by Scott Pratt
“Would you be willing to come into court and testify under oath?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you have any idea where James Tipton is?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Clancy and your boss are both going to call you a liar.”
“Clancy asked me for a paper copy of my investigative files. I kept one for myself.”
Grace had to restrain herself from yelling out loud. She wanted to get on the table and break into a dance. She wanted to wrap her arms around DuBose’s neck and give him a huge hug. Instead, she picked her beer up off the table and held it up.
“To the truth,” she said, and she clinked the bottle against DuBose’s. “May it set Darren Street free.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
I awoke in a barn, tied to a chair, surrounded by three men, all who were wielding shotguns. My head was splitting. They came into focus slowly, like ships emerging from a fog. Mountain men. Rugged looking. Beards on two of them. All wearing billed caps. One wearing bib overalls. I thought I recognized him but wasn’t sure.
We were in the middle of the barn with stalls on two sides of us. The place reeked of dung, and I could hear the snorts of some kind of animal nearby. More than one animal, actually, several animals. The light flickered, and as I looked around I saw oil lanterns hanging from support posts in three corners.
“He’s awake,” I heard a deep voice say.
The man in the overalls stepped in front of me, feet spread. I looked at his boots and gazed up until I met his eyes.
“Give me one reason I shouldn’t blow a hole in you right now and bury you back in the woods,” he said.
“I’m Darren Street,” I said.
“Who?”
“Darren Street. I was James’s lawyer a couple of years ago. I’ve seen you . . . at the party after his trial. I know who you are, but I’m sorry, I can’t remember your name.”
“That ain’t what the driver’s license and paperwork we found in the trunk of your car says. It says your name is William Hickman. And Darren Street didn’t have no blond hair.”
“I’m him. I’m Darren Street; I swear it,” I said.
“What are you doing coming up here at night with a gun?”
“I escaped from a prison in California five days ago. You’ve probably heard about it. Hell, everybody’s heard about it by now. I just got back to Knoxville. The people who helped me get out of prison left me the car, the gun, the clothes, the money, the identification, everything. They left it for me in the trunk of the car so I could—”
“So you could what? Come up here and kill James because he testified against you?”
“No. No, I don’t want to kill him. I just want to talk to him. I was hoping . . . I was hoping Granny might tell me where he is. I went by his house, but I saw it had burned down. So I came up here hoping to talk to Granny.”
The other two men walked over and squatted in front of me. Both of them stared at me for a long time. One spit a stream of tobacco juice onto my pant leg.
“He’s lying,” the tobacco spitter said. “It might be him. It might be the lawyer, but I say he came here to kill James and anybody else he could get to.”
“I didn’t come here to kill anyone,” I said. “Listen, the last thing I want is for James to be dead. I need him to clear my name. I need him to tell me why he came to court and lied about me. I need him to—”
“Shut your mouth,” the man in the bib overalls said. “It’s him. Now that I can see his eyes good I know it’s him. Ronnie, walk down to the house and get Granny. Bring her on up here and we’ll figure out what to do with him.”
Ronnie snorted like one of the pigs and stalked out of the barn. The other man backed off into the shadows. I racked my brain trying to remember bib overalls’s name, and finally, it came to me.
“You’re Eugene,” I said. “I remember now, at the party, you called yourself Eugene the dancing machine. Had a nice wife named . . . let’s see . . . Sherry, right? And a pretty little dark-haired girl named Dorothy, but you called her Dot.”
“You ain’t sweet-talking your way out of nothing, Counselor,” Eugene said. “Might as well shut it until Granny gets here. She’ll be the one to decide what happens to you.”
“So Granny’s the shot caller on this yard?”
“What’s that?”
“Never mind.”
We sat in silence for nearly ten minutes. It was unnerving, sitting bound to an old wooden chair that was probably used to milk cows, the light flickering, the hogs rooting and snorting, and two men—one who was James’s brother and another I didn’t know—lurking ominously. Finally, I heard footsteps and looked toward the door that Ronnie had exited through earlier. Granny walked in first, wearing a pair of black sweat pants and an oversize, light-blue denim shirt. She had a white cotton scarf wrapped around her head in a Windsor style that covered her hair. She walked into the barn and stood a few feet in front of me. The brown eyes that had looked upon me fondly in the past were now hard and emotionless. There was no compassion. Her face gave away nothing. She reminded me of so many of the judges I’d seen in the past, about to pass sentence.
“I’m sorry to see you here like this, Darren,” she said.
“It’s good to see you again, Granny Tipton,” I said. “I apologize for the circumstances.”
“Ronnie tells me you came here to see James.”
“Yes, ma’am. I need his help.”
“You realize you’re the one who is ultimately responsible for everything, don’t you? If you hadn’t come to James’s house and asked him to commit a killing for you and then bought a gun from him, none of this would have happened.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t buy a gun from him, Granny Tipton. I admit I asked him to kill Jalen Jordan and that was wrong. I’ve thought about it a million times over the past two years. I wish I could change it. I wish I could—”
“And now you bring more trouble to my home. You escape from prison, and you come here.”
