Ghost of a Chance

by Bill Crider

  That was the trouble with leading a quiet life, Rhodes thought. When it came time for action, you didn’t have experience to guide you. So you reacted to the situation without thinking it through. You let an adrenaline rush dictate your actions.

  He’d known that he wasn’t going to be able to walk out from behind that tree and say, “Hands up!” and get the right response, but he’d done it anyway—and had gotten the wrong response. And then he’d let himself be led away from the crime scene and into the dark woods.

  Of course the robbers might not be as clever as he thought they were. It could be that they were simply working by instinct, too.

  But he didn’t think so. It was all too well orchestrated, almost as if they’d practiced it.

  Rhodes peered into the darkness. He saw trees and bushes and nothing else. He didn’t hear anything, either. Even the squirrel was quiet.

  Rhodes wasn’t going to walk into a trap, not if he could help it. He turned and headed back to the cemetery.

  And walked right into a trap.

  22

  THE THREE OF THEM HAD TURNED BACK, ALL RIGHT, BUT Rhodes didn’t see them at first. He just saw Ruth Grady sitting on the ground, leaning against a tombstone.

  She raised a hand to warn him, but it was too late. A man stepped around the pickup and trained a rifle on Rhodes. He was lean as a hoe handle and wore jeans, a black T-shirt, and a Texas Rangers cap. He had the bottom half of the T-shirt pulled up over his mouth and nose, while the bill of the cap obscured the upper part of his face. His stomach was revealed, flat and hard, but Rhodes didn’t think it was going to help him to identify the man later on.

  “You can just stop right there, Sheriff,” he said. “We don’t want to have to shoot you.”

  Rhodes didn’t particularly want them to have to shoot him, either, so he said, “What do you want?”

  “We just want to drive out of here and be left alone. Jack the shells out of that shotgun.”

  Rhodes worked the pump action until all the shells were lying on the ground around him.

  “Now put the gun on the ground,” the man ordered, and when Rhodes had obeyed, he said, “And now the pistol. Dump the bullets first.”

  Rhodes opened the cylinder and let the cartridges drop on the ground.

  “Okay,” the man said. “Drop it.”

  Rhodes did.

  “I bet you got some handcuffs on you,” the man said. “Probably those nice new plastic ones.”

  Rhodes didn’t say anything. The man motioned to someone in the shadows, and a woman came out from in front of the truck. She was dressed just like the man and had pulled up her T-shirt to cover her face. Her navel was pierced by a small gold ring, and she was carrying what looked to Rhodes like a Glock automatic pistol.

  “Get the cuffs,” the man told her.

  Instead of going to Rhodes, the woman went to Ruth and stuck the gun to her head while she removed the cuffs from the pouch that held them.

  Each cuff consisted of a single strand of tough plastic about a half inch wide. One end was pulled tight through an opening on the other and locked automatically. The cuffs were much easier to use than traditional steel cuffs, and they were even harder to remove. There was no key; they had to be cut.

  “Let me do that,” said a man behind Rhodes.

  It was the one Rhodes had followed. He came up beside Ruth, and the woman backed away, still aiming her pistol at Ruth.

  The man took the cuffs and said, “Put your hands behind you.”

  Ruth looked at Rhodes, who nodded. She put her hands behind her back, and the man looped the strand of plastic around her wrists and pulled it tight.

  He turned to face Rhodes. He hadn’t bothered to cover his face, but then he didn’t have to. He had a bushy black beard that hadn’t been trimmed in years, and his hair was so bushy that the baseball cap he wore was almost obscured by it. All he had to do was get a haircut and shave, and no one would be able to recognize him.

  He did, however, have a distinguishing mark. He’d been wounded in the shoulder, most likely by the shot Rhodes had fired through the pickup’s back glass. There was a good bit of blood on his T-shirt. The wound didn’t seem to be bothering him at all, however, and it certainly hadn’t impaired his movement.

  “Your turn,” he told Rhodes.

