Ford County (15 page)

“That’s right, Marty,” Mack said with no small amount of fear and frustration. And desperation. The man with the checkbook wasn’t even sure what they were talking about. One week earlier he’d been perfectly efficient. Now he was floundering. Then the most horrifying statement of all: “I’m afraid I’ve got these cases confused with some others.”

“You gotta be kidding!” Mack barked, much too sharply. Be cool, he told himself.

“We really offered that much for these cases?” Marty said, obviously scanning notes while he talked.

“Damned right you did, and I, in good faith, conveyed the offers to my clients. We gotta deal, Marty. You made reasonable offers, we accepted. You can’t back out now.”

“Just seems a little high, that’s all. I’m working on so many of these product liability cases these days.”

Well, congratulations, Mack almost said. You have tons of work to do for clients who can pay you tons of money. Mack wiped sweat from his forehead and saw it all slipping away. Don’t panic, he said to himself. “It’s not high at all, Marty. You should see Odell Grove with only one eye, and Jerrol Baker minus his left hand, and Doug Jumper with his mangled and useless right hand, and Travis Johnson with little nubs where his fingers used to be. You should talk to these men, Marty, and see how miserable their lives are, how much they’ve been damaged by Tinzo chain-saws, and I think you’d agree that your offer of half a million is not only reasonable but perhaps a bit on the low side.” Mack exhaled and almost smiled to himself when he finished. Not a bad closing argument. Maybe he should have spent more time in the courtroom.

“I don’t have time to hash out these details or argue liability, Mark, I—”

“It’s Mack. Mack Stafford, attorney-at-law, Clanton, Mississippi.”

“Right, sorry.” More papers shuffled in New York. Muted voices in the background as Mr. Rosenberg directed other people. Then he was back, his voice refocused. “You realize, Mack, that Tinzo has gone to trial four times with this chain-saw and won every trial. Slam dunk, no liability.”

Of course Mack did not know this, because he’d forgotten about his little class action. But in desperation he said, “Yes, and I’ve studied those trials. But I thought you were not going to argue liability, Marty.”

“Okay, you’re right. I’ll fax down the settlement documents.”

Mack breathed deeply.

“How long before you can get them back to me?” Marty asked.

“Couple of days.”

They haggled over the wording of the documents. They went back and forth about how to distribute the money. They stayed on the phone for another twenty minutes doing what lawyers are expected to do.

When Mack finally hung up, he closed his eyes, propped his feet on his desk, and kicked back in his swivel rocker. He was drained, exhausted, still frightened, but quickly getting over it. He smiled, and was soon humming a Jimmy Buffett tune.

His phone kept ringing.

The truth was, he had not been able to locate either Travis Johnson or Doug Jumper. Travis was rumored to be out west driving a truck, something he evidently could do with only seven full-length fingers. Travis had an ex-wife with a house full of kids and a ledger full of unpaid child support. She worked a night shift in a convenience store in Clanton, and had few words for Mack. She remembered his promises to collect some money when Travis lost part of three fingers. According to some sketchy friends, Travis had fled a year earlier and had no plans to return to Ford County.

Doug Jumper was rumored to be dead. He had gone to prison in Tennessee on assault charges and had not been seen in three
years. He’d never had a father. His mother had moved away. There were some relatives scattered around the county, but as a whole they showed little interest in talking about Doug and even less interest in talking to a lawyer, even one wearing hunter’s camouflage, or faded jeans and hiking boots, or any of the other ensembles Mack used to blend in with the natives. His well-practiced routine of dangling the carrot of some vague check payable to Doug Jumper did not work. Nothing worked, and after two weeks of searching, Mack finally gave up when he heard for the third or fourth time the rumor “That boy’s probably dead.”

He obtained the legitimate signatures of Odell Grove and Jerrol Baker—Jerrol’s being little more than a pathetic wiggle across the page with his right hand—and then committed his first crime. Notarizations on the settlement-and-release forms were required by Mr. Marty Rosenberg up in New York, but this was standard practice in every case. Mack had fired his notary, though, and procuring the services of another was far too complicated.

At his desk, with the doors locked, Mack carefully forged Freda’s name as a notary public, then applied the notary seal with an expired stamp he’d kept in a locked file cabinet. He notarized Odell’s signature, then Jerrol’s, then stopped to admire his handiwork. He had been planning this deed for days now, and he was convinced he would never be caught. The forgeries were beautiful, the altered notary stamp was scarcely noticeable, and no one up in New York would take the time to analyze them. Mr. Rosenberg and his crack staff were so anxious to close their files that
they would glance at Mack’s paperwork, confirm a few details, then send the check.

His crimes grew more complicated when he forged the signatures of Travis Johnson and Doug Jumper. This, of course, was justified since he had made good-faith efforts to find them, and if they ever surfaced, he would be willing to offer them the same $25,000 he was paying to Odell and Jerrol. Assuming, of course, that he was around when they surfaced.

But Mack had no plans to be around.

The next morning, he used the U.S. Postal Service—another possible violation of the law, federal, but, again, nothing that troubled him—and sent the package by express to New York.

Then Mack filed for bankruptcy, and in the process broke another law by failing to disclose the fees that were on the way from his chain-saw masterpiece. It could be argued, and perhaps it would be argued if he got caught, that the fees had not yet been collected, and so forth, but Mack could not even win this debate with himself. Not that he really tried. The fees would never be seen by anyone in Clanton, or Mississippi, for that matter.

