A Swollen Red Sun (3 page)

She was a small, frail skeleton with loose skin, and part of her died in his arms every day. But Olen held her hand until the end. She was tormented with intolerable pain. Yet all he could do was watch and cry and wish that God would take him instead of her.

She died on a Tuesday morning.

He woke up in the recliner the hospital had placed beside her bed. There was a doctor and a nurse in the room. The machine was loud, and the sound it made was flat and continuous. He knew that she was gone. She had waited until he fell asleep before she left him.

He did not cry; he just looked out the window until the room was empty. And then it was the two of them. Him alive and her dead. He should have held her hand when she disappeared into that heavenly void, but he’d been sleeping.

He never had a chance to say good-bye.

Olen lost a war with emotion and stared through the glass. There was hard rain and wind and a sky filled with light, but he never saw a rainbow.

Deputy Dale Everett Banks woke before the sun and walked out the back door to piss. The wind was cool. It came from the east in a constant push and brought with it the first weak specks of light.

He’d stayed up until 2:00 a.m. Couldn’t sleep. Woke up twice to take leaks—not that he couldn’t have waited; he just wanted to come outside and stand there.
Think
.

He felt bad about the money. Drug money though it was. He’d stolen it, and that knowledge played hell on his conscious. One way or another, he had to give the money back. But he
couldn’t
give it back. Or
wouldn’t
give it back. He had tough decisions to make before things went wrong. Country people, dirt-poor from birth, did not lose that kind of money, even to the law, without trying to get back what was taken.

When Jerry Dean came, and eventually he would, Banks had to be ready.

After the obligatory pot of coffee, he packed his first dip of the morning and went to the back porch to watch the golden orange sun crest slowly. Bacon frying and hard snaps of fat and grease popping in cast iron called him from the kitchen.

They’d bought an old cabin of rough battered logs and fixed it up over five long years of weekend remodelings and countless vacations spent cutting cedar. They hammered and hung drywall and ran electrical and did plumbing. Added two rooms on back and a laundry, with a loft above it all where they watched the stars at night through a skylight window.

Everything felt right when Banks closed his eyes.

“Dad, Mom says c’mon in here. Breakfast’s ready.”

Banks nodded, sucked that last tuft of minty black for all it was worth, worked it dry, then dug it out with the tip of his tongue and let it fall in a spent clump on the grass. “Tell ’er I’m comin’, Jake.”

Jake was fifteen and soon to be driving, with a strong interest in farming. He wore Wranglers and boots. Knew how to gut deer and change oil. He could drive a tractor and clean a shotgun. He worked as hard as a boy his age could and made his daddy proud.

They ate breakfast in a hurry. Steph was texting. Reminded her mother she’d need hair spray. Jake reminded them both he had a school trip to Kansas City for the FFA. Had to have his money turned in by Friday or he couldn’t go.

“How much you need again, boy?”

Jake was hesitant to say. He knew they didn’t have it to give.

“Hundred dollars,” he said, and swallowed hard.

“Hundred dollars!” Banks yelled. “Goddamn.”

His wife stopped what she’d been doing and looked at him with the same tough eyes she always did when he swore in front of the kids. “Dale
Everett
,” she scolded.

Grace laughed her precious little laugh. Her laughter was the sound of paradise. The sound angels made. The laugh a father could love more than anything else in the world.

She was eating the jelly off her toast and she looked up with red cheeks and soft blue eyes.

“Hey, pumpkin,” Banks said.

“Dah-dee!”

Grace was the love of his life. She was born with disabilities, but they worked with her every day. Jude quit her job at the courthouse to give Grace what she needed, and it was hard on her, hard on everyone. But after the first year, they saw the improvements they had feared with all their hearts that they would never see.

Now six, she was so alive with her words and observations. She was slow, but amazing in all the ways that special kids are. She took nothing and gave back love and smiles.

Banks loved his family enough to die for them. He would take money that wasn’t his from a meth cook to give them a better life. He would send his kids to college and invest in their futures. It was a cold, hard world beyond their small farm. So that was the least he could do.

Jake looked at his father, curious and guilty for wanting.

