Early's Fall

by Jerry Peterson

  EARLY'S FALL

  A JAMES EARLY MYSTERY

  EARLY'S FALL

  JERRY PETERSON

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  * * *

  Copyright © 2009 by Jerry Peterson.

  Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced, transmitted, stored, or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including but not limited to photocopying, recording, scanning, digitizing, taping, Web distribution, information networks, or information storage and retrieval systems, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The Publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party websites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the Publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

  * * *

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Peterson, Jerry A.

  Early's fall : a James Early mystery / Jerry Peterson. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59414-678-7 (alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-59414-678-0 (alk. paper)

  eISBN-10: 1-4328-2487-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4328-2487-7

  1. Sheriffs—Fiction. 2. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 3.

  Kansas—History—20th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.E84286E26 2009

  813'.6—dc22 2008043357

  * * *

  First Edition. First Printing: February 2009.

  Published by Five Star in conjunction with the author.

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 12 13 11 10 09

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  About The Author

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  * * *

  There is the old saw that every newspaperman has a novel in the bottom drawer of his desk. I did not.

  But I did collect stories that intrigued me during my reporting days in Kansas, Colorado, West Virginia, Virginia, and Tennessee, stories that I felt might one day provide grist for a book. I fashioned the first of those into a series of short stories for novelists and University of Tennessee creative writing professors Wilma Dykeman and Allen Wier while I was a graduate student at UT/Knoxville.

  Several years later, Boston crime writer Jeremiah Healy and University of Wisconsin writing coach Marshall Cook critiqued portions of a crime novel I set in Tennessee and in the process became supporters of my work.

  It was a short story competition that fostered the birth of the character of Kansas Sheriff James Early who is at the center of the novel you are about to read. The Great Manhattan Mystery Conclave sponsored the competition, and the judges selected both Early stories I submitted for inclusion in the Conclave's anthology, Manhattan Mysteries: Deadly Tales from The Little Apple (KS Publishing, 2005). Encouragement came from and continues to come from Conclave organizer Marolyn Caldwell. And Manhattan historian Lowell Jack provided a wealth of material to me that was important in the writing of those stories and this novel. It is one of those curiosities that Lowell and I knew each other decades before our collaboration, when he ran Manhattan's K-MAN radio station and I ran Kansas Farm Bureau's communications department.

  The best characters we writers create take on lives of their own. Early is one of those and thus Early's Fall. Chicago crime writer Tom Keevers read a twenty-page section when he and I were at Love is Murder, a mystery writers conference in Chicago. Tom went to John Helfers of Tekno/Five Star—his publisher—and said you have to read this book. John did, or rather a panel of readers working for Tekno did and said buy this book. Chicago and now West Virginia crime writer Rob Walker became a booster for the book after he read the manuscript, as did Minnesota crime writer William Kent Krueger and Arizona crime writers Jim Mitchell and J.M. “Mike” Hayes. Here's another one of those curiosities. Mike writes a crime novel series that features a Kansas sheriff.

  Now to the good people at Tekno and Five Star to whom I am indebted for their assistance in getting this novel from manuscript into print and onto library and bookstore shelves: acquiring editor John Helfers, book editor Bill Crider, acquisitions editor Tiffany Schofield, project editor Alja Collar, cover designer Deirdre Wait / ENC Graphic Services, and copy editor Janet Patterson. I am a sharp copy editor, but Janet is better than me. Her work on my manuscript has proved to be of exceedingly great value and for that I thank her.

  And here comes the list you would expect if this were Oscar night. I wish to thank my mother who asked time and again why is it taking so long to get this book out—she's ninety-two; John Armstrong and his wife Ula—John is a former president of Kansas Farm Bureau and I was at one time his speech writer; a fellow writer from my newspaper days who wishes not to be named; my first wife Sallie who always supported me in my desire to write—she passed away before I got a book contract and then it was for a book I wrote after her death; my current wife Marge who is my confidante, my proofreader, and a resource on medical matters; freelance editor Rose Kennedy; Pam Harris, a writer and colleague from graduate school days; Bonnie Hufford, a journalism professor at the University of Tennessee and an editor; and fellow writers Gary Anderson and Ned Ricks—Gary critiques everything I write, and Ned is a regular resource on weapons and the soldier's life.

  Also I thank with sincerity Tuesdays with Story, my writers group in Madison, Wisconsin. We Tuesdays writers are one another's first-line critics, line editors, copy editors, and boosters. If you would like to know more about this superior writers group and read the weekly e-letter I write for them, please go to our Web site: http://www.tuesdayswithstory.org/.

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  August 15—Monday Afternoon

  The Jayhawk

  “Is that someone on a horse?”

  Jim Early twisted around in time to see a paint and rider slow-walk past the Jayhawk Bank's front window. “Yup, what's unusual about that?”

