by Ninie Hammon
The distillery was still standing, though he couldn’t take any credit for that. The 40-mph wind had blown the flames the other direction. Oh, he’d kept all the buildings hosed down, drenched the office, the bottling room and print shop, kept the fire out of the trees that surrounded Seth McAllister’s house.
But if the wind shifted, there’d be no stopping it.
He’d sent crews around to the far side of the knob where the flaming warehouses had ignited the nearby woods, with instructions to let the fire burn down to the river and stop it there.
All Craddock could do was let the fire burn itself out. The whole hillside in front of the warehouse was ablaze, with burning bourbon flowing like volcanic lava down toward the Quart House and the Rolling Fork. He’d just have to let the fire burn itself out there, too.
“I bet Sarabeth’s up there somewhere close,” Ben said. “She has a press pass to get through police lines. If we can find her, maybe she could get us up close, too.”
The boys shoved their way toward the front. The police had cordoned off an area directly in front of the covered bridge half the size of a football field. Yellow Police Line tape stretched across the road on both ends of the area and half a dozen troopers stood watch there. Several ambulances and rescue squad trucks were parked on the roadside in that spot, along with three white behemoths—mobile television broadcasting trucks with WHAS 11 News, WLKY Channel 32, and WAVE 3 News First emblazoned on their sides.
Officers up and down the road had kept the crowds of onlookers out of the lanes of traffic so they’d be clear for equipment, though it looked like every fire truck in central Kentucky was already at the scene. The whole hillside left of the road leading up to the distillery was littered with them, like cattle grazing on a field.
There was no equipment on the right side of the road, though. That’s where burning bourbon flowed down the hill like lava.
When they finally managed to elbow their way to the front of the crowd, they could feel the heat of the fire and smell the barbecue sauce stench of burning bourbon. Ben looked around for Sarabeth. Maybe she was talking to officers somewhere in the cleared-out area. But it was much more likely she was up there where the action was, up on the hill, firing away as the firemen fought the most incredible conflagration anybody in Callison County had ever seen.
Ben spotted a trooper he’d run into a time or two in Sarabeth’s office. The guy was dish-faced—looked like something had smashed in the front of his head so the tip of his nose barely stuck out further than his forehead and chin. He was talking to an EMT and pointing toward the bridge.
Ben called out to him. The gray-uniformed officer turned, searching the crowd, looking for the person who had called his name. When the trooper spotted Ben, saw it was some teenage boy, he started to turn back around.
“It’s Ben Malone, sir, Sarabeth Bingham’s brother.” He felt silly shouting out like that. People all around turned to look at him. But the trooper said something to the EMT, who looked briefly Ben’s way, then he walked over to where Ben and Jake were standing just outside the yellow Police Line tape.
“Son, you need to come with me,” he said and lifted up the tape. Ben shot a look at Jake.
“Bring your friend. This way.”
The trooper turned and started off toward the covered bridge with Ben and Jake in tow.
“Have you seen Sarabeth? I know she’s—”
“You need to talk to Detective Hayes about that.”
Ben and Jake exchanged a glance. Detective Hayes was here? If there was anybody on the planet Ben didn’t want to see right now, it was Kentucky State Police Detective Darrell Hayes. Lying on the seat of Jake’s Jeep down the road were pictures of a guy hanging in a jail cell, a guy who’d died with the skinny state police detective’s belt wrapped around his neck.
As soon as he got the chance, he planned to show the pictures to Sarabeth, see if she saw in them what he and Jake had seen. How could he stand around and make nice with Hayes when he suspected he’d killed a guy?
But he had no choice. There was Hayes, leaned up against the hood of a cruiser, talking to a television reporter. Standing behind the reporter, a cameraman balanced a camera on his shoulder.
The trooper stopped with the boys to avoid interrupting the interview.
Ben thought Hayes looked enormously self-important, puffed up like a bullfrog. Though his tie was neatly knotted and hung down straight, the rest of him was a mess. His thin, flaxen hair was blowing wildly—like everybody else’s. There was a stain on the front of his shirt—a bloodstain!—and a wound on his left arm had left his shirt sleeve torn and bloody.
