The Whiskey Baron (13 page)

“Sure,” Chambers said. “She’s famous.”

“She’s also elusive, and she must have a good system set up in her house because the few times we’ve gone in to try and bust her, someone’s already tipped her off and her place is cleared out. We don’t know how big her operation is, but we suspect she might be the single biggest supplier of illegal whiskey on this side of the Mississippi.”

“She’s not in Castle, if that’s why you’re here.”

“But Larthan Tull is,” Jeffreys said. “You see, Aunt Lou distributes. She has runners working for her and connections all over the southeast, but she doesn’t brew it. She lives in the city limits. There’s
no place for her to brew it. Folks’d see steam floating over her neighborhood or see her buying corn and sugar and copper all in large quantities. But I’ve been in her house. She doesn’t have anything that remotely resembles a still. We’ve searched it up and down. She doesn’t make it herself, which means she brings it in from somewhere else, most likely several sources.”

“So Larthan Tull is one of her suppliers.”

“We think he’s her biggest supplier,” Jeffreys said. “We’re pretty good at going around sabotaging stills along rivers and creeks, even in the deepest hollows, but, as I’m sure you’re aware, there’s something futile about that. Makes a man feel like he’s wasting his time on small fries. Fortunately for us, and as I’m sure you’re also aware, Tull has a better setup.”

“His soda factory.”

“Provides a pretty good cover, don’t it? To make soda he needs to buy a lot of the same ingredients he’d need for whiskey, and no one’s going to think twice about billows of steam coming out of a factory.”

“We understand why you might want to turn a blind eye to his operation,” O’Connor said, the first words Chambers had heard him speak. He had a gravelly voice, with an accent that Chambers had never heard before. Vowels elongated and bent out of shape. Not Irish, despite his name. Sounded German.

“A very blind eye,” Jeffreys said.

“He’s a respectable townsman,” O’Connor went on. “A little liquor trade isn’t that much of a disruption.”

“Even though it’s a federal offense.”

“But the fact is, he’s making more than a small town could ever drink. He’s the largest supplier for one of the largest distributors in the country, and we aim to put a stop to him and her both.”

As the two rattled back and forth, Chambers tried to follow what O’Connor was saying, minus interruptions from Jeffreys. O’Connor spoke like he was teaching children in Sunday school while Jeffreys grew redder and redder, until his face resembled a plum tomato, and he stood and leaned over Chambers’s desk. “He’s undermined the Constitution of the United States,” he barked, and he beat his fists on the desk. “He’s a menace to our entire society. A threat to women
and children and good Christians everywhere. A stain on the map of our great country and an insult to God.”

“Hey listen, fellas,” Chambers said, standing as well. “My job’s to keep order in this county, and I do a fair job of it.”

“You do a fair job?” Jeffreys wiped the sweat off his reddened face, turned and paced a lap around the room. O’Connor still sat off to the side, unflappable, rubbing two fingers along his lower lip and gazing down at the desk. “A fair job,” Jeffreys said again. “Will you listen to this guy?”

“Bust him, then,” Chambers said. “You don’t like how I’ve run my investigation, or how I’ve handled certain things, that’s fine. Go on and arrest Larthan Tull, see if I care. Do me that favor.”

“It would be a favor, wouldn’t it? Your dirty work. Just like a redneck sheriff to not want to take up his responsibilities as a citizen of this great country.”

“Easy, both of you,” O’Connor said. He looked at Chambers with gray eyes and tired lids. His voice like a smokefilled box of rocks. Maybe he was older than he looked, not some thirty-year-old punk who’d never had to make a real decision. “Sheriff, did you hear about the patrolman that got beat to death the other night up in York County?”

“Yeah, I heard about him,” Chambers said. The news had come over the wires, an officer bludgeoned with a blunt object, his firearm stolen. He’d been on patrol looking for Hopewell, and no one seemed to know what to make of it. Chambers knew Hopewell, knew that even if he did kill the boys in front of the Hillside, he wouldn’t have murdered an innocent police officer. Chambers knew that.

“We think that’s related. We don’t know how, and I doubt you do either. Our job here is to help you and the other local police put a stop to this violence. Restore order.”

