Everything She Ever Wanted (8 page)

Then they had had a bad winter in '71 and the dock got so much ice on

it, it had sunk itself.
 
Tommy dove and dove and put lines on it and

they had hauled it up.
 
With the help of Walter's best friend, Jake

Dailey, they had cleaned it off and started all over.
 
Tommy had been

there working on the new dock until Walter washed his hands of him over

Pat.
 
Now, he would have to finish the last of it himself.

The lake was an hour's drive at most, but Forsyth County might have

been a world away from Atlanta: wherever you went you could find huge

platters of fried catfish and hush puppies, collard greens, yams,

cornbread, biscuits, and barbecue for only a few dollars.
 
It was well

known that Forsyth County still banned blacks after sunset.
 
The crude

warnings weren't posted anymore, but the sentiment was the same.
 
It

was said the Ku Klux Klan was active in the county.

The Allansons' old Ford station wagon, rusting out on the doors, wasn't

a suitable vehicle for a hopeful judge-to-be, but it was a good work

car.
 
Walter and Carolyn rode with the windows down, smelling hot pine

needles and baked red clay.
 
The kudzu was halfway up telephone poles

and creeping higher as it choked out weeds and fences and anything else

in its path.
 
They crossed the Chattahoochee and the thickets of

spindly pine trees grew denser.
 
Cement spillways waited in the dry

earth for a deluge to fill their hollows with rain.
 
In June, they were

as useless as Christmas tree ornaments.

It was too dry even to remember rain.

The atmosphere changed with each mile beyond Atlanta.
 
There were signs

advertising sorghum syrup, boiled peanuts, and chewing tobacco.
 
In

Cumming, the county seat, old men in overalls talked of other, better

days and spat brown streams of that tobacco from the front porches of

the aged red brick buildings of Main Street.

Walter slowed at the four-way stop at Hammond Corners, paused, and went

straight ahead on Route 306 until it deadended on Highway 53.
 
He had

driven this route so many times he barely noticed the signposts.
 
He

turned onto 53, and they came to the Y where they would veer off to the

left toward the lake on Truman Mountain Road.

Walter stubbed out a cigarette in the glass ashtray that perched

precariously on the dashboard and glanced over at J. C. Jones's

store.

It was quaint and jerry-built, but it was a gold mine for J. C.:

white-painted concrete blocks, gas pumps out front, and the old

signs-PEPSI, ICE, and FISH BAIT.

Jones was a shrewd old boy, rotund and cheerful.
 
Walter knew he had

bought up a whole mile of land along 53 when it was cheap.
 
He and his

pretty wife worked from six in the morning until nearly midnight,

selling everything anybody might conceivably needfrom fishhooks to

thick homemade sandwiches and lemonade.
 
They were always threatening

to retire, but hadn't made any move to do it.

Walter thought about stopping and then figured they could come back

down the few miles from the lake if they needed anything.
 
He eased the

station wagon left and headed up narrow Truman Mountain Road.
 
The oaks

and pin oaks and pines were dense here, enough to throw the road into

shadow.
 
The sunlight was only a blurry yellow haze as it was swallowed

up in the trees.
 
It was so quiet they could hear the whir of tires two

hundred feet away as Highway 53 passed by the back of the narrow strip

of woods.
 
Walter lit another cigarette and turned to say something to

his wife.

The shots came absolutely without warning-from somewhere in the woods

up the six-foot bank to their right.
 
There was no question of

defending themselves or of evasive driving.

Walter and Carolyn Allanson were helpless, caught in their fishbowl of

station wagon windows.

"What!"
 
Carolyn cried out, before her husband pushed her down and

gunned the motor.

They were hit, or rather the station wagon was.
 
Once, twice.

More.
 
No-they were hit.
 
Walter felt a trickle of blood on his face

and had the sense that they were both bleeding.
 
The splat of bullets

hit the car again and again.
 
The windshield spiderwebbed in front of

Carolyn, then in front of him, and then the ing window struts bulged

and the glass inside exploded.

w He kept driving and heard the back window disintegrate.

When it was finally quiet, Walter could hear again the wind in the

trees.
 
He looked back and saw no one at all in the woods.

With a shaky hand, he helped his wife off the floor and kept on

driving.
 
Both of them were cut and dappled with blood.

