by Joan Hess
When Harve finally came on the line, he sounded as if he were rehearsing his speech. “Good to hear from you, Arly. It’s important that law enforcement agents work together to keep crime out of Stump County so our children won’t be sold drugs on the playgrounds and our senior citizens can sleep at night, knowing their houses won’t be vandalized.”
“Save it for the Rotarians,” I said. “I need someone at your end to run a check on a guy named Sterling Pitts. I’d estimate his age at fifty-five to sixty, gray hair, a propensity for khaki. Purportedly, he has an insurance office over there.”
Harve chuckled. “Sounds like a dangerous character. Did you nab him for running the stoplight?”
“He hasn’t done anything—yet.” I told him about the conversation in the bar the previous day, then added, “The last thing we need is a bunch of weekend warriors crawling around in the woods during deer season. You’re not going to win any votes if half of them are carried out in body bags.”
I heard the scritch of a match as he lit one of his infamously vile cigars. “You have a point,” he said slowly, “but do we have a leg to stand on here? If they have the property owner’s permission—and you’re saying they do—I don’t see what we can do about it. It may be stupid, but it’s not against the law.”
“Just check out this guy. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find an outstanding warrant to dangle over his head. I don’t care if they want to sleep in caves and eat bark for breakfast; I just don’t want them doing it during deer season. We have to protect our reputation.”
“Your reputation?” He guffawed as if I’d related a tasteless joke involving politicians and barnyard animals. “Are we talking about the same place that had Bigfoot sightings last spring?”
I waited until he quieted down. “Gawd, I’d forgotten about Diesel. The last I heard, he’s still up on Cotter’s Ridge, biting heads off rabbits and squirrels. He won’t take kindly to being surprised by some wacko in an army helmet. And what about Raz? He keeps a shotgun in his truck in case he finds someone getting too close to his moonshine operation. How many stainless steel tables do they have at the morgue?”
“I reckon you’ve got yourself a problem,” Harve admitted as he wheezily exhaled. “I’ll check out this fellow when I get time, and I’ll also have a word with the county prosecutor. It won’t make a skeeter’s ass of difference, but at least we’ll have tried.”
He promised to call me later, then barked at LaBelle to fetch him a fresh cup of coffee and hung up. I leaned back, propped my feet on the corner of the desk, and tried to remember if anybody else besides Diesel and Raz frequented the ridge. The high school kids preferred the gravel bars along Boone Creek for their beer binges; there were enough aluminum cans scattered in the weeds to support a recycling plant. When the more mature philanderers desired privacy, they gravitated toward the trailers at the Pot O’ Gold or the seedy motels at the edge of Farberville.
Cotter’s Ridge was almost inaccessible by car; the steep, overgrown logging trails were rutted and often blocked by fallen trees. Robin Buchanon’s shack remained standing (or leaning), and the odiferous outhouse behind it, but no one had lived there since she’d been murdered and her children dispersed by social workers. As far as I knew, Raz and Diesel had the ridge to themselves.
Until next week, anyway.
I shuffled through the mail, made a second pot of coffee, and examined the stain on the ceiling until my neck began to ache. I knew Harve wasn’t going to call back anytime soon, but I wasn’t in the mood to run a speed trap out past Purtle’s Esso or lurk around the corner from our one and only stoplight. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with Ruby Bee, either; she’d be in a dither because I hadn’t shown up for breakfast. The last thing I needed was a lecture about common courtesy and the value of good nutrition (as if biscuits and sausage gravy were applauded by the surgeon general).
I finally decided to accept Kayleen’s invitation to drop by the pawnshop and look at whatever material she claimed would lead to my enlightenment. The building that had once housed a New Age hardware store and then a short-lived “souvenir shoppe” was only a block away, but I took my car in case I spotted a getaway car idling in front of the charred remains of the branch bank. The radio rarely did more than snap, crackle, and pop, and the siren sounded like a dying donkey, but the heater was working for some mysterious reason.
