Nights of the Red Moon

by Milton T. Burton

  The house was as orderly inside as out. Danny himself was a plump, bland man of medium height with short gray hair and a pink face that was unlined as a baby’s bottom. I took a grotesque modernistic chair that was surprisingly comfortable while Danny flopped down on a bulbous peg-legged sofa that was straight out of I Love Lucy.

  “Have you ever considered getting some new furniture?” I asked. “This stuff is a bit much.”

  “I know, but it was my mom’s, and I hate to think of getting rid of it. She grew up poor, and this place was her dream house.”

  “Where’s Wendy?”

  “She and some other lady have gone crystal farming.”

  “What in the hell is crystal farming?”

  “Beats me, Bo. She told me how it works, but you know I can’t keep that kind of shit together in my head. So what can I do for you?”

  I gave him a cold smile. “What do you think, Danny? Information.”

  “Yeah, but about what?”

  “The Twiller murder.”

  “I thought you nailed the Raynes kid for that.”

  “I did,” I said. “But there was somebody else involved.”

  “I wish it hadn’t happened, Bo. I hate violence. I really do.”

  “I know you do, Danny. That’s one reason I’ve cut you as much slack as I have over the years. That and the tips you’ve given me. So what do you know about Emmet Zorn?”

  He spaced out on me for a few moments. Like most tea heads, he often displayed the annoying quirk of not reacting to a question until long after it was asked, if at all. “Danny, what about Zorn?” I prodded gently.

  “Zorn? Oh yeah, Zorn. I’m on it, Bo. Thinking, thinking. Hmummm, let me see. I guess the last time I saw him was at a party Wendy and I gave here about a month ago. He wasn’t actually invited, but he and that Twiller woman came with some other people who were. But he won’t ever be allowed to come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “You need to understand that I’ve got certain fixed guidelines for parties. Nothing but food and drink consumed in the house. All smoking, whether it’s tobacco or anything else, is done on the patio. And no hard drugs. That’s an ironclad rule. Anyway, I caught Zorn and some kid doing lines in the kitchen and asked them to leave. That’s when he got real buddy-buddy and told me he knew how we could make some real money. I let him know that I had enough money to suit my modest needs, and then he tried to sell me the stuff.”

  “What stuff?” I asked.

  “Coke. A bunch of it. He claimed to be in tight with some big dealer somewhere and said I could double my money. I told him I wasn’t interested because I could get fifty years in prison too. Besides, I’m against hard drugs. You know that.”

  “Was he trying to impress you or did he really want to sell you the stuff?”

  “Who knows? If he was trying to impress me, anybody could have told him it doesn’t work.”

  I had to laugh a little. “You’re right on that. You’re the most underwhelmed guy I ever met.”

  “What’s the point in getting cranked up about all the important people some guy claims to know? I mean, we’re all going to be dead in a few years, anyway.”

  “So just toke up and watch it all slide by. Right, Danny?”

  “Works for me, Bo. Always has.”

  “How about Doyle Raynes?”

  “I can’t tell you much about him. Kind of a sad little guy, it seems like to me. He’s been to a couple of our parties with some other people. Mostly he just goes on about how he’s trying to restore that old junk car of his. I have a hard time believing he killed that woman.”

  “I know,” I said. “But there’s no doubt the body was hauled in his vehicle, so he had to be involved somehow. What about Amanda Twiller? Did you know her?”

  “Not really. She came with Zorn that night. I think she was all pilled up, but she didn’t cause any trouble.”

  “Did she leave with Zorn?”

  “I think so. Some of this stuff is hard to remember.”

  I rose to my feet. “I want you to get on the phone and call some of your doper buddies and find out anything you can for me, Danny.”

  He spaced out again. “Phone?” he finally asked.

  “The telephone, Danny.” I pointed at the side table. “That thing over there.”

  “Oh, you mean the phone. Sure, Bo, I’ll do what I can.”

  He followed me to the door. “I’m really kinda glad you stopped by,” he said. “It’s been a sad day for me.”

