Bull Mountain (14 page)

“Button that back up, Deputy. We’re going to be fine.”

“I don’t know, boss. You sure this is a good idea?”

“No, I’m not, but you’ll be fine. I promise.” Clayton clicked on the blue light bar, but turned
it back off after seeing the faces of the men in the road.

“Maybe we should just head back,” Darby said.

“Just be quiet. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I thought you’d be in danger. I grew up with these people. If anything, I’m the one in trouble.”

“What do you mean, ‘trouble’?”

“Just stop worrying.”

“That’s hard to do, sir, seeing as two big burly jokers with assault
rifles are walking toward us.” Darby squinted his eyes to get a better look at the approaching welcome party. “Oh my God, boss. The one to the left looks all burned up or something.” Darby dropped his hand to his gun again. Clayton took his eyes off the two men and put them directly on Darby.

“Listen to me, Deputy.”

“Yessir?”

“You listening?”

“Yessir.”

“These men are not going
to hurt you. I promise you that. You are a sworn deputy of Waymore Valley, and these men are not looking to be cop killers. That kind of thing will rain a metric shit-ton of trouble down on this place, and they do not want that. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Darby nodded, fast and sharp, and awkwardly straightened out his hat.

“So just relax. If for a second I think something is
squirrelly, I will handle it and I will get us both out of here pronto. Okay?”

“Okay, boss. I trust you.”

“Good. Now, be quiet.”

The sheriff rolled down his window and turned off the rumbling AC as the two men approached the truck. One of the men stayed back by the tree line, while the one Darby thought looked burned rested his arms on the driver’s-side window ledge and leaned in a
little to inventory the truck’s occupants. When Scabby Mike and Clayton finally locked eyes, Mike smiled wide and motioned for the other man to lower his rifle.

Scabby Mike had managed to become an old man over that past year, since the time Clayton saw him last, but there was no mistaking who he was. Mike had had a severe case of measles as a child, which left horrible scarring over eighty
percent of his face and body. It happened that way up here sometimes because of the mountain’s lack of proper doctoring. The disease left his skin a muddled pinkish color with the texture of pitted asphalt, and his beard grew in patchy and only on the right side of his face.

“Sometimes, that’s just how shit is,”
he’d told Clayton once when they were kids.
“I just thank the Lord I never got
it on my pecker.”
The memory always made Clayton smile.

This made eye contact tough to maintain for strangers like Darby, but Clayton wasn’t a stranger, and Mike’s face was a welcomed one. Clayton considered him a friend. Maybe the only one he had left on the mountain.

“When they told me we had company comin’ up the mountain, I was hopin’ it was you. I wasn’t really in the mood for killin’
any real cops.”

“Well, I reckon I should feel lucky, then.”

“Lucky you got me standin’ here tellin’ you to turn around. ’Cause you keep drivin’ up this here road, your luck is gonna change.”

“I need to talk to my brother.”

“Hal don’t talk to cops. You know that.” Mike shot an intentional glare at Darby, who looked away immediately.

“I thought you just said I wasn’t a real cop.”

“He don’t talk to fake cops, neither.”

“Look, Mike, I’m not here in an official capacity anyway. I’m here as his brother.”

Scabby Mike leaned down on the Bronco’s window frame and shuffled his hat back out of his eyes to look inside the truck. “So what’s Deputy Dawg here for?”

“He’s here as a witness. That’s all.”

“We don’t like witnesses up here, neither,” Mike said, and spat
tobacco juice in the dirt. Darby continued to study the floorboards with great intensity.

“Just tell your boys in the woods to come on out, and let the man know we’re coming up.”

Mike smiled wide, showing off a mouth full of straight but yellowed teeth. “Your brother knew you were coming twenty minutes back.” He spat again, then stood up and whistled—two sharp chirps. At least a dozen
men, armed with everything from assault rifles to shotguns, shuffled out of the trees like ants from a mound that just got stepped on. Darby sank deeper and lower into his seat and gripped the armrest hard enough to push the blood from his knuckles.

Mike laughed a deep belly laugh. “Tell your fearless deputy there not to be so jumpy. If Hal wanted him dead, we’d have done did it by now.”

“He’ll be fine,” Clayton said.

