Dark and Bloody Ground (7 page)

Within minutes a woman was on the phone asking for Lester Burns.

“You better have it this time!” Lester shouted into the phone. “I am not driving all the way back there unless I’m getting my money, you hear? All right. This is absolutely your last chance. Where are you?”

When he hung up, Lester asked Lillian to drive him to Orlando the next day. He did not want to go alone; he might need both hands free in case trouble started. These were not nice people he was dealing with. He told her who they were and that he needed help to collect part of his fee tomorrow.

It was not how Lillian Davis had planned to spend her Sunday, but she agreed. They were on the road to Orlando by noon, Lillian behind the wheel of her black Bronco, Lester beside her with the Uzi at his feet and the .41 Magnum shoved into the side pocket of the door. From time to time Lester sipped from a bottle and chewed aspirins.

Carol and the others had switched motels. Lester directed Lillian to the Days Inn and told her to circle the parking lot twice, as he tried to spot FBI agents. Then he told her to park as close as she could to 121, a ground-floor room.

Lillian stayed in the car as Lester knocked on the door of the room and went inside. When he returned and climbed back into the car, he told her to wait. Carol Epperson was coming out with his money. Lester inspected the pistol and made sure that it was loaded. Lillian pointed out a rather short middle-aged woman standing a few doors down with a younger dark-haired woman; they appeared to be watching. Lester said that they were Donald Bartley’s mother and sister.

Carol came out of her room carrying something wrapped in white motel towels. She climbed past Lester into the back seat, and he closed the door and locked it. Carol unwound the towels and let Lester peek into a paper sack that was filled with stacks of bills secured with rubber bands.

“I understand that this is my fee, ninety thousand dollars,” Lester said, lying to conceal the actual amount from Lillian.

“No,” Carol said. “There’s more than that. It’s all there.” She spoke rapidly, complaining about two men who were out by the motel pool watching her.

Lester told Carol to get out of the car. He would see her in Somerset in a few days, he said. In the meantime, she should stay out of
sight and off the highway and be careful. He would be in touch with her.

Lillian threw the Bronco into reverse and screeched the tires. Lester told her for God’s sake to cool it and act perfectly normal. He wrapped the sack back up in the towels, put it under his feet next to the machine gun, and instructed Lillian not to exceed the speed limit on the way to Okeechobee.

Lillian dropped Lester off at his house. Alone in his garage, he counted the money. There were thirty bundles of five thousand dollars each. He counted out ninety-two thousand and replaced that in the sack, wrapping it again in the towels. Then he hid the remaining fifty-eight thousand along with the other money in the trunk of the Corvette.

Back at Lillian’s duplex, Lester unwound the towels again and emptied the sack onto the floor and began counting the money, riffling through the stacks and dropping them as if he did not like touching them. Once or twice he went to the window and looked into the street. Lillian watched him count. He was acting paranoid, she said. She brought him a drink.

“Ninety-two thousand,” Lester finally announced. “She was right, there’s a little more than I thought. Actually they’re paying four hundred twenty-five thousand, can you believe it? Plus automobiles.”

Lester said that he was worried about fingerprints on the money. Some of it was old, 1970s series, and mildewed. He didn’t know that this was Acker money, of course, there was no way he could know that, but it would be better not to take chances. He would have to wash it.

“You mean launder it?” Lillian asked.

“No, for now, what I need to do is wash it.”

He took the money into the bathroom and began wiping it, bill by bill, with a facecloth wrung out with soap and warm water. It was mostly in hundreds, but there were fifties, too, and a scattering of twenties. With a glass of whiskey beside him, he worked at his washing steadily for hours, calling for fresh facecloths, meticulously wiping both sides of each bill. Around midnight he was done. He scrubbed his hands with surgical thoroughness, as if to rid himself of some contaminant.

He wondered at himself. What was he getting himself into? But it
seemed impossible to stop now. What was he going to do, return the money, saying sorry, I’ve changed my mind? It would be dangerous on the road tomorrow. These people would stop at nothing. The way they fought among themselves, some of them might come after him. There might be others out there who had not been caught. Who knew how many murders they had already committed? He decided he needed a bodyguard.

