The Body and the Blood (20 page)

Chapter Forty-one

“Well, now,” Hawkins said. “I’s afraid of this.”

“Let’s do them tonight, Daddy,” Kevin said as he dug the guns out of my jacket pockets. “Have that big nigger in the ground by mornin’.”

“Sounds like Junior’s scared,” Merrill said.

“Not without reason,” I said.

“True.”

“By God but I hate a sassy nigger,” Kevin said.

“He really just say that?” I asked.

“You thinkin’ what I’m thinking?” Merrill asked.

“That he’s inbred or suicidal?”

“Both,” he said, spinning around.

Grabbing Kevin’s gun, he pointed it at his head, and used his body for a shield.

“Unless you want to see how small your boy’s brain really is,” he said to Hawkins, “drop it.”

Without protest, Hawkins eased the shotgun down onto the wet cement floor. When he was upright again, he held up his hands.

“We won’t give you any trouble. Go ahead and leave. Just do two things. Leave the girl and don’t ever come back to Pine County.”

A wide, distorted smile spread over Merrill’s face. “If she wants to, hell, even if she don’t, Mrs. Hawkins is comin’ with us. And as for Pine County, hell, I been thinkin’ about buyin’ a place next to yours.”

“You’re—” Hawkins began.

“Holdin’ all the cards,” Merrill said. “So shut the fuck up. And just pray that cancer kills your ass before I do.”

“Cancer?” Sharon asked in shock.

“You can’t believe what all these dumb motherfuckers say in front of a dead man. Only I ain’t dead. I like Lazarus come back from the grave. Shouldn’t count a nigga out before you kill his ass. You and Junior in the cell. Now. I ain’t got all damn day. I’ve got to get home and get some rest and think about how many different ways I’m gonna fuck with y’all.”

They quickly moved into the cell.

“Don’t kill them,” Tom Daniels said, descending the stairs. “Let’s wait until we can arrest them and get them inside one of our prisons.”

“Welcome to the party,” Merrill said to him. “You a little late.”

“Well, my son here gave me my invitation a little late.”

Just before Sharon and I had walked in, I’d left a message on his voicemail letting him know where we were and what we were doing—just in case it didn’t go according to plan.

“It’s a good thing I came” Daniels continued. “I’ve got two other deputies cuffed to each other inside a cell upstairs.”

Merrill shrugged. “All you did was save their lives. Whatta you want, a cookie?”

“No need to thank me. But my daughter’d never forgive me if I let something happen to her new husband. By the way, she thinks you’re helping them move this weekend.” He looked over at me. “I figured out how Hawkins did it. Potter helped him. I think we’ve got a solid case.” He nodded over toward the cell. “Now it looks like we’ll have the whole family inside.”

“That’s good,” I said. “They don’t like to be separated. Now they can recreate their little city set on a hill experiment inside. See if it
really
works.”

Merrill looked over at me, his swollen face a lopsided question mark.

“You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

“Good thing I learns fast for a sassy nigger.”

Chapter Forty-two

The morning sunlight dancing on the gentle ripples of the Apalachicola River refracted into sparkles so intense they could only be looked at a moment at a time. Merrill and I were seated by the river’s edge in a couple of wobbly, uncomfortable wooden chairs. Merrill didn’t seem to mind—not about the chairs or the blinding reflection or much of anything. He just seemed happy to see daylight, happy, like his ancestors before him, to be a free man of color.

“They say when they first came to Africa to get slaves they got African tribes known for their docility,” he said, as if giving voice to a stray thought. “Said they’d make good slaves and not cause any trouble.”

“Yeah?”

“I ain’t from that tribe.”

I nodded.

“I’m from the give-me-freedom-or-give-me-death-motherfucker tribe.”

A large limb with three turtles floated by on the other side of the river. When it bumped the base of a cypress tree, two of the turtles fell into the water. The day was so quiet, the water so calm. I heard the two small
ker-plunks
from where I sat.

“Those motherfuckers beat hell out of me,” he said. “They’d wake me up in the middle of the night—hell, it may’ve been the middle of the day, I couldn’t tell—just to take turns punching me. I ain’t as pretty as I used to be. And they did things to me. Not sexual things, but belittling shit.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna kill them.”

I didn’t say anything. I understood how he felt, and his need to give voice to it, but I hoped that eventually, after he had healed, he’d reconsider his wish for retribution. The line between vengeance and justice is often a fine one, but there is a line. Merrill would have to figure out his own lines for himself. All I could do was be his friend, help him however I could.

