by Scott Pratt
“What are you talking about?”
“Hanes Howell is what I’m talking about. He’s right in the middle of it. And the FBI has apparently committed a catastrophic clusterfuck. I’ll tell you about that later. But Howell . . . I’m sure about him. He called your grandfather a washed-up old fool. Can you believe that? I should have kicked his ass for that, Claire. I’m sorry, but at the time he said it, I didn’t know what he was into.”
“My grandfather has been called far worse, Darren. You’re overreacting. What are you going to do?”
“When I get off the phone with you, I’m going to call the sheriff. Tomorrow morning, he and I are going to drive out to Roby Penn’s together, and I’m going to arrest him.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“Nope.”
“So you’re not going to arrest him.”
“It doesn’t matter. He wouldn’t allow himself to be arrested, anyway.”
“So you’re going to a gunfight?”
“Probably.”
“You said he’s the sheriff’s uncle. You’ll wind up in a cross fire.”
“Some things have come up about the sheriff I didn’t know before. I think I can trust him to at least get me close to this guy. I don’t know what he’ll do if bullets start flying, but at least he can get me in there.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know, Claire. I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“Darren, this sounds like a bad idea. A bad plan all the way around. If you go in there, don’t go without a SWAT team.”
“I don’t want to get a bunch of people hurt, Claire. An ATF SWAT team went into Waco. Remember that? They got shot to pieces.”
“But you’ll get yourself killed!”
“I hope not. Believe it or not, I’ve done this kind of thing before. But if it goes bad, I just wanted to hear your voice one more time. Take care, Claire. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
She said, “You better, Darren Street. You better call me,” and I hung up.
CHAPTER 41
It was dark when I awoke. I’d managed to doze off for only a couple of hours. A chill ran through me as I rolled out of bed at 3:30 a.m. and went in to take a shower. As soon as I’d hung up with Claire, I’d called the sheriff and told him to pick me up at five in the morning.
“Why?” he’d said. “Where we going?”
“Just pick me up.”
I didn’t know where Roby Penn lived. Hell, I didn’t even know what the man looked like. I’d heard he was a skinhead and had a white handlebar mustache. I knew him only secondhand, by his legend, the same way thousands of people knew the mobsters and Bonnie and Clyde back in their heyday. I had no idea what Tree Corker would do when I told him what I had in mind, whether the blood of family would overcome the seemingly sincere turnaround of his moral compass. And speaking of moral compasses, I had no idea where mine was pointing. I didn’t know whether I was going after Roby Penn because I thought it was the right thing to do for the safety and betterment of the community or whether I just wanted to kill the man I had come to regard as a plague that needed to be eradicated.
I was the district attorney general, but I had no illusions about whether I was acting under color of law. I wasn’t. There had been no meaningful investigation into Roby Penn. There was no evidence in the files of a law enforcement agency that could be brought forward in a court of law. He would receive no due process. Had I taken the time—and it would have been a long time—I could have eventually gathered enough evidence to get a judge to sign a warrant charging Roby with illegal gambling. Maybe. But in the course of gathering that evidence, I would have had to develop witnesses and informants, and every one of their lives would have been at risk. If Roby so much as suspected someone of helping the police make a case on him, I had no doubt he would have killed them, just as he’d killed Morris and the others.
I dressed, drank two cups of coffee, and cleaned the Walther pistol I’d become so proficient with. I could put a .22-caliber round into a thimble at fifteen yards with that pistol, and I could rapid-fire ten rounds into a circle the size of a teacup. When I was finished, I secured the pistol in its holster at the small of my back and thought again about whether this was something I wanted to do. I decided it was.
Maybe it was akin to a death wish. Maybe I’d lost all hope that I would ever find anything good and decent in the world that wouldn’t be taken away from me. And thinking about what had been going on in and around Knoxville, the hustles and the scams and the corruption that reached all the way to Nashville, made me nauseous. I also realized the corruption was going on all over the world, all day, every day. What difference did it make if Roby Penn blew my brains out and I was no longer a part of this world? Besides, my original intent had been to gain some kind of revenge on Morris and to find an opening for Granny to get into gambling and drugs. Who was I kidding? There was nothing honorable about any of it.
