My mouth dropped open, and it took me a few seconds to recover enough to ask, “How in the world did they get their hands on it?”
“I don’t know how they found it, but Mary had hired that bitch to clean. Gave her too much free rein in the house. Still,” he said, sawing off another piece of sausage, “it wasn’t in the house. It was hidden in the garage.”
“You kept twenty million dollars’ worth of gold in your garage?” I cried.
“Yep, in three forty-gallon barrels. The question is how they found out it was there. If you popped the tops off them, they looked like they were full of used tools.” He shrugged. “Mary wanted to use china, but I told her no one would buy a barrel of china that heavy, so she relented.”
I could hardly wrap my mind around it. He’d had twenty million dollars. In gold. In his garage. In barrels. “Couldn’t you have put it in a safety-deposit box or something?”
“That much gold?” He shook his head, still focused on his breakfast. “Seemed like a good place to keep it.” He shrugged. “Well…until it was gone.”
“So they just found a way to make off with your barrels of gold, then?”
“Nope, they were sneakier than that. They cut a hole out of the back of each of ’em. I figure it must’ve taken ’em a week or more to carry it all off the property without being noticed. We searched bags and shit as people left the pot manufacturing site, but not here. Mary claimed we didn’t have much worth stealing.” He snorted, shaking his head.
“How’d you figure out Bruce Abernathy helped her?” I asked.
His face lifted. “The question is how did you?” He rolled his eyes. “You’ve been sleuthin’.”
“I was never out to steal your money, Hank,” I protested.
He reached over and patted my hand. “Girlie, I know that, but I don’t want you anywhere near this mess. And what a mess it is.”
“Is that why you asked me to leave? So you could strategize with your old work buddies?”
“Partly. We’re trying to find out what that bitch knows, but Bingham’s after her too.”
“He wants the money?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, but he seems more interested in settlin’ a score.”
“For how she treated Lula?”
“I’d like to say that’s the reason, but somehow I doubt it. He may love that girl, but he loves himself more. I suspect she wronged him too before she was locked up. She stirred up plenty of shit in this here town. I suspect that’s why she didn’t fight the prison sentence. She gave things time to die down before comin’ back and stirrin’ everyone up again.”
As clear as it was that he detested Louise, he seemed to be taking this whole thing remarkably well.
“Why aren’t you more pissed? You sure seemed to hate her whenever I asked anything about her before she got out of prison.”
“Because I was bidin’ my time, waitin’, and now it’s time for action.”
“You’re tryin’ to get your gold back?”
“That too.”
What else did he want?
Then it hit me. “You want revenge.”
He didn’t answer, just took another bite of eggs.
“Are your guys the ones digging holes all over the county?”
His head jerked up in surprise. “That would be a fool’s errand. We’d need to know where it was buried first.”
“Who do you think’s doing it?”
“Eh, could be Louise herself. Bruce likely moved it after she was arrested. He wasn’t exactly the sharing type.”
“Doesn’t sound like a man intent on killing himself.”
He snorted.
“What does that mean? You think he did hang himself?”
“Might have done. He took my gold, and the fool knew I’d expect an equal amount of flesh in repayment.” He gave me a sly look. “Which wouldn’t work out too well for him considering he didn’t weigh six hundred pounds.”
“So you think he killed himself because he was scared of what you’d do to him?” I shook my head. “I don’t believe it.”
He lifted a brow in question. “You don’t believe people were scared of me?”
“Sure, but he went to all the trouble of taking it. Why end it all when he knew where twenty million in gold was hidden?”
He pointed his fork at me. “Unless he’d already lost it all, and he knew he was as good as dead as soon as he was released.”
“How would he have lost it?”
He shrugged.
“Does that mean you don’t know?”
“It means I’m speculatin’.”
“Did you talk to him while he was in jail?” I paused, running through the likely scenario. “Or have someone do it for you?”
“I may have had a guy get arrested for a minor possession charge to get access to him.”
“And did he find out anything?”
He paused. “No.”
I wasn’t sure whether to believe him.
After some hesitation, I asked a question I was afraid to get the answer to. “Did you stage his suicide?”
“Nope. As far as I’m concerned, he got off easy. He needed to pay for stealin’ what was mine.”
“You would have killed him?” I asked, feeling sick.
His eyes darkened. “People don’t fear a dog that’s all bark. Gotta have some bite too.”
“You’re not a dog, Hank,” I chided, not hiding my disappointment.
“No, I’m not. I’m a man who ran a multi-million-dollar pot distribution ring. I wasn’t playin’ with Boy Scouts, girlie. They had to know I meant business.”
I’d always suspected that Hank had killed people in his business—shoot, he’d shot a man who was about to kill me without the slightest hesitation. He was obviously a man used to killing, but it had been easier to dismiss when I’d known he was protecting me. It had seemed less questionable.
“You think less of me now?” he barked.
I held his gaze. “Honestly, I don’t know what to think.”
“I got a past, and I ain’t gonna pretend I wasn’t that man. If it’s easier for you to pretend otherwise, I suppose that’s fine, but I gotta confess, wonderin’ what you think of me could get me killed.”
I grabbed his hand. “Hank.”
“I’m gonna get blood on my hands before this is done. Can you live with that?”
“I think the real question is can you,” I said.
“The world will be a better place when Louise Baker is no longer breathin’ in it. If I happen to be the person who puts her down, I won’t have one iota of trouble sleepin’ at night.”
“Hank,” I admonished.
“This is why you have to go away, Carly. You can’t be around for this, because I know what you’ll do.”
This didn’t seem like a good time to bring up the possibility that Bruce and Louise had worked with a third party, given Hank was talking about killing people, but I had to warn him in case the other person had been Big Joe. Plus, I’d told Michelle I’d ask Hank about a finder’s fee. I only hoped it didn’t backfire.