Almost Midnight (12 page)

The next week Darrell and Mary had a pretty good time, considering they were scrounging for food out of dumps and sleeping in the car down nowhere roads where they figured they wouldn’t be found. What the hell, they thought, they were in California. Why not check out some of the sights? They went up to the Mount Whitney fish hatchery north of Independence and spent an afternoon watching the trout swirling in circles, round and round, going nowhere. They picnicked in the shadow of two extinct volcanoes by Red Mountain on Tinemaha Creek, and they visited the old ghost town of Calico over by Barstow. They then swung down through Indio, close to the Salton Sea, and camped out a couple of nights in the foothills of the Santa Rosas, once or twice stealing into the tiny agricultural station of Oasis for fresh fruit and vegetables.

It was a good time but Darrell didn’t want to push it too far. It was late January now. They’d been on the road a solid month, living down-and-dirty. He was concerned about Mary. She hadn’t complained but he thought there might be a limit to her tolerance for this kind of lifestyle. Hell, he wasn’t averse to a bit of an upgrade himself.

He phoned his mom and told her they were in California and could use some help. Lexie didn’t have much money but she called
in some favors, and came up with a cool twelve grand. Mary picked up two thousand dollars in cash at a Western Union near Palmdale and they cashed a check for the rest of it at a bank in Los Angeles. Twelve thousand dollars—just like that. Now they were rolling.

T
HIS WAS THE
first time Lexie had heard from Darrell in more than a month. A couple of days after Christmas she’d dropped by his house with his son Shane in tow, but Darrell and Mary were already gone. She didn’t need anyone telling her they wouldn’t be back soon. She’d known for some time that Darrell was “running in Satan’s territory,” and now, standing there inside the little house, soaking everything in, she could almost smell the danger. She closed her eyes and prayed, “God, please take care of Darrell and protect his life till he comes to himself and comes back to You.” Almost at once she felt God answering her in her spirit: “Don’t worry about Darrell; I’ll take care of him.”

For Lexie it really was that simple. As far as she was concerned, everything was now in God’s hands. She was through worrying.

But not Barbara Epps. Down in Branson Mary’s mother was sick with worry. A week after Darrell and Mary dropped out of sight, Barbara phoned Lexie in hopes of finding out where they might have gone. Lexie said she didn’t know.

“But wouldn’t Darrell know you’d be worried and call to tell you where they were?” Barbara asked.

“I serve a God that’s able to take care of them and Darrell knows I’ll pray instead of worrying,” Lexie said.

Lloyd Lawrence wasn’t worried. Lloyd was steaming mad. The day after Darrell and Mary’s disappearance he went to Darrell’s house to check up on business and found the place empty, his drugs cleaned right out. He’d been ripped off. Nobody ripped Lloyd off, least of all a mere lackey like Darrell.

Lloyd decided to call in some heavy artillery. He contacted a buddy of his, a hard case from Oak Grove, Arkansas, named Roger Dean Widner, and together they started scouring the area, stopping
in at the local bars, asking around for information on Darrell’s whereabouts.

When he wasn’t on the road, a local truck driver named Ralph liked to relax evenings at Betty’s Tavern, drinking a few beers, playing shuffleboard or an occasional game of pool. Betty’s was a tough joint but nobody ever bothered Ralph. He could handle himself fine, even though he was small and past fifty, but the key to Ralph’s survival in tough joints like Betty’s was discretion. He didn’t pry into other people’s business, and he was always careful about where he sat and whom he talked to. Ralph didn’t enjoy conflict; he’d made a habit of avoiding it. So he wasn’t exactly pleased when Lloyd came storming in one night with “a pocketful of guns” and started jacking up the customers for information about Darrell. Eventually he worked his way over to Ralph’s table and helped himself to a chair, Roger Widner standing behind him watching his back.

Ralph had seen quite a bit of Lloyd over the years, usually at the cockfights down in Blue Eye or over in Shell Knob. Lloyd had always struck him as “a real operator.” Once Ralph had even thought of going into the cockfighting business himself (“even though I knew shit about chickens”) and he’d talked with Lloyd about buying some birds to start out with. He’d also seen Darrell from time to time—here at Betty’s, in town at the Nite Hawk, the usual spots—but he couldn’t remember ever exchanging more than a few words with him.