“I didn’t know where else to go. I didn’t know what else to do. I thought if . . . I thought if—”
“You thought if James would just tell you he killed that boy, then you could run to the judge and tell him who really did it and James could go on to prison in your place. Is that what you thought? Are you really that naïve?”
“Is that what happened? Did James kill him?”
“James didn’t kill anybody,” she said. “Eugene, maybe we should just call the sheriff and tell him we have an escaped prisoner on our property.”
“No!” I yelled. I began to strain against the ropes. “No! Just kill me, please! Shoot me in the head, but don’t send me back. Don’t send me back. I’d rather be dead.”
“I don’t want your death on my conscience,” Granny said. “You’ve already caused me enough pain.”
“What have I done to you?”
“You put my grandson in harm’s way.”
“I called it off the next morning, and if James has told you the truth, you already know that. I admit I made a mistake by going to him in the first place, but my son’s life had been threatened twice, I was terrified, and he was the first person I thought of to ask for help. But I realized I made a mistake and I went back. I told him not to do it and I let him keep the money. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for it every day of my life. But everything he said in court was a lie. I didn’t buy a gun from him. I didn’t stalk Jalen Jordan and shoot him down on a trail in the woods. I didn’t do it! And now I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life in prison? I’ll tell you what. You don’t want my death on your conscience? You don’t want to kill me? Fine. Just lay the gun that was in the trunk of my car down right over there. Cut these ropes and walk out the door. I’ll walk over to that pig stall, climb in, and shoot myself. The pigs will clean me up. You won’t have to do a damned
thing.”
Just then, I heard the sound of a vehicle, probably a four-wheeler, pulling up outside. A few seconds later, a man wearing a hoodie walked in. He took a few steps inside the door and pulled the hood off his head.
It was James, or at least I thought it was James. He’d gained at least thirty pounds since the last time I’d seen him and was now nearly bald on top of his head. He stood there looking at me with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. Finally, after all that time, there he was, in the flesh. There were a million things I wanted to say to him, but only one word came out.
“Why?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He was looking at the floor.
“Please,” I said. “Was it Clancy?”
At the sound of the name, he looked me in the eye, and I knew I was right.
“What did he do? Tell me, James. Tell me why I’ve been in hell for the past two years.”
He looked unsure of himself. His eyes began to dart around the room from his granny to his brothers and back to me.
“I didn’t buy a rifle from you and you know it, and I came and called the whole thing off,” I said. “You know I’m telling the truth, James. I’ve been in prison for almost two years for something I didn’t do, and I think I deserve an explanation. If you want to kill me after you tell me why you did this to me, then go ahead. But tell me why you lied.”
“I let myself get deep into the drugs,” he said quietly. “I’m off now, but back then, I’d let it get away from me. Granny, Eugene, Ronnie . . . I ain’t ever told y’all any of this. I lied about everything. But Darren’s been doing time for something I was forced to do by Clancy.”
He took a couple of steps closer to me and drew a deep breath.
“When Darren came and asked me to kill that boy, I’d already been freelancing. I don’t know why, exactly. I guess I just got greedy. I was buying up extra oxycodone out of Florida and paying some boys to haul it up to Eastern Kentucky where I’d found a distributor I could count on. Somebody up there got caught and eventually ratted me out to the feds. This agent named DuBose came to see me one night and told me they were about to indict me. Wanted me to give up our operation here, my suppliers in Florida, plus what I was doing in Kentucky. I told him to go straight to hell, but I was scared shitless. He said I was looking at thirty years and eventually he’d get to all of y’all. I didn’t think he’d really get to any of you because he didn’t offer any details, and I knew how we’d been doing business all this time, but I wasn’t sure. And I was afraid he might be telling the truth about me. I was afraid he might really be able to get to me because of the rats in Kentucky.”
James went on to recount the tale of the night I went to see him and how I hired him and then came back and called it off. He said he betrayed me because he was high and because he was frightened, and then he told a long tale of how Clancy had used him to set me up. As he was speaking, I thought back about the time leading up to the killing, about my conversation with Jordan, about the underwear in the van. About Clancy. The devious son of a bitch. I’d been right all along. It was him.
“Jalen Jordan had been stopped by the Knoxville police four days before he was shot,” I said when James finally broke for a second. “They found a bag in the van he was driving that had two pairs of underwear in it. The underwear belonged to those two little boys who were found dead out at The Sinks. The FBI was probably watching every move he made. They would have been talking to Clancy.”
“He mentioned that Jordan was a child killer, same as you did,” James said. “But it wasn’t until after I did it, after I killed Jordan, that I found out exactly what Clancy was up to. I mean, I knew he hated you and he’d mentioned he wanted to get back at you, but he hadn’t really spelled it out. We met that night and he told me the whole plan, how we were going to pin the whole thing on you. The story about me buying the gun, the deer stand in your garage, the fingerprints on the money, the whole thing. And he did it, too.”
He looked at me and shook his head.
“You damned sure made it easy enough for him,” he said. “Running around doing all that crazy shit you did.”
