by Ninie Hammon
She heard a rap-rap-rap on the locked front office door and looked at the clock—exactly 5:30. That would be Callison County Sheriff Sonny Tackett. She’d called him earlier in the afternoon and asked him to stop by.
He greeted her with a smile. “How you holdin’ up?”
Sarabeth scratched around inside herself for a return smile, but couldn’t locate one anywhere. “There was a man at the funeral home when Daddy died, a guy who looked like a turtle. He expressed it pretty well, said, ‘When the good Lord sends you tribulations, he intends for you to tribulate.’”
Sonny followed her into her office.
“The reason I asked you to come by is … I mean …” She couldn’t get the words out.
When the idea had first struck her, it had seemed brilliant. And the plan that followed had just sort of blossomed out of nowhere. But now, hours later, so utterly tired, she feared she wouldn’t be able to summon the energy to make sense of it for Sonny.
“You don’t need a reason,” he said and sat down on the couch. “If you just need somebody to talk to, I’m in. Says right there on the side of my cruiser: ‘To protect and to serve.’ And the ‘serve’ part, that’s in my other job description, too. It’s called multi-tasking.”
Then she did smile.
“How do you manage it?” she asked. “Do what you do, see what you see every day without becoming cynical or callous?”
“There’s this thing about power made perfect in weakness, but now’s probably not be the best time for that conversation. Just remember what I told you about right and wrong, good and evil. It’s not a fair fight. I know who wins in the end.”
She looked into his steady gaze, took a breath and exhaled slowly. And when she started talking, she felt calmer. “I’ve got a plan to save Ben and catch Bubba Jamison.”
Sonny sat up straight. “That’s some plan! Where’d it come from?”
“It’s sort of like Tecumseh.” She watched that blow right by him. “The Indian Chief Tecumseh claimed he wasn’t born, said he’d burst full-grown from an oak tree. That’s the way this idea came to me.”
“I’m listening.”
“Jennifer Jamison and Kelsey Reynolds. Why do you think they were together out there on the riverbank this morning?”
“Whoa! You might want to announce: ‘new topic, no transition,’ so I could keep up with what you’re talking about. How did we get there?”
“It’s not a new topic. I’ve talked to a lot of people about those girls today.” She’d gone to the high school after classes let out, hung out at band practice, watched cheerleader try-outs, sat in the stands while the drill team warmed up. It hadn’t been hard to gather information. Every kid had a story they were eager to tell her.
“They were loners, outcasts. They had no friends—including each other. No one had ever seen the two of them have a conversation.”
“So what’s your point?”
“I could only find one thing Jennifer and Kelsey had in common.”
Finally, the light bulb blinked on above Sonny’s head.
“Both their fathers are dopers.”
“Right. Now here’s the part that’s a stretch. There are … well, according to your estimates, there are hundreds of dopers in Callison County.”
“I never said hundreds.”
“Dozens, then. So how did the daughters of two of them hook up unless—I said this was a stretch—maybe their fathers worked together. That would have been a bond they shared that nobody else knew about.”
“Not ‘together.’ If Bubba Jamison was involved, he was in charge.”
“That’s what I figured. So maybe Billy Joe works for Bubba.”
“For the sake of discussion, I’ll buy it. I still don’t see what this has to do with saving Ben and catching our friend Mr. Jamison?”
“I think I could talk Billy Joe into turning on Bubba.”
Sonny almost choked. “Earth to Sarabeth! Listen to yourself. Why would Billy Joe Reynolds—?”
“Because he’s B.J. He’s Bije. You don’t know him like I do.” She lifted her hand before he could protest. “I know he’s a doper. But underneath it all, he’s a good man. And marijuana is destroying his family.”
Sonny said nothing.
“Have you ever met his wife?”
“I’ve pulled Becky Reynolds over twice and Anderson Bertram got her off both times. She’s a train wreck.”
“And now Kelsey …” Sarabeth’s voice quavered. Sonny reached over and patted her hand and she finished in a strangled whisper. “His whole life’s coming apart!”
