“No,” Briar says. “Thankyou,on behalf of both my sons and me.”
He takes a sip of Blanton’s, puts the glass down on the coffee table, pulls out the pearl-handled .357 he’d picked up in the kitchen out of the side pocket of the thick shawl-collared sweater he’s wearing, andputs two bullets into Abby Wells’s chest, one after another, the explosions like bombs going off in the front room of the lake house.
He watches as the dead girl slides down off his sofa and onto the floor, pleased to see that the blood has only gotten on the blanket he’d positioned perfectly over the cushions before Abby Wells had arrived.
Briar looks down at her now and, in a voice even softer than usual, says, “I should have mentioned that I don’t trust snitches.”
Then he takes out his cell phone and calls Roof and tells him to come pick up what’s left of his girlfriend, before informing him that the poor thing had been right about something in her last moments on this earth.
“Get ready to go to war,” Briar says.
Then he drinks more bourbon, no one left to toast now but himself.
NINETY-ONE
FIRST THING THE next morning, I’m sitting in Helene Mayes’s office, the one that had formerly belonged to Nash Hader and has since been properly and thoroughly fumigated.
Without asking, she pours coffee for both of us.
“You mind if I tell you a little about myself?” she asks. “It’s kind of an interesting story.”
I grin. “Who doesn’t love one of those?”
“After college I wanted to be a Navy SEAL,” she says. “Can you believe it?”
“Actually, I can believe it.”
“Problem was, I had two things working against me, neither one insignificant,” she continues. “First one was, I’m a woman.”
“Tough to get around that,” I say. “And what was the second?”
Helene barks out a laugh. “I couldn’t swim worth a shit.”
I laugh, too. I drink some coffee. It’s very good and I tell her so.
“My beans,” Helene says.
“Good to know.”
“Something else to know,” she says, “is that I’m in the process, pretty much at shock-and-awe speed, of basically militarizing thispolice force I’m putting together on the fly. Because we’re not going to be able to survive the storm I know is coming without me doing that.”
“As a way of cleaning up the town,” I say. “And by whatever means necessary, as you’ve pointed out.”
“Damn straight.”
“I’ll do whatever I can to help, you know that,” I say. And smile. “You’ve probably heard. I’m once again looking around for a new team.”
Helene says, “My way is theonlyway we’re going to take down the Southern Mafia, and Briar Crockett along with it. The governor asked if I want help from the National Guard, and I told him I won’t need it if I get this thing done right.”
Everything about this woman is big and strong,I think as I look across the desk at her. Starting right here, with her obvious belief in herself, and the obvious way she has no intention of being fucked with. I can only imagine what it was like for the other players to be fighting her for a rebound back in the day.
“This is the way I thought I could do things in Memphis,” she says, “when I thought they were going to make me chief there. But the grift and graft there were absurd to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore and left. And finally ended up here, going up against as much backcountry shit as I did in the big city. And maybe more.”
“Taylor Webb says you’ve got a lead on Burt’s shooter,” I say.
Helene is dressed all in black today. Black sweater, black jeans, black vest. Even her lipstick is dark. Badass, head to toe.
“Thought I did, then I didn’t,” she says. “Thought I was frankly back to square one on that, but when I got here a little while ago and listened to the recordings on our tip line, I struck fucking gold. What I heard on the app must have been left in the middle of the night. Male voice, sounding so shaky it was like the piss had been scared all the way out of him before he made the call. Said he wasn’tgoing to leave a name or a number because he was afraid it might get him killed. But he swore that he got a good look at the guy driving the Ford Fairlane about fifteen minutes before the shooting at McDonald’s.”
