The Wilding Probate: A Bucky McCrae Adventure

by D. J. Butler

  I had a good guess about what Charlie Herbert had meant by two trailers now too, and what had happened with the last will and testament written by Aaron Wilding, the truly final one. It was a will Charlie had probably witnessed, and Aaron had probably asked him to give it to the court. Charlie had gone and stuffed it under the door of the court he was familiar with—Sam Barlow’s magistrate court. That was where Charlie would have been brought if he’d been busted for speeding, for example, or fishing without a license. Charlie may not even have realized that there was a second court, until after he’d left the will, which had to have happened this week.

  Because Sam Barlow was out fishing this week. So he hadn’t seen the will, and no one else had either, because when Sam took off, so did his clerks. And at some point, Charlie had realized that he’d put the will in the wrong place. Maybe he’d been at the Fun Lanes that night because he was trying to tell Dad what he’d done. And Nick had found him there. In any case, what had been on Charlie’s mind in his dying moments was the fact that he had screwed up. Aaron Wilding had trusted him to witness and then deliver Wilding’s true last will and testament, and Charlie had taken it to the wrong trailer.

  Anyway, that was my guess. I didn’t explain any of this to Burt. I just walked back around St. Joe’s, keeping my eyes open and peering deeply into every shadow in search of Indra Wilding.

  “You stick this document in your locker at school?” Burt asked.

  “We’re not going into the school.” And then I had an idea. “It’s all bears in swimsuits, anyway,” I mumbled

  Burt stopped. “What the hell did you just say, kid?”

  That was it. Burt had heard the phrase before. It didn’t have to have been from Indra, but odds were, he was the source. My breath caught in my throat, but I tried to act natural. “I just come here for swimming. This isn’t my regular school.”

  Burt squinted at me. “A town the size of a pothole and it has two high schools?”

  “Kids come into town from half the county to go to school,” I explained. “This is St. Joseph’s. Howard High is the other high school.” I pointed vaguely in the direction of Howard.

  He didn’t really care. “So where are we going?”

  I didn’t want to tell him. I half-expected Burt to cheerfully cut my throat once he had his hands on the will, either because Rainbow had secretly instructed him to or because he was double-dealing as Indra’s covert ally. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Past the rickety stadium seating that ran along the side of the track, we hit Sam’s trailer. It was roughly the size and layout of Judge Ybarra’s, the principal differences being that Sam had better furniture—it was handcrafted, and I thought maybe he even made it himself—and his walls were covered with mounted fish.

  From the outside, it was still a pebble-covered box with a locked front door. I stopped.

  “For real?” Burt asked.

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure. But probably.”

  “What is this, like, the detention annex for the high school or something?”

  “It isn’t fancy,” I said. “But it’s the county’s magistrate court. I’m pretty sure Charlie Herbert brought the will here by mistake.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nodded. “I think he was trying to explain that to me when he died. Only I just figured it out tonight.”

  Burt looked around. On one side of us was St. Joe’s, which blocked out the lights of town, and on the other a street lined with old cottonwoods and living room lights just starting to wink out.

  Burt exhaled through pursed lips, then nodded. “Okay then,” he said, and he kicked in Sam Barlow’s door.

  The door gave way immediately. That was good, because the kick was loud, and I didn’t know for sure where Indra was, and I didn’t really want him to hear the noise and come find me. If, that is, he wasn’t already following us. I scanned around the trashcans and stairwells that made up this side of St. Joe’s, but didn’t see him.

  There on the cheap carpet, just inside the door as if it had been stuffed under, lay a manila envelope. On the front were scrawled the words JUDGE BARLOW.

  “Technically he’s not a judge,” I said.

  “Like I give a crap.” Burt stooped to pick up the envelope. “This it?”

  “It’s got to be.”

  “I’m not paid for ‘got to be.’” Burt pinched together the brad that closed the envelope, opened the flap, and shook out the contents. “This is the last will and testament of Aaron Wilding,” he read. “Dated just a week ago.”

  I felt a rush of vindication. It felt like relief coming in, but as it passed through me my stress levels were no lower. I could easily wind up right and dead.

