Plains Crazy

by J. M. Hayes

  “Our director, Brad Davis, he’s her father. She only answered to him.”

  That caught Doc by surprise. “Somebody’s got to inform him,” Doc said. “And I need her name for my records.”

  “Davis may not be easy to reach,” Sean said. “I just tried and he’s not answering his cell. But if you need to do the next of kin thing, I hear her grandmother’s in town for some kind of reunion.”

  “What’s her name?” Doc prompted again.

  “Jackie. That’s the girl’s name. Her grandmother is a former resident named Jorgenson.”

  Two surprises in a row and this one a lot bigger than the first.

  Sean looked like he was considering something for a moment, then he reached out and took Doc’s arm. “There’s something I’d like you to look at, Doctor, if you don’t mind.”

  “What’s that?”

  Sean led him toward the entrance to a Greyhound-sized RV. “There’ve been some weird things happening around here,” he said, opening the door and ushering Doc into an opulent interior. “Not just Michael. Jackie and Mr. Davis, they’ve been coming and going and there’s been this other guy here, sometimes late at night. Last night for instance.”

  “I don’t understand.” Sean led Doc past a living room and a kitchen and down a hall.

  “That other guy, I think he’s some kind of official with the county. Rumors say some bombs went off in Buffalo Springs today.”

  “Three of them,” Doc said, “but what’s that got to do with…”

  Sean opened a door on a small wood-paneled office that made up in luxury what it lacked in size. “Mr. Davis, he left in such a hurry, he didn’t tell me what to do about returning this vehicle. So I was looking for the registration or something when I found this. We’ve got no business having it.” He pointed at an empty container lying on the carpet between a cherry-wood desk and a leather recliner.

  Doc bent over and tried to make out what it was. There was printing on the side. The first line he deciphered read, “TNT equivalence: 118%.”

  ***

  Whenever something interesting happened, Mrs. Kraus got stuck holding down the fort in the sheriff’s office. Minutes after Englishman and Parker left the building, Supervisors Wynn and Finfrock did the same. She had to show Craig Finfrock that the sheriff’s handcuffs could be opened by anything you could fit in the keyhole. Then the supervisors ran out and jumped in the chairman’s Cadillac and hightailed it toward the explosion and left Mrs. Kraus behind, alone.

  On the bright side, phone calls flooded the office and the rumor mill kept her updated on everything. The blast had been half a mile east of town. Nothing more important than a few weeds and Osage orange trees, and a big hunk of highway, had been seriously damaged. There were lots of broken windows, especially at the school and on the east side. A couple of people had minor cuts as a result, but nothing more. When the sheriff reported he and Parker were making a high-speed dash to Wichita in Mad Dog’s Mini, she filled him in, then made the calls he needed. Sheriff’s offices in the counties they would pass through promised not to impede the speeding Cooper.

  Then it got quiet in the office. There were no more explosions or other catastrophes, so the phone stopped ringing. Mrs. Kraus began to get bored. That was why she decided to search Supervisor Haines’ office. What else did she have to do? She took along her Glock, not that she expected trouble. All the trouble she knew of had left the county and was somewhere on the road ahead of the sheriff. Still, you never knew.

  The door to Haines’ office was open. He had departed in a hurry, through a window in the sheriff’s office just ahead of that exploding grenade. She didn’t think he’d left behind anything incriminating. On the other hand, he might have thought there wouldn’t be anything there to investigate, not even a standing building.

  The room looked neat enough, though the wallpaper was faded and stained from leaks in the roof bad enough to seep clear through the floor above. But for a phone, a blotter, and a pen set, his desktop was empty. She went through his desk drawers. None contained anything more interesting than the files and memos she expected. Except one file in the bottom drawer on the right.

  It was filled with fake ID cards. They had Haines’ pictures on them, but other people’s names—Chairman Wynn’s and Supervisor Finfrock’s, and even a couple of Englishman’s deputies. And there was another one that hadn’t come out right. The county seal and some of the printing was smudged, like the thing had been touched before it dried. It looked like it said sheriff on it, only she wasn’t quite sure. She needed her magnifying glass to make it out. She carried it back to her office. She was still trying to read it as she went around the counter, angling it to catch the light from the windows in the west wall. She wasn’t watching where she was going and she stepped on a pencil that had been knocked to the floor earlier, along with the hand grenade. It caused her to lose her balance and go over sideways into a filing cabinet.

