Strawman's Hammock Read Free Page B

for argument, discussion, or simple recollection, were displaced now by dish antennas and TVs. Friends, kinfolks even, who used to be thick as thieves grew into jobs and habits that never seemed to touch. It was astounding to Barrett how people living in a place so small and intimate managed to be so distant from their neighbors. Ten miles might as well be a hundred. It was a change in the region that he did not like.
    On the other hand, some things Bear would have liked to see changed remained stubbornly the same. Deacon Beach and the county beyond was still not a region where a black man—or a Latin man, or an Asian man, for that matter—was accepted as equal. You still had to know your place here. And if you got respect, you had to earn it at twice the price paid by the sorriest cracker living.
    Barrett had paid that coin firsthand. If it had not been for Ramona Walker, he’d never have gotten his first job as a beat cop on the Beach. Even in the eighties, with a college degree and an honorable discharge from the reserve commission that had sent Bear rolling with artillery into a storming desert, he was not good enough to be considered for hire by Deacon Beach’s all-white council. White men did not want a black man in blues.
    Seven years later Barrett found himself one of only four black men interviewed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. He got that job and made it stick. He was by now a well-known and respected lawman throughout the Third Judicial District, as well as on the Beach, but Linton Loyd had remained completely unimpressed. Their paths crossed often enough, at Rotary Club meetings, on football fields, or in the county’s consolidated gymnasium. Even Barrett’s recent transfer to the nearby field office in Live Oak, practically next door to the Loyd fiefdom, failed to evoke from Mr. Loyd the modest reception typically extended to homegrown boys done good.
    So when the invitation came to join Linton Loyd at his deer camp for the benefit of venison and good company, Barrett had been, to put it lightly, on guard.
    Something was expected. What would it be?
    Linton stabbed his long knife absently into the sand—the preferred way to clean a blade, to keep it from rusting.
    â€œQuestion for you, Bear.”
    â€œCertainly.”
    â€œWant you to think about something for me. No need to answer just yet.”
    Bear blew softly over the rim of his cup. “What is it, Linton?”
    â€œYou know Lou Sessions and me don’t always see eye to eye.”
    This was an understatement. Lou Sessions was the county’s sheriff, the unchallenged authority in his jurisdiction. Lou Sessions hated Linton’s guts. Linton held Lou in something much lower than contempt. The beginnings of the conflict were personal. Something to do with the fact that Gary Loyd had gotten the sheriff’s daughter pregnant and then refused to marry her. Linton backed up his son. Didn’t help that he also pronounced the girl a whore.
    â€œDon’t see how I can help you with the sheriff, Linton.”
    â€œNot just me involved, Bear. He’s bad for the county. Why, we got meth labs and marijuana growin’ all over these woods!”
    That much was true.
    â€œBut Lou, hell, he don’t even want to look. Won’t let you people look, and that’s a fact. You know that, Bear. Hell, ever’body in the county knows it.”
    Even allowing for personal bias, Linton’s assessment of the sheriff’s performance was not far off the mark. Lou Sessions was embarrassed early in his tenure when an FDLE probe uncovered a drug-dealing deputy in Lou’s employ. The incident almost cost Sheriff Sessions his second election. He was now in his fourth term and so hostile to FDLE, or for that matter to the DEA, ATF, INS, or any other outside agency, that by now the sheriff was widely suspected of being guilty of something more than incompetence.
    â€œI can’t get between