The Killing King of Gratis (20 page)

Trapper John was saving another patient in Korea while Skipper surveyed the night’s tools and placed them in a gym bag.

Rope? Check.

Tape? Check.

Shotgun? Check.

His father’s old straight razor? Check. (“Dad kept this sharp”).

Handcuffs? Check (Police issue).

Rags? Check.

Bleach? Check.

Now all he had to do was look for his girl. He didn’t have the luxury of time, so finding Meg soon was mandatory. The drink sweated in his hand, and the Bird swelled just outside his door.

Soon, Skipper, you gotta get it done soon. No time to wait. Your waiting is over.

I
t was just beginning to sprinkle when Delroy went to Amy Delahunt’s office. He was surprised to find the door locked. He banged on it.

Amy peeked around the corner and finally came to the door when she saw it was him. “Sorry, but I thought you were another reporter. I’ve been hiding from them since I got in this morning.” Delroy walked in, trying his best to look contrite for being so pissy before, and followed Amy into her office. He smiled a little, appreciating that she was learning quickly that a reporter is definitely not a lawyer’s best friend. He had been burned before by a reporter telling him that he would keep anything he told him confidential. It was his fault, expecting discretion from someone whose job it was to sell barrels of ink and reams of paper. He never made that mistake again.

“Well, I’ve been working on your file.” She knelt on the floor on all fours, crouching over the deconstructed case file like a hungry dog over a soup bone.

“What the hell are you doing? When you made that copy it was in perfect order, and now, well, now it’s not.”

“Perfect order doesn’t always help, Delroy. Sometimes you have to spread the whole thing out and get down on your hands and knees and really look at something hard. Sometimes, you have to roll around in it.”

“So that’s what you’re doing, huh? You’re rolling around in my case file? What’s it telling you?” Delroy was a little perturbed. He liked pragmatic. Squirming on the floor was anything but.

“Let’s see. It’s telling me that I’m tired and you’re going to take me out to dinner. It’s telling me that I have to get away from this little old town and its little old gossipy ladies and news folks. I have to eat some food and forget about all this for right now.”

“Well, let’s go to Daddy Jack’s then.”

Amy stood up. Delroy noticed only then how short she was without her heels. She couldn’t be an sliver over five feet two inches.
God, she’s adorable
.

“Delroy, I insist you take me out of this town and somewhere we can get something besides barbeque and shrimp. Don’t get me wrong, I like both, but a girl needs a lot more than that sometimes.”

She stood there looking pouty and beautiful. He knew that he didn’t have time to go anywhere at this point, but she looked so good. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt them to take some time away, he told himself, if only to step away from the whole situation and talk about the case. She was his co-counsel, after all, so the trip wouldn’t be a waste of time.
Hell, this is just good lawyering
, he reasoned.

“Well, Amy, you ever been up to Lake Sinclair?”

She smiled, “No, but if you buy a six pack for the ride I’m more than willing to try it out.”

They drove up highway 441 in his Chevelle towards Milledgeville. The rain started tapering off as they got well north of the storm. Amy drank half a six pack of Terrapin Rye Ale on the way. She was feeling fairly tipsy when they finally motored into Putnam County. They turned off 441 and finally drove down a long driveway. It led to a single wide trailer not fifteen yards from the lake’s edge.

“Really Delroy, I’ve never been taken to such a swanky place by a gentleman before.” She laughed. “What’s the name of this chateau?” She stumbled a little as she got out of the car.

“I call it the Villa Delroy. It’s the best damn villa on the whole damn lake.”

She laughed again. He didn’t tell her that he and his ex-wife acquired the lot with the plan of building a house on it. He bought her out after the divorce.

“Well, I love it, this best damn villa on the lake. So are you going to light the fire and cook some beans for me? Really, I thought I told you I needed something a little nicer than that.”

Delroy laughed. He went inside the trailer and came out with a key attached to a small float only moments later. There was a very large flashlight in his left hand. He walked down toward the dock and she followed him. It was starting to get dusky, and Delroy turned on the lights at the dock when he got there. He then took out two of the lawn chairs he stored in a wooden bin built onto the dock’s side.

“Now what is this, Delroy?”

