Almost Midnight (14 page)

Lloyd was right. Once news of the contract got around, Stone County bad guys were bumping into each other trying to stake their respective claims. The contract was hardly classified information. With his characteristic swagger, Lloyd wasn’t shy about spreading the word. Nearly everyone with connections to the local underworld knew about it, and there was plenty of competitive bidding for the job.

The word around Stone County was that Joe Dean Davis, Darrell’s very own cousin, was in on the action. Some people heard that Lloyd had offered Joe Dean ten grand to kill Darrell. Others heard that Lloyd had offered him the ten grand just to find out where
Darrell was. Nobody heard anything about Joe Dean turning Lloyd down.

Years later, sitting in his house trailer on his raggedy property in Mease’s Hollow, his hound dogs running loose outside and his fighting roosters crowing, Joe Dean would offer his own version of events.

Say what people might, Joe Dean said, he’d never actually agreed to take Lloyd’s money in exchange for hunting his cousin down. He’d been in Blue Eye with Lloyd and some other people one day and Lloyd had taken him aside and offered him ten grand to do the job. But he hadn’t agreed to do it. He’d told Lloyd this was something they should talk about again under less heated circumstances. But they never had the chance. This was the last time he saw Lloyd alive.

Now Joe Dean’s a likeable guy. You want to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s a bit tongue-tied, with a lisp and a stammer that sometimes makes understanding him difficult, but he’s witty and engaging and he looks you straight in the eye. He’s not one for dodging tough questions. Even though they ran together for years, he’ll tell you straight out that Lloyd was a bully who’d stop at nothing to get his own way. He’ll even tell you about some of his own shortcomings. So you want to believe him when he says he didn’t take Lloyd up on his offer.

You want to believe him—but there are one or two awkward facts that get in the way. Not too long after his chat with Lloyd in Blue Eye, Joe Dean dropped in to see R.J. and Lexie. He sat at their kitchen table and insisted they tell him where Darrell was.

“Joe, we don’t know where Darrell is,” Lexie said.

“Yes, you do,” Joe Dean said. “Darrell was supposed to tell you and then you were supposed to tell me. That’s the arrangement Darrell and me worked out before he left. He said he’d contact you and then I could come by and you’d tell me where he was. Darrell wants me to know.”

Lexie knew Joe Dean pretty well. His mom, Ruby, was R.J.’s sister and one of Lexie’s closest friends. She knew that Ruby thought the world of Joe Dean, and she’d always tried thinking well of him
herself. But this was just too transparent. She knew that Joe Dean was trying to trick her.

“Joe, I don’t know where he is,” Lexie said, firmly now. “I would be the last one Darrell would want to know where he is because Darrell wouldn’t want anyone to trouble me about this.”

Lexie could tell that Joe Dean didn’t believe her but she was through discussing the matter.

D
ARRELL HAD MADE
his hard decision but they didn’t head back to Missouri right away. Perhaps stalling for time, hoping he’d change his mind, Mary said she wanted to drive down to the Louisiana coast and look around. Darrell agreed, saying he wouldn’t mind doing a bit more exploring himself.

They took the Oldsmobile station wagon into the deepest part of the state, down Route 1 alongside Lafourche Bayou, past the docked shrimp boats and drawbridges and seafood restaurants. They came into Grand Isle at nightfall, the little seabound Cajun town decked out in all its dilapidated, glory-gone charm: the Creole-style houses with their shuttered windows, the lanes of oleander, the lush tropical smell of wild chamomile, the buildings crouching on stilts like they were poised for sudden escape. They went to the end of town, past a petroleum processing plant shimmering vast and spectral on the water’s edge, and made a right-hand turn into the entrance drive for the state park. They paid a ten-dollar admission fee and drove right out onto the beach, backed the trailer up behind a clump of myrtlewax bushes, and fell asleep to the sound of the waves.

