The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  Sheriff Trey Kerrigan parked his white Blazer in the middle of Main Street, behind a fire truck. He wore his election-year Stetson and a short-sleeved brown uniform blouse, with his silver sheriff’s star on the breast and razor-sharp creases. His father’s gun was on his hip in a polished black leather holster. Trey’s face was drawn and serious.

  The sheriff spoke briefly to one of his deputies before climbing up to view Cal’s body in the smoky debris. A few minutes later, he clambered down, the cuffs of his brown uniform trousers black with soot.

  “I’m sorry about all this, Jeff,” he said, wiping the smell of death away from his nose. “Looks like a bomb. We got the state arson team and the ATF on the way from Cheyenne. I’m fair certain they’re gonna want to ask you some questions.”

  Morgan nodded but said nothing. He was eager to tell them about Pierce’s threats, and to begin rebuilding his newspaper, starting with the next edition.

  Trey Kerrigan swept his boot through the glass that covered the sidewalk.

  “You don’t happen to know who the body is up there, do you?”

  “I think it’s Cal Nussbaum. The place was empty when I left for dinner, but Cal was going to come back to the office last night to finish some pages,” Morgan said. Then he realized the dark task before him. “I have to tell his wife.”

  “Don’t worry,” the sheriff said, “I’ll send somebody over to his place as soon as we get the coroner up here. Shouldn’t be long.”

  “No,” Morgan insisted. “It should be me. I owe him that. They have a place up on Nightcap Creek, ten miles out. They don’t have a phone. She won’t know about the fire.”

  “I’m sorry, Jeff. I can’t let you go.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t let you go.”

  Morgan’s heart convulsed.

  “What, am I a suspect now?”

  Kerrigan looked away, down the street.

  “Maybe.”

  Morgan was stunned.

  “You must be shitting me. You think I’d blow up my own newspaper? Give me a fuckin’ break, Trey.”

  The sheriff glared at his old friend.

  “No, you give me a break. Don’t play me for some dumb-ass tinhorn cop. I ain’t sayin’ you done it, but everybody knows you’re havin’ major-league financial problems. It raises questions. Big-city cop reporter, you been around these investigations. You know the routine.”

  “You think I torched the paper for the insurance money?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You don’t have to, Trey. I know the routine, remember? Well, goddammit, I didn’t do it. We’d just turned the corner and I always had other options for money. But not this. No way. You know me.”

  “That was once upon a time. You went away and I don’t know who you are now, Jeff.”

  Anger welled in Morgan.

  “I didn’t change. You did. You’re too goddamned worried about keeping your job. That badge is weighing you down, my friend.”

  Morgan nearly spit the last word. He saw Trey Kerrigan’s right hand curl into a fist at his side and he stepped back to give himself plenty of time to fend off the blow. It never came.

  Instead, Kerrigan leaned toward his old friend and spoke in an angry whisper: “Fuck you, Jeff. I’ll take you down in a minute and don’t think I won’t.”

  A nervous sweat was trickling down Morgan’s side. For the first time in his conscious memory, he faced Trey Kerrigan as an enemy. He felt as if he were fighting for his life. Even if he understood his suspicions, it frightened him to be a suspect. He fought through it.

  “Trey, if you’re arresting me, then take me back to the jail so I can call my lawyer. If you aren’t, get out of my face. I have to go home and tell my wife what happened here,” he said, trying to hold himself together. “Then I need to go out and see Betty Nussbaum. She needs to know. What’s it going to be?”

  Momentarily outmaneuvered, Kerrigan scowled.

  “The feds and the state fire boys will be here by lunchtime.” The sheriff thumped Morgan in the chest with his thick index finger. “You’d better be where I can find you or I’ll hunt down your ass myself. I swear to God I will.”

  Morgan said nothing and walked away. Kerrigan watched him get into the wounded Escort and attempt to start it. By the third gasping try, the sheriff was shaking his head, a mocking smile on his lips.

