Dark and Bloody Ground (22 page)

Sherry knew that the most important thing was to get Benny and Donnie away from the house and off the road. She drove them to a motel in Kingston, only ten minutes away, the nearest town east on I-40, a well-to-do bedroom community for Knoxville and one of the least likely places for the cops to look for fugitives. She registered for them, keeping them out of sight, using the name Wong and entering a false tag number for the Charger, wishing she were driving a car more anonymous than the bright red speed machine. In the room she gave the boys changes of clothes and took their suits. Kissing Benny goodbye and telling him not to worry, she would think of something, she hurried back to Harriman, tossing the suits into a Dumpster along the way.

She worried about tomorrow. The FBI would soon be after them. They had impersonated federal officers, and they had crossed state lines. Everything she had feared would result from Roger’s hot-air recklessness and Benny’s subservience was coming down.

When she reached the house, she telephoned the motel. They were safe. She tried to calm Benny down, saying she loved him and would stick by him no matter what.

“I love you, too, Booger,” Benny said.

Sherry wandered around, touching the possessions she and Benny had acquired together and wondering what to do. She was filled with dread, sensing that it was now only a matter of time before her hopes for a normal life with him were over forever. Or maybe not. Maybe they could go on the run and disappear. People did that, didn’t they?

She walked out the back door and into the woods and, pacing off the distance from a certain tree, unearthed by moonlight a jar of money, a couple of thousand stored for an emergency. There were other jars buried here and there; no sense taking it all now—if she were caught on the run, the less cash she had with her, the better.

Lying on the big bed, she took deep breaths, trying to hold her anxiety in check. What she knew she was going to do, had to do, brought agony. It was not that she was hesitating to help Benny. What did stand by your man mean if not that? But her dad was ill, his lungs deteriorating. What if he needed her while she was running and she couldn’t go to him? What if she couldn’t see or speak to him before he died? She felt she was betraying him.

And there was Renee, who had come to accept Benny, more or less. How long would it be before she saw her daughter again? What would Renee think when and if she found out that her mother was helping Benny run from the FBI? And what if she were watching TV one night and saw that her mother had been arrested with the likes of Donnie and Roger? Or killed in a shoot-out?

Near dawn Sherry fell asleep and dreamed that she was alone, wandering across some featureless white plain, an arctic waste, calling Renee’s name and hearing nothing but the wind. When she awoke, she remembered that she had had this dream before, only not so vividly, and she had the feeling that she would be dreaming it again. She had the impulse to telephone Renee, catch her before she was off to school, tell her good-bye for now. Tell her some lie or other.

Instead she phoned Benny and told him to get ready. She would bring him and Donnie their toothbrushes and shaving things and some other clothes. Benny asked her not to forget his weights. There was no sense in letting himself get out of shape. He might need all his strength.

BANDITS POSE AS IRS

read the banner headline in the
Rome News-Tribune
that morning. The story gave details of the robbery, said that two of five suspects were already in custody, and was accompanied by a photograph of the T-bird, identified as “car used in robbery.” The next day a story reported that officers had gone to Tennessee to search for three other men wanted in connection with the armed robbery: “Floyd County police officials believe the men will go to an area near Knoxville.”

On Thursday, May 30, a third suspect, identified as a thirty-nine-year-old resident of Ooltewah, Tennessee, and a “cousin” of one of the men already in custody, turned himself in to authorities in Rome. Family members, understanding that he was a fugitive, had convinced
him to surrender. Newspaper and television reports announced that FBI and IRS agents had joined in the search for the remaining two suspects, who were believed still to be hiding out in the Knoxville area.

By then Sherry was convinced that it was only a matter of time before Benny was caught, and she discussed with him the possible advantages of turning himself in. He was adamant, however, and she could easily sympathize with his point of view. He would rather die, he said, than go back to prison. In a telephone conversation with him—she was now moving him and Donnie to a different motel every night—she told him that she would remain loyal to him forever and would try to help him to the end.