Hayes was talking animatedly until he happened to glance Ben’s way. He stopped abruptly, leaned over and said something to the reporter and gestured toward Ben. She turned, looked at him and nodded, said something to the cameraman, who lifted the camera off his shoulder and moved with her away from Hayes.
Ben’s stomach tied in a knot.
Hayes gestured to the trooper, who walked with Jake and Ben to where he was standing.
“You know who this is—Sarabeth Bingham’s brother,” the trooper said, though it was obvious he knew Hayes had recognized Ben. Hayes nodded and the two officers had an odd moment that Ben didn’t like one bit. Something was going on.
The trooper turned and left the boys alone with Hayes.
“Your name’s Ben, isn’t it, son?” Hayes said. He put out his hand, “I’m Darrell Hayes.” Ben shook his hand, even though he didn’t want to touch the man. Hayes ignored Jake.
“I know who you are. I was with Sarabeth that day at the jail, the day Doodlebug—” Why had that popped out? He could have said a dozen things and not mentioned that!
“Ben, I have something to tell you about your sister.”
A sudden ache took up residence in his gut, an ache that hurt worse than being blind-sided by an unblocked safety. His throat seemed to close so he had trouble speaking.
“What about her?” His voice was shaking. How could his voice instantly start shaking like that?
“Son, there’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it flat out. I’m sorry to tell you, but she’s dead.”
“Dead?” He felt Jake’s hand on his shoulder. “That’s not possible.”
Ben lost his voice, as if he’d been running, all out, and slammed into a brick wall at full speed. He wanted to talk, to explain that this guy had it all wrong. Sarabeth couldn’t be dead. But he didn’t have the breath to speak. The world was airless, a vacuum inside a vacuum. He just stood there and looked questioningly at Hayes and didn’t say a thing.
Jake felt like somebody had just slapped him. But instead of sending him into shock like the news did Ben, it snapped him out of it. He’d been in a daze, following along with Ben, momentarily engaged when he could get his mind to concentrate on something, like the mystery of Doodlebug’s pictures. But mostly he was in some kind of stupor, trying to get his arms around his own loss. Jennifer had killed herself because what she’d seen as a 7-year-old child had driven her mad.
Now he was instantly hyper-alert, his nerves tuned so tight they almost sang. He felt like someone had tossed a bucket of ice water in his face.
He squeezed Ben’s shoulder.
“What happened?” he asked Hayes.
“We don’t know for sure.”
Then the guy was silent. Like they were going to be content with an answer like that!
“What do you mean you don’t know?”
“There are a couple of ways it could have gone down. Maybe she died in the fire. Maybe she was dead before the fire started.” Hayes reached up and pushed his smudged spectacles to the bridge of his nose, his pasty face as emotionless as a crash dummy.
Jake felt anger fill up a huge empty space inside him. Hayes was enjoying this! Jake could tell. He liked being the guy with the bad news, the guy who knew the inside scoop, making you drag it out of him in little pieces. Made him feel powerful and in charge. Hayes wasn�
�t engaged with Ben, wasn’t concerned about Ben. He was performing.
“Stop dancing around and tell us what happened. In more than one or two sentences. We want the whole story, now!” There was a razor-sharp edge of rage in Jake’s voice.
Hayes’ face closed like somebody’d slammed a door. Jake could tell he didn’t like being talked to like that. But Jake didn’t give a rip what he liked.
“She and Seth McAllister were in the warehouse when it caught fire. The fire could have killed them.” Killed them? Seth McAllister was dead, too? “Or Jimmy Dan could have shot them. Maybe that’s how the fire started.”
He paused again, but saw the dark look on Jake’s face and was somehow cowed by it. Jake could look amazingly like his father when he was mad. And he was mad now.
“Ok, here’s everything I know about it.”
Hayes told his story, starting with a description of the call about the Jimmy Dan sighting, then coming to the distillery and finding Sarabeth’s purse and shoes, and she and Seth gone.