Banks winked and blew his angel, Grace, a kiss. He told the wife he was sorry about what he’d said and then told Jake to have a good time in Kansas City.

The boy exploded with raw bliss that only a fifteen-year-old boy would know. Jude gave Dale a look that said
we don’t have a hundred dollars
, but Banks took everything in with warm eyes. Told his wife they’d make do. Told his family he loved them but he had to go to work.

“Catch some bad guys today, Dad,” Jake said.

“Bye, Daddy,” Steph followed. Her eyes never left the phone.

He gave his Grace a kiss on her tiny strawberry lips and did the same to Jude.

“We gonna be all right, Dale?” she whispered.

He said they’d be just fine. Told Jude to be sure and get Steph her hair spray.

He left the house and went to work. Already wondering if he’d made a mistake, and choosing to believe he hadn’t.

Banks met Hastings by the antique water fountain that was known to give cool water with rust.

“How’d you do last night, kid?”

Bo said he hit three home runs and a double.

Banks told Hastings that was bullshit. Asked him how many beers he’d had.

“Relax, boss. Had the old lady drive me home.”

Banks smiled. Hastings was a good kid. Big and strong with a bull head and an iron will. His old man had been a good cop but could not hold things together. Started drinking hard, harder than a man should drink when he wore a badge. His paperwork got sloppy; he started boozing on the job. Then he would drink behind the wheel. Some knew; some didn’t.

In the end, he made a bad decision and saved everyone the trouble of pretending.

“That tweaker ever show up last night, boss?”

Banks took a drink of hot coffee and cussed. “Huh?”

“That tweaker? Meth head with the bad tattoos.”

Banks swallowed more hot coffee. He felt awkward and could not look at Bo. He shrugged and said he never saw the man.

“Guess one of us’ll be goin’ back out there at some point.”

Banks changed the subject. “Don’t you have court?”

“Yep,” Hastings said. “Never fails.”

Banks told the kid he’d see him around and left the station. The kid left for court.

The Gasconade County Courthouse was perched high above the Missouri River on a towering stoop of land outside Hermann. Its dome roof and mural paintings adorned the inside and the familiar smell of old dust greeted Hastings.

A deputy’s life was a life of inconvenience, often testifying several times a month.

Hastings left the station by a quarter of ten, bound for his date with court. He’d pulled a kid over for speeding in the spring. Thought nothing of it. Just assumed he would let the boy go with a warning. Never figured the boy would run. But he did. He waited until Bo was beside his truck and then dropped the hammer. When he did, the ass end jumped to the left and almost hit the deputy.

Bo dove out of the way, reached for his gun on instinct, but stopped. Had to think for a minute. He could not believe that little son of a bitch had run.

Hastings jumped into the cruiser and ran codes. Lights swirled in red and blue and sirens cut the afternoon silence as the engine raced and screamed across the Christopher S. Bond Bridge.

But the chase was short-lived, and the kid wrapped his truck around a box elder tree. Not hard enough to kill him, but hard enough to throw him out a window. Hastings called for an ambulance and waited. When they searched the kid’s truck, they found a small baggie of meth and enough pot to twist a joint. Not enough drugs to land him time but enough to draw five years’ probation.

Hastings sat down in the courtroom and waited to be called and tried not to fall asleep.

Banks wanted to swing out past Helmig Ferry and see Jerry Dean. Wanted to know what he’d be dealing with. Jerry Dean could not report the stolen money, but he
had
seen cops at his place. Assuming that was him in the boat. Banks knew it was.

By noon, Banks was on the other side of the county. He was on his way to a call about stolen car batteries when an Amber Alert went across the radio about a missing high school girl. It was the kind of call that precedes other calls.

Banks remembered her name, Summer Atwood. She had disappeared from Franklin County after the homecoming football game. A friend dropped her off at a commuter parking lot, where she’d parked but was never seen again.

At the time, it was big news. It still was. Sightings had been reported off and on for the last few weeks. None of them proved real. A lot of high school girls looked alike.

“Gasconade Central, this is 104. Am currently in the area of New Haven, by the Franklin County line. Please advise.”

