Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(22)
But the sheriff of Knox County, a larger-than-life, cowboy-hat-wearing, chain-smoking blowhard by the name of Clifford “Tree” Corker, preferred the spotlight. He didn’t toil in silence or in private. There appeared to be nothing cerebral about him. The forty-two-year-old had been sheriff for eight years, having been appointed by the county commission for two years after the previous sheriff fell off a roof and broke his neck, and then having won another six-year term at the polls. He was up for reelection in November, but nobody was opposing him. Corker made sure he strutted onto the stage of every crime scene in the county that attracted a television camera or a news reporter. He held press conferences on a regular basis, touting his department’s latest “drug roundup” or the apprehension of the latest “danger to the good people of Knox County” in a deep Southern bass. He vowed to “enforce the law of the land” and carried two pearl-handled, nickel-plated, ornately engraved .45-caliber Colt Python double-action revolvers in holsters he tied around his massive thighs with strips of rawhide. If the law of the land was broken and he needed to blow somebody full of holes, he was ready.
“Don’t sell Tree Corker short,” Granny said. “He’s powerful, and he appears dangerous. He’s got a boatload of laws that say he can do pretty much anything he wants, the FBI ignores him, and he has a thousand employees. Most of those employees are loyal to him just because he gave them a job. Five hundred of them are armed and trained to use their weapons. He has a jail he’d love to put you in if you cross him.”
“I was in it for a year,” I said. “It was a shithole, and I’m never going back.”
“You’ll have to figure out a way to deal with him,” Granny said. “Telling him you’re willing to turn the other cheek and go on about your business would be my suggestion. But there are some folks who are going to have to leave his county—his uncle, in particular—in order for us to come in, so that’ll have to be worked out. We don’t care if we pay him the same cut his uncle has been giving him, but we’re not paying any more.”
“How do you propose to get this Roby Penn out of the county?” I said.
“By upsetting his applecart,” Granny said. “By making him extremely uncomfortable. He’ll make a mistake when we do that, and we’ll be waiting.”
“Will I be involved in upsetting his applecart?” I said.
“We’re going to run you into it like a Brahma bull,” Granny said.
“How are you going to do this, Granny? How are you going to get me elected? You have to tell me.”
“Soon. I’ll tell you soon.”
I looked at Eugene and Ronnie, then back at Granny. I nodded my head. “Fine. I’m in. You folks have put your lives and your freedom on the line for me more than once. You help me get elected district attorney, and I’ll make sure you get to do whatever you want.”
“We won’t kill anybody unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Granny said.
“I suppose I appreciate that. So what’s first?”
“I’m going to make a phone call or two and get you some real help,” Granny said. “I’m talking real money and real advice and assistance. Bankers and legitimate businesspeople buy senators and representatives, not district attorneys and sheriffs. People like me usually put up the money for people like you, but I’ve got something else in mind.”
“I can’t say this surprises me,” I said. “The corruption, I mean. I saw it in prison. The guards were in on almost all the hustles. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it being here, though. I mean, Knox County specifically. And if it’s here, it’s everywhere.”
“All over the world, Darren.”
“That’s depressing when you really think about it,” I said. “What about the district attorney in this county? Do you pay him?”
“He was here last evening, sitting right where you’re sitting now,” Granny said. “Fine man. Think the world of him, and I pay him every month, like clockwork.”
CHAPTER 12
Tree Corker looked down through an opaque window at the large crowd of men in the abandoned warehouse off Heiskell Road in the western part of Knox County. He was looking forward to watching two men do battle. He’d heard they were both good fighters with similar styles and that the odds were nearly even. It was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon outside, but inside, the dark aura of bloodlust hung heavy in the dim light. Corker caught intermittent whiffs of dog and chicken dung, blood, man sweat, and fear. He knew the warehouse had stored many things over the thirty years of its existence: tobacco, car parts, water heaters, weapons, explosives, marijuana, and cocaine. He also knew it was now owned by a corporation formed by the heirs of the late Jess Plummer and leased through the heirs’ lawyer on a month-to-month, handshake agreement to his uncle, a white-supremacist bookmaker, hustler, and maybe even a psychopath named Roby Penn.
Roby was standing ten feet across the room. He was a thin sixty-five-year-old former LRRP—Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol—in the Vietnam War. Roby was wearing short-sleeve khaki military fatigues. His arms were covered in tattoos, his head was shaved, and he sported a thick, white handlebar mustache. A gray scar crossed his nose like a small lightning bolt, the result of an argument with an ex-girlfriend with a bad temper and a beer bottle several years earlier. At least that’s the story Tree had heard. He’d also heard the girlfriend had wound up in a dumpster.