The sack of money clutched in his hand, limping from the pain in his hip, Lester lurched into the street. He made his way to the house next door to his own and banged on the door. A light came on. Someone asked who it was at that hour. Lester called out his name. A man peered through a window and opened up.

“Griff, I’ve got a problem.”

“Lester. Christ, have a drink.”

Somewhere in his early sixties, Houston J. Griffin was a big old boy the size of a linebacker. Divorced and retired, he was originally from Eastern Kentucky; he now lived in Georgia and came down to Okeechobee for the fishing. Lester pushed past him and dumped the money out onto the middle of the living room floor. He told Griffin that this was only part of a fee he had collected. His client was charged with murder. Lester was afraid that some of the cohorts were trying to take the money back. He needed help in bringing it to Kentucky. He would pay Griffin whatever he demanded to make the trip.

Griffin said he would do it for expenses plus one of Lester’s Black Angus bulls.

They did not get an early start. In the morning, Lester strolled around the neighborhood flashing wads of bills, boasting that he had just landed one of the biggest cases of his life. A stranger might have thought him deranged, the way he pranced and poured talk of riches into every ear; those who knew him understood it as typical Lester Burns behavior, if somewhat more grandiose than usual. Around Lester, you always felt within reach of a fortune. You wanted to touch him, hoping his magic was catching.

They set off in tandem, Lester riding with Lillian, Griffin following in his white LTD with the money stashed in the trunk in a blue plaid gym bag. Keeping to the speed limit, they figured it might take twenty hours or more up the length of Florida, through Georgia and Tennessee to the shores of Lake Cumberland.

Lester held the Uzi in his lap and checked out every car that
passed. His thoughts were of this gang of thieves. Epperson seemed to be their leader. Lester had not had much contact with the others, but he had the impression that Hodge was the most dangerous, Bartley a wimp who yet might be capable of anything if cornered. Together they were an arrogant bunch who brought to mind the James boys or the Dalton gang, tearing around the country. They had been on quite a spree, there was no doubt of that.

As for the women, Bartley’s girlfriend was staying out of sight somewhere in the Tennessee hills, apparently. Carol was a mess, yapping and intolerable. Early in the day, clean and with black hair shining, she did present allurements—sinuous, exotic as opium, she was plausible as an attraction in some joss house, an amber-skinned geisha mindlessly open to possibilities. Nor, in a sense, was she ignorant, her druggie but grammatical prattle sprinkled with references to oddball books, pop psychology. Lester classed her as a fading flower child turned crook.

Among them, men and women, only Sherry might be an actual human being. Her eyes showed weariness and worry. She seemed the most intelligent. She was kind of a loner.

6

S
HE WAS BORN SHERRY LORAINE SHEETS
on January 15, 1951, in Rockwood, Roane County, East Tennessee, a region similar historically, culturally, and geographically to Eastern Kentucky, which lies immediately to the north. The accents are alike. When hill people from either place say, “The far truck blowed a tar afore Ah pulled mah paints awn and Ah shouldah took thet kaemper of urine,” they mean, “The fire truck blew a tire before I pulled my pants on and I should have taken that camper of yours.” The economy of East Tennessee is more diversified and healthier, but it is also a high-crime area, most of it drug-related; and as in Eastern Kentucky the linchpin in the drug trade is often the county sheriff.

Roane County, where Sherry Sheets was still living when she met Benny Hodge, was known among local criminals as Little Chicago, and not because of the wind or stockyards or even a city. It happens to be a convenient tankful of gas from Central America, and on a given night you might spot a plane loaded with cocaine touching its pontoons down on one of several wide rivers and lakes created by the TVA. Interstates 40 and 75 provide links west to Nashville, east to Knoxville, and north through Kentucky to Cincinnati and other mid-western markets. It is pretty country, romantic when the black CSX trains come barreling out of the mountains and rumble over bridges that cross the Clinch River and the Tennessee; but the drugs are everywhere.