He took her hand and led her onto the pontoon boat tied up at the dock. The boat had to be thirty years old and didn’t have a seat on it. It was basically a flat deck with a small railing around it. A console was placed in the back with a steering wheel and ignition.

Delroy christened it the “Lola” after his grandmother. The name just seemed to fit. Behind the wheel, Delroy set up one chair and the other chair beside it.

“Madame Amy, your throne awaits you.” He swooped his arm toward the passenger lawn chair. Amy laughed and sat down.

Delroy started the motor and they began putting out to the main channel of the lake. The lake water chopped behind them in their wake, and lights started to shimmer in the small lake cottages that dotted the shore. After a few minutes they turned left and made their way into a cove. It was brightly lit at the far end by strings of lights. Under those strings stood the Crooked Creek Tavern.

“Delroy, this is just charming.” The lights, in the darkening sky, made everything look aglow to Amy. The beers she drank didn’t hurt, either.

Crooked Creek sat at the edge of the lake not forty feet from the dock. It had a wrap-around porch, good food, and a full bar. Boaters could dock there and get served as long as they had on flip flops, shorts and shirts, and good manners. Amy and Delroy got seated on the porch and were waiting for their drinks before they mentioned the case.

“Amy, what do you think about everything since you’ve had a chance to look at, I mean wallow in, the file?”

Amy cocked her head. Delroy thought her adorable.

She answered. “Newt seems pretty screwed. He’s got a personal tie, either by location, sexual relationship, or both, with at least Millie and Merry. Of course he was found with Merry when the cops got there, and his DNA was found inside of Millie. So our defense would be that he was set up and that he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That might work once, but that’s a hell of a rough defense to have to make twice, or really three times counting Althea. And it sounds like his alibi, for Millie at least, is that he was passed out or asleep. Which doesn’t really help, because everyone in town knows that he doesn’t like to sleep alone. For Althea’s case, they don’t really have anything on him, but they got enough on the other two so it doesn’t matter.”

She caught her breath and continued.

“Terrence helps a little, but who’s to say that it wasn’t Newt he saw, or that he wasn’t mistaken. People don’t think a little boy is going to lie, but they would believe he might make a mistake. Plus, who knows whether he would be able to even testify after the shock of his mom dying. Who knows how he’ll hold up to an even mediocre cross-examination. So that leaves us with trying to find the real bad guy. I saw your notes, Delroy, how you think it’s got to be someone local. So we have the truck description, and are looking local, but have come up with squat. We have a clothing description, but it’s pretty bland, nothing really stands out. So, finally, it seems to me that, if we can’t find this guy who’s right under our noses, we are, as my old criminal law professor would say, egregiously fucked. No, more than that, he would say we are fucked running backwards, with bare asses and little promise.”

Amy looked at Delroy with eyes wide, smiled, and took a drink of her recently delivered Maker’s and ginger ale.

Delroy was impressed. She was young but she got it. Better yet, she could describe it succinctly and with profanity, always a plus.

“Amy, that’s about how we stand. I’m grasping at straws and not holding on to any of them. Just keep believing in Newt is really all I can say, and look deeper into the owners we haven’t spoken to yet.” He was sipping his Jack and Coke. It was his first of the evening, and it was correct. Delroy had not touched a drop in days, and it was all he could do not to gulp it down. He felt a pang of guilt for drinking after promising himself he wouldn’t until everything was okay, but reasoned it wouldn’t be the first promise he had broken to himself, nor the last.

Their food arrived and they ate watching the moonlight glint off the lake’s surface. Sinclair was far enough north that the air smelled different, more like a forest than the sea or the swamp. They both needed that, to get away from the Gratis smell, the Gratis feel. It felt good to be somewhere that nobody knew you, where nobody started whispering when you walked into a room. Delroy couldn’t remember the last time he felt like that.

They stayed for a few more drinks after they finished eating. Amy gave him her life story. It wasn’t until then he realized she was a local, or at least pretty close to being one. She had an aunt in Gratis and grew up in Swainsboro. Undergrad was at Georgia Southern and then on to law school at the University of Georgia. She always wanted to come back home, or at least near home, and be a small town lawyer. Atticus Finch was her hero, and she didn’t care whether it was a cliché or not. Who wouldn’t aspire to be like Atticus?