  Rance Dalby, the owner of the smallest bank in Kansas, nudged at Early's arm with the notary seal he'd been playing with. “Come on, Cactus, when's the last time you saw anyone ride into Randolph on a horse?”

  “Before Roosevelt marched us off to war,” Early said—Early, the sheriff of Riley County and a leather
y cowboy in his own right.

  “That's what I mean. That's ten years ago.”

  “Rance, we got ranches up on the high ground, and they got cowboys.”

  “But, dammit, they drive pickups today.”

  “So now you know, the Old West ain't dead.”

  The cowboy who had ridden past reappeared at the door of the one-teller bank, his hat pulled low, his spurs jingling as he came in. Dalby, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled to his elbows, ignored him other than to toss a perfunctory glance his way. He picked up a loan paper and fanned himself. “I tell you, I'm going out to the Blue and put my big bare feet in the water, maybe fish a little after Mavis and I close up. Get myself cool.”

  An explosion brought Dalby and Early out of their chairs. Early, still suffering from shell shock four years after the war, dove for the floor. When he came up, there stood the cowboy, a nylon over his face, a vapor of acrid smoke curling up from the barrel of a Forty-Five he held high.

  “Excuse me,” the cowboy said, his voice not much above a whisper. “Now that I got your 'tention, I'm here for your money.”

  He tossed a duffle bag to Dalby. It slapped down on the banker's desk and slid across, dislodging a stack of financials.

  Dalby attempted to work his mouth, but nothing came out. The cowboy waved his pistol at him. “Pick it up. I want everything from your teller's cash drawer, then your vault.”

  Early pushed himself to his knees. He brushed the front of his shirt. “Now, son,” he said, “you don't want to be doing this.”

  “Why not? I got the gun.”

  “Well, you could get yourself a nice long prison term, and I'm told Leavenworth's not the most pleasant place to be.”

  The cowboy brought his pistol down. He leveled it at Early, lowered it just a bit and jerked the trigger. The bullet threw up splinters as it tore into the plank floor by the sheriff's knee.

  “You're serious,” Early said, his eyes like saucers. He twisted around. “Rance, better do what he wants. As for me, I'm gonna just sit down here and wait.”

  “Good idea,” the cowboy said.

  “Yeah, I think you're right.” Early settled on his rump and crossed his legs in what his father had called Indian-style. Dalby hustled past. He held open the bag to his teller, Mavis Anderson, her face blanched white. She fumbled with her cash drawer as she dumped its contents in, and half a dozen coins missed the bag. They fell to the floor, bouncing, rolling, several to ring flat at the bandit's feet.

  “If you don't mind,” Early said, tapping his shirt pocket, “I'd like a chew.” He slipped two fingers in and drew out a package of gum. Early shook a stick out to the cowboy. “Teaberry. Got a flavor that relaxes you.”

  He waved it away as Dalby dashed by and into the vault.

  “Throw the mortgages in that sack too,” the cowboy called after him.

  Early, with great deliberation, unwrapped a stick of gum. He folded it and put it into his mouth. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “Doubt it.”

  In the instant that the cowboy glanced at Early, the banker slammed the vault door shut, locking himself inside.

  The bandit ran to the vault door, cursing. He banged the butt of his pistol on the steel and rattled the handle. When the lock refused to give, the bandit whirled on Early. “You did this,” he said, his voice a spitting snarl.

  He swung his gun hard at Early's head, and the crack of metal on bone sent the sheriff sprawling.

  The bandit whipped around to the teller. “Open the gawddamn vault.”

  Mavis Anderson, built to hold her own with any man, stepped back from her counter, her jowls trembling. “It's on a time lock. Won't open 'til eight in the morning.”

  “Shit. Then I hope he croaks in there.” The cowboy turned away. He ran, not for the street door, but for the window in the back wall of the bank. He dove through it, glass and wood shattering.

  Mavis Anderson peered after the cowboy before she hurried away from her counter, first to the vault, then to Early. She reached down for the sheriff's arm. “You all right, Jim?”

  “Phheww, Lordy, he clipped me good.” Early felt at his head with his free hand while Mavis hauled at his other arm. “Think I'm gonna hear telephones ringing for days.”

  “I thought he'd killed you.”

  Early got a foot under himself. “Mave, I got myself movin' when I saw it coming. Where's my hat?”

  “Over there.”

  He made a swipe at it as he came up, and a second swipe before he got hold of the crown. Early slapped his cattleman's hat on, wincing at the pain of it.

  “What we going to do, Jim?”

  “I guess go after him. Which way did he go?”

  Mavis hurried to the window. She leaned out. “There he is. He's riding up the alley, past the old hotel.”

