Survivors Will Be Shot Again

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes didn’t read much about home invasions, because as far as he knew there hadn’t been one in Blacklin County. All the ones Rhodes knew about had happened in places with large populations and affluent housing additions. Blacklin County lacked both those things.

  “So it’s Nadine’s gun?” he asked.

  “Well, no, it’s my gun. I mean, I bought it in my name, but it was for Nadine. It’s a .38 revolver. She knows how to use it.”

  Rhodes was a bit surprised to hear it. He knew that Nadine had been having some unspecified medical problems. In fact, according to the word around town, even the doctors couldn’t put a name to what was plaguing her. She’d been to specialists in both Houston and Dallas but hadn’t found much relief.

  “Has Nadine practiced with the .38?” Rhodes asked.

  “Sure. No use to have a gun if you don’t know how to use it, is there? We come down here sometimes and shoot at targets at the stock tank. We use the dam as a backstop. It’s safe.”

  “If Hunt was shot with a .38, I’m going to want to have a look at yours,” Rhodes said. “We might need to run a ballistics test on it.”

  “Wouldn’t you need a warrant for that?”

  “I can get one if you don’t want to cooperate.”

  Billy took a deep breath. “Look, Sheriff, we’re getting off on the wrong foot here. I didn’t shoot Melvin, and I wasn’t here yesterday, okay? Nadine will tell you. I came straight home from the bank and we had supper at the house. You can ask her.”

  “I told you I might have to do that.”

  “Sure. I understand.” Now that everything was out in the open, Billy spoke more confidently. “She’ll tell you that it’s just like I said.”

  Rhodes didn’t doubt it.

  “I’m going to have to take the sign,” he said. “Evidence.”

  “It’s just a sign, okay? That’s all it is.”

  “Right,” Rhodes said. He wondered if he could shoot Billy if he said okay? one more time. He was the sheriff, after all. The grand jury might not want to indict the sheriff. Then again, it might. Rhodes sighed and took the sign to the Tahoe, where he put it into the backseat.

  As he closed the Tahoe’s door, Ruth Grady came through the gate in the county’s second Tahoe. She drove down and parked beside the one Rhodes had driven. When she got out, she had to use the assist step. She was shorter than Rhodes, barely tall enough, in fact, to meet the department’s height requirement, but height didn’t matter when it came to being a good officer. She was efficient, all business, and fully devoted to her job. She also looked good in a Western hat, something that Rhodes couldn’t say about himself, which is why he never wore one, even though the thin spot on the back of his head could have used the cover.

  Ruth’s only flaw, as far as Rhodes was concerned, was that she was currently dating Dr. C. P. Benton, better known as Seepy, a math instructor at the local community college. Benton had somehow gotten the idea that he was an unofficial adjunct to the department and was always looking for some way to insinuate himself into an investigation. He’d never interfered with anything Ruth was working on, however. He confined himself to pestering Rhodes. Most recently he’d started a ghost-hunting business, but that had been only a passing summer fad. Now that the college was back in its regular session, Benton had given up on the ghost hunting. Permanently, Rhodes hoped.

  “Hack told me you had a crime scene, Sheriff,” Ruth said as she approached Rhodes and Billy. “More thefts, Mr. Bacon?”

  Billy nodded, and Rhodes said, “It’s worse than just thefts. Melvin Hunt’s in the big new barn over there. He’s dead, been shot a couple of times. We need to look at the scene before the body’s moved.”

  Ruth didn’t show any surprise. “Hunt’s the one whose welding rig was stolen, isn’t he?”

  “He’s the one,” Rhodes said. “Let’s go see what we can find.”

  He led the way, opened the gate, and shut it behind them. Ruth looked back at Billy.

  “He have anything to do with it?” she asked in a low voice.

  “Yet to be determined,” Rhodes said. “He claims he didn’t.”

  “That’s what I’d claim, too, if I were in his shoes,” Ruth said, “but is he telling the truth?”

