Nail's Crossing

by Kris Lackey

  Beside US 377, near where she changed Majesty Tate’s flat, Bond parked in the shade of a burr oak and adjusted her radar. She waved at a few pickups when they honked at her. Her cell rang. No contact name appeared, so she said, “Deputy Bond.”

  “This is Aaron Coblentz, Deputy Bond.” She could hear a calf bawling and remembered that his phone was in his barn so it would not disturb his household. A sensible Amish custom.

  “Yes, Mr. Coblentz.”

  “You said to call if I remembered another strange vehicle around Bromide.” He paused. “I did. Going back to Clarita on Limestone Road, I met a motorcycle coming the other way, toward Clarita. One funny thing about it was that it was tall and skinny and had fenders that were very high above the wheels. The other funny thing was its color. It was the color of sand. Not red sand like in the rest of the state. Sand sand. And the driver’s helmet and shirt were the same color.”

  “Could you tell if the driver was male or female?”

  “Male.”

  “How fast was he going?”

  “Not fast.”

  “Could you make out the driver’s complexion or hair color?”

  “He was white. That’s all I know. Not really short or tall.”

  “Would you mind if I stopped by later and showed you some photos of motorcycles?”

  After Bond’s shift—a lucrative one for Johnston County—Coblentz identified the camo dirt bike as a late-model Suzuki RM-Z250. A few searches, and she found the tire whose front tread she had photographed: a Dunlop MX 71 Geomax Hard Terrain.

  When she phoned Maytubby, he was driving through Tupelo, just a few miles away, so they met in the middle. She offered to drive the Tums wrapper to OSBI Purcell, and she told him about the dirt bike and Survivor prints and what she had learned from Coblentz. She had e-mailed him the print photos, which he would forward to OSBI.

  “Magaw cutting you slack to work for OSBI?”

  “Hell, no. He found me up at the Tate house and got his tail up in the air about it. Huh! I went back to my speed trap in a big hurry.” She lowered her eyelids conspiratorially. “Gave him a dust bath.”

  Maytubby smiled. “I’m headed to Love’s old hangout in Antlers. Then over to Hope, Arkansas, to talk to the State CID about the murder with the DNA matching Tate’s killer’s. On down to south Louisiana—see what I can dig up on our favorite man of the cloth.”

  “Bring me back some tasso.”

  “I can do that.”

  When Maytubby saw the elk skull with hot lips, there was just enough light left to illuminate the tracks of a dirt bike, if any were there to find. He parked in the road and once again walked along the drive. Since he had been there, one or two big trucks had used it. Topping a rise, he looked down on a pile of charred lumber, squared in by a blackened chain-wall foundation. Unlike the Cobalt, this house was annihilated. The debris stank. It was a recent fire. Next to the house was a red Chevy pickup, its passenger side scorched, the mirror and molding melted like candle wax. And hitched to the back, an eerily warped Bass Tracker, its big Merc outboard split from its mount and lying on the sand like a dead ape. The Pushmataha sheriff’s deputy he had talked to must have forgotten Maytubby’s call.

  He walked around the pickup to the unfired side. The paint on passenger door was scored all over. Firefighters had scrambled the yard. He found no motorcycle prints there or on the driveway. He started the cruiser, then killed it and walked toward the road’s dead end, near the bank of the Kiamichi.

  It was deep dusk in the river brush, so he switched on his Maglite and followed the circular turnabout until a little path—maybe a game path, or at most a fishing trail—opened toward the river. Bending over the sand, he moved very slowly, playing his light in a zigzag across the path. A bullfrog jug-a-rummed below. The path angled down until it merged with one that ran along the river. Maytubby turned left, upriver.

  He found the knobby tread quickly. It veered off the path, away from the river. He laid his ruler across it and photographed it, recording its GPS location for OSBI. A patch of brittle cattails had been flattened. He knelt and searched the root line carefully. Nothing but toads and mosquitoes. He walked directly toward the burned house, through heavy brush, looking for signs left by the cycle rider, who may have been carrying accelerant. Considering the house, a single match could have done the job. Maytubby couldn’t find even one broken limb. And returning to the river, he found no containers that had not held beer or bait.

