by Bill Crider
He didn’t see a naked woman, but he did see a man sitting at one of the tables. It was shaded by cedar elms with some green leaves still on them. Most of the leaves were yellow, and the ground was littered with them.
The man at the table was eating a sandwich. A brown paper bag and a can of Dr Pepper sat on the table near him. He took a bite from the sandwich and laid it down on some waxed paper. He chewed for a second and then took a swig from the Dr Pepper can. Rhodes walked over to him, briefly envying him the Dr Pepper.
“Been here long?” Rhodes asked.
The man was about sixty, Rhodes thought. He had a seamed face and close-set eyes. He wore an Astros cap, a floral shirt, and faded jeans. He looked at the badge holder hanging from Rhodes’s belt.
“Been here ’bout five minutes. Just got started on my ham and cheese sandwich. That against the law in this county?”
Rhodes eyed the sandwich. It looked pretty good to him. So did the Dr Pepper. “Not in the least.”
“If it’s not, then you must be looking for the naked woman.”
“That’s right,” Rhodes said. “You seen her?”
“You bet. My name’s Gates. Jerry Gates. No relation to Bill, more’s the pity. Wouldn’t mind having some of that money of his. I’m from Waco. Going to see my cousin over in Palestine. Thought I’d stop here and eat my sandwich.” The man shook his head. “Never thought I’d see a naked woman, though, not that I have any objections. Woman wants to go naked, I say let her go. You, now, being a sheriff, you might not feel that way.”
“She could be in trouble,” Rhodes said.
“Probably is. Probably going to get arrested for public indecency.”
“I’m not talking about that kind of trouble. Usually somebody without clothes in a rest area is in some other kind of trouble.”
Gates nodded. “I see what you mean. Drugs, assault, that kind of thing.”
“Yes,” Rhodes said. “That kind of thing.”
“Maybe so,” Gates said, “but when I asked her if she needed help, she just headed for the bushes. I figured I’d better back off.”
Now they were getting somewhere, Rhodes thought. Thick bushes grew at each end of the rest area, and they were even thicker across the barbed wire fence that separated the rest area from privately owned land.
“Which bushes?” Rhodes asked.
Gates pointed. “Across that fence.”
Rhodes didn’t see how anybody without clothing could cross the fence without some difficulty. Then he saw that someone had built a wooden stile that provided a way over the fence.
“Not any restrooms in this rest area,” Gates said. “You can get a little privacy over across the fence.”
“You sure she’s over there?”
“That’s where she went. Can’t say if she’s still there, but she didn’t come back by here.”
“I’d better take a look.”
“I’m gonna eat my sandwich,” Gates said. “If you need any help, you just holler.”
“I’ll be sure to do that,” Rhodes said.
Before he crossed the fence, he went back to the car and looked in the trunk. He had some blankets, but a blanket wasn’t really what he needed. He moved the blankets aside and found what he was looking for, a long raincoat with a hood. That would do it. He took out the raincoat, shut the trunk, and headed for the stile.
Gates was finished with his sandwich. He wadded up the wax paper and put it in the paper bag. Picking up the Dr Pepper can, he said, “No place to recycle around here, I guess.”
“No,” Rhodes said. “Sorry about that.”
“Doesn’t bother me much.” Gates put the can in the bag. He slid off the bench and carried the bag to the trash can. “If you don’t think you’ll need any help, I’ll be going. My cousin’s expecting me. We’re going fishing this afternoon at some secret place he’s got staked out. Never been fished before. Supposed to be some nice fat bass in it.”
Rhodes hadn’t been fishing in far too long. The thought of an unfished lake with fat bass in it was very appealing, but he knew he’d never get a chance at it.
“You can go on,” Rhodes said. “I wouldn’t want to keep a man from a fishing spot like that.”
“Well, all right, I guess I will, then,” Gates said. “I hope you can find that woman. She was kind of pretty. Wouldn’t want her to catch a cold, running around out here in the woods without any clothes on.”
