over him grated like an iron file. In hindsight, he should have arranged to have the bastard killed tonight. His only deterrent, which he hated to admit even to himself, was the fear that if he attempted it and failed, it was likely that he would have been the one to die.
When Ledge had told him that if anything went awry with Henry, he would hunt him down and kill him, he had believed it right down to the toes of his steel-tipped boots.
If somebody else had threatened him that way, he’d have gotten a good laugh out of it and then annihilated the reckless fool. But there was something about Burnet that induced a deep-seated and unremitting terror. Maybe it was that steely blue stare of his. It could be downright eerie, calculating, cold-blooded, like he had resolved to mess you up bad, but in his own good time.
Whatever Ledge’s fearsome quality was, it had intimidated Rusty into making other plans for him tonight, and he celebrated that decision now, because the alternate scheme had been executed without a hitch.
Several days earlier, he’d driven over into Louisiana and bought the marijuana himself. He had then intercepted the wetback who tended his mother’s flower beds as he was piling his tools into the bed of his piece-of-shit pickup and threatened to sic immigration on him if he didn’t grant Rusty one small favor.
The marijuana got planted in Ledge’s car. To demonstrate what a nice guy he was, Rusty had given the Mexican a doobie for his trouble.
Tonight, immediately after he and Ledge had parted company, using a burner phone he’d called the sheriff’s office with an anonymous tip that Ledge Burnet was selling weed out of his car on the parking lot of his uncle’s bar.
“There were some people with him in his car. I didn’t see who. Anyhow, he drove out alone, headed toward town.”
That’s all it had taken.
Ledge was in lockup. It was unlikely he would be granted bail. If his case went to trial, conviction would be a slam-dunk. Even if Ledge made a plea bargain to avoid trial, both his immediate and long-range futures included incarceration. He had been removed, if not permanently, then for a good, long time.
Rusty could now proceed to his next chore of the night.
He rotated his wrist a few times to work out some of the soreness and keep it flexible, then reached for his phone and made one of the most important calls he would ever make.
“Foster? It’s Rusty. Are you still awake?”
“Are you kidding? Who could sleep? I was about to—”
“Listen,” he interrupted, almost breathless with urgency. “Whatever you were about to do, forget it.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“It’s Burnet. He’s been hauled in.”
“To jail?”
“Yes to jail! Where’d you think?”
“Oh, God! How did they catch him? Was it his car? Somebody saw his car behind the store?”
Rusty pictured him peeing his pants.
“No. His arrest didn’t have anything to do with the burglary. The dumbass was stopped for a busted taillight, something stupid like that. While the deputies had him pulled over, they searched his car. Guess what they found.”
He told Foster the rest of it. He spoke in a rushed whisper, not only to convey urgency but to keep from waking up his parents in their bedroom down the hall. His daddy was a class-A crook, but it wouldn’t go down well with him that Rusty had stolen roughly half a million dollars.
That was, not unless Mervin got a hefty chunk of it.
Rusty freely acknowledged that he’d been spoiled rotten. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d demanded something that he didn’t ultimately get. His mother was sweet and doting and thought the sun rose and set on her boy. She was also clueless to a laughable extent. He manipulated her unmercifully.
His dad had a loud bark, but he hailed from the school of Boys Will Be Boys. Not so secretly, he got a kick out of Rusty’s misbehavior. The more unsavory the misdeed, the more it tickled his dad. Rusty’s shenanigans, the more outlandish the better, showed a creative streak that his dad took pride in.
However, Rusty had no delusions about the depth of Sheriff Mervin Dyle’s affection and indulgence. It wasn’t bottomless. It wasn’t even skin-deep. If it came down to protecting Rusty or preserving his own position of power, his dad would give him over without hesitation and not waste an instant of regret over it.
Cutting Mervin a large slice of the pie would be Rusty’s only bargaining