Almost Midnight (13 page)

Rocky packed up his things and drove back home to Kansas. He couldn’t get out of Missouri fast enough.

O
N MARCH 1
, several days after buying the Benelli, Darrell and Mary drove into the cool highlands region of central Arizona and just before dusk entered the small city of Cottonwood. By this point they’d had enough of sleeping cramped up in the car or outside in their little two-man tent, so when they saw Camelot RV Park and Center on the main drag they decided to stop in and check out the merchandise. It didn’t take them long to find something they wanted—a 1971 Starcraft pop-up camper, which set them back nearly a grand.

They still needed to get a trailer hitch put on the car, a job that would have to wait until the next day, so they took a room at the Little Daisy Motel just down the street. The motel manager caught a glimpse of Darrell sitting in the Dodge while Mary was checking in. He didn’t feel right about the situation—this attractive young woman riding with such a tough-looking dude. Working up his nerve, he slipped outside and watched from the shadows beside the
motel office while Darrell and Mary unloaded the car. He saw Darrell carrying the new shotgun into their room and, for the briefest moment, it seemed Darrell turned his head and saw him, too. Rattled, he retreated into the office, wondering whether he should call the police. He stewed over it for a few hours and then put in the call.

It didn’t take long for the Cottonwood police to swing into action, largely because Mary’s mom had finally taken some action of her own. A few weeks earlier, desperate for news about Mary and fearing for her safety, Barbara had gone to Forsyth and met with Chip Mason at the Taney County courthouse. Barbara had known Chip for years and considered him a friend. An unassuming, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties, with pudgy cheeks and a laconic style, Chip had grown up in the Branson-Forsyth area and had been working as a criminal investigator out of the county prosecutor’s office for almost a decade.

Barbara told Chip that Mary had disappeared with Darrell and that she was beside herself with worry. She didn’t know much of anything about Darrell or if Mary was in danger. She asked if there was anything Chip could do.

Chip told Barbara about Lloyd and Roger busting into Rocky’s place with submachine guns. He told her that Lloyd was making noise all over Stone and Taney Counties about killing Darrell and anyone Darrell happened to be with. Chip said there was one thing he could do straightaway. He’d send out a “missing and endangered person” Teletype to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). That way any law enforcement officer in the country coming across Mary would know to make sure she was safe and advise her to call home.

Chip sent out the Teletype the same day. It included all of Mary’s particulars (nineteen years old, five eight, 120 pounds, light brown hair, green eyes) and descriptions of Darrell, the dogs, and the Dodge (Missouri plate LGP688). It also included two photographs from Mary’s senior yearbook, one an elegant headshot and the other the prank mug shot of her posing dimple-faced behind the Branson PD sign.

So the Cottonwood police, after hearing from the manager at the Little Daisy Motel, ran the Dodge’s plate and got a positive hit. This looked like it could be nasty business. Mary was missing and possibly endangered, and the guy she was riding with was packing serious heat. They figured they’d better make a show of it.

At three in the morning Darrell and Mary were awakened by shouts of “Come out! Come out! Come out!” The room was bathed in spotlights. Darrell went to the window and drew back a corner of the flimsy curtain. Three or four police cars were parked outside with seven or eight cops, maybe more, crouched behind them, some with 12-gauge goose guns laid over the car roofs and pointed directly at the motel room. Darrell opened the door and stood in the threshold with his arms raised, and the cops came barging in. They were excited, pumped up, yelling and jostling. Finally, a smooth blond cop in his thirties (“a cool head,” Darrell thought) took charge of the situation. He ordered everyone to lower their weapons and quiet down.

He asked Darrell why he had his shotgun leaning against the wall next to the bed. Darrell said someone had been spying on them from the shadows beside the motel office while they were unloading the car and he’d wanted to be prepared in the event of trouble. The blond cop asked Mary if Darrell was treating her okay. Of course, Mary said, Darrell was treating her just fine. He then told her she should call home. She’d been reported missing and endangered and her mom was worried about her. Mary said she’d phone home later in the day after they picked up their trailer. Okay, the cop said, but in the meantime he’d contact the Taney County Sheriff’s Department himself and tell them she’d been located in Arizona and seemed all right.