  “So who gets everything?” I asked. “What was the fuss all about?”

  “Fuss?” Burt asked.

  “In the last will, Wilding left everything to his wife. I see now that he did that because there was a previous will, that he’d made when he was single, leaving everything to his kids. And I guess he decided…they didn’t need it, and she did. Or he loved her more than he loved them, or whatever. So he changed his mind again, right? Maybe he found out his wife was cheating on him, or maybe he just got a wild hair. And whatever he did, it was worth killing over to somebody. Maybe to lots of people.”

  Burt’s eyes narrowed. “Like who?”

  “Indra Wilding, for one,” I said. “I think he knew there was at least one more recent will, maybe he knew there were two, and he wanted to get rid of them so he could inherit again.”

  “Yeah? Who else?”

  I suddenly realized that I had come very close to telling him that Rainbow Wilding also had incentive to commit murder. Or that I suspected him of mixed loyalties. My grip on the Glock felt sweaty. “Well, clearly not your boss,” I said. “She’s pretty wealthy as is, it’s hard to imagine she would care about a little grow house full of stinkweed.” I hoped I was right about that. “But there’s Marilyn and her boyfriend. Marilyn stood to inherit everything, which I don’t know how much that is but it must be a lot if people are willing to go to all this trouble. And maybe she could only inherit if Wilding didn’t change the will.”

  Having said all that, I realized I didn’t really know what Rainbow Wilding was doing in Howard. If she really was rich, and she really didn’t care about inheriting her father’s fortune, why not just stay away?

  “You’re a thinker, all right.” Burt handed me the will.

  My left hand held the pistol, so I took the will gingerly between two fingers of my right hand. The sling’s position put the will a little further from my face than was comfortable for reading, but I could make out the words. I skimmed them.

  “Nobody inherits,” I said. “He wants to set up a wildlife trust.”

  I looked to Burt to gauge his reaction—did he know what Rainbow Wilding was doing here? Would he show rage, disappointment, satisfaction? Would he take this will and try to destroy it?

  Before I could see anything in the darkness, I heard the sound of gunfire. Not one shot but several, Bang! Bang! Bang!

  Burt staggered away from the door and sat down in a chair. It wasn’t voluntary; blood poured from his shoulder.

  I threw myself back from the door and peeked out the front window, just in time to see the muzzle flash of another shot.

  Bang!

  The bullet smashed into the monitor of an old desktop computer sitting on the receptionist’s desk in Sam’s front office. The monitor sparked and jumped, and then an ozone reek filled the small room.

  I fired three blind shots out the front door, bang! bang! bang!, then slammed it shut and dropped to the floor, keeping a careful eye on the window above me.

  “Burt!” I hissed.

  What he mumbled back to me was unprintable.

  “Sorry,” I said. “There’s a back door. We can—”

  And then I stopped. There was a back door, but Indra would probably assume there was a back door, too, seeing a trailer the same size and
shape as the one we’d broken into an hour earlier. Wouldn’t he run around to the back, to stop us slipping away, or to break in and catch us by surprise? Shouldn’t I break out the front instead, and run as fast as I could?

  Or call? Sam’s office had phones, I could call for help and just wait. How long would it take the sheriff or one of his deputies to get here? Surely only a few minutes. They were just a couple of blocks away. They might already be on their way now…

  “Kid,” Burt murmured.

  I looked at him. He held a pistol in his hand, a little snub-nosed revolver, and it was pointed at me.

  “Give me the will.” His eyes were slits.

  “Sure.”

  I stood up. Please, I thought, don’t let Indra Wilding be standing in front of the window or he’ll see me right now and shoot me dead. My shoulders were stiff as boards, I half expected to catch a bullet.

  But I didn’t.

  And then I threw myself sideways out the window.

  My ears filled with the crash of breaking glass. For a horrible moment, I imagined myself landing wrong in the shards, cutting my own throat or slicing an eye open.

  But it wasn’t a long moment, because then I hit the ground. I landed on my shoulder with a loud crack, and lightning flashes of pain shot down my arm.

