Outside the Law

by Phillip Thompson

  He peered over the side and watched the corpse sink out of sight, to be borne by the current to a spot somewhere far from this bridge. He checked his sleeve for blood—saw none. He walked back to his car and tossed the envelope on the front seat of his car.

  He rolled back across the bridge and, when he neared the bait shop, pulled his phone from his jacket. He punched a button, waited for the voice mail.

  “Mr. Lang, regarding the vehicle we discussed earlier today,” he said, “it is at the location and ready for pickup. It is a Toyota. The keys will be in the left front wheel well.”

  He wheeled into the shop’s gravel lot and put Pritchard’s car keys in place. For two hundred dollars, the driver—a Mr. Lang he had found yesterday on the Internet—had agreed to tow Pritchard’s vehicle to a junk car company in Amory, no questions asked. By this time tomorrow, the car would be crushed and stacked with a hundred more in the lot.

  He checked his watch. He could still be home by midnight.

  COLT

  “She was real drunk is what she was.” The girl behind the counter was cute, but tired, and not used to talking to The Law. He tried a smile, tried to look less like The Law, more like just a guy. Didn’t seem to be working.

  She tucked a strand of dyed black hair behind her ear and batted her lashes at him. “I already tole your deputy out there what she did.”

  “You mind telling me?”

  Carla—her nametag said Carla—pursed her lips and looked around the convenience store. Toward the back, where the coffee machines were, a couple of gray-hairs fussed over their cups. Nobody at the sandwich counter off to the right. A teenage boy, tall but slouchy, operated the register on the other side of the counter from Carla, so that his back was to hers. Three people stood waiting for the boy to ring them up.

  Nobody stood behind him. He was used to that. People tended to shy away from badges, whether they knew you or not, whether they felt like they had nothing to hide or not.

  “Well,” Carla said, “like I said, she come in hammered. That was pretty obvious. She wanted cigarettes, of course. You know how drunk people are—they always want cigarettes. It’s the damnedest thing. Get drunk, smoke.”

  He nodded, smiled enough to let her know he was still listening, because he was.

  “And ’course, she didn’t have enough cash on her. So she had to dig around in her purse to find a credit card. Then when she swipes it and punches in her PIN, and you know what happened.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Declined.”

  Carla nodded. “Yep. And then she went batshit, if you’ll excuse the expression.” Her blue eyes suggested that she didn’t give a damn if he excused the expression or not. “Started hollering that her card was good, she wants her damn cigarettes and so on. Basically, she wanted me to give her the cigarettes. Like this is some kind of bar she can run a tab at.” She cocked her head toward her coworker. “Billy over there called nine-one-one.” She laughed, a throaty rumble like distant thunder.

  “What?”

  “That’s when it got real interesting. She lit into your deputy out there in the parking lot. Which was pretty damn stupid, you ask me. I mean, he’s huge. Looks like a football player. So, she starts getting mouthy with him, and the deputy is like, ‘Ma’am, if you could just calm down,’ but she wasn’t having any of it.”

  “You could hear them from in here?”

  “I could hear her, for sure. Ain’t that right, Billy?”

  Billy swiveled his head over his left shoulder. “Hell yeah.”

  Carla nodded. “Course, we could watch it all through the window, too. Anyway, she hauls off and swings that big purse at the deputy, and he blocks it with his arm and spins her around. The bag went flying.”

  He nodded. “I figured. Saw the stuff scattered out there in the parking lot.”

  Carla nodded back at him. “Yeah, God knows what all she had in that thing. Your deputy swung her around and basically put her in some kind of wrestling move looked like. Next thing you know, she’s cuffed and in the backseat, cussing him to high heaven. That’s about when you showed up.”

  He nodded again. “I thank you, Carla. I’m gone talk to Deputy Carver now. I do appreciate your time and patience.”

  Carla smiled. “Not a problem, Sheriff.”

