The Highways of the Dead (A Creed Crime Story Book 1)

by James Evan March

  Andrew wouldn’t say how many women he had raped but Lovett felt that he had been doing his thing for a while. DNA evidence taken at that house deep in the woods revealed that at least eight women had been.

  “What about offering a deal with Perez to find out where those women were taken?”

  Lovett sighed. “I would consider it if I thought it would do any good. But even if he knew, which is unlikely, he wouldn’t implicate his associates. If he did, he would be killed as soon as he arrived in prison.”

  I asked Lovett if the sheriff’s department had acted on my report of the abduction at the Express Stop. There was a moment of silence and I fully expected to be told, in a polite way, that it was none of my business.

  “Not that I know of,” said Lovett, finally. “The report written by one of the deputies who went to see you that night is that you were believed to be inebriated and provided insufficient details.”

  “Like a license plate number,” I said bitterly. I didn’t ask Lovett if he was going to do anything about that.

  The D.A. went on to tell me that I could expect to be called as a witness in both trials and that he needed the phone I had put on Andrew’s truck as evidence.

  “The defense may try to find something wrong with your intervention. But I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. Tracking your own phone is not against the law, and neither is going through a locked door when you have good cause to suspect that someone on the other side is in danger. You did have good cause, didn’t you, Mr. Creed?”

  “You bet.”

  Ike Soames called me that same day.

  “Roy! How in Hades are you doing, son?” he asked, with his slow, amiable Southern drawl. Ike tried to present the image of an affable good ol’ boy, the kind that some folks had a tendency to underestimate.

  “If I had a tail I’d be wagging it.”

  He guffawed. “I’m calling because there are rumors afloat that Sheriff Guthrie let it be known in the department that your allegations regarding Andrew were a flat-out lie. There are some mighty good folks in the department, Roy, and I expect that explains the rumors getting out. Some people think he should resign. But I don’t reckon he will.”

  “Thanks for the heads up.”

  “You don’t sound worried enough, if you ask me. Sheriff is a hothead. I wager he has it in for you.”

  “Worry is just paying interest in advance on trouble that might never come.”

  Ike chuckled, a sound like the deep low rumble of distant thunder. It was a sound tailor-made for a tall pudgy man with a merry temperament. For thirty-plus years he had dressed up like Santa Claus and sat in a sleigh hooked up to paper mache reindeer in front of the courthouse on Christmas Eve, handing out candy canes to kids who lined up to sit on his knee and tell him what they wanted to find under the tree.

  “I gave him a call, by the way,” Ike said. Mentioned that that while I recognized I might be a bit prejudiced, since I had been the Creed family attorney going on four decades, it was my opinion that you had done a good deed and that Andrew was lucky you were the one who showed up, else he might have been killed.”

  “I’m guessing that didn’t get me on his Christmas card list.”

  “I doubt he does Christmas cards any more, if he ever did. You were off to war when his wife left him. If you ask me, she had good reason. Guthrie has a violent temper and he just didn’t treat her right. I’m not a shrink but that might have something to do with his son’s low opinion of women.”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  That night I was sitting in the rocker on the front porch, nursing a local micro brew and unwinding after a long day of working the horses and myself pretty hard, when Jenna called.

  “Anna’s folks got to town a while ago. They’ll be taking her home to Texarkana tomorrow. She’ll have to come back for the trials, of course.”

  “You find out why she was hitchhiking?”

  “Yeah. She has a boyfriend. Apparently he got a job in New Mexico. She wanted to be with him. Of course her parents wouldn’t allow it so she set out on her own. People do stupid things when they think they’re in love, don’t they? Anyway, she wants to see you. Wants to thank you again and say goodbye.”

  I thought it over. I was Amy Hopkins’ lifeline right now. I was the one who made her feel safe. But if this continued she might want to correspond, or call when she felt uneasy. In the long run that wouldn’t be helpful to her, psychologically.

  “No. Tell her I appreciate the sentiment. But I’m part of what happened and she has to turn her back on that. All of it.”

  “Well, she’ll see you in court, anyway. Hopefully by then she’ll have been able to pull herself together.” There was a pause and when she spoke again, Jenna’s voice was soft and her tone one of concern. “How about you. Roy? You have a whole lot to put behind you. Still getting those night sweats now and then?”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “Liar.” I couldn’t see the smile, but I heard it. “Everything okay with you and Nelly?”

  “Mhm.”

  “Well, hell.” Then, a self-effacing laugh. “I guess I’m not as adept as you are when it comes to putting things behind me, am I? Okay. I’ll say what you would never say. Shut up, Jenna. See you around, Roy.”

  “Count on it.”

  The next day I called Billy Rogan and thanked him for being on call the last few days. Billy owned a helicopter charter service in San Antonio. I promised to come down and visit.

  I called Tully the same day. I thanked him for connecting me with Hack and told him everything that had happened. He congratulated me on a job well done, which lifted my spirits. Then I told him about the missing victims. He was quiet for a moment.

  “You won’t ever find them, Roy. You go south and start nosing around you’ll end up dead or spending the rest of your life in a stinking prison.”

  Now it was my turn to be quiet. He knew me well, knew I had been thinking about doing just that.