  I heard gunshots. They sounded far away.

  If the shooter was aiming at me, he missed.

  I rolled onto my knees, whimpering, then staggered up to my feet and ran. By sheer force of concentration, I was still holding on to both the will and the pistol.

  Judge Ybarra’s court, I thought. If I could just get around St. Joe’s, I’d get to Judge Ybarra’s, and the deputies there would help me.

  I ran toward the nearest edge of the school. Each footfall was excruciating; the ground felt like a boxer, striking the soles of my feet.

  But there were no more shots. Maybe Indra and Burt had shot each other, I thought, my heart full of wild hope.

  I passed a big black walnut tree, and my feet were kicked out from under me.

  I hit the ground and lost my grip on both the will and the pistol. Something hit the back of my head, slamming my face into the dirt, and then I was dragged to my feet. I gasped for breath and it sounded a bit like sobbing.

  “It turns out we’re not quite done with each other, Rebecca McCrae.”

  My captor was Indra Wilding. He held me by the back of my shirt and shook me.

  “Is this the will you and your new boyfriend were talking about?”

  I was dizzy, but I saw he had both the Glock and the will now.

  I nodded. “I thought he was your boyfriend, though.”

  Indra laughed. “Good. Now all we need to do is catch a ride.”

  “You don’t need me,” I said.

  “Oh yes I do. For now.”

  I wished I was bigger, and weighed more. Then it might have been harder for Indra Wilding to drag me like he did, around the corner of St. Joe’s, behind McAllister’s, and back into Judge Ybarra’s parking lot. I felt like a stray cat being thrown off the property, and I had an image of Indra stuffing me into a sack and tossing me in the river.

  There was a sheriff department pickup truck parked behind the courtroom trailer, the kind with big saddlebags full of tools in the bed and an extended cab split down the middle by a steel mesh so the deputies could keep prisoners in the back seat. A deputy with a cowboy hat stood in the open door of the truck, writing on a clipboard with his back turned to us.

  I opened my mouth to shout a warning—

  And Indra shifted his grip, clamping a hand over my mouth. He held me with one arm around my neck, and with his other hand he kept the Glock pressed against my temple. If his wounded arm hurt as much as mine did, he must be in excruciating pain.

  But excruciating pain didn’t mean he would miss.

  “Mmmph,” I mumbled, but mostly I sucked in air through my nostrils, just trying to breathe.

  “Turn around slowly,” Indra said, when we were close enough to be heard. He dragged me forward, my toes scraping the asphalt.

  The deputy turned around. Only it wasn’t a deputy. It was Sheriff Sutherland.

  He scowled, the facial expression that’s scared many a Howard teenager into pulling his pants up and driving straight home. He leaned forward into his frown, which made his shoulders look even broader than they really were.

  “I assume you’re here to turn yourself in,” he said. “’Cause otherwise, you’d have been well advised to stay the hell out of my sight, pal. And you really would have been well advised not to sneak up on me with my friend’s daughter in a half Nelson like some dickhead amateur luchador.”

  “Shut up and give me the keys.”

  Sheriff Sutherland didn’t budge. “You understand the seriousness of what you’re doing, right? I mean, whatever else we can charge you with, and I have to tell you the county prosecutor is a vindictive son of a bitch who absolutely wants every offender in jail for life, you’re now throwing in a couple of counts of kidnapping. And on top of that, I’m really going to have to kick your ass.”

  “Three,” Indra Wilding said, “two…”

  Sheriff Sutherland held up his keys. I saw veins in both temples throbbing.

  “Set them on top of the truck. And your belt. And your ankle piece, too.”

  Sheriff Sutherland slowly cooperated. His eagle stare never left Indra’s face. “Bucky,” he said calmly, “if this clown ever takes the gun off you, bite him.”

  “Now put the handcuffs on your wrists.”

  The sheriff growled slightly in the back of his throat, but he cuffed himself.

  “Get in the back.”

  “Let Rebecca go.”

  “Rebecca is going to drive.”

