by Bill Crider
Rhodes and Buddy turned the boat around, and Buddy lowered the trolling motor into the water. It worked smoothly and quietly after he started it, so they started back up the creek. A bit of water left over from the rain sloshed around in the bottom of the boat, but it wasn’t too bad. Rhodes’s clothes had dried, and he was fairly comfortable. The slight breeze didn’t chill him, and it didn’t appear that the motor’s propellor would get stuck in the mud. Rhodes was sure it would be fine all the way.
When they passed over the Deep Hole, Buddy said, “Kinda wish I’d brought some fishing gear along. I’ve heard there’s big fish in here.”
“Used to be,” Rhodes said, wishing he’d brought some fishing equipment himself. “I don’t know about now.”
“Guess we don’t have time for fishing, though,” Buddy said. “Gotta fight crime and keep the citizens safe.”
“That’s the job,” Rhodes said.
“Too bad you didn’t find out anything from those marijuana patches.”
“At least we found them,” Rhodes said.
“Yeah, but that’s all we found. We still don’t know who the growers are. Maybe this wasn’t a wasted trip, but we didn’t really learn much.”
“You might be surprised,” Rhodes said.
“You see something you’re not telling me about?”
“No. I’m just shoving some puzzle pieces around. Some of them are starting to fit. Or maybe I’m forcing them where they don’t belong. We’ll have to wait and see.”
“We gonna burn those marijuana fields?”
“Eventually. We need to settle some other things first. I don’t think there’s going to be a harvest anytime soon.”
“You gonna let Seepy watch the burning?”
“Not a chance,” Rhodes said.
Chapter 20
After Rhodes and Buddy returned Lawton’s boat and motor, Rhodes dropped Buddy off at the jail and went home to get the Tahoe. He’d decided that he’d visit the Hunts’ house after all. Will might not be an expert at removing things, so maybe he’d overlooked something that would help Rhodes to put some more of the puzzle pieces in the right places. Rhodes thought he’d found some of the missing pieces. The picture was starting to shape up, but it still had some big gaps in it. Finding a few more pieces would help a lot.
Rhodes realized that there had been times when he hadn’t been able to complete the puzzle. However, even though the picture he wound up with wasn’t whole, there was enough of it for him to recognize what he was looking at. The pattern was clear even with the missing pieces. Sometimes that had to be enough.
Rhodes called the jail to let Hack know where he’d be. Hack didn’t have any major crimes to report, just a squabble between a woman and her son, whom she accused of stealing her postage stamps.
“I don’t think you need me to handle that one,” Rhodes said.
“Nope. Stamps might be a federal crime, anyway.”
“Good thought. You planning to call the FBI?”
“Nope.”
“Probably not a good idea,” Rhodes said. “I’ll check in again later.”
“That’s right. You just go on and do whatever you want to,” Hack said. “Don’t bother to tell me what you found out this mornin’ on your little river cruise.”
“Buddy’s filled you in, I expect,” Rhodes said.
“That’s right. I’m glad I can count on some people.”
Rhodes signed off with a laugh.
* * *
This time when Rhodes arrived at the Hunts’ house, there were no dogs under the porch, and Will’s pickup was gone. Rhodes went out to the barn first. It wasn’t locked, so he went in and looked all around. He found some old pieces of rope and quite a few scraps of metal. A broken-down riding lawn mower sat in one corner of the barn, where a few tools hung on the wall. The tools didn’t look like they’d had a lot of use, and they didn’t seem good enough to have been stolen from anywhere. A gas can sat near the mower, but it didn’t hold diesel fuel like the ones stolen from Billy Barton.
Among the tools was a pair of bolt cutters. Rhodes took them down and looked them over. They didn’t appear to have had much use, but if they’d been used to cut the lock on Billy Bacon’s gate, it should be possible to match them to the cuts. Rhodes took the bolt cutters to the Tahoe and tagged them.
After dealing with the bolt cutters, Rhodes went back to the house and searched the rooms. He didn’t find anything that looked to be of any help there, either. If there had ever been anything to find, Will had removed it.