The line in my own life, the one I seemed to be tripping over so often lately, was between compassion and justice, and like Merrill, I had to figure a few things out.

“I wanna hunt ‘em down and take ‘em out,” he said, still staring at the river.

“Won’t have to. Eventually, they’ll come after Sharon.”

“Maybe.”

“They will.”

“They come after us and we take them out, it’s self-defense,” he said. “We go after them it’s . . .”

“Something else,” I said. “It’s a fine line, but . . .”

“Situation like this it’s all somebody like you got.”

“And you,” I said.

He looked at me again, and I could tell he was considering what I had said.

“I need to tell you something.”

“Okay.”

“But first I’ve got to tell you something else.”

I nodded.

“I’m a better man because of you.”

My eyes stung, and I had to blink several times. He had never said anything like that before, and, though I doubted it were true, and thought it much more likely just the opposite was the case, it meant more to me than he would ever know.

“You like nobody I’ve ever known—or known about,” he said.

“Thanks. And ditto.”

“You got all these lines and codes—like the shit we was just talking about,” he said. “You got faith—and not just in God, but in yourself and me, and fuck all if I understand it, but in humanity. You got this way of making people want to be better, but you never seem to judge us when we’re not.”

“You must’ve really thought you were going to die in that dungeon.”

“Don’t laugh this off,” he said. “Hear what I’ve got to say.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said. “That was—”

“You do this balancing act thing between like mercy and righteousness,” he continued, “and you’re always thinking, always examining, always questioning—yourself and everything else. Thing is, that’s who you are. You slip too far to one side or the other then you’re not you.”

I nodded again. He didn’t have to say anything else. He had noticed the change in me, too, the hardness, the anger and violence that were much closer to the surface now, the rage that more quickly rushed out.

“I know you can handle yourself. You plenty tough. But to be tough—when you have to—and still have compassion, that’s an art. That’s
your
art.”

We were quiet for a moment.

“I’m struggling,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m not sure what to do.”

“You’ll figure it out. This is temporary. Just don’t forget who you are.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

We were quiet again, this time for a while.

“Maybe they got sense enough to stay in Pine County, and this won’t involve you. They realize there’s no way for them to win out here, that even if they get us, your dad or Daniels would square it, then none of this need involve you.”

“I’m involved, and I’m gonna stay involved. No matter what. Besides, I don’t think they think like that. Being in touch with reality don’t seem to be hallmarks of the Hawkins’. Normal rules don’t apply.”

“Normal laws of nature do. If I cut they ass, do they not bleed?”

“Literate bastard, aren’t you?”

“Some kind of bastard,” he said with a lopsided smile. “Sharon says Hawkins really think he’s untouchable, invulnerable. Whole life’s taught him to think that way.”

I nodded.

We were quiet a long moment, and I knew healing was beginning to take place in both of us.

“I know what it’s like to be an inmate now,” he said.

I didn’t say anything, just thought about the paradigm shift he must be experiencing—like the doctor who’s diagnosed with the type of disease he specializes in.

“I’ll be a different CO now,” he said.

I nodded.

A few minutes later, Tom Daniels arrived with what looked to be breakfast. He handed us each a paper cup of coffee and began to pass out glazed doughnuts. When I took the lid off my coffee, the steam rising from the cup warmed my nose, and I realized how cool the morning was. October in Florida is usually like the end of summer in most places, but not this year.

“So how we gonna take down the Hawkins clan?” Daniels asked.

He had not called FDLE or taken any other action against them last night, feeling it best to complete our investigation first, knowing he would no longer be in charge—maybe not even involved. All we had on them at the moment was what they had done to Merrill, and they could fabricate evidence and an arrest report too easily, explain his wounds away by saying he had resisted arrest, even charge me and Daniels with breaking him out of jail. That would all get very complicated very fast. We didn’t just want them on false arrest and imprisonment, which would be difficult to prove anyway, so we hadn’t notified any authorities—and if they were as corrupt as we thought them to be, they wouldn’t either.

“We were just discussing that very thing,” Merrill said.

“And?”

“Think we got it covered,” he said.

The doughnuts were soft and warm and sticky on my fingers and I had eaten three before I realized it. Merrill had eaten more.

