“Hush!” I heard a smack and knew Yolanda had pasted him one. “I’ll let you know.”
We hung up and I followed Highway 385 to Dimmitt. Though most of the little panhandle town was dying on the vine, the usual small-town businesses like the café, drugstore, antique shops, and ironically, a downtown real estate office were still alive. The local hospital seemed to be managing well, and there were several highway patrol cars parked in front of the DPS station. An appliance store, the obligatory True Value hardware store, and a Dollar General said the tough bantam-size agricultural town just might survive the hard times and prosper again.
I’d given Sheriff Davis a courtesy call before leaving the Amarillo city limits. He was used to working with the Ranger Dan Bills assigned to Company C who lived in Hereford, about twenty miles away.
The cigar-chomping sheriff wearing khakis and a tan shirt was waiting on me in the front yard hemmed in with yellow crime-scene tape. Another strip was fixed across the front door of a typical ranch-style house built in the 1960s. He waved as I drifted off Highway 385 and into the drive.
“You look like a Ranger. Cameron Davis.” He stuck out his hand as I climbed out of the truck.
“Good to meet you, Sheriff Davis. Sonny Hawke.”
“I figured you’d be interested in this one. Got a parolee here, Eric Lang. He was murdered last night.”
“Where’d you find him?”
Davis tilted his straw hat back and pointed with the cigar between two fingers. “Half in and out of the door right there. I expected Dan Bills to be here with you.”
And right off the bat I was in dangerous territory. “Well, Dan’s out of pocket, and I’m investigating similar murders, so here I am. What do you think happened?”
“I don’t think. I know what happened. Somebody knocked on the door and shot Lang three times when he answered. Killed him graveyard dead and then drove off like nobody’s business.”
I looked the two-lane up highway and down. Whoever’d pulled in had no way of hiding his vehicle in the long, bare driveway. “Witnesses?”
“Lang’s mama. Said she heard the knock and the shots.”
“Didn’t see the shooter?”
“It takes Miss Abigail a while to get out of her chair. One of them electric lift jobs that stands her up, but the gears move slow. Hell, even if she did get a look at the guy, her cataracts are so bad I doubt she’d have seen much more’n a shape.”
“So this loser was living with his mama?”
“Yep. Fits the profile, don’t it? He never got off the tit, just moved in and lived off her Social Security check and a little retirement her old man left her. She never believed that sorry outfit did any of the things he was accused of.”
“Did anybody unroll his rap sheet for her?”
“Not that I know of, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t care.” He chewed on his cigar. “She started covering for him when he was a kid and got in trouble in school. Always said, ‘Not my boy, my Eric wouldn’t do something like that.’”
“You sound like you heard her.”
“Knew her all my life, and him, too. Went to school with the sonofabitch.”
“I’ve heard that story a hundred times.”
“Yep, and you’ll hear it a hundred more.”
“She have anything else to say?”
“Well, her eyesight’s gone, but not her hearing. Said the killer sentenced Lang like an old-timey judge, said, ‘This is for the crimes and murders you’ve committed. ’”
“That’s a pretty long speech for the victim to stand there and listen to.”
“Said it after he shot, while Eric was breathing his last.”
“Hum.”
“Said the killer had a diesel. Heard it through the open door when he drove away.”
“She sure?”
“The old gal was raised on a farm and only moved to this house when her husband died back in ninety. She can probably tell what make of truck it was from the sound.”
“What happened then?”
“Said she saw Lang laying in the door and dialed the operator.”
“Not 911?”
Sheriff Davis removed his cigar and spat onto the sparse, dry grass. “Said she was so rattled she couldn’t remember the phone number for 911.”
We laughed together.
The sheriff stuck the cigar stub back in the corner of his mouth and adjusted it with his tongue. “The truth is, whoever shot Lang did ever’body a favor. We were already looking at him for some burglaries that started about the same time he got back, and if I’s a bettin’ man, I’d say he had something to do with starting up a new business here selling crystal meth and that’s caused a little. . . tension . . . with the Smith family who lives just across the county line.”
