by Kris Lackey
In the brutal heat, Maytubby grew cold. As the white dust settled, he stood still, studying a mental map of the nation he had policed for three years. He scarcely noticed the arrival of a Johnston County deputy from the west, or the distraught members of Jill’s committee huddling at the door of the church.
His reverie was broken by a jacked-up truck screeching around the 48 bend just as the cycle was leaving Milburn and making the curve south. Blue smoke rose from the truck’s huge tires as it spun a 180 in the road. A body in its bed went overboard and rolled on the shoulder. It was a large body. Maytubby pointed down the road and shouted to Katz, “Get Deputy Bond and bring her to the plane!” Katz jumped into his cruiser and fetched her.
She swayed out of his cruiser, her uniform torn, knees and elbows bleeding.
“We’re in the plane.” Maytubby pointed. He turned to Renaldo, Katz, and the other Johnston County deputy. “Get down to Twenty-Two and Fort McCulloch Road. No strobes or sirens. And take Bee Emet Road, not Twenty-Eight. Keep your cells on.”
Hannah Bond was fastening her lap belt when Maytubby climbed into the cockpit. “Katz told me about Jill. We’ll get her back.”
“Yes, we will.”
“I gave that EMT pretty good directions,” she said. “I would send a deputy to help him …”
“But the deputy who came is Eph.”
“Yep.”
“Clear the prop! Is Trepanier still alive?”
“Probably. Love was not going to quit until he found out who put him in Pontotoc. I heard that coming up on the house. When I busted in, he was out the door. So cranked he didn’t see me grab his bumper. Drug me a ways before I got up in the bed.”
Maytubby applied the left brake and pivoted the plane east. A small crowd had gathered in the superette lot, and some people were taking pictures with their phones. “How’d Love know to go there?”
“I saw cooking stuff. Trepanier might have gone there because one man he was running from didn’t know about it.”
Maytubby taxied onto the highway and pushed the throttle knob all the way in. He lifted off to the west and soon banked southeast.
“I have a name for the Ninja.”
Maytubby looked at her.
“Hillers.”
“I’ve got to keep my distance, but the glasses are good.” Bond picked them up, focused them, and found the Ninja, just then turning east on State 22 and south on 78.
“Love’s losing ground, but not as much as you’d think,” Bond said.
Maytubby handed her his cell. “It’s under ‘Jake.’”
Bond told Renaldo what the Ninja was up to.
“He’s going to make a mistake,” Maytubbby said.
Bond leaned over Maytubby and pressed the glasses against her face. “He’s turning east on …”
“Prairie View Road. It turns into …”
“Nail’s Crossing Road.”
“Which doesn’t cross the Blue like the wagons did.”
“It’s a dirt road, too, so everybody can see where he’s going.”
“Two mistakes. Who do you know with a car on Albert Pike Road?”
She raised her index finger and traced an imaginary Pike Road in the air, pausing at each imaginary house and mumbling the name of its owner. “Tic Miller,” she said aloud. “Where Colonel Phillips Road meets it.” Then she told Renaldo where the Ninja turned.
Maytubby cut the throttle and shortly added flaps. There were big power lines on the right side of Pike, and he had to get past a row of windbreak trees on the left so he could hug the ditch lip on that side. The plane floated just above the road as he coaxed the nose up inches at a time until the lift died and the wheels bumped down. Well below stall speed, he fed the old carburetor, and they moved briskly down the asphalt. “The Millers have any horses near the drive could get spooked?” Maytubby said.
“No horses, period. You stay in the plane while I ask Tic about the car.” She looked at his bare feet on the rudder pedals. “You don’t look official.” She was wearing her police clothes.
He nodded. The driveway was not long, and at the margins was a large open space with a few rusted implements. An elderly man in denim overalls was on the porch before Maytubby killed the engine. Hannah strode quickly across the burned Bermuda grass, ignoring a snarling border collie that lunged at her boots. She did not talk to Miller long before his head bobbed and he fished in his pocket for keys.
Hannah opened the large doors of an old detached frame garage, once painted red, and disappeared inside. Taillights glowed, and a 1955 Chevy Task Force pickup with dung-spattered stock racks backed out fast. Maytubby grabbed his duty belt and water bottle. While Hannah Bond flicked the big floor shifter like a toothpick, getting the most bang out of the big six, Maytubby drank enough water and handed the bottle across the seat. Bond waved it away. He buckled on his duty belt and wiped his face with his T-shirt. Just as he put the glasses to his eyes, the Ninja, spawning a volcanic plume of gray dust, shot across Pike Road going east, on its way toward the rugged margins of the Blue.
Maytubby found Love’s dust storm less than a mile west of Pike. The cell piped up. Renaldo told Maytubby he and Katz were crossing the river on foot above them and coming down the east bank. They would wait on Nail’s Crossing Road.
“Hillers knows Love’s truck, but Jill doesn’t necessarily buy him anything with Love,” Maytubby said. “Love doesn’t know this truck. Let’s fall in behind Love, but slowly. Is Love armed?”
“Yeah. He beat the Cajun with his fists, but he took a Remington Mountain Rifle out of that shanty.”
“Scope?”
“No.”
“Then not worth taking it from him now, except he might hit Jill with a junk shot.”
The dust from the Ninja subsided. Love’s did not. Hannah took off her campaign hat and unbuttoned her uniform top. Maytubby snatched Miller’s beaten straw Western hat from the floorboard and put it on. He yanked Hannah’s top down her back and threw it on the floorboard. Underneath, she was wearing a red Tishomingo Indians T-shirt paisleyed with sweat. They both removed their duty belts and stuck their pistols in their pants.
