The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  But the old-fashioned nightstick just won’t budge.

  Official reports now refer to it as a crowd-control baton and administrators with Ph.D.’s in police science have approved the addition of a neat little extra handle sprouting at right angles to the regular grip—a development that makes it impossible to roll the thing with ankle-bruising force at the feet of a fleeing felon, as street-smart patrolmen have been doing for a century, and effectively tethers it to a steel ring attached to the leather gun harness, which has now magically emerged as the “belt, patrol utility, leather.”

  But the name “nightstick” has stuck; even the newest and fanciest of the modern crowd-control batons remains a nightstick in everyday non-official usage, and the item in Vollie Manion’s hand was a classic—a battered old bum-basher with the chips and scars of long service, and a round irregularity at its tip to show where it had been hollowed out and filled with lead to give it extra authority.

  Vollie had used the time while I was collecting myself to wrap the business end in a couple of off-white hand towels, holding them in place with rubber bands. He displayed the result now with pride and affection.

  “The thing about wrapping the end of the stick with a towel,” he explained genially, “is that you can just kind of tap a feller with it about as much as you want and not leave hardly any bruise at all, but he feels it almost as much as if the towel wasn’t there.”

  He demonstrated.

  The club bounced almost lovingly off the left side of my skull, and the shadowless geometry of the room was momentarily replaced by a chaos of light streaks superimposed on a background of inky velvet.

  Point well taken.

  Deputy Manion was definitely on to something here.

  I decided there was just the tiniest chance that a sudden kick with my right foot might reach his testicles with enough force to let me get loose from the chair to meet him in a standing position. But even so, my hands would still be cuffed behind my back and his would be free. Besides, I had a feeling my reflexes might leave a lot to be desired at that moment.

  All right, then. No kick.

  Nariyuki no matsu…I began preparing the way to inner concealment, the place of hiding where the writ of pain does not run.

  “That hurts a little, of course,” Vollie said, still cheerful. “But that really ain’t the main thing. See, when you hit a feller like that, a blunt blow on the top of the skull, like, it don’t leave no sign outside. But inside there—on the brain, I mean—it leaves what they call pinprick hemorrhages—little bitty breaks in the surface? What I learned in the anatomy class, back there at the university, was that everyone gets knocks like that from time to time. And just one or two don’t mean much.

  “Feller who does any really serious drinking, he’ll kill about that same number of brain cells every time he gets drunk. And if he keeps at it long enough, he starts to get sort of dumb. You seen people like that. They walk around peeing in their pants. Real sad.

  “But of course that takes a long time. Years and years, usually.

  “It happens a lot faster, sometimes, to boxers. They get hit in the head a lot, you know, they get punchy, which just means they had enough of those little hemorrhages that their brains don’t work real good anymore. Never could understand why they let it go that far. I mean, they could stop anytime before that happens and be pretty much okay. And so could you.”

  This time the tap was harder and the darkness lasted longer.

  “What would make me happy,” Vollie said, bending a bit to look into my face, “would be for you to tell me just exactly how you killed ol’ Bobby Don. Reckon you could help me out there?”

  The padded club hit the right side of my skull and set off a pinwheel of blue sparks.

  “Like, now, how did you get him into your car?”

  A tap on the left.

  “And did you beat him to death before you sent the car off the road, or was he only just unconscious in there when it happened?”

  A tap on the right.

  “You know, this could go on and on. We got all the time in the world…”

  I heard the words and recorded them for future consideration, but they came from another world. A place far removed from reality. A dream place where mindless brutes played a game whose only rules were insanity. The nightstick blows still reached my head, but could not find the quiet mountain meadow where I sat sharing gossip with a low cloud that had wandered through the pass from the sea. There in the stillness I touched the grass-green fingers of the Enlightened One and asked him if he had enjoyed his many conversations with the rebbe from Nazareth.

  His reply was glowing silence.

  I touched the sky and filled it, immobile but moving at the speed of light, reaching for the infinite.

  And stopped short.

  Something had changed in the other world.

  I tried to ignore it. But it wouldn’t go away, and the instant of annoyance that I felt at the distraction was a molecule removed from the skin of a balloon. Vanishingly small, but disastrous. Reality collapsed around me and I was back in the shadowless little room, conscious of pain and fury.

  “Vollie!”

  A new voice. A stranger.

  “Put it down, Vollie.”

  There is a technique taught in the military, a special force and inflection of speech known as the tone of command. The man who learns to use it effectively will seldom need to raise his voice to be sure of instant obedience. That is automatic. Irresistible. I heard that tone now, coming from the doorway. And so did Deputy Vollie Manion.

  “I was only just—” he began.

  “Put it down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Reluctantly, but with no real show of resistance, he unwrapped the towels from the end of the nightstick and leaned it on its lead-filled nose in the corner.

  “Now unlock him.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it.”

