One Hundred Nine
I SEE JAKE COURVILLE running toward me, his own rifle hanging at his side. He’s out of breath when he gets to us.
He looks down at the body, then at me.
“Sorry,” I say.
“The fuck are you talking about?” he says. “I was bullshitting when I said we needed to take him alive.”
“Where’s Lynyrd?”
“Eli and Sammy are taking him to the station, and the real po-lice.” He winks at me. “We thought about maybe not taking him alive, either, but then our better angels took over.”
“You’ve got some?”
“Couple.”
I look back in the general direction from which we’ve both just come.
“Hader?”
“I did my best to stop the bleeding,” Jake says. “But he died just as the EMTs from Old Mill finally made their way up to us.”
Then Jake Courville grins. “But not before he gave up Briar Crockett.”
“On what?” I ask.
“On Burt,” he says. “On Helene. Even said Roof said that the old man is the one who shot Abby Wells.”
“He gave you a statement before he died?”
Jake nods. “Got the whole thing on video, already uploaded it to the guys in Helene’s office, and to Cross Rivers PD. Live and in color, least until old Nash wasn’t.”
“They gonna pick up Briar?”
He shakes his head. “We are.”
“At his home?”
“Call it his home away from home,” he says. “But we gotta hurry.”
“Why?”
Jake Courville says, “Because I think he’s about to run, too.”
“Run where?”
“To his plane,” Jake says. “I got a call about five minutes ago that Crockett’s plane is at Parsons Regional Airport, where you picked up Holly Ridenour. We need him in custody, or we got no reason to stop that plane from taking off, for parts unknown.”
He walks over to the truck and takes less than a minute to hot-wire it. He’s on his phone when I get in.
“Come pick up the trash,” he says to whomever is at the other end of the call, then tells them where.
What Jake calls Briar Crockett’s fuck pad is near the widest part of Parsons Lake, less than a mile from where Abby Wells’s body had been found, as Jake is quick to point out.
“Coincidence?” I ask.
“Coincidence is dogshit,” he says.
We ride in silence then, Jake gunning the truck every chance he gets.
He tells me that they’d been watching Crockett’s main house, saw his wife and daughters get into a limousine about two hours ago.
When Jake called his guys to tell them about the shootout at the cabin, they went in but found the place was empty.
“But that day when Helene and you and the rest of us went there?” he says. “I might’ve stuck a tracker on the SUV he rides around in.”
When we get to Parsons, we park a half mile up Lakeside Drive. When we’ve walked up close enough to the house, we see the black SUV and a big guy standing next to it holding what appears to be some kind of sport rifle of his own.
Jake jerks his thumb to the left and we’re making our way around to the back of the house, as noiselessly as possible for guys our size, when we suddenly hear the roar from the sky and see the lights of the biggest seaplane I’ve ever seen in my life banking over the water.
“Guess we were looking at the wrong plane,” Jake says, getting close to my ear.
Then he tells me how he wants us to play it.
“It’s personal for me, on account of what they did to Helene,” he says. “But I know it’s even more personal for you.”
We’d both ditched our night-vision goggles in the truck. Now Jake trains his pale eyes on me in the flashing lights of the plane.
“Take us over the line,” he says.