Chapter Thirty
THIRTY
ALL THE WINDOWS OF Joel Shepherd’s house have been opened.
The breeze blows, billowing the old cotton curtains.
Dust swirls like currents of gold, shimmering in the eerie silver light of the coming storm.
Despite the breeze, the air inside is musty and close, filled with the scent of the decaying house and the hope it once held.
“Have a seat,” Joel Shepherd croaks at me, waving a hand to the empty chair across the round kitchen table from him.
Beside him, on the floor, is his ever-present oxygen tank.
Madison Baker, whom I recognize from the five minutes I spent looking up her website before I left the Dairy, sits in the chair nearest the kitchen window.
She’s in her fifties and plump with a blond bob and a smart blue linen pantsuit.
A leather briefcase rests beside her feet.
In the entryway between the kitchen and the living room, Bart Casada—the farmer who’s been bringing Joel Shepherd his groceries—leans his huge frame against the wall, watching as I take the offered seat.
“What is this?” I ask Shepherd. “What do you want?”
But it’s Madison who answers. “At Mr. Shepherd’s request, I made a few calls today.
Among them, Judge Bolten in Lexington. And an attorney friend of mine in Louisville.
They’ve both had dealings with you and they both informed me that you are intelligent, competent, and true to your word.
In short, we believe that if you say you’ll do something, you’ll do it. ”
I almost laugh. The last thing I’d imagined myself doing when this day began was having an audience with the King of Weed while his lawyer offered me a job.
“I’m sure you’re aware,” I say, in the same level monotone that Madison used, “that I already have a client and an active case.”
Madison looks from me to Joel Shepherd, as if they’re communicating telepathically, and before I can get pulled into the undertow of a bunch of bullshit legalese, I push my chair out.
“This was a waste of my time,” I say.
“Stay where you are,” Joel says. “There’s something was taken from me. I want to hire you to find it.”
Now, as the pieces begin clicking into place, I finally realize why I’m here. And this time, I do laugh.
“You want me to find whatever it was Ezra took,” I say. “Whatever it was he hid in the church.”
The corner of the old man’s mouth ticks up. “That’s right.”
He takes a shallow, rasping breath and says, “Time was, I’d have twenty or thirty guys, all on my payroll.
I could send any one of ’em into that church and they’d be back in an hour.
Now?” He waves his hand around to indicate the dilapidated empty house.
“Who’s here now? Matthew Dishman turned my operation inside out.
But he never got Ezra, never even knew about him.
That’s how good Ezra was. And I can’t take credit for that.
It was James, my son, who brought Ezra into the fold. ”
“How?” I ask.
“We used to hold card games back in the day, before I went away. And Ezra was a regular there. Lost more than he won but everyone loved him. That’s the kind of guy he was.
Always bumming money but you couldn’t hardly tell him no.
Anyway, I got caught and sent away along with most everyone else.
My brother did what he could to keep it going, but with no truck, no way to transport like we’d done, he was out of options.
So, it was my son who went to Ezra—who’d become a preacher a few years earlier—with an idea. ”
“The tent revival circuit,” I say. “The RV.”
“That’s right. Ezra moved the pot in the background of his tent ministry.
Never selling locally and never selling directly, always just delivering to distributors and collecting the money.
Then, Ezra would come out to Big Sandy and do his preaching there and then give me whatever news there was to give and take back whatever I wanted to say to my brother and my son.
But then, my brother died. Heart attack.
After that, my son took over full time and it wasn’t long before he ended up in prison himself.
Stupid bastard went out drunk and hit a van full of kids. ”
He spits the last few words, anger still roiling alongside a shame so heavy it bows the old man’s head.
He coughs and sputters for a few seconds and then wipes his mouth and says, “So that left my grandson. But he was too much like his daddy. Too rash. Too angry. Too busy chasing women and liquor to see the trouble he was getting himself into. You know what happened to him?”
I think back, recalling what I’d read about the Shepherds, what Hollis had told me.
“He died in a bar fight,” I say. “Is that right?”
There’s a long, slow nod. The old man’s hands rest on the table, clasped together. They’re spotted with age, the knuckles swollen and red. He rubs his right thumb over the muscle between his left thumb and first finger. The movement makes a dry, papery sound.