  “How come?”

  “I can’t find Little Trixie.”

  “You mean your black Chihuahua?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Danny, that dog died a couple of years ago.”

  “Are you sure about that? I could swear she was here just yesterday.”

  I sighed and gave him a gentle pat on the arm. “Have a couple more joints, Danny. She’ll come back.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Like most successful bull riders, Lester Sipes was a small man. He also had a very big hat. Which he happened to be wearing right there in his own hotel suite, along with a western-cut suit of dove gray silk and a pair of sharp-toed cowboy boots that obviously held lifts. When we entered the room he stood gazing out the window with his back toward us. Then he turned around and we saw the hard, chiseled face of a man in his early fifties who’d no doubt led an active and strenuous life. His skin was sun-darkened and weathered much like my own, and his eyes were hooded and deeply set behind lightly tinted aviator bifocals.

  “They tell me your name is Bo Handel, Sheriff,” he said. “Is that right?”

  “It is indeed,” I said.

  He looked at Toby. “And you are?”

  “Toby Parsons, Caddo County chief deputy.”

  “Pleased to meet you both,” he said without offering to shake hands with either of us. “I’ve had mixed experiences with law enforcement officers over the years. My father was killed by a Texas Ranger named Bonaparte Foley.”

  He whirled back around to gaze once more out the window, leaving us to absorb this strange announcement. While he was peering at far-distant horizons, he rocked back and forth on his high-lift boots a few times, then he turned back toward us and motioned for us to sit in the room’s two armchairs. He himself took the exact center of the sofa and opened an ornate humidor on the coffee table and removed a long cigar.

  “Old man Foley actually did me a favor when he wasted the bastard,” he said.

  “Really?” Toby said. “That’s a strange thing for a son to say.”

  “I think you’d understand if you’d known my father. I feel sure he saved me the trouble of doing it myself.”

  He stopped speaking and left us to meditate in silence while he went through that tiresome sniffing and clipping ritual with his cigar you often see in old movies—Lord Huffing-Buffington at his exclusive London club getting ready to tell the grimly amusing story of how the wogs in Rangoon buggered Lady Lifton. Eventually he got the damn thing burning and situated in the side of his mouth to his satisfaction.

  “My old man was a piece of trash,” he said. “A cheap hoodlum of the lowest sort. He beat me and he beat my mother, and he had no taste whatsoever. You should have seen how he dressed.”

  I was tempted to comment on the irony of his criticizing anybody’s wardrobe, but I didn’t. Instead I told him we needed to ask him a few questions. He appeared to ponder this idea momentarily, then he lost interest and turned his head a little to look at Toby. “I can’t help noticing that you’re black,” he said.

  We were both startled by such an oddball remark, but Toby recovered quickly and looked at me and said, “What’s he saying, boss?”

  I nodded sadly. “It’s a fact, Toby. We’ve tried to keep it from you, but…”

  Sipes gave us a quick stretching of his thin, rubbery lips that was meant to look like a smile and didn’t. Then he puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “I’m telling you all this just to let both of you know I don’t hold a
ny grudges against cops. I’m not a racist, either.”

  “None of that has been worrying us, Mr. Sipes,” Toby said. “But we would like to know about you and Emmet Zorn.”

  “Emmet and I are old friends. He helped me one time when I was broke and at my wits’ end.”

  “How about the Raynes boy?” I asked. “Your bonding company got him out on bail. Even if there was no actual cash outlay, there is substantial risk involved. We’re a bit curious about that.”

  He removed his cigar from his mouth and spread his arms expansively. “Emmet says the poor kid is innocent, a victim of circumstances. And part of the joy of being in my position is that I’m able to help those less fortunate than myself.”

  “I think it’s more than likely the kid has something on you or Zorn,” I said. “If Zorn were to go down he might decide to cut a deal and take you with him. So I see a little self-interest working behind the scenes.”