So now Lloyd was sitting there asking about Darrell and Ralph wasn’t comfortable with the conversation. There was obviously bad blood between the two men but it wasn’t any of his business. Lloyd asked him two or three times if he’d seen or heard from Darrell. Then he asked him again for good measure. Ralph said he hadn’t seen Darrell lately but he hadn’t exactly been looking for him either. Lloyd told Ralph to keep his eyes open and let him know if anything turned up. He said he planned on killing Darrell but he had to find him first.

Ralph asked Lloyd if he was serious.

“Darrell Mease is alligator meat,” Lloyd said.

Good old Lloyd, Ralph thought. Quite the charmer.

H
AVING HAD THEIR
fill of California, Darrell and Mary drove deep into Arizona and dipped across the border into Nogales. They spent the afternoon walking hand in hand and taking in the sights. One thing in particular caught Darrell’s eye. Just beyond the border crossing, at the portal of town, before Nogales gives way to its cobblestone streets, its arched sidewalks, hole-in-the-wall hotels, no-frill cantinas, and sun-scorched Coca-Cola signs, before the town turns distinctly Mexican, not just American with a Mexican twist, Darrell saw the street vendors with their handmade pottery and wood carvings and trinkets laid out on the sidewalk or displayed in streetside stalls.

He said to Mary, “Just look at all this stuff, monkey. I’d bet there’s a lot of legitimate money to be made setting up shop and selling handmade stuff like this back home.”

He filed the thought for future reference. Down the years he’d return to it often.

Now that they had some serious money in their pockets, Darrell and Mary were living it up a bit, taking the occasional meal in restaurants and camping in state parks. After leaving Nogales they decided they’d spend a couple of days at Lake Patagonia, a park twenty miles north of the border. The reception booth was closed for the night by the time they arrived so they spread their bedrolls out beside the little entry road and just lay there listening to the nighttime sounds. They heard wild burros bray, coyotes howl, and desert owls hoot. It put Darrell in mind of a line from an old Eagles song: “I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight.”

The next morning a park ranger drove up and visited with them for a while. He pointed to the mountains in the distance, the Santa Ritas to the north and the Huachucas to the east, and said that he had a pair of high-powered binoculars that would “draw ’em right up close.” Because Darrell and Mary seemed like nice people, he
said, he was going to let them visit a beautiful scenic spot on state trust land that was technically off limits to the public. Following his instructions, they parked their car by an old earthen dam on the lake and then followed Sonoita Creek past clumps of cottonwood and mesquite trees and down an arroyo until they reached a small pool with catfish visible beneath the clear surface. The ranger had told them to cross the pool by a narrow ledge along the far side, but halfway across they found the path blocked by a large boulder. Darrell tried lifting Mary’s dogs up onto the boulder but they were scared and kept skidding back down. Seeing they weren’t getting anywhere, Darrell and Mary backtracked to the creek and sat beside the bank.

While they were talking about how they might spend the rest of the day, Darrell was suddenly hit by “a strong feeling of terminal danger.” He turned and saw the ranger hurrying down a trail toward them through the desert broom and cacti. Darrell had left his backpack, with a pistol inside, forty yards up the creek. He ran over and retrieved it, thinking this might be showdown time.

“Why the hell didn’t you go to where I told you?” the ranger said, hostile, agitated.

Darrell explained that they hadn’t been able to get the dogs across, though he suspected the ranger had been scoping them out all along with his binoculars and already knew as much.

Then, just like that, the ranger turned on a dime and became friendly again. He gave Darrell and Mary a lift back to their car in his pickup, the dogs riding in the bed, and wished them a nice stay at the park.

They didn’t stick around much longer. Once again, it was time for moving on.

They took it slow and easy going up through Arizona, camping here and there, but Darrell couldn’t get the incident with the park ranger out of his mind. The more he mulled it over the more he became convinced that the ranger was a serial killer. The guy had the perfect black-and-white personality for the role, and he also had the perfect setup. Think about it: here was a trusted authority figure
signing people into a park and then luring them to a remote area where he could kill them without anyone being the wiser for it. He’d selected Darrell and Mary as his next victims, but he knew he’d been busted when Darrell made the fast move for his backpack. That’s why he’d been so hostile coming down the trail to confront them. He’d missed his chance to add to his tally. If the police could ever be persuaded to drag the bottom of Lake Patagonia over by the dam, Darrell believed they’d surely find some rusted-out vehicles. The remains of the people who’d once driven them were probably buried somewhere in the desert.

