Ghost of a Chance

by Bill Crider

  And besides the smell, the toxic waste, and the fumes, there was something else: the labs had a tendency to blow up. City cops noticed things like explosions, even if they occurred in a supposedly abandoned warehouse.

  All in all, the country was the best place to run a meth lab, but nowhere was safe. Blacklin County hadn’t had any large-scale labs, but meth was getting easier to make, which was a problem for cities, and also for places like Clearview.

  Enterprising drug entrepreneurs had rediscovered what was being called the “Nazi cook,” a method of making amphetamines that had originated shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, with German scientists who’d been looking for a stimulant that soldiers could cook up themselves while out in the field.

  The Nazi cook didn’t produce nearly as much meth in one batch as the other method, but it wasn’t nearly as dangerous, either. You could find the recipe if you had the time to search the Internet, and you could buy all the ingredients at your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart. You could make up a small batch in coffee cups if you wanted to, and you could do it in a couple of hours. Less, if you knew what you were doing.

  The old labs had required an organization, but they could turn out around a hundred and fifty pounds of the drug in one cooking.

  The Nazi method required next to no organization at all. One person could do it. Two people like Rapper and Nellie could make a lot of money at it, even if they got only two pounds from a cooking. They could cut that two pounds to make it ten pounds and get ten thousand dollars for it. Maybe more, if they sold it in small lots.

  Rhodes didn’t have any doubt at all that the two bikers were in Blacklin County to sell drugs, and he figured that their drug of choice this time was methamphetamine.

  Proving it, however, wouldn’t be easy, thanks to the absence of fumes and toxic waste in the Nazi cook method. Rhodes couldn’t arrest someone for possession of lithium batteries, Styrofoam cups, or any of the other necessary ingredients. He’d have to catch them in the process of cooking the drugs.

  “I’m going home and have some supper,” he told Hack. “Give me a call if Trask is arrested.”

  “I’ll do that,” Hack said.

  Rhodes hated to admit it, but he actually liked veggie lasagna. Even the low-fat sauce was good. And mozzarella cheese was naturally low in fat, so there was plenty of it. Rhodes felt very self-righteous, eating food that was good for him and enjoying it. And it made him feel better about having sneaked those Vienna sausages for lunch.

  Yancey was lying in wait under Rhodes’s chair, hoping that Rhodes would drop something on the floor, but Rhodes was too careful for that. He didn’t want Yancey to get used to eating table scraps, not even very small ones.

  Rhodes had told Ivy about his day, and she was interested in all of it. She’d met Rapper and Nellie before, so naturally she wanted to hear Rhodes’s theories about the drug lab. But what really interested her was the ghost.

  “Two people came in the office today and asked me about it,” she said. “Did it really look like Ty Berry?”

  “I couldn’t tell,” Rhodes said. “I didn’t see it that well.”

  “Mary West said it told you that it was going to roam the graveyards until you caught whoever it was that was stealing from them.”

  “I heard it told me it was going to walk the night until I caught Ty’s killer.”

  Ivy smiled. “It’s easy to see that you talked to it for a long time.”

  Rhodes forked in a mouthful of lasagna, chewed it, and said, “I didn’t talk to it at all. I barely even saw it, and I sure didn’t catch up with it.”

  “How’s your head?” Ivy asked.

  “Fine, as long as I don’t touch it.”

  “I don’t think it’s swollen much. Your hair hides it, but if you had on a hat, it wouldn’t be noticeable at all.”

  “No hats,” Rhodes said. “I don’t like hats. They cut off the circulation to my brain.”

  “That wouldn’t be good,” Ivy said. “Not that you couldn’t operate as well as most people even if you didn’t have much blood flow to your brain.”

  “I don’t want to risk it.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Ivy said.

  After supper, they cleaned up the kitchen and went into the living room to see what was on TV.

  Nothing, that was what. There had been a time, not too long before, when Rhodes could find something he wanted to watch on the cable channels, but they’d gotten too sophisticated.

