The Hanging Judge (Nowhere, USA Book 4)

by Ninie Hammon

  But he’d gone back! Later, he’d gone back to make sure the poor old lady wasn’t hurt badly, to apologize profusely and beg her forgiveness, to grovel and to return the booze he had stolen — even the bottle of Maker’s.

  Instead of the poor old lady with a knot on her head and a bee in her bonnet he had found a dead body. He had killed Martha Whittiker. He’d moved the body, put it in Dylan Shaw’s apartment out back so the boy would be blamed for the crime only because he knew the kid would not suffer any consequences. He was only a boy, for crying out loud, barely old enough for a driver’s license. Sure, he was a drug-addicted, drug dealer “lowlife,” but he was still just a kid and Fish would never have considered getting him blamed for a murder if he hadn’t been completely certain that the boy’s youth would get him off.

  Nobody’d harm a kid!

  And by the time the Jabberwock finally let go its grip on the county and the law showed up to investigate the murder, there’d be no evidence left to connect anybody to the crime — the real doer, Fish, or his patsy, Dylan Shaw.

  As Fish sat helplessly by and watched Viola Tackett try, convict and sentence the boy to death, he could think of nothing he could do to stop her, to save the kid.

  Except confess.

  The only way to convince anybody that Dylan Shaw hadn’t killed his grandmother was to admit that he, Holmes Fischer, had done the deed.

  So he tried. He tried to stand and protest, tried to get Viola Tackett to listen to reason — and then the world went mad and the next thing he knew he was staggering along at the end of a line of people moving with purpose down the courthouse hallway and the wide stairs to the first floor and out the front doors of the building onto the wide porch. Standing sentinel on both sides of the porch were light poles, each with arms that extended out to hold an ornate lantern-shaped light over the steps.

  The lights in those lanterns hadn’t burned in a decade. Unlike the ones on the pole in the Middle of Nowhere, nobody had been civic-minded enough to replace the bulbs in these. Useless as light fixtures, they’d nonetheless make a dandy hangman’s tree.

  And by the time Fish had stumbled out the doorway behind the crowd, Neb had thrown a rope with a noose tied on the end over the extension arm on the pole on the right and had set up a ladder beneath it.

  Lurching forward, Fish cried out into the strange, unearthly silence that wafted up off the crowd of onlookers like stink off a stagnant pool.

  “Don’t. Wait. He didn’t kill her.”

  His words were slurred and no one paid him any attention. When Viola Tackett stepped past him, Fish reached out and grabbed her by the arm, withstood her frightening stare of disapproval and told her in an earnest voice.

  “You have to let him go. It wasn’t him!”

  The sincerity in his voice persuaded her as no words could have and she paused and gave him a moment of her attention. He had just that one moment, that heartbeat of time, to stop the murder of an innocent boy.

  “I did it, Viola. It was me. I didn’t mean to. As God is my witness, it was an accident. I was stealing liquor when she came in—”

  He watched understanding dawn in her eyes, followed quickly though reluctantly with belief. She yanked him aside and spoke in a harsh whisper.

  “You saying it was you killed Martha Whittiker?”

  “I put her body in his place so he’d be blamed. I knew nobody’d do anything about it because he’s just a kid. You can’t hang him for a crime he didn’t commit.” He paused before he continued, and realized as he said the words how freeing they were. He’d been struggling for so many years, running from the memories of that night, of that encounter with the minions of the pit of hell. Now, he wouldn’t have to struggle anymore. Now he could end it. Though he’d considered it a thousand times, he’d never had the guts to commit suicide. Now somebody else would do that part for him.

  “Hang me. I’m the guilty one.”

  She looked at him and he watched a range of emotions chase each other across her face. She was thinking, calculating, planning.

  “You telling me I’d ought to hang you for what you done, is that what you’re telling me?”

  He swallowed. “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “So you deserve to die, which means if I let you off, you owe me your life — that’s the way of it — right?”

