He opened the suitcase to reveal a gun.
6
Exercising the right of seniority, Kel Knight sent Lorrie Colson out into the night to do a couple of circuits of the town before holing up on a side road by the Gas-N-Go at the southern limits, there to keep an eye out for drunks, hired assassins, and bank robbers, but mostly drunks. The Gas-N-Go was part of the Ferdy Bowers empire of ‘N-Go’ businesses, which also included the Wash-N-Go, the Dunk-N-Go, and the short-lived Mow-N-Go, a mower servicing and garden maintenance company that had barely survived a single summer, most local homeowners being content to take care of their own lawns when the need arose, and also sufficiently skilled to repair their own mowers too, thank you very much, without paying a premium to Bowers and his people for performing the service. Ferdy Bowers was one of the few businessmen in Burdon County not beholden to the Cades, although until recently he’d been smart enough to tick along with them, and not interfere with their affairs beyond a certain level of acceptable competition. But lately Bowers had started smelling money in the air, and relations with the Cades had deteriorated as a consequence.
Knight left the door between the cells and the main body of the station open, just in case the prisoner called out, before stepping into the parking lot and lighting his pipe. Evan Griffin might not have tolerated the smoking of cigarettes in the station house, or by his officers while in uniform, but he gave Knight a pass on the pipe, if only in the lot, since it served to enhance the quiet authority of his sergeant – or so Knight had informed him, and Griffin had been too bemused to argue. This impression of competence was aided by Knight’s passing resemblance to the late actor Lee Van Cleef, who, despite making a decent living starring in Westerns, had no affection for horses. Knight wasn’t sure how a man who didn’t like horses ended up as a Western star, but stranger things had happened in the world, and would undoubtedly continue to happen until that same world came to its inevitable end.
Knight’s radio beeped, and Colson’s voice said, ‘Kel, you there?’
‘Where else would I be?’ he replied, because wherever he went, there he was.
‘Company’s coming,’ she said. ‘Jurel Cade just drove into town.’
Griffin pulled on a pair of plastic gloves before removing the gun from its shoulder holster. It was a Smith & Wesson 1076, chambered in 10mm, the kind issued to FBI agents after two of them were killed in a shootout in Miami-Dade County in 1986 because their weapons at the time lacked sufficient stopping power. The original shitty plastic grip on Parker’s S&W had been replaced with one that looked custom-made, and the weapon was clean, oiled, and in good order. Alongside it was a New York State permit, which would be honored in Arkansas under reciprocity agreements. The weapon was unloaded, although the nine-round single-column magazine in the corner of the case was full.
Griffin restored the gun to its holster and laid it to one side.
‘Huh,’ he said.
He got down on his knees between the two beds and felt beneath their frames. Within seconds, his fingers touched another gun, taped to the underside of the bed on the right. Carefully he eased it free. This time he was looking at a .38 Colt Detective Special, so old that the prancing pony badge on the left side of the butt was worn almost smooth, and the frame was pitted and scarred. Yet, as with the S&W, it was in prime working condition; unlike the S&W, it was fully loaded.
Griffin returned it to its hiding place and resumed his examination of the case. Without disturbing the contents more than was necessary, he established that it contained a couple of changes of clothing, a pair of black Timberland boots – freshly waterproofed, judging by the smell – and a thick sheaf of papers and photographs held in a blue pocket file secured with a pair of elastic bands. Griffin removed the bands and opened the file. He took one look at the contents, closed it again, and restored the bands. He put the S&W back in the case and managed to get one of the catches to lock again, but not the other. With the file under one arm, he left the room, closed the door behind him, and drove home.
He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t even disturbed.
In fact, he was almost relieved.
Kel Knight continued smoking his pipe until a pair of headlights appeared from the south, approaching slowly up Main Street. The street lighting wasn’t great at that end of town, and a couple of the bulbs were also busted, which meant the vehicle didn’t become completely visible to him until it neared the lot – not that Knight needed the illumination to make an identification, not after the warning from Colson.
The colors of the Burdon County Sheriff’s Office were yellow and brown, an unfortunate combination that had led the less respectable elements of county society to dub it ‘Shit-N-Shitter,’ which made it sound like another business misfire from the mind of Ferdy Bowers. Not that anyone would have uttered that description within earshot of Jurel Cade, a man who smiled a lot but never laughed.
Cade unfolded himself slowly from the interior of the car, like some predatory insect emerging from its lair. He topped out at six five in his stockinged feet, but favored heavy work boots with deep soles and heels that added another inch, at least, to his height. There was no fat to him, none at all, and in proximity he radiated heat, so that the windows of his patrol car were permanently fogged, winter and summer, because the vents didn’t work worth a damn, the sheriff’s office being no more flush with funds than any other branch of local law enforcement. The Cades were generally tall and rangy, males and females both, so that family gatherings resembled a collection of blades or farm implements arrayed side by side. They all had the same eyes too: deep blue and hungry, like cruel seas. They weren’t bad, the Cades, not exactly – no family could be entirely ignoble – but they were greedy, and protective of their own. They had been the dominant force in the social, political, and economic life of Burdon County for as long as anyone could remember, and longer still, and seemed destined to remain so into the future given the absence of any significant rivals, the ambitions of Ferdy Bowers and a handful of other holdouts notwithstanding.
‘Evening, Kel,’ said Cade, although it was now well into the night.
‘Evening, Jurel,’ said Knight. ‘Social visit?’
No love was lost between these two men, and each knew it, but Knight had been prepared to accommodate a level of grudging respect for the younger man until Patricia Hartley’s death. In the aftermath, he saw no cause for any but the most superficial of niceties.
‘I heard Evan was up to Boyd’s earlier,’ said Cade. ‘Made an arrest.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Northern boy. Had a little too much to drink, and proved disrespectful of the chief’s authority. We thought we’d accommodate him in a cell, and give him the opportunity to contemplate the error of his ways before we put him back on the road.’
Jurel Cade absorbed this information without any change in expression. Knight might as easily have been addressing himself to a statue. Cade’s hair was thick and black, with a natural curl that he tried to hide by keeping it cut short most of the time. In winter he let it grow a shade longer, with the result that the kink was currently at its most obvious. Some in the county liked to speculate – although again not in the immediate vicinity of Jurel, or any other member of the Cade clan – that he could have a little Jew in him from up the line, but Knight didn’t think that likely. The Jews might have helped open up parts of the state in the nineteenth century through their trading ventures, as was the wont of the Semitic race, but they had long been in general decline in Arkansas, a couple of pockets of Judaism excepted, and Cargill wasn’t Bentonville or Little Rock. Any Jews who ventured as far as Burdon hadn’t lingered, and Knight couldn’t recall ever meeting a Jew native to the county in all his born days, nor did he believe that his father or mother could have boasted the acquaintance of any. He had nothing against them as a people; they simply did not figure in his life or memory, and the same could likely have been said for that of the Cades.