I parked beside the Mercedes. There had been no grand opening as yet, but lights were on inside and presumably Kayleen was busily arranging her lethal display. In reality, the main room was barren and cluttered with the debris left by the previous occupant. I continued into the office, where I found Kayleen talking on the telephone.
“Hold on,” she said into the receiver, then looked up at me. “Can I do something for you, Arly?”
“I’m hoping you’ll answer some questions,” I said.
“Sure.” She told whomever she’d been talking to that she’d call later, then hung up and moved some files off a second chair. “I heard you met Sterling Pitts yesterday. Could that be why you have questions today?”
“You obviously have some sort of involvement with this paramilitary group Pitts mentioned. I’d like to know more about it.”
“Sterling has an unfortunate tendency to get carried away when talking about what amounts to a small social club made up of people who enjoy camping. They don’t exactly share the left-wing philosophy of the Sierra Club, but they’re harmless. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have agreed to allow them to use my property.”
“Pitts was talking about military maneuvers,” I said, unconvinced. “That tends to imply weapons.”
“They use paint pellets instead of bullets. I’ve known Sterling for a good ten years, and I can promise you he and the others are no more sinister than your basic outdoors enthusiasts.”
“Are you aware deer season starts Saturday?” I persisted. “Why is Pitts determined to do this at a time when the ridge is crawling with overgrown boys who can’t see straight?”
“It’s when most of them can get a few days off work. I’m not happy about it, either, but Sterling’s the one who has to accept the responsibility if someone gets hurt. I’m just letting them use the back pasture.”
“Then why let them use it?”
“Sterling can be as stubborn as a mule, and he kept badgering me until I agreed. In the past, they had a place over near Yellville, but the guy who owned the property got sent to jail for tax evasion and his wife refuses to let them come back. I don’t think you should worry about this, Arly. They’ve been going out during deer season for the last five years, and nobody’s ever had more than a bellyache from eating the wrong kind of berries.”
“I wish you’d change your mind,” I said. “They’re risking not only the very real possibility of being mistaken for a buck, but also hypothermia, snakebite, and encounters with our local moonshiner and an unbalanced hermit—all so they can be prepared to defend themselves from a mythical foreign army.”
“Sorry, but they’re old enough to know their own minds, and they won’t be breaking any laws. Sterling’s always careful about that. Just ignore them. Nobody else in town will even know they’re here, and at the end of the four days, they’ll go back home to their microwave meals and warm beds.”
I could tell I was wasting my breath, so I stood up. “You mentioned something yesterday about some material you wanted me to read.”
She herded me toward the front door. “I do, but I forgot it’s in a cardboard box in a storage cubicle over in Malthus. When I get everything hauled over here and sorted, I’ll drop some tracts off at the police department.” She accompanied me onto the porch and glanced at the silver trailer across the road. “He’s an odd bird, isn’t he?”
“Brother Verber? You could say that without any fear of being contradicted by anyone with a lick of sense, which includes everybody but the most witless of the Buchanons.”
“He’s kind of sweet, though,” she continued thoughtfully. “Even though I was brought up Baptist, I sa
id I’d come to the Sunday morning service. It’s good to start putting down roots, meet my new neighbors, learn the local traditions. I’m glad I decided to move here. I think it’s gonna work out real well.”
It was not a sentiment often heard inside the city limits. I left her standing on the porch and drove out County 102 to make sure nobody had run off the low-water bridge or stolen the sign that continued to claim the population to be in the mid seven hundreds. It hadn’t been changed since my high school days.
Not much else had, either.
Sterling Pitts was back in his office after lunch with his fellow Rotarians. Most of the time it didn’t seem worth the trouble, but today he’d had a chance to get Lou Gerkin aside to discuss a group health proposal. Lou’d promised to think it over, which was all you could expect with a speaker droning on about drugs in the schools. As if drugs were the pivotal threat to society, Sterling thought with a sigh. One of these days the pudgy sheriff would be asking himself why he was living under martial law and taking orders from a member of an inferior race.
