The Wilding Probate: A Bucky McCrae Adventure

by D. J. Butler

  “Dammit.” He shoved the will into his pocket. “Cops.”

  Should I just run?

  I eyed the front door. It was only ten feet from me, but there was a counter in the way I’d have to hop, and then I’d have to get the door unlocked—

  Indra didn’t leave me the time to decide. He grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the door by which we’d entered.

  I rattled out the back door and hit the ground with a shock to both ankles. Wordlessly, Indra dragged me right, toward McAllister’s. Before we were halfway there, he jerked me sideways again, pulling me left this time, and dragging me down into a ditch.

  My call had worked. If someone from the sheriff department had come here, that could only mean they had listened to my call. Which meant they must also be sending someone to check on Evil, or they would be in a minute, once they saw the door forced, which would confirm what they’d heard on the phone.

  If Evil was still alive, he’d be safe.

  This was more than I could say for myself.

  “Shh,” Indra said softly. In case I didn’t get the message, he pressed the barrel of his pistol to the back of my neck. It felt like an ice cube.

  He looked over the lip of the ditch and watched the courthouse. I lay down inside the depression and saw nothing, but I heard the scrape of boots on the gravel of the parking lot, and then the click-talk-click patterns of police handhelds.

  “Howard one-eight here.”

  “Howard one-eight,” I heard dispatch answer.

  “I have visual confirmation of a forced entry. Unit for code two.”

  I knew enough cop-radio-speak to know that unit for code two meant that the deputy wanted backup. So I’d done it. I’d alerted the sheriff department under Indra’s nose. But my heart was hammering way too fast to enjoy my success.

  Besides, it wasn’t too late for Indra to simply shoot me.

  “Rebecca?” the deputy shouted. His voice sounded a little muffled, like maybe he was inside the trailer now.

  Indra surged suddenly to his feet. I had a terrible vision of him rushing forward to shoot a deputy, or two deputies, and dropping them dead right there in the parking lot. Instead, he pulled me and we ran the other way.

  I was sweating profusely, which I only realized because my running, slow as it was, turned that slick sheen of sweat into a casing of ice. I shivered.

  We crossed a vacant lot, that was supposed to have turned into a McDonald’s more than ten years earlier, only the owner’s financing fell through in one of the stock market busts of the aughts. The FOR SALE BY OWNER sign had been sitting in the weeds as long as I could remember. The great thing about the lot was supposed to have been its location right next to St. Joe’s, one of Howard’s two high schools. But the McDonald’s didn’t happen and no one since had found the lot interesting enough to step in and pick up the project.

  Indra dragged me several more blocks. We were in downtown Howard now, so there were sidewalks, but we didn’t use them. He stuck to the shadows of trees, and ran behind buildings, and he turned us in a slow loop down Third Street, which is all little old-style Howard bungalows, and then brought us out on the outdoor basketball courts of St. Joe’s.

  I stood in the shadow of a leaning basketball standard with no net on the rusted hoop, catching my breath. Across the big front lawn of St. Joe’s, speckled with tall weedy grass, and over Veterans’ Park, I could see Judge Ybarra’s courtroom. Two trucks from the sheriff department were now parked in front of the trailer, and the lights were on inside the building. I could see silhouettes through the windows that suggested people moving.

  I didn’t hear ambulance sirens, though. I tried to think through the route. Would an ambulance have to pass within earshot of me to get from the Urgent Care to the Fun Lanes? Or would the ambulance even use its sirens? Maybe it wouldn’t need to. Maybe it would drive at flow of traffic, not sure yet whether there even was an injured person to pick up. Maybe the paramedics on the scene could help Evil enough they wouldn’t need to use the sirens.

  I crossed my fingers and looked up at the statue of St. Joseph who stood over the nearest door to the school. He was bearded and robed, and I wasn’t really sure which Joseph the saint was. Joseph, as in Joseph and Mary? But wasn’t there another Joseph, who let Jesus use his own tomb? Maybe there were others. I hadn’t really grown up on saints, but neither of those guys seemed like an obvious choice to have a school named after him.