“I won’t argue that part. But to turn Bubba in, Billy Joe would have to come clean, own up to being a doper, too. That admission will land him in the iron house. You really think he’d be willing to do that?”
“Wouldn’t the state cut him some kind of deal in exchange for his testimony?”
“A deal, yes. Immunity from prosecution, not likely.”
“His wife’s a drug addict.” Sarabeth hung her head and her red curls tumbled down and hid her face. “His teenage daughter just tried to kill herself and now she’s blind. I think it’s worth a try to—”
“And I agree.”
Sarabeth’s head snapped up. “You do?”
Sonny smiled. “I do. I’m not convinced it’s going to work, but Tecumseh is worth a shot. What have we got to lose? Worst-case scenario—Billy Joe says no.”
Actually, that wasn’t the worst-case scenario. The worst thing that could happen was far more horrible than either of them could ever have imagined.
• • • • •
Seth had shown up on the courthouse steps Tuesday morning before the building was even unlocked and had way-laid the sheriff on his way to his office.
Now he felt exposed. Like those dreams you have about being in a public place naked.
But Seth didn’t think Sonny Tackett would decide he was imagining little pink bunnies. He’d never had any dealings with the sheriff to speak of, had only chatted with him a time or two in the courthouse. He knew the man’s character, though. Through fires, floods, wrecks—tragedy and danger—he’d seen how Sonny conducted himself. He was the real deal. Besides, Seth had sensed that Sarabeth trusted him. That was high praise.
On Sonny’s part, he had to concentrate really hard to get past the fact that this big dark-haired dude was apparently the man in Sarabeth Bingham’s life. Sonny had never asked, of course, but he was pretty good at reading body language. He’d seen them at house fires and car accidents, trying not to stare at each other. And the day they’d found Maggie Mae Davis’ body. Sonny genuinely wanted to dislike the man, but he was having a rough go. What he had done was impressive. And if Seth McAllister was right …
“Let’s start over,” Sonny said. The two men were sitting together in Sonny’s cramped office. Its size made Seth seem even bigger than he was, and Sonny thought he was big enough already, thank you very much. “You’re jumping ahead of me and I need to understand it from the beginning.”
“I guess I was talking fast because I wanted to get it all out before you chucked me out of your office on my ear or had me carted off to the Kentucky Home for the Bewildered.”
“Just tell it to me slow. I’m listening.”
Seth started over, telling the sheriff about the owner of Cassidy and Sons Distributing Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and describing the conversation in which John had told him about the barn full of marijuana and the copy of The Callison County Tribune.
“That was in Muskogee County, right?” Sonny wrote it down. “Muskogee County Sheriff’s Department?”
“That’s what John told me. So I guess you’d be looking for Deputy Sheriff Cassidy, John’s brother. That’s who John said told him about the newspaper.”
“And that’s all he said, right?”
Seth nodded.
Sonny put his pen down and looked at Seth in wonder. “How in the Sam Hill did you get from a barn full of dope in Oklahoma to a national network of d
ope growers all over the country, masterminded by somebody here in Callison County?”
Seth stood up and would have paced back and forth as he talked if there’d been room to take more than two of his long strides before he had to turn around. “I had absolutely zero reason to believe that what John said meant anything. Shoot, it didn’t even prove the dopers in Oklahoma were from Callison County, let alone that they were a part of some grand conspiracy. Maybe somebody from Brewster sends the hometown newspaper to Uncle Bob in Tulsa. It could be as simple as that.”
“You didn’t think it was, though.”
“No, I didn’t, but you need to understand that I had no reason to believe otherwise. It was just a hunch.” Seth reached up and ran both hands through his black hair. “Sounds ridiculous, I know, but my father always told me to trust my gut.” “Our fathers must have been friends; my daddy told me the same thing.” Sonny looked up at Seth’s 6-feet 7-inch frame. “They were probably on the same basketball team.”
Seth didn’t drop a beat. “Your father play shooting guard, did he?”
