by Bill Crider
Hack looked at him. “I never said it was bad news.”
“Me neither,” Lawton said.
“It’s never good news with you two,” Rhodes said.
“That ain’t so,” Hack told him. “Anyway, this ain’t bad news.”
“Depends on how you look at it,” Lawton said. “Some might take it one way, some might take it another way.”
Rhodes sighed. “Why don’t you just tell me?”
“I was gettin’ to it,” Hack said. “You’re too grouchy, you know that? I think it’s ’cause you got the low T.”
“Don’t start that again,” Rhodes said. “My testosterone’s just fine.”
“Sure is,” Lawton said. “I’ll vouch for that. Nobody with the low T’s gonna face down a crazy gunman with nothin’ but a loaf of bread.”
“I’m glad somebody’s on my side,” Rhodes said. He hardened his tone. “Now tell me what’s going on.”
“Just the usual,” Hack said. “Local hero sheriff is gonna be the star of the Internet again.”
“Jennifer Loam,” Rhodes said.
Loam, who’d been a reporter for the local newspaper, had been a victim of downsizing. Since reporters weren’t exactly in high demand, she’d started her own news Web site, A Clear View of Clearview, and she had enough advertising to keep it going almost immediately. The way she managed that, in Rhodes’s opinion, was by sensationalizing local news, especially news that involved law enforcement. Any of Rhodes’s accomplishments, no matter how small, were inflated so as to become something on the order of Batman’s exploits in Gotham City.
Hack and Lawton laughed, and Hack said, “I guess we don’t have to tell you, then. You bein’ an ace lawman and all, you figgered it out yourself.”
“What was she doing here?” Rhodes said.
“Came in to ask about the fella we arrested for exercisin’,” Hack said.
Rhodes shook his head. Here we go again.
“That’s not against the law,” he said. “What was he doing?”
“Jumpin’ jacks.”
Rhodes didn’t say anything.
“In his underwear,” Lawton said. Hack gave him a look, but Lawton didn’t notice. “Tighty-whities. I’m a boxers man myself.”
“Too much information,” Hack said. “Point is, the fella wasn’t exercisin’ in the privacy of his own home but out in the middle of the street. Can’t have that. Might’ve got hit by a car.”
“It was Henry Horton,” Lawton said, as if that explained everything, which it did. Horton had some form of dementia, and lately he’d taken to leaving his house and wandering off, though not in his tighty-whities.
“Ruth took care of it,” Hack said, meaning Ruth Grady, one of the deputies. “Went over to get him inside while I called his wife and had her come home from the high school.”
Lucille Horton was the school nurse, and Rhodes knew she was having problems dealing with her husband’s condition.
“She’s going to have to find somebody to stay with him,” Rhodes said, “or get him into a nursing home.”
“She knows it,” Hack said. “She told Ruth she’s workin’ on it.”
“You still haven’t told me where Buddy was going.”
“Oh, that,” Hack said.
“Yes,” Rhodes said. “That.”
“That’s nothin’ much. Just somebody’s found a ‘mysterious package’ on the front porch. Tom Gatlin. You know how he is.”
Rhodes nodded. He’d dealt with the mysterious Gatlin himself a time or two. He sometimes ordered things, forgot he’d ordered them, and then been surprised when a package showed up on his front porch. He’d call the sheriff to come out and make sure there wasn’t a bomb or a box of anthrax on his property.
“What we need is a bomb squad,” Lawton said. “Then we could let the professionals handle it.”
“It’ll be a book or a new shirt,” Hack said. “Last time it was a new flashlight. It ain’t like we got a mad bomber on the loose around here. Buddy’ll take care of it.”
Hack might have said more on the topic, but the telephone rang. Hack answered it and talked for a couple of minutes. When he hung up, he turned to Rhodes and said, “Since your day off is over with, you might’s well take a run down to Billy Bacon’s place.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Thieves got a bunch of his stuff.”
“Again?” Lawton asked.
“That’s right,” Hack said. “Again.”
