Dark and Bloody Ground (14 page)

Other than school texts, Sherry had never read a book all the way through. She was an avid student of local newspapers, however, reading at least one every day from front to back. She gave national and international news only cursory attention—in a given year she might not have been able to name the President of the United States, and she could not have found China on a map to save her life—but she knew what was going on in Anderson, Roane, and surrounding counties as well as any local editor did. She pored over feature stories, social notes, and the want ads with a proofreader’s eye. Sports mattered little more to her than the stock market. Most avidly of all she followed crime stories, especially accounts of arrests, trials, convictions, or acquittals. Why one criminal got nailed and another went free were questions of insatiable curiosity to her. Ask her about any local case and she could provide means, motive, evidence, alibi, or have read between the lines to catch a whiff of payoff. Her obsession was a source of wonder and irritation to Benny. “Booger,” he would say, “why you got your nose in that damn paper again? Ruin your eyes.” She also studied people incessantly at work or when she was out and around, priding herself on being able to guess their occupations, whether someone was cheating on a husband or wife, how much this or that item of clothing or jewelry had cost and whether a
face showed misery or joy, innocence or guilt. If cops had brains, they would have hired me to go undercover, she often said.

Add to all this what she had learned at Brushy, from Benny, from her own small-time misdemeanors and felonies, and from the numerous scrapes friends and relatives had experienced, and one could count Sherry Sheets as a woman of the world. If her circles did not encompass the rich, she believed that she understood them and that she certainly knew more about them than they did about her. To Sherry, the rich were different from her because they were bigger crooks.

She could not drive through the prosperous neighborhoods of Oak Ridge, with their flowering lawns and shiny, expensive cars in every driveway and two or three TVs and stereos blasting and people sipping drinks in Jacuzzis, without thinking that she deserved all that as much as anyone. In the stores at the Oak Ridge mall she studied the spoiled little girls in pressed designer jeans dealing from decks of Daddy’s credit cards and wondered what swindle had gone down, what money passed under the table to float this game? Were there that many nuclear scientists pulling down a bundle? You didn’t make that kind of bucks being an egghead. The honest day-to-day laborer didn’t stand a chance. She knew what her dad and her ex-husband earned at the plants, good salaries, but peanuts compared to real money. They would die never knowing the good life. You had to have an angle.

Sherry wasn’t so much envious as impatient of ignorance and irritated by hypocrisy. The way she saw it, there was a certain amount of wealth in the world. The people who had most of it had figured out when the fix was on. Benny’s approach was similar but simpler. To him, if the other dog had the bone and you could sink your teeth into it, it was yours.

In that neck of the woods, Sherry concluded, the angle was drugs. Drugs were the common denominator that linked rich to poor, poor to middle class. Money might be scarce, but drugs were everywhere, and once you had the drugs, money followed.

With their cash crunch acute, it was only Togical for Sherry to ask why, if Sheriff Trotter could get away with it, she and Benny also couldn’t profit from the same scam, confiscating drugs and selling them. There was one thing about drug dealers, they were not about to blow the whistle. What were they going to do, call the police? Hey,
these people got my drugs and my money! I want them caught and prosecuted!

The prospect of robbery with virtual immunity from arrest proved irresistible. This would be no crude mugging operation. It would require thought and preparation, as well as networking and a certain amount of acting, including costumes and props.

First off, they would need a setup man, someone with accurate information about who the dealers were, where they kept their stash, how well they were armed, whether they were the type to put up a fight. He would get a third of the take. And Benny would need a partner, who would get another third. The idea would be to show up at a dealer’s place pretending to be cops making a bust and steal everything in sight.

And they would need a good fence. Trying to peddle the merchandise themselves would be the one sure way to get caught.

Benny had no difficulty making the right contacts. He still had sources within the sheriffs office who would give him information for a price. At his painting job, which he now could look forward to quitting, one ex-con led to another, connections that spread throughout Anderson and into other counties. As his partner Benny selected Roice Littlefield (an alias), a con whom he had known at Brushy and who had a grudge against Trotter and was delighted with the idea of taking some of the action away from the sheriff. They agreed that they should not target any dealer known as a straight-up guy, honest within the terms of the criminal fraternity. They needed to keep loyalties intact for future jobs. The ideal victim would be someone in cahoots with the sheriff, or any known snitch. No respected Brushy alumnus would be hit.