“Somebody’s got to,” Jeffreys said, and O’Connor cleared his throat.

“We’d like to take out Tull,” O’Connor went on, “but there’d be another one soon enough to take his place. We really want Aunt Lou, and we need your help to get her.”

“Do you boys have a plan, or you just want to pile in my car and drive up and get her?”

“We would if we could,” Jeffreys said. “That’d be new for you, wouldn’t it? Going up and arresting the bad guy without hesitation.”

“But we’ve all got procedures to follow,” O’Connor said. “So we’d like you to help us. Keep an eye on Tull, his movements. Take notes if you can so in a few weeks we’ll have a good idea of where he is and when, and what kind of schedule he keeps. We’d like to catch him in a run to Aunt Lou’s.”

“That’s well and good, fellas, but I got to tell you, driving into town in that fancy strange car’s liable to have already got the neighbors calling each other to gossip about you. I’ll bet Larthan’s already heard that the feds have stopped by the police station. There might have been better ways of keeping this operation a secret. Call maybe, instead of showing up.”

Before Jeffreys could respond, O’Connor said, “We understand, but we don’t think that’ll be a problem. We plan to talk to him ourselves before we leave town.”

“And say what, exactly?”

“Throw him off. Make him believe he’s the one we’re after. So long as he doesn’t know we know about him and Aunt Lou, he’ll think we’re just passing through, hassling him. We do that on occasion.”

“What?”

“Pass through and hassle Tull, ask to inspect the Hillside Inn, cite him for some violation or another.”

Chambers tried not to let the surprise show on his face. These guys knew Tull, had been coming through town without him realizing it for how many years? When he was young and green in the world, he made all kinds of mistakes, usually when he switched jobs. At eighteen, he’d joined the railroad, headed west. Talked big with some guys about South Carolina until he’d found out they’d been through his state more times than he’d left his county. One of them had even spent time in the state penitentiary, and this knowledge had left Chambers hot in the face for three days, the world suddenly much larger than he’d ever been prepared for. And in Texas he’d worked on a ranch for a few months, forgot simple things like latching a pin to keep cattle in. Somewhere in all those years, before he’d moved back to Castle and married Alma, he’d learned humility.
His twenties a decade of discovering his limits well enough that his thirties, forties, and fifties were good years for him. He knew what he was capable of, and knew he knew, and moved with an ease about him because of that knowledge. But now, approaching seventy faster than he’d like to contemplate, it felt like he was regressing, the world passing him by and he just a dumb hick who couldn’t keep up.

Jeffreys looked like he was about to say something more, but O’Connor let Chambers off the hook and said, “We best get on. On your desk there is a card where you can reach us. We’ll call you before we make another move, but we’d appreciate it if you could start keeping tabs on Tull for us.”

“All right, fellas. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Soon,” Jeffreys said.

When they’d gone, Chambers put his feet on the desk and opened the bottom drawer of his file cabinet, where he kept a flask of whiskey for days such as this, but it wasn’t there. A box of shotgun shells, some old receipts and scraps of paper, a rusted horseshoe he kept around for good luck, but no flask.

He slammed the drawer shut. “Those sons of bitches.”

M
ary Jane woke to the sound of dogs. He’d made camp on a bed of pine needles with branches of cedar for a pillow. Somewhere in the distance a hound bayed, followed by a chorus of throaty barks. He ran through the woods along the eastern slope of Castle Mountain. More of a tall hill than a mountain, but a definite peak among the piedmont landscape. The trees thinned at an overlook and he allowed himself to peer down the mountain. Lights flickered in the land below, half a dozen men with lanterns chasing the dogs. He moved on.

Soon he reached a creek, bubbling its way down the slope of the mountain, and he splashed into the water and ran against the current. The cold water bit against his shins and numbed his feet. Where the creek widened, he stepped on a stone, and when he stepped back into the creek he sank to his waist. Bone-cold water sluiced along
and sloshed against his chest, so cold it jarred him awake. What was he doing out here? The men were probably out hunting, but something told him they were the law, and if they were the law he needn’t fear them. It was Larthan Tull he was running from. But something told him Larthan Tull had a hand in the law, so an enemy of Tull was an enemy of the law. The current beat against him and he hiked up the mountain through the water, stepping on stones where he could, allowing his feet to sink into the sandy muck where he couldn’t. As the woods thickened around him, the sound of the dogs faded.

