The Wild Hog Murders

by Bill Crider

  “I wouldn’t mind having an opponent,” Rhodes said. “It would make things interesting.”

  “I wonder who Milton Munday would endorse,” Burns said.

  “Maybe he’ll run,” Rhodes said, “since he knows so much about the law.”

  Burns looked thoughtful. “That might not be a bad idea,” he said.

  * * *

  Jennifer Loam was waiting for Rhodes when he came out of the building.

  “How’d you know I was here?” Rhodes asked.

  “We reporters have ways,” Jennifer told him. “You’re lucky I’m the only one here. I think there are a couple of people from some TV station in Dallas at the jail.”

  “Thanks for the warning. I won’t go back there for a while.”

  “You won’t need to. Hack and Lawton are getting the camera time.”

  “And loving it,” Rhodes said.

  “Sure. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Me,” Rhodes said.

  “Yes, but you’re crazy.”

  “People keep telling me that.”

  “Speaking of telling things, what about this latest murder?”

  Rhodes went over things for her, though she’d already gotten all he knew from his report.

  Jennifer got it all down in her notebook and on her recorder. “Do you want me to say that the killer will be brought to swift justice?”

  “You can say that,” Rhodes told her, “but it might not happen.”

  “I have faith in you,” Jennifer said.

  Rhodes looked back at the building he’d just left. “You might be the only one,” he said.

  * * *

  Rhodes spotted Arvid Fowler’s pickup parked in front of a house on the outskirts of town. Fowler was in the garage, replacing a couple of faulty breakers in the electrical panel in the garage.

  “Dangerous job,” Rhodes said, walking into the garage.

  “Wouldn’t be too bad if this place wasn’t so crowded,” Fowler said.

  Today he wore a tool belt around his waist instead of a pistol, and Rhodes preferred it that way. He took off his Tractor Supply Company cap and wiped his forehead with the back of his arm while Rhodes looked around the garage. It was full of boxes, stacks of plastic flowerpots, an old chest of drawers that needed refinishing, two rusty bicycles, and a few other odds and ends. There was no room for the two cars that were parked out on the driveway.

  “Not a fire hazard,” Fowler said. “Just a mess. So you can’t be here to arrest the owner.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about last night,” Rhodes said.

  “Yeah, well, you shouldn’t have run off like that. We’d have seen to it that you got back to your car all right. The second hog got clean away from us, and when we went back to get the first one, you were gone.”

  “You must not listen to Milton Munday,” Rhodes said.

  “Who?”

  “Milton Munday. He’s the talk show guy on KCLR.”

  “I don’t listen to that station. They never play any music. Nobody else does, either, these days, just stuff they call music. Country music’s not country, mostly, and rap’s not music at all. I don’t like to listen to somebody like Munday run his mouth. What makes him think he knows so much, anyway?”

  Rhodes couldn’t answer that one.

  “He’s a smart aleck, if you ask me,” Fowler said. “So since I don’t like any of the music, and since I don’t like Munday, I don’t listen to anything.”

  Rhodes thought that was a sensible attitude, but he wanted to turn the conversation back to the hog hunters.

  “You all stayed together last night after you left me?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” Fowler said. “We were all chasing the dogs.”

  “When did you come back for the hog you killed?”

  “It wasn’t long after we left it. We hauled it off, and Garver took it to Starkey’s today to get it dressed out.”

  Starkey was a retired butcher who dressed hogs and deer and didn’t charge too much.

  “We’d have done it ourselves,” Fowler said, “but we have jobs.”

  Rhodes wouldn’t have done it himself even if he’d killed the hog. That kind of work was entirely too messy. Which reminded Rhodes of the Chandlers’ pet hog, Baby. He mentioned the incident to Fowler.

  “I heard about it when it happened,” Fowler said. “I don’t know who’d do a thing like that, except maybe Starkey, and he wouldn’t have any reason to.”

  “The Chandlers think maybe hog hunters had something to do with it.”

  “Not anybody I know,” Fowler said. “Not my bunch, for sure, and that’s the truth.”