Chapter 3
Rhodes stopped in the turn-in for the gate to the B-Bar-B ranch and waited until the gray dust from the county road settled before getting out of the big black and white Chevy Tahoe. Blacklin County had had a lot of rain earlier in the year, much more than average, in fact, but there had been none for the last couple of weeks.
The Chevy Tahoe was practically new, only a couple of weeks old. Mikey Burns, one of the county commissioners, had convinced the other members of the commission to buy two of them for the sheriff’s department, although Burns had made it clear to Rhodes that he’d rather have gotten a couple of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles free from the United States Army. Lots of other small counties had them, Burns said, but Rhodes was happy with the Tahoes. He didn’t think anybody would be planting mines in Blacklin County.
Rhodes looked past the closed gate and saw Billy Bacon standing next to a weathered tin barn with rust streaks running down its sides and roof. The barn formed part of one side of a small corral. Billy’s dark green and dusty Dodge Ram pickup was parked by an old hand-dug well nearby. Bricks had fallen away from the well’s wall and lay on the thin grass around it, along with thin gray pieces of concrete that had covered the bricks. The bricks might have once been red, but now they were a faded pink.
Billy saw the Tahoe and waved. Rhodes opened the door and got out. He was still getting used to being so high off the ground when he drove. He didn’t have to use the assist step, but anyone shorter than him would have needed it.
A chain was looped around a post and around the end of the gate frame. The heavy padlock that had held the ends of the chain together lay on the ground where it had fallen after it had been cut away with a bolt cutter. Rhodes put on a pair of nitrile rubber gloves and got an evidence bag. He didn’t think there would be any fingerprints on the lock, but you never knew. He put the lock in the bag, sealed it, and put it in the Tahoe. He tossed the gloves in, too, and pulled the gate open. It was well balanced and squealed only a little bit. It was painted silver, and the B-Bar-B brand was welded to it in two-foot-high red letters. The hinges of the gate were to Rhodes’s right and attached to a tall post that looked like a telephone pole cut in half. Rhodes noticed four nails in it that had white cardboard behind them as if something rectangular had been ripped down from the post.
Billy had been watching all this. He called out to Rhodes, “You might want to drive on in, Sheriff, and get your vehicle away from the road. People come around that corner too fast sometimes, and you don’t want that thing to get hit.”
Billy was right about that. Rhodes was in enough trouble with the commissioners about damages to county vehicles already. He didn’t mind walking, but he didn’t want the Tahoe to get a scratch on it.
Billy gave an impatient wave. He was a loan officer in the Clearview First Bank, but about twenty years ago he’d been a star running back on the Clearview Catamounts football team. They’d called him “Shakin’ Bacon.” His powerful legs had eaten up the field in huge gains, and the town had loved him. As had the college recruiters. He’d been good enough to get a full scholarship to Texas A&M, but a car accident during the summer before he was to begin college had shattered his right kneecap and put an end to his football career. Walking wasn’t easy for him even now, but loan officers didn’t have to do much walking.
Rhodes got back into the Tahoe and drove through the gate. He stopped just inside the fenced area and started to get out.
“No need to close the gate,” Billy called. “All t
he cattle are down in the back pasture. I just closed it out of habit.”
Rhodes got back in the Tahoe again. He was getting plenty of exercise with the new vehicles if getting in and out and stepping up and down counted as exercise, which they certainly did in Rhodes’s book. He drove the fifty or so yards to where Billy was waiting for him. Billy still looked a little bit like a running back, but one who’d put on a few pounds. His wide shoulders stretched the white cotton shirt he wore, and his stomach lapped over the buckle of the belt that held up his faded blue jeans. Rhodes could identify, though he wasn’t as hefty as Billy. Billy couldn’t exercise much because of his knee. Rhodes, however, didn’t have that excuse. Maybe climbing into the Tahoe was helping.
When he stopped the Tahoe by Billy, Rhodes didn’t get out. He just pushed the button that let down the window so Billy could talk to him. Rhodes could smell hay and the musky manure scent of the corral, a mixture that wasn’t unpleasant to anybody who’d grown up around cattle.