And that was it. The Cottonwood PD could do no more. Mary was legally an adult and couldn’t be detained against her will. And what were they going to do with Darrell? Bust him for being mangy? He hadn’t broken any laws and there were no warrants for his arrest. The cops left—a couple of them grousing on the way out about Darrell’s shotgun being better than theirs. Their business here was finished.

Darrell wasn’t so sure. Alone with Mary again, he knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep. His mind was racing with the possibilities. What if Lloyd had connections with the Cottonwood PD? There was a good chance he did. Lloyd had connections everywhere, traveling the country going to cockfights, buying and selling game birds. He even sometimes went to the cockfights near Phoenix. One phone call from Lloyd, that’s all it would take, and those cops would be back with some trumped-up warrant, child support maybe, it didn’t matter, anything it would take to land Darrell in jail in Stone County so Lloyd could get at him. Pour some gasoline into the jail cell through a window, set it on fire: that’s the way it would probably play out. That would be Lloyd’s style.

Oh man, forget it, Lloyd didn’t even need connections with the Cottonwood PD to get at him. Didn’t the blond-haired cop say he was going to get in touch with the authorities in Taney County and let them know where Mary was? That would do it. Lloyd was tight with plenty of people in Taney County. He’d probably already gotten wind of the incident and was setting the pieces in motion to have Mary and him eliminated.

Lloyd would know hard cases in Arizona who’d be happy to do it. Something was up—no sense waiting around to find out exactly what it was.

An hour after the cops left, Darrell and Mary packed up the car and headed for the interstate. The plan was for Mary to drop Darrell off across the state line, a good three or four hour’s drive away, and then return to Cottonwood by herself and pick up the trailer. She’d be safer without him; riding with Darrell she stuck out like a daisy in a field of weeds. They drove east along Interstate 40 past Winslow and the Petrified Forest and into New Mexico. Just over the state line Darrell got out on a little dirt road and set up their tent in some scrub cedars.

Mary got back into Cottonwood around noon, bleary-eyed from the road. She dropped the car off at Camelot so they could install the hitch and then found a pay phone and called her mom.

Barbara asked if Darrell was treating her all right and Mary said he was. She said they’d left Missouri in a hurry because they were afraid of being killed by Lloyd. Barbara said they were right to be afraid. She said she’d talked to Chip Mason and learned that Lloyd and some of his cronies were looking for them with automatic weapons and with every intention of killing them. She said that Lloyd probably knew what kind of car they were driving. She told Mary to be careful and asked her to phone again the next day. Mary said she would.

The car and trailer were ready to go, but Mary was too tired to think of driving out to get Darrell right away. She needed to grab some sleep first.

She picked him up the next morning and they headed east along I-40 through New Mexico and into Texas, taking their time now, happy to be free of Arizona. (Mary never did get around to making that second phone call home.) On March 7 they stayed at Fort Griffin State Park north of Abilene, paying six bucks for a campsite, and then they took Interstate 20 across Texas and worked their way down Route 171 in Louisiana to the little resort town of Many.

After checking into Bird’s Trailer Park just outside of town, they decided they’d better go looking for another top-drawer gun. There was no telling how close Lloyd was on their trail; they could use all the protection they could get. The pickings were slim at the pawnshop in Many and also at a gun shop in the nearby town of Zwolle, so the next day they drove over to Alexandria, the biggest city in north-central Louisiana, where they expected they’d have better luck.

It’s a good thing Darrell and Mary weren’t visiting Alexandria for the local color. The town is so drab and uneventful they could have been excused for thinking they’d wandered into the wrong state. They leafed through a local paper and hit on a business called Randy’s Trading Post that was advertising guns for sale. Mary called and spoke with a guy named Randy Pias and arranged to stop by his office later in the day and pick up an H & K .308 assault rifle.

After lunch they drove over to Petron Oil Company at 727 McArthur Drive, a small complex of sheds, warehouses, and offices located next to a tangle of highway cloverleafs in a beat-down, shanty-shack-poor section of town. They parked outside a one-story cement-block building and then waited inside while a secretary fetched Randy Pias. Pias escorted them down a short corridor into a small rectangular office, windowless, wood-paneled, the desk stacked with files and papers. He opened a steel cabinet standing alongside the wall opposite the desk, took out four assault rifles, and gave them to Darrell for his inspection. Mary thought there was something strange about the whole deal. Here was this businessman, a perfectly ordinary-looking guy, medium build, straight brown hair, thin face, wearing glasses and a gray suit, selling high-powered weapons right out of his office. Darrell picked through the guns and found one he liked. Eight hundred dollars, Pias said, but he’d need to see a Louisiana driver’s license before turning it over.