Missy came to the doorway. “Your wife called while you were out, Mr. Pitts. She said to tell you she’s playing bridge tonight and won’t be home till real late.”
“Anybody else?” he asked, wondering what it’d take to convince the girl to write down messages on paper and leave them on his desk. She seemed to prefer to brief him as if she was a platoon leader.
“A man named Reed, but he wouldn’t tell me his last name or what he wants. Is he a client?”
“No, Missy, he’s a mechanic at the garage where I take my car. He’s got an estimate for some repairs. Now go call the home office and find out what claims adjuster we’re supposed to use while Durmont’s laid up. And shut the door, please.”
He waited until a button lit up on the telephone, then utilized a second line to dial a number that was answered not at a garage, but at a squalid apartment.
“I told you not to call my office,” he began grimly. “Security is essential to our success. Your line could be tapped at this very moment.”
“Yeah, but I got to talk to you, Pitts.”
“I’ll be home alone tonight. Park down the block and come in through the back door. I’m beginning to suspect my house is being kept under surveillance; an unfamiliar car has been parked across the street periodically for the last week.”
“Then why don’t we meet someplace else? My place, or at a bar or something? It’s not going to help our cause if the feds link the two of us.”
“Come to the house at 2200 hours.” Sterling banged down the receiver, frustrated by the necessity of dealing with those of so little discipline. How many times had he stressed the need to follow the procedures laid out in the manual? Calls were to be made only from telephones known to be safe. Names were never used in communications, only designated code words, but Red Rooster had said Pitts’s name in the course of the brief conversation. Of course the feds could figure it out without too much trouble, since Reed had dialed the number of Pitts’s Tri-County Patriots’ Insurance Services.
Instead of plunging back into group health policies or paperwork from the state commission, Pitts opened his drawer and took out a slim book. The Ruger 1022 Exotic Weapons Systems was as soothing as a glass of warm milk. Smiling, he flipped to the chapter on how to transform a Ruger 1022 into a selective-fire, close-combat gun—all without modifying the receiver or trigger housing in any way!
Reed “Red Rooster” Rondly was staring at the blank television screen when Barry “Apocalypse” Kirklin came into the apartment and dropped a six-pack of beer on the scarred coffee table.
“Thought you was supposed to work late today,” Reed said as he leaned forward to wrench a beer out of the plastic holder.
“What the hell difference does it make to you? Oh, I get it—Martha Stewart’s coming over to give you some decorating tips for Thanksgiving.”
“Who?”
Barry opened a beer, then went into the kitchen to look for something to eat that wasn’t covered in fuzzy blue mold. “God, you’re a pig,” he said as he came back to the living room with a bag of chips. “I don’t know how Bobbi Jo put up with you as long as she did. You heard from her since she got to her parents’ house?”
“I don’t want to talk about her—okay? She’s gonna be real sorry she went off like that, taking the car and the VCR. She probably would have taken the refrigerator if she could have figured out how to jam it in the backseat.”
Barry flinched as his friend crumpled the beer can and threw it at the television set. Reed was a couple of inches shorter than he, but considerably more muscular and prone to getting into brawls with frat boys slumming at places like the Dew Drop Inn and the Exotica Club. They’d both gone into the army straight from high school; four years later Barry’d come out with a healthy regard for self-preservation. Reed had come out with a dishonorable discharge and the disposition of a junkyard dog. They were both pushing thirty years old. Barry worked at a bookstore, while Reed drifted from garage to garage, getting his sorry self fired for drinking on the job or coming in late. Or not coming in at all.
Reed opened another beer. “There’s a new guy at the garage, name of Dylan Gilbert, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old, and scrawny as a free-range chicken. He doesn’t know shit about American cars, but he’s pretty good with Jap imports.”
“Fascinating,” Barry said as he moved a stack of old gun magazines from a chair and sat down.
“He needs a place to crash, so I told him he could stay here until he finds something.”
“And?”
“And he says he was with that group in Colorado until a month ago when he heard a warrant had been issued.”
