Chapter One

“Chopper just took off, headed your way,” Joe Joe said.

“DEA?” Riley Hannacker asked.

“Nope, not crickets. State-ies. Gray-babies.”

Joe Joe had a wealth of colorful names for the Kentucky State Police helicopters, manned by gray-uniformed troopers, that buzzed over Callison County every summer looking for fields of marijuana. He called the green Drug Enforcement Agency choppers crickets, flying pickles … sometimes bug guts.

“Took out down Versailles Road” — pronouncing the word in Kentucky fashion, Ver-sails — “and hung a left over the Bluegrass Parkway south, best Larry could tell.”

As soon as he hung up, Joe Joe would call Larry and his other spotters to get a bead on what part of the county the Kentucky State Police helicopter was scouting, searching the windswept foliage below it for a particular shade of “marijuana” green. That was harder than it might sound — even now, with the trees a riot of bright fall colors. Riley had rented a chopper a few times to see what the law saw when they flew over his fields. Of course, Willie Ray Taggart was all the time flying Kiwi so low over them that one of these days he was gonna get a wheel tangled up in some woman’s clothesline and drag her wet laundry across the sky like a tail on a kite. He said he was scoping out the aerial view of the pot fields, but Riley knew Willie Ray just wanted an excuse to do acrobatics, a reason to experience the world out there on the edge. That was Willie Ray.

Gratefully, today’s chopper would have to get real lucky to spot any of Riley’s weed in the field. Most of what little the Cornbread Mafia grew in Callison County these days was already cut and drying. There were maybe a half dozen or so small fields, and spots where it’d been planted between the rows in a cornfield — which took longer to mature because the plants didn’t get as much sunshine that way. All the Callison County fields were test crops where Willie Ray kept track of which hybrids exhibited the traits he was breeding for — a mama plant’s size, maybe, along with a papa plant’s resistance to mold — that kind of thing. Willie Ray couldn’t find out what he needed to know just growing a single plant all by its lonesome, needed to see a whole crop develop under normal growing conditions.

With an advance warning from Joe Joe, it was possible to spread out camouflage nets over small fields and they’d worked real well earlier in the spring. But that was just luck. Unless there were already workers on site, there wasn’t time — even with a warning — to get the nets in place.

All Riley could do with the alarm Joe Joe’d sounded today was cross his fingers and hope. It’d be a real shame to lose any of those fields, a setback for Willie Ray’s hybrid breeding program that had already produced the world’s premier strain of marijuana — Righteous Weed.

“Keep me posted.”

“All over it, boss.” Riley could hear in his voice the grin on his face.

Riley was proud of Joe Joe. His nephew could have drifted along like so many of the other Callison County boys did right out of high school, content to work just enough to get by — in tobacco if they were skittish and marijuana if they weren’t. Not Joe Joe. He’d graduated this spring with a BA in Business Administration, courtesy of Riley’s offer to fund a full ride at the University of Kentucky in Lexington — in exchange for Joe Joe getting a job at Bluegrass Field so he could continue the career he’d started when he was nine years old, fishing in the creek down from Nate Hannacker’s moonshine still.

Papa.

His grandfather’s image bloomed bright in Riley’s mind and a dagger of grief stabbed into his heart. Papa had been gone for five years now and Riley still missed him so much it took his breath away. Someday, he would find out who’d murdered Papa. And when he found that person, he’d put a bullet in the center of their forehead just like they’d done to Papa.

After Riley hung up, he stepped out onto the second-floor balcony that opened off his office and looked down at the little blond boy swimming laps in the pool below. He squinted up into the sun and shook his head — temperatures had hovered near ninety degrees well into October. But Riley was glad Drew could use the pool today, with school out for some kind of teachers’ in-service day. Swimming was one of the few things the boy enjoyed. He watched his perfect form, courtesy of hours of swimming lessons. Drew could be on the school swim team when he got older … except Riley couldn’t imagine Drew ever joining a team of any kind, and his heart ached.

Drew had been emotionally hammered by his grandfather’s death every bit as hard as Riley had been. But he was just a little boy, didn’t know how to deal with the pain and couldn’t seem to get past it. His grief had morphed into something more, something worse, something bigger and uglier and more emotionally dangerous. Riley didn’t know how to help him.

But he did know it would take more than some stupid bouncy castle to make Drew Hannacker smile. Sherry Lynn had delayed the boy’s ninth birthday party to schedule it. The party was excessive, over the top, of course — featuring a bouncy castle and a clown and a puppet show and pony rides. But that was Sherry Lynn’s specialty — over the top. Excess was her mission in life. He honestly wondered sometimes if she woke up every morning thinking, “What is the most extravagant, lavish, overindulgent thing I can do today?” And then set about doing it.

Lord only knows what the woman would have brought to the party if Riley hadn’t reined her in — which he seldom did anymore — what was the point? But when he’d heard her on the phone setting up hot-air balloon rides, he’d put his foot down. And there’d been hell to pay. Her explosion of temper had likely shown up on some seismograph somewhere as a shifting of the tectonic plates in the earth’s crust.

Which was probably what she wanted. Riley was pretty sure that most everything Sherry Lynn did was an effort to get a rise out of him. That had to be the reason she was staging the party of the century for Drew. She knew how the boy felt about crowds.

“It will be a crowd of children, so he’ll be fine,” she’d snapped when Riley’d brought up the salient point that their son was always tense, never relaxed around a lot of people, climbed into a shell of uncomfortable-almost-frightened silence every Sunday at church. It was like she had erased from her consciousness what’d happened two years ago at the Callison County Burley Festival. But that was to be expected, Riley supposed. After all, it’d been “unpleasant,” and Sherry Lynn Hannacker did not do unpleasant. No sir-ee, she did not. As soon as she’d lost the mountain of weight she’d gained after Drew was born, she’d become again the vivacious girl she’d once been — the perpetual high school cheerleader, smiling/happy/bouncy/giggling/fun-fun-fun. She was the reason they’d attended the Burley Festival in the first place, because everybody will be there. Translate that — Sherry Lynn wanted to see and be seen, wanted men to ogle her and women to be jealous of her and she wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity for both.