by Bill Crider
Then I saw the spotlight skittering across the surface of the water. It skittered right into me.
"He's mine," Tolliver said.
There was the crack of a rifle, probably Fred's. Or maybe it was the one Holt had shot at me with. Or neither of them. It didn't matter. I sank under the water, and Jackson went under at my side.
It seemed to me as if I were reliving another incident from my life, one in which I'd found myself involved in a similar situation. That time, though, I'd had a pistol in my hand, and I hadn't been trussed up like a hogtied calf.
I came up again, saw the light, and ducked. Maybe it was only my imagination, but I thought I heard a bullet smack into the water right over my head.
I hadn't seen Jackson that time, and I still hadn't seen Fred. I wondered if he was still alive.
I came up again, shaking my head to clear the water from my eyes. The light was well off to my left, moving slowly. Either Jackson had just appeared or they were waiting for him.
I stayed low and hopped forward as quietly as I could, hoping to get a little closer to the shore. Nothing but my head was out of the water, which buoyed me up.
I looked over at the light and saw red eyes reflecting its beam. Jackson popped up right in front of it, and the men on the shore found him at once. He sank again, and the red eyes disappeared as well.
Those gators would get a bony meal if they went after Jackson, I thought. And where in the hell was Fred. Still at the bottom of the lake?
The light moved in my direction, and I slid under the water. This time when I came up, they might be waiting for me.
I stayed under for as long as I could, and then eased my head out.
Someone nearly shot it off.
"I got 'im!" Merle yelled. Or something like that. It's hard to hear well when your ears are full of water and the pounding of your heart is sending out soundwaves that could no doubt be detected on the other side of the lake.
I heard two more shots, but nothing hit the water over me. They were shooting at Jackson, or maybe Fred.
When my chest started hurting, I got ready to go up one more time. To hell with all this. I was going to hop as fast and as far as I could. If I got shot or if a gator grabbed me, fine. I was tired of being a target.
I was especially tired of being a part of Tolliver's private little shooting gallery.
I came up fast, not minding the noise or the splashing. The water was just about up to the tops of my thighs, and I hopped furiously forward.
Rifles and pistols started popping as I lunged along. I wasn't hit, but I fell face forward into the water.
That didn't stop me. I kept on kicking myself along as best I could with my bound legs.
There were more shots then, more than I would have expected unless Tolliver had more fire power than I thought.
I heard the distinctive sound of bullets hitting sheet metal, and the crashing of glass.
Had someone else joined the party?
Maybe so, and I started kicking, hopping, lunging--all at the same time. Anything to get out of the water and to hell with the gators that might be closing in on me.
I couldn't get all the way out. When the water got too shallow, I could hardly make any progress at all, and finally I was slithering along like a crippled snake, trying to push myself through tangled weeds and slippery moss and sticky mud. I couldn't get out of the lake, but I made it so far that I could turn over on my back and lie there breathing with my nose out of the water.
I lay there and drank in the air and listened.
There was quite a bit of shooting, but no one yelled. It's hard to shoot accurately at the best of times, but in the dark, when you're excited, it's almost impossible except for the best of marksmen with the steeliest of nerves. So it was quite likely that no one had been hit.
I heard the truck start, a sound that was followed by a lot of hoarse cursing. Maybe Lonnie had been standing too far away to get in, and Tolliver was leaving him to fight it out on his own.
The motor revved, and I heard the spinning of the oversized tires as they fought for purchase in the soft ground. I could imagine the gobs of mud flying from under the tires.
The tires caught. I heard the truck buck forward.
There was a scream and a solid thump, followed by another scream that was choked off abruptly.
Whoever was driving the truck--I strongly suspected Tolliver--had forcefully moved someone out of the way.
There was more shooting, and gradually the sound of the truck faded away. I lay there looking at the black sky, still heavily overcast, trying to get my breathing back to normal.
All the shooting stopped, and I could hear someone walking around in the grass. The normal night sounds--bugs, frogs, the water lapping around me--faded back in.
I decided that anybody who wanted to shoot Tolliver was almost certainly a friend of mine, so I called out. "Has anybody out there got a knife?"
"Papa's got one," Brenda Stone said. "Where are you?"
"Over here," I said.
I heard them walking in my direction.
19
As soon as they cut my hands and feet loose they started to look for Fred and Deputy Jackson. I would have helped, but I couldn't walk. I couldn't even stand up. I tried, but I felt as if my ankles and feet were missing.
I kicked my heels against the ground and slapped my hands together, trying to get the circulation started again. When I was successful, I wished I hadn't been. It felt almost exactly as I imagined it might feel if someone were trying to cut my hands and feet off with a fairly sharp knife. Then my fingers and toes began to burn and tingle, and it was as if they'd been stuck into a fire. I didn't scream, but I wanted to. Instead, I lay on the ground and moaned until the pain went away and I could stand up again.
They found Jackson sloshing around half drowned and pulled him out of the water to cut the ropes. I didn't ever hear him yell, or even moan, but I liked to think that was because he hadn't been tied as tightly as I had.
Fred came out of it better off than any of us.