They weren’t exactly in the woods to Rhodes’s way of thinking. The bushes were thick around the rest area, but there weren’t many trees. Cars passed by on the highway every now and then, their tires droning on the pavement.
“I’ll do what I can to help her,” Rhodes said.
Gates pitched the bag into the trash and walked to his pickup. Rhodes went on to the fence and climbed the stile. He’d started down the other side when he heard a door slam. Then the pickup started. Rhodes looked back and saw it drive away. He hoped he wouldn’t need any help. Then again, Gates might have been as much of a hindrance as a help.
Standing at the bottom of the stile with the raincoat folded over one arm, Rhodes called out, “Ma’am, can you hear me? I’m Dan Rhodes, sheriff of Blacklin County. I have a raincoat here that will cover you, and I can take you home or to a hospital or anywhere you need to go.”
No answer.
“Ma’am?” Rhodes said, a little louder. “Can you hear me?”
He thought he saw the bushes move over on his right.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” he said. “Just to help.”
He waited. After about half a minute a woman’s voice said, “How do I know you’re who you say?”
“I have a badge,” Rhodes said.
He unclipped the badge from his belt and held it up. A woman’s head peeked over the top of some bushes about ten yards away. She had red hair, just as Hack had said. The bushes were so thick that Rhodes couldn’t see the rest of her. Just as well, he thought.
“Are you going to arrest me?” the woman asked.
“Can’t say for sure. I don’t know what’s going on here, so right now I just want to help you.”
“You need to arrest Neil, that’s who you need to arrest.”
Rhodes peered at the bushes. He thought he could see a hint of human flesh through the leaves.
“Who’s Neil?” he asked.
“He’s the one who took my clothes.”
Rhodes thought about the circumstances under which a woman might be naked in a rest area so that someone could take her clothes.
“It’s not what you think,” the woman said.
Rhodes had to smile. All too often women seemed to know what he was thinking.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I have a raincoat here. I’m going to walk over there and pitch it over those bushes. You put it on, and then you can come out. We’ll talk things over, and you can tell me about Neil.”
“He wouldn’t like that.”
“Do you care?”
The woman didn’t say anything for a while. Rhodes waited. A little breeze had come up. It blew the fallen leaves around the rest area and made even more of them drop off the trees.
After a minute or so the woman said, “All right. You can bring me the coat.”
Rhodes walked over to the bushes. “Here it comes,” he said, and he tossed the raincoat over the bushes.
The woman didn’t try to catch the coat, and it fell out of Rhodes’s sight. She rustled around in the bushes while she put it on.
“I’m coming out now,” she said.
“I’ll just go on back to the table,” Rhodes told her. “I’ll wait for you there.”
He climbed back over the fence and sat on one of the concrete benches. He didn’t watch as the woman came over the stile. He wasn’t sure how much coverage the raincoat would provide.
As it turned out, it provided plenty. When she neared the table, Rhodes looked up and saw that she’d zipped it all the way up and that it hung down below her calves. She hadn�
�t put the hood on. She was wearing white canvas shoes. Rhodes had wondered how she could traipse around barefooted. Now he knew she hadn’t had to.
She sat across from Rhodes at the table, and he decided that the description Hack had been given was accurate. She was no older than thirty, and she definitely had red hair. Her eyes were brown. She had freckles, which the caller hadn’t mentioned. Maybe he hadn’t gotten close enough to see them.
“I’m Dan Rhodes,” Rhodes said. “Sheriff of Blacklin County.”
“You already told me that.”
“That’s right, I did. You haven’t told me who you are, though.”
“Vicki Patton. Vicki with an i, not a y.” She paused. “I’m not from around here.”
“How about Neil?” Rhodes asked. “Is he from around here?”
“Neil Foshee,” the woman said. “That’s his name.”
“I know of some Foshees,” Rhodes said. “From out around Milsby.”