  “The thing of it is,” Rhodes said, “we’ve had two murders out in those woods on the nights when you and your friends have been hunting there. When I went to see the Eccles cousins about it, they ran off so they wouldn’t have to talk to me, and you and the others say that nothing unusual happened. That’s a little hard to believe.”

  “I can see that it might be,” Fowler said, not meeting Rhodes’s eyes, “but that’s the way it is.”

  Rhodes didn’t let it drop. “Besides the murders, there was a lot of shooting out there the night before last, and it didn’t have anything to do with hogs except that it stampeded them. It just doesn’t seem likely that with all that going on, you didn’t notice a thing.”

  Fowler looked at the panel and then at the brand-new breaker he held in one hand.

  “Likely or not, that’s the way it is. I’d like to help you out if I could, Sheriff, but I got a job to do here, and I’m getting paid by the hour. The Fremonts wouldn’t like it if I spent all my time talking, even if it’s to the Law.”

  Rhodes thanked him and left, more suspicious than ever. He still wanted the autopsy report, and after he got that, he’d go by and see if the Eccles boys had come back home. This time, he wouldn’t take Seepy Benton along. He didn’t know if he could survive without Benton’s detecting skills, but he was willing to give it a try.

  * * *

  The autopsy report didn’t tell Rhodes much that he didn’t know other than giving descriptions of tattoos from various parts of Rapinski’s anatomy.

  “Los Muertos,” Rhodes said.

  “The dead men,” Clyde Ballinger said, looking at Rhodes over the top of the book he was reading. The Corpse Wore Pasties. “I don’t know much Spanish, but I know enough to translate that.”

  “It’s also the name of a motorcycle gang,” Rhodes said, “or it used to be. The gang broke up four or five years ago, and only a few of the members are left.”

  Ballinger put down the book. “I didn’t know you were an expert on motorcycle gangs.”

  “I’m an expert on that one,” Rhodes said. “I thought Rapinski looked familiar.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Somebody who looks like him,” Rhodes said.

  Ballinger picked up his book, said, “Oh,” and started reading again.

  “Why don’t I ever get cases like that?” Rhodes asked.

  “Like what?” Ballinger asked.

  “Never mind,” Rhodes said.

  He finished going over the autopsy report. The important thing was that Rapinski had been killed with one shot from a .38. Now Rhodes would have to get Ruth to check the bullet to see if it was a match for the ones taken from Baty. Blacklin County might not have much of a crime lab, but it had the facilities for that kind of work, and Ruth was trained for it.

  Ballinger put down his book again. “You think what’s left of the motorcycle gang will come to town looking for revenge?”

  “Just two of them,” Rhodes said.

  Chapter 12

  Rhodes didn’t have the facilities of CSI at his disposal. He didn’t have an investigative team, either, though he could have called in the state police if he’d thought he needed them. He didn’t want to do that. His experience had been that calling anybody in on a case was apt to create more problems than it solved. The people who were called often got the idea that the case h
ad been handed over to them and that the investigation was now theirs to run as they saw fit. Rhodes liked to have a hand in things, and being shut out made him uncomfortable and unhappy. He didn’t think of himself as a control freak, but maybe he was.

  Rhodes was sure that Mikey Burns would do things differently. He’d call in the state police in a New York minute if it had been up to him. Luckily, it wasn’t up to him, so Rhodes would go his own way, asking questions, mulling over the answers and seeing what he could see. Sooner or later, he’d find what he was looking for. He always had. Most of the time, anyway.

  This time, however, things were likely to be complicated by the attention focused on the crimes by the TV station that had sent its reporters and by Milton Munday.

  Rhodes could count on Jennifer Loam to report things fairly, but Munday wasn’t a reporter. He was a man out to make a name for himself in a small radio market before jumping to a bigger station. Or maybe returning to a bigger station. Rhodes hadn’t thought about it before, but it seemed odd for someone like Munday simply to show up in a small town like Clearview and land a radio talk show job. Rhodes wondered where Munday had come from and what his plans were. It might be a good idea to ask him, and Rhodes decided he’d do that later. One more thing to add to his list.

