Hal still said nothing. Clayton needed to give him more. He moved close enough to Hal to almost whisper in his ear, and Hal let him.
“They’re on to your boy in Florida—Wilcombe.” Clayton waited to see if that put a crack in Hal’s stone visage, but there was nothing, not even a blink. “They also know the locations of all sixteen cookhouses. They know your routes and where it’s all going. They’ve got times, dates, names, everything. If you don’t listen to me they’re going to storm this mountain like you or I have never seen. I can’t stop it. And if that happens, a lot of people—a lot of your people—are going to get killed.” Clayton thought about what Holly had said back in his office about appealing to Hal’s other sensibility—about the money being paramount. Clayton didn’t believe it, but he put it out there anyway. “Think about the money, Hal. You’ll lose it all. Everything you worked for taken from you before you even know what’s happening.”
Hal spit on the porch, and Clayton thought he caught a slight shift in Hal’s expression.
“Nothing makes a U.S. federal law enforcement agency drool more than a huge pile of money,” Clayton said, using Agent Holly’s words verbatim. “And they are coming for yours. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Hal. You can keep it all and put a stop to all this.”
Clayton thought he saw Halford weighing the possibility of what he was saying. He also thought he heard a whip-poor-will singing through the dead silence that suddenly blanketed his father’s house, but maybe he only wanted to.
“You’ve got guarantees?” Halford finally said.
“Yes.”
“Just me and God’s country, huh?”
“That’s right.”
Hal reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a coin big enough to be a silver dollar. Without looking at him, Hal motioned to the boy still out on the porch, and he scurried over, the wooden train left abandoned on pine slats. He handed the boy the coin and tousled his hair. “Go inside now and clear my food off the table. I done lost my appetite.” The boy did as he was told and hustled off through the screen door, taking only a second to stop it from slamming again, but once inside, he turned back to Clayton and shot him a bird before disappearing from view. The two old men in the rockers collected their things and moved off the porch as if they’d just noticed a thunderhead forming and were looking to take shelter. Old men were intuitive like that. Halford thumped down the steps of the porch and stood just inches from Clayton’s face. The sheriff stood his ground. Hal spoke in a low, controlled voice. “Do you know what your problem is?”
Clayton smelled the pork sausage and gravy on his brother’s breath. “Hal, think about—”
“Do you?”
Clayton let out another sigh. “What, Hal? What’s my problem?”
“You never got it. This isn’t God’s country. It’s my country. Mine. It always has been and always will be. God don’t have nothing to say about it up here. You could have been part of it, but you turned your back on us—on your family—on Deddy. That was your decision.”
“Hal, we don’t need to rehash all this.”
Halford ignored him. “But it ain’t like we all didn’t see it coming. Ever since you were a kid, you walked around thinking you were better than us, and now look at you, strutting around with that star on your shirt, still trying to prove how much better than us you are. If Deddy were here right now, he’d be disgusted at how you turned out.”
Clayton felt a twinge of anger tighten up one side of his face, and he matched his brother’s low tone of voice. “You want to talk about Deddy, Hal? Why don’t we talk about why he ain’t here? Why don’t you tell me the truth about the fire?”
“I don’t need to tell you shit.”
“You’re right. You don’t. I saw the barn. It didn’t look like no kerosene fire to me. It looked like the place exploded. What happened, you guys learn to cook that shit through trial and error, and Deddy paid the price?”
Hal’s upper lip curled. “Get off my mountain before I lose my patience and beat you to death where you stand.”
“Why was the old man in there, Hal? I talked to the fire chief, and he paints a whole different story than the bullshit you tried to pass off. Don’t you think it’s sad? He ran this mountain for seventy years without so much as a scratch and didn’t make it through one when you started making the decisions.”