Eleven
THE BIGGEST HOUSE in Cross Rivers, on far and away the biggest plot of privately owned land, is an antebellum mansion that somehow still manages to look as if construction had been completed only last year.
It originally belonged to the Cross family that had built the town and held on to the house until Briar Crockett decided he wanted it, back at the end of the last century.
Then, and almost magically, the surviving members of the town’s founding family had decided to move away, some to Florida and some to Arizona, and the house and land now belonged to the Crocketts, who hadn’t built the town but acted as if they owned it.
The place sits high up over the Elk River in a section of the town called the Hills. Briar lives there now with Roof and Lynyrd and the two young daughters from his third marriage, to Brooke, a former flight attendant who some in town whisper had been an escort when Briar first met her.
On this particular afternoon, Brooke and the girls are visiting Brooke’s mother in Atlanta, and Briar and his sons are in Briar’s upstairs den along with Klay Monroe, one of the few friends Roof and Lynyrd had ever made at Cross Rivers High.
Klay is currently working as one of Briar’s most reliable drug dealers, his specialty being in the booming growth areas of OxyContin and fentanyl.
“You do much reading, Klay?” Briar has just asked.
Briar’s voice, as always, is surprisingly soft for a man his size.
But then he rarely sees the need to raise it.
He’s always felt that men who do make a habit of raising their voices to make a point, or as a way of trying to intimidate other people, are just compensating for something.
Maybe trying to sound tough instead of actually being tough.
Briar Crockett’s actions, as violent as they so often are, have always spoken far louder than his words.
“Are you talking about book reading, sir?”
Klay is skinny with a lot of red hair and a lot of freckles to go with it, and so fidgety that he never appears to be quite still.
But he’s been a solid earner for the Crocketts ever since high school, despite not being, as Briar has pointed out to his sons more than once, the sharpest blade in the razor.
“I’ve never been much of one for books,” he says. He shifts in his chair and giggles. “Was kind of a problem when I was still in school, as you might imagine.”
He looks over at the Crockett brothers, who give him no reaction.
“Always thought that was one of the reasons that Roof and Lynyrd and me got on as well as we did.”
“Fortunately for you, though,” Briar says, “you exhibited, and at a young age, the same sort of skill set my boys have.”
“Yes, sir!” Klay says.
“But unlike you, son,” Briar continues, almost like a teacher continuing a lesson, “I myself am an avid reader. I’m especially interested, as someone who sees himself as the CEO of a large and profitable company, in other great businessmen.
One such was a man named Thomas Watson. Are you familiar with that name? ”
Klay Monroe shifts again in his chair, runs a hand through his red hair. “Wasn’t he some kind of famous golfer? I think I used to hear my daddy, who liked golf himself, speak of him before he took off on us.”
Briar smiles and briefly closes his eyes before opening them back up and focusing them once again on Klay Monroe.
“No,” Briar says patiently. “I’m referring to Thomas J.
Watson, who grew IBM into a global power, long before those Apples and Microsofts came along.
A giant, that man was, and an authentic American genius.
Anyway, he once said that the power of trust is that it’s very difficult to build but very easy to destroy. ”
He smiles again.
“Does that make sense to you, Klay?”
If anything, Briar Crockett’s voice has somehow become even softer, so soft that Klay leans forward to hear him better, from the other side of a desk so large it sometimes gives the impression that this big old house was built around it.
“Sounds right to me, sir,” Klay says. He clears his throat. “Yes, sir, it surely does.”
“Do you know why I asked you to stop by today?” Briar asks him now.
“Can I be honest?” Klay asks.
“Always the best policy.”
“I was hopeful that you wanted to tell me in person what a good job I’ve been doing for you,” Klay says. “Sales being up the way they are, month to month and so forth.”
Briar gets out of his chair and makes his way around the desk and sits on the edge of it in front of Klay.
“No, son,” he says. “That’s not the reason you’re here.
You’re here because I wanted to tell you—in person—that I no longer trust you.
That the profits to which you just now referred would be even bigger, month to month, if you weren’t skimming me the way you are.
Which is another way of me talking about you stealing from me and stealing from my family. ”
Klay Monroe is suddenly quite still in his chair, as if frozen in place.
“No, sir!”
He’s the one raising his voice now.
“I would… I would never even think about stealing from you, Mr. Crockett!”
He twists his body just enough to face Roof and Lynyrd.
“Tell your daddy!” Klay shouts.
But it’s as if they’re staring at some point beyond Klay Monroe and beyond this room.
“Not only have you thought about stealing from me,” Briar continues.
“You’ve been doing it—and doing it regularly.
In the process, you’ve also done something even worse.
You have insulted me, son. You have disrespected me.
” He shakes his head sadly. “And as much as that doesn’t work for me, it works far less for you. ”
With that, Briar Crockett reaches into the pocket of his baggy carpenter jeans and pulls out his favorite gun—a Smith & Wesson .
357 Magnum revolver like the one he’d learned from his extensive reading that General George S.
Patton had favored, right down to the pearl handle—and shoots Klay Monroe in the face and then in the chest and then in the face again.
The kid probably had paid little attention when he’d arrived, if any at all, to the pads covering the Oriental rug on this side of the desk, Briar and his sons anticipating the cleanup that would be required later.
Briar looks over at Roof and Lynyrd.
“You know what to do,” he says. “And where.”
They both nod. Roof gets up and walks over to the closet and comes back with the tarp. He and Lynyrd proceed to get the body out of the chair and roll it up into the tarp.
Briar walks back around the desk, puts the Smith & Wesson, one of the many guns in this house, back in the top drawer.
His sons are carrying the body toward the door when Briar says, “Hey?”
They stop.
“I meant to ask,” he says. “Either one of you know anything about the girl who went missing yesterday? Or any of those other missing girls?”
Before he gets an answer, he smiles at them.
“And keep in mind, in light of what we all just witnessed, that part about honesty being the best policy,” he adds.
Roof and Lynyrd look at each other and shake their heads, almost as if forgetting for the moment that they’re carrying a dead body.
“No, sir,” Roof says.
“Probably some crazy out in the back woods,” Lynyrd says.
“You sure about that?” Briar asks.
“Daddy,” Roof says. “Stupid might’ve just have got ol’ Klay killed. But we know better.”
“You both better,” Briar says. “And once you’ve taken out the trash, maybe you both can start looking into finding out who might be taking those girls.”
He pauses.
“You hear what I’m telling you?”
“Loud and clear,” Roof says. He grins. “But not too loud.”
“Get it done,” Briar says.
He doesn’t add or else before they’re out of the room because he doesn’t have to, because the threat from him, as always, is as thick in this room as the smell of cordite. In the end, Briar knows full well that his sons fear him as much as everyone else in this town does.
It would never occur to him to fear them or anybody else.
Why the hell would he?