Last Call for the Living (18 page)

As Hicklin was pulling out, a man driving a year-old Nissan Titan turned into the gas station. The driver gave him more than a passing glance.

The convenience store disappeared behind Hicklin. He checked his rearview.

He ascended a winding road that led up into the mountains. A moment later he passed a church that looked abandoned. No lights.

It seemed to Hicklin that night had originated there and was spreading outward.

*   *   *

Lang parked his
Nissan Titan with a notion to fill up the tank. He got out of the pickup, stretched his sore legs against the nagging pains of middle age that followed him like a chaperone. The two days since Kalamity Bibb's murder had been hard to bear. He'd taken a leave of absence at a time when he couldn't afford to.

But everyone knew why.

Other investigators and agencies had involved themselves with Kalamity's case, including the FBI gang infiltration unit. Lang didn't feel like a member of their fraternity, the investigation now well beyond his expertise. The Jube County Sheriff's Department had kindly but firmly been handed its hat.

Sallie Crews had been in touch with the Federal Bureau of Prisons and task forces from across the Southeast. Reports of bank robberies from Bakersfield, California, to Danbury, Connecticut. More than a dozen cities. Similar MOs.

Big news from Atlanta P.D. as Mexican gangs from California were chopping each other to pieces with machetes on the city's Southside. Mexican Mafia franchises—originating from prisons in Atwater and Pelican Bay—had set up shop in nearly every metro county. One house in the city of Smyrna had five hundred pounds of crystal meth stacked like pillows in a back room. Automatic weapons by the crateful.

Having started in South Florida, Nazi Low Riders from Arizona and Texas had traveled farther north into the Tennessee Valley, killing everyone on a twenty-name list. Snitches, rival black and Hispanic gang leaders, even the wife and daughter of a state witness. The hit squad, pure street muscle and following mandates from the top brass of the Aryan Brotherhood, was also suspected in a slew of robberies and assaults spanning five states.

Lang could only shake his head after reading the reports. Lawless men roaming the country. Savages without morals or restraint. And a couple of them had shown up in Jubilation County.

Crews had found Lang slightly crazed at Kalamity's house. He'd been sitting on the back porch, hidden in shadow, smoking his way through a pack of Marlboros. When they carted Kalamity's body out on a stretcher he got in his truck and left. Kal had been wrapped in a black bag, like raked leaves left out on the curb for collection.

He'd recalled the excitement he'd felt on his way to Kalamity's house. Lang never slept so good as he did there. With her.

Later that night he'd wrestled with memories of her. He drank a bottle of bourbon to forget.

Lang had ignored phone calls, including one from his daughter. When he heard Diane's voice on the answering machine he began to cry. Filled with self-loathing, he couldn't even pick up the phone and talk to the only one of his children who still cared. Beside him, Lady studied her owner as if the hound understood something of the human condition.

And found it exhausting.

*   *   *

The little bell
rang when the door opened. Harvey Ballew looked up from his paperback.

“Harvey.”

“Well, Sheriff Lang. What's your pleasure?” he said.

Ballew watched Lang make for the red-and-blue cases of beer.

He brought a case of Budweiser to the counter. Harvey offered him a cigarette from a Vantage soft pack.

“I heard about Kalamity,” the cashier said, a streak of sympathy in his eyes.

“Yeah.”

“My sister was over to KB's place earlier. Lots of people shook up about it. Seems there's some bad folks floating around up here.”

“Get me a pack of Mediums, would you?” Lang said.

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

Lang looked outside. Vacant pumps. Orange light under the canopy. The old highway beyond. He caught a glimpse of the Chevy step-side catching a green light before it disappeared from sight.

“Who was that in here just now? Man drivin' that old step-side,” Lang said.

“Reckon he's the meanest-lookin' son of a bitch I've seen lately. Wouldn't want to cross him.”

“Seen him before?” Lang said.

“No, sir.”

“What was so mean about him?”

“You can always tell the ones done some jail time. Them tattoos, you know?”

