Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(72)

“You ain’t gonna be able to sneak up on him. I swear he has the senses of a wild animal. What kind of weapon you carrying?”

“It’s a Walther pistol. Twenty-two-caliber, long-rifle ammo. Hollow point. It doesn’t have a lot of bang, but I’m accurate. If he starts shooting, I’ll shoot back, and chances are I’ll hit him. If I hit him, he’ll be in trouble.”

“Damn, son, do you have any idea what Roby’s got inside that trailer of his?” the sheriff said. “He’s got military-grade weapons, fully automatic M16s. He’s even got an M60 machine gun in there. I’ve heard he’s got a grenade launcher on one of his assault rifles, but I ain’t ever seen it. You might want to think this through some more. No sense in going out there and getting your head blown off.”

“Made up my mind, Sheriff. A woman I know called me pigheaded not too long ago. She was right. Nothing is going to change around here unless Roby goes to jail or off to that big cockfighting ring in the sky. He’s going to one of those places this morning.”

“You can forget jail,” the sheriff said.

“Yeah, I get it.”

We rode for almost twenty minutes in silence. I concentrated on taking deep breaths, trying to calm my nerves, telling myself to just let whatever happens happen. Stay calm, stay alert. If you get shot, keep fighting until your last breath.

“You ready?” the sheriff said. “About a half mile on the right, I’m going to turn off onto a gravel driveway. It runs a couple of hundred yards back through the woods. Roby’s trailer is at the end of the driveway. I’m gonna hit my blue lights when I get close to the trailer. He’ll be up. Don’t think the man ever sleeps. When he sees the lights, he’ll come out, but he’ll be suspicious and he’ll be armed. He carries a Colt .45 everywhere he goes.”

“Have you ever done this before? Come up his driveway this early in the morning with your lights on?”

The sheriff shook his head. “He’ll think something is wrong. As soon as I stop, I’m going to get out and start walking toward his trailer. I’ll say something like, ‘Roby, we got a problem,’ and then you get out. I don’t know if he’ll recognize you, but you’ve been in the papers and on television and on those buses and billboards all over town, so he probably will. You take it from there. If you want to just open up on him, go ahead.”

“I’m not going to ambush him,” I said. “It’ll be a fair fight. What will you do when the shooting starts?”

“Probably wet my pants,” the sheriff said. “Here it is.”

He turned off the road onto a gravel driveway. “Ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

I felt a sudden sense of calm, something similar to when I stepped into the morning air to duel with Big Pappy Donovan. My senses were heightened, but my hands were perfectly still, my heart rate slow and steady. If I were to die this morning, I would do so without panic. I’d accepted my fate, whatever it might be.

The sheriff turned on his emergency lights and gunned the cruiser’s powerful engine. At the end of the driveway he turned the wheel hard and did a power-slide stop that put us about thirty feet from the trailer. A porch light came on almost immediately, and the sheriff got out of the car. I pulled my pistol from the holster and held it in my lap, waiting for Roby to appear.

A skinheaded man with a wide, white handlebar mustache stepped out the door and walked down the three steps from the trailer’s small front porch. He was wearing combat-fatigue pants, boots, and a white, sleeveless T-shirt. In his right hand was a nickel-plated pistol.

“What the fuck you doing out here this time of the morning, Tree?” Roby yelled.

“We’ve got a problem, Roby,” the sheriff said.

At that moment, I opened the door and stepped out. The wind was howling, making it difficult to hear.

Roby stopped in his tracks about twenty feet away.

“The district attorney has a warrant for your arrest,” the sheriff said.

I held up a piece of paper that I’d folded at my apartment and stuck in my jacket pocket. It was the rental agreement for my apartment.

Roby smiled and took two steps back. His gun started to come up, but mine came up quicker, and I squeezed a round off before he could take close aim. The bullet hit him as his gun roared. I felt the shock wave off the round he fired at me as it whizzed by my left ear, and I knelt. Roby staggered slightly, then turned and ran up the steps and back into the trailer. I fired two more shots through the door opening before he got it closed, but I wasn’t sure they hit him.

I turned and looked at the sheriff, who was just standing there like a frightened child. He hadn’t even pulled one of his Pythons from a holster.

“Sheriff!” I yelled. “Sheriff! Get behind the car.”

I was cursing myself for not killing Roby. One shot from twenty feet should have been enough, but the combination of the wind, seeing the size of the barrel of the gun in Roby’s hand, and the bullet he fired, nearly hitting me in the head, must have made me flinch a little. I moved around behind the sheriff’s cruiser and waited to see what Roby’s next move would be. It didn’t take long to find out, and it wasn’t something I was prepared for.

I’d never been in the military, so I didn’t know the awesome power of a fully automatic assault rifle. The sheriff’s pride and joy, his beautiful black-and-gold cruiser, was suddenly being turned into Swiss cheese as the rounds hammered into it. Roby was firing short bursts of between four and six rounds each from a window at the far left of the trailer. The windshield and all the windows exploded, and I was showered in glass.