“They won’t take me alive,” Benny said.

“I’ll die with you,” Sherry said. “We’ll shoot it out with the cops if they get us. I love you forever.”

In the meantime she did her best to help her outlaw escape. She contacted him only from pay phones, worried that the FBI would surely have her home line tapped. She was certain that agents were following her, hoping she would lead them to Benny. They had not come to the house, but they must have known about her by then. Driving around during the day, she could tell that she was being followed.

But the FBI was no match for her, Sherry convinced herself. She counted on their believing that one dumb broad would never be clever enough to elude them, and she doubted that they would bother watching her twenty-four hours a day. She moved Donnie and Benny only late at night, taking every precaution. For an hour or so she would run preliminary, pointless errands here and there, parking in well-lighted lots and scrutinizing everything that moved when she did. If she strongly suspected she was being tailed, she drove home, waited with the lights out, and crept down to the road on foot through trees to make sure no one was waiting for her. She enjoyed the game.

But after a few days of this, she decided to confront the FBI head on and con them out of wasting their resources on her. She telephoned Gene Foust and asked him to set up an interview for her with an FBI agent, telling Foust that she knew that she was being followed because Benny was on the run, that she did not know where Benny
was, and that it was time to get the Feds off her back. Foust agreed to help, asking no questions. Sherry relied on her belief that, like most local police officers, Foust resented the FBI for its arrogance, its reluctance to share information, and its interference with local practice and custom. It was the FBI that had nailed Trotter and other sheriffs and that posed a constant threat to local autonomy. Foust, Sherry calculated, would stay neutral, at least, in her present difficulties.

She met with Foust and Special Agent Burl Cloninger in a room at the Oak Ridge P.D. Cloninger, graying and avuncular, more casual and friendly than Sherry’s standard concept of the FBI, thanked her for coming forward. He assured her that the Bureau was interested only in Benny Hodge and Donnie Bartley, not in her—a statement Sherry pretended to accept at face value. Seizing an opportunity to appear cooperative, she pointed to a wanted poster depicting Benny that was tacked to a bulletin board behind Foust. That photograph looked nothing like Hodge, she said.

“You all could run right up against him and not arrest him, if you was to have that there picture in mind,” she said. The photo showed Benny with a scraggly beard, unkempt as he had never been since being with her. It must have come from Brushy and was ridiculously out of date. “Benny don’t look like no criminal, I can tell you that much, if you wants to know. Benny’s handsome and real clean-cut.”

She told Cloninger how distressed she was at the disappearance of her boyfriend, whom she deeply loved and had been trying to help stay straight. Unfortunately, her relationship with Benny was a rocky one and on May 27, the last day she had seen him, they had had an argument over money. Earlier that day they had worked out together at the Racquet Club. After the argument at home, he had telephoned someone, she did not know whom. Then he had taken a few clothes and left. He did not take the car, so he must have met someone. As he stormed out, he warned her that if she so much as looked out the window, he would kill her.

At this, Sherry burst into tears and, to illustrate the tragedy of her situation, she displayed to Cloninger the knife wound that Benny had inflicted on her right wrist. Avoiding Foust’s eyes, for fear of faltering or even laughing, she said that she and Benny had often fought violently, after which he sometimes left for brief periods. She had expected him to return as usual this time, until she learned from the
TV that he was on the run. She now believed that he was not coming back to her because he did not want her involved in his present difficulties. In spite of everything, she believed that Benny loved her. Agent Cloninger offered her a Kleenex.

Where did she think Benny might be hiding, Cloninger wanted to know. Through fresh tears Sherry said she hoped Mr. Cloninger understood that, because she loved Benny so much, she could not be expected to help in his arrest. She had no idea where he was. Maybe he had gone to his first wife and daughter or his mother in Morristown; maybe he was with his second wife and daughter in Knoxville. Sherry supplied the names and addresses of all these women.