  * * *

  Rhodes drove up the little hill to the double-wide shared by the Eccles cousins. Their big Mack tractor was parked in the yard, and so was one of their pickups, the red one, but the cousins weren’t in the trailer. Or if they were, they weren’t answering the door.

  They might have gone off somewhere in the missing pickup, or they might be somewhere else on the property. It was a nice enough day, not much breeze, not many clouds, a little warm for that time of year. If Rhodes had owned some property and if there’d been a place to fish on it, he might have decided to see if he could catch something for the frying pan. The Eccles boys had a place to fish, a little stock tank that wasn’t too far away. He could drive there if he didn’t mind bouncing around a little in the car.

  Rhodes had once had a little confrontation with Lance and Hugh, not to mention Bruce, at the tank, so he knew the way. The confrontation had been about an alligator that the cousins claimed they didn’t own. Everything had turned out all right, but Rhodes would just as soon not go through anything like it again.

  The bouncing wasn’t so bad, and Rhodes found the tank without any trouble. A low dam ran around about half the tank, and weeds grew all over it. Many of them were still green. Weeds had a way of surviving even through the winter. The black pickup was parked near the dam, but there was no sign of either Hugh or Lance.

  Rhodes parked the county car next to the pickup and got out and closed the car door quietly. He could hear someone talking on the other side of the dam, so he walked up to the top of it. Down below and a little to his right, Lance and Hugh sat on the ground. Each of them held a long cane fishing pole in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. Beside Hugh was a cheap white foam cooler with the top off. A couple of empty beer bottles lay near the cooler.

  The surface of the water was free of most of the dark green algae that had covered it the last time Rhodes had seen it, though some of the green goo still floated around the edges. There was none in the water in front of Hugh and Lance, who had pulled it up onto the bank so they could drop their lines in the cleared spot. Their red fishing corks bobbed about ten feet from the shore.

  “I wish we’d gone hunting with the fellas last night,” Hugh said. “They got a pretty good hog, I heard.”

  “Not worth it,” Lance said. “Not with another dead man out there.”

  “Let’s talk about that dead man,” Rhodes said.

  “Damn,” Hugh said, looking around. “You sure are sneaky, Sheriff. Don’t you ever give up?”

  “Not often,” Rhodes said.

  He walked down the side of the dam and stood near the cousins.

  “Want a beer, Sheriff?” Lance asked, gesturing toward the cooler with his bottle. “Take two. They’re small.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Well, sit yourself down then, and be quiet. We don’t want to scare the fish.”

  “What fish?”

  “The fish we’re gonna catch,” Hugh said. “Sooner or later.”

  “Let’s talk about the dead men while we’re waiting,” Rhodes said.

  “We don’t know nothin’ about that,” Lance said.

  “You were just talking about them.”

  “Yeah, well, we heard somethin’ or other on that Milton Munday about them. It’s nothin’ to do with us.”

  “Now why don’t I believe that?” Rhodes asked.

  “’Cause you’re a hard man to convince,” Lance said. “Ain’t that the truth, Hugh.”

  Hugh nodded. “You got that right, Lance.”

  Hugh took a swallow of his beer, draining the bottle. He put the bottle on the ground and got another one out of the cooler. After he twisted off the cap, he took a drink.

  “Boy, that’s good for what ails you. You sure you don’t want one, Sheriff?”

  “I’m sure, and I’m tired of fooling with you two. You know something about what happened in those woods the other night, and I want to know what it is.”

  “You callin’ us liars?” Hugh asked.

  “I guess I am,” Rhodes said.

  “That hurts my feelings,” Lance said.

  “Mine, too,” Hugh said.

  The cousins stood up and laid their poles down on the bank, leaving the corks in the water. Hugh drank some beer. Lance just looked at Rhodes.

  “Two against one,” Lance said, “and we got beer bottles. Not good odds, Sheriff.”

  “Unless he’s got a gun,” Hugh said. “You got a gun, Sheriff?”

  “I have a gun,” Rhodes said, and he did.

