by Scott Pratt
I walked out of Freeman’s office muttering and shaking my head. Two months? Freeman seemed to be sure of himself when he said Jordan wouldn’t harm another child, which I took to mean they already had him under tight surveillance. But could I trust my son’s life to them? Not a chance. Two months wasn’t an eternity, but it was a hell of a long time to shut down a law practice. Still, if it meant Sean would be safe, I’d figure out a way. I’d take him somewhere until Jalen Jordan was arrested and then return. It would mean uprooting him from school, from his life, but it was better than the alternative.
I was certain my mother would do anything she could to help, but my wife was a different story. I reluctantly punched her number into my cell phone.
“Where were you last night?” she said as soon as she picked up.
“If you’d bothered to answer my call or if you’d bothered to try to call me, you would have known,” I said.
“You’re such a game player, Darren.”
“I know. Game playing is my life. Listen, Katie, we really need to talk. Can you meet me somewhere?”
“I’m busy right now.”
“Are you working?”
“I’m getting a pedicure.”
“Can we just meet at home? It’s important. Sean could be in real danger.”
“Good lord, Darren, are you still on that? This isn’t a movie, you know. You’re not an actor. You’re just a guy who hustles a living defending criminals. Nobody wants to hurt Sean.”
“Maybe so, but I’m going to take him out of town for a couple of months. You can come if you want, or you can stay here. But Sean and I are leaving for a while.”
“You’re not taking my son anywhere,” she said.
“I’m going to the house to get some of his things,” I said. “If you want to talk about it face-to-face in a rational manner, show up there in an hour.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ben Clancy loathed men like James Tipton. He believed them to be inferior physically—made up of defective genetic material—as well as mentally and spiritually. A man like James Tipton had no chance of spending eternity in God’s kingdom. He was incapable of any sort of meaningful self-examination, which meant he could never truly repent, which meant he could never be forgiven. Clancy might be willing to minimize, or even ignore, some of Tipton’s earthly transgressions in order to get a long-awaited and well-deserved shot at Darren Street, but Tipton, in the long run, was doomed to hellfire and torment.
When Clancy sent such men—and women—to rot in the federal penitentiaries scattered around the United States, he felt not a breath of guilt or remorse. In fact, Clancy walked away from every conviction, whether it be by guilty plea or a jury’s guilty verdict, with a sense of satisfaction and an unshakable belief that justice had been served, because Ben Clancy regarded himself as an instrument of God, a David in a world haunted by Philistines. He spoke fondly and often of being a dispenser of God’s justice during the Sunday school lessons he taught at Calvary Baptist Church in downtown Knoxville and tried to instill a sense of the avenging angel into the Boy Scout troops he counseled each year at camps in and around the city.
Clancy watched warily from a block away as Special Agent Gary DuBose and James Tipton walked into the safe house on Creekside Avenue in Knoxville. He’d arrived early and parked his car four blocks away, then walked around the outside of the safe house and checked out the neighborhood.
DuBose and Tipton were standing just inside the front door as Clancy approached.
“I’d like to speak to Mr. Tipton alone,” Clancy said. He avoided Tipton; he had no desire to shake his greasy hand. Tipton was wearing jeans, running shoes, and a tan, Western-cut shirt. Clancy thought he looked like a pimp. “We’ll talk in the backyard. Did you check him for recording devices?”
“I did,” DuBose said. “He’s clean.”
The safe house was in an upscale residential neighborhood. The homes sat on large lots, and the lot of this particular house was surrounded by a ten-foot-high hemlock hedge. Clancy led Tipton to a spot near the hedge about a hundred feet from the house.
“I understand you’re looking to make a deal,” Clancy said.
Tipton seemed nervous. He was shifting his weight from one foot to another, and his eyes darted around the backyard.
“I lost my leverage a little while ago,” Tipton said.
“What do you mean?”
“The lawyer, Darren Street, he came back by my place this morning. He said he’d changed his mind. Didn’t want me to kill anybody. He said he’d figure out another way to handle it.”
“My understanding is that Mr. Street asked you to kill a man named Jalen Jordan and paid you fifty thousand dollars. Is that correct?”
“That’s right, but now he says he doesn’t want me to do it.”
“Did you give him the money back?”
“He told me to keep it. Said he didn’t want anything to do with Jordan’s money.”
“So you still have it? Where is it?”
“Hidden out at my place,” Tipton said.
“What did Street say he was going to do, exactly?”
“He said he was going to hide with his kid until he could get something figured out.”
“Hide? Any idea where?”
“No.”
“I’ve seen Agent DuBose’s file on you,” Clancy lied. “He’s built a strong case against you for trafficking in oxycodone. You’re looking at thirty years—minimum—in a maximum-security federal penitentiary. Since there isn’t any parole, you’ll serve a minimum of eighty-five percent of the sentence.”
Tipton looked at the ground and dug at the grass with the toe of his shoe.
“But I think we could still make a deal,” Clancy said.
“Is that right?” Tipton said. “What kind of deal?”