  “I regret that you take that attitude, Sheriff. Is it so difficult to believe that I can have charitable impulses from time to time?”

  “After everything I’ve heard about you, it’s damn near impossible.”

  “One can hear anything,” he said. “For example, you may have heard some silly stories floating around about my choice of automobiles. You may have been led to believe that I drive the kind of car I do because I’m superstitious. But that’s not true at all.”

  “It’s not?” Toby asked.

  “No,” he said and leaned forward and gestured dramatically with his hands like a stage magician trying to pull a rabbit out of a hat. “You see, I don’t believe in cause and effect. I believe events are controlled by association. I believe that if a black Mercury comes into my life at the same moment a fortunate event occurs, then by surrounding myself with black Mercurys, I can attract other fortunate events my way. A friend of mine who’s far more conversant with the subject than I am tells me that my view is borne out by quantum theory.”

  He stopped speaking and puffed on his cigar while he regarded us with smug satisfaction as though he’d just solved a problem that had vexed the world’s greatest thinkers for a thousand years.

  “Nonsense,” I said. “Cause and effect rules this universe, and in your case the cause is that a big shipment of your cocaine has gone missing. The effect is that you’re up here in my part of the country looking for it, and looking pretty damn desperately, unless I miss my guess.”

  “I don’t know anything about any cocaine.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me why a guy named Paul Arno showed up in town a couple of days ago.”

  It was a wild shot in the dark, but it hit the target dead center. Sipes jerked like he’d been struck by a bolt of lightning. He recovered quickly and muttered, “Never heard of him.”

  “Sure you have,” I said.

  He sat and sucked on his cigar until the coal looked so hot I thought the whole thing was going to explode.

  I decided to turn the screws a little tighter. “My friends at the FBI tell me that Arno is connected to the remnants of the old Scorpino mob down in New Orleans. According to them, the New Orleans outfit’s not involved in your cocaine business, and Arno isn’t really a made guy. He’s freelance. Which makes me think he might be working for your suppliers. What happened? Do you still owe them for the stuff? Or maybe you’re just fronting for somebody down in Colombia. Everybody has you figured as a kingpin, but what if you’re just a delivery boy in a big hat?”

  Sipes shivered a little, then seemed to pull his composure back around him like a shroud. He rose and took his cigar out of his mouth and did his staring-out-the-window routine again. When he turned back to us his face was once again impassive. “When my assistants told me you were here, I thought—”

  “Thought what? That maybe I’d be satisfied to sit around and listen to you bullshit about quantum physics and elevator boots? No thanks. I’ve got a murdered woman who was connected to your friend Zorn, and I’ve got several pounds of a very dangerous drug loose in my town. I’m not in the mood for chitchat.”

  He looked right at me, and for just a moment it was like a veil had lifted. I could see in the deep wells of his eyes the burning ambition and iron will that had brought him up out of the slums of Fort Worth. “Then since you don’t have a warrant, I believe I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  * * *

  We went out past the same pair of bodyguards who had let us into the suite. Like Sipes, they wore western-cut suits and monumental hats. However, this duo stood about a foot taller than their boss and came equipped with handlebar mustaches.

  “That guy and his charade got under my skin,” I said once we were out in the hall.

  “You’re right about it being a charade. He may have a few screws loose, but he uses his goofy reputation as a sort of shield. So what now?”

  “Let’s go off the clock and have a beer,” I said. “How does that sound?”

  After we had a cold one at a little hole-in-the-wall joint on the edge of Sequoya, I dropped Toby off at the courthouse and went home early. I took a quick shower and stretched out on the sofa in the den to wait for Sheila to stop by. I thought the day was almost over, but the hard part was just about to begin.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Everybody called them Gog and Magog. Those weren’t their real names, of course. Their birth certificates said Lon and Don Flanagan. The Flanagan boys were identical twins, now forty years old, six feet eight inches tall, and pushing three hundred pounds apiece, most of which was bone and gristle. They were pulpwood cutters, part of an extensive clan that had eked out a precarious existence for generations by feeding the paper mills of central East Texas.