“Who’re they?”
“About the sorriest bunch of no’count sonsabitches you ever saw. I’m thinking they might’ve had something to do with this killin’, if it wasn’t your guy, and here’s a little interesting tidbit. The sheriff over in Swisher County has a hunch the Smiths were working with a couple of guys you know of.”
“Who’s that?”
“Do Miguel Torrez and Eric Navarro ring a bell?”
A cold chill went down my spine. “Those are the guys I tangled with back outside of Alpine.”
“That’s right. There’s a little drug pipeline running from down in your part of the world in Big Bend, through here and up to Amarillo where it catches I-40 east and west. Sheriff Guzman over in Swisher County says those boy’s names popped up last week when he took one of the Smith boys in for possession. It wasn’t enough to hold him but for overnight, but when I told him you were on the way out today it rang his bell. Anyway, I’m fixin’ to head over there right now to meet him ’n talk about this shooting. You can come along if you’re still interested in what happened down your way, and then you can mark this one off your list of people your traveler’s after.”
“The Traveler. That fits him.”
An eighteen-wheeler passed with a clatter when his Jake brake engaged. Out of habit I glanced up at the same time a pickup passed in the opposite direction pulling a silver Airstream.
“Um humm. I’ll go with you.” My cell phone rang. “Give me a minute, will you?” I walked back to my truck. Another Jake brake slowed an eighteen-wheeler as it approached the town limits, the engine throttling down loud enough to make it hard for me to hear. I stuck a forefinger in my opposite ear, at the same time wondering how anybody could stand living on such a loud highway. “Hello.”
“Got a minute?” It was Yolanda.
“Sure.”
“I did an internet search for people in West Texas who’ve been released from murder charges on technicalities. You’d be surprised at how many felons get off because of paperwork, or because a judge is feeling generous that day. There’s a lot more than your guy there, Eric Lang.”
“None of this is surprising at this point.”
“Well, I narrowed it down from where you are, say to Quanah then south to Del Rio, and this Dimmitt guy popped up with a few more. Since you said the killer might be headed east. I looked on Google Maps and plotted some of the names. There are three within a day’s drive if you don’t get a lead on his whereabouts. I guess he got away as usual.”
“Yep. Nobody saw him, just heard his voice. But at least we’re on his track. Now we need to trail this guy. Where else do you have felons he might be interested in?”
“Wichita Falls, Comanche, and Del Rio.”
My heart sank as a mental map appeared stretching from the Rio Grande on the southern border up to the Red River dividing Texas from Oklahoma. “Pretty big spread.”
“Well anyway, if the guy isn’t headed toward let’s say Dallas or Ft. Worth on 287, then he may be going somewhere else? Like Austin or Houston. He might be looking to stay off the main drags.”
I listened to her supposes and watched one of those big campers they call a “diesel-pusher” pass. An itch in the
back of my mind was driving me crazy, and I felt like the answer to everything was right there but I couldn’t get a good hold on it. “That kind of fits with what I called you about driving over here. He might be staying away from big cities for some reason, and picking his way through these little burgs now.”
Something tickled the back of my brain again, and the memory of passing the fifth-wheel camper an hour earlier popped up in some strange connection. I’d long ago learned to trust my instincts. My subconscious was working on a problem that I didn’t even know existed.
Yolanda’s voice brought me back. “Right. I think I need to dig a little deeper and see what’s behind him, like that detective back in Arizona did. Maybe put together a list of people who recently got off on technicalities, then work backward from their victims’ names.”
“Dang, girl. You said you didn’t have a law-enforcement background.”
“I read.”
“Good for you. Me and the sheriff are headed out to talk to some folks. They may be able to help. If it don’t pan out, I’m heading for where you said, Comanche.”
I heard Perry Hale on the other end. She either had the volume on her phone turned up or she’d put me on speaker. “You sure decided fast.”