He hadn’t shaved in two weeks, and in his opinion the salt-and-pepper beard was rather becoming. He stopped eating and stopped wearing coats and ties. The bruises and stitches were gone from his head. When he was seen around town, which was not that often, folks hesitated and whispered because word was hot on the streets that poor Mack was losing it all. News of his bankruptcy raced through the courthouse, and when coupled with the news that Lisa had filed for divorce, the lawyers and
clerks and secretaries talked of little else. His office was locked during business hours, and after. His phones went unanswered.

The chain-saw money was wired to a new bank account in Memphis, and from there it was quietly dispersed. Mack took $50,000 in cash, paid off Odell Grove and Jerrol Baker, and felt good about it. Sure they were entitled to more, at least under the terms of the long-forgotten contracts Mack had shoved under their noses when they’d hired him. But, at least for Mack, the occasion called for a more flexible interpretation of said contracts, and there were several reasons. First, his clients were very happy. Second, his clients would certainly squander anything above $25,000, so in the interest of preserving the money, Mack argued that he should simply keep the bulk of it. Third, $25,000 was a fair settlement in light of their injuries, and especially in light of the fact that the two would have received nothing if Mack had not been shrewd enough to dream up the chain-saw litigation scheme in the first place.

Reasons four, five, and six followed the same line of thinking. Mack was already tired of rationalizing his actions. He was screwing his clients and he knew it.

He was now a crook. Forging documents, hiding assets, swindling clients. And if he had allowed himself to brood on these actions, he would have been miserable. The reality was that Mack was so thrilled with his escape that he caught himself laughing at odd times. When the crimes were done, there was no turning back, and this pleased him too.

He handed Harry Rex a check for $50,000 to cover the initial fallout from the divorce, and he executed the necessary papers to
allow his lawyer to act on his behalf in tidying up his affairs. The rest of the money was wired to a bank in Central America.

The last act in his well-planned and brilliantly executed farewell was a meeting with his daughters. After several testy phone conversations, Lisa had finally relented and agreed to allow Mack to enter the house for one hour, on a Thursday night. She would leave, but return in exactly sixty minutes.

Somewhere in the unwritten rules of human behavior a wise person once decided that such meetings are mandatory. Mack certainly could have skipped it, but then he was not only a crook but also a coward. No rule was safe. He supposed it was important for the girls to have the chance to vent, to cry, to ask why. He need not have worried. Lisa had so thoroughly prepped them that they could barely manage a hug. He promised to see them as often as possible, even though he was leaving town. They accepted this with more skepticism than he thought possible. After thirty long and awkward minutes, Mack squeezed their stiff bodies one more time and hurried to his car. As he drove away, he was convinced the three women were planning a happy new life without him.

And if he had allowed himself to dwell on his failures and shortcomings, he could have become melancholy. He fought the urge to remember the girls when they were smaller and life was happier. Or had he ever been truly happy? He really couldn’t say.

He returned to his office, entered, as always now, through the rear door, and gave the place one final walk-through. All active
files had been delivered to Harry Rex. The old ones had been burned. The law books, office equipment, furniture, and cheap art on the wall had been either sold or given away. He loaded up one medium-size suitcase, the contents of which had been carefully selected. No suits, ties, dress shirts, jackets, dress shoes—all that garb had been given to charity. Mack was leaving with the lighter stuff.

He took a bus to Memphis, flew from there to Miami, then on to Nassau, where he stayed one night before catching a flight to Belize City, Belize. He waited an hour in the sweltering airport there, sipping a beer from the tiny bar, listening to some rowdy Canadians talk excitedly about bonefishing, and dreaming of what was ahead. He wasn’t really sure what was ahead, but it was certainly far more attractive than the wreckage behind.

The money was in Belize, a country with a U.S. extradition treaty that was more formal than practical. If his trail got hot, and he was supremely confident it would not, then Mack would quietly ease on down to Panama. His odds of getting caught were less than slim, in his opinion, and if someone began poking around Clanton, Harry Rex would know it soon enough.

The plane to Ambergris Cay was an aging Cessna Caravan, a twenty-seater that was stuffed with well-fed North Americans too wide for the narrow seats. But Mack didn’t mind. He gazed out the window, down to the brilliant aquamarine water three thousand feet below, warm salty water in which he would soon be swimming. On the island, and north of the main town of San Pedro, he found a room at a quaint little waterfront place called
Rico’s Reef Resort. All rooms were thatched-roof cabins, each with a small front porch. Each porch had a long hammock, leaving little doubt as to the priorities at Rico’s. He paid cash for a week, no credit cards ever again, and quickly changed into his new work clothes—T-shirt, old denim shorts, baseball cap, no shoes. He soon found the watering hole, ordered a rum drink, and met a man named Coz. Coz anchored one end of the teakwood bar and gave the impression that he had been attached to it for quite some time. His long gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail. His skin was burned bronze and leathery. His accent was faded New England, and before long Coz, chain-smoking and drinking dark rum, let it slip that at one time he’d been involved with a vaguely undefined firm in Boston. He poked and prodded into Mack’s background, but Mack was too nervous to divulge anything.