  Just as Morgan was about to abandon the heap and walk, the engine turned over. Kerrigan himself pointed the way through the emergency vehicles still parked in the street, across several unfurled fire hoses toward home.

  As he passed, the sheriff cocked his thumb and forefinger like a pistol and, from his hip, aimed it at Morgan. Through the windshield, Morgan watched the hammer fall.

  Claire was waiting for him. Already dressed in her baggy painting pants and a gray Northwestern University tee-shirt, she rocked nervously on the top step of the front porch. When she saw his car, she ran out to the end of the driveway to meet him. Before he spoke, she lost it, her shoulders heaving as she wept in his arms.

  “It was the paper, Claire,” he told her as she held him tight. He clung to her as if she were the last thing in his world. “It’s gone.”

  “They killed him,” she sobbed, unable to catch her breath. “They were here and they killed him. I went out to make room in the shed for my painting stuff and I found ... him that way. Oh, god.”

  Claire’s face was buried in his chest, but she swept her arm toward the house.

  She couldn’t have known about Cal. Not so soon. Morgan wrapped his arms more tightly around her and guided her across the lawn toward the front door. Safely inside, he sat her on the sofa and searched her tear-streaked face. Her eyes were frightened and red.

  “Killed who? Tell me,” he said, wiping tears from her cheeks. “Please tell me.”

  Claire just pointed toward the back door. “Out there,” she said.

  Morgan touched her cold hands and went into the kitchen alone. Last night’s dinner dishes were still on the table, but nothing looked awry. The back door was open. Outside, the porch light still glowed as morning blossomed.

  He walked across the backyard. The thick lawn was dewy and he felt the cool wetness seep through the soles of his shoes. It was still before six and the neighborhood was quiet. No children playing, no dogs barking.

  No dogs.

  He called for T.J.

  Nothing.

  Morgan called again, but the dog didn’t answer.

  As he turned toward the house, he found T.J. The pup had been skinned and hanged by a chain from the porch eave, dangling from a railroad spike driven through his neatly sliced neck. His belly had been slit and blood dripped onto a small, sad pile of guts that cooled in the morning air beneath the carcass.

  Morgan ran inside to Claire. She had composed herself, but was still trembling and cold. He wrapped a hand-knitted afghan across her shoulders.

  “He called,” she murmured as her husband held her close, trying to share his body heat. “He called after ... I was afraid to answer the phone, so I let the machine pick it up. I heard him.”

  She pointed toward the answering machine on a curio table in the hallway. It blinked ominously.

  Morgan left her on the couch and pushed the button. The machine beeped once and rewound. The message was brief and chilling, the voice unfamiliar.

  “You make it too easy, Jew-lover. We got your paper and your fuckin’ dog, easy. We’re comin’ for your pretty Jew wife next if you keep askin’ questions. We don’t need your kind here. You ain’t gonna do to us what you done to P.D. Comeaux. You know us and you know we don’t care nuthin’ about killin’ prairie niggers or Jews, which ain’t even good as dogs. That Indian-trash kid wasn’t worth comin’ home and findin’ your wife gutted like a dog, was she? So don’t go pokin’ your fuckin’ nose where it ain’t supposed to be.”

  The message ended abruptly. Morgan removed the tape from the machine and dropped it in his pocket. His hand was shaking
and his head throbbed. He was exhausted and afraid.

  But now he knew.

  He couldn’t know exactly who called, but he knew in his heart who’d sent the message.

  He knew who’d bombed The Bullet, killing Cal Nussbaum.

  He knew who slaughtered Claire’s puppy.

  And, for the first time since Neeley Gilmartin had come to him, he knew who’d probably killed Aimee Little Spotted Horse and thrown her tiny body into the Black Thunder River gorge. Even if he didn’t know why or how, he knew there was a connection.

  Malachi Pierce.

  Morgan didn’t want to leave Claire alone at the house, even though she had progressed from shock to seething anger. Now she was mad. But he wasn’t sure she was safe by herself, so he took her with him to deliver the answering-machine tape to Sheriff Trey Kerrigan. Not only would it exonerate him, it offered a new lead in the arson-murder at The Bullet.

