by Wiley Cash
“I’d really be sticking my neck out, Ed,” Winston said.
“I know,” Bellamy said. “I know all about sticking your neck out. I know all about that.”
Winston sat quietly for a moment, his mind trying to parse the difference between the right thing and the legal thing, and somewhere just beyond his grasp was an answer that wrapped together everything that had happened so far—Rodney’s murder, the mystery surrounding the airplane, the fires, Frye’s having been shot before his eyes—in a way that made it all, if not palatable, then at least easier to look at without causing anyone more pain. But Winston couldn’t find the words, so instead he gestured with his head toward Jay, and Bellamy stood up from the table and walked toward the door. “Come on, son,” he said.
Winston stood and walked toward the door too, and he watched as Bellamy and Jay made their way down the hall to the reception area. “No more fires, Jay, okay?”
Jay stopped walking and turned to face Winston. “Yes, sir,” he said.
“Come on, son,” Bellamy said again.
When Winston parked Glenn’s cruiser in front of Janelle’s house, he found Glenn standing out by the road. The ambulance was gone, and with it Frye’s body. The Grove had reclaimed its quiet stillness. Aside from the porch light, Janelle’s house was dark. Winston knew that by now Bellamy had returned Jay and gone back to his own home, which sat just a few streets away. Winston imagined Jay inside the house now, lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the night’s events in his head just as Winston himself had done during the drive and would continue to do in the few hours he would lie beside Marie before he would have to rise from bed and drive Groom to the airport for the final time.
Winston got out and walked around to the passenger’s side of the cruiser, and Glenn got in behind the wheel. They drove back to Plantation Cove for Winston’s car where he’d left it parked at the scene of the fire. Winston looked at his watch; it was after 3:00 a.m.
“Hell of a night,” Glenn said.
“Hell of a night,” Winston repeated.
On the drive, Glenn told Winston that Janelle had not come outside after Jay had been arrested, nor had anyone else in the Grove. Glenn had taken a flashlight and searched the street and yards around Janelle’s for any signs of the person who’d shot Bradley Frye, but there seemed to be nothing to find. The paramedics had told him that Frye had been shot in the center of his back, that his heart had probably been punctured, and Glenn knew that only a high-powered rifle and a shooter of considerable skill could’ve done that much damage from that far away.
After they drove into Plantation Cove, Glenn slowed and came to a stop behind Winston’s cruiser. He put his car in park and looked over at Winston. “I think we should go back to the Grove, set up a perimeter. Call in patrol. Maybe even knock on doors to see if anybody saw anything.”
“I don’t know,” Winston said. “There’s just no way to know where that shot came from. I don’t even know where we’d start, especially getting people up out of bed.”
“That whole neighborhood was awake when it happened,” Glenn said. “No way anybody could’ve slept through all that commotion.”
“Better to wait until morning,” Winston said. “Get a team out there.”
“Sheriff,” Glenn said, “with all due respect, your challenger was shot dead tonight right in front of you. It’s in the county’s best interest and yours too to make sure we investigate this the right way. There’s a vigilante out there who knows how to use a rifle, and he might not be done killing.”
“Whoever took that shot saved that kid’s life,” Winston said. “Probably saved mine too.”
“That’s not the point,” Glenn said. Winston could feel Glenn’s eyes probing the side of his face as if trying to uncover something he did not want to reveal. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Sheriff?”
Winston clenched his teeth as if conscious that his mouth could open and he could speak and tell the truth at any moment. He and Glenn had worked together for years, and during that time Glenn had been his most trusted deputy, and Winston hoped that one day Glenn would become sheriff because he was honest and consistent and fair. As far as he knew, they had never misled each other or withheld anything, and they’d certainly never lied to one another. But Winston knew that he was lying now; if not lying, then what was he doing? If he were being honest, he would admit that he wasn’t sad that Bradley Frye had been shot and killed—and perhaps he would even admit to Glenn that he, if only for a moment, had considered doing the same thing just the night before—but he also wished that Frye were still alive because his being murdered made the way forward more complicated for everybody. But regardless of what Winston wanted or didn’t want, in that moment, he knew that he could be either a good man and keep his mouth shut, or a good sheriff and tell Glenn all that he knew. He hoped that if Glenn ever became sheriff, he would somehow find a way to be both a good man and a good sheriff all the time. Winston had always assumed that would be true of himself, but now he knew differently. “Tomorrow morning,” he said, “we’ll knock on doors in the Grove. Get the coroner’s report, see what can be learned about the weapon.”
“It’s a mistake to wait until tomorrow,” Glenn said.
“It might be.”
“It is.” Glenn sighed and shook his head. He turned and looked up at the house that Jay had set fire to just a few hours earlier. From where they sat, it was too dark to see much aside from the white construction plastic that covered the structure’s exterior. “What do you think Englehart was doing out here?”
“Playing security guard,” Winston said. “It’s pretty clear that Frye hired him to keep an eye on things. I reckon Englehart was trying to get in good with the new sheriff.”
