The Inside Ring (24 page)

Jillian’s death shocked DeMarco into motion. He lunged to the end of the chain and the metal collar dug painfully into his neck as he tried to reach Taylor’s body to get the gun. It was hopeless; the body was at least two feet beyond his grasp. Morgan watched in amusement as he lay on the floor, stretched out, straining against the chain.

DeMarco quickly got to his feet and backed away. As he moved backward, his eyes frantically scanned the area around him looking for a weapon. He already knew, though, that within the radius of the chain there was nothing but straw. With his back against the wall of the barn and his fists clenched, he waited for Morgan to come and kill him.

Morgan’s lips twitched in an approximation of a smile and he began walking toward DeMarco.

At that moment, Emma walked into the barn. She quickly took in the carnage around her: Taylor prone, the pitchfork standing upright in his chest; Jillian Mattis, bruised from abuse, her neck and limbs twisted at awkward angles. Finally, she saw DeMarco, chained like an animal, his back against the wall waiting for Morgan.

Emma pulled a pistol from a shoulder holster, aimed it at Morgan, and said, “Stop right there.”

Morgan glanced over his shoulder at Emma, then he surprised both her and DeMarco. Instead of stopping as any sane person would have, he ignored Emma and the gun in her hand and lunged at DeMarco, grabbing him and spinning him around so that DeMarco’s body provided a shield. Then he put his hands on the sides of DeMarco’s face.

“Drop the gun,” Morgan said to Emma, “or I’ll break his neck.”

It was the first time DeMarco had heard Morgan speak; his voice was a deep baritone, raw and raspy from disuse.

Emma smiled in response to Morgan’s threat. DeMarco had never seen anything so wonderfully evil as that smile.

“Drop the gun,” Morgan repeated, “or I’ll do him like I did the bitch.”

“Don’t do it, Emma,” DeMarco yelled. “He’s strong and he’s faster than hell. He’ll kill both of us.”

DeMarco was afraid to move knowing Morgan could snap his neck just as easily as he had Jillian’s. He also knew what Morgan was thinking: with his speed, he could kill DeMarco, distract Emma by flinging DeMarco’s body in her direction, then charge her, hoping Emma would miss with the pistol. With his speed he might be able to pull it off and unless Emma was using hollow-points, it would take more than one bullet to stop him.

Looking into Morgan’s eyes, Emma said to DeMarco, “Do you trust me, Joe?” and she began to lower the gun down to her side.

“No!” DeMarco screamed.

As Emma lowered her gun, Morgan’s hands began to increase the pressure on DeMarco’s face. Morgan was going to snap his neck in the next second.

“Don’t drop the gun, Emma!” DeMarco shouted.

“Of course not,” Emma said, then she raised the pistol in one fluid motion and fired.

Nothing happened for an instant, then DeMarco felt the hands on his face relax and something warm and wet spill onto the back of his neck. Then Morgan fell, his weight driving DeMarco to the ground, his body landing heavily on top of him.

Emma quickly moved to DeMarco and pulled Morgan off him with a grunt. “Christ, he’s heavy,” she said.

DeMarco sat up and wiped the blood off his neck, then turned to look at Morgan. Emma’s bullet had gone through his right eye.

“Jesus Christ!” DeMarco said. “You could have killed me.”

“Don’t be silly. It was an easy shot.”

“Easy, my ass! You could have blown my head off!”

“You’re welcome, Joe,” Emma said.

DeMarco took a deep breath. “Yeah, sorry. Thanks. Now please get this fucking collar off me.”

40

Where the hell have you been?” DeMarco asked.
Emma ignored the question as she applied Taylor’s combination bolt cutter/torture tool to the padlock on the metal collar. She grunted as the lock snapped, then replied, “Jail.”

“Motherfucker,” DeMarco said as he tore the collar off his neck and flung it violently against the wall of the barn. “How did you end up in jail?”

“Well—”

“Never mind; save it for later. Right now we need to get out of this county.”

DeMarco looked around the barn. The pitchfork was still sticking straight up from Taylor’s body. His eyes were wide open, still astounded, staring into the maw of hell. Morgan lay like a toppled statue, a bloody socket where his eye had been. And Jillian Mattis—neck bent, limbs akimbo—made him think of a soiled, broken doll discarded by a careless child.

DeMarco refused to think about his role in Jillian’s death. There would be time for guilt later.

“If we call the sheriff and report this,” DeMarco said, “we’ll never leave here.”