There were very few hiding places. The closets were practically bare, and the cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom held only what might be found in anybody’s house, none of it new. Rhodes looked in the little jewelry box on top of the dresser in the bedroom that Joyce and Melvin had shared, but he saw only a cheap watch and some costume jewelry, nothing that had turned up on any list of stolen items.
Rhodes remembered to check in the cabinet to see if the pistol Joyce had mentioned was there. It was, and Rhodes picked it up to examine it. Either Melvin hadn’t had it with him when he was killed, or it had been returned to the cabinet. Rhodes thought it was more likely that it hadn’t left the cabinet in quite a while. It wasn’t loaded, and Rhodes didn’t see any cartridges for it. He put it back where he’d found it and went back into the room with the new TV set.
Rhodes sat in the rocker where Joyce had sat when he told her about Melvin’s death and thought things over. The way Rhodes had arranged the puzzle pieces had Melvin behind the thefts of all the various items that had been taken. Melvin had been down on his luck for a while, and maybe the thefts had been the only way he believed he could turn things around. It had worked, as the big TV set and satellite dish proved.
In the sequence of thefts, some small things had been taken first, and then Melvin’s welding rig had been spirited away. Except Rhodes didn’t think that the welding rig had been stolen at all. He’d been suspicious from the first because of the dogs. There was no way that Gus-Gus and Jackie were going to let anybody slip around the property without alerting everybody in the house. They might even attack a stranger, as they’d almost attacked Rhodes on his first visit.
Add to that the fact that the welding rig had been insured. Rhodes believed that Melvin had done some smaller thefts and then pretended that the welding rig had been stolen so he could blame it on whoever committed the earlier crimes. After collecting the insurance money, he had to keep on stealing things for a while to make sure that nobody suspected that he was the guilty party. It had been a successful plan up to a point, but then somebody had killed him. That was as far from successful as you could get.
Billy Bacon had a motive for the killing. He’d been pretty hard hit, and the thief had kicked in his well and taken his father’s saddle and saddle stand besides. In spite of Joyce’s high opinion of her husband, Rhodes was pretty sure that Melvin was the thief and also the one who’d kicked in the well just for meanness. It was an excellent theory, and it was too bad Rhodes had no evidence to support it.
Evidence. That was the problem. Where was the evidence? Rhodes was sure that Melvin could have disposed of most of it easily enough. Houston and Dallas weren’t that far away. Just stick the stolen goods in the back of a pickup and take off for the big city. A flea market would be a quick and easy place to get rid of just about anything. Pay for a booth, drive the truck onto the grounds, and start selling.
The thing was that Joyce didn’t seem to know anything about the thefts. She would almost have to have known if Melvin had been going to the city to sell the goods. That meant that someone else was selling them instead of Melvin.
That’s where Riley Farmer came in. He was Melvin’s best friend, maybe his only friend, and was therefore most likely to have been Melvin’s partner. Rhodes hadn’t found anything on Farmer’s property, though, and it was hard to believe that the two men could have gotten rid of everything.
That left Will Smalls. Rhodes had a feeling Will was
a part of the scheme as well. Rhodes didn’t know if Will had somewhere to store the stolen items, but he must have known what was going on. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so determined to keep Rhodes away from the Hunts’ house.
Rhodes thought that Ellen and Joyce had been kept out of the loop, as Hack would have put it, maybe because they would have objected to the criminal activity or maybe because it was just safer to keep them in the dark. Joyce was acting so differently that she might have been told at least a little of the story. Ellen, too. Rhodes wondered if there was a place at the Smalls house where stolen goods could be stored.
Rhodes realized that he’d started rocking in the chair. It didn’t make much noise, and the rocking motion was comforting in a way. He didn’t want to get too comfortable, however. He needed to come up with some answers, not rock and relax.