Milsby had been a town once, but there wasn’t much of it left now. There were still houses in the area, however, and people still lived in a lot of them.
“He’s one of those Foshees,” Vicki said.
That wasn’t a recommendation in Rhodes’s opinion. The Foshees who lived in the Milsby area weren’t the most upstanding citizens in Blacklin County. Rhodes didn’t know one named Neil, however.
“He’s a cousin,” the woman said when he asked about Neil. “I’m not related.”
“Congratulations,” Rhodes said. “Now about your … condition.”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I don’t blame you, but I think you’d better.”
It took a few minutes, and there were several stops and starts in the story, but Rhodes finally got it all. Or most of it. Vicki lived in Railville, where Foshee was a mechanic in a little auto repair shop. She’d known him for a while. He’d been an acquaintance of her ex-husband, who’d seemed like a really nice person but who’d turned out to be a no-good who couldn’t hold a job and who liked to run around with other women.
Some months after the divorce, Foshee had called Vicki and asked her out. She’d gone to a nightclub with him, and they’d gotten along all right, though she thought he drank too much. He told her he didn’t use drugs (not counting alcohol, Rhodes figured), and he was a good dancer. What he didn’t tell her was that while he didn’t use drugs, a claim Vicki no longer believed, he occasionally sold them.
“He said that he didn’t make much money fixing cars,” Vicki explained, “so he needed a little extra. He said he just dealt now and then, and he promised me he wouldn’t get me mixed up in anything.”
Promises, promises, Rhodes thought.
“But he did,” Vicki said. “Get me mixed up in something, I mean.”
The way it happened was simple enough. Foshee came by her house and asked if she’d like to go for a ride in his convertible. It was a nice day, and Vicki thought it would be fun. It was, too, until Foshee told her what the real purpose of the ride was.
“Drug run,” Rhodes said.
“Yeah,” Vicki said. “Ice.” Then she added, “Crystal meth.”
Rhodes nodded. He knew all too well what ice was, and he even knew about the Foshee connection, or the rumors of it. The country around the old Milsby community had plenty of room in it for houses back in the woods, well off even the sandiest and most overgrown county roads, houses where nobody had lived for a generation or two but that could be put back into good enough shape to sleep in and to cook meth in. It didn’t take much of a place to cook meth, but the Foshees were supposed to have quality goods. Rhodes hadn’t been able to catch them with anything, however. Maybe that was about to change.
“He sells it at the clubs,” Vicki said. “He was even selling it when I went dancing with him. I didn’t know it, or I’d never have dated him. He gets it from his cousins here and sells it around Railville.”
Rhodes wondered if the sheriff of the neighboring county knew about Foshee. Probably not. There were a dozen people like him in every little town in East Texas.
“I told him I wasn’t going to have anything to do with drugs,” Vicki continued. “We had a big fight about it, and he stopped here and told me to get out of the car. I didn’t want to get out. I don’t know anybody around here, and I didn’t have any way to get home. I told him if he put me out, I’d call the cops.” She looked at Rhodes. “I mean the police.”
“It’s okay to say cops,” Rhodes told her.
“I thought it wasn’t polite,” Vicki said. “Anyway, he stopped here and made me get out of the car. He wouldn’t let me take my purse. My cell phone’s in it, so I couldn’t call anybody.”
“What about your clothes?” Rhodes asked.
“Oh, he made me take them off. He said any man who stopped wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say, not if I was naked. He said they’d all be afraid of being accused of rape. He said maybe somebody would rape me and it would serve me right.” She tried to smile but didn’t quite succeed. “I sure can pick ’em.”
“You’ll do better next time,” Rhodes said, though he had his doubts. “At least he let you keep your shoes.”
“I think he just forgot and drove away before I could take them off.”
That was probably it. Judging by what he’d heard so far, Rhodes didn’t think Neil was the thoughtful type.
“Come on with me,” Rhodes said. “I’ll get you fixed up with some clothes and a ride back to Railville.”