  He didn’t know where she might be going with this and then he realized she was going to grant him clemency, that she believed he never intended to hurt Martha Whittiker, that it’d been an accident.

  Relief flowed over him in a warm flood. He wasn’t going to die here after all.

  “Yes, Viola. I owe you my life.”

  “We gonna talk about what that means, you and me, later, when I got the time.”

  Of course, she had to tell the crowd eager for blood that there would be no public execution here this afternoon. They could all go home.

  Viola pushed him aside and stepped out onto the edge of the porch. The crowd of people had assembled on the steps below where they could look up and see the terrified Shaw kid, hands tied behind him, standing on the ladder. Neb had slipped the noose around the kid’s neck and Zach was pushing him up the steps while Neb pulled on the rope to force him to keep moving.

  “Listen up, everybody,” she said, in a voice to be heard above a noisy crowd. Except this one was dead silent. “I just found out something you all need to hear.”

  She gestured to where Fish stood, leaned for balance against the courthouse wall. “I know some of you’s been concerned we got the wrong man here, after listening to the blathering of that woman, saying Liam didn’t believe Dylan here done it. So’s you’s feeling bad, thinking maybe we was about to execute an innocent man. Well, Fish here done stepped forward and cast away all the doubt. He knows who it was killed that poor old woman — doncha, Fish?”

  The crowd turned toward him and he nodded his head.

  “Fish was there, in Martha Whittiker’s house. He was stealing a bottle of whiskey so he was scared to come forward and say so. But now that he’s finally admitted the truth, we can all rest in our souls that justice is being done here today.”

  For the first time since he’d looked down at the bleeding body of that poor old woman on the floor in front of him, Fish knew that everything really was going to be alright.

  Then Viola turned and stepped toward the ladder where the boy was now balanced on the top step on his tiptoes. Fish noticed when she did so that the rope was already cutting into the kid’s neck and that the front of his pants were stained dark where he’d wet himself.

  “Dylan Shaw, you got any last words?”

  Fish’s eyes snapped from Dylan to Viola. He must have heard her wrong. Why would …?

  “I figured not. You gonna send out a message loud and clear to everybody in Nowhere County — they’d best toe the straight and narrow or Viola Tackett will see they get what they deserve!”

  And with that she gave a mighty shove and the ladder fell out from under the boy.

  He was looking right at Fish. In his last instant of life on earth, Dylan Shaw’s eyes had locked with Fish’s.

  Then his head snapped sideways and he went limp, swaying slowly back and forth beneath the light pole on the courthouse steps.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Toby Witherspoon couldn’t see a thing from where he was standing. There were too many grownups in front of him and they weren’t about to move so a little boy could squeeze his way to the front and watch a hanging. If they noticed him, they’d ask if his mother knew he was here and tell him to go home.

  He had waited until his father was bleary-eyed drunk, then he had pulled the dirty purse wrapped up in a towel out from under his bed and put it in a garbage bag to take downtown and show the sheriff. He didn’t have one of those dumb girls’ bikes he saw sometimes on old television shows that had a basket on the front, though he secretly thought a basket on the front would be a handy thing to have on a bike.

  His
was a 10-speed, though, a big one so tall he had to lean it over with his foot on the ground when he straddled the bar. Ten-speeds weren’t designed for dumb girl things like baskets, so he had wrapped the garbage bag that contained his mother’s purse around and around his waist and tied it tight with the pull ties so it wouldn’t fall off. Then he had set out for town.

  Only eight years old, Toby Witherspoon had never actually ridden his bike all the way into town from his house on Iron Rock Road. He had ridden the distance a hundred dozen times in the car, though, so he knew the way and how long it was, knew he could surely ride his bike that far.

  But as he pumped hard on the pedals up the hills and rode the brake down the other side on the shoulder of the road, he broke into a sweat, his breath heaving in and out.