  They never showed any of the old Italian Hercules movies, for example. Instead, they had a modern Hercules show, in full color, that was just as bad as any of the old movies. But it wasn’t the same, since it was bad on purpose and therefore bad in all the wrong ways. Rhodes didn’t like it.

  They never showed any of the old horror movies, either. Rhodes couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one of Roger Corman’s minor efforts.

  Rhodes wondered if he could find a rerun of Murder, She Wrote. It might be a good idea to pick up some of those crime-fighting tips from Angela Lansbury.

  He’d begun surfing through the channels when the telephone rang.

  Ivy answered, listened for a second, then said, “He’s right here, Hack. Just a second.”

  She handed the phone to Rhodes.

  “You ready for action?” Hack asked.

  “Always,” Rhodes said, because that was what Hack expected. To tell the truth, Rhodes wasn’t ready for anything more than an hour or so of TV watching.

  “That’s good,” Hack told him, “ ‘cause Ruth needs some backup. She’s out at the Dugan Cemetery, and she’s got those grave robbers cornered.”

  The Dugan Cemetery was a couple of miles southeast of Thurston, so it took Rhodes a little over twenty minutes to get there. He didn’t want to use the light bar and siren to let the grave robbers know he was coming.

  Actually, they weren’t grave robbers, not in a technical sense, but Rhodes hadn’t wanted to take the time to explain that to Hack. Besides, the phrase fit the situation well enough.

  According to Hack, Ruth’s county car was a quarter of a mile from the cemetery, pulled off on a side road.

  “But she’ll be down by the graveyard watching the robbers,” Hack had said. “She said to let you know there’s plenty of trees around, and if you stay off the road nobody’ll spot you coming. She’ll be behind a tree somewhere. Try not to shoot her.”

  In his long career as a law officer, Rhodes had shot hardly anyone at all, and he’d never come close to shooting a deputy. But he thanked Hack for the warning.

  Ivy was more worried about Rhodes getting shot than about his shooting someone else.

  “Remember what happened at that wrecking yard,” she had said as he was getting ready to leave.

  “That’s the first time anyone’s ever shot me,” Rhodes said, wincing a little at the thought. Now and then his shoulder still twinged.

  “He dropped a car on you, too,” Ivy reminded him.

  “He tried. But he missed.”

  “Not completely.”

  Rhodes didn’t flinch at the memory, though he felt like doing so. If the car had been aimed just a little better, he might not have been able to walk quite so well. In fact, he might not have been able to walk at all. That was a thought he didn’t want to dwell on.

  “I don’t think anyone at a country cemetery will be dropping a car on me,” he said.

  “What about shooting?”

  “Nobody will be shooting at me,” Rhodes said. “They probably don’t even have guns.”

  “Hah,” Ivy had said.

  Rhodes didn’t blame her. They’d have guns, all right. He turned off the car lights and turned down the dirt road that led to the Dugan Cemetery. It had partially dried out from the previous day’s rain, but it was still slick. Driving on it in the dark was a chore, and Rhodes had to be careful not to slide off into the bar ditch.

  When he came to the side road that Hack had mentioned, Rhodes turned to the right. Ro
ad was a relative term. It wasn’t much better than a cow track. Ruth’s car was pulled off to the side about a hundred yards away.

  Rhodes parked behind her and got out. He hoped the cars wouldn’t be sunk to the hubs in mud by the time he and Ruth got back to them.

  The night was crisp and clear, with plenty of stars against the black sky. Light pollution was creeping down from Dallas, but the sky in Blacklin County still got darker at night than it did in a lot of places these days.

  Rhodes took his shotgun from the car and carried it over to a barbed-wire fence. He leaned the gun against a post on the opposite side of the fence, spread the wire, and climbed through. He took the gun and made his way through the trees, hoping he’d find Ruth before he got to the cemetery.

  He found her without too much trouble. She was standing behind a big oak tree, occasionally taking a look around the trunk at what was happening in the cemetery.

  Rhodes cleared his throat and whispered, “It’s me.”