Sherry did not take drugs, or hardly ever. Although she had done
a little selling here and there, and one or two other things that could have landed her in jail or, at least, lost her a job, she had managed to stay out of trouble through her twenty-nine years. “I put forth my best effort, whether it’s legal or illegal,” she liked to say, “and ain’t nothing’s illegal till you’re caught.” For Sherry, however, nothing was ever the same after the day she first laid eyes on Benny Hodge, September 3, 1980. Her daughter, Sherri Renee, happened to be celebrating her fifth birthday on that date; but a child was one thing, Benny Hodge another.

On that Wednesday, Sherry drove up to Brushy Mountain State Prison, in Morgan County, to apply for a job as a guard. The pay was good—eight hundred and forty-seven a month take-home, plus full benefits—and Sherry thought it sounded like a better way to earn a living. Where else could you get paid, as she expressed it, to sit on your butt all day watching men? It beat being a cashier or a beautician, jobs she had held since her 1972 marriage to Billy Pelfrey, a welder at one of the big government plants in Oak Ridge. Billy’s sister, Charlene, had told her about the opening at Brushy. Charlene was already a guard there and described it as a piece of cake—a little scary sometimes, but what was wrong with excitement? Sherry had an itch. She was as bored with her marriage as with her work.

Years ago Brushy Mountain had been notorious for its harsh treatment of prisoners. You could still see the corner of the exercise yard where men were hung up by their thumbs and whipped. It remained one of the few prisons in the country from which no one had ever escaped, owing mainly to the physical situation of this castellated fortress, surrounded on three sides by sheer rock cliffs and rugged hills thickly forested and infested with snakes. James Earl Ray, who for a few months was Benny Hodge’s cellmate at Brushy, made an escape attempt in 1977. Along with several other inmates, Ray staged a fight during a baseball game and scrambled over the rear wall while the guards were distracted. One prisoner who bolted spontaneously without his shoes fell and was quickly captured. Ray and others scattered up into the mountains.

Warden Herman Davis directed his men to forget about the other escapees until Martin Luther King’s assassin was run to ground. Fifty-five hours later, a mile or so into the forest, they heard twigs snapping, and the bloodhounds found Ray in a hole, trying to cover himself with leaves, dehydrated and exhausted. At Brushy a man may make it over the wall, but he soon discovers that he has nowhere to
run. This absence of hope could partially explain why there were seven murders at Brushy between 1976 and 1980.

When Sherry filled out her application, she already knew from her sister-in-law something about how it was on the inside; and Sherry had been selling marijuana and Quaaludes (downers) to two other guards, a fellow she knew from high school and his buddy. (She was able to buy the pot from friends at a hundred and eighty dollars per quarter pound and sell it to the guards for six to eight hundred dollars; the pills she bought for two dollars and fifty cents each and sold for twenty dollars apiece.) She understood how the prison’s microeconomy ran on drugs at wildly inflated prices. Still, she had much to learn.

When she passed her interview, Warden Davis told her she could start work in two weeks. She and Charlene were walking through the front gate, heading for the parking lot, when a state car pulled up. In the back seat, staring straight ahead, was the best-looking man she had ever seen. The sight of him made her gut flip.

“Who’s the hunk?” she asked Charlene.

“That’s Benny Hodge.” Charlene explained that Hodge had been let out for the day to go see his new baby at the hospital in Knoxville.

“He was messing with some girl,” Sherry asked, “while he was locked up in here?”

“He sure did. He married her, too. That’s Benny.”

“Lord have mercy.”

For the next two weeks Sherry thought about Benny Hodge. She tried to imagine how he had managed to knock a girl up while he was behind bars. There were no conjugal visits allowed at Brushy and besides, they hadn’t even been married when she became pregnant. Had he sneaked her into his cell? Had Benny been able to slip it to her in the visiting room under the eyes of the guards? It must have been some quickie, that was for sure, and Benny must be hung like a bull. Sherry dreamed about him day and night.

She spotted him again on the job at Brushy. She was in Shack Number One, a wooden structure directly in front of the main prison building, with a clear view of an alleyway to the left. Through a window she watched Benny Hodge unloading big cases of canned produce from a truck and carrying them down the steps to the basement storeroom. The other prisoners working with him staggered under a single case. Hodge was lifting three and four cases at a time and carrying them effortlessly. He barked at the other men, directing them like a foreman.