Barry shook his head. “Did he just happen to tell you this when you two went outside for a smoke?”
“Yeah,” Reed said grudgingly, “something like that. We was standing next to my pickup, and he took to admiring the modified shotgun on the rack. He was real impressed when I said I’d done the work myself, and then we got to talking about weapons in general. He converted an SKS rifle to an automatic that uses AK-47 magazines. He went on to say he’d had to sell it before he left town, and that’s what led to him telling me about the warrant. Seems he sent an early Christmas present to a judge, but a hotshot at the post office called the bomb squad. Somehow or other they traced it back to Dylan.”
“I hope you didn’t reciprocate by spilling your guts to him,” Barry said with a dark look. “He sounds like he’s got a big mouth and a propensity for sharing secrets with strangers. The last thing we need is for him to have too many beers and start talking about our operation to anyone who’ll listen.”
“I didn’t say shit about anything to him, but I’m going over to Pitts’s house tonight to discuss this guy with him. Since Bradley got thrown in the state prison, Carter Lee upped and disappeared, and Mo got gunned down by thievin’ mongrels, we’re down to what—four members? The women are useful, but I wouldn’t share a fox hole with either of them. A bed, maybe, but you can’t trust women in combat. God put ’em on this planet to bear children, which is why they’re as useless as tits on a boar hog when the going gets rough.” He opened yet another beer and drained half of it, ignoring the dribbles on his chin. “I came home one night and found Bobbi Jo bawling on account of she’d spilled her fingernail polish on the bedspread. Jesus!”
“The manual says the optimum number for a cell is ten. That doesn’t mean we ought to stand on the corner and pass out application forms to anyone who walks by.”
“Yeah,” said Reed, back to staring at the blank screen.
Barry left to find something to eat in one of the dives along Thurber Street. Although usually alert, he failed to notice the figure sitting in a small car parked across the road from the apartment building.
Chapter 3
Estelle pranced across the dance floor, her heels clattering like castanets, and fidgeted impatiently on the stool at the end of the bar while Ruby Bee finis
hed filling two mugs from the tap and took them to Jim Bob Buchanon and Roy Stiver.
Ruby Bee was grumbling as she came back behind the bar. “I swear, I don’t know how men can talk as much as they do about deer season. You’d think they were out to get a buried treasure instead of a flea-ridden old buck. Those two”—she jerked her thumb at the corner booth—“have been jabbering for more than an hour. If they’d spend half as much time earning a living as they do talking about dogs—”
“I had a real interesting letter this morning,” Estelle said, unable to restrain herself. Beaming, she took a folded piece of paper out of her purse. “It’s from a lawyer over in Oklahoma.”
“Since when do you know any lawyers in Oklahoma?”
“Since I got this letter this morning.” She paused while she unfolded it and smoothed it out on the surface of the bar. “His name is Chester W. Corsair, and his office is in Muskogee.”
Ruby Bee gazed blandly at her, then shifted her attention to Jim Bob and Roy. “You boys want some pretzels or a couple of pickled eggs?” she called, knowing full well Estelle was close to bubbling over with excitement. However, it was her bar and grill, not Estelle’s, and she could do as she pleased when it came to earning a living.
Instead of answering, Jim Bob dropped a few dollars on the table, and he and Roy walked out of the bar, still deep in conversation about how many bottles of whiskey and bologna sandwiches they’d need.
When the door closed, Ruby Bee said, “Does this Mr. Corsair want you to go to law school and become his partner, or is somebody suing you for wrongful hair?”
Estelle decided to be magnanimous about this petty display of poor manners. “Do you recall me talking about my Uncle Tooly?”
“I recall a little about him. Didn’t he marry a one-eyed widow woman with a lot of money?”
“You’d think one eye would be enough to see he was nothing but a skinny old geezer with more hair poking out of his ears than on his head, but she married him anyway. They lived in her fancy house on Lake Eufaula until she died. Then he bought himself a farm way out in the middle of nowhere and took to experimenting.”