  “Also yet to be determined,” Rhodes said. “He’s already lied a few times. He called to report a theft, but not the body, which he didn’t want to admit he’d seen. He had, though. It’s been there a while, maybe as much as a day. I have a lot of questions about the whole situation.”

  They reached the barn and went inside. Rhodes put on the nitrile rubber gloves and led the way to the body. Before doing anything else, he took photos of it with his cell phone. He didn’t much like the cell phone. Somehow it made him feel as if he were on a leash, but he had to admit that it took much better pictures than the old Polaroid the department had owned years before. Not only that, but he could e-mail the pictures right back to any computer at the jail, which is what he did as soon as he’d taken them.

  When he’d e-mailed the photos, Rhodes searched the body, hoping to find something useful. Hunt had a cell phone in one pocket, but it was an old flip phone. It wasn’t going to have any videos or photos that might help Rhodes determine who might have wanted to kill Hunt. There would be phone numbers in its memory, however, so those would need checking.

  Hunt also had a wallet, but there was nothing of interest in it, only three twenties and two tens, Hunt’s driver’s license, a couple of credit cards, and an insurance card. No photos. His pockets held a quarter and a dime.

  “He didn’t have a weapon?” Ruth asked from about fifteen feet away, where she had been looking at the area around the tractor.

  “I haven’t seen one,” Rhodes said. He put the phone and wallet into evidence bags. “That doesn’t mean he didn’t have one, though. Whoever killed him might have taken it.”

  Ruth left the tractor and came over to where Rhodes stood. “You think Hunt is the one who’s been stealing from Billy?”

  “Kind of looks that way. But—”

  “But we have to keep an open mind,” Ruth said. “I know, but it’s good to speculate, just the same. Why did Billy lie to you?”

  “He probably hoped I’d believe him.”

  Ruth grinned. “If he thought you would, he doesn’t know you very well. Lying to you just makes him look more like a suspect than he would have if he’d told the truth.”

  “He called to report it,” Rhodes said. “That’s in his favor.”

  “I would’ve called it in, too, if I’d killed Hunt. I’d try to deflect suspicion. Not that it’s working.”

  “It’s okay to be suspicious,” Rhodes said, “but let’s not get carried away.”

  “I won’t,” Ruth said. “I have another question, though. How did Hunt get here? Where’s his car?”

  “I wondered about that,” Rhodes said. “I think he came with someone else. There might’ve been two people stealing from Billy instead of just the one we saw on the video.”

  “Thieves fall out?”

  “That’s a possibility. There are some others. Maybe he was here hoping to catch the culprits. We’ll have to see what we can turn up before we decide. Have you found anything here that would help us?”

  “No,” Ruth said. “Somebody was careful. Picked up his brass or used a revolver. I didn’t look under the body, but the bullets might be there. Or they might not. As for anything else that might be here, this place doesn’t look like it’s ever been swept out, so there’s no way to separate what the killer left behind from everything else—that is, if he left anything at all. I don’t see any holes in the wall, so I guess the slugs are still in the body.”

  Rhodes wasn’t discouraged by the seeming lack of evidence. He’d always had a lot more luck with talking to people than he’d had with finding clues. He and Ruth continued to search throughout the barn but still found nothing that appeared likely to be helpful. They stopped when the ambulance drove up and parked just outside the bi
g barn door.

  Ruth went out to tell the paramedics to wait until the justice of the peace got there. They didn’t have long to wait, as the JP wasn’t far behind the ambulance. He got out of his car and entered the barn. It was his job to make the declaration of death, and he took it seriously.

  The JP was named Franklin. He was a big man with a grim look, which Rhodes thought was appropriate to the situation.

  “Seems like you never call me unless somebody’s died, Sheriff,” Franklin said. “I do weddings, too, you know. Call me for a happy occasion, why don’t you.”

  “I’ll try to do that next time,” Rhodes said. “We don’t get a lot of calls about weddings, but I’ll keep you in mind. Meanwhile, come on in and have a look at Melvin Hunt.”

  “Melvin Hunt?” Franklin looked up at the roof of the barn, then looked back at Rhodes. “I know him. Well, I don’t really know him. I’ve heard of him. What’s he doing here in this barn?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Rhodes said.