But they were alive.

The call came in to the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office in Cumming at

11:20', and Sheriff Donald Pirkle and Deputies Jim Avery, Randall

Parker, and Richard Satterfield responded to J. C.

Jones's store.
 
The station wagon had been hit nine times, and the

officers retrieved four bullet fragments from inside the vehicle.

Back up toward the lake, the sheriff and his men located an area that

could only be a carefully prepared ambush site.

Branches had been cut off a pine tree and arranged as a shield to hide

a shooter from the road .
 
There was a beer can on the ground with a

half inch of beer, still cool, in the bottom, and six .22caliber bullet

casings.
 
Behind the blind of limbs, the investigators detected a trail

through h the woods that led back to Highway 53.
 
There were faint

tracks in the dirt shoulder of the highway, zigzagging impressions,

indicating that a large vehicle had been parked there recently.

Someone had apparently waited quietly in the burgeoning heat of the

June morning for this particular vehicle to head up Truman Mountain

Road.
 
The space between the severed tree limbs had given the shooter a

perfect straight-arrow look down the road toward the Joneses' store.

It was a miracle that the Allansons had not been hit by at least one of

the bullets.
 
Or maybe the shooter had only meant to scare them.

Whoever it was had certainly done that.
 
Walter Allanson's hand

trembled as he lit a cigarette.
 
Yes, he answered Satterfield's

question.
 
He did have an idea about who had ambushed them.
 
"My son.

I think my son did it.
 
We had trouble before.
 
He stole guns from me a

few months ago."

Allanson offered his son's name: "Tommy.
 
Walter Thomas Allanson.
 
He

lives in Zebulon, Georgia."

Pat and Tom were having dinner that night with the colonel and

Margureitte at their Tell Road horse ranch in East Point around 6:30.

It was there that they received the message that Nona and Paw had to

talk to them at once, and that was how they learned that someone had

shot up Tom's parents' station wagon near their Lake Lanier property.

Tom wondered why his life was growing steadily more bizarre and

violent.
 
He had no idea who might have wanted to take a bead on his

father's car.
 
It might even have been an accident, some damn fool

poaching deer.
 
But Pat wasn't all that concerned about the ambush

incident.
 
Since Walter Allanson treated her like trash, his

misfortunes didn't distress her.
 
He was an evil man, she reminded Tom,

and he probably had a lot of enemies.
 
He might even have exposed

himself to somebody's wife or daughter-somebody too angry to waste time

going through legal channels to punish him.

But Tom-Tom did things by the book.
 
On Monday, July 1, Pat and Tom

appeared at the East Point Police Department at 5:15 P.m. Pat,

extremely agitated and tearful, did most of the talking.
 
She demanded

that a warrant be sworn out for the arrest of Walter 0.

Allanson, charging him with public indecency and threatening telephone

calls.
 
Sergeant Charles Butts informed Pat and Tom that he had no

jurisdiction over incidents occurring in Zebulon and directed them to

either the Pike County sheriff or the Zebulon Police Department.

Tom stood quietly behind Pat until she completely broke down in tears,

and then he stepped forward and told Butts, "My father's running for a

judgeship in this county.
 
This kind of man doesn't need to be running

for any office."
 
Butts swore later that he had heard Tom say softly

that "if this kind of stuff keeps up, I'll kill the bastard."

Very likely, Tom did say that.
 
And now both father and son had

threatened each other.
 
But Tom did not yet know that his father had

accused him of the Lake Lanier shooting.
 
Nor did Walter Allanson know

that Pat had accused him of indecent exposure.

On Tuesday, July 2, Margureitte was in her office when the phone

rang.

She was amazed to hear Walter Allanson's voice.
 
She had not expected

him to call her again.
 
Right after her first meeting with him in his

office, she was so wary of Allanson that she had gone to the East Point

police to try to tell someone he was dangerous-especially to Tom.
 
She

had also told the women in her office that she was afraid of Tom's

father.
 
Now, here he was, calling her again.

"This is Mr.
 
Allanson."

"Yes, Mr.
 
Allanson."

"Mrs.
 
Radcliffe, what time do you go to lunch?"

She told him that she usually had lunch between twelve and one,

depending on the patient load.
 
"I'll be a little late getting out

today."