"Hell," he said later, "it was easy. Soon's I sunk down, I started to swim toward the shore. I got out before the shootin' even started, almost, but there wasn't a thing I could do to help you two, so I just stayed quiet. I figured it wouldn't do any good for me to yell out or anything. No use in all of us gettin' shot."
I asked him how he managed to swim, as trussed up as he was.
"Like a damn fish, that's how. They don't have any arms and legs, do they? I'm a little disappointed that you and Deppidy Jackson didn't figure that out for yourselves."
I just hoped that when I got as old as Fred--if I got to be that old--I'd be able to do half the things he could do. I don't know why I even bothered hoping, though, since I couldn't do half of them even at the age I was now.
The Stones, Brenda and her father-in-law had come to our rescue unintentionally, armed with her .22 and his deer rifle. Brenda had heard the truck again and wondered what it had to do with our trip to the woods the previous night.
She was still certain that the dumping area had something to do with Holt's death, and of course she was right. I gathered that she didn't mention that fact to her father-in-law, however. She simply called him and told him that she'd heard the rustlers, that they were messing around in the woods below her house, that they might have killed Holt, and that if they were captured maybe Perry would go free. That was all the old man needed to hear. He grabbed up his deer rifle and drove to her house without a second thought.
"We got there just as they were throwing you-all in the back of that truck," Brenda said. "We didn't know who you were, but it sure didn't look right, them throwing you in the back all tied up like you were. We followed along to see what was going on, but we had to walk. I was afraid they might get so far ahead that we'd never find out what they were up to."
"Not me," Mr. Stone said. "I'd walk a hundred miles if it meant I could find out somethin' to get my boy out of that damn jail. You mea
n to tell me that the Sheriff was in on that killin' all the time?"
We explained things as best we could. By then we were all crammed into the Jeep and on the way back to town. There hadn't been room for Ransome's body. We'd taken it out of the Jeep and left it behind to fend off the gators for itself.
"We saw all those barrels," Brenda said. "I wondered what they were."
I suspected they would still be there. I was pretty sure that Merle and Tolliver would have split up, with Merle taking the bobtail, but they wouldn't have taken the time to bury the barrels. That didn't matter any longer.
Lonnie hadn't gone with his pals. We'd left him right where Tolliver had left him, keeping Ransome company. Tolliver had finally managed to run somebody down with the truck. He'd smacked into Lonnie and run over his back with one of the tires, which had effectively ended Lonnie's career as a barrel handler, or as anything else.
We let Jackson out at the jail, where he was going to send out an APB on Tolliver and Merle. Brenda and Mr. Stone went in to tell Perry that he would almost certainly be getting out the next day, or as soon as Jackson could talk to a judge.
Fred and I took them home afterward, and then we took Jackson to pick up the County car he had used to drive to the dump site.
It had been an eventful evening.
~ * ~
Jackson came by Fred's house the next day. I was finally feeling dry again, and I'd almost decided that I'd take baths only once a week or so from now on. I hoped never to get into any body of water larger than a bathtub.
Jackson told us that Merle had been picked up by a Sheriff's Deputy on a Farm-to-Market road near Columbus and was telling everything he knew, which was enough to implicate Tolliver. We might never get Tolliver for the murders, but Jackson thought there was a chance of that if he played things right. It meant test-firing all Tolliver's personal weapons, including those recovered in a search of his house, but it was at least a possibility.
"We found a gator hide, too," Jackson said. "I went back and looked over Holt's property early this morning, and way down in the woods near the river he had a shack where he was curin' hides. There were two or three small ones, and one big one. That big one was yours, I guess, Fred."
"I don't want it," Fred said.
"Couldn't let you have it even if you did," Jackson said. "It's evidence."
I asked him if he thought Tolliver would be caught anytime soon.
"Sure he will. He won't be able to get very far in that truck. Too easy to recognize. Especially since old man Stone shot out one of the headlights and drilled the windshield a couple of times."
My own opinion was that by now some rice farmer was missing a pickup and had been given the County truck in its place. I thought that Tolliver was no doubt fording the Rio Grande by this time, but I didn't say so. It was up to Jackson and his law enforcement friends to find Tolliver now, not me. I'd solved the crime I'd come to investigate. I'd found out who killed the alligator.
"I hope that you get that rifle bullet from him one day and try matching it against Holt's rifles," I said. "Just to be sure."
"That's a mighty good idea," Fred said. "I'll remind you of it."
Jackson nodded, but he didn't make any promises.
After he left, Fred settled up with me, Mary fed me a substantial lunch, and I pointed the Subaru in the direction of Galveston.
~ * ~
The jacked-up truck came careening out of a side road and smashed into me less than a mile from Fred's house.
Tolliver hadn't left the County after all. He'd been waiting to get even.
I didn't see him coming. The road was at right angles to the one I was on, the truck hidden by the scrubby bushes growing along the fence row. I was listening to an oldies station and trying to reach the high notes along with Roy Orbison on Only the Lonely.
I got a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, and then the truck clobbered me.
I was wearing my seat belt, which is the law in Texas, even if it did make me uncomfortable. So I stayed with the car as it rolled over and over.