  Franklin nodded and followed Rhodes to where the body lay.

  “Looks dead to me,” Franklin said. He squatted and felt for a pulse in Hunt’s neck. “Dead, all right. Looks like he was shot twice. One high up on the shoulder, another one right about where the heart would be. Looks like the first didn’t get him, but the second one finished the job.”

  “Survivors will be shot again,” Rhodes said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” Rhodes said. “Just talking to myself.”

  “Sure. Anyway, his color’s bad, too. How long’s he been here?”

  “Don’t know for certain,” Rhodes said. “A while, though.”

  Franklin stood up. “Thought so. You know who did it?”

  “Not yet,” Rhodes said.

  “But you will.”

  “That’s right,” Rhodes said.

  “You and Sage Barton,” Franklin said. “You always get your man.”

  “You’re thinking of the Mounties,” Rhodes said.

  He wished people wouldn’t bring up Sage Barton. Barton was the two-gun hero of a series of wild adventure-romance novels by a couple of writers who’d attended a writing conference in Blacklin County a few years before. To Rhodes’s surprise, the novels had sold very well and might even be filmed, or digitized or whatever they did now. It seemed as if everyone in the county had read the books and reached the conclusion that Rhodes was the model for the main character. Rhodes didn’t know how they could think that, since he shared none of Barton’s heroic abilities. Recently Seepy Benton had suggested that Barton was modeled on him because their initials were S. B. Rhodes had done all he could to encourage this idea, but apparently the only person who believed it was Seepy Benton himself.

  “The Mounties, Sage Barton, and you,” Franklin said. “Always get your man. You will this time, too.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Rhodes said, thinking about how a vote of confidence for someone usually came just before that someone got fired.

  “You know it’s the truth,” Franklin said. “Well, I’d better get back to town to do the paperwork and let you get started on catching whoever did this.”

  Rhodes wasn’t sorry to see Franklin go. As soon as he got outside, Ruth brought in the paramedics to remove Hunt’s body. The wheels of the gurney wobbled a bit on the concrete floor, sounding like the wonky grocery carts that Rhodes always got when he used one.

  When the paramedics were ready to pick up the body, Rhodes turned it over to check for exit wounds. There were none, so as Ruth had surmised, the slugs were still in the body. They’d show up in the autopsy.

  As the paramedics were putting the body on the gurney, Rhodes took Ruth aside.

  “I’m going to leave you to finish working the scene,” he said. “Maybe you’ll turn up something. I need to go tell Hunt’s wife what’s happened.”

  “Funny that she hasn’t called the department about him,” Ruth said.

  “Not so funny,” Rhodes said. “He has a little drinking problem. He’s gone missing before. The difference is that this time he won’t be coming home.”

  “I’m glad you’re the one who has to deliver that news instead of me,” Ruth said.

  “I’m not,” Rhodes said.

  Chapter 5

  Rhodes didn’t often think about his boyhood. He was usually too involved in the present to think about the past or the future, but driving the winding dirt roads that would take him to the Hunt home brought back things that he hadn’t thought of in years, like the house where he’d lived the early part of his life. It was gone now, but part of an old barn still remained on the property, or at least it had been there the last time Rhodes had driven by. The roof had collapsed, and by now there might not be much of it left. Rhodes had gathered eggs in that barn and learned to milk a cow. He hadn’t milked a cow in many years, but he could still remember his father putting a bucket under the cow’s udders, positioning Rhodes on a three-legged stool, and letting him lean into the cow’s warm side. Rhodes’s hands had been too small to do a very good job of squeezing the teats, but he’d been able to get some milk to stream into the bucket before his father finished the job. He’d even been allowed to drink some of the warm milk, something that would now no doubt be considered quite unsanitary and possibly dangerous.

  Rhodes grinned at the memory. His family had moved to town before he’d become an expert milker, but he thought he could still milk a cow if called upon.

