The Huckleberry Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery

by Patrick F. McManus

  Angie shook her head. “I hate all this talk about eating when we have a dead body lying behind us. On the other hand, is anyone interested in a turkey-and-bacon sandwich with cold curly fries?”

  The three men stared at her. “You better not be just tormenting us, Angie,” Dave said.

  “Nope,” she said. “I have five such sandwiches and fries, all prepared by the café at my hotel. They’re for sale at a thousand dollars apiece. No checks, considering my present company.”

  “I want to believe it but I can’t,” Pap said.

  Angie pulled a brown paper sack out of her shoulder bag and distributed the sandwiches. The men bit into them and groaned with pleasure.

  Dave said, “No wonder that bag of yours was so heavy, Angie! I figured you planned to set up housekeeping out here.”

  “I’m afraid I forgot the glassware, Dave, but I did bring a bottle of bourbon.” She took it from her bag and handed it to Pap. “So we’ll all have to drink out of the bottle. I hope none of you have communicable diseases or are squeamish.”

  “Not me,” Pap said. “But I may have to take up religion. This is a miracle!”

  Later they relaxed around the campfire telling stories. Finally Tully said, “Dave’s turn. Maybe he will enlighten us as to how he learned to shoot like that and all the martial-arts moves he obviously has.”

  Dave laughed. “I wouldn’t call them martial arts, but I spent a year in Japan in the company of six Japanese gentlemen a good deal smaller than Angie. Every day for a year I paid them a lot of money to beat me senseless. They struck so fast you couldn’t see them move. If you’ve ever seen a rattlesnake strike, that’s how fast they were. By the end of the year, I was one massive ache but I could take out two of them in a match. I figured that was enough. From then on I worked on fleeing, just in case more than two bad guys showed up.”

  Pap laughed. “I myself have always favored fleeing right up front, so nobody gets confused about my intentions.”

  One by one they dozed off, curling up on the sand next to the campfire.

  • • •

  The following morning they explored the island. On the far side they found an aluminum canoe turned upside down on the bank, with one paddle under it, the transportation the sniper had apparently used to get through the swamp.

  As Tully had noticed in his flight with Pete, a large portion of the island was barren of trees and the ground appeared to be tilled. There were watering cans scattered about near endless rows of stalks cut close to the ground. They found a pole shelter, the front of which was open. There were four cots inside containing a few rumpled blankets. In the back of the structure were half a dozen bags of commercial fertilizer and a pile of empty bags. The fire pit out front contained partially burned pizza boxes and wrappers for other fast foods.

  “I guess we know what was going on here,” Tully said. “They were growing marijuana. The murdered guys were the ones who took care of it, watering the plants and hoeing the weeds and so on. I figured them for farm laborers of some kind, and I guess that’s what they were.”

  “Looks as if they weren’t treated too badly,” Angie said. “But there was no way off this island. They were essentially prisoners here.”

  “You don’t feed prisoners pizza,” Tully said.

  “Yeah,” Pap said. “And they could have got away if they wanted to. Something kept them here. My guess is they were promised a cut of the profits. So in the end the guys running the operation decided it would be cheaper to kill the help than pay them. It would also keep them from blabbing to the cops, if they got ripped off. It’s like I always say, murder is done for money or to keep someone quiet. Hey, Angie, how about killing someone because you don’t want to pay them?”

  “It might seem the reasonable thing to do, if you don’t mind murdering people.”

  Tully squatted down to get a closer look at some of the stubble. “If you’re so smart, Pap, what happened to the marijuana?”

  “Why, they harvested it! What do you think, Bo?”

  “I think a couple tons of the stuff is pretty hard to market and distribute all at once.”

  “Yeah,” Dave said, “but where are you going to store a couple tons of it? Haul it to a commercial warehouse? I don’t think so.”

  Angie put her hands on her hips. “Okay, Bo, I’ll say it. How about a barn?”