“You sure you wanna do this, Clayton? He ain’t real fond of you, these days.”

“He ain’t never been real fond of me.”

“Well, it’s a little worse now, since the funeral and all.”

“Hal needs to realize that I lost a brother, too.”

“It was the uniform, I think, that set him off.”

Clayton shook his head. “Hal’s drinking and acting like an ass
was a lot more disrespectful than my dress uniform.”

“He don’t see it that way.”

“I don’t give a shit how he sees it.”

“All the more reason for me askin’, Clayton. You sure you want to go up there?”

“I’ll be fine, Mike.”

Mike narrowed his eyes at Clayton like he was trying to read something written on the sheriff’s forehead, then pushed himself back off the truck. “Let them
through,” he yelled to the posse of gunmen up the road. They cleared a path for Clayton, and he put the Bronco back in gear. He looked out at Mike again and tipped his hat.

“Good to see you, Mike.”

“Yup. Yup.”

As the sheriff and his deputy rolled past the gathering of hard stares, dirty faces, and loaded weapons, Darby closed his eyes and got reacquainted with the Lord.

3.

“Jeez-us, Sheriff. This is bad. I just know it. You’re family to these people, but they could care less about me. Your brother will kill me just for being dressed like this.” He pulled at the deputy’s star pinned to his chest.

“Nobody is getting killed, Darby. He’s not as crazy as everyone says. It’s just what he wants people to think. It’s how he keeps people doing what he wants them to do.
My deddy was the same way. Besides, he’ll be too busy with me to worry about you. Just stay in the car, and you’ll be fine.”

“Whatever you say, Sheriff, but I’m still not feeling good about it.”

The road opened up into a vast expanse of red dirt and pea gravel. Clayton counted at least ten more armed men watching as they approached, but with their guns pointed down. A few others too twitchy
and haggard to be employees wandered about the yard and hovered around the corner of the house near the rain barrel. Clayton assumed they were local tweekers looking to score. There was a time when Halford would never have allowed scrounge like them anywhere near his home. He was getting either soft or sloppy. Either one was a good sign he might be open to a conversation like the one Clayton
was there to bring him.

The man closest to the mouth of the drive was talking into a two-way radio connected to his gun strap with a length of paracord. Clayton had no doubt who was listening on the other end, and hoped it also explained why all the guns were lowered. Halford was being cordial—another good sign. Clayton wheeled the Bronco through the entourage and parked next to a variety
of jacked-up, camouflaged pickup trucks, some brand-new and some as old as he was. He thought he recognized his deddy’s old Ford F-100. At least Halford had managed to keep that alive. A simple cabin made of cedar and pine stood in the middle of the clearing. To Clayton it looked frozen in time. If it was any different from the way he remembered it, he couldn’t tell. His old bedroom window faced east,
and the same blue curtains he remembered from when he was a boy were still there. Two old men he didn’t recognize sat in rockers on the porch. One of them held a guitar in his lap but wasn’t playing. Two children about nine or ten sat with their legs dangling off the porch, neither of them wearing shoes. The blackened color of the soles of their feet made Clayton wonder if they ever had. One
of the children held a hand-carved wooden train car. The other held a knife and was picking at a loose board on the porch. Neither of them looked up as Clayton got out of the truck and approached the front steps.

“That’s far enough, Sheriff,” a deep voice bellowed from behind the screen door. It was the man himself. Halford Burroughs stood every bit of six feet, four inches tall and took up
the entirety of the doorway. He was as thick as a redwood but angular and solid like stacked cinder blocks. Clayton and Buckley had grown to resemble their father, naturally thin, cut, with ropey muscles, red hair, and fair skin—the kind that burned in the shade—but Halford retained their mother’s features. He was olive-skinned; his hair was a thick mound of dark brown ringlets that matched deep
brown eyes that curved down at his cheeks. When they were kids, the girls on the mountain called them “sad eyes,” but Clayton never saw a hint of sadness in them. His beard was full and lush, streaked with gray and silver. He stood behind the screen door, unarmed, with a paper napkin draped down the front of a dark undershirt.

He pushed open the screen door, stepped out onto the porch, and
let the door slam behind him. He squinted his eyes as they adjusted to the sunlight and pulled the napkin from his shirt collar. He wiped away what looked like gravy from the corners of his mouth and beard, then rolled the napkin into a ball between his palms and tossed it on the porch. The kid with the toy train scurried over, picked it up, and disappeared into the house. The screen door slammed
again.