  “Damn, barked my shin good that time,” she said, sitting on the floor amidst the glass shards from the broken window, massaging her injured leg. She punched the offending file just hard enough to repay it for her seeping wound without creating fresh ones on her knuckles.

  That was when she noticed the fax machine was no longer plugged in. The fax sat atop that file cabinet. Its power cord was still attached, but the phone line wasn’t. It lay on the floor beside her. Mrs. Kraus wondered when that had happened. She hadn’t thought she’d touched the fax or the cord as she fell. She reached up to restore the connection and discovered a phone line was already plugged in there. Curious.

  She cautiously got on her hands and knees and peered around behind the cabinet. It was just a short phone line coming out of the back of the fax machine. It led to a gizmo, to which the loose wire she’d found apparently needed to be plugged.

  These newfangled contraptions had to go and be so complicated. Why on earth did the fax need a phone line to pass through a funny-looking box with some wires leading to…What was that back there? She brushed some glass aside and sat on the linoleum and stretched to reach behind the cabinet so she could pull the wires and see what they were connected to. Sweet Jesus, they went to what she thought was a blasting cap, stuffed into a roll of dough-like material and duct taped to a pint of lighter fluid.

  Haines must have hooked this up when he went through the faxes just before the incident with the grenade. Either he hadn’t made a good connection or someone had tripped on it and pulled it loose while they were trying to save themselves. Otherwise, she thought, it would have exploded when the next call came in on the fax line. And with the lighter fluid as an incendiary device, turned her into a crispy critter in a matter of seconds.

  Mrs. Kraus felt herself go all wobbly. She would have had to sit down if she wasn’t already doing so. This was the second time today she’d come whisker-close to being killed by one of Jud Haines’ weapons of terror. That was scary.

  A phone rang. Since it didn’t trigger an explosion, she reached up and answered it.

  “Just a second, Doc,” she said.

  A stray thought nagged her memory and she had to concentrate to snag it. When she did, it raised the hair on the back of her neck. She’d remembered one of her mother’s favorite sayings. Third time’s a charm.

  ***

  Pull over!”

  Mad Dog hit the brakes and guided the Mini Cooper to the side of the road. Before he could ask why, his brother had thrown the door open and vaulted across the ditch. That was when Mad Dog noticed the truck among the evergreens, and the way the ditch had been torn up as the truck found its way there. He and Hailey tumbled out as well while Parker tried to figure out how to move the seats so she could do the same.

  “They’re not here and there’s no blood,” Englishman said, looking worried all the same.

  “Who…” and then Mad Dog realized that the truck with the crumpled roof was Englishman’s, the one the Heathers had been in when they left Buffalo Springs after encountering that cou
ple in the Nissan. Mad Dog and his brother and Parker had been updating each other and comparing notes on the road.

  “Somebody must have picked them up,” Englishman said, worrying it over in his mind. “But they should have called to let me know this happened before it got reported to the office. They ought to know how much I’d worry, under the circumstances.”

  He came back across the ditch, stuck his head in the Cooper, and asked Parker to call the office. “They wouldn’t be able to get me on my cell,” he reasoned. “Not since the battery ran out. Maybe Mrs. Kraus has heard from them.”

  Parker’s phone began to ring before she could fumble it off her belt with the gauntlets on. She punched a button and told it, “Parker.”

  Mad Dog looked around, trying to picture how the accident had happened and what might have become of his nieces. Hailey was standing just a few feet ahead of the Cooper, front leg lifted, nose and tail extended. She looked like a bird dog pointing a covey of quail.

  “Is that Mrs. Kraus?” Englishman wanted to know.

  Parker told him it was, and handed over the phone.

