Lucas also taught Michael the ins and outs of the freight business. He stressed to Michael how important it was to be friendly and honest with the customers, to put their needs first, and to make sure their freight arrived on time and undamaged. Michael enjoyed the freedom of being on the road, and he quickly saw that he needed to develop a personality—a persona, really—that would help Lucas’s business grow and eventually allow Michael to open and operate his own firm. Michael was disingenuous about kissing people’s asses, but he was good at it. He knew he’d grown into a handsome young man, he knew he had an infectious smile, and he knew his massive size made people want him to like them. He took advantage of all those things, and within two years, by the age of twenty, Michael Donovan had started—with the help of his uncle—Donovan Trucking, based out of the same town as his uncle’s firm.
Michael had one truck, and that was the way he wanted to keep it, because he had no intention of doing things the traditional way. Michael had worked hard at learning the business, but he also still liked to get out on the weekends, and he knew there was a huge amount of money to be made in the cocaine business. His truck was a perfect form of distribution; he simply had to become a little creative. The feds had declared war on drugs, and the wide-open cowboy days of the early eighties were gone by the time Michael got into the coke business. But there was still a huge demand out there, and the profit margins made the risk more palatable. He found a supplier in Atlanta through a kid named Randy Hayes. He’d done a couple of years with Hayes in Atlanta juvy, and Hayes had talked about his family connections in the cocaine trade. Once Michael had a supplier, he needed distributors for his product, and he wasted no time procuring them all along the eastern US seaboard.
Michael’s truck hauled legitimate loads of everything from clothing to lawn furniture to car parts to kitchen appliances. He procured freight customers in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware. His drug business started when he was fronted one kilogram of coke by one of Randy Hayes’s cousins. Michael broke the kilogram down into thirty-five ounces and stuck them into a sealed piece of PVC pipe, which he then placed inside a tubular axle on his trailer. He paid $16,000 for the kilo, and over the next two weeks, he sold the thirty-five ounces for $2,000 apiece, which meant he made $54,000 on one kilo in two weeks.
Over the next five years, he built the cocaine business to the point where he was hauling fifteen kilos a month—all of it in the axle of his trailer—and netting nearly $1 million each trip. He had become rich, cautious, and ruthless. He trusted no one. He had the brains to find lawyers and accountants who were willing, for a healthy sum of cash, to help him launder and hide his money offshore. Two attempts had been made on his life—one in Dayton, Ohio, and one in Charlottesville, Virginia. Both of them had ended with him killing the person who was trying to rob and kill him.
And then, at the age of twenty-eight, the crooked cop who had become infuriated because Michael had had sex with the cop’s girlfriend set Michael up and packed him off to prison for what was supposed to be thirty-five years. Before they sent him off, Michael conned a woman named Linda Lacy into believing he loved her, and he used to her to keep his trucking and cocaine business running—although on a smaller scale—while he was inside. He spent eleven years stomping guards, taking over hustles, and ruling yards as a shot caller when he wasn’t locked down in a hole for what he’d done to the guards. He made millions off his prison hustles, all of which he smuggled out to Linda through corrupt guards. Darren Street came along in his eleventh year, and by year twelve, he was out, thanks in large part to the work Darren had done. Six months after he got out, he caught Linda cheating on him with an old inmate buddy of his whom he’d given a job. He shot them both, cut them up and bagged them, and took them to yet another buddy who ran a huge junkyard near Lexington, Kentucky. Linda and her lover wound up in a car compactor, and later in a smelter.
So when Darren called him for help in finding the men responsible for murdering Darren’s mother, Michael—who had become Big Pappy by then—was glad to help. He didn’t really think Darren would have the stones to clip those two crackers, but Darren had surprised him. The problem was, he’d left an eyewitness, and now things were getting out of hand. Cops in West Virginia and Knoxville were sniffing around, a paid informant had popped up out of nowhere, and his old buddy Rex Fairchild had turned out to be a pathetic, unreliable druggie.
Even Darren was suspect now. His mother had been killed, his son taken away, and his girlfriend had dumped him right before Christmas. He sounded unsure of himself over the phone. Pappy wondered, if it ever came down to it and the cops managed to arrest Darren and get him back into jail, whether he would roll on Pappy to get himself a lighter sentence. Maybe he would even tell them Pappy had taken it upon himself to seek revenge for his old friend. Darren might tell them that Pappy had committed the murders.
Pappy shook his head and pushed himself up from the chair in which he’d been sitting. Thinking time was over. He walked to a locked cabinet in a corner of the office, opened it, and gazed over his choices. The cabinet contained an arsenal of weapons: pistols, rifles, shotguns, assault weapons—all of them untraceable—along with boxes upon boxes of ammunition and a selection of knives, holsters, and body armor. There were even some flashbang and antipersonnel grenades. The cabinet also contained several changes of clothing and a selection of fake beards, mustaches and wigs, hats, and fake identification cards.
Pappy made his selections and walked back out into the warehouse. He lifted the door on the trailer, pulled a ramp down, and then climbed inside the trailer. He backed a 2013 silver Ford Focus sedan out onto the floor of the warehouse and placed his weapons, clothing, and disguise in the trunk.
He walked to the cab of the truck, climbed up, and grabbed the remote control for the warehouse door. He pushed the button on the remote and folded his huge frame into the Focus. He pulled out of the warehouse, onto the road, and headed east.
It was a little more than three hours from Cincinnati to Charleston, West Virginia. Depending on where and when Pappy found him, Rex Fairchild didn’t have long to live.
CHAPTER 51
Katherine Davis walked into the house on Clinton Avenue, removed her coat, and sat down on the couch in the living room. Her aunt, Detective Dawn Rule of the Knoxville Police Department, came in shortly thereafter and handed her a cup of coffee.
“You sounded pretty upset on the phone,” Dawn said.
“Where’s Uncle Jim?” Katherine said. “He might be interested in this.”
“He got called out to some shooting in Sevierville. A policeman was involved, so the TBI has to look into it. What’s going on?”
“Something is happening,” Katherine said. “I mean, one minute Darren is telling me he wants me to go apartment hunting with him today, and the next he sends me a text and says we’re going too fast, he needs some time. Have you talked to the trooper in West Virginia? What’s his name? Grimes?”
“Not in a week or so. It’s the holidays, Katherine. I take some time off during the holidays.”