I didn't try to count the rolls. My brain was spinning faster than the car. I was pretty sure that Tolliver had me this time.
He had hit me on the passenger side, which was the only good thing that happened.
He mashed my little Subaru like it was a bug.
The passenger door came over to meet me, and the seat folded up like a wet paper towel. The door on my side flew open, and if I hadn't been wearing the seat belt, I would have been about halfway to the Mexican border.
The Subaru either rolled through the ditch by the side of the road or it flew completely over it. I'll never know for sure, since there was no one there to videotape the incident for posterity.
The car went through a barbed-wire fence, and I think I remember hearing the strands of wire popping under the tension like a set of overwound guitar strings, but that may be simply a false memory. I was bouncing around so much that it shouldn't have been possible for me to hear anything like that.
Tollive couldn't drive through the ditch to get me. He couldn't drive the truck across it. It was too deep and the sides were too steep, so he had to get out and come after me with his hands. Maybe he didn't have any more ammunition for the rifle.
By the time he'd gotten out of the truck, crossed the ditch, and come into the field where the car had finally stopped rolling, I had managed to unfasten the seat belt and get out of the car, which by some miracle had landed upright.
I was so disoriented that I was staggering around like a man who's just come off a four-day drunk. I was trying to walk, but I couldn't get my legs to work right. I wound up lurching around, trying to keep some distance between me and the car, which I was afraid would blow up at any moment.
It never did, possibly because there was hardly any gas in the tank. I'd been planning to drive by Hurley Eckles' store and fill it up on my way back to Galveston, at the same time filling Hurley up with the details of the gator story. It would have kept him and Temp amused for years.
As far as the Subaru was concerned, it might as well have blown up. It was a total loss either way.
There was no way I could defend myself from Tolliver. It was as if my brain had come loose from my skull. I was completely disoriented.
Tolliver, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted to do to me, which was to beat me to a pulp, and he proceeded to do it, yelling at the top of his lungs all the while.
I have no idea what he was yelling. He might have been incoherent, or it might have been that the words simply weren't registering on my brain as comprehensible sounds. The effect was the same.
He was hitting me right and left, and the blows weren't registering, any more than the words were.
I just didn't feel them.
That's not exactly right. I did feel them, but there was no pain. The message that I'd been hurt wasn't getting through. My brain had shut down the pain centers. I could feel Tolliver's fists thudding into my body, but that was all. There was contact, but no effect.
He started with a general pummeling, but when he saw that I wasn't hitting back, that I was more or less standing there staggering around like a human punching bag, he began to get more careful, aiming his punches, working first on my stomach, then my sternum, then my face.
It was a good solid right that finally woke me up. It jolted my head, split my lips, and sent shock waves all over my body. My brain was suddenly working again, and I immediately wished that it wasn't.
For the first time I realized that if I didn't put up some kind of defense, Tolliver was going to kill me with his bare hands. In my brain-damaged shuffle, I hadn't even put up my own hands to protect myself.
Now I tried a few feeble blows that had little or no effect, but that did serve to turn aside Tolliver's fists. Waves of pain began to wash over me from his other blows and from the wreck.
The pain cleared my head. I saw Tolliver standing there, his hair awry, the white streak standing almos
t straight up, his eyes wild, his arms flailing as he came at me.
"SonuvabitchbastrdI'llkillyoukillyou!" he screamed.
He obviously wasn't in a mood to be reasoned with or I might have asked him why he blamed me for his troubles. There were a lot of people who were more to blame than I was, not the least of whom was himself, but I had a feeling that he wouldn't see the point.
I tried to sidestep his charge, stumbled, and my bad knee gave way. It must have been hit in the crash.
Unable to slow his charge, Tolliver fell too, tripping over my feet.
We grappled on the muddy ground, and he worked himself on top of me, grasping my throat and squeezing, at the same time pounding my head into the ground and continuing his screaming.
"Sonuvabitcbastardkillyou!"
Nothing came out of my own mouth but a weak gasping noise as what breath I had left was being gradually choked off forever.
I went suddenly limp, and then arched my back with all my strength, planting my heels and thrusting upward as hard as I could.
Tolliver pitched over my head, releasing his grip. I had been afraid he might hang on and rip my head off.
I made a quick roll, turning in time to see him flip himself over to face me again.
We were like two animals, crouched in the mud and grass, ready to tear one another's throats out.
He scuttled forward like some deformed land crab, moving more quickly than I would have thought he could. If he got me this time, I was done for. My throat still felt as if his hands were wrapped around it, and my breath was short. My body ached all over. I could move only about a third as fast as he could. Maybe not even that fast.
He came straight at me, spreading his arms the better to gather me in and crush me.
I took a breath, lowered my head, and sprang at him, butting him in the face as hard as I could.
I heard the crunching of bones, felt his nose go soft, and felt his teeth cave in.
I fell back, stunned. If he could get up now, he could have me. I didn't have anything left to face him with. I lay there on my back, my eyes open, staring at the sky, expecting to see him loom over me and raise his foot to smash my face the way I'd smashed his.
