CHAPTER 24
WAYLON’S WORDS—“I CAN TELL YOU THAT RIGHT now”—created an electric silence in the sheriff’s office. Miranda, the sheriff, and I all stared at the deputy.
Finally O’Conner spoke. “Well, go ahead, Waylon. We’re all ears. What do you know, and how do you know it?”
“I reco’nize the feller’s voice,” said the big man. “That, and the way he walks—kindly bowlegged and loose-jointed, but springy, too. Name’s Jimmy Ray Shiflett. Grew up here. Always had him a big chip on his shoulder.”
“That goes for all the Shifletts,” said O’Conner. “Seems to be in the DNA.”
Waylon nodded. “Jimmy Ray lit out when he was big enough—sixteen, maybe eighteen. Spent some time in the army, then come back a few years ago with an even bigger piece of timber on his shoulder.”
“That’s right,” said O’Conner. “He left the army under some sort of cloud, if I remember right.”
Waylon nodded. “Some kind of trouble in Afghanistan. Buncha villagers killed at what turned out to be a wedding. Way Shiflett tells it, the wedding was a cover for a Taliban get-together. He says the army’s done gone to the dogs—not lettin’ soldiers be soldiers. Lettin’ in all kinda riffraff—blacks and Hispanics and A-rabs. Course, them ain’t the words he used.”
“Sounds like a prince,” Miranda observed.
Waylon shrugged. “Shiflett says the real reason he got throwed out was for standing up for the white man. After he come back home, he took up with some of them militia folks over in North Carolina. I disremember the name of the group.”
O’Conner pondered this a moment, then posed a question to the deputy. “You think he’d come in peacefully if we called and said we wanted to talk to him?”
The big man’s face scrunched into an expression of disbelief. “Come in peaceful? Hell, no! He’d head for them hills like a scalded cat. He might be crazy, but he ain’t stupid. Long time ’fore that boy was a soldier, he was a hunter and a tracker, good as any I ever seen. If he gets wind we’re a-comin’, he’ll be gone just like that”—Waylon snapped his fingers—“and we won’t never catch sight of him no more.”
“What if he doesn’t get wind of us?” the sheriff persisted. “What if we just show up at his door with a warrant—will he put up a fight?”
Waylon guffawed. “Will a politician lie? Will a bear shit in the woods?” He shot a quick, abashed glance at Miranda. “Sorry for the language, Miss Miranda.”
“I hear worse all the time,” she said. “Mostly from my own mouth.”
“You could still bring in the feds,” I suggested. “Sure, they’d end up taking the case away and getting credit, but they also have the resources to do it.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, Doc,” said Waylon, shifting his enormous frame, “but if Jim and me can’t bring him in, I don’t reckon the FBI can. Look at how long it took ’em to nab Eric Rudolph.”
It was interesting to hear Rudolph come up again so soon after our meeting in Montgomery. “And he survived up in the mountains for, what, five years?” I asked.
Waylon nodded. “Says he got by on acorns and salamanders, Dumpster scraps, that kind of thing. But word on the street is, he also got help from some Carolina militia folk. Them, and his crazy family.”
“Crazy how?” asked Miranda.
Waylon snorted. “His brother cut off his own hand with a power saw—on purpose—and sent it up to the FBI. ‘A message,’ he called it.”
I had either missed or forgotten that piece of the story. “And the message,” I said, “was, ‘we’re all nuts here’?”
“I’m guessing the FBI got it,” said O’Conner, “loud and clear.”
I wanted to get back to the case at hand. The problem at hand. “But y’all think there’s a high risk our suspect, Jimmy Ray Shiflett, could cut and run.” Waylon and O’Conner both nodded. “Or put up a serious fight?”
“Hell, he’s probly got enough guns up there at his place to start a war,” Waylon said. “Dynamite and such, too.”