"That's great police work, Mal," Paul said. "I might just vote for you next time."
"Can we leave?" Neely said. "I don't like this story."
* * *
They rode in silence for half an hour. Still flying with all lights on, Mal appeared to doze occasionally as his ponderous breakfast got digested.
"I'll be happy to drive," Neely said after the car eased onto the gravel shoulder and flung rocks for half a mile.
"Can't. It's illegal," Mal grunted, suddenly wide awake.
Five minutes later he was fading again. Neely decided conversation might keep him awake.
"Did you bust Jesse?" Neely asked as he tightened his seat belt.
"Naw. The state boys got him." Mal shifted his weight and reached for a cigarette. There was a story to tell so he limbered up. "They kicked him off the team at Miami, out of school, barely got out with no jail time, and before long he was back here. Poor guy was hooked on the stuff and couldn't shake it. His family tried everything, rehab, lockdowns, counselors, all that crap. Broke 'em. Hell, it killed his father. The Trapp family once owned two thousand acres of the best farmland around here, now it's all gone. His poor momma lives in that big house with the roof crumblin'."
"Anyway," Paul said helpfully from the rear.
"Anyway, he started sellin' the stuff, and of course Jesse could not be content as a small-timer. He had some contacts in Dade County, one thing led to another and before long he had a nice business. Had his own organization, with lots of ambition."
"Didn't someone get killed?" Paul asked.
"I was gettin' to that," Mal growled at his rearview mirror.
"Just trying to help."
Chapter Seventeen
"I always wanted a banker in my backseat. A real white-collar type."
"And I always wanted to foreclose on the Sheriff."
"Truce," Neely said. "You were getting to the good part."
Mal reshifted, his large stomach rubbing the wheel. One more harsh glance into his mirror, then, "The state narcs slowly crept in, as they always do. They nabbed a flunkie, threatened him with thirty years of prison and sodomy, convinced him to flip. He set up a drop with narcs hidin' in the trees and under the rocks. The deal went bad, guns were grabbed, shots went off. A narc took a bullet in the ear and died on the spot. The flunkie got hit, but survived. Jesse was nowhere around, but it was his people. He became a priority, and within a year he was standin' before His Honor receivin' his twenty-eight years, no parole."
"Twenty - eight years," Neely repeated.
"Yep. I was in the courtroom, and I actually felt sorry for the scumbag. I mean, here's a guy who had the tools to play in the NFL. Size, speed, mean as hell, plus Rake had drilled him from the time he was fourteen. Rake always said that if Jesse had gone to AM, he wouldn't have turned bad. Rake was in the courtroom too."
"How long has he served?" Neely asked.
"Nine, ten years maybe. I ain't countin'. Y'all hungry?"
"We just ate," Neely said.
"Surely you can't be hungry again," Paul said.
"No, but there's this little joint right up here where Miss Armstrong makes pecan fudge. I hate to pass it."
"Let's keep going," Neely said. "Just say no."
"Take it one day at a time, Mal," Paul offered from the rear.
* * *
The Buford Detention Facility was in flat treeless farmland at the end of a lonely paved road lined with miles of chain-link fencing. Neely was depressed before any building came into sight.
Mal's phone calls had arranged things properly and they were cleared through the front gates and drove deeper into the prison. They changed vehicles at a checkpoint, swapping the roomy patrol car for the narrow benches of an extended golf cart. Mal rode up front where he chatted nonstop with the driver, a guard wearing as much ammunition and gadgets as the Sheriff himself. Neely and Paul shared the back bench, facing the rear, as they passed more chain link and razor wire. They got an eyeful as they puttered past Camp A, a long dismal cinder-block building with prisoners lounging on the front steps. On one side, a basketball game was raging. All the players were black. On the other side, an all-white volleyball game was in progress. Camps B, C, and D were just as bleak. "How could anyone survive in there?" Neely asked himself.
At an intersection, they turned and were soon up at Camp E, which looked somewhat newer. At Camp F they stopped and walked fifty yards to a point where the fencing turned ninety degrees. The guard mumbled something into his radio, then pointed and said, "Walk down that fence to the white pole. He'll be out shortly." Neely and Paul began walking along the fence, where the grass had been recently cut. Mal and the guard held back and lost interest.
Behind the building and beside the basketball court was a slab of concrete, and scattered across it were all sorts of mismatched barbells and bench presses and stacks of dead weights. Some very large black and white men were pumping iron in the morning sun, their bare chests and backs shining with sweat. Evidently, they lifted weights for hours each day.
"There he is," Paul said. "Just getting up from the bench press, on the left."
"That's Jesse," Neely said, mesmerized by a scene that few people ever witnessed.
A trustee approached and said something to Jesse Trapp, who jerked his head and searched the fence line until he saw the two men. He tossed a towel onto a bench and began a slow, purposeful, Spartanlike walk across the slab, across the empty basketball court, and onto the grass that ran to the fence around Camp F.
From forty yards away he looked huge, but as Jesse approached the enormity of his chest and neck and arms became awesome. They had played with him for one season-he was a senior when they were sophomores-and they had seen him naked in the locker room. They had seen him fling heavily loaded barbells around the weight room. They had seen him set every Spartan lifting record.
He looked twice as big now, his neck as thick as an oak stump, his shoulders as wide as a door. His biceps and triceps were many times the normal size. His stomach looked like a cobblestone street.
He wore a crew cut that made his square head even more symmetrical, and when he stopped and looked down at them he smiled. "Hey boys," he said, still breathing heavily from the last set of reps.
"Hello Jesse," Paul said.
"How are you?" Neely said.
"Doing well, can't complain. Good to see y'all. I don't get many visitors."
"We have bad news, Jesse," Paul said.
"I figured."
"Rake's dead. Passed away last night."
He lowered his chin until it touched his massive chest. From the waist up he seemed to shrink a little as the news hit him. "My mother wrote me and told me he was sick," he said with his eyes closed.
"It was cancer. Diagnosed about a year ago, but the end came pretty fast."
"Man oh man. I thought Rake would live forever."
"I think we all did," Neely said.
Ten years in prison had taught him to control whatever emotions ventured his way. He swallowed hard and opened his eyes. "Thanks for coming. You didn't have to."
"We wanted to see you, Jesse," Neely said. "I think about you all the time."
"The great Neely Crenshaw."
"A long time ago."
"Why don't you write me a letter? I got eighteen more years here."
"I'll do that, Jesse, I promise."