The Devil's Country [Kindle in Motion]

by Harry Hunsicker

  “I’ll mark you down as a ‘Negative’ for knowing Molly.”

  Another moment of silence. He rearranged some pens on the top of the counter.

  “You know what’s good for you,” he said, “you’d get out now.”

  I wondered if he meant his store or the town itself.

  Everyone else in Piedra Springs had been friendly until this guy. Was he just a jerk or had something changed?

  “Have a nice day.” I smiled and left.

  Next door, Jimmy and Dale’s Broken Promise had a closed sign in the window, but the door was unlocked, so I stepped inside.

  All the chairs rested on top of the tables. Jimmy was mopping the floor. The air smelled like pine disinfectant.

  “Heya, Jimmy. How’s it going today?”

  He jumped back, clearly startled, the mop handle pressed against his chest like it was a barrier. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

  I sat at the bar. “Thought we could talk about what happened last night.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Did you hear about the woman?” I asked.

  He began mopping again. “The one that got killed?”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  He turned to a fresh section of floor. “I got work to do.”

  “Need any help?”

  He didn’t answer, just mopped faster.

  “What time did you get out of here last night?”

  He jammed the mop in the bucket, sloshing water everywhere. Then he resumed swabbing the floor, wiping back and forth furiously, the long part of his mullet swinging from side to side.

  Molly’s body had been found a little after three, still warm. Bars in Texas had to stop selling alcohol at two. They could stay open until whenever, but the booze had to stop flowing 120 minutes after midnight, which was when most shut down.

  There was a lot of activity involved with shutting down for the night.

  You had to close out the register, restock the beer coolers. Make sure everything was shipshape. Then you had to lock up and turn on various alarms. I figured all of that might take forty-five minutes. Say, until a little before three.

  “Did you go out the back way last night?” I asked.

  He scooted the bucket to a different section of the bar, the area by the jukebox.

  “I’m wondering if maybe you saw something when you left.”

  He stopped working and stared at the jukebox. He spoke without turning around. “You need to leave, OK?”

  Jimmy had been a chatterbox last night, my new BFF. Now, he was like the guy at the feed store. Unfriendly, on the edge of hostile.

  “What about her children?” I asked. “Have you seen or heard anything about them?”

  Jimmy mopped furiously but didn’t speak.

  “You saw her children last evening, didn’t you?”

  No answer.

  “A boy and a girl,” I said. “You probably forgot to mention them to the sheriff when you were talking about me and those two guys in the cowboy hats.”

  He closed his eyes, muttered to himself.

  “So who were those two guys anyway?” I asked.

  He took several deep breaths, almost hyperventilating but not quite. His face was flushed.

  “You OK, Jimmy? You’re not looking so good.”

  “I just want to run my bar.” Emotion choked his voice. “Is that so hard to understand?”

  I didn’t reply. We weren’t that different. I just wanted to sit in a corner and read. Not be bothered. That raised the question: Was someone other than me interfering with Jimmy and his goal of just running his bar? Did that someone have anything to do with the death of Molly and the disappearance of her children?

  He jammed the mop in the bucket so hard the latter tipped over, spilling liquid across the floor.

  I slid off the barstool and took the mop from his hand.

  He offered no resistance.

  I sat the bucket upright and began sopping up the spilled liquid.

  “You don’t got to do that,” he said.

  I kept mopping.

  He pulled a chair from a table and sat, shoulders slumped.

  “Molly, or whoever she was, is dead,” I said. “But her children, odds are good they’re still alive somewhere.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Somebody needs to find those kids.” I wrung liquid from the mop into the bucket. “And I’m afraid I’m the only one who’s going to be looking.”

  Jimmy stared at the floor. “You ever wonder how things come to be the way they are?”

  I shrugged but didn’t reply. Most of the spilled liquid was back in the bucket. I decided to clean some of the floor. I began mopping by the bar, my back to Jimmy.

  “Like that story about the frog and the water that starts to heat up real slow,” he said. “You wake up one day and you’re cooked. Hardly even noticed it getting hot.”

  “Tell me about last night, Jimmy.” I didn’t look up from my task.

  One trick I’d learned as an investigator was to engage yourself in an activity while you conducted an interview. The subject would focus on what you were doing and be more likely to answer questions. I’d interviewed a CPA in Longview one time, got him to confess to killing his estranged wife with a garden hoe. I’d been sewing a button on a shirt during the interview.

  The technique didn’t work all the time, however.

  “You need to leave,” he said. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you.”

  “Who told you that?” I stopped mopping.

  No answer.

  I turned around.

  He had a small pistol in his hand, not pointing at anything in particular, just in my general direction. He held the weapon like it smelled bad.

  “You gonna shoot me, Jimmy?” I leaned the mop against the bar. “Did somebody tell you to do that, too?”

