chapter 8
EIGHTEEN MONTHS EARLIER, in the predawn darkness of a spring Alabama morning, Ethan “Moon Pie” Daniels had to make a critical decision: abandon his drug-running buddy, Reese Davis, or stick around to face the real risk of being busted for several serious crimes.
A deeply suspicious sheriff’s deputy had attempted to interrogate Moon Pie while he was awaiting instructions on what to do with a woman he had kidnapped earlier, following the shooting death of his criminal gang’s leader. Subsequently, that same deputy had unsuccessfully attempted to tail Moon Pie’s vehicle. And when Moon Pie couldn’t contact Reese on the push-to-talk radiophone at their prearranged rendezvous point, his blood pressure had escalated. Then, at the instant his high beams illuminated Jake and Katy and the rescue party, looking like survivors of a suicide bombing, being escorted from the swamp by a uniformed deputy, his flight reflex kicked into overdrive.
Moon Pie had tried to contact Reese numerous times as he quickly drove away from the group that was congregating in the middle of that rural roadway. Each unanswered call intensified his bad feelings. Realizing that he had to run, he began implementing his preplanned disappearance into the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. He took quick inventory of his readily available assets, cash, weapons, and illegal drugs that he could convert to cash later.
Moon Pie had feared this day would come, and he had a plan. He had always assumed, however, that he would be fleeing a drug task force, not a felony kidnapping charge, and Lord knew what else he’d be implicated in by his association with his redneck, drug-dealing buddies. He had only a few hours to get fuel and additional supplies with credit cards before law enforcement would be using them to track him, and since that nosy Alabama deputy had his tag number, he knew he had to get the hell out of Dodge. He set the cruise control at a safe sixty-five mph and headed north on Highway 45. Mindful that an APB would be out for him and his vehicle, when he spied a broken-down car on the side of the road, he considered it providential and stole its tag.
His time hiding out in Missouri had been frustrating. The local competition for selling drugs was intense. The Ozarks were ground zero for meth production, and he found the customer base to be even car-struck-dog crazier than he expected. He lasted only a month before giving up and moving to the Cotton Belt railroad town of Jonesboro, Arkansas, with a brilliant idea for a colossal scam. Jonesboro was only about eighty square miles, but it drew hunters from all over the state, as well as southern Missouri, western Tennessee, and northwest Mississippi.
He quietly assumed a new identity, paying for quality forged documents, and placed a cheap option on a vacant Kmart building. After a few months of advertising a new state-of-the-art indoor rifle and pistol range, he soon had over five hundred future members who paid him a thousand-dollar membership fee. He bailed on the real-estate option and radio-station ad debts, leaving Arkansas in the middle of the night with a pile of cash.
Moon Pie had changed his hair color, put on a few pounds, and grown a goatee when he moved back to Mississippi. He settled in Columbus, where he promptly opened a cash-for-gold business called the Gold Mine—his front to launder cash from dealing drugs. He ran drugs on the Tombigbee Waterway, a 250-mile river system channelized in the 1970s by the United States Army Corp of Engineers to connect the Ohio Valley with the Gulf of Mexico. Columbus was close enough to his old base of operations in Tupelo to easily recruit some trusted criminal support, yet far enough away for him to feel somewhat comfortable with his new look and identity. The old river town was a perfect place to set up shop. It also allowed him to be near his old stomping grounds, where he could participate in his favorite pastime—poaching whitetail deer.