Dark and Bloody Ground (28 page)

“Bro,” Benny said to Donnie at the pool. Benny had taken to calling him that lately because, Benny said, “Donnie walks, talks, acts, and fucks like a nigger.” “Bro,” Benny said to him, “how’d you like to have some full-time butt?”

Donnie was for it. He knew Becky was nuts for him, he said. She had been hanging around his sister, exercising with her every damn day just to have the excuse to talk about him. She was polishing his motorcycle, from what he had heard.

As it happened, Carol’s daughter’s fifth birthday was the eighteenth. Carol could see her child, Sherry would visit with Renee, and they would bring back Becky Hannah with them. Sherry was uneasy about leaving Benny on his own for a few days—as far as she knew,
he had been faithful to her for more than two months—but she could not pass up the chance to see Renee and her parents.

On July 18 Rebecca Hannah met Sherry and Carol at the Knoxville airport and drove them in her Datsun sports car to a pizza parlor on Kingston Pike, where Carol’s father, mother, and daughter joined them to celebrate. Show Biz Pizza, which featured balloons and popcorn and an actual clown and relentless repetitions of “Happy Birthday,” was designed to entertain and placate a child whose parents’ work schedule, style of life, or other commitments rendered more demanding observances, such as a party at home, inconvenient. It was extra-special day care, where clashing cymbals and fake calliope toots made conversation avoidable.

After that Becky drove Sherry and Carol to Harriman, where they took Renee out to dinner. They spent the night at the same Kingston motel where Sherry had first hidden Benny and Donnie after the retreat from Rome.

They left early the next morning for Kentucky, taking advantage of Becky’s car, which was presumably unknown to the police, so Sherry and Carol could retrieve belongings left with Harold Clontz and the Mt. Vernon couple. They were lunching on corn dogs at a drive-in restaurant near London when two men, one wearing a sports jacket and the other casual clothes, approached the car from either side and displayed FBI badges.

“Let me do the talking,” Sherry said under her breath. She was in the passenger seat, Carol in the rear.

Sherry showed her license.

“Are you also known as Sherry Hodge?” an agent asked. Sherry said yes but that Wong was her true, legal name, because she was married to but separated from a Chinese. She had lived with Benny Hodge until recently and had from time to time assumed his name. They had shared a house on Route 5 in Harriman, but she was now living with her parents and did not know where Hodge had gone.

The agent showed her photographs of Benny and Donnie; she identified both of them. She knew that they were fugitives and that assisting them could lead to charges against her.

It would probably be a good idea to take a full statement from her, the agent said. Would the ladies agree to follow him to the local KSP post, where they could conduct an interview in more private surroundings?
Of course, Sherry said. To tell the truth, she had begun to hope that the FBI would find Benny, if they could capture him without hurting him. The strain of not knowing where he was had begun to take its toll on her.

On the short drive to the station Sherry wondered aloud how the FBI had found them. They must have been following Becky after all, knowing of her connection to Bartley. Becky had been present with Donnie’s sister when the FBI had questioned Sharon about her brother’s whereabouts. Or had the manager of the Kingston motel recognized the name Wong from Sherry’s previous registration and tipped off the FBI? It had probably been a mistake to have stayed there again.

Four FBI agents took turns asking Sherry questions at the London KSP post, a modern glass structure on an island at the juncture of 1-75 and Highway 80. They isolated her in a room away from Becky and Carol, in whom they displayed less interest.

Sherry spoke of how she had met Benny at Brushy. She said that she loved him with all her heart and was lost without him. She repeated word for word what she had told Agent Cloninger in Gene Foust’s presence—the fight on May 27, her speculation that Benny might have gone to his mother or to one of his wives, his professed determination to kill himself rather than return to prison. Her purpose in being in Kentucky now, she said through tears, was to try to contact acquaintances of Benny’s in a desperate attempt to locate him. She had persuaded Becky and Carol to come with her because she was afraid.

Where had Sherry spent the previous night? With her parents, Sherry responded. The agents suggested that they had information that conflicted with that idea. Perhaps she would care to correct herself? No, Sherry said. Whoever claimed that she had not been at her parents’ house was a liar.

