Chapter 38

The entire Missions clan was being hunted down, aggressively. They would all be caught and someone would know where Pussylips was.
Dee Lee had been around long enough to know that one of Pussylips’ family members was probably involved in some way in the robbery. No one else would know his courier schedule. Either someone paid a family member for the information, or a family member had done the robbery itself.
Fran, John, Heron, Wid’s father Willard Senior, and several others had already been picked up for questioning.
The reluctant ones were being interrogated with Vise grips in cages at the poultry farm. They would talk, or they would all be buried alive in graves filled with chicken shit.
Kurtis, Darroll, Darlene the wife, and two step-sons, Alden and Leonard, were unaccounted for.
Dee Lee believed the older sons, Kurtis and Darroll, and possibly Darlene, were the keys to the missing kilos.
He studied the road behind his aluminum sunglasses. His colostomy bag felt full of gas and sat like a bloated water balloon on his lap. He needed to empty it, or at least relieve some of the gas pressure, but he wanted to save the shit for Lewis White.
His red DSL cellphone was ringing.
He picked it up. “What is it now?”
“DF. It’s Ballmeat. I bear the gift of bad news. Very bad, but interesting news”
“What?” Dee glanced dramatically over at Glenny. “It’s Paul Astephen.”
“One of your missing mooses got killed last night,” Astephen said. “I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
“Who?”
“Uh. The name rhymes with Carol… Physicians.”
Darroll Missions, Dee thought, filling in the blank.
“What happened?”
“You want me to say over the cellphone?”
“It’s digital. Don’t worry about it. Where are you, a payphone?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s fine then. Just tell me.”
“I saw him in his Forerunner heading toward Halifax on the 101 or trying to leave the province maybe, in Gaspereau, so I pulled him over. But when he saw the cop car, he apparently tried to swallow a sandwich baggie full of coke, trying to avoid a bust for drug possession, probably. Anyway, the bag must have come loose in his throat, either that or he choked on the plastic. By the time I got to his window, he was having a seizure. Then he was not breathing. Then that was it.”
“Did you give him CPR?”
“No. I’d get prints and hairs all over him. I searched the truck and then drove him to Stiles Park.”
“Fuck, Paul. Did he have anything with him?”
“No coke. But I think it was definitely the two older brothers, one way or the other. Darroll and Kurtis.”
Dee hung up, without saying thanks to his police officer asset.
He looked over at Glenny and shook his head. “Darroll Missions’ is dead. That leaves only Kurtis, and maybe Darlene.”