Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(67)
“Daddy, there’s a lot of things I haven’t told you over the years. When I took over for Joe DuBose, it was a huge surprise to me. I mean, who was I? Country bumpkin, raised out here in the hills. You wasn’t ever active in politics and neither was momma, as far as I could tell, so when they appointed me, I near fell over. Had no idea what I was doing. I’d only been on patrol for a couple of years after I finished working at the jail. Turned out Roby was the one who got me the job because he told this district attorney at the time, this man named Ben Clancy, that if he got me into the sheriff’s office I’d do whatever Roby told me to do. And that’s what I did for a while. I was a coward.”
“So they been using you,” Calvin said. “Roby and whoever he’s in with. Who is it? Politicians?”
“Mostly, but more than that. There’s a huge flow of money going. Roby and some other people do what they do, and we look the other way. And when I say ‘we,’ I mean the sheriff’s department, the district attorney’s office, maybe even the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the FBI.”
“And he pays you? Roby pays you and them others?”
“He does. He pays, but he ain’t the only one that pays, by any means. There’s a pretty good crowd of them that digs in their pocket every month. But Roby is one of the biggest. He makes so much money it boggles the mind. And then there’s the drug dealers and the pimps and the—”
“Drug dealers? You mean to tell me you let people sell drugs and then you take part of the money?”
“I’ve been working with the FBI for years hoping to put a stop to it, but they never would arrest anybody. Turns out their agent was a crook. He took all the money I’d been bringing him and left the country after I told him Roby was gonna kill those people. Nobody knows where he is. And now somebody powerful in Nashville wants me to kill Roby and another man. I ain’t ever killed anybody, Daddy. I just got in way over my head. I can’t do it. I can’t kill Roby.”
“He’d kill you in a heartbeat,” Calvin said.
“I know that. I know what he’s capable of. Hell, he’s threatened to kill me several times over the years. He threatened to come here and kill you if I ever crossed him. And I’ve seen what he can do with my own two eyes. But I ain’t like him. I can’t kill him.”
“Then arrest him.”
“I might as well put a gun to my head and pull the trigger.”
“Get this new district attorney to kill him for you.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“There’s been all kinds of talk about him killing folks. Go talk to him. Tell him what you’ve told me. Tell him somebody has to either arrest Roby or kill him, and you doubt anybody’s gonna be arresting him anytime soon. If he really has killed people before, and if he wants to clean things up around here, maybe he’ll do it.”
“He’d have to kill me, too. I’d be a witness.”
“So? Just because you’re a witness doesn’t mean you have to say anything.”
“Roby’s kin, Daddy. He’s my uncle. The district attorney would think I’d tell.”
“Will you stop going on about Roby being kin? Roby Penn doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about anything or anybody but Roby. He got drunk and killed his girlfriend and left her in a dumpster. He fights animals, Clifford. What kind of person fights animals and gambles on it? You say he threatened you, threatened me. You’ve heard the stories, just like I have. You know he’s killed men, probably women and children, too. Who knows how many? Everyone he kills from this point forward is on you. You have the power to stop him. I don’t know who the person in Nashville was that told you to kill Roby, but seems to me he was giving you some pretty good advice.”
Tree wiped his mouth, rose, and put his bowl and bread plate in the sink.
“Thank you for the advice,” he said. “I don’t know how much of it I can use, but thanks just the same.”
“Go talk to the district attorney,” Calvin said. “What can it hurt? Just be honest. It might feel good.”
Tree stopped at the door and looked back at his daddy.
“It might at that,” he said. “I’ve never really known what it felt like to be a real sheriff. Hell, I might just like it. You be safe now. Keep an eye out.”
CHAPTER 39
Roby Penn liked to stay close to home, but on this day, he was a little more than fifty miles from his trailer outside Knoxville. He was standing on a tree-covered hillside five hundred yards away from a house that was being built just outside of Newport, the county seat of Cocke County. The town was known for its lawlessness in East Tennessee. Its rugged mountains were home to folks who raised fighting roosters and pit bulls, operated chop shops, and grew large patches of marijuana.
Roby had made three trips to Newport before he picked out his spot. The shot wouldn’t be that difficult, and the report would echo off the surrounding mountains so that nobody would know where it came from until the investigators figured out the angles many hours or even a day after Roby was long gone. He had borrowed a truck from a man who owed him a gambling debt and placed a tag he’d stolen off a car on the truck. It was parked half a mile away off an old logging road. Anyone who may have happened by would think the driver was either deer hunting or looking for deer signs since the gun-hunting season had started four days earlier.