“After he died, the only one left was Billy. My brother’s grandson.
And Billy wasn’t no ’count. As stupid as he was devious, I’d say.
I don’t know whose harebrained idea it was to start peddling hard shit, but I want you to know I never touched that stuff.
I was a farmer, goddammit. Just a farmer and—” His words are swallowed by a hoarse, strangled coughing fit.
Bart walks behind us and gets a glass from the dish drainer, runs it full of water, gives it to the old man. Joel reaches for it with a shaking hand and takes a few short sips.
When he recovers he says, “Billy and Ezra together were like two foxes in a henhouse. Frenzied, stupid, and dangerous. I’d hoped at least Ezra was too smart to steal from me, but on that count, I was wrong.
Maybe he thought I was too old, too sick, too far away to ever find out what they were doing.
And maybe, if I hadn’t been so old and sick, I’d still be in there.
But, as it is, they let me out with an ankle bracelet and I wasn’t home two weeks before Dean Griffon came rolling up to my door with a grocery sack of horse and snitched on both of them. ”
Shepherd pauses and takes another drink of water.
I watch him drink and then I say, “So you got Nathaniel Nickels involved.”
He nods. “He wasn’t supposed to kill nobody.
Billy was a shithead, but he was kin and under no condition did I want him dead.
No, I sent Nathaniel over to Billy’s to beat some sense into him and find out where the money—my money—was.
But … Nickels turned out to be just the latest in the parade of dumbasses I found upon my return to Mount Zion.
He beat the shit out of Billy and Billy finally told him all the money was in goddamn Bitcoin and it had to be accessed from his laptop, which Nickels took off Billy’s coffee table and brought to me.
Problem was, I couldn’t open the damn thing.
It was locked. Apparently, what I needed was a fingerprint. ”
My stomach drops as more pieces click into place. I lean forward, listening.
Shepherd notices the shift and says, “You’re ahead of me.
But it didn’t occur to me to even think about a fingerprint lock on a computer.
That shit didn’t exist when I went in. Bitcoin neither, for that matter.
But, listen, I never wanted Billy dead. I sent Nickels back over there to round up Billy and bring him over here so he could open the laptop in person, but he called when he got there and said Billy was dead.
That idiot actually asked me if I wanted him to bring me Billy’s whole-ass corpse!
I said, Goddamn, no, you stupid meathead.
Cut his finger off and bring it over here. ”
“And then you told him to burn the place down,” I say. “Get rid of the evidence.”
“That’s right,” he says. “Only, no surprise to any of us, Nathaniel Nickels couldn’t tell a dead man from a live one. I only heard later about Billy crawling his half-dead self out of that house. Jesus Christ. I never wanted any of that.”
He shakes his head again and, watching him, I believe him. I believe that, for all Joel Shepherd’s faults, he never meant for anyone to die.
“So, what happened next?” I ask.
“Nickels called and said he had the finger with him and should he bring it here. I told him to hold off, go over to Ezra’s while you’re at it and scare the shit out of him, get him to give you his part of the heroin money, threaten him with the finger, show him how he’d tortured Billy, whatever he had to do to get whatever cash Ezra had made so far.
Teach him a lesson. Take the cash, and leave.
Don’t kill nobody. So, he went over there, dragging that big-ass baseball bat along with him, and …
that’s the last I heard of him. I waited around all night and the next morning—”
“And then you heard Ezra King was dead,” I say. “Bit by a snake.”
He nods. “That’s right. I figured Nickels and Ezra must’ve fought and a snake must’ve got loose and bit Ezra and he died.
Then, Nickels ran off. Back in the day, I’d have had a manhunt out after his ass but now …
damn, wasn’t nothing much I could do except wait and see if he came back.
And Ezra? I thought the man was dead—same as everyone else—until he called me. ”
“Ezra called you?” My face must betray my surprise because the old man laughs a thin, croaking laugh.
“Shit, I was as shocked as you are,” he says. “He didn’t actually call me though. He called Bart. He had Bart’s number in his burner phone.”
“Because of the grow operation,” I guess. “Bart’s the farmer now. He’s the one growing your product.”
Shepherd looks at Bart, now leaning against the kitchen counter, his huge arms crossed over his chest, and then back at me.