Chapter 36
Ali called Tuesday when Jojo was just about to step into a steaming hot bath, knew all about what’d happened to Jojo on her way home, and refused to divulge her sources.
“I know a guy who knows a guy,” she said dismissively. Then she switched gears. “I think you need a bodyguard.”
“I’ll get right on that. You got anybody in mind?”
“Yeah … me.”
“There appears to be some role-reversal going on here. I was a combat soldier. Shouldn’t it be me who’s a bodyguard to the hairdresser/coffee shop owner?”
“Nobody’s trying to kill me. Somebody is trying to kill you.”
“And when the dude shows up for my murder with a bowie knife or a chain saw, what’s your plan? Hand him a can of whoop-ass and hide under a table?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“I’m worried about you Jojo.”
Jojo was instantly sorry she’d made fun of Ali’s offer to help. “Don’t be. You know I can take care of myself.”
“Until you can’t.”
“When I can’t, Trident will. Or Conor.”
She could have bitten off the end of her tongue.
“Ohhhhh, so it’s Conor now, downgraded from Lieutenant McCaffrey a few short days ago. Spill it. I want details.”
There was no way to get Ali off the hunt now. She was a hound dog that’d treed a coon.
“Okay, okay, okay. I don’t have time for this. Tell you what. I’m dropping my car at Milligan’s tomorrow morning to get a new window.”
“That somebody shot out!”
“Why don’t you give me a lift from there to the courthouse … and you can meet Conor for yourself.”
“Oh, me likey, me likey. What time? And how do you think he feels about pink hair … asking for a friend.”
Ali arrived at Milligan’s the next morning with tropical fish hair.
Jojo slid into the front seat beside her. “Looks like you put on makeup this morning with a trowel,” Jojo told her. “What’s up with you?”
“I figure if you throw this one back like you have all the rest of them, maybe I can catch him on the rebound.”
“I thought you’d sworn off men.”
“No blanket statements about ‘all men’ apply to red-headed men. They’re in a class by themselves.”
Unfortunately, when they got to the courthouse, Conor was sequestered in a conference room with the FBI and ATF, but Ali forced Jojo to promise she’d get him to Coffa Cupee before the end of the week.
“Pinky swear?”
Jojo rolled her eyes and swore.
Though the address was zoned as a private residence, it was clear to Conor and Jojo as they pulled up in Conor’s cruiser that Greg Barnes ran a junkyard.
Jojo could see a dead washing machine, a chest freezer, an outboard motor, a bird bath attached to a Venus de Milo statue and a portable basketball goal—the kind on wheels—through the links of the fence.
“What do you bet this dude doesn’t have a business license in Somerset County?” Jojo asked.
“Or a state license to run a junkyard.”
The gate was closed and padlocked. And beyond it, among the various flotsam and jetsam—that included a looked-to-be-in-pretty-good-shape outhouse with a half-moon carved in the door—were the carcasses of probably thirty half-dead or more than half-dead vehicles.
Jojo couldn’t help wondering momentarily if she could have gotten a side window glass from this guy for a lot less than she was going to pay at Milligan’s Garage.
Then she saw a man making his way along an “aisle” between the rows of junk walking toward the shack that was set just inside the locked gates.
“We’d like to have a word with you please, Mr. Barnes,” Conor said.
“And you are?” he asked the question as he kept walking toward the shack.
“Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Conor McCaffrey and this is Jojo Kaufmann.”
“I don’t have anything to say to either one of you.”
Jojo was surprised that Conor lost patience.
“Come over here and unlock this gate and let us in and we’ll have a chat, or I will get a warrant and come back here—maybe bring the health department, somebody from the county zoning board—and drag you down to the barracks and we’ll have a chat. Pick!”
Something about Greg Barnes had gotten under his skin.
Barnes gave Conor an evil eye but then shuffled over to the gate, pulled from his pocket a key ring with about a thousand keys on it, and began flipping through them with dirty, permanently oil-stained fingers.
Jojo wondered if a man like this would have the sense to wear gloves so he didn’t leave fingerprints behind.
Barnes finally found the right key, inserted it into the padlock, opened it and swung the gate wide. “You want to come inside?” Without waiting for a reply, he marched over to the shack and opened the door. “It’s warmer in there than it is out here.”
Jojo went in front of the man into the shack and Conor went behind.
It smelled of old sweat and wet leather and grease, motor oil maybe, with a little gasoline stink thrown in.
There was a desk piled high with papers beneath a lamp with a Pittsburgh Steelers logo on the shade, a couch too filthy to sit on, a recliner that appeared to be broken, and two ladder-back wooden chairs.
“What is it you want to talk to me about … Go on, have a seat.”
“We’ll stand,” Conor said. “We’re interested in the lawsuit that you filed against Vanguard Construction Company, the one that went through court last week and you lost.”
Barnes spit onto the filthy floor. “He crippled my boy and got away with it, paid off the judge and got away with it.”