Ben was frozen, so pale the freckles stood out on his face like pepper on a fried egg. He didn’t even flinch when Hayes insinuated Sarabeth and Seth were sleeping together. Jake reacted, though Hayes didn’t see him clench his jaw so the veins stood out on his neck. He’d spent his life defending Jennifer’s reputation, beat up half the boys in the county. And she’d had no reputation to defend. But Sarabeth! And Hayes liked telling that part. Jake saw the look in his gray eyes. Something was wrong here. Something was very, very wrong.
When Hayes described the gunfight and the sheriff’s death, Ben actually groaned. Jake knew how kind the sheriff had been to him, how he’d treated him with dignity when he got busted.
All at once, the enormity of the loss hit Jake, too. Sarabeth wouldn’t be there to see Ben cleared. She was gone.
Jake’s throat tightened with unshed tears, but he still listened to Hayes, with a laser-beam focus on every word. And not just to the words, but to his tone of voice when he said them.
Then Hayes talked about loading the sheriff into his cruiser and driving hunched over in a hail of gunfire.
“As I was driving away, he stopped using this,” Hayes said, pulling Jimmy Dan Puckett’s gun out from where he’d shoved it down under his belt, “and started using the sheriff’s shotgun, the one Sonny dropped in the doorway when he went down. After I was out of range, I could hear the shotgun go off again inside the warehouse. I heard three shots, but there could have been more after I got down here to the covered bridge where I could radio for help. A few minutes later, I looked back up the hill and I saw smoke.”
He was explaining how the shots could have been Jimmy Dan murdering his hostages or just shooting random. He gestured up the hill and pointed out that with a shotgun like that firing in a warehouse full of whiskey…
Jake couldn’t hear him anymore. In an instant, the world went totally silent. Hayes was standing there, his lips moving but there wasn’t a sound. In fact, he seemed to be moving in slow motion, too, waving the gun around in the air. A gun with a broken plate on the grip wrapped with black electrician’s tape!
Jake recognized the gun he’d helped his father tape together the night before Ben got busted in the dope barn. The night daddy’d said he wasn’t sure he was going to allow Jake to go off to college after all.
But if it was Jimmy Dan Puckett’s gun, how had Daddy gotten it from him? And how did it get here? Jake froze. Good question: how did it get here?
“Nobody will ever know for sure why Jimmy Dan showed up at Double Springs today,” he heard Detective Hayes say, “or why he kidnapped Seth and Sara—”
“How’d you get the gun?” Jake cut him off. “If Jimmy Dan was shooting at you with it, how did you get it?”
Bubba Jamison’s boy was glaring at him with a look on his face that made Hayes want to punch him. But he was a big kid, strong, not anybody you’d want to cross. Besides, he was Bubba Jamison’s son. Good thing, too, because if he’d been anybody else, Hayes would have been screwed!
The gun! He’d forgotten to get rid of the gun! How stupid was that? Setting the fire, then dashing down here to call for help, talking to the other officers, the press … he’d just forgotten all about it. He’d gotten so caught up in telling the story, making it good for Sarabeth’s little brother, that he’d just whipped it out.
He hadn’t before. The other times he’d told what happened, he’d stuck to the script.
“You didn’t answer my question. I said ‘how’d you get the gun?’”
“Son, you need to learn to listen,” Hayes hissed. He paused and looked pointedly into Jake’s eyes. “Get your Daddy to teach you how to pay attention. I said Jimmy Dan used a small gun like this one. And as I was saying”—back to the script now—“when they pull the bullets out of the door of my car, and out of the sheriff, ballistics will show they came from the same gun that shot little Maggie Mae Davis.”
There was a sudden boom behind him and they all turned. A fireball of flaming bourbon had exploded 100 feet in the air above the blaze, shooting streams of orange and red in every direction. Everyone gasped, oohing and aahing like a crowd watching a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.
Hayes turned back and looked at Ben, not Jake. The kid was shattered, his face a mask of shock and confusion. He hadn’t caught Hayes’ blunder. He probably hadn’t tuned in to a word Hayes said after he told him his sister was dead.
The knot in Hayes’ stomach began to uncoil. He’d dodged a bullet, that’s for sure! Bubba’s boy was still snarling at his heels, but he’d let Bubba handle him.