“I tell you what, Sheriff,” Billy said, sounding a little nervous as if he thought the criminals might still be around, “these thieves are gonna run me out of the ranching business. This is the third time they’ve hit me in the last few months. And I’m not the only one down here they’re stealing from, as you well know. It’s about time you came to have a look around instead of sending one of your deputies.”
“Down here” was the southeastern part of Blacklin County, a few miles farther east than Able Terrell’s compound. Rhodes had dealt with Terrell before, but so far Terrell hadn’t made any complaints about theft from his place. There were some who thought they knew why.
Others who owned property or homes closer to Bacon’s place were the ones who were being hit. Some of them, like Melvin Hunt, had lost high-ticket items. Hunt’s welding rig, which cost around ten thousand dollars, had been stolen not long after the thefts had begun. It could easily have been driven a few miles to the interstate and then straight south to Houston or straight north to Dallas in a couple of hours, never to be seen in Blacklin County again.
“Looks like with all the evidence you have, videos and all, you’d have caught ’em by now,” Billy said.
Rhodes didn’t know what Billy meant by the “and all.” Aside from the video, there wasn’t much of anything else. Billy himself had supplied the video evidence of the thefts from his place. His security camera had recorded it and stored it in something called “the cloud.” Rhodes didn’t know for sure what that was, but he knew it didn’t have any connection to actual clouds.
One man showed up in the video, but he was smart. He was covered from top to bottom in loose-fitting camo gear, a hood pulled over his head and drawn tight around his face. He stayed away from the outside camera most of the time, and he stuck to the heavy shade of a metal canopy. When he came within range of the inside camera, he never looked directly at it. Rhodes wasn’t sure that there was only one thief, but if there was another person involved, he was keeping out of camera range.
“The videos haven’t been much help,” Rhodes said. “It’s impossible to tell anything about the man in them except maybe his size.”
Billy took off his Clearview Catamounts cap and wiped his forehead. It was the first week of September, still summer in Texas. The late afternoon sun was warm, and some days it was downright hot. Billy looked at Rhodes. “On the TV shows, they can enhance those videos to where you can practically see somebody’s fingerprints.”
Rhodes suppressed a sigh. “Sometimes those TV shows exaggerate the abilities of their technicians and their computers.”
Billy returned his cap to his head, covering his thinning gray hair. Rhodes remembered that when Bacon had been Shakin’ Bacon, he’d had long hair that hung out from beneath his helmet and bounced when he ran free down the field. Those days were gone, however. Rhodes could remember when his own hair had been thicker and longer, too, and now he had a thin spot of his own on the back of his head. Maybe he needed a cap like Billy’s.
“Well,” Billy said, “you won’t be getting any video this time. You know why.”
Rhodes knew. On their last visit the thief or thieves had stolen Billy’s video camera, the final indignity. Billy hadn’t replaced the camera.
“I haven’t looked to see what they got this time,” Billy said. His mouth had a bitter twist. “Since the thieves come in the afternoon when I’m at the bank, I thought I’d sneak down here early, maybe catch them in the act, but I was too late. My wife thought I was crazy. She told me I’d get hurt if the thieves saw me, but I’m not scared of them. When I got here and saw the lock was cut on the gate, I figured I’d better call you before I looked things over. Wasn’t that much left here for them to take, so I don’t know why they bothered to come back.”
“There must’ve been something,” Rhodes said.
“Not enough to make them happy. See my well?”
Rhodes nodded.
“They did that,” Billy said. “Just out of meanness. Tried to knock down the whole wall. Lot of the bricks fell down in the well. Just meanness.”
Rhodes didn’t know what to say to that, so he nodded again.
“Get on out of the truck and come look in the barn,” Billy said.
Rhodes got out. The tin door cut in the wall of the barn was a full step up off the ground. It hung open, but Rhodes couldn’t see very far inside.
