“What’s going on?” Benny said.
Darren tried on a reassuring smile, then noticed the boy still had the tiny plastic construction hat in his hand. “Can I see that?” he asked; it was out of his mouth before he even knew why he’d asked. It was hunger for any information that might shed some light on this town and what the meeting with the man with the sailboat tie had really been about. Benny handed it over. It was then that he heard Bell call his name, heard a haunting in it. “Darren.” She had a view into the living room and the front of the house from where she was now standing beside the kitchen table. Iris had opened the front door, and where Darren had expected to see the blue of Thornhill PD uniforms, he saw instead the pale, chalky brown of the San Jacinto County sheriff’s deputies’ uniform.
Vaughn, Darren thought.
Bell tried to catch his eye. “I’m sorry,” she said.
There were two deputies, a man young enough to get carded buying beer and a woman deep in her thirties. She was the one who held handcuffs. As he realized what was about to happen, his knees gave, enough that he might have collapsed if he hadn’t reached for the nearest hand. His mother’s. She looked gutted. “I’m sorry, son.”
He looked into her eyes, trying to make sense of why she kept saying this, a word she’d offered so seldom in his whole life, and now she couldn’t stop saying it. Sorry.
He flashed back to her surprise arrival in San Jacinto County when he’d feared she’d testified to the grand jury. If she said she was sorry again, he might actually vomit.
“What did you do?” he asked his mother.
The female deputy said, “Darren Mathews, you’re under arrest for obstruction of justice in a felony homicide.”
“What did you do, Mama?”
The deputies shoved his arms behind his back.
He felt a deep pinch in the nerves of his right shoulder. The cuffs were tight, but surprisingly light. He should have known this. But he’d never worn them, had never had a hand press his head down to keep it from banging on the door frame as he was shoved in the back of a squad car. Iris and Benny had come out on the front porch to witness. Neighbors on Juniper Lane watched as Bell ran after the car, beating a palm against the trunk. As the deputies pulled away from the curb, Darren’s mother howled.
Part Four
22.
HE KNEW enough not to speak during the ride south.
He hadn’t said a word for an hour, not even to ask them to roll down a window, to beg for some way to breathe in the stuffy back seat, which was closed off by plexiglass. The air was thick in the back of the squad car, weighty and still, save for his own hot breath, which he had been counting at a steady clip to keep his nerves even. It was a trick his uncles had taught him when he was a boy, a way to still his mind when he was blind with fear. And he was afraid. Terribly so. If an hour in the back of a squad car riding through his beloved East Texas, among the tall, regal pines, made him feel like he could hardly breathe, how would he fare a day, a month, a year in a Texas prison, the birthplace and breeding ground of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas? He was at one thousand and thirty-two inhales; he was running a separate counter of every third exhale, anything to keep his mind occupied, to carry it far away from the trap he’d found himself in, a trap he could, in this moment, admit he’d laid for himself. His mother had only found the gun that killed Ronnie “Redrum” Malvo, had only begun her blackmail campaign against him because Darren had let the .38 lie hidden on his property. Because he’d thought he was protecting Mack, putting a black man’s freedom over “justice” as the State of Texas recognized it. Somewhere beneath the swampy surface of his pain over what his mother had done to him — turning over the gun to Frank Vaughn, the district attorney of San Jacinto County, and, it sure as hell seemed, testifying in front of the grand jury that indicted him — was a willingness to tell a painful truth. He had done this to himself.
His neck was damp with sweat, a sharp line of it running down his back, as the three of them rode in silence, the deputies having likewise decided that talking now wouldn’t do either of them any favors. The less Darren Mathews knew, the better.
They passed snow-cone stands and abandoned gas stations. A trailer with a sign advertising homemade armadillo sausage. The winding driveway to a horse ranch, mere yards from a semicircle of trailers rusting in dirt. He wondered if this was one of the last times for a while that he’d see this stretch of Highway 59, its humble grace, the beauty in its contradictions. Outside the town of Corrigan, they passed a café with dusty colored bulbs lining the A-frame of its clapboard structure, faded to a dull gray. The place made him think of the day he’d walked into Geneva Sweet’s Sweets in Lark. He could almost taste her fried pies, the peach that made your knees buckle. He thought of the bell on the door and the day that brought Randie into his life. He hadn’t called her back. She would have no idea what had happened to him. This scared him as much as anything, that he had yet to give her a clearheaded apology, that his disrespect would linger between them, that she might slip through his fingers for good.
He was booked and fingerprinted, photographed, and had his pockets stripped. They let him keep on his street clothes, let him wear his boots on the filthy floor of the jail, but he knew better than to be lulled into thinking this might mean an arraignment was coming quickly. A small, poor county like this one saw a judge one or two times a week, at best. Darren had understood from the time they cuffed his wrists that he could be in here for a while. He asked to call his lawyers, the first he’d spoken since he’d left Thornhill. His voice croaked on the words. He cleared his throat, stamped down his nerves, and made the demand again. The intake officer said Darren would get his turn, even though Darren was the only man or woman in booking, even though there was no great rush of folks trying to get at the lone pay phone in the front room.
