Tight Lines (31 page)

He nodded. “Twenty grand. Okay. Yes.”

We then argued about the date for the probable-cause hearing. Redlich asked for a month to give them time to process all the evidence. I asked for a week, citing the stress of waiting on Daniel’s health. Judge Ropek set it for ten days hence, a small victory for the good guys.

Before the court officer took Daniel away, he gave me a phone number and told me to talk to Cammie Russell. She’d get the money.

And as I turned to head out of the courtroom, Joan Redlich handed me a copy of the search warrant. I thanked her and stuffed it into my attaché case along with the police report.

I called Cammie Russell from one of the pay phones in the courthouse lobby. She had a soft voice with a hint of the Smoky Mountains in it. She said she’d be there in an hour. I told her I’d meet her outside the front door.

She actually arrived in about forty minutes. She was tall and slim in her white jeans and orange blouse. She had cocoa butter skin and black eyes. Her hair hung in a long, loose braid down the middle of her back. Her high cheekbones and small nose reminded me of a young Lena Home. There was a Cherokee Indian somewhere in her ancestry. I guessed her age at twenty-five, but I figured she had looked the same way since she turned thirteen and would still look as good at fifty.

Then she smiled, and I amended my first impression. She looked
better
than a young Lena Home.

She held her hand to me. “Cammie Russell,” she said.

“Brady Coyne.”

“How is Daniel?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know how he usually is. I’d say confinement doesn’t suit him.”

“I can see you’re a master of understatement, Mr. Coyne. He must be climbing the walls. Can we get him now?”

“If you brought enough money we can.”

She held up the briefcase she was carrying and nodded.

An hour later Cammie Russell and I were eating ham-and-cheese sandwiches and sipping coffee on the deck behind Daniel’s house in Wilson Falls. Daniel was slouched in a deck chair with his eyes closed, sucking steadily on a stick of cannabis. His leg no longer jiggled.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1992 by William G. Tapply

Cover design by Kathleen Lynch

978-1-4804-2742-6

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