  Mad Dog had never seen Hailey do anything like that before. “Whatcha got, babe?” He couldn’t see anything where she was pointing, just a footprint on a patch of bare dirt at the edge of the pavement. He bent and looked at it closer. The print had an unusual pattern. He’d never seen one like it before, not until about an hour ago over where they were filming This Old Teepee.

  Mad Dog thought he knew who the girls had gotten a ride with. It left a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t sure why until Englishman turned the phone off and handed it back to Parker.

  “Mrs. Kraus discovered a bomb in the courthouse, and Doc’s found something that confirms Jud Haines is one of our bombers,” Englishman said. “But he’s not alone. He’s had at least one partner it this.”

  Mad Dog nodded. He said the name at the same time Englishman did. “Brad Davis.”

  ***

  They hadn’t managed to peg the speedo. The Mini was heavily loaded, and there were too many little towns to pass through, each with its traffic light or hard-to-see intersections. That succession of hamlets came every five to eight miles, so much alike all of them could have been labeled Slow-Place-In-The-Road, Population Declining.

  “Jackie’s dead?” Mad Dog said. “My granddaughter?”

  The sheriff tried to stop himself from reaching a foot for the brake pedal that didn’t exist on the passenger’s side as Mad Dog threw them around a couple on a Harley.

  “She’s dead,” the sheriff agreed. “And she’s probably Janie Jorgenson’s granddaughter. Whether she’s related to you, that’s another question.”

  Mad Dog dropped well below the Cooper’s top speed to pass a horse-drawn Amish buggy. “Yeah, not if what Davis said is true. Then he couldn’t be my son, but who else could he be if he’s mixed up in this thing?”

  “Well, Haines could be Sam,” the sheriff said. “He might be forty, and I’ve never met or heard a thing about his family.”

  “If it’s Haines,” Parker said from the back seat, “he’s taken his sweet time getting around to killing you, Mad Dog.”

  “Look,” the sheriff said, “it’s obvious Haines is a crook. He had those faked identity cards Mrs. Kraus found. He most likely put that device on the fax. It’s all but certain he planted the bomb at the Texaco. Then there’s the money and the grenade. But that’s all we know for sure.”

  Parker ticked items off across her leather-clad fingers. “Mrs. Jorgenson says you have a son. Mr. Davis says it isn’t him. Mr. Davis says she’s his mother and the head of Windreapers. We’ve got no independent proof of any of that. But Davis and Jackie are linked to Haines and the explosives and now, maybe, Davis has the Heathers.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Yeah, that last part scares me. But right now, we don’t know who any of these people really are. Or if any of the stuff they’ve told us is true. It’s a tragedy about Jackie, but she was involved in this somehow—the arrows if not the bombs.”

  Mad Dog blew by a tractor pulling a piece of farm machinery and avoided the eighteen-wheeler headed in the opposite direction with less margin for error than Parker approved, judging by the way she started to grab for Hailey. “The Janie I saw today hardly seemed bent on destroying me or Buffalo Springs.”

  The sheriff agreed, to a point. “She stopped and took that bomb from Wynn Some, then tossed it safely outside of town. She may not want anyone to get hurt, but she knew what was in that sack. That makes her part of the bombings.”

  “Maybe,” Mad Dog said. “But I don’t believe she wanted to hurt me, or that she was lying about us having a kid.”

  The traffic was getting heavier as they closed in on Wichita. At least they had a divided highway to work with now.

  “Janie was in this car with me while it was rigged to explode,” Mad Dog said. “She sure wasn’t acting like a suicide bomber.”

  “No,” Englishman said, “Haines gets my vote. It’s like he was following a plan to scam the county until he realized all that money could be his alone. The first few bombs were set so they weren’t likely to hurt anyone—except the bomb in your car. Then things changed. He’d squeezed the money out of the supervisors and he was ready to make his getaway. That’s when he decided he was willing to kill people, other than you. The grenade you found, that was convenient, otherwise he must have planned to set off the bomb on the fax to insure the supervisors wouldn’t wise up before he skips the country and wires himself the money. Think about it. If Doc hadn’t stumbled on a curious assistant, and that grenade had been the real thing, why would we suspect him? We might still be sifting debris to find out who was in there. He could have been long gone by the time your car exploded.”