  “Sorry, son,” he said. “They might last a few years. May be hooked on drugs to keep them pliable. Then there’s disease. They’re as good as dead. You need to move on.”

  “Yes, sir.” I thanked him and hung up. The colonel was right. He always was. Time to move on, or try to. It was over.

  That’s what I thought, anyway.

  18

  Makker woke me a few nights later. His forelegs were on the bed and he licked my face once. That was enough. I could tell by the movement of his head that he was on the alert, hearing something. Since he kept checking the row of clerestory windows above my bed I assumed whatever had alerted him was outside.

  I rolled out of bed and pulled the loaded Ruger Blackhawk from under the mattress, along with the loaded spare cylinder. Moving to the corner of the bathroom wall I sat on my heels and peeked around the corner. The front door was still deadbolted. So was the backdoor over my left shoulder. A glance at the front gate security panel by the front door informed me that it was still closed and secure.

  There was a sodium vapor light hovering over my cabin, on a tall pole located on the west side. Its light coming through the windows gave me plenty of illumination to see that no one was at the windows overlooking the porch. All of them had security locks on them. To get through one would require breaking the glass.

  Makker was at my left shoulder, head swiveling. He was hearing something I couldn’t hear. He didn’t bark unless I told him to, and I didn’t tell him.

  Finally, I did hear something: the squeak of one of the porch door’s hinges. The porch light was on, too, and in a moment was casting the shadows of three men moving single file across the windows above my desk. Two of them were carrying objects that were too long to be pistols and too short to be rifles or shotguns unless they were sawed off.

  I moved quickly to the back door. Wearing just my boxers, I held the extra cylinder in my left hand and put it in a pocket long enough to unlock the door and slowly open it. I slipped out onto the small wooden back porch. Ma
kker stayed right by me. I had taken two steps when a man came around the back corner on the west side of the cabin.

  He was short, bulky, with dark hair and had what looked to me like a Mac-10 or -11 with its wire stock. That was all I could see since he was silhouetted against the outside lamp’s light. When he noticed me and spun around I fired once, aiming for the head at a distance of about fifteen feet.

  I had already shut down my forebrain and let the midbrain – the animalistic part – take over. That way I avoided what the army calls “condition black” and could focus solely on tactics and mechanics. It was all part of the physiology of combat. The man sneaking around the corner might as well have been a paper target.

  The impact of the .45 Long Colt snapped his head back and he toppled backwards. I wasn’t there to see him hit the ground, since I had broken into a run for the woods that covered the back of my property, Makker loping along beside me.

  I heard the front door being kicked open as we put the back porch behind us. The treeline was only about forty feet away and we made it right before two men came through the back door and another that had circled around the east side of the cabin came into view. One knelt beside their dead companion. Hunkered down in the brush at the edge of the trees, I was hoping they would be discouraged enough to beat a retreat.

  Instead they spread out and headed towards the tree line. The one furthest away from me produced a flashlight and swung it back and forth. That wasn’t going to do him much good. Quietly laying belly-down, I put my right cheek on the ground, my face turned in the direction of the nearest man. Makker lay down beside me. His dark brindle coat made him nearly impossible to see in the darkness.

  The man entered the brush not ten feet away. I waited until he had taken a half dozen steps deeper into the woods before whispering “Aanval.”

  Canines can see five times better than humans in the dark. Makker streaked like a cruise missile, veering around a tree trunk before launching himself at his target. His jaws clamped down on the target’s right forearm. Humans produce about 120 pounds of bite pressure. A Dutch Shepherd produces twice that.

  The man screamed in pain and triggered his weapon as he spun around and then fell backwards, firing about twenty rounds. It was a submachinegun. The bullets thunked into tree trunks and clipped some branches. The one thing he wasn’t going to hit was the snarling dog whose jaws were locked on his forearm, unless he put the weapon in his left hand, and he didn’t have time for that. Once he was down, Makker went for his throat and the man abruptly stopped screaming.

  I was up, in a crouch, sheltering behind a tree trunk, looking east, in the direction I expected the other two men to be. They were both heading my way, and one was cursing in Spanish. The one with the flashlight was furthest away. The flashlight beam bounced and danced wildly in my direction. In the process it briefly silhouetted the other man, who was closer. That was all I needed. I fired three rounds. I heard the man cry out and then the thud of his body hitting the ground, snapping some dead branches under its weight.

  Three down, one to go.

  The one to go decided to get going. I caught sight of him running like the devil was on his heels, across the open ground behind the cabin. He was still gripping the flashlight, and it’s beam danced wildly up and down. He had a pistol, and fired a couple of wild shots over his shoulder to discourage pursuit. I was standing then, but still behind the tree trunk. His bullets didn’t come anywhere near me. He didn’t think to drop the flashlight. That made him an even better target. I raised the Blackhawk – then lowered it. Seconds later he vanished around the corner of the cabin.

  I called for Makker to heel and we walked around that side of the cabin. The fleeing man was halfway down my long dirt driveway. He was shouting. Beyond him, the lights of a vehicle came on. The running man vaulted over my gate, losing the flashlight in the process. I heard a car door slam, a wheel spinning in the gravel of County Road 1954’s shoulder, and then a shimmy and a squeal as the driver laid rubber before the car sped away.