A nuisance, but nothing Darrell and Mary weren’t prepared to deal with. A few days later, a brand-new Louisiana driver’s license in hand, Mary returned to Pias’s office and paid the eight hundred for the rifle.

The next two weeks they stayed at Indian Creek Recreation Area ten miles south of Alexandria, five dollars a night for a spot in the primitive zone. The first few days were as peaceful a time as they could have hoped for. They caught catfish in the creek and cooked them over an open fire. They bought groceries at the corner store in the tiny hamlet of Woodworth, and they stretched out on the grass and breathed in the lovely scents of loblolly pine, cypress, and sweetgum trees. The hours just melted away.

But then Darrell finally got around to asking Mary about her phone call home. It was an awkward topic and they’d been avoiding talking about it. Mary told him that her parents had been worried about her and wanted to know if she was okay. She also told him that Lloyd had been busting into places with automatic weapons looking for the two of them.

Darrell vividly remembers Mary telling him something else, too. He remembers her saying that Lloyd and another guy had actually gone down to her parents’ place in Branson and threatened Barbara and Fred with submachine guns. It’s possible that this really happened and Barbara mentioned it to Mary on the phone. Or perhaps Mary, in her fatigue, just imagined Barbara mentioning it. Or perhaps Darrell didn’t hear Mary right. It’s tough to say. The only thing that matters is that this is what Darrell believed he heard Mary telling him. And it seemed perfectly plausible. Lloyd loved the bold and brazen gesture. He believed himself invincible. Of course Lloyd would do something like this. Of course he would.

Darrell was mortified, and humiliated. He was enraged. He wasn’t in good standing with Mary’s folks to start with and now this. Lloyd threatening them was the last straw. He told Mary they’d have to change their plans. They’d spent all this time running and hiding from Lloyd. Well, they couldn’t run and hide forever. They’d have to take matters into their own hands and go back and deal with Lloyd. Otherwise they’d never be safe. Right now Lloyd had the upper hand. They’d have to do something to change that. They’d have to go back and kill Lloyd before Lloyd had a chance to kill them.

Darrell had always suspected it might come down to this. He’d talked about it off and on with Mary since leaving Missouri but he’d never made a firm decision. Mary had always tried talking him out of it, saying she wanted them to buy a house in California or some other faraway place, get married, put the whole business with Lloyd behind them. But now his mind was made up. As he saw it, there was no other option.

On March 23 they went to Hickory Street in a seedy residential section of Alexandria and for two grand bought a blue ’81 Oldsmobile station wagon from a guy named Michael Fritz. They’d seen the car advertised in the paper and they figured it was high time they got some new wheels. Riding around in the Dodge Diplomat was like giving Lloyd a free shot at them.

A week later they rented a twelve-by-twenty-foot unit at Inner Space Storage on Twin Bridges Road in the south end of Alexandria. Stow the Dodge here for now, they thought, and come back for it sometime later. It was still a good ride, just fifty thousand miles on the clock. Not only that, they had a lot of memories sunk into the Dodge. Give it a little time: they’d be back for it.

L
LOYD WAS GETTING
frustrated. So far his strong-arm tactics hadn’t paid off. For more than two months now he’d been jacking people up for information about Darrell and no one had told him a damned thing.

This didn’t mean Lloyd was giving up, which wasn’t Lloyd’s style. Someone had to know something. Darrell hadn’t just fallen off the end of the earth. Someone had to know where he was.

Anyway, maybe he’d been approaching this whole thing wrong. He’d been spending too much of his own valuable time chasing Darrell down. There were plenty of people who’d be happy, with a little positive incentive, to do the job for him. Put out a contract on Darrell—ten thousand dollars, say—and let someone else dispose of the problem. For ten grand a lot of local boys would be fighting over the chance to be first in line for the assignment. Lloyd wasn’t fussy. He didn’t care who took Darrell out—so long as he was taken out.