That was when I noticed that somewhere along the way I’d acquired a pair of handcuffs on my wrists. I felt something sharp at the base of my rib cage and looked down to see a big, long-barreled revolver. Its muzzle was buried in my side, and its other end was attached to the arm of an exquisite gentleman who was wearing several hundred dollars’ worth of hand-tailored silk suit and a camel’s hair overcoat. I saw a handsome matinee idol’s face with wavy hair that was going gray at the temples, a pencil-line mustache, and manly features. He looked like Errol Flynn, but he wasn’t. He was Milam Walsh, and his smile was the smile you’d expect to find on a mako shark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Buick whisked off down the street, picking up speed. Within a mile or so my wits were starting to come back. I recognized the driver as Nolan Dunning. But I almost fainted dead away when the man in the front passenger seat turned around so I could see his face. “Hi, Virg!” chirruped my old nemesis Stubb Martindale. “How’s tricks?”
I sat motionless for a long moment, then lunged desperately for the door, only to find that its handle had been removed. I tried bursting it open with my shoulder, but it was useless. Almost wild with fear and rage, I was turning to attack Walsh when I sensed movement above my head and saw Martindale’s arm coming my way. There was no pain; just a flash of dull orange behind my eyelids and the last thing I remember was the floor of the car coming up to meet my face. This time I was out for the count.
* * *
I have no idea how long I was unconscious, but I think it was about ten minutes. When I came to, the windows were dark, and I knew we were beyond the edge of town and away from the streetlights. My breathing must have changed noticeably and alerted them, because Walsh reached up and turned on the dome light. “Hello, Tucker,” he said in a voice that was full of good-natured self-confidence. “You’ve become a real nuisance. Did you know that?”
I could only groan.
“Headache?” he asked cheerfully.
“Screw you,” I managed despite my throbbing head.
“Oh, come now, Tucker. There’s no point in being childish. Get off the floor and sit up like a man.”
Martindale reached over the seatback and grabbed the collar and shoulders of my coat and hauled me up and pitched me back against the rear seat. “How’s everything going, Virg?” he asked.
“What in the name of God are you doing here?” I asked, rubbing my head.
“I finally figured it out, Virg.”
“Figured what out?”
“The big secret.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but the pain in my skull was gradually receding. “Good for you,” I said.
“Not curious about the big secret, huh?”
I only grunted at him.
“I think I’ll tell you anyway, Virg. The big secret is that them who gets the prizes in this life are the ones that open the door when opportunity knocks.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
He giggled. “You see, Virg, I got some talents that you high-and-mighties down there in Matador County never did know nothing about. And that’s because you don’t know me. Oh, you recognize me when you see me on the street, but you don’t really see me. Not as a man, anyway. To you and your kind, fellows like me ain’t nothing more than fence posts. You don’t even notice us till we ain’t there any longer. Then somebody asks, ‘How come there’s a hole in that fence?’ ‘Awww, ole Stubb, he up and left and the cows done got out.’”
He was right, but I didn’t feel in the mood to be apologetic about it. “Tough shit,” I said.
“Yeah, and you gonna find out how tough in a little while. Anyhow, we were talking about my talents. One of them is that I can hear a gnat sneeze a half mile away. Bet you didn’t know that, did you? You just wouldn’t believe how good my ears are. So that night back at the ranch I didn’t go get no camera like Dalton Polk told me to do. Shit, he wasn’t never gonna look at them pictures no how, so why bother? I just followed the two of you out to the barn and hung around outside the doorway and listened while you talked. Heard every damn word you both said, too. And another talent of mine that comes from being a nobody at the bottom of the heap is that I don’t dismiss things as quick as you do. You wrote Sheriff Walsh off as a kind of high-toned security guard for them fellows down in New Orleans, but I got to studying, and I figured out that maybe he might be just a little more important in this gambling deal than you thought he was. I also reasoned that he might have some use for a sharp fellow who could tell him you were coming his way. So I lit out for Beaumont the next morning. And it didn’t take him no time at all to see my value as a man. Ain’t that right, Sheriff?”