  Walking to the trailer out near the round pen behind the barn I checked to make sure Lopes was okay. There were no lights on in the trailer and the door was locked. I called to him through the door and it opened.

  “Gracias a Dios que estás vivo!” he exclaimed, clutching at my arm. Then he looked down at Makker and let go. “Lo siento, jefe. I should have come to help.”

  “No. Absolutely not. You did the right thing. And if anything like this happens again I want you to do exactly the same.”

  “Will it happen again?”

  “Hope not. But, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to work here anymore. Or if you just don’t want to stay out here I can help you get set up in town.”

  I think that wounded his pride. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to stay. I was relieved and grateful, and told him the law would be coming out and that he might have to make a statement.

  Entering the cabin’s porch, I glowered at the broken front door. It had taken more than one of the men to do the deed. The wood had shattered where the dead bolt was, across the top where the slide bolt was, and dead center where they had kicked it more than a few times.

  Once inside, I dialed the county sheriff’s department and gave them my name and address.

  “There was a break-in. At least two of them got away in what I think was a dark-colored Escalade, west on 1954. The others? You’ll want to bring some body bags.”

  I went into the kitchen, grabbed a towel, drenched it under the faucet and sat down on my sofa. Makker was glued to my side. I cleaned the blood off his muzzle, checked him for wounds – there were none – then sat back and closed my eyes, still gripping the Blackhawk. My hands shook for a little while longer.

  Epilog

  A WPD police cruiser and two sheriff’s cars, one of them with the siren on, arrived in under an hour. I didn’t know the sheriff’s deputies but I did know the driver of the black-and-white. It was Jenna. Being on duty, she had heard the alert go out for the Escalade, which included where it was coming from. An ambulance arrived a few minutes later, also with its siren on. I was sure my neighbors, country folk all, weren’t going to be happy being awakened by this commotion in the early morning hours.

  One of the deputies paused at the gate to pick up the flashlight and put it in an evidence bag.

  I led them to the bodies in the woods. A lot of flashlights, a lot of pictures taken – it was a crime scene, after all. I didn’t feel much remorse. These men had come to kill me and they had died for it. I made sure to get a good look at their faces. It was part of the routine, to reconnect with humanity.

  One of the deputies pointed out that the first man I shot hadn’t fired his weapon.

  “That’s why I’m standing here talking to you,” I said.

  They took the Blackhawk as evidence and I calculated that there was at least a 50-50 chance I would be cuffed and taken in. There was talk about my “killer” dog and how he might need to be locked up, as well. But Jenna huddled with one of the deputies for a while and when she came over to me she was wearing a tired smile.

  “What a mess. They were gangbangers, you know.”

  “Figured as much.”

  “Perez’s familia. I’m guessing he got word to them through his lawyer. Damn, Roy, you just matched Wayland’s homicide rate for last year.”

  “Sorry about that. I’d rather it hadn’t happened. Now I have to put in a brand new door.”

  She gave me a funny look. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s the only part of this that bothers you.” The way she said it made clear she knew it wasn’t true. She looked at Makker. “But you don’t need to worry about yourself or your friend here. It was a clear cut case of stand your ground It’s pretty obvious they came to kill you, so...yeah. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What if more of them come?”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t trying to convey indifference. “If it happens, it happens. But I let the f
ourth man get away so he could relay all the gory details. I figure this was a matter of pride for MS13. They didn’t expect to lose. And I don’t think they’ll want to lose again.”

  She smiled, quite fondly. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Roy.”

  I smiled back and we walked to her cruiser. As she drove down to the county road, Makker and I went inside the cabin to wait for the deputies to finish their work..

  THE END

  THANK YOU FOR READING THE HIGHWAYS OF THE DEAD. PLEASE CONSIDER WRITING AN HONEST REVIEW. -- James Evan March

  An excerpt from the next Creed Crime Story

  THE MOTHER OF BROKEN PROMISES

  Coming Soon!

  Prolog

  Arlen Jackson got up and went to the lavatory when the Greyhound Dreamliner began pulling into the station at Wayland, Texas. He had been in the front of the boarding line in Huntsville so he had taken a seat in the first row behind the driver. Now he had to make his way to the back carrying the small, cheap nylon duffle.

  It was the only piece of luggage he had and it was stuffed to the gills. At three feet long, it still came in under Greyhound’s limit of 62 inches in total exterior dimensions, but he still had to mumble apologies as it caromed off a few legs.

  The lavatory was slightly roomier than a coffin, but Arlen was a slender man who stood a few inches under six feet. There was no sink, just a toilet and a hand soap dispenser. Putting the duffle on the toilet, he unzipped it, dug down under his tightly rolled clothing and found the gun.

  The duffle and clothes had been bought at a thrift store within walking distance of the prison. On release he had been given a tee shirt, black jeans and some used tennis shoes, along with a TDC-issued debit card, his $100 in “gate money.” He had bought the duffle, some shirts, a pair of jeans, three pair of socks and a ballcap for twenty three dollars.