Almost Midnight (8 page)

As often as not these days Darrell was grabbing his sleep at Rocky Redford’s house, about half a mile north of Reeds Spring Junction off U.S. 160. Rocky was a big, brash, good-looking guy with jet-black hair and smooth, clean features. He was also a full-time operator, sneaky smart, too smart maybe for his own good, working so many side deals that the main deal sometimes got lost in the shuffle. He’d moved to southwest Missouri from Hutchinson, Kansas, in the early 1980s and wound up dating Donna’s mom for a spell, which is how he got to know Darrell. When things blew up with Donna, Darrell was stone-broke and depressed, and Rocky offered to put him up until he got back on his feet. The arrangement worked out pretty well for both men. Rocky provided the living expenses
and the dope, and Darrell afforded Rocky the thrill of spending quality time with a bona fide Ozarks hillbilly.

Rocky had never come across anyone quite like Darrell. Even today, reflecting back on their times together, he can’t help speaking of his old buddy in anything but near-mythic terms. “Darrell was one of the most impressive guys I’ve ever met—a free spirit, fiercely independent, the kind of guy who’ll be there when the last dog gets killed. He used to say, ‘What is, is; what ain’t, ain’t.’ I’ve got these words written on my bedroom wall—a motto to live by. He was the best with pistols,
the best;
nobody else was even close. A lot of people—mean people—were afraid of Darrell because of his reputation. They assumed he was a tough guy, a hit man. It wasn’t something Darrell cultivated. I doubt he was even aware he had this reputation. It’s just the way he was—reckless and brave and the best shooter around. The word was out—everybody knew about Darrell. Once a guy from Louisiana owed my sister money and she asked me to collect for her. I went and told the guy to write a check. The guy said no. I said, okay, today’s Tuesday, if I don’t get paid by tomorrow, on Thursday I’ll talk to Darrell about it. The guy paid right off.”

Rocky’s younger brother, Rick, a brash, sweet-talking hotshot in his own right, was also down from Kansas trying his luck in the Missouri Ozarks at the time. Rick and Darrell would eventually become the best of friends, but their initial encounter, as Rick recounts in a recent letter from prison, was a real eye-opener.

“Darrell walked into the living room of my brother’s house, wearing a pair of boots that didn’t match. We smoked some agricultural products. I then witnessed Darrell eat what I remember to be a gallon of chocolate ice cream, while simultaneously sipping on a cheap bottle of wine. To this very day, I can still envision within the framework of my mind those different colored boots; the carton of ice cream; the purple-colored wine; and Darrell with long, scraggly hair, with a full beard the length of Jeremiah Johnson’s. Although I do not remember the precise year, I can tell you this: It was shortly after I had seen the movie
Deliverance
about a trio of companions taking a canoe trip together in ‘hillbilly country.’ That night at my
brother’s house, as I kept looking over at Darrell devouring his ice cream, continuing to inhale, it dawned on me. Darrell reminded me an awful lot of the pair of hillbillies in
Deliverance
—the same mountain men who ended up buggering Ned Beatty. Needless to say, even if Darrell had asked, there was no way in Dante’s Inferno that I was canoeing that night.”

Mismatched boots and all, Darrell seems to have attracted a great deal more admiration than scorn during these rough-and-tumble days. Rick and Rocky’s brother-in-law, Jae Jones, who currently manages the radio station at the College of the Ozarks, wasn’t alone in seeing him as a kind of hillbilly icon, a throwback to a simpler, more primitive era.

“I was working at Silver Dollar City and dating Rocky’s sister, Debbie, when I got to know Darrell,” Jae said recently. “He was a real character, a real colorful figure in the Ozarks. I found him amazing. Darrell intimidated some people but to me he was more of a protector. He said to me, ‘Jae, I’m going to be your friend whether you like it or not.’ He was a complex guy. He would talk to me about poetry and history but he was also an outlaw, a by-God Rambo. Don’t think Darrell couldn’t hand you your heart in a second. Darrell could walk the walk. People weren’t inclined to mess with him. But once you got to know Darrell, you couldn’t help being fond of him. There was nobody like him. We’d be canoeing on Swan Creek and Darrell would go swimming and catch two or three little turtles and put them in his mouth and then swim back and stick his tongue out and show them to us. I could sit here all day telling you stories about Darrell. Because here’s the thing: Darrell was one of the last true hill people. He exemplified the best of hill culture. He was honest and quick-witted. He could live off the land. He was good with his hands, a hell of a stonemason and carpenter, an excellent horseman. He knew so much about animal and plant life. This is a precious, dying culture down here. The old-time hillbillies are dying out. Darrell was one of the last of the old breed. I sometimes think he was born fifty years too late, a hundred years too late.”