She volunteered that she had a “close personal friend” with the Oak Ridge Police Department whom she would contact if and when Benny chose to surrender. She trusted this friend and believed he would not hurt Benny. If Benny ended up dead, maybe killing himself, she did not wish to be responsible. The honest truth was, she said, she was as anxious to find him as the FBI was. If he did contact her, she would try to talk him into giving himself up.

The agents let the women go; they drove back to Tennessee. From
what Sherry could determine, the FBI had believed her, except possibly about where she had spent the previous night—but it would not be unusual for someone to try to conceal having stayed in a motel close to her hometown. For safety’s sake she slept that night with her parents, fending off their questions and trying to ignore their warnings that she was ruining her life for a lost cause. She told them nothing about where she had been and said only that she would be returning to Benny and would stay in touch. Her father was wheezing so heavily that she could not sleep, thinking of the anxiety she was causing him and wondering if she would ever see him again.

The next day she had Becky drive her to Lake City, where Sherry confronted the fence and demanded money from him that she said he owed Benny. The fence responded by pulling a gun and threatening to blow her head off. Sherry instructed Becky to head straight to the Lake City Police Department, where Sherry telephoned Burl Cloninger and said that she was terrified. She was being stalked by one of Benny’s acquaintences, who was threatening her over some money Benny supposedly owed. She had never seen nor heard of the man before in her life.

What was she to do, being hounded by the FBI and now some crazed gunman? Was there some way she could be given police protection? She should relax, Cloninger told her. If she was not harboring Benny, did not know where he was, and did not owe money to criminals herself, she had nothing to worry about. He would be grateful if she stayed in touch. She said she certainly would. It was a tough world out there.

The women took three days to travel to Ormond Beach, driving only at night. Sherry was confident that they were not being followed. Even the FBI had to sleep, and they had better things to do than to trail women around the country.

Becky Hannah was delighted with the accomodations at the condo and spent hours each day running and walking on the beach, enjoying her first experience of the ocean. Sherry was pleased to see that Becky’s presence had the desired effect on Donnie, who was after her day and night. “Those two is going to croak of heart attacks,” Sherry predicted.

Soon the men plunged into preparations for what Roger began referring to as the million-dollar lick. It was just a phrase, Sherry suspected,
typical of Roger’s bullshit. They would probably be better off robbing one bank and getting out. The target Roger had chosen was no secret: he studied a map of Kentucky and marked in a booklet obtained from Radio Shack the police frequencies for the Eastern Kentucky region. Sherry bought Benny a nondescript summer suit, altered it for him as she always had, and asked few questions.

Early on Sunday morning, August 4th, she kissed her outlaw good-bye and asked him to be back by Friday, which was his thirty-fourth birthday. Benny said he would make every effort.

18

T
HEY DROVE THE OLDS STRAIGHT THROUGH
from Ormond Beach to Hazard, where Donnie and Benny registered at the Mountain View Motel as Snapper and Shane Hall. They timed the journey at nearly fourteen hours.

On Monday they made a quick run to Fleming-Neon, checking on the route and the doctor’s house. Returning through Whitesburg, Roger stopped at Maloney’s department store, which specialized in automotive and sporting supplies, to buy a box of Remington .45 automatic shells. That evening they drove to Viper, a village hidden in a hollow about eight miles south of Hazard, to pay a call on Sonny Spencer, whom Roger had known since they had been kids together. Sonny, Roger said, was blessed with a special talent, of which they could make very good use.

Sonny Spencer had not seen Roger for more than a year and a half. A wiry, taciturn fellow, Sonny had been in jail during that time; he greeted his old pal with something short of effusiveness. He led the men into his kitchen and offered them beer. He did not have any dope, he said; he was trying to stay clean on probation. He had managed to get hold of a bulldozer to do some stripping on the land he had inherited and was planning to rely on that and on the odd jobs he could pick up as a carpenter. He was just thanking his stars to be out of prison. Actually he had Lester Burns to thank. He would have been inside for twice as long, and convicted on other charges, if it hadn’t been for Lester.

Roger agreed that Lester indeed was a wizard, a friend to the needy if there ever was one, and recalled a couple of Lester’s more spectacular performances. Donnie said that he had heard his mother talk about Lester Burns, who was supposed to be the smartest lawyer in Kentucky and the richest.