  Indra released me, but kept the pistol pointed in my direction. Scooping up the sheriff’s guns and belt, he pushed Sutherland into the back seat of the truck and locked him in, taking his big hat for good measure. Then he handed me the keys.

  I climbed into the driver’s seat and Indra took shotgun. I had to scoot the sheriff’s seat forward and up to fit me, and when I finally took the wheel and turned the key in the ignition, awkwardly because I had to do it with my left hand, I was shaking.

  “Where to?” I said the words as calmly as I could manage. It wasn’t very calm.

  “My father’s house. You know the way.”

  I put the truck into gear and turned south, heading toward the Dog Ears and the Ups. I tried to focus on next steps, and how to catch Indra Wilding by surprise and get a gun away from him. Instead, I found myself thinking of Evil, and regretting that I wouldn’t be driving past the Fun Lanes or the Urgent Care, so I could see whether someone was taking care of him.

  “Is Evil okay?” I looked at Sheriff Sutherland in the mirror.

  The sheriff nodded. He looked like a caged bear on the other side of the quarter-inch-thick wire mesh, teeth grinding together and eyes shooting death wishes at Indra Wilding. “They got him to Urgent Care, thanks to your dad.”

  “Thanks to Dad?” I hadn’t expected to hear that.

  “Yep. He got a text from you, and remembered your cell phone had never turned up, so he figured out there was something fishy going on at the Fun Lanes. We sent a deputy and an ambulance.”

  Wow. Dad.

  “Evil will be okay. Shock, exhaustion, dehydration, but I think we got to him in time. You kids ought to know to take it easier the day after some jerk shoots you or bangs you on the head with a shovel. I’m surprised you’re still conscious.”

  “Say what you want,” Indra hissed. “We all know it’s only talk.”

  As we turned past the Dog Ears, I noticed that there were headlights behind me. Just a single car, and it was too dark to tell what kind of car it was. But the roads were empty enough that I noticed.

  And hoped.

  “So what’s the deal, champ?” Sheriff Sutherland asked Indra. “You say your father’s house. Does that make you a Wilding?”

  I had fo
rgotten that I’d reached that conclusion only recently. “Sheriff Sutherland,” I said, looking at him in the rearview mirror, “meet Indra Wilding. Aaron Wilding’s son, and once one of his heirs.”

  Indra said nothing.

  “That what all this bullcrap is about?” Sheriff Sutherland shook his head. “Money? I couldn’t imagine a stupider reason to shoot someone.”

  I didn’t say anything, but part of me wanted to point out that he might feel that way because he had plenty of cash. I could imagine lots of stupider reasons than money for shooting somebody. Anger, envy, and hate were all completely pointless reasons to kill another human being—money could be spent to buy security, good health, education, peace.

  Indra snorted.

  “So we’re your hostages, right?” the sheriff pressed. “You got the official truck, so you’ll get waved right past any checkpoints, that was a pretty good move. Mind you, if anybody tries to reach me on the radio and I don’t respond, they’re going to get suspicious. And then they might start stopping sheriff department vehicles. So either you ought to get out of the county as soon as possible, right now, before anybody starts asking questions, or you better get my cooperation.”

  Indra’s sneer flattened into a suspicious glare. “A minute ago, you were going to kick my ass.”

  “Oh, I’m still going to kick your ass, believe me. I get you in my jail cell, you’re going to have an astonishing number of accidents—slip and bang your face on the toilet, crush your fingers in the door, accidentally get a size thirteen boot up your butt cheeks. But in the meantime, I want you not to hurt Rebecca. So let her go, and I’ll drive you out of the county. Heck, I’ll drive you to Canada if you want. I’ll drive you right to the border on dirt roads where there’s nobody to check your passport, you can’t get a better deal than that. And nobody will ask you questions at any point, because you’ll be with me.”

  “You know I’ve killed people.”

  “So have I.”

  Indra scratched his chin. “Hold on to that thought.” Turning to me, he added: “Kill the lights.”

  I pulled over and turned off the headlights. We were just shy of the turnoff to the Wilding house. The car behind me slowed, then passed.