Seventy-Nine
IN THE END, there’s only one name on the list that interests them: Carlton Fish.
He’s a well-known local hillbilly who’s lived in a run-down shack for as long as anybody can remember, almost like one of those weird survivalists, his place all the way up a mountain in Old Mill, a few miles at least from civilization, the way Fish has always preferred from everything the Crockett boys know.
He hardly ever comes down the mountain these days, which makes it as easy to stay away from people as it is for people to stay the hell away from him.
“A drunk and probably a perv,” Hader had told Roof and Lynyrd before they left his apartment.
“Cops have been shooing him away from schools, on the rare occasions when he does come down off his mountain, for years. I gotta tell you boys, I wanted him to be good for these girls going missing in the worst way. So did Burt Webb, for that matter. He talked to Fish, I talked to him, because both of us wanted everybody in town to get off our asses every time another girl would go missing. But we had nothing to tie him to any of it.” He’d paused and said, “And so you know? That old man even gives me the creeps.”
When they get close to the shack, they see a pickup that looks older than this mountain parked practically at the front door.
Roof and Lynyrd both have guns. Lynyrd has the bag with the goodies in it slung over his shoulder, walking a few yards behind his brother.
“Okay,” Roof says, “let’s get ’er done.”
They knock on the door and, after a couple of beats, hear Carlton Fish growl at them from inside.
“Go away, whoever you are.”
“We just want to talk,” Roof says.
“I open this door,” Carlton Fish says, “you’ll be talking to the business end of my Mossberg.”
“You don’t want to do that, Mr. Fish,” Roof says. “It’s Roof and Lynyrd Crockett. You know who our daddy is, and he’s the one that sent us.”
There’s a pause now. They still don’t hear any movement from inside the shack.
“Sent you here for what?” Fish asks.
“Give us just five minutes and we can explain,” Roof says. “Then we’ll be on our way, I promise.”
The door opens now and Carlton Fish stands in front of them, his white beard looking to be nearly a foot long, ratty-looking red flannel shirt hanging out of carpenter jeans, T-shirt showing underneath it, casually pointing a 20-gauge Mossberg at them, as promised.
“What’s this BS about your daddy?” he asks. “I ain’t seen him in years.”
“I might have lied about that part,” Roof says.
Then Lynyrd is stepping out from behind his brother, his gun in his hand, shooting Carlton Fish high in the chest and then in the neck, knocking him back into his shack as blood spurts out of him, the Mossberg still in Fish’s hands when he hits the floor dead.
After that, they put on their latex gloves and quickly do everything they need to, putting Fish’s finger on the heavy trigger of the shotgun and firing two shots of HV load.
They take care to put the first shot over the doorframe and the second into the wall next to the front door, as if Fish had been the one who’d fired on them, if wildly, before they shot back and put him down.
There is an old dresser against a back wall. Lynyrd, still wearing his gloves, pulls out the jewelry they’d taken off the girls out of his bag and puts each item in Fish’s dead hand before placing them all in the top drawer of the dresser.
When they’ve done all that, careful not to have touched anything else in there, the fire still going in the old man’s fireplace, they step back outside, and it’s then that Roof calls Helene Mayes.
When she answers on the first ring he says, “This here is Roof Crockett. Pretty sure my brother and me just solved the case of who took those missing girls.”
“Where are you?” she asks.
“Carlton Fish’s place in Old Mill,” he says. “Almost all the way up the mountain. Ask one of those deputies of yours who normally can’t find their ass with their elbows how to get here.”
He pauses then.
“One more thing,” Roof says. “Better send whatever it is you send to pick up a body, and maybe a janitor.”