She was engaged once but broke it off. Her ex-fiancé still called her every week and would have her back in a second. “I’m not bragging,” she said, “In fact it makes me feel bad.” Delroy felt bad for him as well, to lose a woman like this.

She told him Johnnie called her after their falling out. She said she would write a scathing article in Newt’s defense and that they should make up.

“Seriously Delroy, I wonder what she wants me to do for her. Either she’s awfully lonely, or she has some chore she needs done.” Delroy nodded thinking about her article in today’s paper and how it attacked the sheriff’s office for stopping their search. He loved the article but was disappointed that it was now on the back page, directly under the death announcements.

He let Amy do most of the talking, and he soaked up every word. Her voice was as beautiful as she was. Her accent felt like home. For his part, he told her about the divorce and about his relationship with his dead brother’s kids. He wasn’t totally honest, though, not wanting her to be scared away about his depth of feelings for either the ex-wife, or the children. He realized he felt too deeply, about too many things, and was helpless to stop doing so. It wasn’t quite right.

They got on the Lola after paying up and went back to the single wide. Lightning bugs were hovering in the forests coming up to the water’s edge, outlining the shore with their glow when they docked. Delroy helped Amy out of the boat and put his arm around her as they went up the hill to the trailer.

Once there, they went inside and he put her in his bedroom. She was hanging onto him now, and he could feel her breath on his neck as he finally put her on the bed. Amy held him tightly, if only for a moment, before falling back on her pillow. Without a word he went into the small den and got on the couch, closing the door to the bedroom as he left.

He wanted badly to go back to her, but he didn’t want to risk complicating their relationship, not yet at least. He would pursue her that way, he knew that, but only after the case was done. He needed every ally he could get right now. Besides Kero and Amy, he felt alone. Even Cozette was tired of helping him, and Anna believed the whole thing was over with Newt in jail.

Amy woke him early the next morning. She was fully dressed and brewing coffee for them when he opened his eyes. Somehow in that 1956 vintage single wide kitchen she found some coffee and two old ‘UGA’ mugs. It took a couple of “get up Delroy” shouts for him to get off the couch, but soon they were back in the Chevelle and heading down 441. Amy was distant and professional. She handled what must have been a bad hangover very well.

It was nearly eight in the morning when Delroy dropped her in the alley behind her office. The last thing she needed was people talking about how she was sleeping with her co-counsel. When he stopped she got out of the car and unlocked her back door. Before going in she turned and looked at him.

“I really did have fun last night. We’ll go for a ride on the Lola again. Now leave me alone for a while. I have a hunch and I don’t need you bothering me while I’m checking into it.” She went inside and locked the door behind her.

Delroy left and made his way toward his office. He would never understand women, not at all. Smiling, though, he knew he would sure as hell keep trying to. Some of them were worth the effort, and then some.

T
hat night, while Amy and Delroy got to know each other, Skipper was finding out about the swamp during a storm. He decided to stay off the river and went looking for Meg at Cozette’s. The swamp was darker, but the stormy river was too much for his little fishing boat to handle.

He made his way through the small channels that wound through the Neck and finally pulled into a small cove not twenty yards from Cozette’s dock. The black water surged under his fishing boat, but the trees protected him from the storm’s stinging rain. Although the wind howled overhead, it eased upon hitting the solid curtain of the swamp.

As a child Skipper explored the Neck, too. That was years ago, but he still knew how to get to the few homesteads in its heart. Cozette’s was one of the biggest. He came here as a child to catch a glimpse of Odette, the old hoodoo root doctor. He would hide in his boat downstream from their old trailer. Every now and then she would come to the water's edge, a large red headscarf covering her head and a long blue dress covering the rest. She was always festooned with draping necklaces made from animal claws and bright beads. To a child it appeared that magic could fly from her fingertips. She was Gratis, but also something totally apart from the place. It was her exotic nature that drew Skipper, and that her home looked like it belonged in a Caribbean jungle, not in Gratis. Now, unfortunately, she was dead, and the single wide was a two story wood planked house. The old post planted into the bank to secure boats was replaced by a dock with a shed beside it. All of its allure was lost to progress, and even the old root doctor’s magic was nothing more than a product label.