After a time he stepped out of the creek and onto the mossy bank. The dripping water weighed his clothes down like irons on a chain gang. He wrung out his pockets, felt like his clothes were bursting sacks. Trying not to think of a chance encounter with a copperhead, he took off his shoes and upended them to drain out puddles of water. So wet and chattering from the cold in the dark, he slid into a dreamlike state whereby time passed on two parallel tracks, the real of the night and the dogs and his busted shoulder numb from the chill of river water, and the warm and fluid wander of thoughts as though his mind clung to the vestiges of some lost dream. The widow’s bed, perhaps, a haven, a return to his free life. Time before the road, before the weight of responsibility for Ernest and Lee, before he’d found himself in a corner cell, the door guarded by Tull and his henchmen. The world was not a kind place to those forced to reckon with the here and now of their lives. Like the shot of a rifle, the irrevocable strike of the hammer against the firing pin, Mary Jane had been ejected from his world and now roamed without a center, with only a sense of loss.

When he’d dried his clothes as best he could, he focused on the real and tried to study where he was. Above him he searched for something recognizable in the sky. He found the North Star at the end of the Little Dipper, for all the good it did him. Ancient navigators may have read the sky’s asterisms to find their way across darkened seas, but Mary Jane had never been one for navigation. He set on up the mountain, figuring he was far enough from the dogs that they’d lost any scent of him. Tree frogs and whippoorwills and rustling limbs created a racket, but there was no sound of man.

He stumbled into a clearing near the mountain’s plateau. The trees fell away and starlight shimmered from a liquid sky. In the clearing were the burnt remains of a house, scraps of charred wood long gone, the fire a distant possibility. A few stray beams jutted from the ground, but the only thing whole, on the far side of the rubble, was the rock hearth, which stood untouched like the day it was made. In the heart was a fire and beside the fire sat a figure in the shadows.

Mary Jane crept closer and saw the man had no eyes. He wore tattered clothes and rested his hands on a cane. He faced blankly into the crackling fire and didn’t stir, even as Mary Jane stepped into the rubble.

“Hello?”

The man turned to him.

“Sir?”

“The Lord sent you to me.”

The man’s face was grimy with soot, and the sight of the bleak eyeless sockets raised the hairs on Mary Jane’s neck. Gone were the days you could trust a stranger on the road. Hard times had turned strangers into villains, drifters into thieves and bandits. Cautiously, Mary Jane drew up next to the fire, lay his satchel by the hearth, and sat on the ground.

“There’s some beans left in the pot,” the man said. “Ain’t much, but you’re welcome to them.”

Mary Jane had subsisted on stolen fruit for two days, plucked tomatoes, apples, squash. His belly rumbled in protest, so he said, “I thank you. I’m obliged.”

The man nodded. “The Lord will provide.”

Mary Jane spooned hot beans from the pot, swallowed without chewing. The man closed his eyes and appeared to be sleeping. Through bites, Mary Jane watched him breathe. When he scraped the empty pot with the spoon, the man’s eyelids opened, but if he was disappointed that he still had no eyes with which to see, his face didn’t show it. He licked his lips, grabbed a stick at his side, and poked at the fire. Flames shot up and sparks swirled like fireflies before it all settled down to the coals.

“You’re welcome to put another log on this fire for me.”

He aimed with the stick at a cord of chopped wood.

When he’d completed his task, Mary Jane said, “You live here?”

“No, I come down from Tennessee. Name’s Ephraim.” The man cleared his throat. “I go where the Lord calls me, and last week he called me to this here mountain to pray.”

“You and me both.”

“You a Christian man?”

“Baptized in the Broad River when I was twelve.”

“That’s good. You’re saved then.”

“I hope so.”

“Ain’t no hope about it. You committed yourself to Christ, which is all you need for forgiveness.”

“I’ve got a lot to be forgiven for.”

“Doesn’t matter. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

“I don’t know that I believe that anymore.”

The man swished his mouth as though freeing food from between his teeth. He said, “Even Jesus had his time in the wilderness.”