Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(58)
“From everything I know about Roby Penn,” Granny said, “he’s a bad hombre and getting worse by the minute. He has to go, and soon.”
“How?” I said.
“We’re counting on you, Darren. You’ll figure something out.”
I was beginning to wonder whether I really could do anything about Roby Penn. He seemed so deeply ingrained in what was going on in the county, and he was so violent, that I didn’t know whether I could take him on. I decided I’d worry about it later. “Do you by any chance have any idea what happened to that marine? You’ve heard about him, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard, and I think I know what happened. There’s a big network of men who attend those bare-knuckle fights in counties all over the Appalachians. They send out mass text messages when the fights are going to happen. Eugene and Ronnie know more about it than I do, but they’ve told me some things. The mass text seems like a stupid way to operate because it seems to me the cops could come in, grab up one phone, and they’d have everybody on the list. But the police just aren’t interested in what they’re doing, because they do it in counties where they know they can pay people off.”
“Right, but back to the question. Do you know who killed Gary Brewer?”
“The word I got is that when the fight started, the marine knocked the boy he was fighting—name’s Harley Shaker out of Cocke County—knocked him down and spat on him. Now I don’t know Harley Shaker personally, but I know some of the Shaker family, and I would think that if you spit on one of them, even during a fight, you would do so at your peril. It’d be looked at the same as pissing on him.”
“So Brewer spit on this Harley Shaker, and Shaker beat him to death?”
“That’s what people who ain’t supposed to be saying anything are saying.”
“Heard anything about what happened to his body?”
Granny shook her head. “When something like that happens, everybody runs. So I haven’t heard anybody say what happened to the body. My guess, though, is that Roby Penn would have had to take care of it. It happened at his place, from what I hear. He would have cleaned up the mess.”
I was wearing gloves, but my fingers were beginning to tingle so I shoved my hands in my jacket pocket.
“What else do you know about Roby Penn?” I said.
“Quite a bit, but probably not as much as I should. They say you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Roby’s an enemy and he doesn’t even know it. I should know more about him. I know his family is from around here, that he had kinfolk who served in World War II, and that he enlisted and went to Vietnam. Wound up getting wounded. I know that a couple of years after he got out, the state government came in and wanted a piece of his property to build a highway. He told them to go to hell, so they took it under eminent domain. When they came out with the bulldozers to start the work, Roby started firing at them with a deer rifle. He could have killed several of them, but he didn’t. Still, they gave him six years in prison for it. Then his son got killed in Iraq by his own guys. What do they call that? Friendly fire?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Friendly fire.”
“The army tried to cover it up. Roby stayed on them, though, and the truth finally came out. Several years ago, after he’d done the six years in prison, he quit filing income tax returns and quit paying taxes. That cost him another year, but he had to go to a federal pen. So he’s had run-ins with local, state, and federal governments, and he hates them all. He’s in his midsixties now, and these murders tell me he might be going off the deep end.”
“So you want me to go at Roby the old-fashioned way or the newfangled way? Old-fashioned is figure out a way to get him into a confrontation and kill him. Newfangled is the cop way. Get informants in, do surveillance, and get him on tape. Find out who was with him when he killed Morris and his wife and jumped in the boat. Put all of them on trial and in prison.”
Granny stopped and looked up at me. “Jumped in the boat? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Just a theory. I’ve already heard around the office that they escaped from Morris’s house on the water.”
She gave me a look that told me she didn’t necessarily believe me, but she turned and started walking again. “I don’t think you’re going to get him the cop way. Do you know the tie between Roby Penn and the sheriff?”
“I think I’ve heard they’re related, but I don’t know how exactly.”
“Roby is Tree Corker’s mother’s oldest brother, which makes him Tree’s uncle.”
“Nepotism at its finest,” I said.
“That’s how it’s usually done. Now what was it you want to talk to me about?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Must be bad,” she said.
“Granny, you’ve been so good to me, and I know when I agreed to do this district attorney thing I said you could do whatever you want, but I’ve changed my mind about part of it. I’d like to ask you to please not sell any drugs in Knox County. When I was out campaigning, I talked to so many people whose families had been devastated by drugs, people whose lives had been ruined. You can take on as many gambling rackets as you want, and if you insist on doing the drug trade, I won’t go back on what I said, but would you please consider not selling the drugs in Knox County? It would be a huge favor to me.”