by Bill Crider
The snake stopped squirming, as if it were just waiting for its chance to bite someone else, preferably Rhodes.
“I’m going to send you on your way,” Rhodes said. “Tell all your pals what a friend I am to all the little creatures of the forest.”
The snake pretended not to hear.
Rhodes eased the stick out of the ground, and just as it came free, he used it to flip the snake away from him and Bud. It landed near the bushes with a flop, stayed motionless for a moment, then slithered away.
Rhodes sighed again, this time with relief. His clothes were soaked with sweat, and not entirely from exertion. He thought that he liked snakes even less now than he had before, if that was possible.
Now all he had to worry about was Bud Turley. The most important thing was to get him to the ER as soon as he could. None of those old first-aid tricks, like putting on a tourniquet or sucking out the venom, worked with copperhead bites. Not that Rhodes would have sucked out the venom even if it had been recommended.
He looked down at Bud, who hadn’t lost any weight in the last few minutes. He was still far too heavy for Rhodes to carry or even drag out of the woods. Rhodes didn’t think there was a chance Bud would die, but he might go into shock. For that matter, he might be in shock already. His hand was beginning to swell.
As he was trying to think of some way to deal with Bud, Rhodes heard something in the woods behind him.
Great, he thought. Now the wild hogs will get me.
He turned around. He didn’t see any wild hogs. He saw Ruth Grady.
“Who’s been doing all the screaming?” she said. “I could hear you a mile away.”
“That was Bud,” Rhodes said, pointing to him.
“Oh. I thought it might have been you. I’ve heard that you had a run-in with some feral hogs here once.”
“This time it was a snake. And I didn’t have a run-in with it. Bud did. Besides that, I think he’s been shot in the foot. I need to check that.”
Rhodes knelt down and took off Bud’s hiking boot and peeled down the sock.
“That’s one nasty sock,” Ruth said, “and I don’t mean the blood.”
“I expect his feet sweat,” Rhodes said.
“Yeah. I’d say they’ve been sweating for about a week. Or two.”
Rhodes got the sock off. It appeared that he’d shot off the end of Turley’s big toe.
“You’d better tie that off,” Ruth said. “We don’t want him to bleed out while we’re dragging him through the woods.”
“You think we can do it?”
“Sure. The two of us can manage. It’s not that far.”
“We’ll see.”
“It won’t be a problem. Let’s see. You shot his toe off, and what else?”
“He was bitten by a copperhead.”
“Then I don’t blame him for screaming. I hope he’s guilty of something, considering all he’s gone through in punishment.”
“He’s guilty of plenty,” Rhodes said.
Of course, the next day Turley denied nearly everything.
Rhodes wondered why hospital rooms were always so cold. Was there some theory that germs didn’t like low temperatures?
He was standing by Bud Turley’s bed in room 132 of the Clearview Hospital. It wasn’t the most cheerful room that Rhodes had ever been in, but it was clean—and cold.
Bud’s foot was wrapped up and no doubt cleaner than it had been for about a week. Or two. His arm was swollen, but the doctor had told Rhodes that Bud probably wouldn’t lose any tissue.
Bud was, in fact, almost completely recovered from his wound and the bite, though the doctor had also confided to Rhodes that Bud would never walk as easily or as well as he had before losing most of his big toe.
“Sure, I ran,” Bud was telling Rhodes. “I was scared you’d blame me for killing Ronnie Bolton. I could tell by the way you were looking that you thought I did it. Who wouldn’t run?”
Rhodes said, “You jumped me in Larry’s trailer the other day. I know what you were looking for.”
Turley somehow didn’t seem as big, lying in a hospital bed, and nobody looked very frightening in a hospital gown. His tattoos were more ludicrous than intimidating. He looked away from Rhodes and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, come on, Bud,” Rhodes said. “I can match the ATV tracks outside the trailer to the tires of the one that’s in your shop.”
He was lying, since the ground had been too hard to take any tracks from the ATV, but maybe Turley didn’t know that.
Bud kept mum for a while. Finally he said, “I didn’t really jump you. I thought you were a burglar, and you scared me. I was going to catch you and turn you in, but I decided I’d just get out of there instead.”
“You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?”
“I’m having some pain,” Bud said, reaching for the call button. “I think I’d better call for the nurse.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Rhodes said, and Bud dropped his hand. “It would be a lot easier on both of us if you’d just tell the truth.”
“You wouldn’t believe me even if I did.”
There were two chairs in the hospital room. One of them could be made into a bed of sorts and wasn’t comfortable for sitting. The other was a straight-backed metal chair with a cushioned seat. It wasn’t very comfortable, either, but Rhodes sat in it anyway.
“You could always give the truth a try,” he said, crossing his legs. “It would be a nice change.”
“You think I killed Ronnie Bolton. I can tell.”
“You could always change my mind.”
“You don’t mean that. I know how you sheriffs are. You get your mind made up, and you don’t care about the truth. You just want to make an arrest and send somebody to the pen whether they did anything or not.”
“You’ve been watching too many cable TV movies,” Rhodes said. “I don’t want to send anybody to prison unless he’s guilty. If you’re not guilty, you don’t have a thing to worry about.”