I heard a soft knock on the door at precisely five o’clock and picked up my coat, a stocking cap, and a pair of gloves. A cold front had settled in, and it was chilly and blustery outside.
“Morning,” the sheriff said when I opened the door. He was wearing his uniform, including the Pythons.
“Morning,” I said. “I see you put your guns back on.”
“Felt kind of naked without them.”
“Ready to go?”
“I reckon so. Whose vehicle we taking?”
“Let’s take yours,” I said. “I’ve never ridden in a car that looks like a tank and has the words High Sheriff printed on it.”
“Mind telling me where we’re going?”
“I’m going to arrest your uncle Roby. You need to take me to where he lives.”
“You got a warrant for his arrest?”
“No. I’m going to make a citizen’s arrest.”
We walked to his cruiser, and I was surprised to hear the sheriff chuckle as we strapped ourselves in.
“Citizen’s arrest,” he said as he started the car and pulled out of my complex. “That’s a good one. You think you’re going to just walk up to the door and knock and tell Roby Penn you’re there to arrest him, and he’ll just come along quietly?”
“I don’t think it’ll go that way, no.”
“It ain’t gonna go that way, I promise.”
“I don’t expect you to get in the middle of it. Just drop me off near his house.”
“He lives in a trailer.”
“Then drop me near the trailer.”
“You ain’t gonna be able to sneak up on him. I swear he has the senses of a wild animal. What kind of weapon you carrying?”
“It’s a Walther pistol. Twenty-two-caliber, long-rifle ammo. Hollow point. It doesn’t have a lot of bang, but I’m accurate. If he starts shooting, I’ll shoot back, and chances are I’ll hit him. If I hit him, he’ll be in trouble.”
“Damn, son, do you have any idea what Roby’s got inside that trailer of his?” the sheriff said. “He’s got military-grade weapons, fully automatic M16s. He’s even got an M60 machine gun in there. I’ve heard he’s got a grenade launcher on one of his assault rifles, but I ain’t ever seen it. You might want to think this through some more. No sense in going out there and getting your head blown off.”
“Made up my mind, Sheriff. A woman I know called me pigheaded not too long ago. She was right. Nothing is going to change around here unless Roby goes to jail or off to that big cockfighting ring in the sky. He’s going to one of those places this morning.”
“You can forget jail,” the sheriff said.
“Yeah, I get it.”
We rode for almost twenty minutes in silence. I concentrated on taking deep breaths, trying to calm my nerves, telling myself to just let whatever happens happen. Stay calm, stay alert. If you get shot, keep fighting until your last breath.
“You ready?” the sheriff said. “About a half mile on the right, I’m going to turn off onto a gravel driveway. It runs a couple of hundr
ed yards back through the woods. Roby’s trailer is at the end of the driveway. I’m gonna hit my blue lights when I get close to the trailer. He’ll be up. Don’t think the man ever sleeps. When he sees the lights, he’ll come out, but he’ll be suspicious and he’ll be armed. He carries a Colt .45 everywhere he goes.”
“Have you ever done this before? Come up his driveway this early in the morning with your lights on?”
The sheriff shook his head. “He’ll think something is wrong. As soon as I stop, I’m going to get out and start walking toward his trailer. I’ll say something like, ‘Roby, we got a problem,’ and then you get out. I don’t know if he’ll recognize you, but you’ve been in the papers and on television and on those buses and billboards all over town, so he probably will. You take it from there. If you want to just open up on him, go ahead.”
“I’m not going to ambush him,” I said. “It’ll be a fair fight. What will you do when the shooting starts?”
“Probably wet my pants,” the sheriff said. “Here it is.”
