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As he said it, I found myself wondering whether I was seeing a bigger or a smaller Jim O’Conner than the one who’d courted Leena Bonds. Then I found myself wondering whether he was seeing a bigger or a smaller Bill Brockton than the one who’d lost Kathleen. I remembered my last phone call with Jeff, and I knew the answer. I vowed to call him and apologize.
“Hell, that’s enough of my cracker-barrel psychology for one day,” said O’Conner, draining the last of his whiskey. “Let me get Waylon to take you back to your truck.”
“You sure Waylon ought to be driving?”
“Hell, Doc, I could drive that stretch of road with my eyes closed,” said Waylon.
“He’s not kidding — I’ve seen him do it,” O’Conner laughed. “It’d take another three drinks before Waylon started to feel that whiskey, and even then, he’d be a better driver than you or I stone-cold sober.”
With some misgivings, I climbed into the truck with Waylon. I rolled down the window and called to O’Conner, “Will you please make him promise not to drag me into any more adventures along the way?”
He laughed. “You hear that, Waylon? Straight to the Pilot station; no stops. All right?”
Waylon nodded. “No stops,” he said.
It never occurred to me to extract a promise to drive with the headlights on. Halfway along the river road, Waylon flicked off his lights, leaving us careening along in utter blackness.
“Waylon, stop!” I yelped.
“Cain’t,” he said. “I promised — no stops.”
“Then turn your lights back on!”
“You b’lieve now?”
“Believe what?” Had something in our discussion of religion struck a nerve in Waylon?
“B’lieve I can drive this with my eyes closed.”
“Yes, for God’s sake. Now turn on your headlights.”
He did. As the beams shot through the blackness, I saw that the big truck was tracking dead-center in the right-hand lane, halfway through an “S” curve, as if it were on rails.
“Waylon, you’re going to turn me into either a believer or a dead man.”
He laughed. “Well, either way, you won’t feel scared no more.”
CHAPTER 29
The guard at the John J. Duncan Federal Building was the same stony-faced sentinel who’d been keeping watch over the lobby the last time I was here. This time, I was determined to get a smile out of him. I checked his name tag. “Morning, Officer Shipley,” I said cheerily. “I’m Bill Brockton, from UT. I’m going up to the FBI’s offices again.” He nodded ever so slightly. “You doing all right today?” He looked startled.
“Just fine, sir.” He said it stiffly, but it was a start, at least.
“Glad to hear it. By the way, did you read the paper this morning?” He nodded warily. “Did you see that story about the recently declassified CIA case?”
“Uh, no, sir, I don’t believe I saw that one.”
“You’ll appreciate this, being familiar with federal agencies,” I said. “You remember back when President Jimmy Carter got attacked by that wild rabbit?” He looked puzzled, so I decided to refresh his memory. “Carter was fishing in a pond down in Georgia, and this big bunny came swimming out toward his boat in a threatening manner, hissing and gnashing his teeth. Remember that?” He nodded, and I could tell he wondered where this was going. “Well, according to this new report, the CIA sent double agents — undercover squirrels and chipmunks — scampering throughout the forest to gather every scrap of intelligence they could about this foiled rabbit assassination plot. After spending months on analysis and millions in payoffs, they still couldn’t catch this killer rabbit. The reason, it now turns out, is the CIA itself had been infiltrated…by a mole.” He looked at me without expression. “Get it — a mole?” I grinned and nodded encouragingly.
I saw pity in his eyes. “Yes, sir, I’m afraid I do get it.” He shook his head sadly. “That,” he said, “has got to be the worst joke I’ve ever heard.” He continued to take the measure of the joke’s lameness, and when he’d finished, he finally cracked a smile.
“There,” I said triumphantly. “You’re a tough audience, but I knew I could make you smile.”
“Don’t quit your day job,” he said, waving me toward the elevator.
Up on the sixth floor, I tried the CIA joke on Angela Price and the rest of the federal and state agents. They liked it about as much as Shipley had, so I decided to hold the FBI joke I’d prepared as an encore. “Okay, a lot has happened since I saw you last,” I said. First I told them about what I’d seen in the pot patch just twenty-four hours earlier; then I recounted what happened in the cave; finally I circled back to the sheriff’s drunken phone call. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Maybe it was just the liquor talking, but he sounded like a man who’s trying to do the right thing.”
Price looked dubious. “Well, I’d be happy to be convinced of that. But it’ll take a lot more than a sloppy drunk crying into the phone to persuade me. I’d give more weight to the theft of the bones and the explosions in the cave.”
“Yeah, the phone call rang a bit hollow to me after that, too,” I admitted, “although we don’t know for sure the sheriff was involved in those. Or in his brother’s shakedown operation, either.”
The DEA agent — I had never really gotten a fix on his name — leapt in and began asking questions about the pot patch: who was the farmer, where was his patch, how big, and so on. Some things I could answer, but others — the location, Vern’s full name, the number of plants — I didn’t know. “I’m sorry I’m not more help on the specifics,” I said. “I was a ways off, I was sick as a dog, and I was scared ou
t of my wits. Not at my most observant.” I hesitated. “I’m not sure I should say this next part, but I feel sorry for Cousin Vern. He’s obviously struggling, he’s got a sick kid, and Orbin shot the man’s dog out of pure spite. Looked like it just about broke Vern’s heart. I don’t know how much leeway you have in cases like this, but if there’s any way to give that guy a break somehow, it seems like the humane thing to do.”
An awkward silence followed my plea. Finally Price spoke up. “Well, Doctor Brockton, it’s a good thing you became a scientist rather than a law enforcement officer or a prosecutor. If we let everybody who’s got a sad story off the hook, we wouldn’t make many arrests. Still, if it makes you feel better, I’ll remind you that the focus of this informal investigation is corrupt officials, not small-scale pot farmers. And we do have some discretion in how we deal with small fry who help us land bigger fish. Beyond that, we can’t promise anything.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. I appreciate that. And I’ll certainly encourage anyone who can to cooperate as fully as possible. Mind you, I haven’t seen anything that suggests that Tom Kitchings is involved in extortion. However, sick and scared as I was out in the pot patch, I saw enough to testify that Tom’s brother — who is also his chief deputy — is crooked as a dog’s hind leg.”
“Is he taking bribes, or is he extorting money?” The question came from a man who had slipped into the room right after I’d started talking. Price introduced him as David Welton, the in-house lawyer for the FBI’s East Tennessee field office.
“Well, he put a gun to the man’s head and promised to kill him if he didn’t come up with a thousand dollars in two weeks. I’d sure call that extortion.”
Welton was taking notes now. “And he was in uniform when he did this?”
“Hell, even his helicopter was wearing a uniform.”
The lawyer looked at Price. “Sounds like we’ve got him on both Hobbs and colorful law,” he said. She nodded.