“Yeah, right. Tell that to all those guys who’ve been in the pen for twenty years, and now they finally get a DNA test done and it proves they were innocent all along.”
Turley hadn’t been watching TV. He’d been reading the newspapers, which surprised Rhodes a little.
“You can’t tell me you haven’t read about some of those cases,” Turley said. “You can’t tell me those guys weren’t railroaded.”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything, but none of those cases were from this county.”
“Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to those yet.”
Rhodes uncrossed his legs and started to get up. “If that’s the way you feel about it, I’m not going to waste my time with you.”
“You’re gonna get those bones tested, aren’t you,” Turley said. “And check the dental records.”
“Yes,” Rhodes said. He settled back down on the chair. “But I think we’ve found Ronnie Bolton. You probably know for sure. If you’d tell me what you know, I might be able to help you with the prosecutor.”
Turley leaned back into his pillows and looked up at the ceiling. Rhodes looked up, too. It was just a ceiling. Acoustic tile. Fluorescent light. Nothing new there.
“I didn’t kill Ronnie Bolton,” Turley said. He was still looking at the ceiling. “I’ve thought about it a lot, and even if I’d killed him, I don’t think you could prove it.” He turned his eyes to Rhodes.
Rhodes shrugged. Turley was right. Rhodes didn’t have any proof of anything, just a bunch of suppositions, and suppositions didn’t cut any ice in a courtroom. With what he had right now, Rhodes didn’t think a judge would even issue a warrant for Turley’s arrest. He’d hoped to talk to Turley and eventually get a confession, but not under these circumstances. Turley was too much aware and on his guard now.
“I’m right,” Turley said. “You think I did it, but you can’t prove it. The thing is, though, that I didn’t do it.”
“If you didn’t kill him, who did?” Rhodes said.
“Hell, you should be able to figure that out for yourself.”
“I’m a little slow today. Why don’t you just tell me.”
“Sure,” Turley said. “I’ll tell you. It was Larry. He’s the one that killed him.”
29
“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT,” TURLEY SAID. “PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IF we’d been thinking straight at the time, we’d have reported it, and that would have been that. Oh, sure, we’d have got a hard time from a lot of folks, but sooner or later they’d have seen it couldn’t be helped.”
“You were there when it happened, then,” Rhodes said. “The accident.”
“Yeah, I was there. It was a weekend, and we were out in Big Woods, looking around for signs of Bigfoot. He’s out there, you know. I don’t care what anybody says. He’s out there, and one of these days I’ll find him.”
Rhodes thought the likelihood of that was small and getting smaller all the time. He said, “We’re talking about Ronnie Bolton, Bud. Not Bigfoot.”
“It’s all tied together, though. See, we were out there, and you know how it can be in those woods. All quiet and scary, especially when you get to thinking about wild hogs and snakes and all.” He held up his bandaged hand and looked at it for a second. “Anyway, we were a little skittish, I guess. The kid came sneaking up on us, and Larry turned around and shot him. Just like that.”
Turley closed his eyes as if that would keep him from seeing it all happen again. When he opened them, he said, “I thought I’d die, too, just keel over right there. You can’t imagine what it’s like, to see a kid lying there, blood coming out of a hole in his chest, and you can see just by looking at him that he’s dead and that there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
“Why did Larry take the boy’s baseball cap?”
Turley’s eyes came into focus. “He didn’t take the cap. I did. Larry didn’t even know I took it. Not then.”
Rhodes was beginning to think that maybe Bud was telling the truth. He said, “Why did you take it, then?”
“Evidence. I wanted to be able to prove that even if I was there, I didn’t kill anybody.”
Rhodes said that he didn’t see how the cap would prove that.
“I don’t guess it would. But it was something to give me a little hold on Larry if he ever tried to turn me in for doing it. Which I didn’t. Do it, I mean. Hell, you could prove the bullet came from his gun if you could find it.”
“The gun or the bullet? We’d need both of them, and we’d have to prove he owned the gun. If he was smart, he got rid of it.”
“Nobody ever said Larry was smart. He kept the gun in his old truck. I was talking about the bullet.”
The bullet hadn’t been in the grave. Even the careful excavations by Tom Vance hadn’t located it.
“We panicked after we knew the boy was dead,” Turley went on. “We thought we’d go to the pen if we told what happened. People think we’re crazy anyway. They’d be just as happy if we were in the pen for life or if we got the needle. That way they’d never have to see us around here again. We started just to leave the boy there for the hogs to find, but we were afraid someone might come looking for him before that happened, and anyway, it just didn’t seem right. So we took him to the creek and buried him. The ground was pretty soft, and we buried him deep enough. Or that’s what we thought. A lot of that creek bank’s washed away lately.”
“And you just left him there and went on like nothing had happened. All these years. You were even part of the search party.”
“Well, it would’ve looked pretty funny if we hadn’t been. We know that place about as well as anybody. People expected us to help out. And since we were helping with the search we could keep people from looking where we buried the boy.”
Rhodes thought it over. It made sense. Except for one thing. The cap.
“Larry had the cap at his place. You were looking for it there. But you told me you were the one who took it.”
