“What’s going on?” I said.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “Well, that isn’t true. It’s your fault and it’s my fault. I used a guy who I didn’t know had become a drug addict, and you left a damned eyewitness alive. I told you you should have killed that dude who owned the bar. He’s apparently telling the cops he can identify you now. The guy I used was too damned lazy or too messed up on drugs to do the job himself, so he enlisted an old buddy of his. But it turns out that guy wasn’t healthy enough to do what we needed done so he sent his son-in-law to get the information we needed. The son-in-law did a pretty good job of getting what we needed, but he also likes to drink, and he ran his mouth to a guy up there who turns out to be a paid informant for the West Virginia State Police. It’s a problem, Darren. We have to fix it.”
I was right. He’d used a bunch of dumbasses, and now he wanted me to help him fix it.
“How?” I said.
“We’re going to have to make some people keep their mouths shut.”
“Are you talking intimidation or something more serious?”
“At this point, I think the cop has too much leverage for us to go the intimidation route. I think we’re going to have to go all Michael Corleone on them.”
Michael Corleone? I wasn’t sure what he was talking about at first, and then I remembered The Godfather. At the end of the first movie in the trilogy, Michael Corleone, who had taken over his father’s business interests, ordered the assassinations of all the rival New York dons, along with a Las Vegas casino owner named Moe Greene, a double-crossing Corleone family member named Tessio, and his own brother-in-law. All of the killings occurred on the same day, while Michael was attending a christening for his niece.
“How many are we talking about?” I said.
“Five. The bartender, my guy in Charleston, some redneck biker named Skidmore and his son-in-law, Jimmy Baker, and the paid rat. His name is Lester Routh. And before you get your panties in a wad, I’m going to do four of them myself. All I want you to do is take care of the bar owner.”
“Do you have a time frame in mind?” I said.
“We need to do it soon. I don’t want this West Virginia cop gaining any more momentum. We just go up there, kill every damned one of his witnesses and informants, and he has no case.”
“He’ll come after us that much harder if we kill his witnesses,” I said. “And besides, they aren’t really witnesses. None of them saw a damned thing. I was wearing a disguise when the bar owner saw me and talked to me. Even if I wound up getting arrested, they couldn’t convict me.”
“I’ll bet you thought the same thing when they arrested you for the murder you didn’t commit,” Pappy said.
“You’re right about that,” I said reluctantly. “I have to give you that one.”
“Do you really want to take a chance on going to jail again? Do you want to sit in some county jail in West Virginia for a year while they get their act together and try you? You know you won’t get a bond if they arrest you for two murders, and you know it’ll take them close to a year to get you to trial. Do you really want to take a chance on that happening? I don’t, not for a single second.”
I pulled my car into the parking lot of an apartment complex and sat there in silence for a few seconds. If Pappy was right about the cop closing in—and I suspected he was—then I had a serious decision to make. Did I let the investigation play out and take a chance on getting arrested again? Or did I do as Pappy was suggesting and take out the bar owner while he took care of the rest of the witnesses? It certainly wasn’t unheard of or unprecedented. The Mafia, drug cartels, gangs—they’d all done it successfully at one time or another.
“Get some kind of plan together and call me in a couple of days,” I said. “I’ll be thinking about some things myself in the meantime.”
“So you’re good with it? You’ll take care of your end?”
“I’m not going back to jail. I’ll do what I have to do.”
CHAPTER 48
Katherine called me around four in the afternoon and I picked her up at six. We went to one of the older restaurants in town, the Copper Cellar on Kingston Pike. She was wearing red and green and was smiling when she climbed into the car. She was so young, so beautiful, and so positive that I found her intoxicating.
“Tell me about Darren Street,” she said after we got settled in at the restaurant.
“Not much to tell,” I said.
“Not true, and you know it. Where did you grow up?”
“Here. In Knoxville. I went to Farragut and then to UT and then to law school at UT. Same thing you’re going to do.”
“I know about your mother, and again, I’m so sorry. What about your father?”
“I don’t think you want to know about my father,” I said.
“I do,” she said. “I want to get to know you. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but if you do, I’d like to hear it. I’m genuinely interested.”
“My father was a drunk,” I said. “He beat me and my mother on a regular basis until I got old enough to put a stop to it.”
“You put a stop to it?” Katherine said. “How?”
“It was the night before Thanksgiving when I was thirteen years old. He was drunker than hell. He always wanted spaghetti the night before Thanksgiving, so that’s what my mother made for him. He started cursing her and threw some of it in her face. Then he reached down and started unbuckling his belt, which meant he was going to start beating her with it. I knew it was coming because of the way he’d been acting that week, so I’d stashed an aluminum baseball bat near the refrigerator in the kitchen. When he started taking off the belt, I told him to stop, that he wasn’t going to be hitting anyone in our house ever again. He turned his attention to me, which is what I wanted, and I grabbed that bat and I broke several of his ribs with it. Then I took his belt away from him and beat him senseless. I wound up dragging him through the house, out the front door, and down the porch steps into the yard. I told him to leave and to never come back. I told him if I ever saw his face around there again I’d kill him, and I meant it. So after a little while, he crawled out to the garage in back, got in his car, and left. He never even came back to get his clothes or anything else. I guess he moved in with his girlfriend; I didn’t really care. A couple of years after that, he got drunk and ran his car into a tree. And that was the end of Billy Street. I didn’t even go his funeral.”
“I’m sorry, Darren,” she said. “It was incredibly selfish of me to ask you to talk about that, to bring up that kind of memory and that kind of pain. It must have been awful. And here we are, together on Christmas, about to enjoy a meal, and I ask you to talk about something so terrible. I truly am sorry.”