They spent five nights and four days in Grand Isle, their nicest stretch anywhere since leaving Missouri. A quarter mile down the beach, they found an old rickety pier stretching out into the water on wooden pilings for fifty or sixty yards before branching out into a T. Darrell stood there for hours every day, fishing for flounder, speckled trout, or bluefish, while Mary played in the water. She had never swum in saltwater before; Darrell had a tough time convincing
her to take a break. Sometimes they stood together on the pier and watched the shrimp boats trawling in the gulf, brown pelicans bopping and bumping in the surf, and the occasional dolphin venturing close to shore. They took the fish Darrell caught back to the campsite, where there were some open grills and a scattering of picnic tables, and cleaned and cooked them. Once or twice, for a change of pace, they went for a snack at one of the Cajun joints along Route 1.

Heading back north, late April now, they stayed a few days at Chicot State Park near Ville Platte in Evangeline Parish. Their money was running low again so Darrell bought two crayfish traps at a country store and set them up in a shallow swampy side of Lake Chicot. They got two meals a day out of those traps. Darrell also did some hunting on the sly in the park grounds. He killed a few squirrels with his pellet gun and he also bagged an armadillo. He found it kind of amusing: when he first met her Mary was a vegetarian; now she was happily cooking and eating Louisiana mud bugs and anything else he brought back to their trailer.

Their second day at Lake Chicot, they saw a wild sow raiding some trash bins just across the lane from where they were camped out. A boar was with her but he seemed nervous and kept his distance, hanging back in the magnolias. Mary put out a saucer of red wine and the sow lapped it up and started staggering around. After a while she sobered up but then Mary put out some more wine and she got drunk again. Darrell and Mary got quite a kick out of watching her.

By the next day Darrell’s mood had turned. He was tense now, zeroing in, consumed by thoughts of Lloyd. He felt like a balloon just waiting to pop. The spare tire to the station wagon was flat, and when Mary returned from running some errands in town without getting it fixed he yelled and screamed at her. He had never yelled at Mary before. Right across from them, a guy pulled up in an expensive camper and immediately started making a racket, cutting firewood with a chain saw and blasting music from a radio. This was nerve-wracking enough, but then the guy kept overthrowing
his son while playing catch, the ball bouncing against Darrell and Mary’s trailer. Darrell thought it was deliberate. He was convinced the guy was trying to provoke him. After the fifth or sixth overthrow, he stuck his head out the back of the trailer and cussed the guy’s son out while he was retrieving the ball. The kid looked at Darrell, panic-stricken, and said, “It’s not me; it’s my dad.” The guy stormed over to defend his son and flashed an auxiliary police badge with his name and picture on it. “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” he said. Darrell wasn’t impressed but decided against getting into it with the guy. He was trying to keep a low profile; he didn’t need this kind of aggravation. He asked Mary to go to the entrance booth and report the guy for disturbing the peace. The rangers at the booth told Mary they’d take care of it. The guy might be an auxiliary cop, they said, but that didn’t mean he was running the park.

O
N MAY 5
, Lloyd flew to Phoenix with Travis and Bush Clark, and Travis’s wife, Peggy. They rented a car at the airport and drove out to Ehrenberg near the California state line. Ehrenberg was the site of the Copperstate Game Club, the most prestigious cockfighting arena in the southwest. They spent the better part of four nights at the club, hanging out in the bleachers making side bets, kibitzing down by the drag pits, grabbing burgers and beers from the snack bar. For Lloyd it was a good time, a chance to catch up with some old acquaintances and temporarily forget his hassles back home. There was nothing quite like a good old-fashioned cockfighting derby for recharging the batteries. Nowhere did Lloyd feel more at home.

The foursome arrived back in Missouri on Monday, May 9. On Thursday morning Lloyd dropped by Travis’s house in Lampe so they could divvy up their winnings from the trip. After expenses they’d each come out ahead by seventeen hundred dollars. Lloyd had won almost a thousand dollars more for himself on top of this from side bets. Nobody knew cockfighting better than Lloyd.

——

H
EADING NORTH ON
Route 7 in Arkansas from Russellville, Darrell and Mary could tell they were getting closer to home. The steep banks and zigzag bends of the highway; the tumble of trailer homes in the nooks and crannies of the rugged terrain; the hills unfolding in various shades of green and blue and brown; the broken-dream gift shops, weather-beaten and abandoned, sneaking up on them around the sharp corners: after more than four months on the road, they were back in the Ozarks, on the Arkansas side.