“Nope. Center.”
Sonny gestured toward the chair. “Sit down, you’re blocking out so much light I’m gonna get Seasonal Affective Disorder.”
Seth sat back down in Sonny’s overstuffed armchair.
“So you figured, ‘What the heck, I don’t have anything else to do today, I’ll just call 187—”
“No, 185.”
“Excuse me, 185 of my close personal friends all over America and ask them a bunch of questions they can’t answer. I got this right so far?”
“Yeah, but you left out the part about how these people are my customers and I’m grilling them for information about illegal drugs. That about covers it.”
Sonny had to ask, though he knew the answer already. “Why?”
Seth paused. “Because I’m sick and tired of watching dope destroy people.”
Sonny knew the specific “people” Seth was talking about, but let it slide.
“What exactly did you say?”
“Well, after about a dozen calls, I had a rap down. Told them marijuana-growing was a big problem in my community, said I was doing a little investigation of my own to see if I could find out if any Callison County dopers had taken their show on the road. Then I just went fishing. I asked what they knew about dope—busts, confiscations, anything—where they lived.”
“And what did you find out?”
“Absolutely zero from 181 of them.”
“And the remaining four?”
“They’re the other robins that make it spring.” He started to explain the bird analogy, but it was plain Sonny understood. Apparently, their grandmothers had played on the same basketball team, too.
Then Seth gave the sheriff a specific, detailed description of what the distributors in New York Mills, Minnesota; Aberdeen, Kansas; Tupelo, Mississippi and Amarillo, Texas had told him.
In all four locations, police had discovered the remains of huge marijuana-growing operations in places where there’d never been so much as a lone dope plant in the ground before. In all four cases, the dopers had signed crop-share leases for the land, which meant until their crops, supposedly soybeans or cotton, were sold, the landlords didn’t get paid. So the dopers got to use free fields to grow acres of marijuana.
“In Texas, they made an arrest, a local guy, and based on what my distributor friend could remember of the story about it on TV, he wasn’t saying much. But apparently he was some dumb cowboy and nobody could figure out how he suddenly knew so much about how to grow high-test marijuana.
“In Aberdeen, the police fingerprinted the house where the workers were living. Maybe they did in all the other places, too, I’m just telling you what my sources remembered about something they saw on the news or read in the paper. You can make some phone calls of your own to find out the details.”
Sonny had been taking notes furiously the whole time Seth was talking. He looked up then, a little sheepish himself. “You know that big pile of dirt you had to walk around to come up the courthouse steps?”
Seth nodded.
“They dug up the sewer pipe yesterday leading to three clogged johns in the basement. Cut right through the courthouse’s buried telephone cables. Patched it up for local calls only today. But you can bet your granny’s sweet bippy I’ll be calling all these places as soon as I can.”
“You might want to call the folks in Aberdeen first.”
“Because?”
“The Aberdeen police ran the fingerprints and got hits on two men with prior arrests for growing dope …” Sonny burst into a grin that threatened to split his face open before Seth even completed the sentence. “ … in Kentucky.”
“I’d give you a high five if I didn’t have to climb up on a chair!” Sonny said.
Seth abruptly stopped smiling. “You know, if I figured this out, maybe somebody else did, too.”
“Like who?”
“Like Jim Bingham.”
Chapter 22
Billy Joe felt someone touch his shoulder and looked behind him. It was Bessie. He reached up and patted her hand and said nothing. What was there to say?
“How’s Kelsey?” Her voice was quiet, sad.
Billy Joe had moved a waiting room chair over in front of the window and was sitting backward in it, straddling the seat, with his arms folded on top of the chair-back and his chin resting on them. His ever-present UK ball cap was cocked back on his head.
A handful of other people stood together in groups talking softly nearby. Squire Boone and his wife from Crawford were there, Billy Joe’s neighbors from down the road, and a couple of his sisters and their husbands.
The view from the sixth floor of Norton Children’s Hospital was spectacular. Tuesday morning rush-hour traffic bustled past on the busy streets below, and if you leaned way out and looked to the left, you could actually see a slice of the Ohio River.