It was then that he thought about the storm cellar. It would’ve been easy enough for Melvin to come home with a pickup full of what he could have told Joyce was “welding supplies” that he had to put in the barn. He could put them in the storm cellar instead, knowing that there was no way Joyce was going into it. He could keep things there until he got a chance to pass them along to someone else, either to Will or to Riley. Of if either of those two had been with him when he stole things, they could simply have taken them away almost at once and sold them within hours.
That theory still left some things unexplained, such as why there had been no vehicle at Bacon’s barn after Melvin was killed. Had Riley taken him there? Or had it been Will? It wasn’t out of the question that Melvin had walked, but that wouldn’t explain the lock that had been cut on the gate chain.
Rhodes stood up. He needed to have a look in the storm cellar. He went out the back door and into the yard. The roof of the storm cellar was concrete, and a small, rusty vent pipe stuck up from the back end. The doorway was almost flat on the ground, thick wood covered with shingles, and it had a hasp and a padlock on it. That was interesting, since locking a storm cellar door from the outside didn’t make any sense. People needed quick access to the cellar in case of a storm, so nobody ever locked the door. Not from the outside, anyway. Storm doors locked from the inside so the doors wouldn’t be flung open by the wind, causing whoever was inside to be sucked out into the storm.
Rhodes didn’t think it was a good idea to use the bolt cutters he’d found, but there’d been a screwdriver in the barn. He got the screwdriver and knelt on the ground to remove the screws that held the hasp. He justified what he was doing by telling himself that he had permission from Joyce to search the house, with Ellen as a witness. He hadn’t been told that he could break into the storm cellar, but he considered that doing so was part of a reasonable search. He’d replace the hasp when he was done if that turned out to be necessary.
Rhodes set the screwdriver and screws on the roof of the cellar when he’d finished. He stood up, stretched, and then bent over to grasp the edge of the door. He pulled it upward. The door was heavy, all right, but not too heavy for him to lift. A door that was hard to open would have been a problem for anybody who was in a hurry to escape a impending tornado. Not as bad as a locked door, but bad enough.
Rhodes let the door drop open on the ground with a solid thump and looked down into the cellar. Concrete steps led into the dark below, and he couldn’t make out anything in the murk. He’d have to go back to the Tahoe for his flashlight.
“I guess it’s a good thing I came back out here for the dog food,” a voice behind Rhodes said.
Rhodes turned around. “I’d have been glad to bring it back to town for you if Joyce or Ellen had asked me to.”
“Well,” Will Smalls said, “they didn’t think of it, and neither did I. I could’ve gone to Walmart and picked some up, but I figured, why buy it when there’s a bag of it already open? So here I am.”
Smalls stood facing Rhodes, the sun glinting off his rimless glasses, his hand on the butt of his pistol. Rhodes thought about the little Kel-Tec in his ankle holster. A man who has a pistol in an ankle holster isn’t in a good position for a fast draw.
“See, I never thought you’d look in the storm cellar,” Will said. “That’s why I told Joyce it’d be okay for you to come on out here and poke around. I can see now that was a mistake. I wanted you to look around in the house and decide there was nothing to find, but now you’ve gone and messed things up. That’s a real shame.”
“That’s not the only mistake you made,” Rhodes said. “Getting involved in theft and then killing your brother-in-law, that wasn’t too smart, either.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Will said.
He drew the pistol, racked the slide, and pointed the gun at Rhodes. It was a Glock 17, and Rhodes wondered how good a shot Will was with it. Probably good enough, considering that he was only fifteen or so yards away. Just about anybody could hit a man at that distance if he fired enough shots, and at the moment Will looked like the type who’d keep pulling the trigger as long as he had to.
“Gimme your gun,” Will said.
Rhodes raised his arms. “Do you see a gun?”
“Turn around,” Will said, and Rhodes did.
“Okay,” Will said. “I guess you don’t have a gun. You wanted to see what was in the cellar, so get on down in there.”
Rhodes didn’t think going into the cellar would be a good idea, but he couldn’t think of another alternative, not with the Glock pointed at him. He looked into the cellar again.