“That’s not quite the way I heard it,” Conor said.
“Oh.”
“The way I heard it was that you claimed the harness that your son was wearing was defective and Garner claimed that your son took it off. We talked to your son?—”
“You talked to Kyle?”
“Yes, yesterday.”
“So … how’s he doin’?”
“You don’t know?”
“He don’t like to have me around much anymore. He gets disability payments and that’s enough to live on so he don’t need me. All he does is sit in that chair and play them dumb video games, and he ain’t got no use for his papa no more.”
“You filed a lawsuit on his behalf a year and a half ago?—”
“Had to. When the accident happened, he was seventeen, still a minor. If it’d a’been up to him, he wouldn’t have done it. If it was up to my son, he wouldn’t have done nothing.”
He turned to Jojo. “You’re from here, ain’t ya? I seen you around. Did you know Tom Garner?”
“I knew him to speak to.”
“That man was hard as nails. He seen my son laying there on the ground with his back broke and the EMTs trying to get him on that spine board and all he was interested in was whether or not OSHA was gonna come and shut him down, he didn’t give a shit about my son.”
Barnes turned and sat down in the broken recliner, and when he did, Jojo spotted it. The room was dim, so maybe …
As Conor continued to question the man, she walked across the room, leaned over and picked up off the floor the thing she’d seen shining there. It was a small, ragged piece of Mylar, a little larger than the hunks of it the FBI had collected from the trees on Long Bottom Road.
“So you held it against Tom Garner that your son was crippled, is that right?” Conor asked as Jojo returned to where she’d been standing beside him.
“Well, hell yeah, I did.”
“You threatened to shoot him—in front of witnesses. Do you know that’s against the law? It’s called terroristic threatening. Punishable by up to two years behind bars.”
“And you come all the way out here to bust me for that?” But before Conor could answer, Barnes held up his hand.
“Look, I know … maybe Kyle did take the harness off. What difference does it make? He was a seventeen-year-old kid and wasn’t nobody supervising him, wasn’t nobody making sure that he behaved like he’d ought to and not get hurt.
So maybe the harness didn’t fail, but that foreman failed when he let my boy up there on that roof knowing that he was a wild teenager who was as like as not to take that harness off.
He let him up there anyway and now that boy’s going to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Does that seem right to you?”
Jojo spoke then, holding out the piece of Mylar, her heart banging hard in her chest. “This belong to you?”
Barnes blinked. “Well, since you found it laying on the floor in my house, I’d say it’s a safe bet it belongs to me. Why do you care?”
Conor stepped forward and took the Mylar from Jojo. “You cut a piece of Mylar. What’d you use it for?”
Barnes was confused and annoyed. “What the hell do you care what I did?—?”
Conor took two steps toward him, leaned over and spoke quietly, a clear threat in his soft words. “What did you do with the piece of Mylar?”
Barnes got up out of the chair and hooked his thumb upward. “I put it right there.”
Jojo and Conor looked where he pointed. A three-foot piece of shiny Mylar was stapled across the ceiling.
“Roof don’t leak, but there’s a crack in the ceiling right there and the wind blowing through it would freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
“But you have a whole roll of this, right?”
“Yeah, somewhere. Ain’t a whole roll, just part of one.”
Barnes began to lose his patience. “Why do you care if I got a roll of Mylar? Why’d you come roaring in here?”
“Did you hate Tom Garner enough to kill him?” Conor asked bluntly.
“Hell yeah! If I coulda got my hands around his throat, I’d …”
He paused then, looked from Conor to Jojo and back to Conor. Jojo saw recognition dawn on his face.
“That’s what this is about.” Barnes plopped back down with a sigh in the recliner and began to chuckle. “This ain’t about me yelling threats at Tom Garner in the courtroom is it?”
“I’m wondering where you were last night about seven o’clock.”
“I was sitting here by myself, but I expect what you really want to know is where I was last Wednesday when some fellow was shooting people—includin’ Tom Garner—out of them ski lift chairs.
” His chuckle turned into a bitter laugh.
“Well, you are shit outta luck on that score. You ain’t gonna hang that one on me. I got a rock-solid alibi.”
“And what would that be?” Conor asked.
“I was in jail!” He laughed then, a genuine hearty laugh. “Go ahead and call the sheriff of Washington County and ask. Got busted for getting drunk and starting a fight in a bar. Spent two days as the guest of the county.”
They could hear the sound of his laughter as they walked out of the shack and back to Conor’s cruiser.
Jojo got a call from Milligan’s Garage as they were driving back into town. Her phone was on “speaker” and Conor heard a voice say, “Your truck ain’t gonna be ready until tomorrow mornin’. Sorry ’bout that, but we’ll bring it out to you when it’s done.”
Before Jojo had time to process it, Conor said, “If you need a ride home tonight, I’m glad to take you. I’d like to meet your uncles.”
Right. Meet my uncles. Goody.