Unfortunately, it made me think that maybe Thompson hadn’t finished up whatever it was he needed to do after the auction, or maybe he’d gone straight back to the department building in the center of town.
Or, worst of all, we really did have the wrong address, and this house belonged to a perfectly pleasant man named Jethro with a taste for the shinier things in life.
I threw the car into park and leaned back in my seat for a moment as I tried to process what we should do. The size and style of the house alone set off a thousand warning bells in my mind, but once I factored in the gardeners, things started to seem even worse than I’d anticipated.