A funny and loyal friend. A larger-than-life, honest-to-goodness
hillbilly. A reckless and dangerous dude. Darrell was all of these things. He was so unselfconscious, however, and so stoked up half the time on drugs and booze, that he wasn’t fully aware of being any of them. He had little idea what kind of impact he was having on the people around him. He was a legend in the making, and maybe one of the only people in Stone County not clued in to it. And the stories abounded.

“Say, did you hear about the three pilgrims dropping by Darrell’s house up in the hollow? They’re all pretty tanked and, anyway, the talk soon turns to guns or shooting or some such. Well, Darrell’s always got guns close at hand, loaded to the brim, and he reaches under a cushion on the sofa and pulls out a .22 pistol. The pilgrims follow suit and before you know it they’re each holding a pistol of Darrell’s. Old Darrell—he says, ‘Boys, these pistols are all loaded. Let’s put them back now.’ One guy’s waving a .44 Magnum in the air and he says, ‘No, they’re not.’ Now Darrell wants to prove his point before somebody gets hurt so he fires a shot through his front window. Takes the pane right out. The pilgrims meekly put the guns down and slink on out of there. That’s Darrell, boy, seizing control of the situation.”

“Hey, and what about Canadian Pete? Now there’s a guy who bit off more than he could chew. They’re sitting at Rocky’s kitchen table cleaning guns and Pete takes up a pistol and aims it at Darrell’s head. Darrell looks at him hard and says point it somewhere else but Pete just chuckles and says, ‘What’s your problem, man? This one ain’t even loaded.’ ‘Yeah, but this one is,’ Darrell says, cocking a .22 and drawing a bead on Pete’s forehead. Pete’s not the fastest learner but this speeded him right up.”

At any given time there were always at least a dozen Darrell-isms making the rounds. Some were apocryphal; most were true. Even those that perhaps weren’t literally true just as well could have been. No one would have been surprised by anything Darrell did.

I
N EARLY 1987
Darrell started using crank, methamphetamine. He bought his first line from his cousin Leonard Joe Graves, and before
long he was snorting as often as he could. The sense of exhilaration, the surge of energy: Where had this stuff been all his life? He’d get high and then come down and scuffle about for money so he could afford to get high again.

Darrell and crank: no big surprise—in some ways, it was a connection just waiting to happen. By 1987 half the guys Darrell knew were into meth. He couldn’t have avoided the stuff even if he’d wanted to. Everywhere he went somebody was bound to be cranking. Joe Dean Davis, just out from a nine-month stint behind bars for growing marijuana, was doing it. So were Rocky Redford and a dozen of Darrell’s other running buddies. Almost overnight meth had become the drug of choice for outlaws in southwest Missouri and the easiest thing in the world to score. You wanted a gram of high-grade stuff for a hundred bucks or less? No problem: show up at the cock- or dogfights, or sidle into a brokendown jukejoint—you’d be taken care of, guaranteed.

Something else guaranteed: the crank you purchased at the cock- or dogfights or the local jukejoint was certain to have been produced locally. There was no need to import the stuff. By the late 1980s the Ozarks were jumping with illegal meth labs. They were everywhere and nowhere, tucked into the mist-shrouded hills, hidden away on rancid farm property, invisible to everyone save the outlaws who ran them and the few dedicated lawmen who sought to root them out.

The main wheel behind all this illegal meth production was Lloyd Lawrence, the region’s most prominent cockfighting promoter. It was through cockfighting, apparently, that Lloyd first became involved with meth. He’d feed the stuff to his game birds to get them hyped up for their bouts. There was obviously an untapped market out there—if the chickens dug it so much, what about humans? A risky business, to be sure, but since when had Lloyd been averse to risk?