Just beyond the cozy village of Jasper, they made a left onto a dirt-and-gravel road and followed it for five and a half grueling miles to an isolated camping spot on the Buffalo River. It was a nice spot, with barbecue grills, picnic tables, wooden outhouses, and a drinking water depot. Better yet, they had it all to themselves; no one else was around.

They stayed here for four days—their final stop before Missouri. They were down to their case money now, just a few dollars left from the windfall of a few months ago, so they didn’t even think of making the trek back to Jasper to pick up groceries or to grab a bite at the Dairy Diner or Sharon K’s Café. Instead they stayed put, let the dogs run, and made do with the rock bass, sun perch, and slough perch that Darrell was able to catch out of the river.

Darrell was deep into it now, running various scenarios through his mind, trying to picture what he’d be up against when they got back to Missouri. One thing he was certain of: he wouldn’t be tangling with just Lloyd. Lloyd would have people watching for him, looking for an opportunity to kill him. There’d be a bounty on his head by now. Lloyd would have seen to that. If he were going to get to Lloyd he’d have to go through some of Lloyd’s henchmen first. Roger Widner probably, maybe one or two other guys from Arkansas, some local Stone County talent: this was what he’d be up against. Oh yeah, and Marvin Yocum, don’t forget about him—Marvin was sneaky-good with a pistol and a noted outlaw around Reeds Spring. Chances were Lloyd would have brought Marvin into this deal, too.

Just after dark, their fourth day on the Buffalo River, they made their way back to Route 7 and headed northeast toward Bull Shoals Lake on the Arkansas-Missouri border. This was it: no more stopovers, no more detours—they were going back into Missouri so Darrell could settle his long-overdue business with Lloyd. Mary was at the wheel, taking it slow and deliberate, caressing every curve of the highway, still hoping—still half believing—that Darrell wouldn’t go through with it.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HEY CAME BACK
into Missouri through Protem, a tiny village a couple of miles north of the Arkansas line, and snaked their way up Route 125. An hour and a half of hard driving, all sharp curves and tall pines ghostlike in the moonlight, and they pulled into the Camp Ridge Recreation Area. Darrell wanted a secluded spot where they could lay low for a few days while he figured out his next move, and this seemed as good a bet as any.

Camp Ridge was a picturesque hundred acres of pine stands and picnic tables set back off Rural Route H in a remote corner of the Mark Twain National Forest. In daylight hours, the surrounding woods would be filled with the roar of trail bikes, but now, after midnight, everything was quiet and deserted. Half a mile away, up Route 125, was the broken-down hamlet of Chadwick, a scattering
of trailer homes, abandoned frame buildings, a gas station and convenience store, a post office, an aluminum-clad elementary school, and, one short street off the main drag, a squat square building with white-painted bricks on the outside, and on the inside a cement floor, corrugated tin ceiling, green wooden shelves, and an old-fashioned wood stove. This was Harris Market, where Darrell and Mary would get most of their supplies over the next couple of days. Years later, ninety-two-year-old Audrey Harris, still minding the store, would remember the couple as “real polite but kinda quiet, like they was still finding their way.”

Their first night back in Missouri, Darrell wasn’t thinking about stocking up on groceries. He unhitched the camper and told Mary he wanted her to drive him over to the fire tower road, near the junction of U.S. 160 and Route 248, so he could retrieve the methamphetamine he’d left hidden in the woods five months ago. This wasn’t what Mary wanted to hear. He’d promised her he was through with drugs. They’d been over this at least a dozen times, arguing, crying, the nastiness practically tearing them apart. She told him to forget the drugs, or else they’d never have a chance at a clean start. He said he wasn’t interested in using the drugs himself. Once the business with Lloyd was done with, he’d sell them and put together a nice stake so they could get started on their future.

Mary knew she wasn’t about to win this one. They drove without talking, watching the speed limit, shrinking back in their seats with every approaching headlight. They were going into Lloyd Lawrence territory now and they knew one false move, one unlucky break, and they could both be dead. They crept down the fire tower road a hundred yards or so and dimmed their lights. Darrell got out of the station wagon, easing his door shut, and moved quickly into the woods. Five minutes later he was back, carrying the knapsack with the stolen meth. Mary turned the car around and headed back to the campground, faster now, scared, wishing she was just about anywhere instead of in southwest Missouri.