  Gog and Magog lived simple lives that consisted of work, hunting, sex with their rawboned wives, and what they called “frolic,” by which they meant the periodic near-destruction of the Roundup Club, a large country-and-western dance hall that sat just past the city limit out on Route 9 South. These annual events constituted a sort of demented fall harvest festival for the pair, and usually began near the end of a weeklong drinking binge. Or as Magog explained to me when I talked to him in the jail after the last such affair, “All we wanted to do was have a few more beers and listen to the music.”

  Nelda Parsons’s father was the one responsible for their unorthodox nicknames. One night a decade and a half earlier, he chanced to be driving past the Roundup just as that year’s frolic burst out through the front doors and rolled onto the parking lot. Teeth, hair, and eyeballs were flying every which way, along with unlucky patrons and assorted lawmen, including a pair of rookie city cops who’d been foolish enough to answer the frantic call for assistance that had gone out over the police radio. Sweet and gentle man that he was, Reverend Parsons was so shocked by this unrestrained orgy of redneck violence that he later said that for a few horrifying moments he thought the tribulation had come to town, and that Armageddon was at hand.

  This statement got wide currency and inspired some other Bible scholar to reach far back into the maelstrom of Old Testament prophecy and extract from the Book of Ezekiel the names Gog and Magog, those two evil nations destined to plague the righteous in the earth’s Latter Days. The twins were flattered and let it be known that they considered the nicknames the highest compliments ever paid them.

  So it was not a joyful moment for me when Linda Willis hammered on my door a few minutes after seven that evening and interrupted my visit with Sheila to tell me that the Flanagan boys were firmly ensconced at the Roundup a full month before they were due to mount their annual assault on the public peace of Caddo County.

  “Have they caused any trouble yet?”

  “No, but everybody’s on edge. Otis stopped by there for a beer and said that the place feels like last year when we were under a tornado warning for two whole days.”

  “By the way,” I said, “why are you still on duty?”

  “I’m pulling a double. One of the evening guys called in sick, and I need the money.”

 
I didn’t like my deputies working double shifts, but with barely enough people on the force to cover all three shifts there was nothing I could do about it. “Let me get my boots on,” I said.

  “I want to go too,” Sheila said. “It sounds interesting.”

  “Why not,” I said, shaking my head in bemusement. “The more the merrier.”

  “You drive,” I told Linda when we got to the Suburban. I opened the rear door for Sheila to climb into the backseat.

  “What are you going to do?” Linda asked once we were on our way.

  “I’m going to make them go home.”

  “Can you do that? Legally, I mean?”

  “Of course not, but I’m going to do it anyhow.”

  “I’ve wondered why they always do what you tell them to do,” she said. “I mean, they’ll fight us deputies, and they’ll fight the city cops and the highway patrol, but they won’t give you any crap. Why’s that?”

  “That’s one of those stories that’s too rough for your young and tender ears.”

  “Damn it, Bo! I hate it when you say stuff like that. If I wasn’t driving this damn truck I’d kick you in the shins.”

  “Settle down,” I said with a laugh. “When we get there you both just stay well back away from those two. And whatever happens, don’t shoot one of them. We don’t want to annoy them any more than we have to.”

  * * *

  Except for the jukebox wailing out a Garth Brooks song that nobody was paying any attention to, the Roundup was almost silent, and the whole place seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when I came in the door. I spotted the twins sitting at a table on the far side of the room, calm and placid and looking like a pair of well-fed bison in striped carpenter’s overalls. I walked right up to their table without hesitation. “A little early this year, aren’t you, boys?” I said.

  “We ain’t looking for no frolic tonight, Sheriff,” Magog said.

  “That’s right,” Gog said. “We come to town to see you.”

  “Me?” I asked in surprise. The Flanagans weren’t the sort to take their problems to the law, and other than a few times over the years when I’d sent word that I needed to see them, they had never sought me out.