  He phoned Scrooby at home.

  “I’m having spareribs with my lovely wife, Sergeant Maytubby.”

  “I’m in Antlers. Was Wiley Bates in that pile of charcoal I just looked at?”

  “Pushmataha called us.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  Scrooby exhaled heavily into his phone. “Sergeant, I am overworked. I cannot possibly remember every name on every prayer chain. Also, I am off duty, and I am hungry. Good night.”

  Maytubby e-mailed Scrooby what he had found, and attached the print photos. He called Jill Milton and wished her a good night. She was still at a meeting of her book club. They had read Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. He was reading it, too, but he stayed out of her book club because he liked the other one better, the one with just the two of them.

  He did not relish three hours of empty two-lane blacktop through the Ouachita. Even so, he didn’t drive fast. The country was teeming with deer.

  The night was hot. A three-quarter moon etched the highest ridges of Blackjack Mountain. Insects popped like hail on his windshield. Did Woodley burn his car and take to the dirt bike? Had he always ridden the bike? Was he the driver of the green Tercel, who bought the stag Bowie? Did he frame Love? What was Bates doing at the Antlers house? Was he incinerated to shut him up? Or did he just get drunk and knock over a kerosene lamp? Maybe he drank enough Heaven Hill to spontaneously combust.

  The little towns came and went: North Pole, Steel Junction, Tiner—some without a single streetlamp. On its newer stretches, US 70 bypassed towns and took a straighter path through the low mountains than its predecessors. Pines crowded the right-of-way and threw jagged moon shadows across the asphalt.

  Only a logging truck every dozen miles or so broke the road’s monotony. The closest NPR station, KTXK in Texarkana, waxed and waned as the cruiser topped a ridge or dropped into a swale. The Cleveland Symphony was playing Schubert, a composer Maytubby disliked, but not nearly as much as he disliked Christian rock with its mindless repetition and gooey tunes. Country, well … The Schubert faded, and Maytubby turned the radio off. The road slowly unwound.

  He had just passed the Eagletown turnoff, not far from the state line, when he heard a snap. A chip appeared in the windshield. His mind was just making the leap from gravel to bullet when a rising shriek silenced the road noise. A ghostly form appeared at the passenger window, backlit by the moon. Its head, reflecting the cruiser’s orange dash lights, warped into a smile. Maytubby’s skin burned. He stomped the brake and saw the muzzle flash of a very long pistol just beyond his windshield. Before the biker could brake, Maytubby pulled behind him and accelerated. The biker could not turn around with the pistol, and Maytubby checked him when he veered left or right. There was no tag on the bike, and its lights were out. The Amish man’s description was perfect: sand-colored helmet, suit, gloves, and boots.

  Again the banshee scream as the cyclist leaned into full throttle. The Charger fell behind for a few seconds. The motorcyclist turned on his lights and disappeared around a bend as Maytubby accelerated past the dirt bike’s top speed.

  Beyond the bend, the road was empty. Maytubby rolled down his window and slowed, listening to the snarl and searching each of the tracks that peeled off the highway. At last, he saw the ruby taillight bobbing north up a steep hillside just before the bike went airborne and vanished over the crest.

  North of the highway lay the rugged
forests of the southern Ouachita, webbed with thousands of unnamed and unnumbered roads. The next state highway was thirty miles north, the direction the bike had gone. Maytubby would just have to wait until the day that fellow decided to show himself again.

  At an abandoned roadhouse, the only structure in Ultima Thule, he pulled onto an apron, turned off his lights, opened the door, and listened for the two-stroke engine. First some coyotes yowling, then the little chain-saw snarl, far back in the hills. He switched on his cabin light, looked at the hole in the back window, and fingered the exit hole in the front. Likely a .357 Magnum.

  As he crossed the state line, Maytubby reported the shooting to OHP, then called the Pontotoc sheriff’s office and warned the dispatcher that Austin Love’s life might be in danger. Scrooby would be sleeping off his ribs.