  He rounded a curve, crossed the wooden bridge over Crockett’s Creek, and saw that the old barn where his house had been was almost gone, fallen completely down and almost hidden by vines and bushes that had grown up over and around what was left of it. That was why it was better not to think about the past. What was left of it never lived up to the memories.

  Rhodes drove past and around another curve, turned left onto another road, and drove a half mile to where the Hunts lived. He pulled off to the side of the road, stopping the Tahoe in front of the house. It had been new when Rhodes was a boy, but it hadn’t been fancy even then. It hadn’t been kept up, and now showed its age. The paint was flaked and peeling, and a few loose shingles lay on the roof. A pane in one of the windows had been replaced by cardboard. The yard was mostly weeds, and it hadn’t been mowed in a while. The house sat up on concrete blocks, and the space between the house and the ground was covered with tin that had been painted white like the house, though some of it had been bent away and not straightened. It was streaked with rust. The satellite dish on the roof looked like new, however.

  Rhodes couldn’t remember exactly when the Hunts had moved into the house, but it had been a good many years earlier. The original owners, an old couple named Phelps, had moved somewhere to be closer to their children. Houston, Rhodes thought, or Dallas. They were probably dead by now.

  Melvin’s wife, Joyce, had worked in town for a while at the Walmart, but she’d quit a few years ago and hadn’t had another job as far as Rhodes knew. Melvin made a little money doing odd jobs around Clearview, and he’d done welding for people who needed it until his rig had been stolen. Hunt might’ve been the one who cut out the B-Bar-B brand and welded it to Billy’s gate for him. Rhodes would have to remember to ask Billy about that.

  The welding rig had been kept in the barn in back of the house. The barn was in no better condition than the house, but at least it hadn’t fallen down. Yet. Rhodes didn’t think it was going to last much longer if something wasn’t done.

  Rhodes looked through the windshield of the Tahoe at the trees in back of the barn. They grew thickly all the way down to Crockett’s Creek, and Rhodes wondered if the Hunts had experienced any problems with feral hogs. It seemed likely, but something like that would be the last of Joyce Hunt’s concerns now.

  Rhodes got out of the Tahoe and shut the door. As soon as he did two black-and-brown short-haired dogs of indeterminate breed charged out from under the little porch in front of the house and headed straight for him, ba
rking loudly, teeth bared. There was some leopard hound in their background somewhere.

  Carelessness. That was what came of thinking about the past. You forgot about the present and what might get you in trouble. Rhodes should have thought about the dogs. There were almost always dogs at houses this far out in the country, and the people who had them didn’t usually keep them around as companions. They wanted real watchdogs who could protect their property from other animals and unwanted guests, and this pair didn’t appear to be in a friendly mood. They appeared to be in the mood to rip somebody’s arms off, and the nearest somebody with arms was Rhodes.

  Moving with an alacrity he hadn’t experienced since the long-gone Will o’ the Wisp days, Rhodes opened the Tahoe door, jumped inside, and slammed the door. He was just in time. The dog that had been two steps ahead of the other, unable to stop his forward momentum, slammed into the door with enough force to shake the vehicle. Or maybe Rhodes was just imagining that. The Tahoe weighed nearly six thousand pounds, after all.

  The dog wasn’t hurt. He and his partner stood outside the Tahoe, jumping up and trying to bite Rhodes through the window, their claws scratching the paint as they slid back down. The Blacklin County Sheriff’s Department decal was going to be a mess. The county commissioners wouldn’t be happy about that.

  Rhodes could have unlocked the shotgun and given the dogs a bit of a surprise, but he didn’t want to do that. He saw an old GMC pickup sitting beside the house, so he figured someone, probably Joyce Hunt, was home. Eventually she’d come out to see what was happening and call off the dogs. Or Rhodes hoped she’d call off the dogs. If she didn’t, he could always use his handy cell phone to call her and ask her to do it. He was prepared to wait a while before trying that option, however.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Up at the house a screen door opened and a woman stepped out on the porch. It was Joyce Hunt. She wore a pair of jeans, low-heeled work boots, and a sweater. Her gray hair hung down almost to her shoulders. She stood for a second looking at the dogs and then called out to them.