  Rhodes let himself be cuffed. When the man was satisfied, he said, “Sit over there by the deputy.”

  Rhodes didn’t like being ordered around, but they had the guns, so he did as he was told.

  “Let’s go,” the first man said.

  “Can’t,” the man holding the rifle on Rhodes and Ruth said. “Damn tires are all flat.”

  “Truck’ll run. These two won’t be following us for a while. Get in.”

  “Let me pick up these guns first,” the bearded man said.

  He took Rhodes’s pistol and the shotgun. Rhodes assumed that they had Ruth’s pistol already.

  When he had the guns, the man went to the truck. When he got there, the two men and the woman got in the truck along with a fourth man that Rhodes caught only a glimpse of. He’d obscured his face like the other man, so the look didn’t help Rhodes at all.

  The pickup started and moved sluggishly out through the cemetery gates.

  “What a revoltin’ development this is,” Rhodes said as he watched the red taillights slowly move away.

  “It’s not so bad,” Ruth said. “We got fooled, but we’re alive.”

  “What happened when you checked the truck?”

  “That man who came up at the last there was slumped over the wheel. There was a lot of blood, and I thought he might be dead. He wasn’t. When I got close to the door, he slammed it into me and knocked me down. Then he took off for the tall timber.”

  “And I was dumb enough to go after him,” Rhodes said.

  “Let’s don’t talk about being dumb,” Ruth said. “Especially since I’m the one who watched you running after him and just stood there while those other three came up and stuck a gun in my back. They made me sit here until you got back.”

  “What would they have done if I hadn’t come?”

  “I don’t know. Do you think they had it figured that far ahead?”

  “Looks that way to me. Let’s see if we can get to the cars and get out of these cuffs.”

  “We won’t have to go that far,” Ruth said. “There’s a cuff cutter in a holster on the back of my belt.”

  She and Rhodes turned until they had their backs to each other, and Rhodes managed to fumble the cutter out of the holster. His fingers were getting numb. He dropped the cutter almost as soon as he had it, but he groped around until he had it again. Working by guess and by God, he finally got the jaws open and then closed them on the plastic strand around Ruth’s wrists. Or what he hoped was the plastic.

  “Is that right?” he asked.

  “I think so. Give it a try.”

  Rhodes mashed the handles together, met resistance, and mashed harder. The plastic parted.

  Rhodes dropped the cutter. Ruth flexed her fingers and then picked up the cutter and freed Rhodes.

  They both stood up. Rhodes’s fingers stung and tingled as the circulation began to return to them. The bearded man had pulled the cuff a lot tighter than was necessary.

  “Ought to be easy to follow them,” Ruth said. “They can’t be going too fast with those tires.”

  “You’d probably be surprised,” Rhodes said.

  “Too bad they had their faces covered. How are we going to identify them?”

  “Navel ring?” Rhodes said.

  “Everybody has one of those.”

  Rhodes gave her a quizzical look.

  “Not me. I didn’t mean everybody. Just a lot of people.”

  “Right. Well, maybe we don’t have to worry about their faces.”

  “The license plate was smeared with mud,” Ruth said. “I noticed.”

  “So did I. But I could read parts of three of the numbers. Enough to tell what they w
ere, I think. That should do it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No. But Hack keeps telling me about the wonders of computers. If they can’t figure out which Dodge Ram has those three numbers, then they’re not nearly as good as he thinks they are.”

  “I guess you could find out.”

  “I guess I could,” Rhodes said. “I’ll go to the car, and you can look around here to see if there’s anything that’ll help us. Collect some of that brass.”

  There were bullet casings all over the ground. It was as if a small war had been fought there, which it had, in a way.

  “I’ll be back with a flashlight,” Rhodes said. “Don’t step on anything important.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Ruth said.

  As soon as he got back to the county cars, Rhodes called Hack on the radio.

  “I need a make on a license plate,” he said.

  “Gimme the numbers,” Hack said.