  Ruth turned around quietly with her pistol leveled at him in a two-handed grip. She lowered it immediately and motioned for him to come up beside her.

  Rhodes didn’t have to worry about making noise. The people in the cemetery were making enough of their own to cover any stray sounds coming from the trees. But he tried to stay behind cover as best he could.

  There appeared to be three people working in the cemetery, and they’d cut the chain on the gates so they could back their big Dodge Ram four-door pick-up inside the wrought-iron fence and load it up.

  “They hadn’t hit this place before,” Ruth said. “I’ve been watching it pretty closely just in case they thought it was time, and I guess it was.”

  “How long have they been here?”

  “I spotted them a little over half an hour ago. They’d just gotten backed inside. They work pretty fast, though, and I think they’re about done.”

  Rhodes could see several small headstones, probably among the oldest ones, already in the back of the truck. He couldn’t tell what else might be in there.

  “So what do we do next?” Ruth asked.

  “Arrest them,” Rhodes said.

  He stepped out from behind the tree. A spotlight beam hit him in the face, and then the shooting started.

  21

  RHODES HADN’T SEEN THE FOURTH PERSON IN THE CEMetery, the one who had been sitting inside the pickup, the one who’d apparently been watching him and who’d started firing what sounded like a 9mm pistol in his direction.

  When the first shots were fired, the three men who’d been working in the rear of the pickup jumped to the ground. All three of them came up with weapons from somewhere or other. They’d obviously had them close at hand.

  And not just any weapons, either. They were as well equipped as a modern army. Rhodes couldn’t say exactly what they were shooting, but bullets sprayed everywhere. They clipped leaves off the trees, broke off small limbs, knocked bark off the tree trunks, and sent big chunks of dirt flying all around. Rhodes could hear brass shell casings clinking off tombstones and the side of the truck. The strobing muzzle flashes made the cemetery look like some kind of gothic discotheque.

  Rhodes didn’t take the time to admire the effects. He was sitting down behind the oak tree with his back to the trunk, holding the shotgun with both hands and telling himself that it was only his imagination that the bullets smacking into the tree trunk were actually jarring it.

  Ruth Grady was sitting beside him with her short-barreled .38 in her hand.

  “I think I’ll let you make the arrest,” she said, shouting to make herself heard. “It’ll look better in the papers.”

  “Why don’t you make the arrest,” Rhodes said, “and I’ll take the credit? That’s the way the bad sheriffs do things in the movies.”

  “Too bad you’re not that kind of sheriff.”

  “Yeah,” Rhodes said. “It is.”

  As suddenly as it had started, the shooting stopped. Rhodes didn’t waste a second. He rolled to his left and began firing the shotgun. It was essentially a short-range weapon, but the pellets would carry far enough to worry the robbers. There was a sound like hail as the shotgun pellets hit the pickup, and a tinkling crash when the spot-light shattered.

  Ruth rolled out on the other side of the tree and triggered off three quick shots from her pistol. Two of them hit the Dodge with a twang of punctured sheet metal.

  By that time, the robbers had slapped in fresh clips, and the graveyard lit up again. Rhodes and Ruth rolled back behind the tree.

  “Good shooting,” Ruth said. She reloaded her pistol. “I don’t think I could have hit that light even with a shotgun.”

  Adrenaline was jangling through Rhodes’s veins like electricity. Hitting the spotlight had been nothing more than luck. In fact, Rhodes thought he was lucky just to hold his hands steady, but he didn’t see any need to tell Ruth that.

  He said, “I go to the range and practice a lot.”

  “I’ll bet you do. They’re going to make a run for it, you know.”

  “Figures,” Rhodes said.

  “Either that or they’ll kill us.”

  “You’re a real comfort,” Rhodes said.

  He shoved three shells into the shotgun, pulled his Chief’s Special from the holster at his back and waited for the fusillade to end.

  When it did, he rolled to his right and stood up. Sure enough, the three men were getting in the truck. Rhodes didn’t try to shoot them. He aimed for the truck tires, hoping he’d get lucky again and not disgrace himself.