They had in mind a job, Roger said, that would set the mouths of even the likes of Lester Burns to watering. What was more, they were prepared to let Sonny Spencer in on it. All he would have to do was open a certain safe.

He was not interested, Spencer said. He could not take the risk. The cops were watching him. Lieutenant Danny Webb from the KSP post over in Hazard knew his every move. It was like living in a goldfish bowl.

Donnie removed some cocaine from his jacket and began cutting it on the kitchen table. When he had three neat lines, he offered one to Spencer, who declined. Donnie sniffed up two through a rolled-up dollar bill and Roger did the other one.

It was nothing that complicated, Roger said. He had absolutely reliable information that a certain person over in Letcher County, way at God’s end of nowhere, had recently purchased one of those home safes. And Roger himself knew for a fact and had known for years that this man kept a truckload of money at home. If anyone could open that safe lickety-split, it was Sonny Spencer.

He was out of practice, Spencer said. He had no idea whether he could open it, the mechanisms changed all the time, and if it was a new one, he might not be able to crack it.

“Your mother’s ass you couldn’t. What if I told you this safe’s got a million bucks in it?”

Spencer whistled but said he was still not interested. He asked Roger not to talk about it anymore. He did not want to know more than he had already heard. He wished them the best of luck, but it was very important to him to keep his nose clean at the present time.

Maybe Sonny would like some help stripping that coal, Roger said. Where was the field? Just over the next hill, Spencer said. No, he did not need any additional men. It was a small operation.

“You might find you could use some help,” Roger said.

They checked out of the Mountain View Tuesday morning and drove over to Fleming-Neon for another look-see. Roger’s information was that the old man lived in the house alone, his wife having died a year ago. Rolling past at a crawl, they noticed for the first time
a siren horn attached to the house beside the front door. The trick would have to be to play their FBI routine well enough for the doctor to open the door voluntarily to let them in. Any sort of scuffle might be noticed from the road or heard by neighbors out on their porches on a warm summer’s evening, and the doctor might easily trip his alarm.

They continued on past the clinic. A patient was entering; others were waiting in their cars. It looked like a land-office business. Supposedly the doc was there every day without fail, until around five. It had been in the clinic that Roger’s friend Roe Adkins had received the fifty thousand in cash in a garbage bag from the old man, seven or eight years ago. Adkins never tired of telling the story.

Donnie asked what made Roger think that the doc still had that kind of money lying around. Maybe it had been a chance thing, because the banks had been closed that day.

Why did Donnie think the doc had bought a safe only a few weeks ago? Roger asked sarcastically. To keep his choppers in? To store his underwear? Besides, there were other indications nobody needed to know about. Donnie and Benny should just listen to him, follow orders, and get rich. Hadn’t he been right about the other Letcher County job and about Gray Hawk? What they needed to do now was to convince Sonny to help them open the safe. It would save precious time and could be crucial. Once they were inside the house, they would need to get out fast.

It was one of those hot, wet afternoons when it had rained so much and so regularly in the mountains, for days and days, that with the sun shining briefly here and there, water condensed, sending great plumes of mist into the air. This fog, this mist, was not a continuous thing, not a blanket as in the lowlands, but a scattering of rising smokelike columns forever moving and shifting among the verdant hills and hollows and mountaintops, as if ascending from mysterious conflagrations underground. It lent to the already shadowy landscape an atmosphere of silvery, eerie unease.

That afternoon Sonny Spencer leaned against his bright yellow 450 bulldozer, watching one of his two hired men operate a backhoe while the other shoveled coal that was slick with wet into a ten-ton truck. Suddenly, over the noise of the engine and the scraping of the claws of the scoop, he heard his name shouted from far away, echoing
through the hollow. He turned to see three figures on the ridge, silhouetted through the mist. The black barrel of a shotgun or a rifle protruded over the shoulder of one of the men. They began to descend the side of the hill. As they drew closer, Spencer recognized Roger Epperson and his sidekicks Bartley and Hodge. Bartley carried a rifle in the crook of one arm; in his other hand he dangled a big pistol.