One Hundred One
brIAR CROCKETT IS waiting for us in front of his house when Helene Mayes and I pull up in her car, as if he knew we were coming.
Jake and the boys are right behind us in the van.
As Helene and I are out of the car and approaching Briar, he smiles broadly, like he’s a one-man welcoming committee, and points to Jake and Eli and Sammy and Michael Gola, the sniper, all of them having fanned out behind us, none of them showing the guns I know they’re all carrying.
“I’m intuiting this isn’t a social call,” Briar says.
“I need to speak with your sons,” Helene says.
Briar puts out his hands in a helpless gesture.
“I’m afraid they’re not here,” he says. “But I’ll certainly make sure to tell them you stopped by.”
He looks over at me. “Nice to see you again, Silas.”
“Wish I could say the same.”
“I remember that I used to get that kind of attitude from your father,” Briar says.
“Yeah, he did have some snark to him on occasion,” I say. “But at least he managed not to raise any criminals.”
He stares at me for a long time, an almost curious look back on his face.
“Everybody around here is aware by now how big a man you are,” he says.
“In terms of your physical self, I mean, in terms of your celebrity, even the size of your loss because of that automobile accident. But it has become clear to me, in this short amount of time since you’ve been back, that your arrogance has grown all out of proportion as well. ”
“This isn’t about arrogance, Briar,” I say. “It’s just about making things right. And justice, not that you seem to have much of an understanding about that.”
“Actually,” he says, “it’s about you and Ms. Mayes here continuing to be all wrong about my family. And about me.”
Helene pulls out her arrest warrant, holding it up for Briar Crockett to see.
“We have sworn testimony from a missing girl who is no longer missing,” Helene says.
“Her testimony, quite credible, is about your sons running a trafficking ring pretty much right under your nose. So let us all stop fucking around here and you either tell them to come outside or tell me where they are.”
She reaches into another pocket and pulls out what I know is a search warrant, handing it to Briar.
“Or you can stand out here and continue to dick around while my men and I head inside and start going room to room,” she says. “By the way? If your wife is inside, you might think about giving her a heads-up.”
“Fortunately, she’s at yoga,” he says. “Or maybe Pilates. I can never keep her self-improvement schedule straight.”
He hands her back the warrant without even looking at it. “You can search all you want,” he says. “Roof and Lynyrd won’t be there. All you’ll accomplish, if you’re still here later, is traumatizing my daughters when my wife brings them home from school.”
“We’re far more interested in your sons than your daughters at the moment,” Helene says.
“And I’ve already told you they’re not here,” he says. “And so you know, there’s no way they’d be involved in something like you’re describing without me knowing about it.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Helene says. “Another is that you’re an accessory after the fact, already trying to cover your sorry ass.”
I move closer to Briar Crockett from the side, up on him before he sees me there.
“When your daughters get older,” I say quietly, “they’ll be the same age as this girl who got taken by their brothers.”
I finally get a reaction out of him with that, see a flash in his eyes that somehow reminds me of an old Mark Twain line, the one comparing anger to acid.
“You should consider your words more carefully,” he says.
“Just did,” I say.
He turns away from me and back to Helene. “My sons didn’t do this.”
Helene gestures for Jake and the others to head inside.
“You want to give your boys some sound fatherly advice, Mr. Crockett?” Helene says. “Tell them to turn themselves in.”
“Something else I’ll be sure to pass along,” he says.
We’re back at Helene’s car, both our doors open, when Briar Crockett calls out to us. When we turn, we see him swiveling his head around and sniffing the air.
“You smell that?”
“Smell what?” Helene calls back to him.
“Blood in the air,” Briar Crockett says.