  Tully stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans. “That’s an A for Miss FBI. And who do we know has a barn? The Poulsons! And Mr. Poulson, the owner, happens to be missing and presumed dead, and his wife has been murdered. The ranch has a very large barn out behind his house. It is watched over by an extremely smooth sociopath by the name of Ray Porter, alias Ray Crockett, and Mr. Porter has a criminal record. Furthermore, who has been urging me to search the Poulson place for the body of Mr. Poulson? The ex–Mrs. Poulson! And what happened to her?”

  “She was pushed off a bridge and killed,” Pap said. “No doubt to take heat off the ranch. I hate to admit it, Bo, but you might be on your way to making a pretty decent sheriff.”

  Tully smiled. “Thanks, Pap. Maybe we’ll get this whole business wrapped up in a couple of days.”

  Angie said, “And this ties into the huckleberry murders exactly how? Some evidence would be nice.”

  Tully tugged on the corner of his mustache. “Well, Angie, since the FBI probably isn’t going to let us do this the Blight way, we’ll have to tie the dead huckleberry pickers to the island. Maybe we can do that with fingerprints on the watering cans and whatnot. But to really pin the murders on the guys who ran the marijuana operation, we have to track down the fourth man, the kid who escaped the murder plot, Craig Wilson.”

  Angie said, “I don’t think we’ll solve anything standing around here.”

  “That’s right,” Poke said. “Besides, that fellow you killed, Dave, is going to spoil pretty fast in this heat.”

  “Not to mention I’m starving to death,” Angie said. “Crabbs is actually starting to sound pretty good to me.”

  Tully laughed. “I hadn’t realized we were undergoing such extreme hardship, Angie. Guys, we better get back to civilization before Angie goes even more wacko on us. Anyone who thinks Crabbs isn’t so bad is right on the brink.” He stepped backward and almost fell over something. “Hey, what’s this?”

  Pap bent over and looked at the little contraption. “It’s a fogger!”

  Dave scratched his head. “A fogger? What’s a fogger?”

  Pap said, “It explains why there aren’t any mosquitoes in the swamp! They put the fogger in their boat when the wind is just right and drive across one side of the swamp. It puts up a big cloud of insecticide that drifts across the swamp and kills all the mosquitoes and any innocent bug who happens to be passing through. Now that we’ve got the missing-mosquito mystery solved, shouldn’t one of us paddle the canoe back?”

  “Leave it for now,” Tully said. “I want all of us to stick together.”

  They trooped back to the raft. They wrapped the body in one of the blankets and leaned the rifles against it. Angie and Poke took up their positions fore and aft, and Dave and Pap manned the poles. “Point the way, Poke,” Tully said.

  “What you mean, ‘point the way,’ Bo? Weren’t you paying attention when you poled us in here?”

  “No, I had you as a guide.”

  “Hunh. Well, it was dark. Let’s see. I reckon if we head this way, it will take us back the way we came in.”

  “That way!” Pap shouted. “That ain’t the way we come in.”

  “Well, what way you think it was, Pap, you’re so dang smart?”

  “I wasn’t paying that much attention either. I figured you were the one knew the swamp.”

  “Shucks,” Poke said. “I’ve never been in this far on a dark night with some fellow shooting at me.”

  Angie put her hands on her hips. “If all you mountain men will just shut up for a moment, I’ll tell you how to get out of here. See that line of dead trees over there? Well, follow a
long them until we see green woods. Then we’ll know we’re moving along the north edge of the swamp. We keep the green trees off to our right until we see Bo’s red Explorer.”

  “That’s right,” Tully said. “I was checking to see if Angie had been paying attention, and by golly, she was.”

  Angie rolled her eyes.

  Two hours later they were in the Explorer and headed back to Poke’s. Tully paid him three hundred dollars in cash and they were on their way into town.

  “What we going to do with the stiff?” Pap asked.

  “Drop him off at the medical examiner’s.”

  “You think that’s a good idea? In the old days we would have taken him out in the woods and buried him. Or we could have got some stones and sunk him in the swamp.”

  Tully turned and looked back at him. “Have you forgotten we have an FBI agent in the car?”