“Maybe he was already in with him,” Glenn said.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Glenn said. “It just strikes me as strange that Frye sent Englehart back out here after the fire.” The mention of the fire seemed to remind Glenn who’d set it, and he looked over at Winston. “What did you do with that kid?”
“Turned him loose,” Winston said.
“No charges?”
“No.”
“That’s what I figured you’d do.”
“Yeah,” Winston said. “It seemed like the right thing.”
“Hard to say,” Glenn said.
“It always is.”
The two men sat there for a moment as if waiting for the other to either confess something or ask a question that would lead to a confession, but neither of them spoke.
“Well, I’m going to get,” Winston finally said. He put his hand on the door handle. “We’ve got liftoff tomorrow morning.”
“Yep,” Glenn said.
“All right,” Winston said.
Glenn nodded in the direction of the house. “I might nose around up there,” he said.
“What are you hoping to find?” Winston asked.
“I don’t know,” Glenn said. “I’m just not ready to go home yet.”
“All right,” Winston said. He opened the door and stepped out.
“Sheriff,” Glenn said. Winston turned and looked back into the car. “Get some sleep.”
“Yeah,” Winston said. “You too.” He closed the door and walked to his cruiser and climbed inside. He turned around in the cul-de-sac, and as he passed the scene he could see the light from Glenn’s flashlight searching the ground around the house.
Winston had only made it out to the development’s entrance when Glenn’s voice called to him over his walkie-talkie. Winston stopped the car and took the radio from his belt. “Go ahead,” he said.
“Sheriff,” Glenn said, “you might want to turn around.”
Winston parked in front of the house and walked up through the muddy yard where Glenn waited at the corner of the garage. Around the corner, the driveway ended at an aluminum door, large enough to accommodate two cars. Here, the side of the house was burned black a
nd charred, except for the spot where Glenn held his flashlight beam on a sheet of bright, new construction plastic that had clearly been placed on the house after the fire.
“What do you make of that?” Glenn asked.
“I didn’t think Englehart was in the construction business,” Winston said.
Glenn raised his flashlight and shone it along the expanse of the garage. “No windows,” he said. “All the other garages in these houses have windows.” Winston turned to look at the houses in the distance to see if Glenn was right, but it was too dark, and the other houses were too far away.
“You try raising the garage door?” Winston asked.
“It’s locked,” Glenn said. “Front and back doors are too. So are all the windows on the first floor.”
“A big gust of wind could tear that plastic loose,” Winston said. “We might’ve found it that way.”
“I think that is how we found it,” Glenn said. He stepped forward, and without speaking, he reached out and tore the plastic off the corner of the house. The staples popped free, and the sheet came down easily. Glenn kept tearing it, backing up as he pulled the whole sheet free. Beneath the plastic, the flames had burned a hole through the plywood and the insulation beneath, revealing charred wall studs and damaged drywall. Winston used his flashlight to knock some of the drywall loose, and he found that it left behind a hole large enough to stick his head and shoulders through. He and Glenn looked at each other, both of them thinking the same thing: they had done something together that they probably shouldn’t have done; but Winston was also thinking something that he knew Glenn could not possibly have been thinking: they had come back to one another in this moment of complicity.
Glenn held the flashlight while Winston bent at the waist and braced his hands against the house’s exterior and poked his head through the wall. There wasn’t enough light, and he’d been able to see only a little of what was inside the garage, but what he saw was enough for Glenn to take a crowbar from one of the home sites and pry open the garage door. Only then, standing at the entrance to the garage, did they have a full appreciation of exactly what they’d found. In the garage’s back left corner, their flashlight beams passed over four pallets loaded with brown-paper-wrapped squares that had been shrink-wrapped and stacked waist-high. One of the pallets had been unwrapped, and it was clear that packages had been removed. In the middle of the garage sat a folding table, piled with scales, baggies, ties, and various items. Whoever had been at work here had been comfortable; they’d left behind empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, wadded-up bags of potato chips.
“I’ll be damned,” Glenn whispered.
For Winston, it all came into focus: the comments Englehart had made about Bellamy on the runway the morning after the plane came in; Bradley Frye’s showing up at the crime scene and asking about the FBI; his insistence that Winston keep people out of Plantation Cove; and his willingness to employ Englehart to serve as the night watchman. He’d wanted Jay turned over to him because he was afraid of what the boy might have seen, which was the scene that Winston was taking in at that very moment, the scene Englehart had tried to keep anyone from seeing.
“We’d better find Englehart,” Winston said. He called in to Rudy and had him pull everyone off patrol to head for Plantation Cove except for one deputy tasked with locating Englehart. But he was nowhere to be found.
In the hours remaining before dawn, Winston and Glenn set up a perimeter around the scene, and, along with a few fresh deputies, they began the process of cataloging every shred of evidence inside the garage, beginning with those shrink-wrapped pallets.
Chapter 14
Winston arrived home as the sun was rising, three boxes packed away in his trunk, each item in each box cataloged and filed. The pallets of drugs had been moved and locked away in the evidence room at the station, waiting for the FBI to claim them, but Winston wanted to hand-deliver the evidence in his possession to Rollins and Rountree up in Wilmington. He and his men had cracked this case wide open, and he wanted that to be clear. The knowledge of what they’d found, how it implicated Bradley Frye, and the high it gave him all coalesced to push his exhaustion aside.