  Outside, Carver sat in the front seat of his cruiser, laptop open. He clacked away on the keyboard. The driver’s side back door was open, and two bare feet, toes up, stuck out. Purple nail polish. He peeked around the corner of the door. Around the car, a debris field of lady things was marked with tiny plastic orange cones Carver had pulled out of the trunk. The cones marked off a wallet, some loose change, a pack of chewing gum, a tampon, an ink pen, and a book of matches. The purse from which the objects had flown sat, upright, two feet behind the car.

  A mess of blond hair popped up from the backseat. The woman glared at him. She wiggled into as good a sitting position as she could, as her hands were cuffed behind her back. Positioned such as she was, he could see she was top-heavy. The black T-shirt strained against her bosom.

  “Ma’am?” he said as neutral as he could.

  The woman’s eyes went wide and took on a look like a trapped dog. “Sheriff, please, I’m sorry,” she said in a voice nearing hysteria or tears or both. His brow furrowed. “I swear to God, I didn’t mean to. I’m real sorry. Swear to God I am.”

  He raised a hand to shush her. “Ma’am, just calm down a little bit.”

  She pulled her legs into the car and scooted away from him until her back was jammed up against the opposite door. “Nuh uh,” she said. Still drunk. Obviously. “I seen what you do to people what cross you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I seen you shoot that guy over at the Jug last summer!” she shrieked.

  He sighed. He seemed to recall a busty woman in the crowd at the Jug the day he shot O. W. Banks. Who was drunk at the time. Obviously. And holding a pistol in his right hand.

  He cut his eyes toward Carver, but the deputy was still clacking on the computer. If he heard the woman—and how could he not—he didn’t let on. “John, what’s her name?”

  “Cheryl Brinks. Missus,” Carver said without looking up.

  He peered into the backseat. “Well, Mrs. Brinks, I’m not going to shoot you. So just try to calm down, and we’ll get this rectified as soon as we can.”

  Cheryl relaxed. Nodded and exhaled. He caught a whiff of alcohol, smiled anyway. Behind him, a ways off, he heard a faint buzz, a big engine a long ways off. He stood straight just as Carver finished his report, clicked the laptop shut, and then climbed out of the driver’s seat. He eased the back door shut, then shook his head and grinned at his boss.

  “What?” he said.

  “I never tell a suspect I’m not going to shoot him.” The grin still there.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Makes me a liar if I do.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, I suppose so.” The noise behind him grew louder.

  “I could have saved you a trip into the store.”

  He shrugged. “You looked busy with Mrs. Brinks there.” He waved his hand toward the back of the car and grinned. “And this carefully preserved crime scene. Shit, I thought somebody had gotten assassinated.”

  “Shut up, Colt.”

  John stared over his shoulder toward the noise, which had turned into a loud rumble. He turned just as the Ford pickup swerved off the highway and into the parking lot, tires howling on the hot asphalt. Behind the wheel, the driver scowled, cheeks red and angry above the brown beard and below the Bass Pro ball cap.

  “What in the hell?” Carver said.

  He turned to face the truck, now parked about twenty feet away. “I’m guessing that would be Mister Brinks,” he said as he started walking toward the vehicle.

  “Colt,” John said, taking half a step.

  He waved him off as he closed on the truck. “I’m good.” The driver’s door flew open and a heavyset man, fifty or so, piled out. His w
ork boots smacked the asphalt. Jeans, short sleeves. No visible weapon. He knew John was back there, so he just kept walking until he was about six feet from the driver, who stood fuming.

  “Can I help you, sir?” he asked. Calm. Professional.

  “Sheriff, what is this bullshit about?” The man’s hands were visible, but he was clearly pissed.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

  “I’m Brad Brinks,” the man said. “That’s my wife you got hog-tied back there.” His voice carried across the parking lot to his wife’s ears.

  “Brad!” she screamed from the backseat. “Go on home, damn it! Don’t make thangs worse than they already are!”

  Brinks leaned forward, up on his toes like he was trying to propel his voice over Colt’s head. “You keep your goddamn mouth shut, you hear! Just shut up!”

  Brinks looked back at him. “You gotta put her in cuffs?”