  “I just want you to go. That’s all.” He put the gun on the table. Wiped his eyes.

  “OK.” I eased toward the front door. “But I’ll be back.”

  “I know.” He sighed heavily.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I left Jimmy sitting in his bar, a morose look on his face and a gun he clearly didn’t want to use resting on the table.

  Outside, the day had gotten warmer. The sky was cloudless, a pale, washed-out blue that promised a hot afternoon.

  I stood in the shade by the front door of the bar and thought about where to go next.

  Across the street, the breakfast rush at Earl’s had ended. Only a handful of cars were parked in front, including the Toyota Prius driven by the out-of-town woman in the green canvas sneakers.

  Jimmy’s place was at the end of the block. The bar and the feed store shared a parking lot. The building next to the feed store was two stories tall, space for stores on the ground floor, offices up top. The structure was obviously vacant and looked like it had been built in the thirties.

  I decided to check out the murder scene itself, the alley behind the bar. So I walked around the corner of the building and into the parking lot, the place where all this mess had started. Suzy and her date and the white van, the woman and the two children.

  There wasn’t a white van in the parking lot this morning.

  Instead, there was an onyx-black Bentley.

  The British auto was facing the alley, idling.

  A man stood at the front of the Bentley, staring at the ground. He wore a black suit and white shirt. His hair was blond, neatly trimmed. He was not tall or short, maybe five eleven, average build.

  I walked between the wall of the bar and the Bentley. A figure sat in the passenger seat, an old
er-looking man eating an ice-cream cone.

  The man in front of the Bentley didn’t look up, though he must have heard me approaching. He continued to stare at the cordoned-off area, the spot where Molly had died.

  I stopped a few yards away and took stock of where the murder had occurred.

  Crime-scene tape ran from the back of the bar to the feed store, then across the alley, where it attached to the rear of another building.

  In the middle of the area was a rust-colored stain about the size of a large pizza box.

  The blond man in the black suit was tieless, shirt buttoned at the collar. He was in his forties, with a face that was long and thin, a pointed jaw that matched his nose.

  After a moment, he looked over at me and said, “Are you familiar with death?”

  Not exactly the greeting I expected. Not, “Good morning. Hey, what about this weather? Can you believe somebody got killed right here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “More so than I care to be.”

  A single, errant gust of wind rustled through the parking lot. A crumpled piece of newspaper blew across the crime scene.

  “The first time I saw a dead body was in Kuwait in 1991,” he said. “The Iraqis left seventeen in a house in Jahra. All women and children.”

  His voice was soft, accent hard to place, the cadence formal, almost stilted.

  “Hard thing to see,” I said.

  “Tears flowed from me that day.” He clasped his hands in front of his waist.

  Another piece of trash blew down the alley.

  “The poem by John Donne.” He looked up. “‘Every death diminishes me.’ I learned the truth of this statement in Kuwait.”

  We were silent. The boy from yesterday rode his bike into the parking lot from Main Street. He screeched to a stop a few yards on the other side of the man with the blond hair. The kid wore the same Dallas Cowboys jersey, No. 22, Emmitt Smith.

  The man and I looked at him.

  The kid stuck a cigarette in his mouth, lit it. “I heard somebody got killed. That’s some cray-cray shit right there, let me tell you what.”

  He was older than I’d thought originally, probably closer to eighteen. He was small, though, and pale, like he didn’t eat very well.

  “Her name was Molly,” I said. “Did you know her?”

  The man strode to the boy and yanked away the cigarette, dropped it on the asphalt. “Smoking’s bad for your health,” he said.

  “Screw you, old man.” The kid gave us both the stink eye.

  “This gentleman asked you a question.” Mr. Bentley pointed to me. “Did you know the person who died here?”

  The teen suggested Bentley Man perform an anatomical impossibility, a certain body part be inserted into a certain orifice. Then he rode off, middle finger held high.

  “Kids today.” I shook my head.

  “The breakdown of the family unit,” the man said. “No respect for their elders. Children running around like hooligans.”

  “I blame the Internet.”

  The man looked at me with a quizzical expression on his face for a moment. Then he stuck out his hand. “My name is Silas.”

  I shook, introduced myself. His skin was soft, grip firm. Up close like this, I could smell the Old Spice aftershave coming off him.

  “Did you know the victim?” he said. “Molly . . . that’s what you said her name was?”

  “I met her briefly last night.” I turned away from the bloody asphalt, looked at the Bentley. “Nice car. You live around here?”

  Two unrelated statements, one a question. An easy way to keep someone off balance, see what they comment on first. The problem with this technique was that guys who own Bentleys usually aren’t thrown off balance by some dude asking questions in the parking lot of a bar.