  Downtown at the fire scene, Morgan found Trey Kerrigan in a grim conversation between the sheriff and the county coroner about the dead man, whose remains lay heaped in a black plastic body bag on a gurney between them, part of the discussion but past caring. He hung back, watching and listening.

  The verbose Carter McWayne had followed his father and his grandfather in the funeral business and the distasteful corollary job of Perry County coroner. In his mid-forties, his fleshy face and enormous belly might have belonged to any devotee of The Griddle’s fatback-gravy specials, but his bulging eyes marked him as a McWayne.

  Now the coroner waggled his sausage-like fingers as he explained it would be a day or two before he could positively identify the body with dental records and medical X-rays, if they existed at all.

  “We got your basic full-thickness, fourth-degree burns here,” he said with all the passion of his craft. That is to say, none.

  Carter McWayne had always fancied himself a medical professional, even though he was no more qualified to the privilege than a hospital janitor. He was an undertaker, not a doctor. But his sepulchral voice rose from the blubbery tomb of his chest and spilled out fifty-cent anatomical words with unimpeachable authority, albeit with a fat man’s breathy punctuation. The corpulent coroner’s heavy breathing seemed to be a conscious process.

  “There is coagulation necrosis of the epidermis and dermis, with destruction of the dermal appendages. Soft-tissue facial structures are mutilated, muscle is exposed and ruptured, no fingers for prints, cranial vault shows heat fractures. We got significant epidural hematomas, frontal and parietal, probably post-mortem.”

  “Goddammit, Carter, try to say it in English,” the sheriff bristled.

  “That is English,” McWayne growled in his deep voice. “But it means this fella’s a big mess.”

  “Will you be able to make an ID?”

  “Not me. I’ll have to get the forensic pathologist down in Cheyenne to come up here. If he can’t get comparative X-rays, he’ll probably do DNA. But don’t count your chickens, Trey. There’s a chance we’ll never know.”

  “That’s it?” the sheriff asked incredulously.

  “I don’t have X-ray vision.”

  “Could it be Cal Nussbaum?”

  McWayne shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “I can only tell you it was a male.”

  “How’s that?”

  “That’s a funny thing about fire victims. Where he was laying on the flat, concrete floor, the skin of his back was perfectly preserved, along with some clothing and glass. No obvious mortal wounds, but there’s too much hair on his back for all but a few of the women around here.”

  “Did he die before the fire started?”

  The short-winded McWayne shook his head, the mushy bag of fat under his chin quavering out of sync.

  “Sorry, sheriff. Too friggin’ much damage.”

  “Best guess, Carter.”

  “That’s your job, Trey. But the floor under him wasn’t scorched, and there was lots of unburned debris. It’s a better-than-even bet he was rendered unconscious, maybe killed, by the concussion of the bomb. Don’t quote me.”

  Kerrigan twisted one end of his prodigious mustache as he listened, his forehead creased with impatience. He wanted more and he wanted it faster than he was getting it.

  Morgan couldn’t wait any longer. He stepped forward and pressed the cassette tape into the sheriff’s hand. Trey Kerrigan seemed startled to learn that he’d been standing near enough to hear. Suspects, he knew, should be kept at a comfortable, uninformed distance.

  “This should help your investigation,” he said brusquely. “It’s from my answering machine. The caller makes threats against my wife. And if you send a deputy over to my house, he’ll find my dog butchered on the back porch. They made their point.”

  Kerrigan turned the cassette over and studied it. Then he squinted at Morgan.

  “What am I gonna hear on this tape?”

  “Threats.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But it looks like this explosion is related to the Gilmartin case. Listen to the tape and decide for yourself. But, personally, I think you’re going to want to have a little talk with Malachi Pierce.”

  “Pierce? Christ, you think this was a militia hit?”

  “It’s more than that. It might be a murder cover-up. But right now, you don’t want to take my word for it anyway. I’m still a suspect, remember? Listen to the tape yourself.”