  He hooked his thumbs in his pistol belt, the right hand still close to his weapon. “She was being belligerent to my deputy.”

  Brinks thrust his head toward the cruiser and the debris around it. “You call that belligerent?”

  “He does.” He stared Brinks down for a second. “You want to keep talking about what I do and don’t consider belligerent, or you want to get back in that truck?”

  “Look, Sheriff,” Brinks said, hands on his hips. “I don’t want no trouble.”

  “Well, you’re getting a little right now.”

  Brinks stared back at him. Steady. Not afraid, but not hostile, either. Just the steady gaze of a man who has won and lost his share of fights, who has taken the measure of more than one man. Eyes of appraisal, like a breeder checking out a pup, seeing bloodlines and potential, strengths and weaknesses, and deriving a full value of the creature before him based on years of experience, good and bad.

  “Ahite, Sheriff,” Brinks said. “I hear you.”

  He nodded; Brinks climbed into the truck and cranked up. Headed south on 69, toward Alabama, without looking back.

  He watched the truck grow smaller until it disappeared around a curve in the late afternoon glare that bent the orange of the day into a gunmetal gray at the horizon. He was getting tired of this work. Or was he getting afraid—and that was making him tired? No, he was tired of staring down someone in a parking lot or a beer joint or an apartment over something stupid and more often than not induced by alcohol. Cheryl Brinks being the latest example.

  Her comment about O. W. Banks rang in his ears. He had already shot three men, killed two. And should have killed the third one just on general principle. Lawman does that, though, and it divides the flock into two groups—one scared to cross you for fear of being shot and the other just looking for a chance to take you down a peg. Brad Brinks was in the second group, but he was smart enough to know today wasn’t his day.

  He walked back to the cruiser. John stood rigid and ready to draw down, even with the threat gone. “See?” he said. “Told you, I’m good.”

  John shook his head and grinned. “I shoulda known,” he said. “I’m taking Mrs. Brinks in and post a bail, soon as I get all this shit picked up.” He swept a muscular arm around to indicate the items on the asphalt.

  “Want some help?”

  “Naw, I got it.”

  He nodded, fished his keys out of his pocket. His car was parked off to the side of the store. “All right, then I’ll see you back at the office.”

  “You bet, boss.”

  He walked to his own vehicle, cranked it, and let the air conditioner start pushing the hot sticky air around the interior before he dropped it into gear and pulled onto the highway.

  He took his time rolling up 69 toward Columbus. John would handle Mrs. Cheryl Brinks. Had he not been driving back toward town from the river and heard the radio, he wouldn’t have stopped in the first place. He turned the knob on the air conditioner one more notch. His rearview mirror blazed orange, the glare making him squint, and he reached for his sunglasses in the passenger seat. Outside, pine thickets gave the illusion of cool shade, though the lack of rain over the last month meant the gloom beneath their boughs was only slightly less stifling than the sun-splashed wide pastures that fell away from the highway and toward the Tombigbee two miles to the west as he wheeled through a sweeping curve. Overhead, a sky of blue so pale it only hinted at its natural color offered no respite, just wisps of cloud even paler than the sky. Even the kudzu that throttled every fence post and tree and any other stationary object along the highway seemed to gasp for air from broad green leaves withered and fading.

  These long spells of dryness, of thirst not slaked, only seemed to amplify the dryness and thirst of the people who lived here. The heat, which even when lacking rain was never without its suffocating humidity, a mocking presence in the air, created a need that grew more urgent by the day, a need that transformed into sullen resentment that started deep and burned slowly, only to erupt and rage until it had spent itself.

  He barreled past a tiny crumbling cemetery tucked in a stand of oaks, pale worn stone reminders of a long-dead era. The scene brought to mind an image of his mother’s delicate frame standing at his dead father’s grave, her still-blond head bowed, and her songbird voice carrying the ancient hymn she often sang, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” He never could remember all the words, but he smiled at the remembrance of her alto voice and embraced the calm it brought.