  Neither one seemed like a natural patron of hostages, either, or people lying unconscious on the floor of a bowling alley. Plus, I had no idea what kind of prayer you were supposed to say to a saint. Really, the McCraes had never been a praying household, and less so since Mom had left. Still, I crossed my fingers and thought, because I didn’t dare say it out loud: St. Joseph, get us both out of this and I’ll… What would St. Joseph want? I’ll let kids from St. Joe bowl free for a week.

  Whatever else he was, presumably St. Joseph was the patron saint of the kids studying at his school.

  I realized that Indra didn’t know I’d sneakily sent an ambulance, and I needed to keep playing my part. “Can we call the Urgent Care now? Then you can take Charlie Herbert’s truck and get out of town. Now’s probably the right time to do it, with the sheriff department distracted. I think you and I are done.”

  Indra Wilding looked at me with flat eyes. “Yes. You and I are done.”

  I didn’t like the tone of his voice. He prodded me with his pistol, and for once I wished there were a whole lot more traffic in Howard at night. Especially foot traffic. I would have been grateful for a passerby to notice this man pushing me around with his pistol, but no such luck.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Back to the river,” he said. “And the truck. I can’t leave you here in town, so you’re going to come with me and I’ll drop you off somewhere down the road. Far enough from a phone so you can’t do me any harm.”

  It was a lie, and I knew it. He had no intention of helping Evil, and he had no intention of letting me free. Indra Wilding was going to kill me. He hadn’t punched me in the face to control me, he’d punched me in the face to remind himself that he had to be brutal to me, treat me like an enemy.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Then I ran.

  Indra cursed. I sprinted past him to force him to lose precious time turning to come after me, but there was no way I was faster than him, especially with my arm in a cast and my balance thrown off. I had precious seconds at best, and I gambled on McAllister’s. I ran toward the burger bar as fast as my exhausted legs would carry me, but when I hit the road, I heard the squealing of tires.

  A black SUV slammed on its brakes and skidded to a halt right in front of me, so close that I bounced off its hood and almost fell down. Two others pulled up behind it.

  I wondered where Indra was, but as I staggered away from the first SUV, rough hands grabbed me and dragged me back. My vision swung wildly as my body practically flew through the air, but I didn’t see Indra.

  Instead, I saw a big-shouldered man in a suit, and then I was stuffed into the back seat of the SUV and the door was slammed shut behind me.

  And the car drove on.

  For a few long seconds, I couldn’t make out anything, except a greenish glow that must be the light of the car’s dashboard instrumentation.

  “Rainbow?” I croaked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, kid.” The words sounded like the words of a mobster, but the accent wasn’t Brooklyn, or at least it wasn’t the Brooklyn accent I recognized from movies and TV. It could have been a Spokane accent, or Pocatello—just mid-American western flat. “I didn’t see any rainbow today. Just rain.”

  “Who told you my name?”

  This second voice belonged to a woman, and I recognized it. It was Rainbow Wilding’s voice. I sat up, and my eyes adjusted enough that I could see her sitting in the back seat beside me, still wearing her expensive suit. Closer up, I realized that she wasn’t as
old as I had taken her for, not as old as my Dad. Older than her brother Indra by a few years, though.

  “Nobody told me. I guessed.” I wondered whether I could trust her. She traveled with rough men, but that didn’t mean she was a crook.

  “Not out of thin air.”

  I sighed. “I read a will.”

  “You’re the lawyer’s kid.”

  “I don’t really think of myself as a kid.”

  “Neither did I when I was sixteen. I was wrong. You read my father’s will. Which one?”

  I trembled with adrenaline, and I knew that as soon as that artificial kick passed through my system, I’d collapse from fatigue. “I read two of them. Or anyway, I skimmed two of them.”

  “Dated when?” I couldn’t see Rainbow Wilding’s face in the darkness, except for one cheek and ear that were bathed in spectral green dashboard light, which made her look a bit like a detached and floating ghost’s head. “This is important.”

  In the front sat two of her muscle men. The one in the shotgun seat, who I thought was the one who had yanked me into the car in the first place, leaned back and stared at me, his face veiled in the darkness of the SUV.