“Tattoos?”

“Lightning bolts on his neck,” Harvey said, pointing to just below his Adam's apple. “Like something from a comic book. But the scary thing—which I don't think he saw me having a look at—was the swastika on his wrist.”

“Swastika?”

“Yeah, Nazi shit. Also, he was wearing a sweatshirt. Why in this damn heat anyone would want to wear a sweatshirt is beyond me!”

“How did he pay? Credit card?”

“Nah, he had cash. Fifty-four dollars.”

“Drop a name?”

“Said hardly a word. By the way, oddest thing about him was his smell.”

“Yeah?” Lang said.

“You know that gamey smell, like you been up in the woods three weeks and bathed maybe twice? It settles in your clothes.”

Lang nodded in agreement.

“And the dude was a heavy smoker. Nicotine stains on his right forefinger.”

“Good eye, Harvey.”

“Why you askin' about that guy?”

“No reason. Thanks. How much do I—?”

“Beer and smokes is on the house tonight, Sheriff.”

“You don't have to do that, Harvey,” Lang said.

“My treat. I'm just awful sorry about Kalamity. We all spent our time bowed up to her bar and knowed her for a good woman.”

Lang nodded gratefully, even though he felt a twinge of shame that so many people knew of his business. He still left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. Walked quickly to his truck, then tore ass out of the parking lot, heading down SR 9. At Osbourne Road, the mountain road, he turned left, accelerating uphill past the dark church, Lang knowing the country folk who worshiped there in their strange fashion. He drove higher into the mountains.

Reminded of something, he reached under the steering column and touched the .45.

*   *   *

Hicklin was naked
.
From beyond the bars they told him to squat and cough. He did. The first time he had to strip in front of grown men it had disturbed him. Like a kid in a high school locker room. Now it was routine. A big cock swung between his legs. He was the alpha male with size to match, the pack leader.

The correctional officer stood three feet from the bars, as if he were prepared for Hicklin to run right through them.

He worked his shoulders and chest hard that summer until the muscles were sharply defined. His shoulders were as broad as anybody's in the yard. Much of the tattoo ink had settled in. His face was longer and leaner with goatee. Five years inside and nothing in his eyes had dimmed. He roamed in a perpetual state of retribution, knowing he could take on any nigger or spic or screw in the place.

And they all knew it, too.

Inmates in his vicinity walked as if the lion were planning his evening meal.

The games and daily hustles of prison life were played. Now and then someone got killed. Some fish or scoundrel doing dips on the parallel bars one moment. A toothbrush fashioned into a blunt tip was puncturing his neck the next. The guards got nervous when prisoners wore all their clothing, a big tip-off that something was about to go down. The yard full of Michelin Men, sleeves and tops, pant legs stuffed with newspaper and magazines. The more layers the better. Could save you a trip to the infirmary or, better yet, the big black nowhere.

From the whites-only corner of the yard Hicklin acknowledged violence and its ever-present threat as a stabilizing force. Convicts would attack each other like animals and there was always a reason. Sometimes just two men, other times dozens of convicts from rival gangs, would produce weapons and charge each other. Then the tear gas would launch from the guard towers. Hicklin would clasp his hands behind his head and drop to his knees, per the CO's commands. An amused grin on his face.

He found there was a beauty to a prison riot, an unintentional choreography. As if it were all entertainment to begin with.

He was muscle and brains. White convicts looked to him for guidance. It wasn't long before Hicklin was taking counsel with hard timers. He'd been lucky, too. If it wasn't for a blind spot on one of the surveillance cameras—video that would have been damning evidence of his murder of a black inmate—Hicklin might be on death row. But the investigators had nothing on him. Life went on.

Hicklin took orders and did as he was asked. Satisfied, the Brotherhood let him in.

Blood in. Blood out.

It was a mantra among the gangs. Black, brown, white. Only way to stay alive unless you were a queer or Jesus freak.