  It wasn’t a hot day. Just like every day since J-Day, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky — which didn’t seem right to Toby but he was just a kid so what did he know? He was drenched in sweat and it had taken him three times as long as he’d thought it would, but he had finally made it into town and was cruising down Main Street toward the courthouse when a bunch of people came pouring out the front door of the building. He pulled his bike over onto the sidewalk, got off and leaned it against the big concrete planter that grew nothing but weeds now. He tried to get close enough to see what was going on but it was hopeless.

  He did get close enough to hear the murmured conversations of the adults who were standing there explaining what was going on to some newcomers. Some teenager had killed his grandmother. There’d been a trial and he’d been convicted … and they were about to hang him right there on the courthouse steps.

  Toby was staggered by the news.

  “Viola Tackett’s the law now, alright. Don’t need no jury trial.”

  “Don’t need no evidence, neither. She just listened to what Wilbur said he seen and the next thing you know …” He didn’t finish, just gestured like he had a rope in his hand that was tied around his neck. He pulled on the imaginary rope and made a face like he was choking.

  Toby stood in shocked disbelief.

  Didn’t need any evidence? This Viola Tackett person, who must be the sheriff or the judge or something like that now, just listened to what people said and believed them.

  Toby didn’t have to find his mother’s body — though he was sure now that when he told them where the dog’d dug up her purse, they would dig there and find it. All he needed was to get to this Viola Tackett person and tell her his story. Then she’d go out and arrest his father and they’d hang him from the courthouse steps.

  Toby had to see this.

  Then he remembered the Bible story he’d learned in Vacation Bible School, when his teacher had been that fat girl who was the preacher’s daughter. Hayley was her name. He remembered her because she had been real nice to him until he’d let it slip about his mother. He’d said he didn’t believe in prayer because he had asked God over and over to keep his father from hurting his mother but God hadn’t stopped him. And after that, Hayley looked at him funny and didn’t smile at him anymore.

  But she had taught them a Bible story about a “wee little man” named Zacchaeus, who had wanted to see Jesus, but he was so short he couldn’t see over the taller people in front of him. So he had climbed up in a tree to see.

  That’s what Toby Witherspoon did.

  There weren’t any trees right next to the courthouse, but a small maple was growing in one of those special tree holes they made sometimes in the sidewalk and in the concrete around buildings. It was a smallish tree, but that was really the good news because it wouldn’t have held anybody bigger than Toby.

  It took him several tries before he was able to scramble up the skinny trunk and grab hold of the lowest-hanging limb. Then he pulled himself up to his waist, threw his leg over the limb and sat straddling it, which put him just a little over the height of the people standing between him and the courthouse steps.

  What he saw there made him instantly sick to his stomach.

  There was a ladder with a kid on it who didn’t look to be a whole lot older than Toby. He was standing on tiptoes on the top step, with his hands bound behind his back and a rope in a noose around his neck. Some lady stepped forward then. The woman was short and dumpy and ugly. An old lady with crooked teeth and a big bun of dark hair sitting on the back of her neck.

  That must be Viola Tackett, the woman the man’d been talking about, the one who listened to the evidence and decided whether somebody was guilty or not.

  She called out to the crowd, said something about a fish that had made it clear the kid on the ladder really had killed his grandmother — something like that. Then she’d turned her face up toward the kid — and it looked like he had peed his pants, since the front of his jeans was a dark blue. She asked him if he had any last words, and when he didn’t say anything she stepped back and shoved the ladder over!

  Just shoved it over. Toby looked away, felt bile rising up in the back of his throat, and only glanced out of the corner of his eye at the kid — the kid’s body, he was dead — hanging there by the neck, his head twisted at an impossible angle on his shoulders.

  Viola Tackett. That was the woman’s name. That’s who Toby had to see to tell her about how his father had killed his mother.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Sam and Charlie knelt beside the unconscious Malachi, and Charlie felt a profound sense of deja vu all over again, harking back to kneeling on the floor beside Liam after Viola shot him in the back. Killed him. Without a shred of care or remorse. And she was about to hang that poor Shaw kid without any more feeling than she’d had for Liam.