  Kerrigan unbuttoned his shirt pocket and put the cassette inside. “Any other surprises?”

  “No, but I need a big favor. Can you have a deputy take Claire to the airport in Blackwater and put her on the next flight to Chicago? I need to know she’s safe. The tape will tell you why. I’ll take her back to the house and pack some things and make the arrangements, if you’ll have somebody pick her up in, let’s say, an hour?”

  Kerrigan pondered his request, but not long.

  “I ain’t no taxi service,” he bristled. “Damned if I’m gonna help a suspect’s wife flee the state.”

  “In that case, Trey,” Morgan said. He scribbled Jerry Overton’s name and the phone number for the Chicago ATF bureau in his pocket notebook, then tore the page out. He handed the scrap of paper to the sheriff.

  “Call this guy. Tell him everything. He can help. And if something happens to me or to Claire, make sure he knows.”

  Morgan turned and started back to his car, where Claire was anxiously rolling the radio dial up and down the FM band, searching for distraction. He’d left the motor running.

  “Not so fast. We got things to settle, damn you.”

  Morgan kept walking.

  “Go to hell, Trey.”

  Nightcap Creek was a place of legend.

  Before the turn of the century, a mad French trapper claimed the stream was visited by a ghostly brigantine that sailed up its rocky channel at midnight on a certain night each year. Nobody ever saw the supernatural sailing ship, although in Morgan’s day the secluded stream became a favorite haunt of horny teen-agers who stole away in their fathers’ cars to watch for it through the carnal fog on their windshields. Many stories were told on the banks of the Nightcap.

  A few families — Cal and Betty Nussbaum among them — bought land in the Nightcap drainage and hauled their shabby trailers up there. Most of them were set back from the dirt road among the lodgepole pines, close enough to pump water from the creek in the warmer months.

  Cal’s mobile home was sun-washed green and dirty white, surrounded by a buckrail fence. A rough-hewn cedar shingle hung from the top rail, with the name NUSSBAUM spelled out in three-inch-high block letters. Morgan turned through the open gate, rolled the Escort to stop in front of the trailer and set the emergency brake so he wouldn’t have to turn off the engine.

  “Want to come in with me?” he asked Claire.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t take it right now,” she said.

  Claire turned up the radio and pushed the buttons huffily. On the way to Nightcap Creek, her husband had explained why
he wanted her to go to her parents’ home in Chicago for a week, maybe two, until he could find his equilibrium again. She didn’t want to go. She resisted, saying she was a big girl who learned more about prejudice before she was ten than the grown man who now sought to protect her from it. The more Morgan deflected her arguments, the more frustrated she got. By the time they reached Nightcap Creek, she had nothing left to say and no new way to say it.

  “I won’t be long,” Morgan said.

  The mountain forest around him smelled fresh and clean, although smoke still adhered to his clothes. The air was cool under the cover of the trees, the soil soft. Old pine needles crackled under his feet as he climbed the three steps to the trailer’s front door. Morgan breathed deeply and knocked. He checked his watch: it was six-fifteen in the morning and the sun cut long, sharp shafts through the pines. He hoped he would not be waking Betty to a nightmare.

  Someone moved inside. The trailer rocked gently as someone walked across the floor. The latch clicked and he steeled himself to deliver the grim news of Cal’s death. He prayed she didn’t ask if he’d seen the body.

  Betty Nussbaum was tall, like Cal, but with a pleasant face and faded strawberry-blond hair sugared with white. She wore thick glasses that made her green eyes as big as shimmering pools on the Nightcap. As she opened the door, Morgan smelled fresh coffee and biscuits wafting from the trailer. She’d been making breakfast.

  “Good morning, Jeff,” she greeted him. “You’re up early.”

  Morgan cleared his throat and looked down at his shoes.

  “Betty, it’s about Cal.”

  “Cal’s not here. He was gone when I got up.”

  “I know. That’s why I came up.”