As for the fences, they were everywhere. A certain Knoxville dealer in gold, silver, coins, and estate jewelry was one; a bartender at a Lake City veterans club was another. Both had plenty of cash available for instant payment, so the hot goods could be got rid of immediately.

Through Littlefield, Benny bought a gun—as a parolee, he could not have obtained one legally, and owning one put him in violation of parole, but that was not of paramount concern. A Smith & Wesson .38 special five-shot, with a four-inch barrel, it looked like something a plainclothes cop would carry. At Green Acres Flea Market, he bought a gold policeman’s badge.

Gaining entrance to the dealer’s house or apartment would be half the battle: it would not do to break the door down as in the drug raids depicted on television; someone might get hurt. To make Benny look more like a cop, Sherry trimmed his hair, giving him a conservative part on the left, and had him shave off his beard. She found him a sportsjacket that she altered to fit his broad shoulders and narrow waist, and she insisted that he wear a shirt and tie. She decided that the only thing he lacked for authenticity was a warrant.

Benny knew where the search and arrest warrant forms were kept in Sheriff Trotter’s secretary’s office. Sherry managed to make off with some while everyone was out to lunch. She filled one out with the name of their first target, entered “suspected possession of drugs for resale” on the proper line, and signed the name of a local judge. For extra effect she added the imprint of an old notary public’s seal she had found at the flea market. No one would examine the imprint too closely. People who knew they were guilty tended to be cooperative.

“I reckon we’re set for our first lick,” Sherry said.

For Sherry, the scam was pure excitement. Even though she would not take part in the robbery itself, she felt as much a part of it as if she were actually going to be there. On the night itself she sent Benny off to work with a housewifely kiss, wished him luck, and told him to be careful. She waited in the apartment, smoking and pacing, trying to picture the action in her mind. She had driven Benny and Roice several times to check out the location, a small, isolated house on the outskirts of Briceville. There were no immediate neighbors; the place was ideal because of its obscurity and lack of outside lighting. The dealer, who was fairly small-time and sold mostly marijuana, lived there with his girlfriend. If his pickup was in the driveway, he was at home. If there were visitors, Benny and Roice were to drive around until any guests had left. The fewer people involved, the better.

Sherry jumped when she heard a noise at the door, but it was only the fellow who was letting them share his apartment. He was tight as a tick and quickly passed out on his bed.

The first thing she would do if this job turned out to be any kind of a success, Sherry promised herself, would be to put a deposit down on a house she had already picked out. How wonderful it would be to spend their first Christmas together in a place of their own. Her parents
had still not accepted Benny, but they would come around once they understood what he was really like, so good with children, her soulmate. If nothing else won them over, his cooking would.

Out on Highway 116, about fifteen miles from Clinton, Benny and Roice pulled up a few yards from the dealer’s house. There was his truck, with the girlfriend’s Chevette parked on the lawn. A light burned inside.

Benny and Roice waited until the highway was deserted and made their move. As agreed beforehand, Benny knocked on the door. When the girlfriend answered, he showed his badge and asked if so-and-so lived there.

“We got a warrant here to search this place.” He waved the form at her. The man came to the door and Benny repeated his speech. Roice was right behind him, ready for trouble with his gun.

But there was no trouble. They were no sooner inside than the man was trying to reach some sort of compromise.

“You trying to bribe an officer of the law?” Benny asked, just to gig him. “You want this to go down easy, you show us what you’ve got.”

The man led Benny to a back bedroom. Meanwhile Roice noticed that the girl was wearing some pretty stones.

“You see that Biggin, my partner?” Roice asked her. “Let me give you a little hint. He’s one mean son of a bitch. If he sees those rings of yourn, he’ll take ‘em off you. He can’t get ‘em easy, he’ll chop off your fingers. Why don’t you just give me ‘em and I’ll slip ‘em into my pocket and give ‘em back to you before we leave. That’s a good girl.”