  It was beginning to dawn on Charlie that Viola Tackett was a woman everybody in the world underestimated, and lived to regret it. If they lived long enough to tell the tale.

  Clearly, Viola had been planning to kill Liam from the git-go; it was no crime of opportunity. It was part and parcel of her overall scheme to take over Nower County that she’d probably started planning on J-Day. So far, it appeared to be chugging down the track with a full head of steam right on schedule.

  She didn’t think any of it surprised Malachi.

  He had looked grim when Raylynn told them what his mother was doing, that she was sitting as judge and jury for the kid Liam had said didn’t kill his grandmother.

  “Yeah, it figures that’s where she’d go next.” But he hadn’t elaborated and neither she nor Sam was inclined to question him about it.

  It was obvious now that he understood there was going to be no effort to determine if the kid was innocent or guilty, that his mother was using the kid just as she had used Liam, stepping over their bodies on her climb to the top of the heap. Though Charlie wasn’t completely sure she understood the reasoning, she’d bet it had something to do with demonstrating her power, to cow those who might dare to oppose her.

  Which of course, lead to the inescapable conclusion that Viola Tackett absolutely would have killed Charlie if it had happened to work into her current plans. And that she would kill Charlie, just as soon as she got around to it.

  “You need … to get out of here,” Malachi said, and she hadn’t even realized he had regained consciousness. Coming around as fast as he did seemed to indicate that he hadn’t been knocked completely out, which made sense given that the blow came from his own brother, who likely didn’t give a rip about Malachi but did know that his butt would be in a crack if he happened to accidentally harm Mama’s favorite little boy.

  Malachi was lying on his back with his hands handcuffed behind him.

  “Now, right now. Leave.”

  She didn’t have to ask why.

  “Help me get him up,” she said to Sam.

  “No, leave me. Go on — while she’s still occupied.”

  “We’re not leaving you here to—”

  “Mama wouldn’t hurt me. I’m not in any danger.” He turned his eyes on Charlie. “But you are.”

  “She threatened to kill me.” Charlie hadn’
t meant to reveal what Viola’d whispered in her face; it’d just slipped out. Sam gasped but Malachi didn’t seem the least surprised.

  “You have to get away from here before she gets finished out there and turns her attention on you.” He looked at Sam. “Get her out of here! Stick her somewhere she won’t be seen for a while.”

  Charlie knew there wasn’t anywhere she could hide in Nowhere County that Viola Tackett couldn’t find her. “What good will that—?”

  “I’ve got to talk her off the ledge,” he said. “Bargain with her. Make a deal.”

  “A deal to keep her from killing Charlie? What—?” Sam said.

  “Maybe I can convince her I’ve seen the light, that blood’s thicker than water … some kind of crap like that. I am my only bargaining chip. She wants me on her side and she might be willing to trade that for” — he looked Charlie in the eye, his gaze frigid — “your life.”

  They could hear Viola’s voice, shouting at the crowd from the steps, but it wasn’t loud enough to hear what she was saying. The crowd’s sudden reaction carried clearly, though. Women screamed, a couple of them, and there was some kind of communal gasp and groan, a visceral response to watching somebody die right before their eyes.

  “Out the back door, down the back steps,” Malachi ordered.

  “But—”

  “Go now!”

  Sam grabbed Charlie’s arm and literally yanked her to her feet, then headed toward the doorway that lead out the back side of the courtroom. Either Sam knew where she was going or she had just guessed right because the door led into an anteroom, apparently where the judge got dressed up in a robe, then into an office that was empty except for a single rolling chair sitting in the middle of the room, and out the door of that office that opened on the second-floor hallway. The back stairs lay on the other side of a closed door and they hurried down them to the first floor, where Sam stopped and opened the door a crack and peeked out. There were people at the far end of the hallway coming back in the front doors. Sam suddenly shoved the door shut.