Billy stepped up into the barn with some difficulty and disappeared into the dark interior. Rhodes followed him. The only light came from the doorway and some nail holes in the tin roof and sides. It took Rhodes’s eyes a couple of seconds to get adjusted. When they did, he looked around. All he saw was a few bales of musty hay that might have been there for years and the bare tin walls.
“You ever haul hay?” Billy asked him.
“One summer when I was in high school,” Rhodes said.
He remembered how it had been, tossing the heavy bales up onto a trailer where another boy, Robert Haskins, had stacked them. When the trailer was loaded, they’d drive to the barn, unload it, and then go back for another load. The bales were heavy and dusty. By the end of the day Rhodes had been so tired he could hardly move. He’d itched all over, and his eyes and nose had been red and runny.
“Don’t haul much of it on wagons anymore,” Billy said. “I just have it rolled up instead and leave it out in the field instead of bailing it. That’s what everybody does now. Been that way for years. Can’t hardly find a regular bale anymore.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to load a hay wagon now,” Rhodes said.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Billy said. “Tell you the truth, I kinda liked it. It was good for me. Kept me in shape for the football season. You played a little ball, too, back in your day, didn’t you?”
Billy was talking fast. He seemed jittery. Rhodes couldn’t figure out why.
“I didn’t play much,” Rhodes said, thinking that his day hadn’t been so long before Billy’s.
“I remember hearing about you. Will o’ the Wisp Rhodes, they called you.”
Rhodes had gotten lucky in the first game of the season, returned a kickoff for a touchdown, and gotten a nickname. He’d been injured in the next game and spent the rest of the season on the bench. That had been his whole football career.
“That nickname was mostly a joke,” Rhodes said.
“Maybe so, but you were a hero for a little while there.” Billy paused. “Folks still blame you a little bit for what happened with the team a while back, I guess.”
Rhodes knew what he meant, but it hadn’t been Rhodes’s fault that a football coach had been murdered. Rhodes had just followed the investigation to its logical end.
“I think they’re getting over it,” he said, but he knew better. The Clearview Catamounts hadn’t gone to the championship as everyone had thought they would, and that was a terrible thing to people who took their high school football seriously, which meant just about everybody in the state of Texas. Nobody in the town of Clearview would ever get over
it. They’d pass along the story to their kids and grandkids, and long after Rhodes was gone people would be talking about the time the sheriff cost them the state championship. They might not remember Rhodes’s name, but they’d all know the story. Not that it would matter to Rhodes.
It was hot and close in the barn because of the sun shining on the tin roof and sides all day, and dust motes floated through the little shafts of light from the nail holes. Rhodes sneezed.
“Dusty in here,” Billy said, waving his hand in front of his face as if to ward off any germs that Rhodes might have expelled. “Nothing left but hay, straw, and dust.”
“What about mice?” Rhodes asked. He wasn’t fond of mice.
“Might be some mice, but they don’t come out during the day. Nothing much for them to eat anymore, so maybe they’re all gone. Look over there.”
Rhodes looked. He didn’t see anything except a spot where the floor might have been a little less dusty.
“That’s where I had my daddy’s saddle,” Billy said. “They took the saddle, the saddle stand, the tack, everything. It wasn’t worth a whole lot, but it was my daddy’s. He’s been dead ten years now. It was about the only thing of his I had left. You know who I think is doing this?”
Rhodes wanted to say that he wasn’t a mind reader, but in this case he was. Or at least he knew just about what Billy was going to say. Others had expressed opinions about the thefts, and Rhodes expected that Billy shared them.
“It’s Able Terrell,” Billy said when Rhodes didn’t answer quickly enough. “Him and that bunch in his compound. They’re the ones behind it.”
“You have any evidence to support that claim?” Rhodes asked.
“They live there all to themselves, act like they don’t have to depend on anybody else. They have to get money some way or another. Thieving is one way to do it. That or making meth. You oughta arrest the whole lot of ’em.”
Rhodes didn’t believe that Terrell was guilty of either of those things, although his son had been involved in some thefts once before. Nothing like that was going on now, however. Or Rhodes hoped it wasn’t.