“Call it a gut feeling. I don’t think he’s headed for any of the borders.”
Chapter 12
Sunrise in Bouregard Parish began with high, pink clouds reflecting the morning’s glow over the cypress trees lining the banks of LaBeouf Bayou. Fog rose from the low places where cool night air settled onto the warmer water. A graceful gray and blue great heron flapped ten feet above the muddy surface, its wingspan nearly six feet from tip to tip.
A house perched on stilts located not far from an S-curve on the bayou that ultimately flowed into the Sabine was still dark. In the shadows where the light hadn’t yet penetrated, a splash like a gator slapping its tail startled a raccoon that was washing its breakfast on the bank.
Two shapes moved down a two-track dirt driveway leading from the unpainted house with the windows open for any breeze. It began a mile back where the drive intersected the crumbling blacktop lane the locals wishfully called a road.
The shapes materialized into two men walking down the bare parallel tracks, the bottoms of their pants wet from overhanging grass. A doe feeding on the fresh grass at the edge of the woods snorted and bounded away at their approach.
Wearing a floppy crusher hat, Daddy Frank moved with surprising ease for a man in his early eighties. A worn pump shotgun rested over his shoulder. He paused and pointed a crooked finger at the quiet house.
In the other skinny lane beside him, the creature named Boone seemed to glide above the sand in a loose-jointed stride. He wore an oversized shirt, cargo shorts, and kayaking sandals. His dead eyes locked in on the house, then scanned back to his master. Nodding without expression, the bald, tattooed man stepped off the track and through the knee-high blazing star and coneflower grass to disappear into the woods as silently as the doe.
Daddy Frank remained rooted in place, enjoying the morning light. He couldn’t see the bayou through the rising fog, but the sound of a bass exploding on a bug made him smile. Several whistlers rocketed overhead. The wind over their wings made the ducks sound like tiny jets.
He scratched the gray bristle on his cheek and spoke to himself in a voice barely above a whisper. “Maybe this is what Heaven’s like.”
The sun finally crested the cypress and pine trees, sending bolts of brightness onto the house and the yard, the light reflecting off the windshields of three jacked-up trucks. Many parts of the track blazed with light, but Daddy Frank waited in the dense shade of a thick cypress.
Soft bumps from a disturbance in the house reached his ears and he tilted his head to listen. A shriek cut off as if someone inside had thrown a switch and then more, louder bumps followed. Table legs stuttered across a wooden floor. A startled male voice yelled, the sound dying as fast as it came through rusting window screens.
Hard, flat reports from a firearm ended with a body crashing through the screen door. A man wearing only jeans rounded the porch and rushed empty-handed down the long stairs to the ground. Daddy Frank noted the terrified look on his face as he charged down the track to escape whatever was loose in the house.
Daddy Frank knew exactly what it was and remained perfectly still.
The frightened man gasped for air, and repeatedly glanced back over his shoulder as if the Devil himself was on his heels. The flight instinct absorbed everything that was human and the panicked meth-head raced away from Death with the tunnel-vision blindness only terrified quarry can know.
Only when Scooter was within shotgun range did the old man shoulder the 12-gauge and pull the trigger as if he were rabbit hunting. The man may have seen the movement in the shade, but it was too late. His chest absorbed a load of double-ought buck in a pattern the size of a hubcap.
Scooter’s sharp, “Oh!” erupted in a gush of blood, and he fell onto his face, kicked once, and lay still as his heart pumped blood from nine .33-caliber holes.
Seconds later, Boone stepped out of the silent house with a bloody straight razor in one hand and a wet dishrag in the other. Looking as if he’d just enjoyed a fresh shave that peaceful morning, he cleaned the razor with care. Finished, he wiped his face, arms, and bare legs before pitching the rag back through the punched-out screen. He bobbed his head and took the wooden stairs with the smooth motions of a panther, strolling down the drive as if he was in a park. Behind him, smoke boiled from an open window.