When Benny finally returned in the early hours of the morning, Sherry knew at once from the smile on his baby face that everything had gone down as planned.

The dealer had swallowed their act cold, Benny told her, whispering so as not to wake their friend. The guy had practically begged them to take his stash. If only Sherry had been able to see how grateful he was when they didn’t arrest him! Maybe by now he had figured out that they weren’t even cops.

Benny showed Sherry the wad of bills that was his take. Some of it was cash from the dealer, but the reason they had taken so long was that they had gone directly to the fence in Lake City afterwards to get
rid of the stuff. No problem there. They had waited around until the bar closed and gone home with the fence to put a value on the stuff and get paid. There had been several bags of grass and some jewelry, including rings the girlfriend had given Roice to hold for her, if you could believe that. It turned out Roice had a sense of humor.

Sherry counted the roll. Benny’s take was just under five thousand, not a bad night’s work. She gave him back two hundred and stored the rest in a shoebox under their bed. They had agreed that she would be the banker.

In bed Sherry made Benny tell her all over again everything that had happened. The only thing she regretted was that she hadn’t been there. Next time, she was going to drive the getaway car. Armed robbery was some kick. There was nothing like it, was there?

“Not that I know of,” Benny said.

During the following months Sherry and Benny expanded and refined their operation. Benny worked only when they ran out of money, about every five or six weeks, but they realized that the closer they were to home, the more they risked taking heat. In a system of tradeoffs made possible by a widening network of contacts, they exchanged information with criminals in other counties. Someone over in Cumberland County would put the finger on a dealer in, say, Crossville; Benny would do a lick over there, paying the informant a piece of the take and, quid pro quo, tip him off to a job in Anderson, from which Benny could expect a piece. Little cheating was possible, because the informant knew more or less what the take was likely to be in his home area. Since law enforcement agencies were poorly coordinated from one county to another and were unlikely to hear or care about some ripped-off drug dealer anyway, the chief danger of the scam was retribution from offended dealers in one locale or another. The farther away Benny operated from home, the less vulnerable he was. That is to say, the less likely he was to end up in a ditch with his hands tied behind his back and his head blown off.

Sherry occasionally drove the getaway car. One of the first purchases she made with her new money was a 1980 Fiesta, replacing her ‘72 LTD. Deciding that she needed more zip hurrying home after a robbery, she switched to a Mustang, then traded that for a bright red ‘83 Dodge Charger, a car favored by bootleggers, moonshiners, and their offspring, stock car racers on the Southern circuit. To monitor
the cops, she and Benny installed a police scanner, locating local frequencies from a code book sold at Radio Shack stores. They kept a battery-operated blue revolving light under the seat and attached it to the roof sometimes when making a bust.

Sherry devoted most of her energies to keeping Benny out of trouble, insisting that he stick to robbing illegals and rationing his cash so he would not be tempted to make some conspicuous purchase. None of the cars was expensive enough to raise an eyebrow; each was registered in her name. Drawing on her beautician’s skill, she colored Benny’s hair differently each time out, styled it variously, and used a theatrical makeup kit to give him scars, wens, wrinkles, bags under the eyes, or a hideous case of acne. Usually he shaved his beard and mustache, or Sherry had him keep sideburns or a goatee.

Worried about the gun, she bought an Army-issue steel waterproof ammunition box that held the .38 and boxes of bullets and buried it in the yard between robberies. She paid cash for everything. And there was ample cash. A typical lick netted five to fifteen thousand dollars. Benny’s cut of one big job was thirty thousand.

She slipped up only once, neglecting to remove Benny’s badge from a suit she took to the cleaners. She did not realize the oversight until the lady behind the counter handed her back the badge, enclosed in a plastic bag like lost change, when Sherry picked up the cleaning. “I was so worried,” the lady said, “your husband would be furious if he thought you’d lost it.” “He sure would have been,” Sherry said. To herself she laughed to think that Benny would from then on be known at the cleaners as an undercover officer.