Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(66)

“Make them both go away, and do it soon,” Turner said. “If we need you for Street later, I’ll contact you.”

The sheriff felt himself being squeezed against the passenger door as the car made a quick turnaround, and they cruised back to the apartment complex in silence.





CHAPTER 38

The trailer where Tree Corker grew up sat halfway up a hill, its base carved out of the red clay and rock beneath the surface. It was late afternoon by the time he returned from Cookeville, and the shadows were long beneath the quickly fading sun. A rusted, faded-green pickup sat in the gravel driveway, old but still operational. The place was marked by the signs of poverty, but Tree knew his daddy worked hard to keep the place looking respectable. He fixed leaks, caulked windows, painted when he could afford paint. He kept the wood-burning stove in perfect condition and spent hours cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood. Tree’s daddy had always been distant, but the sheriff badly needed someone to talk to. Tree knew his daddy was honest, and he needed counsel from an honest man.

Calvin Corker greeted his son with a small wave of the hand as he was climbing down a ladder from the trailer’s roof. It was a standard greeting and as much physical affection as he showed Tree. Calvin was a tall man like his son, although time and gravity had reduced his height from six feet five inches to just over six feet three. Unlike his son, he was lean and quiet. He’d spent his life as a laborer at a sawmill three miles from his home, eventually becoming the supervisor before the sawmill shut down and forced his retirement at the age of sixty.

“You’re moving around pretty good for an old man,” Tree said as his daddy put the ladder in a lean-to shed behind the trailer.

“You can call me old when I get to seventy,” Calvin said. “Got two years of youth left in me. What brings you up this way? Got no criminals to catch?”

“I got a pretty serious problem, Daddy,” Tree said. “You got a few minutes to talk?”

The sheriff saw an unfamiliar look come over his father’s face. This was new ground for both of them.

“I was about to go in and fix me some supper,” Calvin said. “You hungry?”

“Am I breathing?”

The two men went inside, and Calvin headed for the kitchen. Tree went to the wall near the television where there was a photo of his mother when she was eighteen years old. To Tree, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She’d been a smoker all her life, though, and had died of complications due to emphysema and pneumonia five years earlier. Tree had yet to get over it, and he didn’t believe Calvin had, either.

“Looking at the picture of your momma again?” Calvin said from the kitchen.

“Yep. Pretty as ever.”

“Hard to believe she could produce something as ugly as you.”

“Hard to believe she’d marry something as ugly as you.”

“You know what they say: ‘Love is blind.’”

“It’s damned well true in this case.”

Tree knew the banter was his daddy’s way of showing affection, and he took no offense. They sniped whenever they were around each other and had since Tree could remember. Tree’s older brother, Charles, wasn’t close to the family. Charles had joined the air force right out of high school and was now living in Arlington, Texas. He’d come home once every four or five years prior to his mother’s death. They hadn’t heard from him since she’d died, though. Tree’s sister, Charlotte, two years younger, was a music teacher in the Campbell County school system. She and her family didn’t visit often, either, and Tree didn’t see much need in visiting people who didn’t seem to want to visit him. He believed his daddy felt pretty much the same way he did.

Tree could smell the food in the kitchen and walked in. His daddy was warming up a staple: leftover soup beans and corn bread.

“Smells good, Daddy,” Tree said.

“There just ain’t nothing better,” Calvin said. “I don’t care who you are or what you say, there ain’t nothing better than a pot of soup beans and a skillet of corn bread. I believe man was made to exist on those two things.”

“I don’t mind a steak every now and then,” Tree said.

“You can have your steak. I’ll eat my beans.”

Calvin plated the beans and buttered the corn bread. He put a pitcher of sweet tea on the table and sat down.

“Me or you?” he said.

“Your table,” Tree said.

“You always say that,” Calvin said, and he began to pray. When he was finished, he looked across the table and said, “So what do you want to chew on?”

“Big trouble brewing,” Tree said. “You hear about the election and the district attorney and his wife and a couple of other people getting shot?”

“I hear things,” Calvin said. “Don’t take the paper, but I watch the news, and Trisha comes by now and then. You know how she likes to gossip. Roby mixed up in all this?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Cause I know Roby. Known him all my life. He was in Vietnam when your momma and I got married. I was kinda glad, to tell you the truth. I figured he’d get liquored up at the reception and hurt somebody. You notice he didn’t ever come around here when you were a boy, didn’t you? He just ain’t right in the head, never was after Vietnam. Your momma knew it and I knew it, and we made him stay away. Does he have you in trouble?”