Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(74)

“Thank you, Sheriff,” I said, and I reached out and shook his hand. “I thought for sure I was dead. I appreciate everything you did this morning. You showed a lot of courage.”

“Me? You’ve got the balls of an Angus bull, son. The way you stood there toe-to-toe with him and then kept your head when he started with that M16. Hell, I peed on myself a little when he came out with that machine gun. It was a good call you made to cut and run when we did. I didn’t have any idea I could move so fast.”

By this time, we’d walked back to the spot where the sheriff’s car lay as dead as Roby Penn. He shook his large head and removed his hat.

“Rest in peace, Felina,” he said.

“Felina? You named your cruiser Felina?”

“After that Marty Robbins song ‘El Paso.’”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that. Good song.”

The car was shot to hell. All the tires were flat, all the windows shot out, and it was leaking fluids.

“I don’t think she’s fixable,” the sheriff said.

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“Maybe I’ll get something a little more practical.”

“Sounds like a good idea. So now that Roby’s dead, what do we do with him?”

“I know what we ought to do with him. We ought to bury him where he buried that marine.”

“You know where Gary Brewer is?”

Corker nodded. “I hate to admit it, but I do. He’s buried in a barrel underneath a garbage dump that’s just over that knob.”

“I was just in that garbage dump,” I said. “It helped saved my life, along with you and my other friend.”

I knew I was lucky to be alive. I was lucky the dump happened to be there and provided me with enough cover to keep Roby from tearing me to shreds with the machine gun, I was lucky the sheriff had grown a backbone and wounded his uncle, and I was lucky Eugene had shown up. But the thought of Brewer in a barrel so nearby dampened my spirits. Life was so fickle. I could have very easily wound up in a barrel next to him.

“So what’s our story going to be?” the sheriff said.

“I think the story should be that you and I came out here to question Roby as part of the investigation into the disappearance of Gary Brewer and the murder of Stephen Morris. We don’t have to say much more than that, just that an informant had told us that Brewer was buried on this property and that Roby had bragged to someone about killing Morris. When we got here, he opened fire on us with automatic weapons. We returned fire, split up, and when he went after me, you went into his house and grabbed a hunting rifle. Just as he was about to kill me, you took a shot from about two hundred yards and put a bullet in his head.”

“That’s what we’re going to tell the TBI? They investigate officer-involved shootings.”

“Not unless I tell them to. And I’m not going to tell them to. I’m the district attorney and you’re the sheriff. This is our case. Screw those guys. Let’s see if we can find the bullet that killed Roby. If we can come up with it, we’ll get rid of it so we don’t have to worry about ballistics.”

“Sounds like a plan,” the sheriff said.

We searched for twenty minutes in the brown grass before the sheriff found the flattened, bloody piece of metal that had torn through Roby’s skull. It was about thirty feet from the body on a patch of bare dirt. I took it to the edge of a cluster of trees fifty yards to the right and buried it.

“You got a cell phone?” I said.

“It got broken during the fight.”

I unzipped one of my coat pockets, pulled out my phone, and tossed it to him.

“Guess you better call in some folks. Keep it as low-key as possible. Nothing in the press. You have people you can trust, right?”

“Plenty of them.”

“There’s a lot of mess to clean up here, and we need to find Brewer’s body,” I said. “Did Roby tell you exactly where it is?”

“Pretty close. He used a front-end loader and his tractor. I don’t think it’ll take all that long to find him.”

“His family will be grateful to you,” I said.

“And to you, Counselor.”

It was the first time the sheriff had ever called me “Counselor.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Make the call.”





CHAPTER 43

I called Claire the first chance I got, which was after one of Sheriff Corker’s deputies gave me a ride to my apartment around noon. Roby Penn had been hauled off to the morgue, the sheriff’s car had been hauled off to the junkyard, and Gary Brewer’s body had been located and removed from a fifty-five-gallon drum that was buried very close to where the sheriff said it would be. What was left of his body was placed in a body bag and taken to the morgue.

There were other barrels in the dump, too. A deputy opened one to make sure there wasn’t a body in it and found it stuffed with bundles of shrink-wrapped cash. They hadn’t counted it all when I left, but there had to be more than a half million dollars, and they were just getting started.

The sheriff’s deputies also hauled fifty different weapons out of Roby’s trailer along with thousands of rounds of ammunition. They would be seized and eventually wind up in the sheriff department’s arsenal.