  “That’s right,” Angie said. “And I haven’t quite acclimated myself to the Blight way.”

  “That’s a pity,” Pap said. “It complicates matters no end. Susan will want to know why we didn’t leave the body where it was until she did her examination.”

  Tully said, “And I’ll tell her we would have had to pole the raft back out of the swamp, drive into town, notify her and her crew, then lead them back to the swamp, load them all on the raft, pole them out to the island, and—”

  “Stop!” Angie cried. “I get your point!”

  “So the way we’re going to work this,” Tully said, “we’re going to drop Angie off at her hotel, then we’ll haul the body to the medical examiner, ask her to get some prints off it so maybe we can get an ID.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Pap said.

  “I don’t think it sounds that great,” Angie said. “I have to file a report.”

  “We’ll give you everything you need for your report,” Tully said. “You might have to write in a few gaps. You do know how to write gaps, don’t you?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Well, I’ll teach you. Here’s your hotel.”

  Angie said, “I have to take a nap, to get my mind working again. Just remember, everything in my report has to be the truth.”

  “It’ll be the truth.”

  “It better be. Otherwise I may find myself permanently assigned to Blight.”

  • • •

  Tully and Pap stopped at the medical examiner’s office. Tully went in and got Susan and two attendants with a stretcher on wheels.

  “Jeez,” one of the attendants said. “He’s all bent.”

  Tully said, “Yeah, well, you’d be bent too if you had to ride in the cargo space of an Explorer for fifty miles. Strap him down and he’ll flatten out nicely when he warms up. We just spent a night out in a swamp with him, so you can’t expect everything.”

  “What happened?” Susan asked.

  Tully told her his version and afterward said, “You understand that’s our story, sweetheart, and we’re sticking to it.”

  “The usual, in other words. So what do you want me to do?”

  “I can give you the exact time of death, so you don’t have to bother with that ugly stuff. You can do whatever you do, as long as you wait until I’m out of here. The main thing I want are the prints off the guy. Then get them over to Lurch so he can try to get an ID. I checked the guy’s pockets but he didn’t have a billfold. He paddled out to the island in a canoe, so there should be a vehicle somewhere near the swamp, unless he was dropped off by someone. In any case, this guy was involved in a large-scale marijuana operation. His pals are still out there running around and they’re very dangerous.”

  “So you think you know who they are?”

  Susan’s attendants were strapping the corpse to an examination table behind them. The sounds were ugly. Tully shuddered. “Yeah. They’re the same guys that killed the three kids up in the huckleberry patch. One down and two to go. The problem is, I just don’t have proof of anything yet. There are some watering cans and various tools out on the island. I may get Lurch out there to see if he can pick up some prints. It hasn’t rained since the murders, so the prints should be okay. That way we can tie the murdered guys to the island.”

  Susan laughed. “You’re looking for proof, Bo? Whatever happened to the Blight way?”

  “That’s my fallback position.”

  • • •

  He dropped Pap off at his house, then drove over to the courthouse and went to the department office. The crew didn’t even bother to look up. He tried his special coffee pump. It filled his cup with dark black coffee that smelled wonderful. He smiled in surprise. He stuck his head into the radio room. “This is great, Flo. I like having a pump all to myself.”

  She favored him with one of her blazing smiles. “Anybody else tries to use it, boss, I break his wrist.”

  Daisy looked up. “Well, it’s about time, Sheriff. Do you ever think to turn on your phone, so we don’t have to worry ourselves sick about you?”

  “No way you need worry about me. Old Tully knows how to take care of himself. We did have to kill a fellow who took a shot at us. Pap was lighting one of his hand-rolleds in the dark, and I guess the assailant took offense and tried to gun the old man down. I can’t say I blame him. Maybe he hated those hand-rolleds as much as I do. One of our party—not me—drilled the sniper through the chest. We’ve got some prints coming in from the dead guy, Lurch. You may be able to get an ID on him.”

  “Great,” the Unit said. “I’ll check with Susan.”

  Daisy said, “We should know better than to let you out unsupervised.”