She added that Benny had spent so many years in prison that he had often said that he would rather “blow his brains out” than go to jail. She expected that he would not be taken without a fight. He had with him, she believed, a .38 pistol with a four-inch barrel but no automatic weapons, as far as she knew. Benny did not especially like guns.

She volunteered that he was a weight lifter who did not drink or use hard drugs but smoked marijuana occasionally as well as about a pack and a half of Camels a day. He had left a Kawasaki 900 motorcycle at her house. Because she was broke, she had sold the bike for eight hundred dollars and was now living on that. She had been working for a gold and jewelry shop whose owner had recently been arrested for dealing in drugs and stolen property. Fortunately, she had quit that job because she had worried about having her own probation revoked.

As for Bartley, Sherry admitted knowing him casually, said she disliked him, and described his Honda 500 turbo bike, red and silver, that she believed he kept at his sister’s trailer in Oliver Springs. She named the sister and supplied her telephone number.

Sherry was proud of her performance before Cloninger, who had seemed downright sympathetic and had thanked her for her cooperation. She believed that she had sprinkled her monologue with just the right convincing mixture of specific fact and bullshit, giving both more and less than she had been asked, playing the verbal shell game she knew so well. From what she could tell, it had worked, because she was no longer aware of anyone following her. About what Foust may have said to the FBI about her and whether she could continue
to trust him, she was less sure—but in that she had little choice and had to rely on instinct.

Two days after the interview, however, an acquaintance who worked at the federal building in Knoxville relayed a message that the FBI was about to close in on Benny and Donnie that very night. Sherry immediately telephoned a motel in Crossville.

“I’m coming,” she said. “Be ready. Just get in the car and don’t ask no questions. Everything’ll be okay.”

16

I
T WAS SHERRY'S POLICY
always to hide the boys at a motel that was close to an interstate, in case of the need for a fast getaway and because these were generally crowded and more conducive to anonymity. The one at Crossville, some thirty-five miles west of Harriman, was near the I-40 exit. Believing it might be a mistake this time to wait for nightfall, she arrived there in midafternoon, circled the parking lot twice to check for cops, paid the bill in cash, and kept the motor running as Benny and Donnie climbed in.

“What’s the big rush this time?” Benny asked.

“I got a tip. The Feds might be on to you. I got to get you out of this area.”

“Where we going?”

“Haven’t thought of that yet.”

She did not decide whether to turn west or east until reaching I-40 and, simply because it came first, headed up the east on-ramp. In less than a mile the traffic began to thicken and slow; it soon crawled to a halt. Up ahead they could see flashing red lights.

“Goddamn it!” Donnie said. “An accident! We’ll never get out of here! Turn around!”

“You crazy?” Sherry said. “Turn around where? You want them to think I’m drunk? Keep your lid on. They’ll think you escaped from the loony bin.”

A patrol car coming the other way crossed over the median and
joined the head of the double line of traffic; two more police cars passed on the shoulder to the right.

“I’m running!” Bartley said and started climbing over the front seat to get at the door. With a mighty stiff-arm Benny sent him crashing back and told him to calm down or he’d break his neck. It was just a big accident, was all it was. They’d get through.

Sherry turned up the radio and began singing along. Then she fell silent. They were close enough now to see that there had been no accident.

It was a roadblock. Standing on the highway, police were looking into every car and checking licenses.

They were all too scared to speak, even Bartley, who pressed himself into a corner of the rear seat. When he tried to hide on the floor, Benny pulled him up by the shirt and Sherry told him for God’s sake to sit up and try to act normal. The cops would see him down there, and it would all be over for sure. “Just don’t let out a peep, can you?”

It seemed to take forever to reach the head of the line. Benny slowly removed the .38 from his gym bag and placed it under his seat. Finally Sherry rolled down her window and, switching off the radio, gave the officer a smile and asked what the matter was. Somebody rob a bank?

The officer looked in and asked to see Sherry’s license. He examined it. Then he said:

“Sorry to detain you, Mrs. Wong. You’re right. Somebody did rob a bank, in Crossville. They won’t get far.”