  The country flattened a little, but the road was unfamiliar. At De Queen, Maytubby decided he was within striking distance of Hope. A sleepy night clerk at Clock Inn slid a room key into a little drawer and shoved it at him. A sheet of cracked Plexiglas with a hole in the middle covered the drawer. A sign on it said “Stick Finger in Hole and Yank.” Maytubby did as instructed. He parked the cruiser out of view of the street. He fell asleep fast but was awakened after midnight by a dirt bike screaming down US 71. It continued down the highway, as did the one a half hour after that, and the one another fifteen minutes later. De Queen apparently held great allure for nocturnal dirt bikers. He should have driven on to Hope. Who would stoop so low as to break the peace of Hope?

  The Southwest Regional HQ of the Arkansas State Police CID occupied the latest in economical and low-maintenance public building designs, its steeply pitched roof a nod to the fashion in new tract homes. But the roof was metal, and it was blue. At seven thirty, Lieutenant Lynn Washington swung into the parking lot just behind Maytubby. As they shook hands, Washington noticed the hole in the windshield.

  “Last night,” Maytubby said.

  “No shit.”

  “Don’t worry. Oklahoma side of the line.”

  “You think it was my shooter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  There was nothing on Washington’s desk but a telephone and a small closed laptop. The room was immaculate—not even a paper clip or a crumb on the carpet. A matted and framed diploma from the University of Arkansas said that Washington had earned a BS degree in criminal justice and that he had earned it magna cum laude.

  He reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a manila folder, and slid it toward Maytubby. “Have a seat. You want coffee?”

  “No thanks.” Maytubby picked up the folder. “How did you get DNA from a sniper?”

  “One of his ejected shells fell next to a honey locust trunk.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yes. He apparently tried but failed to recover it. Or maybe he just didn’t see the thorns in the dark—they’re black.”

  “And long. And the thorns have thorns.”

  “You see we found a scrap of Tums wrapper.”

  Maytubby flipped through the material in the folder. He stopped when he read that a suspect was interrogated and released. He pointed to the page. “Why was this Boone questioned?”

  “He’s an itinerant roofer. He’d roofed an outbuilding for the victim. Some people saw them arguing in Arkadelphia about money.”

  “Same DNA cleared Boone and my suspect.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And what happened to the other party in the roofing dispute?”

  “He won.”

  “You suspect him of hiring a hit?”

  “I questioned him and looked around pretty thoroughly. Got a warrant and looked through his phone records, bank records, e-mails. If he hired a hit, he did it far from here and with cash from somewhere else.”

  “Do you know if he had any southern Louisiana connections—or went there often?”

  “I didn’t find anything that would make me think that.”

  “Did you find any motorcycle tread prints near the shooter’s position?”

  “Nothing. There was a paved county road nearby. Usually deserted. He could have parked on it or had someone waiting for him. We hit dead ends in every direction. Hell, there wasn’t even a mysterious stranger in town.”

  “Did you find any shoe prints?”

  Washington jabbed an index finger at the wall. “Oh, yeah. That’s the other reason we questioned Boone. He wore Red Wing Wellington boots with crepe wedge soles, and so did the shooter.”

  “Really.” Maytubby told Washington about the Survivor boots in Bromide.

  “Now we got DNA and fall guys,” Washington said. “I think I’ll find whatever roof Boone is shingling this week, climb up there, and ask him a few more questions.”

  “Wait till he gets to a shady part.”

  “Hey, I went to policeman school, too.”

  Chapter 20

  The heat was no respecter of state lines. As Maytubby passed through El Dorado, a bank thermometer missing a few teeth read 97 at 11:00 a.m. He checked his mirrors for a sandman on a skinny bike.

  There was no quick route to Jennings, Louisiana, for which Maytubby was grateful. He was so sleepy, an hour on an interstate would have done him in. His Web map said he would spend about ten minutes on I-49, the rest of his trip winding through the Kisatchie forest, Winnfield, and greater Dry Prong.

