Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(26)

“Looks like the marine shouldn’t have spit on Harley,” the sheriff said. “I don’t think he’s taking it well.”

“Bring it, soldier boy!” Shaker yelled.

The marine waged back in on light feet, taking short steps, maintaining his balance. He tried to sneak an uppercut in, but Harley blocked it with an elbow and countered with a hard right that caught the marine flush across the bridge of the nose. Blood starting pouring from the marine’s nostrils, and he fell backward. Now it was Harley’s turn to pounce. He began pummeling the marine with body shots and knocked him senseless with a precision blow to the chin. The marine went straight over on his back as half the crowd roared and the other half booed.

Shaker stood over the marine for a second, but then he suddenly jumped on him, straddled him, and began beating him with his fists, elbows, and forearms. The referee pulled him off, but Shaker knocked the referee out cold with a punch to the temple. He turned back to the motionless marine. Harley looked around, saw a piece of concrete the size of a brick on the ground a couple of feet away, picked it up, and bashed the marine’s skull several times with the concrete. He finally stood, dropped the concrete, and raised his arms in victory.

“Spit on me, would you?” Shaker yelled. “Fuck you! I done killed me a soldier boy.”

The crowd immediately began to disperse.

“Shit,” Sheriff Corker said. “This ain’t good.”

“Get on down there,” Roby said. “See if he’s really dead.”

“If he’s really dead, I ain’t here.”

“Do you think I’m here? Do you think anybody was here? Dead or alive, we gotta deal with him. All I’m asking you to do is go down there and check it out while I deal with my boys and the money. I’ll be along directly.”

Sheriff Corker descended the two flights of steps to the fighting area. Harley Shaker was standing ten feet from the marine, a wild look in his eyes. Everyone else, including the referee, had left.

“What the hell, Harley?” Corker said. “You know the rules!”

“He spit on me! You seen it! He spit on me! Nobody spits on Harley Shaker and lives to tell about it.”

The sheriff knelt and felt for a carotid pulse. Nothing. The marine’s eyes were bloody, open, and lifeless.

“You killed him,” Corker said, struggling to stand back up.

“Shouldn’ta spit on me.”

“Do you know what kind of heat this could bring down on us?”

“I don’t care. Bring the heat. He shouldn’ta spit on me. You gonna try to arrest me? ’Cause that won’t go too good for you.”

“No. Get on out of here.”

“Not without my money. I want my money.”

“Fine, you want your money? You can just hang around and collect from Roby. I don’t know if he’ll feel much like paying you, though, after what you’ve done.”

A few minutes passed. Shaker paced in a circle, and the sheriff smoked a cigarette.

“Is he really dead?” a rough voice said. It was Roby Penn. He walked through a back door and sauntered into the abandoned warehouse space a few minutes later.

“Deader than four in the morning,” Sheriff Corker said. Corker looked back down at the marine, who had somehow chosen to come to this place for a bare-knuckle-boxing match and wound up dead.

“Harley, you crazy son of a bitch. What’d you have to go and kill him for?”

“He spit on me, Roby. You seen it.”

“And now we got a body on our hands that we have to get rid of. And this ain’t just some redneck who lives with his granny, Harley. This boy’s family has a bunch of money. They’re gonna make sure people come looking for him.”

“So? We make sure they don’t find him,” Shaker said.

“What do you think we ought to do with him, Tree?” Penn said to the sheriff.

“Shit, I don’t know. We only got about three hundred people running around out there who know what happened here today.”

“Yeah, and every one of them knows the code and the price for breaking it. They’ll keep their mouths shut,” Penn said.

“Bull. They drink and they flap their gums,” the sheriff said. “Word’ll get around.”

“So what do you want to do with him?”

“Get a truck, a tarp, and some shovels.”

“So you’re gonna bury him?” Penn said. “Where?”

“I figure it’s your place and your problem,” the sheriff said. “Besides, you make the most money, you take on the worst problems when something goes bad.”

“You want me to bury him? You don’t give me orders, fat man.”

“I’m not touching this, Roby. Make Harley help you. Maybe he’ll think twice before he goes off on somebody again. And make sure y’all do it right. This guy needs to go away.”





CHAPTER 14

A gleaming black Cadillac cruised slowly into the parking lot of a popular restaurant not far from Neyland Stadium and backed into a spot about twenty feet from where I was sitting. It was a new car, a sleek CT-6 sedan. It looked like it should be carrying a mob boss. The windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see who was driving.

After receiving a phone call from Granny Tipton, I’d jogged from my apartment to a public park a couple of miles away, cutting through strip malls, doubling back, heading into and out of residential areas briefly, and then down Neyland Drive toward the restaurant. I had to make sure the cops weren’t following me. After Dr. Nicolas Fraturra, I’d gone back into full paranoid mode. It was an exhausting way to live, but I was already becoming used to it. I got up off the bench I was sitting on and walked toward the car. I went to the passenger side, opened the door, and peered in.