Rhodes stood up, and after a couple of seconds so did Vicki.
“One other thing,” Rhodes said. “Do you know where Neil was going? I don’t mean just to see the Foshees. I mean specifically.”
“Kind of,” Vicki said. “He was trying to find it on his GPS, but he said the road he was looking for wasn’t even on there. It’s more of a lane than a road.”
Rhodes was disappointed. That wasn’t much help, and it wasn’t even kind of specific. There were probably quite a few old dirt roads that weren’t on anyone’s GPS device.
“He said he’d have to go by an old school,” Vicki said, “and then past what used to be a store. Is that any help?”
“As a matter of fact,” Rhodes said, “it is. What kind of car is he driving?”
“It’s a Chrysler 300. It’s black. Are you going after him?”
“Sure I am,” Rhodes said. “I’m the sheriff.”
Chapter 14
Rhodes had never taken a naked woman to his house before. He wondered how Ivy would react.
Not that Vicki was really naked. She had on a raincoat, after all, and was modestly covered. A damsel in distress, you might say. Surely Ivy couldn’t complain about it.
Rhodes parked the county car in the driveway and told Vicki to wait. He’d explained things to her on the drive to the house, and now he was going to have to explain to Ivy, who he hoped would be at home. Maybe she would, since the insurance office where she worked was closed on the weekends.
“Are you sure this will be okay?” Vicki asked.
“I’m sure,” Rhodes said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “You’ll like Ivy. She’ll get you fixed up.”
Rhodes went to the front door so as not to arouse Speedo, who would want attention that Rhodes didn’t have time to give him. As soon as Rhodes opened the front door, Yancey came charging up, his toenails clicking on the hardwood floor, his yips bouncing off the walls. Ivy would know that Rhodes was home or that an intruder had come in through the unlocked door. Yancey would have greeted either one the same way.
Rhodes glanced into the den, where Ivy sat in a chair, reading a book.
“You’re home early,” she said, closing the book. “Let me guess. You aren’t going to be here long.”
“Right the first time,” Rhodes said. “You’re good.”
“Just experienced.” Ivy stood up, walked over, and kissed him on the cheek. Yancey danced around their feet, as excited as a lottery winner. “You must have a good reason to be here,
though. Tell me.”
“I have a naked woman in the car,” Rhodes said.
“I really should start locking that front door,” Ivy said.
“I could have gone around to the back.”
“I’ve always enjoyed your sense of humor,” Ivy said.
“It’s not exactly a joke, but I’ll admit that she’s not really naked.”
“I didn’t think she was.”
“She’s wearing a raincoat.”
“A raincoat.”
“Right.”
“That’s all?”
“Right.”
“You’re not joking?”
“No. Maybe I’d better tell you the whole thing.”
“Yes,” Ivy said. “That might be a good idea.”
Rhodes did his best. Yancey got bored with the story and left the room. He might go to the kitchen and look at the cats, but looking was all he’d do. He wouldn’t dare bother them. More likely he’d get into his doggie bed in the bedroom and take a nap.
When Rhodes had finished telling Ivy Vicki’s story, he said, “I thought she could stay here, and you could go out and buy her some clothes. She says she’ll pay us back, but she doesn’t have her purse.”
“Or anything else,” Ivy said.
“True. We should help her. When you get the clothes and get her dressed, call Hack and have him send Ruth to take her back to Railville.”
“Just leave her here in the house and go looking for clothes?”
Rhodes had to admit that it might not be a good idea to do that. He thought Vicki had been telling him the truth, mostly, but leaving her in the house could be a mistake.
“Take her with you, but leave her in the car. Nobody will notice anything.”
Ivy gave in, but Rhodes could tell she wasn’t happy about it.
“What could possibly go wrong?” he asked.
Ivy laughed. “More than you could imagine, but maybe it will work out. Bring in your friend and we’ll see.”