He reached out his hand and put it on Ben’s shoulder. The boy didn’t even look up.
“I’m sorry, son, I really am. A lot of good people died here today.”
And before Jake could say another word, Hayes motioned to the television reporter. She scurried back, cameraman in tow as he shoved the gun into his belt and pulled his shirt out over it to cover it up.
Lights were blinking on and off in Jake’s mind like a pinball machine on Tilt. Hayes turned away and Jake put his arm around Ben’s shoulder.
“Come on Ben, let’s go.”
“She’s dead.” Ben’s voice sounded like a wind-up toy. “Sarabeth’s gone.”
Jake could tell Ben was about to lose it, so he took him by the arm and led him around behind a rescue squad truck, then into a 4-foot gap between two ambulances. It was as private a place as he could find.
Ben leaned up against the side of the ambulance, bowed his head and covered his face with his hands. But he didn’t cry, just stood there like that, shaking his head back and forth.
Jake wanted to be comforting, to say something to help. But his head was spinning. Words, phrases, thoughts jetted through his mind, random and nonsensical.
Hayes said that gun was Jimmy Dan Puckett’s gun, said the bullets would match the one they’d found in Maggie Mae Davis. But Daddy had had that same gun just a few days ago. Jake had held it in his hands while Daddy taped the broken handle. There was no way for Hayes to get that gun unless Daddy gave it to him, which meant Daddy was mixed up in all this somehow.
And if Daddy was involved in it, he was in charge. Bubba Jamison didn’t follow orders, he gave them. Hayes was the hired help, not Daddy. Hayes must be on Daddy’s payroll, which would explain why he’d helped Doodlebug commit suicide! Hayes had been taking orders then and he was taking orders now. Whatever had happened here today, Daddy had orchestrated.
And no matter how it had really gone down, Sarabeth, Sonny and Seth had been murdered!
Jake sucked in a breath as the reality of it hit him. Daddy had killed her. He’d wanted Sarabeth out of the way. He’d forced Jake to make friends with Ben to get at her. He’d set Ben up to discredit her. He must have decided discrediting wasn’t good enough, so he’d lured her out here somehow and then he’d set the fire to cover it up.
Ben began to cry. Jake couldn’t hear anything, but he could see his friend’s chest shaking. Not kno
wing what else to do, he put his arm around Ben’s shoulder. Now wasn’t the time to tell him. But Jake knew, as certain as he’d ever known anything in his life, that his father had killed Sarabeth Bingham, the sheriff and Seth McAllister, too.
“Wow, would you look at that!”
Jake jumped. He hadn’t realized anybody was sitting in the ambulance he was leaning against. A woman’s nasal voice came from the passenger side window a few feet away. “That burning whiskey’s flowing down that hill like syrup dripping down a pancake!”
“Flaming syrup,” the man in the driver’s seat said. “Check out the Quart House down by the fence.” The man grunted. “Glad that ain’t my house down hill from those warehouses. How’d you like to be a’sittin’ in your living room watching L.A. Law and look up and see rivers of fire coming right at you!”
Jake could only see a narrow band of the hillside from where he stood. Framed between the ambulances was a slice of the field. At the base of the hill, inside the stone fence that encircled the distillery property, sat the Quart House gift shop. And above it, flaming bourbon lava flowed down from a volcano.
Suddenly, Jake was 14 years old again.
“We had four gooks tied to posts at the bottom of the hill and there were rivers of fire flowing down, coming right at them. It was like lava from a volcano.”
His father’s story about the time in Vietnam when the Air Force had laid down a swath of napalm on a hillside above the village where he and his platoon had been questioning prisoners.
“Seeing death come for you, that’s worse suffering than dying. Watching it, and all you can do is scream.”
The day they’d stood over the helpless body of a wounded doe, Daddy’d said, “The best part’s seeing it in their eyes. They know they’re gonna die but they can’t do nothin’ about it.”
Daddy never killed anything outright. Not a deer, not a rabbit. Not a Vietnamese prisoner. And he wouldn’t kill Sarabeth outright either. He’d want her to see death coming. Watch the rivers of fire flowing at her.