“You get what you want, which is to stay out of prison and we leave your family alone. I get what I want, which is a dead child killer and Darren Street’s skin nailed to the side of a barn.”
“That whole red bandana thing must have got pretty deep under your skin,” Tipton said.
“Mention red bandana again and you and Darren Street will be sharing a cell,” Clancy snapped.
Tipton held up his hands. “Take it easy,” he said. “What do you have in mind?”
An idea had formed in Clancy’s mind as soon as he heard that Darren Street had left Jalen Jordan’s cash with Tipton. Some things would have to fall into place, but the idea had promise.
“Are you a hunter, Mr. Tipton?” Clancy said.
“Beg your pardon?”
“A hunter! Do you hunt and kill wild game?”
“I do.”
“What do you hunt?”
“Deer, mostly. Bear every couple of years.”
“I take a buck every year myself,” Clancy said. “I assume you have a rifle?”
“I do.”
“Scope?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is it accurate? Can you shoot?”
Tipton nodded. “I can take the head off a squirrel at a hundred yards.”
“I’ve never let a drug dealer facing the kind of time you’re facing walk away before,” Clancy said, “but in your case I’m going to make an exception. You can keep your property and you can keep the money Darren Street gave you, but we’re not going to give you another dime. We’ll stay away from your family. And in exchange, you’re going to do exactly—and I mean exactly—what I tell you to do.”
Clancy reached into his inside jacket pocket and extracted an envelope, which he handed to Tipton.
“You’ll find a prepaid cell phone in there and some photographs of the same man Darren Street wanted you to kill. I don’t know yet how it’s going to happen, but you will be ready at a moment’s notice, day or night. I will call you on that phone and give you instru
ctions. You will follow them to the letter. You want to make a deal with me? Fine. I’ll deal. But this will be a high-stakes game, Mr. Tipton. Do I make myself clear?”
Tipton nodded again.
“Say it,” Clancy said. “Say, ‘This is a high-stakes game.’”
“This is a high-stakes game.”
“You will deal only with me. You will not talk to anyone else. Say it.”
“I will deal only with you. I won’t talk to anyone else.”
“If you make the slightest mistake,” Clancy said as he pointed his finger at Tipton’s nose, “if you suddenly grow a conscience, if you hesitate in the least, prison will be the least of your worries.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I was surprised when I heard the garage door opening. Katie had actually showed up. I went downstairs and walked into the kitchen just as she was walking in from the garage. The sight of her always made me hesitate for just a moment. She was an absolute knockout, completely out of my league. She was two inches taller than me and looked, for all the world, like a fashion runway model. Her hair was thick, sandy blonde, and wavy, and it cascaded down her shoulders to the middle of her back like a waterfall. Her face was structured perfectly: full, sensual lips, high, strong cheekbones, a petite nose, subtle chin and forehead. And her body . . . my God . . . it was a bottomless pool of pleasure. She was soft and firm, smooth and warm, athletic and voluptuous. She was wearing beige designer shoes, black designer shorts, a designer blouse that matched the shoes and shorts perfectly, designer jewelry that perfectly accented her designer outfit, and designer make-up that was meticulously applied and made her even more beautiful than she was naturally.
“I appreciate you coming,” I said in the friendliest tone I could muster.
“I live here,” she said. “Where’s Sean?”
“He’s with Mom. We’re going to stay at a hotel downtown until I can figure out what to do.”
“Don’t you think you’re letting this get completely out of hand, Darren?”
“Sit down, please,” I said, gesturing toward the kitchen table. “Let me fill you in on what’s happened.”
She went to the refrigerator, retrieved a bottle of mineral water, and walked to the kitchen table.
“So fill me in,” she said, and I started talking.
Katie and I met at a party at the University of Tennessee early in our senior year and very quickly wound up in the sack, half-drunk. The sex was incredible and became addictive. Thinking back on it, I suppose it was nothing more, or nothing less, than that elusive phenomenon people call chemistry. I couldn’t get enough of the way she looked, the way she felt, the way she smelled. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, everything stopped when Katie arrived. It was as though the universe revolved around her; she became the center of everything.
I’m not sure why she was so attracted to me. I like to think it was because I was smart and sexy and handsome, but ultimately, I think it was something neither of us really understood. I realized early on that there were things about her I didn’t like—things I actually loathed—but inertia seemed to set in. The old “object at rest tends to stay at rest” thing. It was easier to stay with her than to break things off.
Before we knew it, we’d graduated. I went on to law school, and she barely made it into the master’s program for exercise science. She didn’t really want to keep going to school, but her father was willing to pay and it allowed her plenty of time to work out, which is what she loved more than anything. We moved into an apartment together, but the relationship steadily deteriorated. I was gone a lot, and when we were together, we argued constantly. We were about to call it quits a couple of months before I graduated from law school, but then she started having symptoms, took a pregnancy test, and voila!
Sean.