  The problem with that was that the little Kel-Tec .32 automatic was in an ankle holster, and there was no way Rhodes could get to it before the Eccles boys got to him. Not that it mattered. Rhodes didn’t intend to shoot them anyway.

  “I don’t see no gun,” Hugh said.

  “I don’t think he’s got one,” Lance said. “Let’s get him, Hugh.”

  “You’d better think about the last time you tried me,” Rhodes said. “If I remember rightly, the two of you wound up in jail.”

  “Yeah,” Lance said, “but that was then, and this is now. We got you at a disadvantage.”

  “You’ve had too many beers,” Rhodes said. “It’s impaired your judgment.”

  “Hah,” Lance said. “We ain’t impaired.”

  He took a step toward Rhodes. So did Hugh. Both men switched their grips on their beers so that they held the bottles by their narrow necks.

  Rhodes stood his ground, looking from one cousin to the other. He didn’t look at their hands or their feet. Hands and feet could fool you, and Rhodes knew their eyes were the key to whatever they’d do.

  “You might not get off as easy this time,” Rhodes said. “Randy Lawless won’t want to help you.”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Hugh said. “He’ll help whoever pays him.”

  He took another step. So did Lance, who flicked a look at his cousin.

  That was the cue for Rhodes to move. He didn’t back up. He stepped forward and kicked Hugh in the chest.

  Hugh yelled, dropped his beer bottle, and staggered backward. Rhodes’s momentum almost carried him past Lance, but he was able to grab hold of Lance’s shirt and steady himself.

  Lance was no longer interested in Rhodes. He turned his head to look at Hugh, who stumbled off the bank and splashed on his back in the water.

  Rhodes kept his hold on Lance’s shirt, planted his feet, and slung Lance after his cousin.

  Lance’s arms windmilled, and he lurched into the tank, landing practically on top of Hugh.

  Rhodes walked down to the edge of the water.

  “You’re scaring the fish,” he said.

  Lance rolled off Hugh and stood up. His cap had come off, and water stre
amed from his red hair. Hugh lay where he was, coughing and spluttering, his head occasionally sinking under the water. His cap had stayed on.

  “Hugh can’t swim,” Lance said.

  “The water can’t be more than a foot deep there,” Rhodes said.

  “He don’t know that,” Lance said. “He’s panicking. You better help him.”

  “You do it,” Rhodes said.

  “I ain’t the one put him there,” Lance said.

  He stepped out onto the bank, grabbing hold of a small bush to help his balance.

  Hugh continued to splutter and sink and rise and splutter.

  Lance watched, his wet clothing sticking to him.

  “Gonna drown if you don’t get him out,” he said.

  Rhodes was beginning to think Lance was right, and it was clear that he had no intention of helping his cousin. Rhodes leaned down.

  “Take my hand,” he said to Hugh. “I’ll help you up.”

  Almost as soon as he said it, Rhodes knew he’d made a rookie mistake. He knew it even before he felt Lance’s shoe make contact with his rear end, and he thought about it as the kick launched him out over the water.

  Or, more accurately, over Hugh, who hadn’t been in any danger of drowning at all and who was waiting for Rhodes with open arms.

  Rhodes barely had time to think about what he was going to do, but he knew he couldn’t let Hugh wrap him up in a bear hug. Hugh might not drown him, but whatever happened wouldn’t be pleasant. So Rhodes doubled his arm and speared Hugh’s chest as he struck him.

  The combination of the elbow punch and Rhodes’s weight was enough to drive Hugh under the surface again, and this time he wasn’t faking when he sucked in water and rolled like a big catfish.

  Rhodes didn’t want to think about big catfish. He’d had a close encounter with one of those, too, and it had been a scary experience. He pushed himself away from Hugh, but he’d made another rookie blunder. He’d forgotten about Lance, who landed on his back like a bag of sand and pushed him under the water and down into the slick mud beneath.

  Lance straddled Rhodes and held him under, and he made his own mistake. He’d tried to get hold of Rhodes’s arms, but he’d missed them. He should have pushed Rhodes’s head in the mud. That would have ended things quickly.