“I did. Larry got religion a while back, I guess you could say. He started talking about how his life had taken a turn for the worse ever since that day and how he wanted to get it back on track.”
Rhodes felt a little better on hearing that. He’d been right about that part of it, at least.
“So he came to my place one day when I was gone and took the cap,” Bud said. “It was in the shop, in a box under that table where I keep the radio. I don’t know how Larry figured that out, but he did. Maybe he’d looked around for the cap before, different times when I wasn’t around. He told me he had it and that he was gonna set things right. I don’t know how he thought he was gonna do that. The boy was dead. You can’t set that right. You just have to go on with your life.”
“After Larry was killed, you wanted the cap back.”
“Hell, yes. Wouldn’t you? I was gonna burn it. If somebody found it at his place, they might tie me in with the boy’s killing, and Larry wouldn’t be around to tell them he was the one that did it. You know that. You were there looking for the cap yourself, to use it against me.”
Rhodes hadn’t been looking for the cap, not specifically, but there was no need for Turley to know that.
“All right,” Rhodes said. “Let’s say you’re telling the truth. I guess you must’ve killed Larry to stop him from letting people know what happened that day in the woods. You were afraid that if he told the story, you’d be implicated. You couldn’t let that happen.”
“Kill Larry?” Turley said. “What the hell makes you think I killed Larry?”
No matter how Rhodes pressed him, Bud wouldn’t admit that he’d killed Larry. Larry was his best friend, he said, and even if Larry was getting all holier-than-thou, Bud wouldn’t have killed him.
“Not even if he was going to ring you in on a murder charge?” Rhodes said.
“It was an accident. I told you that. And he didn’t want to ring me in on anything. He just wanted to get it off his chest. He said he’d messed up his whole life, starting on that day, and he wanted to set it right if he could.”
“Did he say how he was planning to do that?”
“Nope. Larry was a good old boy, but when it came to making a plan, he was a little helter-skelter if you know what I mean. He probably didn’t even have a plan.”
Through everything, Bud was matter-of-fact and convincing, and his story never varied. Rhodes left the hospital thinking that he’d been wrong about nearly everything.
So he went to the courthouse for a while. He drank a Dr Pepper and ate a package of the peanut butter crackers and thought everything through one more time.
Chester Johnson was at his vegetable stand, sitting on the tailgate of his truck, just as he’d been the last time Rhodes had paid him a visit. It was almost as if no time at all had passed.
Rhodes stopped the county car. Johnson slid off the tailgate and walked over to him, just like before. This time, however, Johnson didn’t try to sell Rhodes anything.
“You’re sure paying me a lot of visits lately, Sheriff,” he said. “I didn’t know you and I were such good friends.”
“This isn’t exactly a visit,” Rhodes said. “It’s more like county business.”
“You mean you’re gonna give me back my gun?”
“That’s not it. It’s still at the lab, being tested.”
“Waste of time and taxpayer money. Won’t find a danged thing on it.”
“Speaking of finding things,” Rhodes said, and stopped.
Johnson waited a while and then said, “Yeah?”
“I remember that you drove all the way to Louetta Kennedy’s store to use the phone that day you found Larry Colley dead in the woods. You must not have a cell phone.”
“Don’t need one. Don’t have anybody to call.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You called Larry Colley a few times.”
Johnson looked confused. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“His i
ncoming calls were recorded on his cell phone. He had one, even if you don’t.”
Johnson kicked at the dirt. “I still don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Well,” Rhodes said, “there’s a little problem. I didn’t find Larry’s cell phone anywhere in those woods. It just flat disappeared.”
“And you think I took it? What would I do with a cell phone? I told you I didn’t have anybody to call.”
“I know that. But you might have taken it because you knew it had that record of your calls on it. Some of those phones hold a lot of numbers from incoming calls. You might have figured that somebody, like the sheriff, might check those numbers and see that you’d been calling Larry. He’d wonder why. And he might find out about how you’d been having some trouble with Larry over those car repairs that you forgot to mention to me until I’d already found out about them. All that might not look so good for you, so why not just take the phone and not have to worry about it?”
“Lotta ‘mights’ in there,” Johnson said. “And you managed to find out about those calls anyway. So you’re just fishin’ for an answer.”
Rhodes grinned. “People say that to me all the time. But if you don’t go fishing now and then, you’ll never catch anything.”
“You won’t catch me, and that’s for sure. If I took that phone, you don’t think I’d keep it, do you? How dumb do you think I look?”
“Not all that dumb,” Rhodes said. “I think the phone was in one of those side pockets of his overalls, and you saw it sticking out. You figured, ‘Why not?’ and just grabbed it. No ties to you left behind.”
“I’d never do a thing like that,” Johnson said with such a pious look that Rhodes knew he had to be lying.
“I’m sure you got rid of it right off the bat,” Rhodes said, and Johnson couldn’t help but allow himself a brief sly smile of pride in his own cleverness. “So it wouldn’t do me any good to accuse you of theft,” Rhodes went on.
“Nope.”
“Well, I just wanted to know for sure.”
“And now you do, don’t you?” Johnson said.
