The old fire truck was gone, the same one Ray and his friends had followed when they were teenagers and bored on summer nights. A lone volunteer in a dirty tee shirt was folding fire hoses. The street was a mess with mud strewn everywhere.
Maple Run was deserted by midmorning. The chimney on the east end was still standing, as was a short section of charred wall beside it. Everything else had collapsed into a pile of debris. Ray and Harry Rex walked around the rubble and went to the backyard, where a row of ancient pecan trees protected the rear boundary of the property. They sat in the shade, in metal lawn chairs that Ray had once painted red, and ate tamales.
"I didn't burn this place," Ray finally said.
"Do you know who did?" Harry Rex asked.
"I have a suspect."
"Tell me, dammit."
"His name is Gordie Priest."
"Oh him!"
"It's a long story."
Ray began with the Judge, dead on the sofa, and the accidental discovery of the money, or was it an accident after all? He gave as many facts and details as he could remember, and he , raised all the questions that had been dogging him for weeks. Both stopped eating. They stared at the smoldering debris but were too mesmerized to see it. Harry Rex was stunned by the narrative. Ray was relieved to be telling it. From Clanton to Charlottesville and back. From the casinos in Tunica to Atlantic City, then back to Tunica. To the coast and Patton French and his quest for a billion dollars, all to be credited to Judge Reuben Atlee, humble servant of the law.
Ray held back nothing, and he tried to remember everything. The ransacking of his apartment in Charlottesville, for intimidation only, he thought. The ill-advised purchase of a share in a Bonanza. On and on he went, while Harry Rex said nothing.
When he finished, his appetite was gone and he was sweating. Harry Rex had a million questions, but he began with, "Why would he burn the house?"
"Cover his tracks, maybe, I don't know."
"This guy didn't leave tracks."
"Maybe it was the final act of intimidation."
They mulled this over. Harry Rex finished a tamale and said, "You should've told me."
"I wanted to keep the money, okay? I had three million bucks in cash in my sticky little hands, and it felt wonderful. It was better than sex, better than anything I'd ever felt. Three million bucks, Harry Rex, all mine. I was rich. I was greedy. I was corrupt. I didn't want you or Forrest or the government or anyone in the world to know that I had the money."
"What were you gonna do with it?"
"Ease it into banks, a dozen of them, nine thousand dollars at a time, no paperwork that would alert the government, let it pile up over eighteen months, then invest it with a pro. I'm forty-three; in two years the money would be laundered and hard at work. It would double every five years. At the age of fifty, it would be six million. Fifty-five, twelve million. At the age of sixty, Td have twenty-four million bucks. I had it all planned, Harry Rex. I could see the future."
"Don't beat yourself up. What you did was normal."
"It doesn't feel normal."
"You're a lousy crook."
"I felt lousy, and I was already changing. I could see myself in an airplane and a fancier sports car and a nicer place to live. There's a lot of money around Charlottesville, and I was thinking about making a splash. Country clubs, fox hunting - "
"Fox hunting?"
"Yep."
"With those little britches and the hat?"
"Flying over fences on a wild horse, chasing a pack of hounds that are in hot pursuit of a thirty-pound fox that you'll never see."
"Why would you wanna do that?"
"Why would anyone?"
"I'll stick to huntin' birds."
"Anyway, it was a burden, literally. I mean, I've been hauling the cash around for weeks."
"You could've left some at my office."
Ray finished a tamale and sipped a cola. "You think I'm stupid?"
"No, lucky. This guy plays for keeps."
"Every time I closed my eyes, I could see a bullet coming at my forehead."
"Look, Ray, you've done nothing wrong. The Judge didn't want the money included in his estate. Yo............