  “God has blessed me and my family greatly, Mr. Baines.” He handed me a business card. Plain black lettering with the man’s name—Silas McPherson—and an address on a county road. Below that was a single phone number and an e-mail address. “Come see me before you leave town.”

  “How do you know I’m not from here?” I stuck the card in my pocket.

  “An educated guess.” He smiled.

  “I’m not leaving for a while.”

  He cocked his head to one side.

  “Molly had two children with her.” I gave him a brief description. “They’re still out there somewhere. I’m not leaving until I find them.”

  “If you need my assistance, please let me know. I have certain resources at my disposal that might help.”

  I glanced at his Bentley again.

  The older man in the passenger seat was staring at a phone. For some reason, maybe because he appeared smaller than Silas, I got the impression he was the subordinate, an aide-de-camp.

  “Do you know where the body is?” Silas asked. “Molly’s.”

  The man in the passenger seat looked up from the phone. His eyes found mine. He smiled, a timid expression on his face. It was hard to tell because of the windshield, but it looked like one cheek was bruised or discolored somehow.

  “If no one claims her,” Silas continued, “I’d like to see that she gets a decent burial.”

  I looked away from the man in the passenger seat. “A burial?”

  “Even the least among us deserves a proper resting place, don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I told Silas McPherson good-bye and left him in the parking lot, standing in front of his Bentley. I wondered what one did in such a desolate part of the world to earn enough money to buy that car. Oil or cattle, maybe. Or perhaps he made his fortune elsewhere and chose to live in the region for the peace and quiet and fine-dining options such as Earl’s Family Restaurant.

  A curious man, that Silas McPherson.

  Yesterday, I’d seen a public library on a side street, closed at the time. The library would be open now, hopefully, and would have an Internet-connected computer.

  The next step in this type of investigation was a door-to-door, asking people along either side of Main Street if they’d seen anything. The same for the street on the other side of the alley. With the number of places that were out of business, I didn’t imagine that would take very long.

  Also, after my encounters with Jimmy and the guy at the feed store, I wanted to learn a little more about the town of Piedra Springs and my new pal Silas. A few minutes on a search engine seemed like a good way to get up to speed on both topics.

  I turned west on Main Street, walked past the feed store.

  From the front window, the old man who’d sold me the knife watched me go, a sour expression on his face. Evidently, he had finished his inventory chores.

  I waved and continued past the empty building.

  The library was two blocks away, on Maple.

  The next cross street was gravel, little more than an alley.

  First Avenue, that’s what it was called. I didn’t recall seeing a Second or Third Avenue, and I wondered if the founding fathers of Piedra Springs had realized they were never going to be as big as New York, so they just stopped with First.

  The four buildings at the intersection of First Avenue and Main Street were all empty. Dust covered their windows. Padlocks and chains dangled from their doors.

  For some reason, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I walked slower and rolled my shoulders, trying to keep loose and ready. For what, I didn’t know.

  Maybe the beer bottles on the sidewalk bothered me. Maybe it was because the air smelled like old cigarette butts and stale urine. Maybe it was the slight sense of movement just out of my view.

  Who’s to say?

  In any event, I wasn’t all that surprised when th
ey appeared, right as I got to the corner and was thinking about how easy it was for a town to go downhill when people used the sidewalk as a toilet.

  There were three of them.

  The middle guy was Suzy’s date from the night before, the ex-con with the swastika tattoo on his forehead.

  He had two friends with him, pale-skinned men in their thirties who looked like they were on their way to a Klan rally. The guy on the left wore a T-shirt with a Confederate flag on the front over a caption that read, it's a white thing. you wouldn't understand.

  The guy on the right had a tattoo on his forehead as well. Simplicity was its own virtue, I suppose, because his message to the world was a single word: racist!

  They stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking my way.

  I smiled, kept my tone friendly. “You fellows are on your way to the Barack Obama Appreciation Dinner?”

  Dead silence.

  The guy in the Confederate flag shirt looked at Suzy’s date. “What the hell is he talking about, Chigger?”

  “Chigger?” I said. “Is that your name?”

  Suzy’s date, now ID’d by his nom de guerre, flexed his fingers and glared at me.

  “You dissed me last night,” he said. “Messing with that girl’s head, telling her I ain’t good enough and shit.”

  Mr. Confederate Flag pulled a blackjack from his back pocket. The guy with the one-word tattoo slid a pair of brass knuckles over his fingers.

  “Time you learn some respect,” Chigger said. “A nice little tune-up, that’ll do you good.”

  There was no one else on the street at that moment. Just the three human skid marks and me, all of us standing on a sidewalk that smelled like piss.

  They were about ten feet away, clustered too close to one another.

  I walked toward them, hands clasped over my breastbone, a nonthreatening stance but one from which an attack could be undertaken quickly.