Ninety-Seven
TWO NIGHTS LATER, Jake Courville and the two DEVGRU dudes, Eli McCann and Sammy Chu, bust what the Crockett clan must have thought was a safe house, and might have been one until Helene’s reinforcements rode into town.
The place is in Old Mill, an isolated spot deep in the woods near the reservoir over there.
When Jake and Eli and Sammy kick in the door, they find what they would describe later as a mother lode of oxycontin and cocaine and methamphetamines—in addition to one bedroom stockpiled with enough automatic weapons to invade Kentucky.
Now I’m looking through a window into one of the interview rooms at county police headquarters, watching the three punks I’d first met when they were peddling drugs at the high school that day. One of them, I’m certain, had to have been the shotgun shooter outside of Rowdy’s that night.
Helene is across the table from them. It’s a little past ten o’clock. She’d told me we might be here awhile, and I’d said, “I got nowhere else to be.”
Eli is standing in front of the door, arms crossed, like he’s a bouncer.
“Lawyer,” the dull-eyed one who’d done most of the talking in the school parking lot keeps saying. “Lawyer lawyer lawyer.”
“For what?” Helene says mildly. “You haven’t been arrested yet, and you certainly haven’t been charged.”
“Lawyer lawyer lawyer,” he says, smirking at her.
“I do need to point out, Lonnie,” she says, glancing down at the yellow pad in front of her as if reminding herself of his name, “that if you continue to go out of your way to irritate me, I’m going to head down the hall for a cup of coffee and leave you and your buddies alone here with my friend Eli. ”
I see Lonnie’s eyes dart over in Eli’s direction.
“If you’re not going to arrest us,” Lonnie says, “then you have to kick us loose.”
Helene smiles. “Oh, fuck no,” she says. “We haven’t had the chance to get to know each other yet.”
“What the hell kind of policing is this?” Lonnie asks.
“Mine,” Helene says. “But thanks for asking.”
Lonnie’s two buddies are sitting there, silent and sullen and staring down at the table.
“Lawyer,” Lonnie says, but even he has to know it’s starting to sound as if his heart isn’t in it.
“Who hired Alden Brooks to kill Burt Webb?” Helene asks now.
We’d established by now that that was the tattooed man’s name. Ex-con whose last known address had been over in Greenville. A career enforcer who’d apparently graduated to gun for hire.
“Who dat?” Lonnie asks.
Helene smiles again, as if she’s here making three new friends, before she casually reaches over and backhands Lonnie so swiftly and violently across the face that she knocks him sideways out of his chair.
“The fuck?” he yells when he’s on the floor.
I notice that neither of his friends makes any effort to help him up, perhaps afraid that any kind of sudden move might earn them a good slap of their own from Helene Mayes.
Lonnie is bleeding from the lip when he gets back into his chair, warily looking over at Eli and then back at Helene. Like Mike Tyson said: Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.
“Now where were we?” Helene says calmly.
“You can’t keep us here like this,” Lonnie says, putting a hand to his lip and seeing the blood when he pulls it away.
“Sure I can,” Helene says. “Who killed Abby Wells?”
Lonnie looks genuinely surprised at that.
“Abby?”
“You heard me,” Helene says.
“Wait,” he says. “Roof’s girl is dead?”
Roof’s girl.
I’m on my way in there as soon as the words are out of his stupid, bloodied-up mouth.