Daniels shook his head. “We’ll get back to that in a minute. For now, let’s talk about taking Mike Hawkins down. He is our bad guy, right?”

“Oh, he’s a bad guy,” I said. “Comes from a long line of them, but it doesn’t mean he killed Menge.”

“But Sharon told you that’s what he was put there to do.”

“And I don’t doubt that, but it doesn’t mean he did it. She said Chris was protecting Justin, that Mike was too scared of him to do anything.”

“Well, I think he did,” he said.

“Then arrest him.”

“Can’t. Don’t have enough on him yet. It’s why I didn’t do anything to Hawkins last night.”

“I thought that so I could kill them,” Merrill said.

“No, but if you’d’ve let them kill
you
, then we could’ve taken them down.”

“My bad, but nobody told me the plan.”

“I’m hoping they’ll fuck up in an even bigger way this time and we can get them all—including Mike.”

“Not possible to fuck up any bigger than fuckin’ with me.”

I remembered something Paula Menge had told me earlier, and must have made a noise, because Daniels said, “What?”

“Paula Menge told me that she hired a PI to investigate Hawkins. She thinks he took off with half of her retainer, but—”

“Probably didn’t make it out of the dungeon.”

“Least not alive,” Merrill said. “He wasn’t in there when I was.”

“I’ll look into it,” Daniels said.

“You should probably talk to Sharon too.”

“I will.”

We were all quiet a moment, each of us still. We were weary and wounded, but had promises to keep and many miles to go.

“So how do we make the case?” Daniels asked.

“Against Hawkins?” I asked. “I thought you were thinking Sobel with Pitts’s help. Or maybe Martinez. You giving up on him?”

“I don’t think he did it now. I wanted it to be him, but we’ve got to go were the evidence leads.”

“Matos is convinced you’ve been trying to set Martinez up.”

“Wonder what he’ll say when I arrest Hawkins?”

“If that’s the way it turns out, what will you do about Martinez?”

He looked into the distance.

I followed his gaze. Across the river, Spanish moss on the branches of cypress trees rising out of the water along the banks waved like clean sheets on a clothesline in the morning breeze.

When he looked at me, his eyes were every bit as sad and vulnerable as I had expected of a man who had long since realized he was impotent to protect his wife from the evils of this world.

“I’m not sure. Gotta do something.”

I felt like a voyeur, sickened and guilty for seeing something so private, as if my knowing was part of an on-going violation of him and his family. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks, but right now I’m more concerned about the Hawkins boys. Where’s Sharon?”

“Merrill’s mom’s.”

“Mom’ll put holes in ‘em if they come callin’,” Merrill said. “And I’ll stay over there at night ‘til this thing’s over.”

Daniels nodded. “We’ve got him at the right place at the right time. We’ve seen firsthand how his family operates. We know they sent him in there to do the deed. And we’ve got him with the murder weapon.”

Merrill said, “When this happen?”

“While you were away,” he said. “We found it in his cell. Now, we’ve just got to find his accomplice.”

“Who found the shank in his cell?”

“Pitts.”

“There’s your accomplice.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I searched his cell. There was no weapon in it.”

Out on the river, a silver pontoon boat sped by, a small fiberglass boat tied to the back, bouncing in its wake. On board, a quartet of middle-aged men in jeans, flannel shirts, and baseball caps gave us an obligatory wave.

“You think he planted it?” Daniels asked.

“Somebody did.”

“So we’re no closer to knowing with certainty who did the deed?”

I shrugged. “We’re getting closer all the time, just don’t know how yet. Every scrap of information helps. Better to know too much than too little. Eventually we’ll get the piece that makes all the others fall into place.”

“You’re right, I’m just ready to be done with this one.”

“Well, we’re not there yet,” I said, then told them about discovering that DeLisa Lopez was in the institution for over thirty-two hours the day of and following the murder.

Small waves caused by the pontoon boat’s wake rippled the smooth surface of the water and slapped at the base of the cypress trees and sandy banks.

“And we’ve still got to strongly consider Potter, Pitts, Sobel, Martinez, and Paula Menge.”

“You tell him about the uniform we found?” Daniels asked.

We nodded.

“Y’all ever find the tune-up video?” Merrill asked.

“I think I’ve got a good idea where it might be,” I said.

“
Think
?” he said. “Why haven’t you gotten it?”

“Been too busy savin’ your black ass.”

“Well, now you done that, let’s go get the motherfucker.”