“Indeed it is,” Walsh agreed.
“Say! How ’bout that redheaded gal? Was she a pretty good piece?”
“Hey!” Nolan yelled from behind the wheel. “Watch your mouth.”
Stubb giggled again. “Nolan ain’t too happy you wound up with his girl, Virg.”
“Piss on you, you white trash peckerwood,” I growled.
He was raising his sap again when Walsh stopped him. “Enough, Stubb!” he said curtly. “Let’s leave a little something to tell us what we need to know.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Mr. DeMour’s journal,” Walsh said.
“Come clean on who you’re fronting for and I might just give you the damn thing,” I said.
“You’re hardly in any position to bargain,” he replied.
“As long as you don’t know where that journal is, I am.”
“Oh, I think we can get that little piece of information out of you. I fully believe that Stubb here will prove most adept at that sort of persuasion.”
He was probably right, but I saw no reason to agree with him. So for lack of anything better to do, I kept talking. “I’ve been wondering ever since Rosario Maceo was shot just who could really be behind this whole business.”
Walsh sighed. “Behind it all? Why, some people who are intent upon seeing the Gulf Coast realize its full potential.”
“Full potential?” I asked. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Think for a minute. Imagine a string of resort towns and casinos from Beaumont to Brownsville. Galveston, Port Aransas, Corpus Christi, Padre Island. Why, Texas could become the playground of the nation. A nation that’s going to come out of this war rich beyond imagining.”
“And you’re their waterboy?”
In the dim glow of the dome light I could see his well-kept teeth gleaming as he smiled indulgently. “You’re not going to get under my skin with a meaningless little insult like that. I’m the man who can provide a certain type of protection, which makes me a major factor in the whole plan.”
“How long have you had somebody tailing me?”
“Ever since you hit town.”
Martindale turned around to look at me once more. “There you go again, Virg,” he said. “Too high and mighty to cover your own back. It just never entered your mind that somebody as important as you are could be under surveillance, did you? I mean, with that Ranger commission and all.”
“You’re sure right about that, Stubb,” Walsh agreed. “That’s something I’ve noticed about the Rangers. They pin on that badge and they think everybody who sees it is going to roll over and play dead for them.”
We fell into silence and the big Buick sped onward into the night. I saw a sign that said, SARATOGA 5 MILES, and I felt my heart sink. I knew where they were taking me—into the heart of the Big Thicket—the Pine Island Bayou drainage basin—one of the most impenetrable parts of the whole state. Sparsely populated with only a couple of small villages and a few dozen subsistence farms, it was about fifty miles long and half as many miles wide—a low, flat, alluvial jungle of ancient gums and oaks and magnolias, many of which were too big for two men to reach around, their trunks rising from tangles of vines and undergrowth so dense that it was joked that the bears and panthers that had once roamed it by the hundr
eds had to use the trails to get around.
The Thicket had been settled in the years between the Texas Revolution and the Civil War by the last of the old Southern frontiersmen, people who neither wanted nor needed the benefits of civilization beyond gunpowder, lead, salt, coffee, and what few other things they couldn’t make for themselves. Three generations of Texans had grown up on stories of people who had wandered into the Thicket and never been seen again. I didn’t want to be one of them, but it was my guess that Milam Walsh and his cronies had other ideas.
* * *
I once knew an old Oklahoma deputy sheriff who’d enjoyed one of the most interesting careers of anyone I ever met in law enforcement. After more than three decades of chasing moonshiners and other assorted felons in Oklahoma’s notorious Cookson Hills, he’d been one of five experienced lawmen hired to teach pistol shooting to the agents of the FBI after Congress passed the bill that allowed them to carry firearms in the mid-1930s. Besides being a man of great courage and vast experience, he was blessed with a native wit and one of the most brilliant, if untutored, minds of anyone I had ever encountered. One of his maxims—and it is a maxim I have come to believe myself—is that criminals are fundamentally stupid no matter how high some of them may score on an intelligence test. And some do score quite high.