“Long time, Hal.”

“Not long enough. I don’t know what you’re thinking coming here, but it would be in your best interest to go ahead and get your ass gone.” Halford took a step forward and the porch creaked under his weight.

“If you really wanted me to leave, you wouldn’t have let me up here in the first place. We need to talk.”

“I don’t talk to cops. Even wannabe cops like
you.”

“I’m not here as the law, Hal. I’m here as your brother.”

Hal laughed. It was cold and humorless. A yard full of ass-kissers joined in and Clayton gave a quick glance around, feeling uneasy. Halford took another step forward into the sunlight. “First of all, you ain’t
the law
up here. Hell, you ain’t hardly the law down in the Valley, from what I hear. But more important, the only
brother I got done got himself killed by some friends of yours a little over a year ago.”

“I had nothing to do with that, and you know it.”

“It’s one big brotherhood, though, right?”

For the first time, Clayton felt the heat of the day. Sweat was running between his shoulder blades and down his lower back. His shirt was sticking to him and his neck was kinking up from having to look
up at Halford. All of a sudden he craved iced tea—laced with a fifth of bourbon.

“Hal, I didn’t drive out here thinking we had any shot of repairing the damage between us. I’m not fool enough to think that will ever happen, but I got things you need to hear all the same. You don’t want to hear them? Fine. I’ll be on my way. But ask yourself something. Don’t you think if I drove all the way
up here, after all this time, and let all these assholes you call family put guns in my face in front of my deddy’s house, that what I have to say might just be important?”

Hal chewed on that. He studied Clayton, then shot some stink-eye over at Darby, who was melting in the cab of the Bronco. The floorboard went back to being the most fascinating thing Darby had ever seen.

“Come on, Hal.
It’s hot out here.”

“Fine. Talk, but you can do it from there. No way in hell you’re coming into this house. You lost that right a long time ago.”

Clayton sighed and took off his hat. He wiped the sweat off his brow with his forearm, and put it back on. He took another glance around the yard at all of Halford’s men, each face more eager than the next to hear what Clayton had to say. “I
don’t think you want all these people hearing what I got to say.”

“Why not, Sheriff?” Halford held his arms out. “We’re all family here, right?”

Clayton took a step toward the porch and spoke in a hushed voice. “I think I might have . . . a way to help our family.”

Hal didn’t say a word. He just stared at Clayton like he was a complete stranger. Clayton took another wary step toward
his brother and lowered his voice even more. “A way out, and I mean completely out. It’s a chance for you to retire from all . . . this . . .” He held out his arms like a scarecrow and motioned toward the gathered crowd. “I have guarantees,” he said, almost in a whisper now. “You can keep everything you have. The money. Whatever. Just shut down the dope.” Clayton looked at the tweekers by the rain
barrel scratching themselves nervously. “No more looking over your shoulder. No more men with guns at your front gate. Just you and God’s country.”

Hal still said nothing. Clayton needed to give him more. He moved close enough to Hal to almost whisper in his ear, and Hal let him.

“They’re on to your boy in Florida—Wilcombe.” Clayton waited to see if that put a crack in Hal’s stone visage,
but there was nothing, not even a blink. “They also know the locations of all sixteen cookhouses. They know your routes and where it’s all going. They’ve got times, dates, names, everything. If you don’t listen to me they’re going to storm this mountain like you or I have never seen. I can’t stop it. And if that happens, a lot of people—a lot of your people—are going to get killed.” Clayton thought
about what Holly had said back in his office about appealing to Hal’s
other
sensibility—about the money being paramount. Clayton didn’t believe it, but he put it out there anyway. “Think about the money, Hal. You’ll lose it all. Everything you worked for taken from you before you even know what’s happening.”

Hal spit on the porch, and Clayton thought he caught a slight shift in Hal’s expression.

“Nothing makes a U.S. federal law enforcement agency drool more than a huge pile of money,” Clayton said, using Agent Holly’s words verbatim. “And they are coming for yours. But it doesn’t have to be like that, Hal. You can keep it all and put a stop to all this.”