A call had come in. She’d been seen at the Fuel Mart at the south edge of town.

“104, this is Gasconade Central. Please be advised we have 105 en route.”

Banks reached for the mic attached to the top of his shirt. “Gasconade Central, this is 104. Copy that.”

Banks let off the gas and grabbed his clipboard to restudy the address. Back to the less pressing issue of the missing car batteries.

Jerry Dean Skaggs spent the morning watering the plants that paid his bills. His cash crops grown along the Gasconade River were scattered and strung out in small intimate clusters. Nurtured on the south side, among the cedars and inlets that jutted and poked out of banks that made narrow passage.

He walked a half-mile through itch weed and dense timber with a wooden pole across his back. It stuck out a good four feet beyond each shoulder, and every two feet there were large brass hooks where he’d hang the four five-gallon buckets it took to provide drink.

He walked a different path each time to avoid creating an obvious trail for some hunter to stumble across and follow. There were many different kinds of hunters in the woods. Deer hunters and coon hunters and turkey hunters.
Even pot hunters
. People just like him who poached other growers’ crops. Jerry Dean would know about that. Jerry Dean had been known for crop poaching.

Farmers and pot rustlers who knew what they were looking for were always a threat, but a good cultivator with strong survival instincts
used his head
and was not afraid to put the work in.

That meant walk and crawl and carry.

Jerry Dean carried water over rough country. Up rocky hills and down deep hollers. Brought nourishment to his plants. Crops grown in places hard to reach. He’d pick the last place he, himself, would venture, places a man would not explore without good reason. Then he’d work the dirt with a shovel and mixed chicken shit with the soil.

Thorny patches of locust thorn worked best. A man would have to be curious indeed to crawl through spiky jagged locust thorn. Sharp as knife points and they gave deep cuts that burned like a napalm fire.

Jerry Dean crawled through many feet of sharp prickly points and edges, which gouged and sliced and stuck him. But he worked through it.
Determined.
Four days strong on crank. He was hard at work at his livelihood. Growing good weed. Better weed than those other peckerheads around similar parts could manage.

It was high-grade Afghan Kush he and his partner, Bazooka Kincaid, sold in bulk to the coons in the city. They funneled the weed down a pipeline courtesy of Jerome Delmont, a spook he’d met in Algoa.

It was tumultuous at first, but they’d grown close—driven together by circumstance—and a trust formed, groomed slowly over time, until they bonded as cellmates do.

Jerry Dean made his rounds to the
girls
and removed the lids from the buckets and gave them the nourishment they needed. His shoulders ached, and he dipped in the river to wash the funk off. To wake him up and give him a clean face for the twenty-minute boat ride back to the trailer. He would sleep it off at his cousin Ronnie’s. He did not want to deal with pigs. He’d check his money later; it was fine.

He needed half a day’s rest but managed to stay conscious long enough to pass out in the small cluttered bedroom of his cousin’s trailer without air-conditioning.

Fish stirred outside his mobile home. Shirtless and lean-muscled. Wearing sullied jeans with a hole in the knee and a pair of cowboy boots. It was a hot day for October. Eighty-two degrees. He walked to his small shed and opened the door and stepped inside. There was a window unit working overtime, but you couldn’t tell. Water ran down the wall and soaked an extension cord that ran out the door and stuck in a utility pole.

“It’s hotter than two rats fuckin’ in a wool sock out there.”

Jackson Brandt nodded absently. He was propped up against a toolbox on an old kitchen chair. There was a lightbulb in his hands. Sweat running down both cheeks onto his neck.

He’d punched out the center of the metal ring and dumped a handful of salt in the bulb. He held his thumb over the hole and shook the bulb vigorously. Specks of salt removed the white kaolin stain on the glass.

He screwed the lid from a plastic soda bottle over the threads. There was a hole at the top he’d fitted with the hollow tube of an ink pen.

Jackson worked slowly and methodically. He was heavily involved, thoroughly engaged at the deepest level of concentration. Lightbulb pipes were delicate to construct and difficult to maintain, but they were the best pipes for smoking crank if you had the patience to make one.