“I would… I would never even think about stealing from you, Mr. Crockett!”
He twists his body just enough to face Roof and Lynyrd.
“Tell your daddy!” Klay shouts.
But it’s as if they’re staring at some point beyond Klay Monroe and beyond this room.
“Not only have youthoughtabout stealing from me,” Briar continues. “You’ve been doing it—and doing it regularly. In the process, you’ve also done something even worse. You have insulted me, son. You havedisrespectedme.” He shakes his head sadly. “And as much as that doesn’t work for me, it works far less for you.”
With that, Briar Crockett reaches into the pocket of his baggy carpenter jeans and pulls out his favorite gun—a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver like the one he’d learned from his extensive reading that General George S. Patton had favored, right down to the pearl handle—and shoots Klay Monroe in the face and then in the chest and then in the face again.
The kid probably had paid little attention when he’d arrived, if any at all, to the pads covering the Oriental rug on this side of the desk, Briar and his sons anticipating the cleanup that would be required later.
Briar looks over at Roof and Lynyrd.
“You know what to do,” he says. “And where.”
They both nod. Roof gets up and walks over to the closet and comes back with the tarp. He and Lynyrd proceed to get the body out of the chair and roll it up into the tarp.
Briar walks back around the desk, puts the Smith & Wesson, one of the many guns in this house, back in the top drawer.
His sons are carrying the body toward the door when Briar says, “Hey?”
They stop.
“I meant to ask,” he says. “Either one of you know anything about the girl who went missing yesterday? Or any of those other missing girls?”
Before he gets an answer, he smiles at them.
“And keep in mind, in light of what we all just witnessed, that part about honesty being the best policy,” he adds.
Roof and Lynyrd look at each other and shake their heads, almost as if forgetting for the moment that they’re carrying a dead body.
“No, sir,” Roof says.
“Probably some crazy out in the back woods,” Lynyrd says.
“You sure about that?” Briar asks.
“Daddy,” Roof says. “Stupid might’ve just have got ol’ Klay killed. But we know better.”
“Youbothbetter,” Briar says. “And once you’ve taken out the trash, maybe you both can start looking into finding out who might be taking those girls.”
He pauses.
“You hear what I’m telling you?”
“Loud and clear,” Roof says. He grins. “But not too loud.”
“Get it done,” Briar says.
He doesn’t addor elsebefore they’re out of the room because he doesn’t have to, because the threat from him, as always, is as thick in this room as the smell of cordite. In the end, Briar knows full well that his sons fear him as much as everyone else in this town does.
It would never occur to him to fear them or anybody else.
Why the hell would he?
TWELVE