“Go ahead,” Will said. “It’s not so bad.”
“I heard there were spiders and snakes down there,” Rhodes said, thinking of an old song. “I don’t like spiders and snakes.”
“Those are gonna be the least of your problems,” Will said.
“I figured as much.”
Rhodes bent over and started into the cellar. He heard movement behind him, but before he could straighten up and turn, Will had kicked him in the rear and sent him stumbling down the steps.
Rhodes wasn’t quite able to maintain his balance, but he didn’t fall, either. He landed at the bottom on his feet and dropped to his hands and knees in two or three inches of water. He stood up as quickly as he could, but when he turned the door slammed down, leaving him in almost complete darkness.
His only chance of getting out was to shove the door open before Will could get the hasp screwed back into place. He felt his way up a couple of steps. Bending, he positioned himself and shoved as hard as he could against the door. It bounced up maybe an inch, but that was all. Will must have been sitting on it to put the screws in the hasp. Will wasn’t big, but he was big enough to hold the door down.
Rhodes shoved again with the same lack of success.
“Won’t do you any good, Sheriff,” Will said. “You might’s well make yourself comfortable.”
Rhodes didn’t think there was any chance of getting comfortable in nearly total darkness in a dank cellar with several inches of water on the floor, not to mention an untold number of spiders and snakes hiding out in the various nooks and crannies, so he sat down on one of the steps to think things out. The boards of the door were too heavy for his pistol to shoot through, so that wasn’t an option. He couldn’t think of any others, either.
He wondered how long it would take a man to go blind in total darkness. Probably longer than it would take him to starve, unless there was some food in the cellar. Some people did put tin cans with a little food in cellars, just in case. He wouldn’t have to worry about water. There was plenty of that.
He might not have to worry about going blind, either. A little bit of light came in through the vent, not much, but enough to keep the place from being completely inky. There might be a flashlight somewhere, too, unless Melvin counted on bringing one from the house in case of storms.
Rhodes wasn’t really worried about all those things, however. The Tahoe was parked in the front of the house in plain sight, and he’d told Hack where he was going. He might be trapped in the cellar for a while, wh
ich would be uncomfortable, and it would be embarrassing to have to be rescued, but he’d survive if the spiders and snakes didn’t get him.
“Sheriff, I got a little problem,” Will said.
“I hope you’re not expecting any sympathy from me,” Rhodes said, “because you’re not going to get any.”
Will ignored the remark. “See, the thing is, I forgot about moving your vehicle. I was gonna put it in the barn, but I can’t do that.”
“Because you don’t have the keys,” Rhodes said.
“That’s right. I forgot to get them from you.”
Rhodes laughed. He was glad he wasn’t the only one who had those little forgetful moments. Will wasn’t a very professional criminal, and Rhodes was glad of that, too.
“Here’s what I’m gonna do,” Will said. “I’m gonna take the hasp off again and open the door an inch or two. You can throw the keys out to me.”
Rhodes laughed again. “That’ll be the day.”
Will was quiet for a few seconds. Then he said, “I guess I’ll have to take ’em, then.”
It occurred to Rhodes that while the ankle holster was a disadvantage at times, it had one thing going for it. Will didn’t realize that Rhodes was armed.
“I guess you will,” Rhodes said.
Will was quiet again, but Rhodes heard him working on the screws. While he was doing that, Rhodes got his Kel-Tec from the ankle holster and got ready.
“I’m gonna open the door now,” Will said. “I don’t want to shoot you, but I will if I have to. You can give me the keys or get shot. It’s your choice. You know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean,” Rhodes said.
“’Cause it doesn’t make any difference to me now,” Will said. “I’m already in about as much trouble as I can get in. Shooting you won’t make much difference to me. It will to you, though.”
Rhodes didn’t think that Will was stupid. He’d open the door, all right, but he’d do it fast. He’d also do it from the side that wouldn’t leave him visible until the door was fully open, and by then he’d have the pistol out. Rhodes had a little plan that covered the situation, however. He got himself set and ready.