“Fuck you, James,” I said. “Like you said a minute ago, I’ve been doing your time. I’VE BEEN DOING YOUR TIME! IN A FUCKING FEDERAL MAX PRISON!”
I yelled so loudly that Eugene, who was closest to me, flinched and raised his shotgun.
“I’m sorry, Darren,” James said. “I didn’t mean for it to turn out the way it did.”
“FUCK YOU AND YOUR APOLOGY! TAKE IT AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS! GO AND TELL MY LITTLE BOY HOW SORRY YOU ARE! GO TELL MY MOTHER, YOU FUCKING COWARD!”
I started leaning from side to side in the chair, pulling it forward a bit at a time in an effort to get at him. He started backing away, and I spit at him. The next thing I knew, a boot caught me flush across the mouth and I went over onto my back. I lay there stunned for a second, but then I rolled onto my side and was trying to get to my feet when the butt of a shotgun cracked me in the jaw and I went down again. I laid there on the dirt floor of the barn for a couple of minutes, maybe more, and gradually, from deep inside me, a pitiful moan began to rise. The moan crescendoed into a primordial scream, and I writhed on the floor and screamed until my lungs failed me. Finally, I managed to get back to my knees. I’d loosened the ropes that were holding me enough to be able to semistraighten my back, and I looked up at James again.
“Do you know what the most important thing a man can gain in prison is?” I said through the blood that was oozing from the cut inside my mouth. “Respect. Without respect, you’re either dead or somebody’s bitch. I have no respect for you, James, and your family shouldn’t, either. Because you’re nothing but Clancy’s bitch, and if you don’t do something about him, that’s all you’re ever going to be.”
“I’ve heard about enough of this boy’s bullshit,” one of the brothers growled, and suddenly all three of the men in the barn were pointing their shotguns at me. I heard the hammers cock and waited for the glorious death that was about to come.
“Wait,” James said. “Wait. Don’t kill him.”
“Appears to me like it’s him or you,” Eugene said. “You want to go to prison?”
I looked alternately from the brothers to Granny, wondering what was to come next, hoping they would just go ahead and end it. These were mountain people, bound by blood. If a choice was to be made between one of their own and me, I knew I didn’t stand a chance, but I honestly didn’t care at that point. Granny, who had stood silently for a long time, finally spoke.
“Cut him loose,” she said to Eugene.
The shotguns were lowered, Eugene produced a knife from his pocket, popped open the blade, and a second later I was free. I stood uneasily, my head still aching, my nose and jaw throbbing from the blows I’d received earlier.
“You need to be on your way, Darren,” Granny said.
“What? On my way? To where?”
“You’re on the run. Keep running.”
“I’m not running, Granny. We’re back to square one. Just leave me a gun and walk outside. It’ll be over in just a minute.”
“I can’t abide sending James off to prison,” she said, “even after hearing what he did.”
“The only other option is to go to court,” I said. “I have a good lawyer. I’ll help James find a lawyer of his own. Maybe we can make a deal. If we can prove what Clancy did, James might still be able to walk away from this.”
“We don’t rely on the law,” she said. “We rely on ourselves.”
“You relied on it once. You relied on me. You trusted me. I’m not even sure I can ask you this in good conscience after what I’ve been through, but would you be willing to trust in the law one more time? The system can be skewed by people like Ben Clancy, but for the most part, it works.”
“You can’t promise anything,” Granny said. “You can’t guarantee o
ne single thing.”
“That’s true. I can’t guarantee anything, but—”
“Like I said a while ago, I was high through a lot of what happened back then, but I did manage to do something that might help,” James said.
“Please,” I said hopefully. “Tell me you have recordings.”
“I’ve got something better in a safety deposit box,” he said.
“What is it?”
“A pair of shoes.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
I got Grace on the phone by telling the secretary I was a legendary professor from the University of Tennessee Law School named Payne. Grace and I had both attended UT, and anyone who went through that place had heard of Dale Payne. She picked up immediately.
“Professor Payne? It’s Grace Alexander. So nice to hear from you.”
“Hello, Miss Alexander,” I said.
Silence.
“Miss Alexander?”
“Just a moment, professor.”
I heard the phone drop onto a desk, heard the sound of heels on hardwood, and heard a door close. More footsteps.
“Darren?” she said in a high-pitched whisper. “Oh my God, Darren? What are you . . . where are you . . . are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Grace. I’m not going to tell you exactly where I am, but I’m close.”
“You broke out of a federal prison! In a helicopter! You’ve embarrassed the United States Bureau of Prisons and the Department of Justice. Every US Marshal and FBI agent in the country is looking for you, not to mention every state trooper, city cop, sheriff’s deputy, and wannabe cop with carry permit. Do you know the president of the United States mentioned you at a press conference the other day?”
“Really? The president? I’m flattered.”
“Flattered? Are you crazy? Have you gone completely insane? They’re going to shoot you on sight. Your face has been flashed so many times in Knoxville, it’s burned into the memory of every man, woman, and child in the city. They’re saying you should be considered armed and dangerous. If you come anywhere near here, you’re going to wind up dead, and there won’t be a thing I or anyone else can do about it.”
