A year after Fairchild and Big Pappy were busted, Skidmore had been paralyzed from the waist down when he crashed his motorcycle into a guardrail on a rainy night and was thrown into a rocky hillside. The gang eventually pushed him out. He was paralyzed and without means, so he wound up moving to Cowen to stay with his sister and her husband, who was a coal miner. They kicked him out after a year because of his drinking and belligerence, but not before he had managed to win the heart of a lonely woman named Bea Baker. Baker had an illegitimate teenage son named Jimmy, and the three of them became a family. Skidmore was often drunk and abusive, but he would also tell the boy stories about his glory days as president of the biker gang and the various crimes they committed. He even told the kid about a couple of murders of rival gang members. Jimmy idolized him.
When he received word through a couple of old gang members that Rex Fairchild was wanting to talk to him, he gave them his phone number. A day later, Fairchild called him and told him Big Pappy needed some information on a guy who had recently been released from prison. His name was Donnie Frazier. Fairchild wanted to know whether Frazier had anything to do with a bombing that happened in Knoxville, Tennessee. Skidmore was too proud to tell Fairchild that he wasn’t really capable of getting out and gathering the information, so he’d farmed the task out to his stepson, Jimmy Baker. Jimmy had actually done a pretty good job, too. He’d found out everything Fairchild wanted to know, and Skidmore passed the information along.
But Fairchild had called him that morning, obviously upset, and said that somebody in Cowen was a rat. He said the state police knew everything, even the name of the person who had gathered the information, and that everybody could be looking at conspiracy-to-commit-murder charges. Skidmore called his stepson as soon as he got off the phone with Fairchild and told him to come to the trailer at four in the afternoon. Bea wouldn’t be home from her job as a bookkeeper at a sawmill, and they could talk in private.
Skidmore heard Jimmy’s motorcycle pull up outside and waited for him to walk in. Jimmy had a trailer of his own about two miles away, but he didn’t have a job. He lived primarily off his girlfriend’s income as a hair stylist, but he also stole car stereos and broke into houses in and around Webster Springs and Elkins. He’d been caught a few times and sent off to prison once, but he kept on stealing. He just didn’t know any other way to get by. Jimmy walked in and mumbled a greeting. He went straight to the refrigerator and grabbed a Keystone Light, then walked back and sat on the couch near Skidmore. He was wearing a black leather jacket, leather chaps, boots, and had taken off his leather gloves. He had a bushy, brown beard and had a wide, black bandana tied around his head. His cheeks were pink and puffy.
“Little cold to be on that hog, ain’t it?” Skidmore said.
“Got nothing else to drive,” Jimmy said. “The Toyota threw a rod two days ago. Gonna be a while before I can get it fixed.”
“We got a little problem,” Skidmore said. “Actually, it’s a big problem, and I got a feeling you’re the cause of it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know that information I had you gather a little while back?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You told somebody about it, and that somebody told the state police. Now the state police are talking about coming at us with conspiracy-to-commit-murder charges. So don’t bullshit me. Who in the hell did you tell?”
“I ain’t told nobody, I swear it,” Jimmy said.
Skidmore lifted a .38-caliber revolver and pointed it at his stepson’s head. “Say that again and I’m gonna splatter your brains all over the wall.”
“Jesus, Rocky! Take it easy!”
“You been hanging around Lester Routh any? You know that worthless son of a bitch is a paid informant for the state police, don’t you?”
“Nah, Lester’s all right.”
“You don’t know he’s an informant? Because everybody else in this cracker-box town knows it.”
“If he’s an informant, I didn’t know it,” Jimmy said. “I swear it.”
Skidmore cocked the pistol. “What did you tell him?”
Jimmy put his hands up. “Please don’t kill me, Rocky. Please put that gun down.”
“Not until you tell me what you told Lester.”
“We were drinkin’. I may have told him about it.”
“About what?”
“Everything, I reckon. I think maybe I told him about you asking me to gather up some information on Donnie Frazier for you, and how everybody I talked to opened right up and told me Donnie and Tommy had bombed that lawyer’s momma’s house and killed her.”
“And you told him you passed it along to me?”
Jimmy was nodding. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you mention Fairchild or Big Pappy?”
“I may have,” Jimmy said. “Please, please don’t kill me. I didn’t know about Lester. I swear I didn’t know. And I was drunk.”
“You’re dumber than a damn bag of hammers,” Rocky said as he lowered the pistol. “And if it weren’t for your momma, you’d be a dead bag of hammers right now. Get out of here. I need to start trying to see if we can fix what you fucked up.”
CHAPTER 43
I rented a motel room off Interstate 40 and started looking for apartments after Grace kicked me out. I called her at least a dozen times the next day, left her messages, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I probably should have been feeling things like sorrow and pain and panic and confusion, but I was pretty much just numb, almost zombielike. I told Pappy about Grace giving me the boot. His primary concern was whether she would tell the police. I told him she’d told the police I was home with her the night I killed Frazier and Beane, and that I didn’t think she would betray me. He seemed to accept it, but Pappy was hard to read sometimes.
It was strange, though. My mind kept flashing back to standing in her kitchen, listening to her tell me she couldn’t live with a murderer, couldn’t love a killer. I hadn’t really thought of myself in those terms, but I knew if I got down to the core of what I’d done and didn’t try to whitewash the facts with emotion, she was exactly right. I’d put fifteen hollow-point bullets into Donnie Frazier and Tommy Beane and then didn’t want to wash their blood from my face. I’d drunk moonshine while Ben Clancy was swinging from a rope in Granny Tipton’s barn. I’d arranged to have scalding baby oil poured onto a man’s face. And I didn’t feel a bit of remorse for any of those things. I had no plans to kill or maim anyone else, but I knew I was certainly capable. I supposed many people would find that kind of self-awareness unhealthy, even terrifying, but I found it liberating. Did that make me a psychopath, I wondered? Had what Ben Clancy and the criminal justice system had done to me, combined with the murder of my mother, and Katie taking my son half a world away, turned me from a troubled but relatively healthy person into a psychopath? I didn’t think so, but I didn’t know for sure.
On Christmas Eve, just after noon, I called Dan Reid.
“Have you found out anything about Katherine Davis?” I said when he answered his cell.
“Merry Christmas, Darren.”