The encounter with the ranger also added to Darrell’s sense of vulnerability. Here they were, Mary and he, out on the road, naked to the world, with Lloyd gunning for them and who knows how many other dangers lurking in the shadows. What’s more, they were falling perilously short in the weaponry department. They’d sold most of their better guns since fleeing Missouri, leaving them with only a few pistols and knives. While they still had some money left, Darrell thought they’d better do what they could about restocking the arsenal.

On February 26 they pulled into Phoenix, as good a place for restocking as any other. For some time even before leaving Missouri, Darrell had wanted to pick up a Benelli Super 90, the fastest automatic shotgun on the market. They phoned around and found a place called Phoenix Arms, way up in a distant suburb, that had a Benelli available at a decent price.

Darrell waited outside in the car with the dogs while Mary went in to buy the gun. She was less likely to arouse suspicion, and she also had a valid driver’s license as identification. Linda Cofone, who ran Phoenix Arms with her husband, Carl, at the time, remembers thinking that Mary seemed “very proper and conservative, a very nice young lady.” Buying the Benelli was easier than checking out a library book. No mandatory background check—no mandatory anything. All Mary had to do was answer “no” to all the questions on the purchase form. “Have you been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term
exceeding one year?” “Are you a fugitive from justice?” “Are you an alien illegally in the United States?” “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana, or a depressant, stimulant, or narcotic drug?” “Have you ever been adjudicated mentally defective or have you ever been committed to a mental institution?”
No. No. No. No. And no again
. Mary paid $519.95 for the shotgun and she also picked up a sling, a shell holder, three boxes of buckshot, and another three boxes of slugs. She paid in cash, a total of $596.87, and signed the receipt Mary Epps of Reeds Spring, Missouri.

B
ACK IN MISSOURI
, Rocky Redford was relaxing at home one late-January evening when Lloyd Lawrence and Roger Widner came busting through his front door with submachine guns. Lloyd knew that Rocky and Darrell sometimes ran together and he thought Darrell might be hiding out in Rocky’s house. He certainly wasn’t worried about hurting Rocky’s feelings. If the guy was stupid enough,
crazy enough
, to be sheltering Darrell, he deserved to have his door busted down and a gun shoved in his face. Who the hell was Rocky anyway? Rocky was nobody.

Rocky pleaded innocence. He told Lloyd he didn’t know where Darrell was. He hadn’t seen Darrell since Christmas. He only knew Darrell had taken off somewhere with Mary. Lloyd had to believe him. No way would he lie to Lloyd. He’d have to be stupid or crazy to lie to Lloyd.

Lloyd seemed to believe him. He told Rocky to report to him immediately if he heard any news of Darrell’s whereabouts. He said that Darrell had ripped him off big-time and he was anxious to settle the score.

Rocky wasn’t stupid. The encounter with Lloyd hadn’t been his idea of a good time but that didn’t mean he couldn’t play it to his personal advantage. He had an upcoming court date in connection with his recent drug bust and he’d already had a couple of conversations with the county prosecutor about working out a deal that would get him off the hook. Now he had a bargaining chip.

A few days later, at the Forsyth courthouse, Rocky met with prosecutor Jim Justus and criminal investigator Chip Mason. He told them about his exchange of pleasantries with Lloyd and Roger. He told them about the bad business between Darrell and Lloyd, and that Lloyd was threatening to kill Darrell and probably Mary, too. He told them he’d keep them posted.

One evening not long afterward, Rocky was sitting at his kitchen table, quite possibly feeling pleased with himself. He’d endeared himself to Lloyd, after all, and he’d also wriggled out of his drug rap. Things were looking bright again.

But perhaps not quite so bright after all. While Rocky was sitting there, a couple of bullets crashed through the kitchen window and punched holes in the far wall. Now this—even Rocky had to admit—this was not an encouraging development. Maybe Lloyd hadn’t believed him after all.