  Pugh asked, “You say you didn’t shoot him, Bo?”

  Tully shook his head. “No, Brian, Dave did. The guy was apparently aiming for my father and barely missed him. Anyway, we ended up spending the night in the swamp. Now, Brian, I want you to put together a raiding party for seven o’clock tonight. Get Ernie and six other deputies. Make sure they’re well armed and wearing their vests. I’ll be back at four and will fill you in then.”

  Daisy asked, “Can I go, Bo?”

  “You bet, sweetheart. You’re a deputy, after all. But wear your vest. There could be serious shooting.”

  She said, “You really think these guys are dumb enough to shoot, Bo?”

  “I hope so. We’ll have Dave along. Give him a call at the restaurant, just to remind him, Daisy. He’s probably already sacked out, so give him a couple of hours. Oh, and be sure to inform the FBI. She’ll be at her hotel. What’s her name again?”

  “Agent Angela Phelps.”

  “Right. Tell everybody we’ll meet here at seven.”

  He walked into his office and shut the door. After staring at his painted window for a moment, he dug out his tattered pocket notebook. Putting his finger on a number in the book, he sat down and dialed the phone.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mitch?”

  “No, I’ll get him.”

  Mitch answered. “Yeah?”

  “You guys need to hire a receptionist, Mitch. The phone manners there are terrible.”

  “I’d do that, if I was a rich sheriff. How you doin’, Bo?”

  “Fair to middling. I spent the night camping out and every bone and muscle I’ve got is aching. But enough about that. I’ve got a stiff down at the medical examiner’s, and I was wondering if one of you sterling citizens might be able to identify him.”

  “We don’t have any fresh kills, Bo, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Remember the guy who chased the little girl into your house and one of your guys laid down a line in front of him from an AK-47? I’d like someone who saw the guy to come down and see if the stiff is the same fellow.”

  “One second, Bo.”

  Tully could tell Mitch had his hand over the mouthpiece but he could still hear him giving an order. Someone shouted, “What! No way! I ain’t!”

  Mitch said, “Red will be right down, Bo. He may be a little worse for wear but he’ll be right there.”

  “Thanks, Mitch.
I appreciate it.” He hung up.

  Tully sighed and sipped his coffee. When he had drained the last drop of it, he wondered if Flo had got over her divorce from her loser husband. If so, she’d be a good prospect for a live-in housekeeper. On the other hand, he didn’t think he could stand listening to a woman constantly gripe about her ex-husband. You need to let divorcées cool for about a year. He put both hands flat on his desk and slowly pushed himself up. He walked out into the briefing room and caught Pugh just as the deputy was leaving.

  “Do we have Bev out of the hospital yet?”

  “Yeah. She seems to be okay. I put her up at the Pine Creek Motel, on the county, of course.”

  “I hope you explained to her that it is not a good idea to start turning tricks out of there.”

  “That slipped my mind. But she talked about taking up a new trade.”

  “Good. In any case, I want you to pick her up and bring her down to the M.E.’s lab. I want to see if she can identify our dead body as one of the guys that used to sit at her table in Slade’s.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  “See the two of you there in an hour.”

  As he walked by Daisy’s desk she spun around on her little swivel chair and said, “Bo, you better go home and get some sleep. You look terrible.”

  “Maybe. First, though, I have to stop by the medical examiner’s. One of the guys from Mitch’s gang is coming down to see if he can identify the body. Brian’s bringing our prostitute. It’s a party. Then I’m headed home.”

  “Oh. Well, say hi to Susan for me.”

  “You bet,” Tully said. “I suppose you know she hates me.”

  “Maybe. But single desperate women can get over hate for a man pretty fast.”

  He grinned at her. “I’ll keep that in mind, Daisy.”

  Pleased to see her blush, he worried all the way out the door he might be hit in the back with a blunt object.

  He was waiting in the reception room at the medical examiner’s office when Red showed up outside on his motorcycle, the machine apparently unencumbered by a muffler. He walked out to meet the rider. “Hey, Red, I expected you might bring along those AK-47s.”