“After what happened to me, I’m inclined to agree with you,” Emma said, apparently referring to her recent incarceration.

Fleeing the scene of a homicide was not a decision DeMarco made lightly but he didn’t see that they had a choice. He discussed it with Emma and they decided to make it look as though Taylor and Morgan had killed each other. DeMarco pulled the pitchfork from Taylor’s chest, wiped Jillian’s prints off it, and placed the fork in Morgan’s hand. Emma took Taylor’s pistol and fired a bullet into a mound of hay, then put the weapon into Taylor’s hand. Although the type of bullets they used was different, Taylor’s gun was a .38 caliber, the same as Emma’s.

DeMarco figured the local cops would walk into the barn and correctly conclude that Morgan—psychotic son of a bitch that they all knew he was—had raped Jillian Mattis and broken her neck. Based on the way DeMarco and Emma had arranged the evidence, they would then incorrectly reason that honorable Maxwell Taylor, county patriarch and ex-lover of Jillian Mattis, had tried to avenge her. Alas, Morgan stabbed Taylor with the pitchfork, and Taylor, with his dying breath, plugged Morgan through the head.

If the sheriff’s office had the services of a top-of-the-line forensic specialist, their simple subterfuge would be uncovered but DeMarco reasoned they had two things in their favor: Taylor’s lack of popularity and the absence of an immediate successor to his throne. People in the county would be relieved to have the despot gone and without someone in authority pressing the local cops to solve the case, DeMarco was betting they’d do a slipshod investigation. At least he hoped so.

His biggest concern was that someone other than Morgan had seen his car parked in front of Jillian Mattis’s house, but there was nothing he could do about that. No plan is without flaws; there are no perfect crimes.

Emma and DeMarco rechecked their work in the barn then DeMarco entered Jillian’s house and wiped it free of his fingerprints. At the last minute he remembered he had forgotten to wipe his prints off the chain and collar and went back into the barn to finish the job. Exiting the barn, he looked one last time at Jillian Mattis and silently begged her to forgive him.

As they walked toward their cars, DeMarco stumbled and almost fell.

“You okay, Joe?” Emma asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re limping.”

DeMarco nodded. The knife wound in his leg where Estep had stabbed him was throbbing. He wanted to pull up his pant leg and look at it but he was afraid of what he might see.

Emma took hold of DeMarco’s arm to stop him and turned him so she could look at his face. She studied DeMarco’s pupils as though she knew what she was doing and touched the lump on his head tenderly. “We better get you to a hospital and have that hard head of yours checked out,” Emma said.

“No, we need to get out of here before the sheriff drives by and sees our cars. I’ll find a hospital in Waycross if I need one.”

“Okay, but try not to pass out at the wheel on the way there,” Emma said.

There was no chance of that happening, DeMarco thought. He feared if he slept the dead would invade his dreams: a grinning Dale Estep draped in blue Spanish moss; Taylor smiling arrogantly as air hissed from the holes in his chest; and Morgan, Cyclops’s twin, blood running hot out of his eye socket. But he knew it wasn’t the ghouls that would keep him awake in nights to come, it was the innocents: Billy Mattis and his mother. He’d hear the snap of Jillian’s neck breaking until the end of time.

THE DOCTOR AT the clinic in Waycross asked what had caused the wound in DeMarco’s leg. DeMarco told him he had cut it on a piece of sheet metal. “Doin’ some work around the house, ya know? Threw all the junk in a heap, then tripped over it.”

The doctor took in the condition of DeMarco’s clothes and the bruise on his head, then gave him a look to let him know he wasn’t stupid. Fortunately—at least from DeMarco’s perspective—two ambulances bearing the carnage of a three-car pileup distracted the doctor and without further comment he gave DeMarco a tetanus shot and a prescription for painkillers.

He found Emma in the emergency room waiting area reading a magazine on gardening. He couldn’t imagine her being interested in an activity where one couldn’t occasionally draw blood.

They drove their two rental cars to a drugstore for DeMarco to fill his prescription, then to a grocery store for DeMarco to buy a six-pack, contrary to his physician’s orders. DeMarco took his beer to Emma’s car, popped the top on a can, and drank. It was an ordinary Bud in a can—and he had never tasted anything so wonderful.

“Better watch the booze,” Emma said, “with that head injury and those pills.”

DeMarco ignored her advice, took another swallow, and told her about his night in the Okefenokee Swamp. “What a way to go” was Emma’s only comment about Estep’s demise.