He set the coffeepot in the kitchen, and while it was brewing, he snuck upstairs and peeled off his clothes in the bathroom and took the hottest shower his skin could stand. His mind swirled with ideas and possibilities, some of them hard to decipher through the haze of the past several hours. While they’d worked, Winston, Glenn, and the deputies on the scene had parsed everything that had happened, from Rodney Bellamy’s murder to Frye’s to the discovery of the drugs there and down in Myrtle Beach. So much of it had come together, and while Winston didn’t know exactly who had killed Rodney, he felt certain that he knew why Rodney had been killed: he’d stumbled upon something he wasn’t supposed to see, and he may have even recognized people like Bradley Frye. Questions remained about who had murdered Frye, but Winston hoped those questions would wane with time. Bradley Frye had been exposed as a drug dealer—and if the bullet that killed Rodney ended up matching Frye’s weapon, probably a murderer too. It was fine with Winston if people in the county believed that the same unseen hand that had landed the airplane was the same one that had shot and killed Frye to keep him quiet.
The shower made him feel fresher, but he suddenly found himself very tired despite his adrenaline. He did his best to be quiet, but Marie woke up while he was getting dressed, and she opened her eyes into the weak morning light coming through the closed blinds and frowned at him. “What in the world kept you out all night?” she asked.
He stood at the foot of their bed in his dark slacks and undershirt. He buttoned up his uniform while he talked. “Marie,” he said, “I can’t begin to explain all of it.” But of course there were things she needed to know. He told her about Bradley Frye’s death, and then he told her about finding the drugs.
“That’s terrible,” she said, and it was. But Winston could read in her face the recognition that it meant that, at least for a while, he’d remain sheriff and the thing they’d both been dreading would not happen. There was a lot left to untangle, but at least Winston would be the one untangling it, not Bradley Frye. He could attend Rodney Bellamy’s funeral service that afternoon with the assurance that progress was being made on the investigation and the promise that, hopefully, justice would be served.
In the kitchen, Winston found Groom sitting at the table, a cup of coffee in front of him, his duffel bag at his feet. “Morning, Sheriff,” Groom said.
“Morning,” Winston said. He picked up the coffeepot and poured a cup, and then he looked out the back window. A gentle breeze came off the waterway and stirred the tops of the pine trees. It seemed like the perfect day for flying. Winston found himself smiling. He looked at Groom. “You’re going to hear about it when you touch down in Wilmington,” he said, “so you may as well hear it from me. We had us a major break last night.”
Groom’s relaxed demeanor became serious. He cocked his head. “How major?” he asked.
“It’s still early, but it looks like we found about twenty million dollars’ worth of cocaine packed up and sitting in a spec house about a mile from the airport. And it looks like we now know who the local was.”
Groom’s face took on a look of disbelief. He smiled, and then he laughed. He put his hands on the edge of the table and sat back in the chair. “I’ll be, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ll be. Congratulations.”
Maybe it was the news of the bust or the fact that he’d fixed the aircraft and would be in the air soon, perhaps even back home in Florida by that evening, but whatever the reason, the drive to the airport was the most relaxed and talkative Winston had seen Groom since he’d arrived. He asked Winston about who Bradley Frye was and the crime scene and the string of events that had caused the previous night to take such unpredictable turns. Winston told him what they’d discovered, about his plan to deliver the evidence to the Wilmington field office.
“I can’t believe the
y didn’t make it any farther than across the street,” Groom said. “These guys must’ve been serious amateurs.”
“Well, there’s also the bust down in Myrtle Beach,” Winston said. “So they at least moved some of it that far, but who knows? We might not ever know. Maybe we can match the prints from that scene to this one. We’ll see.”
“Good stuff at the scene?” Groom asked.
“Yeah,” Winston said. “Lot of fingerprints, which is funny because we didn’t find a single one in our aircraft. Maybe they got reckless once they thought it was safe.”
“They always slip up,” Groom said. “Somebody always gets reckless.”
“Other stuff too,” Winston said. “Scales, food, handwriting, a pistol, cigarette butts.”
They came to a stop at the one stoplight on the island. A newspaper carrier in an old pickup truck rumbled past them toward the beach. Groom followed the truck with his eyes, and he watched it pass until it disappeared around the bend toward Caswell Beach. Then he turned to Winston. “You want to fly with me?” he asked.
“What?” Winston said. He looked over at Groom, expecting him to have been joking, but it was clear that he wasn’t.
“Fly with me,” Groom said. “You’re planning to drive the evidence up to Wilmington anyway to hand it off to the office. You might as well give it to them at the airport instead.”
Winston laughed because he didn’t know what else to do. The stoplight changed to green, and he made the turn toward the bridge. “In that airplane?” Winston asked. “The one you just fixed?”
“Hell,” Groom said. “You’re never going to take a safer flight than this one. And think about it, you climbing out of that plane and delivering this evidence on the runway in Wilmington? It’ll be like a movie.”