  Vollie wanted to go on arguing, but he didn’t. I started to sit up as he moved behind me, but the sudden agony as he fumbled a key into the locks and unsnapped the manacles from my wrists came as a surprise. Circulation seemed to have been cut off for some time. I hadn’t remembered the cuffs being that tight.

  “Grab him!”

  The deputy’s hands caught my shoulders as I toppled forward at the waist and the world narrowed to a gray-upholstered tunnel. That was a surprise, too. I seemed to have been off in the other place, the real world, for too long. Things getting out of hand back here in kindergarten. Have to attend to them. But not right now.

  “You need to lie down?”

  My field of vision didn’t improve much, but a new face moved into it. An older man. Dark skin tone. Mustache. Eyes like obsidian marbles, but not as warm.

  “Be okay…in a minute,” I told him.

  “Sure you will.”

  The face moved out of sight, and a second pair of hands moved my torso forward until it was resting on my thighs. Someone pushed my head down between my knees and supported it there.

  The edges of the world began to widen. I could see the floor and my own feet and the nightstick over in the corner.

  “You want to throw up?”

  I started to say no, but found myself less sure than I had thought. Might be worth considering. Something sour down there. Not sour enough, though, and not big enough to be worth the effort. The moment passed and I managed to shake my head a little. “Stomach’s fine,” I said. “But I keep getting these funny headaches, Doctor…you got an aspirin?”

  That brought a grunt of what might have been amusement.

  Or something else.

  I decided it was time to sit up again, and after a moment of resistance the hands on my shoulders let me do it. The walls of the cell stayed put. I was back. For a while, anyway.

  The man with the obsidian eyes moved back to where I could see him and picked up one of the towels Vollie had used to wrap the stick. He wet it at a sink in the corner and handed it to me.
<
br />   “Go into the booking room,” he told Vollie. “Sit down and wait for me there.”

  “I ought to go back to—”

  “Do what I tell you. Now.”

  Vollie wanted to say something else but decided not to. He left, and the man who had sent him away looked back at me.

  “Name’s Frank Ybarra,” he said. “I’m the sheriff hereabouts.”

  He didn’t offer to shake hands, and I didn’t feel slighted. We looked at each other for a few long seconds, measuring, but didn’t seem to come up with anything definite. Not enough information. Later, maybe.

  “Towel’s for your nose,” he said. “It’s bleeding.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  We see these things.

  We shake our heads.

  We wonder.

  But they are also a part of our own lives. They occur on our very doorstep. The difference is only one of degree…

  TEN

  Sheriff Frank Ybarra’s office was on the other side of the building, and we went there when my nose finally dried up.

  Big-city cops have an interrogation technique known as “good cop–bad cop” in which one member of a team is abusive and the other becomes your lifelong friend by saving you from him. It is so old and so hackneyed that television writers have almost given up using it to fill dead spots in their scripts. All the same, it seemed possible that I was getting the small-town New Mexico version now, so I kept my mouth shut as I followed the sheriff through the cell block, past the booking room, and through a sparsely furnished area that might have been the detectives’ bull pen if the Farewell sheriff’s department had any.

  He closed the office door behind us and nodded toward a straight chair. I fitted myself carefully into it and waited for him to talk.

  “Get you a doctor, if you like,” he said when he was settled behind the desk.

  I shook my head, still waiting.

  Sunlight coming through the window behind him threw the sheriff’s features into shadow—not by chance, I decided—and made them unreadable as he moved his right hand to pick up a smooth-polished stone that had been lying beside the telephone.

  “Hell of a way to start a day,” he said.

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  The stone bounced in his palm, and I wondered if it was a kind of worry bead for him. Something to keep his hands busy while his mind was otherwise occupied. He bounced the stone again and put it down.

  “Vollie Manion’s new on the job,” he said. “Sent him to the academy over in Albuquerque, but I don’t think the training took.”

  “Try a mental hospital,” I suggested. “They’ve got the kind of instructors he needs. Or maybe you could hire a keeper.”

  The sheriff’s expression didn’t change, but his eyelids came down for a moment, and something feral was still dissolving in the depths when they snapped open again. He took a deep breath and released it slowly.

  “Thing is,” he said, “there would be some real advantages to proving that an outsider like you, someone not from Farewell, killed the Thieroux boy.”

  He seemed to be waiting for some kind of reply, but I wasn’t feeling helpful, and after a moment he went on.

  “Sheriffs have to stand for election. They shouldn’t; it’s a bad system that got started a long time ago and never was changed, and it is purely hell on the professional objectivity. You sure don’t win any votes by proving someone’s husband, father, brother, or best friend is guilty of murder. So it’s a good day when you can tell them it was someone they don’t know and don’t even have to make bail for. Everyone’s happy.”

  He paused again, and I wondered if I was going to hear the good-cop routine after all. But no.