  Early forced his legs to work for him, to carry him out the front door to his war-surplus Jeep. He twisted the ignition key, and the Ford V-Eight he'd dropped under the hood roared to life. Early slammed the shifter into first. He mashed the gas pedal, and his spinning tires threw up a spray of dirt that showered Everett Morgan running up from his grocery store.

  Early glanced down a side alley as he rammed the shifter into second—nothing. He turned back and blanched. A pickup came motoring down the middle of the street, toward him. Early jerked his Jeep to the side, jammed the shifter into third, and glanced over as he shot past the next alley.

  Another block and the town ran out with the Jeep rocketing up through sixty. That's when Early saw the cowboy, off on the Olsburg Road, the paint churning dirt, galloping east toward the rise that would take him and his rider out of the Big Blue Valley. Early tromped on the brakes, downshifting, spinning the steering wheel. He whipsawed the Jeep onto the Olsburg and again floored it, the war machine whistling across the tracks of the K&N and into the open, eating into the cowboy's lead.

  Ahead the road bent.

  But the cowboy and his horse didn't.

  The rider rammed his spurs into the paint's flanks and the beast took to the air in a leap that carried him and his rider across the borrow ditch and over a woven wire fence. They came down on the far side and disappeared into a field of August-tall corn.

  Early slowed. He steered the Jeep around the bend—looking, looking—and floored it one more time, speeding off toward a farm lane. Early grabbed up his microphone.

  “Alice, you there?” he bellowed over the whine of the Jeep's engine.

  “Yes,” came back a voice over the Motorola.

  “Robbery at the Jayhawk Bank. Guy on horseback. Lost him going east on the Olsburg.”

  “Robbery at the Jayhawk. Got it.”

  “Call the Pott sheriff, state police, and get Hutch up here.”

  “On it.”

  Early threw the mic aside as he tromped hard on the brake pedal. He skidded the Jeep into a drive that led onto the Bert Torben farmstead, dust billowing, his whip antenna whacking from side to side. Again Early floored it. He shot through the yard, Em Torben's chickens flying off in a claque of squawking and loose feathers. Early slurried the Jeep around the buildings, slowing when he saw Torben belting up his silo filler. The sheriff slid the Jeep to a stop near the elderly farmer, and dust rolled up over them. Early tried to wave it away, hacking at the taste.

  “You got a horse I can have, Bert?”

  Torben, gape mouthed, flapped at the billowing dust too. “Gawd, I haven't had a horse since I bought my Farmall in 'Thirty-Nine. What you need one for?”

  The sheriff sprang from his Jeep, gesturing across the way, toward a far pasture and the cowboy and his horse racing away across it. “To catch that sumbitch.”

  Early, angry, reached back for the Winchester in its scabbard in front of the windshield. He yanked the rifle out and sighted down the barrel at the retreating figure, adjusting for windage. Early squeezed the trigger.

  “Hell, you'll never hit him at this distance, sheriff.”

  “I know that, but he doesn't.” Early l
evered a new shell into the chamber. He fired, levered again, and fired a third time. Then and only then did he step back. Early brought the rifle up and rested the stock against his hip.

  Torben pulled off his straw hat. He wiped a hand back over his nearly hairless dome. “Guess I'm lucky I didn't have no cows out there, wouldn't ya say? You know, yer bleedin' from the ear.”

  “Huh?”

  Torben touched his own ear. “Bleedin'. Up here. Yer not hearing too good?”

  Early put his hand to his ear. When he brought his hand away, his fingertips were wet and red. “Got clipped.”

  The sheriff wiped his fingers on his tans, then levered a fresh round into his rifle's firing chamber. The gun again ready, he slipped it back into its scabbard.

  Early took a bandana from his back pocket. He dabbed at his ear as he and Torben stood watching the horse and rider, now no larger than their thumbs, clear a fence at the end of the pasture and disappear into a distant woods.

  “Shoot,” Early said, “he can go any direction now.”

  “So what's this all about?”

  “Robbery at the Jayhawk.”

  “He got the community's money?”

  “No. Your money's still in the vault. Locked in with Rance. I guess I better get back. Sorry for the disturbance.”

  “You know,” Torben said, “if you was to go up the Olsburg, you can cut over through Jessie Smith's land—he don't have it fenced. That'd bring you around to the back side of that woods. You might see him.”

  “Worth a try. Tell Em I'm sorry about her chickens. I probably scared a week's worth of eggs out of them.”

  Before Torben could answer, Early wheeled his Jeep around. He motored at a leisurely pace past the buildings and through the yard, but once in the farm lane, Early drove like a man possessed, skidding his Jeep onto the Olsburg Road. He raced away only to downshift at the end of Torben's fence line. There he bucked off through the borrow ditch into a hay field and tore across the newly mown hay, waving to a kid barreling down a slope in a doodlebug with a mower attached, laying more of the bluestem prairie hay flat.