  He turned off Highway 69 onto a side road, headed north. He picked up the bypass near the Alabama state line to avoid going through town and kept the big Crown Victoria up over seventy-five all the way to the exit for 45 North. He made his way through the traffic and lights for the turnoff to the lock and dam, took it on the yellow light, and drove to the convenience store a mile down the road on the right.

  He sat in the car with the engine running, watching the activity in the store through the plate glass window front. Two other cars in the lot. The old blue Honda belonged to Burton; the Chevrolet must belong to the teenager standing at the counter while Burton rang him up. He waited until the kid exited carrying a huge cup with a straw sticking out the top. The kid unlocked the Chevy with a remote, cranked up, drove off.

  He climbed out and met Burton at the door. He grinned. Every time he saw Jim Burton, he thought of John Lennon. Same circular little glasses, long hair, long face. Burton looked like 1969 when it got old.

  Burton didn’t smile back. He rarely smiled at him. “Sheriff.” Burton stepped aside as he came through the door. “What’s up?”

  “Relax, Jimmy,” he said as he walked to the counter. “I’m just here to get some Copenhagen.”

  Burton looked skeptical. “That all?”

  “Pretty much. How you been doing?”

  Burton walked back behind the counter, pulled a can of Copenhagen from the rack on the rear wall, slapped it on the counter. He shrugged. “I been doing OK.”

  “No trouble from that McNairy bunch?”

  Burton had gotten crosswise with a group of Tennessee redneck mafia types about a year earlier. The group had set him and his store up to run a food stamp scam, a clear violation of Burton’s parole terms—part of his sentence for his possession conviction. But Burton, being just smart enough to see an opportunity but not smart enough to cover his tracks completely, had gotten caught skimming profits from the group, who liked to call themselves the McNairy Mob. Realizing his impending fate, Burton did what any good parole violator would do—he began cooperating with the authorities. Burton had been his main informant ever since, especially after he had had to shoot Kenny Jenkins in a parking lot not far from here because of the scam.

  “No trouble at all,” Burton said, sliding his hands in his jeans pockets. “Fact is, I ain’t heard from them since…you shot Jenkins.”

  He nodded, slid a ten across the countertop. “That’s about what I figured. But you hear anything else around town lately?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything. Names, deals comi
ng and going, things like that.”

  Burton’s eyes narrowed behind the glasses. “Deals? What’s your angle, Sheriff?”

  He put his hands out, open, as if to show he had no subterfuge in mind. “I don’t have an angle, other than I’m the law. And come to think of it, that’s a pretty big angle. But I got a kid in my jail from the other night talking all kinds of shit about somebody ripping off drug dealers.”

  Burton shrugged. “Ain’t heard nothing about anything like that.”

  “Really.” He gave Burton a long stare while he slid a thumbnail under the paper label of the snuff can and sliced it open. “Nothing at all?”

  Another shrug. “Naw. I ain’t in the business anymore, remember?”

  “This kid in my jail,” he said, “he’s looking at armed robbery, accessory to murder at the least. DA wants to charge him with capital murder.”

  Burton shook his head. Kids these days. “Sounds like he’s in deep shit.”

  “The deepest. And a guy like that is willing to roll over on just about anybody. Know what I mean?”

  Burton frowned. “Yeah, I know what you mean, but like I said, I ain’t heard nothing. At all.”

  He stepped back. “Fair enough. Keep an ear out, Jimmy. You hear anything about a guy, a white, guy, ripping off dealers in any of your social engagements, you let me know, ahite?”

  Burton nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  He left Burton standing behind the register with a confused look on his face. He sat in the car and scolded himself for thinking he was tired earlier. He wasn’t tired. He was just bored.

  DELMER

  He eased the car into a parking spot on Forrest Street and cut the lights. Downtown was dead this time of night—a little after midnight—so he didn’t worry about being seen. From his car, he could see up to the apartment on the second floor. Lights on in the window, softened by a gauzy curtain. Behind the soft light, strobes of white and blue and shadows. TV still on.