Chapter Thirty #2
“No comment. What I will say is Ezra and Bart go way back. They’ve known each other a long time and Ezra would’ve known that Bart could get a message to me, which he did.
Ezra was slicker than goose shit, but everyone has their weaknesses.
With Ezra, it was gambling. The minute he let go of that pulpit, he was right back to his old ways.
Lost nearly all his cash at some Indian casino halfway to Mexico. Came running back here.”
“Why?” I ask. “He wanted to make a deal?”
“That’s right,” Shepherd says. “He’d worked out—somewhere between here and Arkansas—the real reason Nathaniel Nickels was walking around with a severed finger in his pocket.
He told me he knew where the finger was and he’d trade it to me for stake money so he could get away for good.
I told him to bring it on over and we’d talk and he said he didn’t have it on him but he could get it—if I made the deal. ”
“When was this?”
“The day y’all dug up his empty-ass coffin. The coroner do that? Take the body out of the coffin? I’ve heard all kinds of shit today.”
“Seems likely,” I say. “From what we know, Ezra probably paid him to pass Nathaniel Nickels’s corpse off as his own, and when he heard we were going to exhume the grave, he panicked.”
Shepherd nods, takes another drink of his water. The refrigerator hums. A phone in Madison Baker’s briefcase buzzes. She ignores it.
“Well,” Shepherd says. “Then Roman Bradley sure screwed us on that one, whether he knew it or not, because Ezra called again the evening after y’all brought out the empty coffin. He said he’d run into a problem. It’d be another day.”
“But somebody killed him,” I guess. “Before that could happen.”
Shepherd nods. “That’s why I brought you over here. I want to hire you to go in there and get that finger for me from wherever the hell Ezra hid it.”
“Why me?” I ask.
He leans back and even that small motion leads to another coughing fit. Bart refills his cup and the old man takes sips between gasping.
When he recovers he says, “I sure as shit can’t send Bart.
There’s a cop out there watching the place.
And from what I’ve heard, either the DEA or the FBI will be rolling in soon, and once that happens, there’s not a chance in hell of me getting that finger back.
I know you’re buddy-buddy with the local pigs so I figure you can get yourself in there and look for it. ”
“Seriously?” I say, breathing out a sardonic laugh. “You must be desperate.”
“You’re goddamn right I’m desperate. I’ve not got much time left.”
“So what good is the money going to do you?” I ask, leaning closer, my hands on the table.
“It ain’t for me,” he says. “It’s for my great-grandbaby.
Look, before my grandson died in that bar, he married a good, hard-working local girl and they had a daughter.
Now, of course, his widow won’t come anywhere near me and that goes double for her kid and I don’t blame her.
Not after … after everything. But they’re poor as dirt, barely making it… ”
I squint at him, clenching my jaw shut, while I try to figure out if he’s full of shit.
He doesn’t look at me. Instead, he glares down at his hands as he says, “When I started this—all this—it was just a hobby. I liked pot and I liked growing it. Then it got bigger and bigger and when the government stopped subsidizing tobacco, I had a choice. I could sell the land that’s been in my family five generations to some farming conglomerate or I could try to keep us afloat with marijuana.
I chose the latter and … I’d say I don’t regret it but …
maybe we could’ve done without the land, without the farm, without the cash.
Look where it got us. We had to sell the land anyway to pay off the legal expenses, the medical bills.
Now my brother’s dead. My son’s in prison.
My wife and grandson are both gone and I wasn’t here for any of it. I wasn’t…”
He stops, his voice so strained and thin that it merely disappears. I wait.
Eventually, he recovers and his voice is just a whisper as he says, “I should’ve been here for them and I wasn’t.
But, before I die, I can be there for her.
My great-granddaughter. I made the mess that she was born into.
All I want now is—before I die—to do whatever I can to make her and her mamma’s life better. ”
He meets my eyes with a look of hard, desperate determination.
“Help me,” he says. “Help me, Miss Gore.”
“You’re asking me to aid and abet a convicted felon, to corrupt what’s about to be a huge investigation. Even if I believe your story—and I admit, I’m at least halfway there—why should I risk everything to help you?”
“Because,” he says, almost a whisper. “I know the answer to the question you most want answered: Who killed Ezra King?”
I lean back in my chair, cross my arms, stare at him.
“Bullshit,” I say, as cool as you please, but my heart is thundering in my chest.