  Mad Dog skimmed by an RV on the right as a cement truck lumbered along, blocking the passing lane.

  “Ah, Hell,” the sheriff said. “I don’t have a clue about any of this. We’ll find out soon enough…or we won’t. But I’ve got to find my daughters and catch Judy before she gets on her plane.”

  ***

  Mrs. Kraus relaxed in the comfort of a window booth at Bertha’s from which she could keep an eye on the courthouse in case it suddenly erupted in smoke and flames. Bertha had taken pity on the stressful day she’d undergone and slapped down a big glass of sweet iced tea with lemon and a massive chunk of fresh-baked apple-crumb pie with the terse and unheard-of comment, “On the house.” It hadn’t been that long since the judge brought her lunch, but Bertha’s pies were to die for, and nearly dying in the line of duty was thirsty work.

  After the last bite, she picked up the cell phone one of Bertha’s customers had loaned her and punched in Parker’s number again. The phone sure had a lot more thingamabobs on it than she could imagine uses for, but if you just hit the right buttons, you got the party you wanted, and heard them better than she’d expected.

  “Another update,” she told the deputy.

  “It’s Mrs. Kraus,” she heard Parker inform the occupants of Mad Dog’s car. Then she thought Englishman shouted something like “You can’t fit through there,” and Mad Dog reply, “We just did.”

  “We’re just outside of Wichita,” Parker said. “What’s up?”

  Mrs. Kraus had already told them about the bomb wired to the fax machine and the stuff she’d discovered in Jud Haines’ office. And she’d passed along what Doc had found out at This Old Teepee.

  “I closed up the building,” she told the deputy. “Put danger signs on the front doors since you can’t bolt them shut. I got Chairman Wynn organizing county security. The crater in the highway already has a detour around it.”

  “Good,” Parker said.

  “Greatest thing,” Mrs. Kraus continued, “is a highway patrolman stopped in here at Bertha’s. He was sent to check on us. Minute he came in, everyone started telling him about the bombs. We finally got someone who believes us. He’s called for back-up. Just went to check out the courthouse a few minutes ago. I gav
e him your number. When he gets a minute, he’s gonna call to ask the sheriff what’s going on. I wasn’t sure what I should tell him, so I didn’t.”

  Parker relayed the information and told Mrs. Kraus that was terrific.

  “And I heard from Doc again,” Mrs. Kraus cackled, saving the best for last. “Most serious bomb-related injury he’s discovered was Deputy Wynn. The chairman’s son was idiot enough to eat some of that plastic explosive. He thought it was a sack of dough. Doc says he’ll survive, but he won’t be available for duty this afternoon.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Well, Doc hadn’t run into this problem before. He called poison control and reassured himself the stuff won’t kill you. Then he improvised. It ain’t gonna be the way Wynn Some feared, but that boy’s still got an explosion to look forward to when Doc’s most powerful laxative takes effect.”

  ***

  They were off the diagonal on the west side of greater Wichita. Mad Dog could see his brother fidget when they got stuck and had to wait out a traffic light on Ridge Road. The airport was just ahead. They should make it with a little time to spare.

  But traffic poked, staying tightly packed and stubbornly resistant to letting Mad Dog slip the Mini through. They caught two more red lights before Mad Dog made a space where one hadn’t seemed to exist and squirted around a van and onto the airport’s entrance road.

  “Long- or short-term parking?” Mad Dog asked. “Or do you want me to drop you in front of the terminal first?”

  But Hailey was fussing behind his ear, her attention on something off to their left, along the stretch of aircraft businesses and hangers that paralleled the easternmost of the runways between which the airport feeder road led.

  “I think that’s Jud Haines’ car,” Parker said as Hailey jumped in and out of her lap and made insistent nose prints on the window. A red Buick sat in a parking lot that served the airport’s executive terminal, as well as charter and private aircraft storage and service facilities.

  “The girls are probably at the main terminal,” Englishman tried to persuade himself, “unless they’re hostages.” He checked his watch and Mad Dog knew there wasn’t much time left if Englishman hoped to catch Judy.