Walsh and his cronies were true criminals despite their badges. They were men with criminal minds and criminal attitudes, subject to all the criminal shortcomings that keep the prisons full. Had they cuffed my hands behind my back, which is what any reasonably prudent officer would have done, I would be dead today. But they didn’t. And they should have known better. Stubb Martindale because of the skinny kid I’d once been who fought him three times, the third time committing what amounted to a felony assault; Nolan Dunning because of the beating I’d given him up in San Gabriel; and Walsh because he was supposedly an experienced lawman. But through the hoodlums’ combination of arrogance and sloth, coupled with the unshakable belief that they had the monopoly on violence and intimidation, they’d cuffed my hands in front of me, and it proved to be their undoing.
I made no conscious decision. Indeed, I suppose the decision had been made thirty-five years earlier when I was born with the same bullheaded determination that drove my ancestor, Isaiah Tucker, all his life, a determination that was rooted in our genes. There was no doubt in my mind that my ultimate destination that night was meant to be a shallow grave, but I didn’t intend to go easy because it just wasn’t in my nature to do so. So I did what only a fool would have done.
On either side of the car rose dark walls of forest. A couple of miles back we’d turned off the paved road onto a gravel trail that led deep into the heart of the Thicket, and since then I’d been looking for my chance. At last I saw what I needed. Ahead the road forked, and in the apex of the fork sat an ancient gum tree, its trunk nearly three feet in diameter at the base. At that precise moment Walsh began to blather on once again, building his air-castle casinos along a golden Texas coast that would never be. I noticed that the car’s speedometer read twenty-five miles per hour just as I lunged over the back of the seat and wrestled the wheel out of Nolan Dunning’s grip.
The Buick was the big four-door model, just one step down from a limousine. The back passenger compartment sported a footrest on either side, a sort of flattened bar fixed to a U-shaped mount that held it a couple of inches above the floor. As I sprang forward my right foot slipped under this metal contraption, and a little voice in the back of my mind told me that any triumph I might enjoy that night was going to be tempered with sorrow.
Dunning had good reflexes, but they weren’t good enough. He managed to get his foot on the brake, but the car hadn’t shed more than a small fraction of its speed when I steered it headfirst into the gum tree. The results were dramatic. Stubb Martindale flew halfway through the windshield as neatly as a man slipping his foot into an old and well-loved boot. At the same time Dunning slammed into the steering wheel so violently that it came apart in my hands, his head whipping forward like a puppet on a broken string, while Walsh piled into the back of the front seat in midsentence. Stubb was motionless and the other two stunned. As for me, for just one unworldly moment, I felt like I was suspended in space, held aloft by some great hand holding my left foot, which was firmly wedged under the footrest. Then I felt a crystal clear pop as the bone in my instep behind my big toe broke just as cleanly as Dunning’s finger had broken that day back in San Gabriel. A dozen thoughts raced through my mind, most of them having to do with chickens coming home to roost and quid-pro-quos and devils getting their due. But I didn’t have time to dwell on the irony of the moment. Like the man in Frost’s poem, I had miles to go before I slept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I wound up spending the night in the woods. It was cold and damp and lonely, and at times it was frightening. What more is there to say? All the stories I’d heard about panthers, which is what woodland cougars are called in that part of the world, came back to haunt me when I heard a large animal somewhere behind me in the underbrush lapping water with a feline intensity. I had Walsh’s .38 Police Positive, but I had little confidence in it being adequate for a varmint that size. At last the sky grew light in the east, and the day began to dawn foggy and gray. As soon as I could see a few yards I stood up. During the night I’d had to slit the side of my boot with my pocketknife where my foot was swelling horribly, and it was agony to get on my feet again. But I had no choice.
I was on a narrow dirt road. I had absolutely no desire to go back toward the car, so instead I went in the opposite direction. Each step sent a burning pain shooting up my leg. After a few hundred yards I became dizzy and almost passed out. I hadn’t had a thing since the peanut butter and crackers I’d eaten the evening before, and my blood sugar was getting low. I stood with my hand braced against the trunk of a tree until the dizziness passed, but still I felt weak. Nevertheless, I pressed on.