According to the people who hung out with him, Lloyd was a junky for risks. He loved the action, rolling the dice, camping out on the precipice. Most of all, he loved getting his own way, and heaven help the person who tried to stop him. A lifelong resident of the
Shell Knob area, near the border between Stone and Barry Counties, and an army veteran of World War II and Korea, he’d made a name for himself locally doing whatever he wanted, however he wanted. You’d never guess it from his appearance, short and chunky and grandfatherly, but Lloyd commanded the respect of even the meanest outlaws in the area. He was a bully, tough and ruthless, but he also possessed a certain noblesse oblige. Swaggering through the Ozarks, lord of the realm, he’d routinely dispense favors to anyone fortunate enough to be in his good graces. He’d buy cars and trucks and four-wheelers for family members and friends, he’d take people on weekend jaunts to the cockfights in Oklahoma and put them up in his trailer, he’d drop off gifts of money or booze to old cronies he knew were down on their luck. He had connections in the construction business, and once he took Joe Dean Davis up to Springfield, got him signed on with the carpentry union, and landed him a job paying four hundred dollars a week. Joe Dean had never had a regular job that paid as much as fifty dollars a week. But Lloyd was Lloyd, and sooner or later there was always a price to pay. He rarely lost track of who was in his debt.

Lloyd wasn’t averse to risk, but when running his crank empire he was smart enough to parcel out as much of it as he could. He provided the working capital, the lab equipment and raw materials, and the recipe for cooking meth, leaving most of the actual production to others. He franchised, setting up various associates in clandestine meth labs throughout the region. Once the cooking was done he’d arrange for pickup and distribution. It seemed an almost foolproof system. The authorities weren’t likely to get in the way. Law enforcement in most parts of southwest Missouri was sparse, shoddy, and corrupt. In any event, if a problem should arise in this direction, Lloyd knew which levers to pull to smooth things over. And if any of his own people should be so reckless as to think of ripping him off, Lloyd had plenty of muscle at his disposal. A late-night visit from Kendall Schwyhart or some other five-star enforcer was not something to look forward to. The anticipation alone could kill you.

——

R
OCKY COULDN’T BE
faulted for showing an interest. He was in a transitional phase, working at the Radio Shack down in Branson while plotting his next move. The job itself wasn’t much but his new co-worker certainly made clocking in easier. Mary Epps was very pretty. Not yet nineteen, with light brown hair and pouty lips, she was a delightful nine-to-five bonus Rocky hadn’t been counting on.

Mary seemed kind of in transition herself. She’d been raised in Branson, on the right side of the tracks, the oldest of two kids. Her parents were fixtures in the area. Fred Epps was smart and gruff—a shrewd businessman. His wife, Barbara, was strong-willed, bold, and brassy—and a tireless worker. Together, practically from scratch, they’d built a highly successful trash and recycling business in town. Growing up, Mary hadn’t presented many problems beyond the usual, but in her last year at Branson High she’d started ruffling the waters. Nothing too serious, typical teenage strut-about, but enough to earn her notice as something of a wild child. In the 1986 edition of the
Buccaneer
, her high-school yearbook, there was a “Who’s Who” section dedicated to graduating seniors. Among the timid photographs with their earnest captions (“Most Likely to Succeed,” “Most Athletic,” “Most Studious”—the usual sort of thing), Mary stood out like a gangster at a garden party. There she was, posing in a faux mug shot behind a Branson Police Department sign, with the caption underneath reading “Most Unpredictable.”

A tough caption to live up to, but Mary seemed determined to give it her best shot. After graduating high school she took some courses at the College of the Ozarks and also at Crowder College near Neosho and then, in early 1987, she found herself working at the Radio Shack alongside Rocky. Ever alert to romantic possibilities, Rocky wasted little time chatting Mary up, and he soon discovered that she was fascinated by, among other things, guns and outlaws. She even had a couple of outlaws in her own family. Her uncle Dave, on her mom’s side, had ridden with a tough biker gang
at one point, and her cousin Red Stephens would eventually receive a life sentence for killing a Reeds Spring deputy. Guns and outlaws: subjects with which Rocky had more than a passing familiarity. Attempting to impress her, he regaled Mary with stories of his best friend, Darrell. Now there was an outlaw, an outlaw to beat all outlaws—Darrell, fearless, reckless, way out there, beyond the pale, the last of the true wild men. And guns? Nobody knew more about guns than Darrell. Nobody was a better shot. Darrell was Davy Crockett and Jesse James and Wild Bill rolled up into one.

Rocky succeeded in impressing Mary all right, but not in precisely the direction he’d intended. Forget about Rocky: Mary now had her heart set on meeting Darrell. She got her chance in early March 1987 when the wild man himself dropped by Radio Shack. Mary came out of the back room, sure of herself, playing it coy, and walked right up to Darrell and looked him in the eye. Darrell shot her a smile, which she didn’t return. He thought she might be sizing him up. She went behind the counter and he followed her over and they had a nice chat. Her nineteenth birthday was coming up and some friends were throwing her a party. She invited Darrell to come by.