  “The hell of it is,” he said, “I kind of got out of the habit of thinking that way during the time I spent on the force in San Francisco—even before they sent me to the FBI academy. Department had sent me there because I was a senior detective, up for lieutenant, and in that town you either do some kind of postgraduate work or forget about making captain. Not that I ever made captain anyway. Guessed wrong about one street snitch, and he shortened my stride by half a foot before I could get the knife away from him, so I took my medical retirement and a plaque that said I was one hell of a police officer and came back here to Farewell and got elected sheriff because no one in town knew me well enough anymore to hate my guts.”

  He bounced the rock in his hand one more time and then flipped it suddenly across the room, scoring a direct hit on a wastebasket in the corner.

  It had been a long speech, and I might have suspected it had left a bitter aftertaste in his mouth, but for the flat factuality of tone and the black-marble stare that remained fixed on my face. If it was a feint, it was a good one.

  “You know,” he said without any perceptible gear-changing noises, “that’s a really fine glass eye. Took me all this time to spot it, and even then I wasn’t sure until you let the left eye glance over to see where the rock went, and the right one didn’t move with it.”

  “Sloppy,” I nodded. “Have to work on that when I get some time.”

  “Vollie Manion never spotted it at all,” the sheriff went on. “Put down your eye color without any other notation on the booking card. I know, because I looked the card over before I tore it up. You’re free to go, unless you want to see a doctor or prefer charges.”

  I thought that over for a minute. “What about Bobby Don?” I said.

  The sheriff sighed and leaned back to study the ceiling.

  “Robert Donald Thieroux,” he said, “died sometime after midnight and before dawn this morning when he drove your rented car off a downhill curve on the county road, out toward his granddaddy’s place. Would’ve been no investigation, maybe, if Vollie Manion—he’s not stupid, just got some kind of problem that seems to feed a natural streak of snake-meanness—if Vollie hadn’t gone and spotted something wrong with the car’s brake lines. They’d been knife-cut, almost all the way through.

  “Just a guess—I’ll have to send the damaged items to the state crime lab to make sure—but the way the job had been done, the lines most likely wouldn’t have let go the first few times someone came to a stop. It would have taken a good solid foot. The kind you’d use if you wanted to slow down suddenly before starting a curve. So whoever did the cutting had to be somebody who knew his business. A mechanic, maybe, or someone who’d had a lot of experience doing it before. Don’t know of anyone living around here who would fit in the last category, so there we are again, looking for someone new in town…” He glanced at me to make sure I was taking it all in.

  I was.

  “But you don’t fit,” he continued. “Three people whose word I have reason to trust have already told me you were busy playing cards right through the time when you would have had to be hacking away on the brake lines. Every one one of them put you out there in the back room of the country club all night long.”

  The sheriff let the tiniest trace of a smile slip past the corners of his mouth, and it surprised me. His face didn’t seem like the kind of place where smiles happened very often.

  “In fact,” he said, “Deke Pemberton tells me you must have the greatest set of kidneys this side of the Mississippi. Says he never even saw you get up from the table to go pee. How the hell do you do that, anyway?”

  “Early toilet training, long habit, and minimal liquid intake,” I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “Worth knowing. Anyhow, you didn’t have an opportunity, didn’t have any reason to think Bobby Don was going to go stealing your car…and I just can’t see where a little disagreement over a few hands of seven-card stud would be much of a motive. Especially for a man who makes his living playing cards.”

  Nice shot.

  The sheriff had done his homework. Or asked more questions than he had told me about.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sure glad to know I’m no longer a murder suspect. For the moment, anyway. But it still
leaves quite a bit of room for speculation, doesn’t it? Especially in one area that is kind of important to me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Oh, just odds and ends you might say. Details. For example, I can’t help wondering if the Thieroux boy was the intended victim. After all, I didn’t lend him the car. Or even know he was going to take it.”

  This time it was the sheriff’s turn to nod and wait.

  “And then there’s the matter of how he was able to drive it from the lot without leaving his own wheels—the fancied-up Caddy I noticed when I arrived at the country club yesterday. Unless he hitched them up and drove away Roman fashion, one foot on each hood, he had to have help, and I think it would be interesting to know who that was and why he was so obliging and what became of the other car.”

  Ybarra’s face had resumed its fine-tuned blankness.

  “And if those cut brake lines really were intended for me, then who knew what kind of car I was driving, where it would be parked, and how long I would be away from it? Also, I can’t help wondering why anyone would want me dead, in a town where—as you mentioned earlier—no one knows me…”

  I stopped for breath and perhaps in hope of some small reaction from the man across the desk. But all I got was breath. The eyes never changed, and the voice was empty of inflection as he agreed that it sure would be nice to know all of that. Yes, indeed.

  “So, then, you’ll want to be going back to your motel,” he said, making it a statement instead of a question. Our conversation appeared to be at an end.

  “Suits me,” I said. “But not if I have to ride with your deputy. I don’t think he likes me. Use your phone to call a cab?”

  The eyes blinked but didn’t lose their light-devouring opacity.

  “Sure, if that’s what you want,” he said. “But Miz Dana—Marilyn Prescott’s little sister—she’s right outside there in the waiting room.”

  He took a moment to let that sink in.