  Rhodes gave him what he had.

  “That ain’t gonna get it.”

  “You mean to tell me a computer can’t work it out?”

  “It might, at that. Let me get to the DPS. You hang on.”

  Rhodes told him that he couldn’t do much else. While he was waiting for Hack to talk to the Department of Public Safety, he located the flashlight and some evidence bags.

  In only a few minutes, Hack was back on the radio again.

  “I bet I got it,” he said. “I asked ’em if they had reports of stolen plates. Turns out they do, so I got ’em to check those first. There was a set of plates with those numbers stolen over in the next county about a month ago.”

  “So they didn’t belong on a Dodge Ram,” Rhodes said.

  “Nope. On a Ford Ranger. So where does that leave you?”

  “We’ll start checking out the Dodge Ram owners tomorrow. Right now, I have a crime scene to investigate. Maybe I’ll find a clue.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  “Wouldn’t it, though,” Rhodes said.

  23

  RHODES DROVE BACK TO THE CEMETERY, WHERE RUTH had found something interesting. He got out of the car and walked over to where she was holding it up for him to examine. It was a night-vision scope with a little lever on top, and Ruth was holding it with her fingertips on the edges of the lever.

  “You squeeze the lever for power,” Ruth said. “No batteries to get low.”

  “So they probably saw me when I stood up,” Rhodes said.

  “It was the woman,” Ruth told him. “She was the one in the cab, and it must’ve fallen out in the confusion. She was scoping the woods while the men did the heavy work.”

  “Sexists,” Rhodes said, handing her an evidence bag.

  “You get a lot of that in your criminal classes.” Ruth took the bag and put the scope inside it. “Fingerprints would be better than trying to identify that navel ring. Did you get anything from Hack?”

  Rhodes told her about the license plate.

  “Are you sure that’s the right one?”

  “No, but it’s a good bet that it is. Our friends seem like the kind of people who’d steal a license plate. Did you find anything besides the scope and the brass?”

  “Not a thing. We can try with the flashlight, and I can come back tomorrow if I need to.”

  They went about it methodically, but they didn’t find anything more.

  “I might have an idea about who those people were,” Ruth said after about fifteen minutes. “If you want to hear it.”

  “Any idea at all would help,” Rhodes said. “What have you got?”

  “The Packers,” Ruth said.

  Rhodes had had plenty of dealings with the Packers over the years, though he wasn’t sure exactly how many of them were Packers, since they had an extreme disdain for all civil and religious ceremonies, including marriage. Maybe especially marriage.

  He didn’t know exactly how many of them there were, either. They all lived together in the country out around the little town of Obert, where they did pretty much what they pleased. They hunted out of season and trespassed on other people’s land to do it. They fished in every stock tank within a five-mile radius of where they lived. They stole corn and watermelons from the fields. As far as Rhodes knew, none of them worked at a regular job. Several of them had been in and out of the county jail at one time or another for a variety of misdemeanors, minor and otherwise, and the occasional felony.

  In another century, the Packers might have been called outlaws, though that wouldn’t have been a strictly accurate description. It was true that they lived outside the law, but it was their attitude as much as their actions that defined them. As far as they were concerned, the law just didn’t matter. They were simply indifferent to it.

  “Did you recognize any of them?” he asked.

  “No,” Ruth said, “but it’s their style, isn’t it? And robbing graveyards is just the kind of thing they’d do. They wouldn’t see a thing wrong with it. In fact, they’d probably resent it if you told them it was against the law.”

  Rhodes thought she was right. The Packers would regard the idea of dead people having any rights as ridiculous, and they wouldn’t see how stealing from cemeteries could affect the living. Not that they would have cared if it did.

  “I guess we should check and see if any of that bunch owns a new Dodge pickup,” he said. “We can do that tomorrow. Let’s look around here for a little longer before we give up. You might want to come back in the morning to check it out during the daylight.”

  “They really made a mess, didn’t they?” Ruth said.