  Ruth was on the other side of the tree, and she was also firing at the tires.

  Rhodes hit a rear tire with his second shot. It exploded, and the back of the truck sank to the right.

  It took Ruth three shots to get the other back tire and level the truck’s rear end. Rhodes got a front tire just before the men slapped in some more clips and fired back.

  Behind the tree again, Rhodes said, “How much ammunition do you think they have?”

  “Probably not much more than the Russian army,” Ruth said as she reloaded. “I hear they’ve fallen on hard times. The Russians, I mean.”

  Rhodes closed the cylinder of his pistol. “Whatever they have, it’s more than we do. And their firepower’s a little more advanced than ours, too.”

  “Maybe so, but we have them right where we want them. They’ll never be able to drive that truck out of there with those flat tires.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Rhodes said.

  He heard the sound of the Dodge’s engine over a lull in the firing. He rolled again.

  They’d left one man with a rifle outside the truck to protect their backs, but Rhodes ignored the bullets whizzing over his head and popped off a couple of shots at the truck, which was lugging forward toward the gates.

  One bullet spiderwebbed a hole through the back glass, and the truck stopped suddenly, as did the shooting.

  Rhodes stood up.

  “Shotgun,” he said, and Ruth tossed it to him. He caught it in his left hand and holstered his pistol. He ran toward the cemetery with Ruth at his side and a little behind.

  Three of the robbers abandoned the truck and headed through the gates for the trees.

  Rhodes knew it wouldn’t do any good for him to yell for them to stop, but he did it anyway. It had exactly the effect he thought it would.

  “Check out the truck,” he said to Ruth as they came to the fence.

  She was a lot younger than Rhodes, and she wasn’t puffing at all from the short run. Rhodes was. He thought she might vault right over the fence, but he was glad to see she headed for the gates.

  “I’ll see if I can catch up with any of them,” he said.

  He had to pause in the middle to take a breath, but he didn’t think Ruth noticed.

  There wasn’t much doubt that the three runners would split up. Rhodes could hear them thrashing through the trees. He decided to go after the one in the middle, who seemed to be making a bit more noise than th
e others. Maybe that meant he was a little clumsier.

  When he heard a shot from the direction of the grave-yard, he came to an abrupt halt, his feet slipping in the mud and wet leaves.

  Ruth was in trouble. Rhodes could go on and hope she came out of things all right, or he could go back, in which case the runners would certainly get away. He didn’t have any difficulty making a decision. He turned around.

  It was too dark to see much, but Rhodes could see enough. There was a fourth runner now, and Rhodes watched as he vaulted the fence easily, heading in the direction opposite that taken by his cohorts.

  Ruth was sitting on the ground by the Dodge Ram, shooting at the fleeing figure. Rhodes ran around the edge of the fence, hoping Ruth would recognize him and not shoot. He didn’t have enough wind to tell her who he was.

  The man ahead of him was listing slightly to the left and holding a rifle in his right hand. That was all Rhodes could tell, and then he lost sight of him. He could hear him, however, so he kept following.

  He had gone for about a quarter of a mile before the noises stopped. When they did, so did Rhodes.

  He stood there sweating and trying not to pant too loudly. His blood was pounding in his head, but he took deep breaths, and eventually his pulse slowed.

  Gradually he began to hear a few quiet sounds, the scratching of leaves over his head, a squirrel skittering through the branches of a nearby tree. But there was nothing from the man he’d been chasing. He’d obviously gone to ground somewhere not too far away.

  As Rhodes stood there, it dawned on him that he’d most likely made a big mistake. Maybe two or three of them.

  To begin with, he’d let someone lure him off into the woods. And in doing so, he’d left Ruth back there alone. What was to keep the three grave robbers from turning around and coming back to attack her? Rhodes couldn’t think of a thing.

  To make things worse, for all Rhodes knew, the man he’d been after might be standing behind the trunk of the next tree, ready to riddle Rhodes with bullets or, if he was out of bullets, to crack Rhodes’s skull with his rifle butt.