“What are you doing?” Helen asked.
“I dropped off our requested jury charges and thought I’d see how things were going in here. Since the judge has taken the afternoon off, Clarice let me cut through his chambers.” She paused. “Are you OK? Your hands are shaking.”
Helen clasped her right hand in her left and then rubbed them both against her skirt. “I’m fine.” She started to walk toward the double doors but then stopped and squinted back at Gloria. “How much of . . .” She waved a hand at the gallery. “. . . that did you see?”
Gloria shrugged. “A few seconds maybe. I had just walked in. Long enough to hear him tell you he loved you.” She gave a nervous smile. “Who was that?”
Helen smirked. “An asshole of biblical proportions.”
“Oh . . . I thought he might be your ex-husband.”
“One and the same,” Helen said, her stomach twisting into a knot as her mind drifted back to Butch’s threat. One and the same . . .
7
Butch Renfroe’s mother liked to say that her only son was “sorry.”
Now, Gladys Renfroe didn’t mean “sorry” in the sense that a person was apologetic or regretful but rather the lesser-known and undeniably southern definition of the word.
Useless. Wretched. Pitiful. If a person needed a picture to illustrate this meaning, Butch figured that a snapshot of himself would do the trick.
I’m a sorry son of a bitch, he thought, gazing at his reflection through the display window of Reeves Drugs on the Giles County Courthouse square.
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket, and he grabbed it without glancing at the screen. He knew who was calling just as sure as he knew that his ex-wife wouldn’t be backed into a corner.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“Did you deliver the message?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“She said she was going to kill me.” Butch winced at himself through the glass.
For a good fifteen seconds, there was silence on the other end of the line. Then the voice, low and deliberate, responded. “Sounds like you’re a dead man, then.”
8
Helen held the revolver in both hands and pointed it at the target’s forehead. Instinctively, she squeezed her left eye shut, and the index finger of her right hand hovered over the trigger until . . .
She fired without thinking. Once, twice. Three, four, five, six times. Then she lowered the .44 Magnum, whipped off her goggles, and walked forward until she could survey the results. The pattern wasn’t her best. Two shots between the eyes, a couple on the chin, one on the left temple, and one just under the left nostril. Still, she had hit the face six times from twenty-five yards out. Six kill shots, she thought, nodding her head in satisfaction. That was good shooting under anyone’s gauge.
She replaced the target sheet with a clean one and returned to her spot at the end of the range. At 8:00 p.m., she was the only person here, and in truth, the facility had been closed for almost an hour. But Doug Brinkley, the owner of the place, had been a friend ever since Helen’s days as a deputy in the sheriff’s office, and since he lived only a quarter mile from the range, he didn’t mind opening it for her.
“Big trial tomorrow, huh?” Doug had asked after turning the lights on and giving her several target sheets.
Helen nodded, anxious to burn the stress of the day off.
“Well, I hope you put that bastard under the jail,” Doug said. “I know what he’s done for the town, but I don’t like him. And I don’t trust anyone from New York City.”
The popular rumor was that Michael Zannick hailed from Manhattan, but his last address prior to Pulaski had actually been in Boston. Regardless, Helen didn’t correct her old friend. Instead, she simply said, “I’ll do my best.”
“Your best is usually more than enough,” Doug said before giving her the key. “Stay as long as you want and then lock up. You can put the key in my mailbox on your way out.”
Despite the anxiety she felt, she smiled, grateful for good people like Doug Brinkley whom she’d spent the last thirty years of her life earning the trust of.
What will Doug think if Butch drops the bomb tomorrow? Helen asked herself once she was alone in the facility. As she began to shoot—starting with twelve warm-up shots at three yards and gradually moving to twelve more at five, seven, ten, fifteen, and finally twenty-five yards before starting over at three again—more questions dogged her mind. Will he still unlock the shooting range for me after hours? Will he even vote for me in November? Could thirty years of goodwill be erased by one awful mistake? And then there was “the nut cutter,” as she so eloquently labeled the most critical question in any case.
Am I willing to find out?
After an hour, Helen’s face and neck gleamed with sweat, and her shoulders ached. She had completed three circuits and counted only a handful of misses. Despite wearing plugs, her ears still rang with the sound of the gunfire, but like always, she felt better. More in control of herself and her emotions.
When she was a young girl and only child, her father had taken her dove hunting every fall and deer hunting in the winters. By the time she was thirteen years old, she was a crack shot with a twelve gauge and not bad with a rifle. John Paul “J. P.” Lewis had been a lieutenant in the Pulaski Police Department, and he worked six days a week. Since he was always working or sleeping, the only quality time Helen ever had with him was in a field or a deer stand. Though her mother abhorred the hunting excursions, thinking they made her daughter “too rough” and hurt her chances to compete in beauty pageants, Helen loved every minute of them. For her sixteenth birthday, her dad took her to a range and showed her how to shoot handguns. Then let her ride patrol with him that night, and she saw him arrest a drunk driver. J. P. Lewis wasn’t a sophisticated man by any stretch, but he was a good man and had an important job that had helped keep the town safe.
What would Daddy have thought about what I did in law school? she wondered, cringing as she stuffed the snub-nose revolver in her pocket and headed for the door.
She turned off the lights to the warehouse and locked up. Then she walked toward her car—a government-issued black Crown Victoria. She’d stopped at home to change clothes after work and now wore faded jeans, a gray sweater, and a black cap with an orange T on the front. She had replaced the high heels with dark brown cowboy boots—“shitkickers,” as her daddy would have called them.
As she started the vehicle and gazed out at the hilly landscape of Highway 64, which was lit by a full moon, she wished she could call Tom; if there was anyone in the world she could talk to about her current predicament, Tom McMurtrie would have been that person.
But cancer had taken Tom last year. Helen had no one she could speak with about her problem, so she did what she always did when she was under extreme stress. She didn’t talk to anyone. She didn’t pray. She didn’t go for a long walk or run.
She’d fired her powerful revolver over and over again at the paper targets, and as the sound and smell of gunfire filled her eardrums and nostrils, she eventually realized there was only one fail-safe solution to her current situation.
Helen squeezed the steering wheel, wishing for all the world that there was another way. But there isn’t, she thought, putting the Crown Vic in gear and involuntarily tapping the pocket of her jeans.