  South of Alexandria, he could find Cajun music on the radio. He listened to “Valse de Kaplan” and “Mamou Hot Step.” In the early afternoon, passing through Mamou, he slowed to look over the plain brick facade of Fred’s Lounge, home of the Saturday morning Cajun music broadcast, chanky-chank dance, and peppermint schnapps binge. A few Mamouans stared at him and his cruiser.

  Bubba Fusilier Chevrolet looked pretty much like car dealerships everywhere since the 1970s: white metal building, generic plastic signage, big American flag. When Maytubby parked on the new-car lot, no salesman rushed out the door to greet him—maybe a first. When he pushed into the frigid showroom, no one stirred from their cubicles behind the floor. As he passed the cells, each occupant was typing furiously away on a computer. He walked toward Service, past bathrooms and a water fountain. In a little office, a young woman looked up at him. The nameplate on her desk said she was Bennie Schexnaidre. She saw him looking at it. “Bennette,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “Nice to meet you. My name is Bill. I’m looking for the sales manager.”

  “What kind of cop are you?”

  “Tribal police. Chickasaw Nation, in Oklahoma.” He showed her his badge.

  “Never heard of Chickasaw. We got Houmas. What you doin’ down here, shah?” She made a puzzled smile.

  “Working on a case with the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation. We want to find someone we think bought a car here.”

  “I better help you. The sales staff is overwhelmed.” She smiled at her monitor. “As you could see. Have a seat.”

  Maytubby handed Bennie Schexnaidre copies of David Woodley’s Oklahoma driver’s license and his registration for the 2004 white Cobalt coupe. Before she accessed the database, she stared at the photo.

  “Do you recognize this man?”

  “Hmm.”

  “By another name, maybe?”

  She shook her head and began typing. Maytubby heard one of the salesmen creak up out of his chair and walk across the showroom. A door beeped to announce it was being opened. The thick, pleasant nasal timbre of Cajun speech bounced among the shiny cars.

  “That matches our records.” She picked up a pen and wrote on the registration copy. “This is the local address he gave us. It’s in Mermentau, just a few miles south of here on Ninety.” She pushed the papers across the desk.

  “Do you mind if I show this photo around?”

  “Let me. Here.” She took the enlarged copy of Woodley’s license, rose from her desk, and led him back to
the showroom. The walk-in and the salesman who met him stopped talking, and the other salesmen looked up. “Any you know thiz guy? He bought a car here couple years bag.” She held up the sheet, and they came quickly, eager to identify the crook—even the customer, who seemed to forget his mission. They stared at the redheaded man with asymmetrical eyes.

  “Nat boy’z uu-glee,” said the walk-in.

  “Yah,” the other said, nodding. Then they shook their heads.

  The service manager, walking outside the showroom glass, saw the gathering and came inside to see what the excitement was about. He didn’t recognize the redheaded man, but he said, “I can tell you dad’s not the David Woodley. You know whad …” He grabbed a small phone book off a salesman’s desk and flipped through it. “No Woodleys.”

  Bennie Schexnaidre said, “His address then was in Mermentau.”

  The service manager pointed at the photo and looked at Maytubby. “Tague dad down to Mermentau and show it aroun’ at C’est Si Bon and Sonnier’s. Somebody know dad levee rad.”

  Maytubby folded the photo and registration and touched his forehead. “Gentlemen, Ms. Schexnaidre. Thank you very much for your time.” When he started the cruiser, he could see the group in the showroom staring at him.

  Ten minutes later, still checking his mirrors, he was crossing a muddy Bayou Mermentau on US 90, which became Railroad Avenue in the little town on the east bank. A few blocks in, after passing a few defunct storefronts, he found Sonnier’s Grocery. It was a freestanding clapboard building with a broad, flat facade like those in Westerns. A flat metal canopy with rod supports ran the length of the beige building.

  Maytubby’s arrival brought the manager out of his cubby. A few shoppers craned to appraise him. Studying Woodley’s photograph with an impatient frown, the short, middle-aged manager, who wore an unconvincing honey-blond toupee and a red tie striped with ragin’ cajuns in black, squinted and wrinkled his nose but did not shake his head too forcefully.