  “One about ten years ago,” I said, struggling to remember the date.

  “And the other more recent?” she snapped.

  More recent? “No,” I said slowly. “The other was about twenty years old.”

  Rainbow snorted. “How many wills did my father write?”

  “It’s what people do,” I said. “They update their wills, you know, when their life situation changes. Like when they…remarry, for instance.”

  “Thanks for the lecture.” Rainbow didn’t mean it. “Now tell me what you saw up on the mountain.”

  “Up on what mountain?” I said feebly. The guy in the seat in front of me leaned in closer. He smelled stale and sweaty, and there were onions on his breath.

  “You were hiding outside Marilyn’s house. Don’t lie. I know the car there isn’t hers, it belongs to a kid named Ronald Patten. You and Ronald were there, watching. Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  How did they know the car belonged to Evil? Were these cops? Maybe Rainbow Wilding traveled with bodyguards because she was a politician of some kind. I had a terrible sinking feeling. I hadn’t been rescued; I’d been snatched from the jaws of one predator by a pack of a different species, but I still had teeth at my throat.

  And then I realized what had been niggling at the back of my mind all evening.

  “You’re looking for a third will,” I said.

  Rainbow didn’t move, just kept looking at me. In the dim light her eyes looked like a lizard’s. “Go on.”

  “It’s more recent.” This much, Rainbow herself had virtually told me. Now I started guessing. “Charlie Herbert must have witnessed it.”

  A hiss of breath in the darkness told me my guess had struck home. “Have you seen it?”

  “No, but I know where it is.”

  “Don’t give me any nonsense about Charlie’s shack.” Rainbow’s voice carried an unstated threat. “Or the little weed factory, either. We’ve searched both places quite thoroughly.” I remembered her two dead thugs, one with a rebar spear in his sternum and the other with a hatchet to the head. I didn’t mean to, but I shuddered.

  “No,” I said. “It’s actually here, in town. We’re quite close.”

  “Your father’s office.”

  “No, Dad has the twenty-year-old will. And he had the ten-year-old will too, until he filed it with the District Court today. But I know where the most recent will is, and I can get it for you.”

  “Go on.”

  “But these guys are scaring me.” I pointed at the two men. “I’ll bring you the will, but these guys disappear.”

  “You think I’ll just let you go, and hope you come back? We still haven’t finished talking about what you might have seen up at Marilyn’s place.”

  “You can come with me.” She didn’t seem to be jumping at that idea, so I threw out another. “Or I’ll take along one of your bruisers, only first he gives me his pistol.”

  “No way,” the man in the shotgun seat harrumphed.

  But Rainbow Wilding cocked her head to one side and looked at me. She was silent for a moment, and I thought the expression I was seeing on her face might just be a hint of a smile.

  “Burt,” she said firmly. “Give her your gun.”

  The man called Burt muttered something in a language I didn’t know. But he reached into his jacket and pulled out a Glock, which he handed to me. I took it.

  “Show me your ankles, Burt,” I said.

  “That’s my only piece.”

  “Ankles.”

  Burt muttered again, but he lifted up his cuffs and showed me both ankles, lifting his feet off the floor to do it. By now my eyes had adjusted enough that by the dashboard lights I could see that he wasn’t wearing an ankle holster on either leg. “Satisfied?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Go with her, get the will, and let her go,” Rainbow Wilding said to Burt.

  I ejected the magazine to make sure the pistol wasn’t empty, then reseated it. For once, I’d be the one who was armed. “Let’s go, Burt,” I said.

  Burt and I stepped out into the light of a single street lamp and two of the three SUVs pulled away, taking Rainbow with them. They left Burt a single vehicle and Rainbow’s instruction, “Call when you’ve got it.”

  I waited for a moment to give them time to disappear, and in the meantime looked at Burt’s face.

  He had strong eyebrows, a square jaw, and wide open eyes, all of which gave his face a very honest look. It might have been a reassuring look for him to have, except that Burt’s face also looked excited and a little angry. I decided to try being honest with him.