When he reached Scooter’s body, Boone lowered his head like a scolded dog. “I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. That’s why I was standing here.”
His skin was moist. Boone wiped his nose with one palm and studied the wetness as if looking for something that might be alive. “But what if he hadn’t run this way?”
“He did, though.” Daddy Frank pointed back at the house. “The guns? They in there?”
“Nossir.”
“Well, that cain’t be helped. Both of them Thibideaux coonasses we’re after in there?”
“Yes.”
“They done for?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Daddy Frank remained in the same place, dim in the shade. “Scooter was good and loyal until he wasn’t. We cain’t leave him here, but I don’t want him burned like them others. He’s still family.”
Boone waited, his face revealing nothing.
Daddy Frank drew a long breath through his nose. “You think that was a gator we heard splash a little while ago?”
“Probably.”
“All right then. Take ’im up a ways and dump ’im in the bayou. Don’t leave no tracks. Weigh him down out there.”
“They might drag it.”
“Ain’t nobody gonna get out here for a few days.” Daddy Frank waved his hand. “By that time they won’t bring up much.”
“Dental records.” A light flickered in Boone’s eyes, the only appearance of life he ever offered.
“There is that.” Daddy Frank paused, thinking. “I hate to do it, but he brought all this on himself. Knock ’em out.”
“May I have them?”
“For a while. But then we’re gonna bury ’em in the family plot.”
“All of them?”
“You can keep one, and slice off his finger pads, just in case.”
The sun was high by the time they were back in Daddy Frank’s blue and white two-toned 1986 Ford pickup. He pulled out of a cut in the trees and onto the blacktop. Boone lay on the bench seat, his bald head on Daddy Frank’s leg. The old man drove with his left hand on the wheel, absently stroking the spiderweb tattoo on the younger man’s skull, the same way he used to stroke his duck dog.
His eyes closed in ecstasy, Boone relaxed. “Daddy?”
“Hum?”
“I’m sorry he got out of the house. It wasn’t your place to end it. That was my job, and I
failed.”
“No you didn’t. It wasn’t but a pull of the trigger.”
“Daddy?”
“Hum?”
“Thank you for the tooth.”
The rough blacktop intersected the highway. Daddy Frank steered onto the smooth concrete and accelerated. He spread his fingers along the blue lines of Boone’s spiderweb. “You’re welcome.”
He patted Boone’s cheek and reached for the satellite phone on his dash. With that settled, there was much to do before Friday’s delivery.
And it was time for that crybaby Tanner to man up.
Chapter 13
Tanner Wadler drove his leased Taurus to work as the sun topped the pines, a frown creasing his brow. He was the only immediate family member who wasn’t excited about the upcoming Plan. If he didn’t know any better, he’d bet that another family’s blood ran through his veins. Once he even told Donine that he went through the family Bible when he was in high school to see if he’d been adopted.
While the rest of the Wadlers were black haired and dark complected, Tanner was a redhead. His white skin burned and peeled in the humid summertime, while his other relatives darkened to the warm color of stained mahogany.
He turned down the radio, pulled into the employee parking lot, and killed the engine beside his friends’ vehicles. The car blazed like a wet cherry beside the muddy trucks and SUVs parked in rows. As always, Tanner was the last one to arrive, but his foreman, Bo, was Tanner’s best friend, who understood that Donine’s pregnancy had been hard.
Tanner sat in his car with the windows down, breathing Beaumont’s petrochemical odors that soaked into his sinuses. Sometimes he felt as though he could smell nothing but fumes from the refineries for days at a time.
He slapped a round container of Copenhagen against his thumb to pack the grind, then twisted off the silver cap, sniffing the fresh wintergreen to chase the sulfur away. Packing a pinch under his bottom lip, he tucked the can into his back pocket and closed his eyes as the rush of nicotine reached his brain.
Tanner spit a dark stream into a plastic Dr Pepper bottle he kept in the console. His cell phone rang. It was Jimmy Don. “Hey, Daddy.”
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