He turned off the road onto a gravel driveway. “Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
I felt a sudden sense of calm, something similar to when I stepped into the morning air to duel with Big Pappy Donovan. My senses were heightened, but my hands were perfectly still, my heart rate slow and steady. If I were to die this morning, I would do so without panic. I’d accepted my fate, whatever it might be.
The sheriff turned on his emergency lights and gunned the cruiser’s powerful engine. At the end of the driveway he turned the wheel hard and did a power-slide stop that put us about thirty feet from the trailer. A porch light came on almost immediately, and the sheriff got out of the car. I pulled my pistol from the holster and held it in my lap, waiting for Roby to appear.
A skin-headed man with a wide, white handlebar mustache stepped out the door and walked down the three steps from the trailer’s small front porch. He was wearing combat-fatigue pants, boots, and a white, sleeveless T-shirt. In his right hand was a nickel-plated pistol.
“What the fuck you doing out here this time of the morning, Tree?” Roby yelled.
“We’ve got a problem, Roby,” the sheriff said.
At that moment, I opened the door and stepped out. The wind was howling, making it difficult to hear.
Roby stopped in his tracks about twenty feet away.
“The district attorney has a warrant for your arrest,” the sheriff said.
I held up a piece of paper that I’d folded at my apartment and stuck in my jacket pocket. It was the rental agreement for my apartment.
Roby smiled and took two steps back. His gun started to come up, but mine came up quicker, and I squeezed a round off before he could take close aim. The bullet hit him as his gun roared. I felt the shock wave off the round he fired at me as it whizzed by my left ear, and I knelt. Roby staggered slightly, then turned and ran up the steps and back into the trailer. I fired two more shots through the door opening before he got it closed, but I wasn’t sure they hit him.
I turned and looked at the sheriff, who was just standing there like a frightened child. He hadn’t even pulled one of his Pythons from a holster.
“Sheriff!” I yelled. “Sheriff! Get behind the car.”
I was cursing myself for not killing Roby. One shot from twenty feet should have been enough, but the combination of the wind, seeing the size of the barrel of the gun in Roby’s hand, and the bullet he fired, nearly hitting me in the head, must have made me flinch a little. I moved around behind the sheriff’s cruiser and waited to see what Roby’s next move would be. It didn’t take long to find out, and it wasn’t something I was prepared for.
I’d never been in the military, so I didn’t know the awesome power of a fully automatic assault rifle. The sheriff’s pride and joy, his beautiful black-and-gold cruiser, was suddenly being turned into Swiss cheese as the rounds hammered into it. Roby was firing short bursts of between four and six rounds each from a window at the far left of the trailer. The windshield and all the windows exploded, and I was showered in glass.
“He’s gonna kill us!” Sheriff Corker said. “I told you about what he’s got in there.”
The sheriff had wrapped himself into a ball on the ground.
“Shoot back, dammit!” I yelled at him. “Get off the ground and shoot back!”
I hadn’t expected to get into a protracted firefight, so I only had one clip of ammunition containing ten rounds. I’d fired three shots.
“Never mind,” I said to the sheriff. “Give me your gun belt.”
He looked at me and shook his head. Something came over him at that moment, as though he would forever think of himself as less than a man if he gave me the Pythons. He pulled one of the pistols out and squeezed three shots off at the trailer. I was relieved to have the help. I fired two more, but we were so overmatched in firepower that I didn’t think it was going to matter.
The shooting stopped for a minute, which concerned me because I didn’t know what Roby was up to in there.
“We can’t stay here,” I said to the sheriff. “If he’s got a grenade launcher, he’ll blow us up. Even if he doesn’t, he’s eventually going to come out of the trailer and work his way around until he can pick us off from a distance.”
I was wrong about the grenade launcher, but at that moment, the door to the trailer opened and a scene straight out of Rambo unfolded. Roby walked out with his machine gun and a long belt of ammunition wrapped around his arm.
“Oh no,” I said. “We have to split up. I’m gone. Kill him if he comes after me.”
I got up and started running for the tree line.