A quarter mile farther down the road I came to a mailbox that stood beside a lane that was really no more than a pair of well-worn car tracks. The mailbox was reasonably new, and the grass was worn away where the mail carrier had been driving off the road to get to it. That told me there had to be people who went with the mailbox.
The lane wound its way into the woods for maybe an eighth of a mile, then made a sharp bend to the left and opened into a clearing of about three acres. In the center of the clearing, surrounded by a half dozen mammoth oak trees, stood a large house with a roof of wood shingles. Perched at least three feet off the ground on brick piers, it had a long gallery across its front, an open dog-trot hallway, and brick chimneys at either end. Though it was void of paint and its wooden shingles were green with age, it was trim and square and its yard was neat. From one of the chimneys a wisp of wood smoke curled upward into the chilly air, and under a shed in back I could see a Ford pickup that looked no more than a year or so old.
I was about two-thirds of the way across the front yard when an ancient, liver-colored pit bull emerged from beneath the porch and made its way toward me, its golden eyes full of curiosity. Its tail wagged languidly, and its progress was slow and deliberate like that of an old gentleman with all the time in the world. Then a man came around the corner of the house. He appeared to be a few years older than me and wore a battered felt hat, khakis, and a denim coat. Like the dog, his eyes were more curious than hostile. When he saw me he stopped, but the dog sauntered on until it stood at my feet. Then it sat back on its haunches and looked up at me expectantly. I reached down and let it smell my hand. After a moment’s hesitation, it licked my fingers and thumped its tail on the ground. Thus encouraged, I scratched it carefully between its closely cropped ears. Its muzzle, head, and neck all showed masses of scars beneath its reddish coat. I examined it closely for a few moments, then asked, “Is this a Lightner dog, by any chance?”
The man nodded slowly. “Yes. It’s an Old Family Red Nose out of William Lightner’s stock. You know pits?” he asked.
<
br /> “Some.”
“A fellow named Dan McCoy picked the sire for that animal. I’ve heard he’s dead now.”
“He is, but I knew him well,” I said.
“Really?”
“If we’re talking about the same man. The Dan McCoy I knew was an itinerant fry cook and full-time alcoholic who rode the rails all over this county. Had a talent for breeding bulldogs that’s never been equaled. McCoy’s eaten at my father’s table many a time.”
“That’s him,” he said and paused to reflect for a moment before he spoke, then tilted his head quizzically to one side. “Are you a dog fighter?” he finally asked.
I shook my head.
“Me neither. I’m too tenderhearted about dogs. But my daddy…” He smiled and shook his head ruefully.
“Mine too.”
He raised his hat and scratched his head for a moment, then asked, “Mister, I know it’s changing the subject, but you look a little peaked. Is there anything I can do for you?”
I straightened up from petting the old dog, and when I did, the world spun and reeled all around me once again. “I don’t know,” I muttered. “Something to eat before I pass out might help. I think I’m about to faint.”
* * *
Ten minutes later I was seated at a big pine table in a big clean kitchen, halfway through a stiff bourbon toddy, with my spirits beginning to lift. My host’s name turned out to be Frank Riddle and his wife was Nan. She was a small, sandy-haired woman with a ready smile and a good figure under a gingham dress and ruffled apron. They both had direct blue eyes and faces unsullied by either guile or suspicion.
I’d told them I was an officer in the middle of an investigation. My badge and ID lay on the table. I’d given Walsh’s Colt to Riddle outside because I didn’t like the idea of entering the man’s house armed. It now rested on a shelf near the door. In the far corner of the room loomed a large coal-oil cookstove where Nan Riddle busied herself with breakfast. Her husband sat across the table from me nursing a cup of coffee. After putting a cookie sheet full of biscuits in the oven, she sat a pan of hot steaming water in front of me, along with a washcloth, a towel, and a bar of soap.
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