But Billy Joe hadn’t moved the chair for the view. He just had to look at something besides the baby-puke green walls of the waiting room or he’d start screaming and they’d have to haul him out of here in a straight jacket. They might yet.
How’s Kelsey?
Billy Joe had absolutely no idea how Kelsey was. Oh, if you were talking about her physical condition, he could speak to that. She was “stable.” Given the nature of her injuries, that was remarkable. A bullet had entered her left temple about two inches in front of her ear and had exited the other side half an inch closer to her eye socket. There had been no significant bleeding, and the brain did not appear to be swelling from the trauma. Her face was swollen, though, blown up like a balloon so she was unrecognizable. Other than that, she was fine.
Except the bullet had ripped out both optic nerves on its way through. Kelsey would never see so much as a sliver of light again as long as she lived.
“Right now, she’s got umpteen-dozen machines and gizmos attached all over her and she can only have visitors for five minutes once an hour,” Billy Joe said.
“Can she talk?”
“They’ve got her heavily sedated. Her mother’s in there with her.”
And she’s probably heavily sedated, too.
“If you need somebody to watch Bethany, I’d be glad to have her over.”
“Mom and my sisters got that covered, but thanks.”
Billy Joe was relatively sure Bethy didn’t know what had happened to her older sister. She’d been asleep, they all had, when the police came knocking on the door yesterday morning with a ridiculous story about how Kelsey had been shot.
That was impossible, of course, because Kelsey was in bed in her room. Billy Joe had gone to answer the bang-bang-bang on the door with Becky in her nightgown behind him, and she’d turned when the officer mentioned Kelsey and run down the hall to the child’s room.
“I’m sure sorry you had to come all this way for nothin’,” Billy Joe’d said to the officers as they waited for Kelsey to stagger out of her room, her flaxen hair in a pro
found state of bed-head. “I can put on a pot of coffee right quick if you—”
A high-pitched wail had exploded out of Kelsey’s room, so desolate it’d raised the hair on Billy Joe’s neck. He’d found Becky standing beside the girl’s bed. The covers had been turned back and two pillows were lying there where Kelsey should have been.
What had happened after that wasn’t real clear in Billy Joe’s head, but he knew that Bethany had slept through most of it.
“All Bethy knows is that Grandma came by to pick her up so she could spend a few days on the farm. I’m going back home late this afternoon to gather up some stuff for Becky and spend some time with Pumpkin. Somebody’s got to tell her what happened to Kelsey, but I swear I don’t know what to say or how.”
Sarabeth leaned over and spoke softly into his ear. “And how are you, Bije?”
That was a fair question, but Billy Joe was still one behind. He hadn’t answered the how’s-Kelsey question yet.
Truth was, he didn’t have any idea how Kelsey was. Because if he’d known that she was so miserably unhappy she didn’t even want to live anymore, he’d have done something about it. He didn’t know what, but he’d have done something!
A little sob stitched his breathing and Sarabeth squeezed his shoulders.
“Police said they believe there was a suicide pact. Said she went out there yesterday morning with Bubba Jamison’s daughter and they were both gonna kill themselves.” He turned around then and faced Sarabeth. “They were going to kill themselves. Fifteen years old and you want to die! Oh, Bessie, what happened to my baby girl?”
Sarabeth pulled him to her and he held on, his arms around her waist, crying in silent, heaving sobs. She cradled him, patted him on the back and cried with him.
Billy Joe sat opposite Sarabeth in the hospital cafeteria. She shoved a cup of coffee and a sausage biscuit at him but he just shook his head.
“Eat, Billy Joe. I know you haven’t had a thing today and I bet you didn’t eat yesterday either, did you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume you didn’t. So you’re due to drop over from dehydration or low blood sugar in … ” she looked at her watch “ … I’d say 30 minutes, an hour max. Maybe Becky can get them to put you in a bed next to Kelsey so it’s not so hard on her to look after you both.”