Katie’s parents thought so much of me that they immediately offered to pay for an abortion. It was her body and her life, but I told her I didn’t want her to abort the child. We’d find ways to bridge the gaps, to put aside our differences, I said. I told her I would do my absolute best to be a good father and husband. She was leaning toward the abortion for a while because the thought of having a huge belly was repulsive to her, but I eventually wore her down and we got married. It was a simple ceremony performed by a General Session Court judge at the courthouse in downtown Knoxville because her father—an extremely wealthy, notorious slum lord—told me he would burn every dollar he had before he would spend a dime marrying his daughter to a piece of gutter trash like me.
“And now you’re going to shut down your office, take Sean out of school, and go where?” Katie said after I’d told her everything that had happened.
“I’m not going to shut down the office. I’ll just have to reschedule everything, delay things for a while. I’ll keep Rachel on and keep the doors open. It’ll be similar to having some type of surgery or something. I’ll go to the judges and explain what’s going on and they’ll move the cases back for me. And I was thinking I might call Peter Camp. I’m sure he’d let us stay with him and Jenny until they arrest this guy. He’s in Nashville, so it isn’t too far, and they have plenty of room.”
“But you said the FBI agent told you he was sure no more children would be killed. Isn’t that what you said?”
“I’m not willing to bet Sean’s life on what an FBI agent said.”
“And what about me?” Katie said. “My choice is to either give up my entire life until this imaginary crisis has passed or stay here while you and Sean go to Nashville. And if you do that, I wind up looking like a terrible mother, a terrible wife, and a terrible person.”
“It isn’t an imaginary crisis,” I said, resisting the urge to tell her she was already a terrible mother, wife, and person. “This is as real as it gets.”
“I think we should depend on the FBI,” she said. “They’re like gods or something.”
“Are you serious? You’re willing to bet Sean’s life on what an FBI agent said because leaving until we’re sure Sean will be okay would be an inconvenience to you?”
“Don’t call me selfish,” she said. “I hate it when you call me selfish.”
“I didn’t call you selfish,” I said, “although calling you selfish is like calling a dog’s ass ugly.”
“That’s it,” Katie said as she pushed herself away from the table and stood. “I’m done. And I’m not agreeing to you taking my son anywhere. Bring him back here today or I’ll call the police and have you arrested.”
“For what? Trying to protect him?”
“For kidnapping,” she said, and she turned and stormed out of the room.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ben Clancy looked down at his ringing cell phone. The ID told him Special Agent Paul Freeman was calling; it was just before noon.
“Jalen Jordan is going into the mountains,” Freeman said. “He and his mother are going to the bank to get him some money and he’s going to try to lose us long enough to get to one of the trail heads in the national park. Then he’s going to hike the Appalachian Trail north into New York or Maine.”
The black bag teams Clancy had requested had placed listening devices all over Jalen Jordan’s apartment, his mother’s house, and in his mother’s car. A GPS tracking device had been planted in Jalen’s mother’s car as well. Their phones were being monitored and records of their phone conversations, e-mails, and texts were being studied. The FBI and the US Attorney’s Office knew what both Jalen and his mother were doing every second of the day and night. FBI agents had also been tailing Jordan and his mother, and they’d been doing so openly. They were pressuring Jordan, trying to force him into a mistake.
Clancy sat up straight when he heard the news that Jordan was going into the mountains. The world had suddenly become brighter. God was smiling on him, offering him a beautiful opportunity. He forced the smile off his face.
“It might be perfect,” Clanc
y said flatly.
“Perfect? How could it possibly be perfect?” Freeman said.
“It gets Jordan out of populated areas away from children, so we don’t have to worry about him killing another child. If he goes to the Appalachian Trail, then he either goes north or he goes south. You say he’s going north. Fine. We get eyes on him from the air and we put four or five agents on the trail close to him. Not too close, but close enough to make sure he doesn’t get off the trail without us knowing it. Quantico has agreed to prioritize the DNA tests. It shouldn’t be more than a week. Once we have the results, we take him down out in the wilderness and bring him back to civilization. Nobody will be in harm’s way when the arrest happens. The more I think about it, the better I like it.”
“So you’re suggesting we gather some folks, gear up, and go camping?”
“Like I said, it’s perfect,” Clancy said. “Let him think he’s gotten away, and when the time is right, we’ll take him down.”
James Tipton looked down at his cell phone and groaned. Clancy. Fucking Clancy again. It seemed like he’d been calling every ten minutes.
“Hello?”
“Do you have everything together?”
“Yes.”
“It’s time to go. Right now. Listen to me very carefully. Take your weapon, your binoculars, and a tree stand and drive to Gatlinburg. Turn left at traffic light number eight onto Historic Nature Trail Drive. Turn into the Rainbow Falls Parking area. Park and get onto the trail. Walk at least a half mile. Avoid contact with anyone and conceal yourself. Get into position in the stand and wait for Jordan.”
“Are you kidding? Already?”
“Did I stutter? Right now, damn it!”
Tipton had made a deal with a representative of the government of the United States, but to him it seemed more like a deal with the devil. As he jogged from the parking lot on Circle Head Road toward the Bullhead Trail, carrying his deer rifle in his right hand and with a tree stand strapped to his back, he wondered whether he would be able to identify the guy, whether he could make the shot, and ultimately, what would happen later.
