“We have sworn testimony from a missing girl who is no longer missing,” Helene says. “Her testimony, quite credible, is about your sons running a trafficking ring pretty much right under your nose. So let us all stop fucking around here and you either tell them to come outside or tell me where they are.”
She reaches into another pocket and pulls out what I know is a search warrant, handing it to Briar.
“Or you can stand out here and continue to dick around while my men and I head inside and start going room to room,” she says. “By the way? If your wife is inside, you might think about giving her a heads-up.”
“Fortunately, she’s at yoga,” he says. “Or maybe Pilates. I can never keep her self-improvement schedule straight.”
He hands her back the warrant without even looking at it. “You can search all you want,” he says. “Roof and Lynyrd won’t be there. All you’ll accomplish, if you’re still here later, is traumatizing my daughters when my wife brings them home from school.”
“We’re far more interested in your sons than your daughters at the moment,” Helene says.
“And I’ve already told you they’re not here,” he says. “And so you know, there’s no way they’d be involved in something like you’re describing without me knowing about it.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Helene says. “Another is that you’re an accessory after the fact, already trying to cover your sorry ass.”
I move closer to Briar Crockett from the side, up on him before he sees me there.
“When your daughters get older,” I say quietly, “they’ll be the same age as this girl who got taken by their brothers.”
I finally get a reaction out of him with that, see a flash in his eyes that somehow reminds me of an old Mark Twain line, the one comparing anger to acid.
“You should consider your words more carefully,” he says.
“Just did,” I say.
He turns away from me and back to Helene. “My sons didn’t do this.”
Helene gestures for Jake and the others to head inside.
“You want to give your boys some sound fatherly advice, Mr. Crockett?” Helene says. “Tell them to turn themselves in.”
“Something else I’ll be sure to pass along,” he says.
We’re back at Helene’s car, both our doors open, when Briar Crockett calls out to us. When we turn, we see him swiveling his head around and sniffing the air.
“You smell that?”
“Smell what?” Helene calls back to him.
“Blood in the air,” Briar Crockett says.
ONE HUNDRED TWO
NEARLY TWO DAYS later, Helene and her people still haven’t located Roof and Lynyrd, and there are still no leads on the death of Abby Wells.
I’ve spent the day in the fields with Charlie Hall and Les. When we finally call it a day, I change into my workout clothes and head straight for the gym.
No weights today, no stretching, no crunches or push-ups. I lace up old boxing gloves nearly worn out by now and go right at the heavy bag.
I need to hit somebody today.
I want to throw lefts and even a few overhand rights, no matter how much throwing shots like that hurts my shoulder.
But even that’s part of it.
I even want to hurt today, too.
Hurt for what they did to Holly. Hurt for Burt and even for Abby, whatever reasons she’d had for getting into bed—literally—with a Crockett.