I heard Roby yell, “I’ll be back for you directly!” and then the machine gun opened up.
The sound was deafening, and dirt began to fly up near my feet. The rounds tore through the trees, shredding the smaller ones. The bullets were closing in on me as I ran with everything I had through a small stand of trees and over a small hill. When I cleared the hill, the shooting stopped. I glanced to my right and saw what looked like a garbage dump just a few yards away. I ran to the dump and dove behind a berm of dirt. I pointed the pistol in the direction I thought he would be coming from and waited.
Less than ten seconds later, I saw him. He was more than thirty yards away, a little too far for a confident shot with the pistol. I needed him to get closer. He was walking slowly now, his eyes scanning the property. The front of his T-shirt was covered in blood, and his left arm appeared to be dangling. He disappeared behind a small rise, and I raised my head just a bit. When I did, he saw me, and he turned straight for me. I fired two more shots, but he opened up immediately with the machine gun, and the withering fire drove me into the dirt. If I could have, I would have started tunneling like a mole. But all I could do was duck my head and hope maybe he ran out of ammo or the gun would jam. When he was almost on top of me, I said goodbye to Claire and wondered whether I’d be seeing Grace, my little girl, and my mother soon. I wondered whether the sheriff was running away or whether Roby would kill him as soon as he was finished with me.
And then, just like that, the shooting stopped.
I looked over the berm and raised my pistol, expecting to see Roby trying to unjam his weapon, but he wasn’t there. I looked around and saw nothing. The only sound now was the wind and my own heavy breathing. I raised up higher, and I saw him, lying on his face. I stood and walked slowly over to him, pointing my gun at the back of his bald head. The machine gun was on the ground by his right arm, the barrel steaming in the cold air. As I got close, I noticed a hole in the center of the back of his head. I reached down and felt for a pulse. He wasn’t breathing. I tossed the machine gun to the side, rolled him over, and was confronted with a gruesome scene. Roby’s forehead, along with his nose, and part of his left cheek, had been blown away.
Roby Penn, probably the most feared man in Knox County, was dead. The question was, who had killed him? Had Sheriff Corker run up behind him and put a bullet in h
is brain and then run away? That didn’t make any sense.
I began hurrying back toward Roby’s trailer, hoping I wouldn’t find the sheriff shot full of holes. About halfway back, I heard an engine start. I sprinted up a hill and saw a Jeep pull slowly out of a stand of trees, drive through a field in the direction of the road, and then disappear into another stand of trees.
The Jeep looked exactly like the one owned by Eugene Tipton.
CHAPTER 42
I found Sheriff Corker walking in my direction before I got back to Roby’s trailer. He was dirty from lying on the ground behind his patrol car but didn’t look too much worse for the wear.
“Did you kill him?” the sheriff said.
“No, but he’s dead. Somebody else killed him.”
“Who?”
“I didn’t see him, but I think it was an old friend.”
“So somebody else knew you were going to be out here this morning?”
“I told somebody last night, and that somebody must have told somebody else.”
I had no doubt that after my conversation with Claire, she had called Granny Tipton. Eugene was probably in the woods at Roby’s place within hours after that phone call.
“I shot him, you know,” the sheriff said. “Just so you don’t think I’m a coward. When he was getting a bead on you with that machine gun, I put a round into him. I think it hit him in the left shoulder. Didn’t stop him, but it bought you some time.”
“Thank you, Sheriff,” I said, and I reached out and shook his hand. “I thought for sure I was dead. I appreciate everything you did this morning. You showed a lot of courage.”
“Me? You’ve got the balls of an Angus bull, son. The way you stood there toe-to-toe with him and then kept your head when he started with that M16. Hell, I peed on myself a little when he came out with that machine gun. It was a good call you made to cut and run when we did. I didn’t have any idea I could move so fast.”
By this time, we’d walked back to the spot where the sheriff’s car lay as dead as Roby Penn. He shook his large head and removed his hat.
