“And you made yours. You’re about to find out that when you deal with the devil, you pay the consequences.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I could hear the resolve in his voice. He was coming. I was a little afraid, but I knew I wouldn’t back down from him. I’d been in dangerous situations before, had been afraid, and had found the courage to do what I had to do. “Are we going to do this like men, or are you going to sneak up and bushwhack me like some bitch?”
“Did you just call me a bitch?” Calling a man a bitch was another unforgivable insult in prison.
“I asked you a question. What’s it going to be? I think I’ve earned enough respect for you to tell me when you’re coming. All I’m asking for is a fighting chance.”
“Tomorrow,” Pappy said. “You pick the time and the place. I’ll even let you pick the weapons. Guns or knives?”
“Are you serious? You think I’m going to do some kind of O.K. Corral shootout with you?”
“You can rat me out and call the cops. You can try to set me up and have an army of police waiting. Or you can be a man and live up to the consequences of the choices you’ve made. And that means me and you, a fight to the death. Old school. A duel. Just the two of us. No seconds, no doctors. I’ve always thought I was born way too late, anyway.”
He was like a runaway train headed straight for me, and there was nothing I could do to derail him. The tone in his voice told me he’d crossed over the edge into a psychopathic state. I had, unfortunately, visited that same state of mind myself. There was no reasoning with him at this point. I could have easily called the police, and they would have set up an ambush. They would have either arrested him or killed him. I suspected they would have killed him because he would have started shooting as soon as he smelled a cop. And even in my semidrunken state—I’d sobered up considerably, given the content of the conversation—I knew part of what he was saying was right. I’d known that he was a killer when I called him, the day Dawn Rule and Lawrence Kingman first told me about Donnie Frazier. I’d known he’d killed his girlfriend and her lover, and probably more. I’d known he was a drug dealer on a large scale. I’d known I was throwing my lot in with a dangerous and perhaps even psychotic individual. Now that things had blown up, was I going to turn tail and head to the police? Or was I, as he said, going to be a man and live up to the consequences of the choices I’d made?
“There’s a place outside of Petros,” I said. “It’s where I went to practice shooting before I killed Frazier and Beane. It’s in the middle of nowhere. We can do it there. I’ll text you directions. It isn’t hard to find the gravel road that leads to the range. Once you get on the road, you drive exactly one and one-tenth of a mile. You’ll top a rise, and the range will be on your left.”
“Time?” Pappy said.
“If we’re going all old school, we might as well do it tomorrow at dawn. I’m assuming you can get here by then.”
“I’ll be early. Weapon?”
He was a massive, tremendously strong man, and he probably had some experience with knives. I had none. I was strong, too, but nothing like him. I was probably quicker than he was, but the only way to cut him with a knife would be to get close to him, and if I got close to him, he might get his hands on me. If he did that, I knew it would be over.
“Pistols,” I said. “No rifles, no assault weapons, just pistols.”
“Sounds perfect,” Pappy said. “We do it just like they did back in the day. We start with our backs to each other. We walk five paces, we turn, we aim the pistols in the air, we count to ten, and then we lower them and start shooting.”
Five paces each would put us about thirty feet from each other. Ten yards. He wouldn’t miss from that distance, and I hoped I wouldn’t, either. I’d become very proficient with the 0.22, but I wasn’t sure how I’d do when I was looking down the barrel of a gun. He’d already told me he was wounded, though, and maybe, just maybe, he would have lost enough blood to give me some small advantage. Maybe his hands would be shaky. Maybe his vision would be blurred just a bit.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll meet you at dawn.”
“There will be no quarter given,” he said.
“None expected,” I said, and I disconnected the call.
CHAPTER 56
Will Grimes looked around the mobile home. He was standing about five feet from where Rex Fairchild had been shot. The bodies had already been removed, and the Charleston Police Department’s forensics examiners were still going over the place. There was an occasional pop and flash as the investigators took photographs. Sergeant Eric Young, the officer who had helped Grimes squeeze Rex Fairchild, was standing next to him.
“I assume the crusty coroner has already been here,” Grimes said.
“Yeah,” Young said. “He’s a piece of work.”
“What was his opinion?”
“He said they’re dead. Trauma caused by gunshot wounds.”
“He’s always so insightful,” Grimes said. “How’d you find them?” He’d received a call from Young at around eleven-thirty that morning and had driven back down from Elkins.
“Somebody went into the car lot and found the brother-in-law and called 9-1-1. Around the same time, Fairchild’s girlfriend’s daughter called dispatch. They found Fairchild on the couch right there. He’d taken two in the chest and one in the head. The girlfriend was over there in the hall. Same gunshot wounds, two in the chest and one in the head. He shot their Rottweiler, too, but not before the dog took a chunk out of him. We’ve got blood samples from the carpet that will confirm who the shooter was.”
“Dog dead?”
Young shook his head. “The dog was the only one that made it, outside of the daughter and the shooter,” he said. “The dog took one to the chest, but from what I’ve heard, he’ll live. The girlfriend also got off a shot from a shotgun. Forensics picked some pieces of what they think is an ear out of the wall right there. We should have plenty of DNA.”
“So Big Pappy Donovan is wounded and on the loose. He won’t know about the daughter, so he won’t know we’re already onto him. I assume you’ve put out an APB on him?”
“We have, but the girl couldn’t tell us much about the car. Just that she thought it was silver and small. We’re checking around the car lot to see if we can find it on some security camera footage.”
“Did you get anything out of Fairchild yesterday when you talked to him at the jail?” Young said.
“Nothing. He was terrified of Donovan. I guess he had a good reason to be.”
“Does this shut down your case against the lawyer?”
“Didn’t have much of one in the first place. I haven’t been able to get the district attorney to take it to a grand jury. Fairchild was my only direct link to Big Pappy Donovan, and Donovan is the only link to the lawyer. So I guess this pretty much shuts me down.”
“Do you think this Donovan is finished, or do you think he’ll go after your other witnesses?”