  “They certainly did, and they hauled off half the stones in the cemetery. Maybe this time we’ll get them back.”

  “Where do you think they got all those guns?” Ruth asked.

  “Probably at a flea market or a gun show. They aren’t that hard to get. If anyone can get them, the Packers can. Are you turning into a gun-control advocate?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking that they could have killed us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Rhodes told her. He’d been thinking about the same thing. “I believe they just wanted to scare us away. If they’d wanted to kill us, it would have been easy enough. They don’t mind stealing, or any of the other things they do, but they’ve never killed anybody. At least that we know about.”

  “What about Ty Berry?”

  “I’m not sure about Ty. But even if they did kill him, we’re different. We’re law officers. If they’d killed us, they’d have to leave the state. Or the country. They’d have every sheriff, local cop, DPS officer, and Texas Ranger in the state after them. They wouldn’t want to kill us. We’d cause them a lot more trouble dead than we’ve ever caused them while we’re alive.”

  “That’s a comforting thought,” Ruth said. “I guess.”

  “It’s the best I can do,” Rhodes said.

  Rhodes got in late and gave Ivy only a sketchy idea of what had happened. He confessed that there had been a few shots fired, but he didn’t say how many. And he didn’t mention the handcuffs.

  He was up early the next morning, but by the time he got to the jail, Hack already had some information for him.

  “I checked the courthouse records. Runt Packer bought a Dodge Ram about five months ago.”

  Runt’s real name was Samuel, and he hadn’t gotten his nickname because of his current size. In fact, as Rhodes recalled, Runt was about four inches over six feet tall and almost as wide. But he’d been born prematurely and had weighed around four pounds at birth. He’d been kept in the hospital for several weeks, and his family had called him Runt forever after. It might have been his Dodge Ram, but he hadn’t been one of the four in the cemetery. Rhodes would have recognized him from his size alone.

  “I guess I’ll have to pay the Packers a little visit, then,” Rhodes said.

  “You better have some backup, considering what went down last night,” Hack said.

  “Who told you about that?”

  “I t
alked to Ruth. She said there was lots of shootin’ goin’ on.”

  “Don’t spread that around. Ivy thinks there were one or two shots fired, but that’s it.”

  “What about the paper? Ruth wrote up a report. Somebody’ll read it sooner or later.”

  The Clearview Herald sent someone over about once a week to go through the records. Then the most colorful crimes would find their way into the paper.

  “Maybe she won’t read it,” Rhodes said.

  Hack snorted.

  “I’ll tell her the paper exaggerated,” Rhodes said. “She knows that happens.”

  Hack snorted louder. He was about to say something when the phone rang. He listened for a few seconds before saying, “You’re gonna have to go a little slower, Miz Tabor. I can’t get anything written down if you’re talkin’ so fast.” He found a pencil and started writing. “Okay, you can go ahead. Yes, that’s fine. I’m gettin’ it now.... She didn’t show up at all? All right. I got it. And you’ve called her three times this morning.... I got that.... Well, I don’t blame you, Miz Tabor. I’d be worried, too.... Yes, ma’am, I’ll be sure to tell the sheriff. He’s standin’ right here. I’ll send him right on over there. Don’t you worry. I’m sure there’s nothin’ wrong, but we’ll check on it.”

  Hack hung up the phone and turned to Rhodes. “That was Ida Louise Tabor. Looks like there’s a little problem with Faye Knape.”

  “What problem?” Rhodes asked.

  “Seems like she didn’t show up for the Chickenfoot game last night,” Hack said. “Miz Tabor called her, but she didn’t get an answer. Called back twice this morning, too. Still didn’t get an answer. I told her you’d get on over there and check things out. Unless you want somebody else to do it.”

  Rhodes needed to pay a visit to the Packers, but he could go by and see about Faye on his way.

  “I’ll go,” he told Hack. “And while I’m gone, you check and see who owned those buildings.”