  At least partially.

  “Indra Wilding was chasing me,” I said. “I think he wants to kill me.”

  “Good thing you got a gun,” Burt shot back. “Tell you what, if I see him coming, I’ll point him out and step out of the way so you can shoot him. Or maybe I’ll just throw myself to the ground and shriek.”

  “I thought you’d rather be warned. You don’t need to be so sarcastic.”

  “Just doing my job, kid,” Burt said. “Which, by the way, is also what my pals Dock and Steve were doing. Their jobs. Only when they went to figure out who was hiding in the tall grass and spying on them, they got killed for their trouble.”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Yeah, I don’t see you a shoving an iron pole into a grown man’s chest or sinking an ax into a guy’s head. Frankly, I don’t see you shooting anybody, either. I get that kids out here know their guns and all, but they mostly shoot tin cans and raccoons. Shooting a human being is an entirely different proposition. I think if I really wanted to take that gun back, I could just yank it out of your hands. But in the meantime, you’re dangerous. So forgive me if I’m not all excited to be walking around the streets of Hicktown here without a weapon.”

  “Why don’t you just take the gun away from me, if you think it’s so easy, and you’re so uncomfortable without it?”

  “I’m doing my job, like I said. And right now, my job is to follow you to wherever this will is stashed and get it. Afterward,” Burt’s sneer flashed into a cruel grin, “we’ll see.”

  “This way.” I didn’t like it. Despite his open face, Burt didn’t feel straight to me, and I wanted to test him, catch him up. Marilyn’s orders had seemed straightforward, but maybe Burt had other plans.

  Maybe, it occurred to me, Burt was playing a different game. After all, when I’d heard Indra Wilding talking on the phone in the little A-frame cabin, it had sounded as if he was talking not to Rainbow, but to someone in Rainbow’s entourage. Just stay away, Indra had said, and keep her out of this.

  I started walking toward Sam Barlow’s trailer.

  “You know we could drive,” Burt said.

  “It isn’t far.” Being in the SUV only made me feel conspicuous
, and what I wanted to feel right now was discreet. Burt didn’t press the point.

  Sam’s court was held in a trailer not too different from Judge Ybarra’s. Probably I should call him Magistrate Barlow, but that doesn’t feel right, Sam’s not that kind of guy. Sam’s the kind of guy who fishes a lot, who buys everybody at the bar a round of drinks when he shows up, and who is surprisingly good at chess. His curving mustache and pointed little beard make him look like an old Spanish don, but the dons never got this far north, and his relaxed grin and slow conversational pace make you want to call him Sam, even when he’s forty years older than you. He’s everybody’s favorite uncle, Sam Barlow, and he’s the county magistrate—that means he runs a minor court that can handle certain small matters, mostly to keep the little stuff from clogging up Judge Ybarra’s District Court. Traffic tickets, licensing disputes, small claims, all that kind of stuff, you end up in front of Sam.

  The night Charlie Herbert had died, his last words, he’d said something about how he’d gone to the wrong trailer. I hadn’t understood what he meant then, or how he’d come to be there, but I was starting to be able to fill in the gaps. Charlie had been in the Wildings’ secret room, and someone had manhandled him. Probably, I guessed, that someone was Marilyn’s lover Nick, and probably at some point he’d stolen a deputy’s uniform and worn it as a way to get Charlie to trust him. Which must mean that Charlie hadn’t recognized Nick, so if Nick was Marilyn’s lover, he hadn’t been living with the Wildings. In fact, unless Charlie was just so stoned out of his mind he didn’t recognize people, it must be the case that Marilyn had done the beating up without Nick, and then Charlie had escaped, so Nick had stolen a deputy’s uniform and gone after Charlie. Because if Charlie recognized the guy who’d been pummeling him, he wasn’t going to trust him, no matter what uniform he wore. Maybe Nick had also been the one who had burgled Judge Ybarra’s court. Maybe Charlie had told him he’d given the will to the Judge. Or maybe he’d told Marilyn and she’d done the burgling. Only she didn’t seem like the type, not with those nails.