“Now you wanna tell me why you were loafing in a jail cell while Estep and Taylor were trying to kill me?” DeMarco said.

Emma took the can of beer from DeMarco’s hand, took a sip, and handed the can back to him. “I went to see Hattie again, as you know. Among other things, Hattie told me how Taylor was using the Okefenokee Swamp as his own private reserve: poaching alligators for hides, harvesting the lumber, taking rich men gator hunting. That kind of thing.”

“Interesting, but what does this have to do with you getting arrested?”

“I’m getting to that.”

DeMarco nodded. “Was Estep helping Taylor?”

“Of course,” Emma said.

DeMarco lit a cigarette and swallowed more beer. It felt so good to be alive and able to enjoy all his life-shortening vices. “How in the hell did Taylor and Estep get away with it?” he asked.

“For one thing, everyone who worked at the swamp really worked for Taylor and—”

“I knew those rangers weren’t spotted-owl fans.”

“—and Hattie thought he was bribing someone back in Washington responsible for the swamp. Maybe at the Department of Interior. And the other thing he’d do is change the swamp boundary.”

“Change the boundary?”

“Think about it. He owns all the land adjacent to the swamp. How the hell can anybody tell where public land stops and private land begins? Estep would change the boundary markers every few years, bring in crews to harvest timber or whatever, then move the boundary back and start someplace else. According to Hattie, Taylor’s been doing this for almost thirty years. He had himself this huge, tax-free estate, and would use state and federal money to replant trees or clean up whatever mess he made. Hell of a scheme.”

DeMarco shook his head in amazement.

“But that’s not how he made his
real
money,” Emma said. “According to Hattie, that damn swamp gets thousands of tourists every year.”

“More like four hundred thousand. I saw that in one of the brochures at the motel.”

“Well aren’t you smart. Anyway, Taylor was raking it in big-time from the tourists. He was not only getting a legitimate share of the tourist trade from his businesses—he owned the motel where we stayed in Folkston, by the way—but he was also taking a slice of the gate at the swamp.”

“A slice of the gate?”

“Yeah. Ten folks pay the entrance fee; they pocket the cash from three and the books show only seven went in. Same thing with the crap they sell in the souvenir shops.”

“Can we prove any of this?”

“I would imagine. An accountant could take a look at the books and put some of it together, and I’m sure if squeezed properly, Estep’s ranger friends will talk.”

“So how did you end up in jail?”

“Hattie wanted to show me where the boundary used to be and a couple of places where Taylor currently had crews working on federal land. We drove down to a fence line that said ‘No Trespassing,’ and she convinced me to crawl under it with her. Like an idiot, I did. Couple of lumberjacks see us, tell us to get lost, and Hattie gives ’em a ration of shit. The lumberjacks call the sheriff’s office, and Hattie gives the deputies a ration of shit. So they threw us in jail.”

“Why the hell didn’t you call me so I could make bail for you?”

“They wouldn’t let me. Prisoners’ rights are not a hot social issue down here. They decided to teach Hattie a lesson for shooting her mouth off—she’d given ’em problems before—so they just let us sit in jail for two days. I’m lucky I didn’t end up on a chain gang. Anyway, when I got out I saw your note and went right to Jillian Mattis’s place.”

DeMarco shared with Emma what he learned from Jillian Mattis, the sad tale of the Honeys.

“My God what a horror story,” Emma said.

Indeed it was. Taylor had dominated the county since the late 1960s. He used the money he had mysteriously obtained in 1964 to gain economic control, then used his influence to take over the legal system and the media. And with power came the abuse of power—a symbiotic relationship DeMarco had seen all too often in the nation’s capital. Taylor indulged his lust for teenage flesh and when any whim was opposed, and he couldn’t get what he wanted by threats or economic pressure, he turned to Morgan or Estep for assistance.

DeMarco also thought about Taylor’s lifelong plunder of the Okefenokee Swamp, and reflected that the money was probably not as important to Taylor as his ability to treat the swamp as his personal property. It was
his
swamp, not the government’s. It was the moat surrounding King Max’s castle.

“We still have three mysteries, Emma,” DeMarco said.

“Only three?”

“One, where did Taylor and Donnelly get their money in 1964? Two, what’s the damn connection between Taylor and Donnelly? And three, why in the hell did Taylor try to kill the President?”

“He didn’t try to kill the President, Joe. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

“What?” DeMarco said.

“You remember Hattie saying something about a man questioning her, a honey-tongued, handsome son of a bitch?”

DeMarco sat a moment.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered.