Carved in Bone - Jefferson Bass [60]
The image almost pushed me over the edge again. I concentrated hard on another question that had been nagging at me. “Waylon, that first day you took me up to meet Jim—how come Leon Williams, the sheriff’s deputy, helped you shanghai me?”
Waylon rubbed his chin, and I heard a sound like coarse sandpaper rubbing on rocks. “You want the short answer or the long ’un?”
“Give me the long ’un, if you don’t care to.”
“First I’ll give you the short ’un: bullshit walks, money talks. Deputy sheriffs in Cooke County don’t make too much. Leon’s probably pulling down about twenty thou a year, which ain’t what it used to be. So he’s open to a little extry income, if the deal ain’t gonna get him thowed in jail hisself.”
“So how much extra income did he get for handing me over to you the other day?”
“Hell, you was pretty cheap, Doc. Couple hunnerd, I think.”
“That is cheap. Should I be insulted?”
“Naw, that weren’t about what you was worth; that was about how bush-league Leon is. If Orbin had-a been carrying you ’stead of Leon, he woulda charged ten times that much.”
I wasn’t sure whether that made me feel better or worse. “What’s the rest of the answer?”
“Well, they’s some history between Leon’s people, the sheriff’s people, and Big Jim. Some of it goes way back—some bad blood about fifty, sixty years ago between the Williamses and the Kitchingses.”
“I might’ve heard something about that. Leon’s grandfather dying in a shootout or a fire at the jail. Is that the thing?”
“Right. He’d been arrested by Tom’s granddaddy, who was the sheriff way back then.” Williams hadn’t told me that piece of the story. “So if Leon gets a chance to thumb his nose at a Kitchings behind his back, he’s probably gonna do it. Nothing big; he’s just disrespectin’ Tom to feel better about his own self and his people.”
“And where does Big Jim fit into all that?”
“Well, he’s got a little history with the Kitchingses, too. He ain’t never quite forgive ’em for standing between him and that girl. And they ain’t never quite forgive him, either, for I don’t know what—maybe just for bein’ a better man than what they are. Sometimes a real good person just rubs you the wrong way, you know?” I nodded; I did know. “Well, Jim—I think he’s that person for the Kitchingses.”
By now my head had cleared, and my stomach and I seemed to have reached an uneasy truce. I checked my watch; I had been unconscious or asleep for three hours in the truck as the big man kept vigil over me. The afternoon was waning, and my trip to the cave would have to wait. I thanked Waylon for watching out for me, said good-bye, and pulled onto I-40, heading into a blood-red sunset that kept me in mind of fighting cocks and feuding clans all the way back to Knoxville.
When I got home, I showered and fell into bed. Before drifting off, though, I made up my mind, and dialed the phone number I’d pulled from my Rolodex the day Tom Kitchings pulled a gun on me.
CHAPTER 20
THE JOHN J. DUNCAN FEDERAL Building is a cube of pink granite and black glass in downtown Knoxville, occupying a unique nexus in the city’s geometry of history, power, and knowledge. On one side it faces the old Tennessee Supreme Court building; on another side it flanks the new Tennessee Supreme Court building (which, for its part, now occupies the old post office…). One corner of the cube backs up to the main public library; the opposite corner has been rounded off to form an entrance, at the corner where the two Supreme Court buildings approach one another. Inside its gleaming granite and glass, the Duncan Building houses three federal agencies that strike fear into the heart of East Tennessee’s assassins, mobsters, and deadbeats: the FBI, the Secret Service, and