They put him in a cell by himself, a blessing and a curse.
It was the moment he began to dry out for real.
He’d gone days without a drink, sure. But fueled by spite, by a need to prove that his mother was no better than him, to cede her no higher ground. And there had been the adrenaline inherent in working any case, even one as unofficial as this one. Now he was alone, truly alone, his boots sticking to a floor that smelled of urine and something else sharp and sour that he couldn’t name, the air hot and damp. Down the hallway outside of his cell stood a slow, oscillating fan that mercifully hit one corner of his cell every forty seconds, so he parked himself on the very edge of the metal bench affixed to the painted brick wall, where he could feel the fan’s intermittent blessings.
Back against the wall, he sat and waited for what he knew was coming.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to quit before. There had been a time when he and Randie first started getting serious. There had been a time around Bill King’s pro forma trial for the murder of Ronnie Malvo (because of the confession Darren had horse-traded out of him). And, of course, in the madness of the past three years, he’d woken many a night, bolted straight up in bed in a cold sweat, nights he swore he saw his uncle William sitting at the foot of his bed, always delivering the same message from the other side: You know you can’t drink him out of office, right? He’d tap Darren’s ankle and say, You can’t right a sinking ship in retreat, son. Some part of him knew, had known for a while, that his drinking was slowly killing the one thing he trusted about himself: his ability to hope. It was a precious legacy he’d inherited from generations of Mathews men and women. Sure, hope was too often offered instead of real change, a cheap placeholder for a better day. But it also kept people alive. You couldn’t grow a tomato, a sweet pepper, or a peach without hope. You had to believe the land you were on could bear fruit to bother trying. You had to have vision to eat.
He didn’t realize he’d nodded off until he opened his eyes to total darkness.
The lights in this part of the jail had been cut off.
The slow buzzing of the fan, the little rattle it made when it turned in a new direction, was gone. Someone had turned it off. The heat made Darren’s stomach turn. His throat was dry, and his head felt heavy and untethered at the same time. It was so quiet that he heard Frank Vaughn breathing before his eyes adjusted and he saw the district attorney of San Jacinto County sitting across from him in his cell. He thought he might be hallucinating, like seeing his uncle at the foot of his bed.
The DA’s presence here, like this, broke several state laws.
Vaughn knew it, and he knew Darren knew it too.
The audacity of it stirred him, woke an instinct to fight back, to play outside the bounds of propriety as well. He felt a strange and dangerous kind of freedom here in this dark room, alone with Frank Vaughn. The DA sat in a straight-backed chair, his legs comfortably crossed. He’d filled out over the years, grown fat living off the drippings of America’s latest madness, its toe-dip into dystopia, fascism under the guise of a return to better days, nostalgia as a slow, magnolia-scented death. He was clean-shaven and wearing glasses with square frames. “Your lawyers have been informed, Mathews, don’t you worry about that. And I pulled some strings to get a district judge out here to arraign you in the morning. One night here, that ain’t so bad.”
He shifted in his chair, and in the dark, Darren caught a flash of the man’s white teeth, thought he saw the makings of a smile. “Of course, as far as your stint in state prison, well, I doubt it’ll be as comfortable as this,” Vaughn said.
“You don’t have a case,” Darren said. He’d been Miranda’d, but he also didn’t care. This was cynical and foolhardy, he said. The murder case on which the obstruction charge rested had been adjudicated, which was one of the reasons this gamble of trying to indict Darren had never paid off before. “Bill King confessed to killing Malvo.”
“You mean the man you visited just days before King signed an affidavit saying he’d killed a man there was no evidence he’d ever even met?” His smile spread in the dark. “That’s right. I’ve got the visitors’ log from Telford Unit. I know you two talked.”
Darren’s head came off the brick wall. He sat up a little. This was new.
In all their work around the case, all his lawyers’ conference calls and meetings in the years that Frank Vaughn had been trying to get Darren to stand trial, no one had ever brought up the visit Darren had made to Bill King that led to King’s coerced confession. Because Darren hadn’t told them. He hadn’t told a soul on earth what he’d done. It was just him and Bill “Big Kill” King, who’d agreed to confess for his own reasons. But now, would his lawyers have to address this in a court of law, in front of an East Texas jury, folks who could smell horseshit from two counties over? “His kid was missing,” Darren said, trying on an argument for court. “He was feeling penitent. There were marks on his soul he wanted cleared in his lifetime. He’d renounced the ABT.” That was the reason he confessed, Darren was trying to convince the DA.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Vaughn said. “The other is you playing fast and loose on some agenda ain’t got a thing to do with doing right by Ronnie Malvo.”
“I could say the same about you. Quite a leap from DA of a tiny county in Texas to representing the whole of the Eighth District in DC. Bet it takes a lot of noise for anybody to remember your name. This trial ought to get you a few rounds on Fox TV.”
“And CNN,” Vaughn said. “MSNBC. Story like this, and I may make one of the late-night shows. The Daily Show, one of them. I’ll fundraise off this for a year.”
“That gun doesn’t have my prints on it,” Darren said. “You don’t have enough.”
Vaughn gave a little shrug. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.