The games continued. Drugs were king. Hicklin helped the Brothers get their slice of the profits, the Georgia chapter being their most recent and clandestine outpost. Coded communications with AB in other prisons revealed a vast network of criminal enterprises within state and federal facilities. A chess match played since the 1960s between the Brand and rival gangs, law enforcement, wardens and guards. In places like Marion, Lewisburg, Tamms and Atlanta. Out west to Folsom, Chino, Atwater and Pelican Bay.

The fun even trickled into the state pens. Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, the Carolinas. One or two Brothers blessed by the council would show up and set up a franchise. It was that easy.

They'd x out the poseurs and wannabes before last call. The imitators had their balls handed to them. The AB reinvented itself.

An exclusive circle of the hardened.

The Brotherhood's aspirations surprised and enticed Hicklin. Domestic terrorism, robberies, drugs and weapons trafficking, killing police officers and judges. Men locked in a cell for twenty-three hours a day. Brooding on ways to expel their hatred.

Some of them even got college degrees along the way.

Outright war at Hays erupted with the blacks one winter. But everyone knew that, although outnumbered, Preacher and Hicklin's crew was the fiercest and most ruthless. It all started with a slight made against a convict. Escalated into a hostile struggle for power. Control of the heroin trade.

That's because everything meant something inside. Using the wrong toilet could and did ignite the conflict. Boundaries were set long ago, like ancestral overlords drawing up a battlefield. For a few months the violence seemed incalculable and as reliable to occur as the sun was to rise.

Hicklin earned an extra year inside for chewing a man's ear off. He ate it in front of a howling pack of onlookers. An African was set on fire and ran screaming down the tier like some Hollywood stuntman, a trail of cooked flesh dripping off his arms and back.

At one point the guards took to spraying them with liquid tear gas. If there had been a hole big enough for the two thousand convicts, the prison staff would have thrown them all in and wiped their hands of the whole business.

It was a tense existence. Living day to day at such a heightened alertness was hard on the nerves. It physically transformed Hicklin.

When he looked in the mirror one day he no longer recognized himself.

*   *   *

Charlie shivered as
if a coat of frost had wrapped itself around him. He tucked his knees and rocked quietly.

Thinking about death.

What is it going to be like? How will they do it? Will it hurt? Will my mind keep going? Thoughts just drift off into space like a wayward radio signal?…

Hummingbird was dead. He tried not to look at her body.

Now Flock stood over him, talking to Lipscomb in the other room. Flock braced the shotgun across his left forearm, the weapon like some sleeping python. The muzzle dipped periodically and Charlie recoiled as the big black hole pointed at his head. He figured Flock was doing it on purpose.

Lipscomb grew angry during their conversation, a hostility directed at himself that filled the cottage like smoke from a blocked chimney.

“It ain't here!” Lipscomb said, clearing off a counter of dish plates to emphasize his point.

“You shouldn't a killed her,” Flock said. Off Lipscomb's look he knew to explain his comment with as much deference as possible. “I mean … bet a bean she knew. Maybe just had to give her some time?”

Both men stared at Hummingbird for a moment, her body as discarded as wrapping paper on Christmas morning.

“Probably right,” Lipscomb agreed. “But I wasn't interested no more. I didn't want to hear it from her lips.”

He turned and looked down his nose at Charlie.

“I'd rather hear it from him,” he said.

As if on cue, Flock scooped Charlie up, righted him on the sofa. Charlie felt his face go all funny. He fainted briefly.

Regaining consciousness, he struggled to meet Lipscomb's eyes, fearful that the man might grab something and start hammering at his feet. A realization struck him.
No one was coming to his rescue.

“Shut that door,” Lipscomb said to Flock, before turning to Charlie again.

Lipscomb sat down and put a suggestive hand on Charlie's knee, turning his head with his other hand as if to kiss him.

Charlie retracted, frightened, batting at Lipscomb's advancing hands.

“You know where he is, don't you, bank teller?”

“No, sir,” Charlie said. “He comes and goes. I've been here
—
”