“I haven’t been down this road in a while,” Maytubby said under the glasses. Anybody live in that last building before the woods? The native stone?”
“Not since I’ve been working. Kids drink and fool around in there.”
“Love’s getting close. He’s parking his truck across the road to block it.”
Bond pulled into the driveway of the stone house. Out her passenger window, Maytubby watched Love through the glasses until the house eclipsed his view. Love, who was maybe fifty yards away, had pointed the rifle through his passenger window. He was staying with his truck in case he had to follow Hillers. In the turnaround, maybe forty yards beyond Love, the green Ninja circled as it had done on King’s Road.
Bond killed the Chevy.
“I’m going, Hannah.” He handed her the glasses.
Behind the house he found a rusted garden cultivator and wheeled it down an imaginary furrow, like a yeoman farmer, across a little clearing. By the time he reached cover and ditched the tool, he could hear Love shouting from his pickup, hoarse as a crow.
Maytubby ran fast. His farmer’s hat peeled away.
“I already killed your preacher boy,” Love shouted. “Not before he give you up.” The Ninja circled faster. “Now I’m gonna kill you.”
Hillers juiced the Ninja a half second before the boom of the big rifle. Maytubby heard the thock of the slug hitting a bois d’arc trunk. The Ninja spun and retraced its ground, Hillers’ smoked visor pivoting. The Remington’s bolt clicked as Love ejected a casing. There was no way out for Hillers but the road Love blocked.
Maytubby stopped and crouched behind a red cedar. He wiped sweat from his eyes. Jill’s black hair obscured her face, but he saw she had thrown her left arm
over her neck. She was still. Hillers would dodge Love’s next shot and then return fire. The Ninja leaped again, just before the boom echoed among the riverside outcrops. Maytubby heard splashing in the river behind him.
Hillers dismounted, drew his long pistol, and knelt. Maytubby sprinted for the motorcycle. Before the third report of Hillers’ semiautomatic, Maytubby had Jill off the Ninja and was lying on top of her. He pulled his pistol from his belt and rolled, back-to-back with Jill. Hillers jumped to his feet and spun around. His visor did not nod to find them. Before Maytubby could find his mark, two pistol shots came from the woods behind him. A chunk of the motorcycle helmet burst away.
The shots continued as Hillers dropped his pistol and mounted the bike. It keened through the turnaround and up the road. He slowed at Love’s truck, slid for a second into the bar ditch, and then got a purchase on the straight section road beyond.
But a new obstacle blocked Nail’s Crossing Road: a filthy rusted truck from the middle of the last century, squatting sideways from ditch to ditch. Hillers braked and aimed for the shallower bar ditch to his left. As he was bracing for its lip, he looked up at a very large form in a sweaty red T-shirt.
* * *
Hannah Bond, first marksman in her CLEET graduating class, raised her much-ridiculed Smith Model 10 .357 Magnum in both hands, led the motorcycle by three feet, fired, and followed through. The Ninja pitchpoled, catapulting Hillers into a barbed-wire fence.
She ran up the road, came even with him, and fell prone in the sand. He was fighting the wire. She saw blood on his thigh. “Be still,” she said.
His movements slowed but grew more methodical as he stripped the wire from his torso and legs.
“I said be still.”
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on,” he said, limping free of the wire. She could see the house and road and herself mirrored in his visor. He lurched and rasped like the vulture that had ravaged one of his earlier kills.
Maytubby’s words came back to her. The vulture was unarmed. She aimed at his heart but did not shoot.
He fell bleeding in the dust.
Chapter 30
Rotor beats from a Norman Regional medevac chopper turned heads at Nail’s Crossing. The sky behind the craft took everyone by surprise: a bank of gray clouds—clouds that were not wildfire smoke.
Hannah Bond turned back to the task at hand, knotting a bandanna that, wound around the Model 10’s barrel, would stanch the blood from Hillers’ femoral artery. The bar ditch where she knelt was damp with blood. She didn’t know if she had gotten the tourniquet on in time. Renaldo and Katz, their uniforms soaked from the waist down, stared at themselves in Hillers’ visor.
* * *
In the shadow of the rock house, Jill threw back her head and guzzled hot water from Maytubby’s bottle. He held a bloody compress of leaves under her nose as she drank. A violet bruise was spreading under her eyes and over her nose. After handing back the bottle, she held his shoulder for balance as she pulled a goathead from her heel. She had lost both shoes but refused to let Maytubby carry her to the car, because he had cut his instep on a broken beer bottle.
“His name is Hillers,” Maytubby said.
She nodded and looked at the ground.
“He break your nose or did I?”
She looked toward Hillers and pointed with her chin.
As the chopper hovered over the road and began to settle, gray dust stung them all. They bowed their heads and covered their faces. When the dust had subsided, one of the EMTs confirmed that Love was dead. Katz volunteered to accompany Hillers in the medevac. The other EMT, while checking Hillers’ vitals, told Hannah she would make a good field surgeon. She called an ambulance from Ada to retrieve Love’s body and then drove Maytubby and Jill to the plane. In Miller’s front yard, Hannah said, “I’ll call Sheriff’s Investigation in Tish.”
“I’ll call OSBI.”
“They’ll be tickled.”
Maytubby taxied onto Albert Pike Road and was airborne in fifteen seconds. Banking west toward Ada, he and Jill looked at the squall line. “It seems otherworldly,” she said.
“Computer generated.”
“Yeah. I can’t remember what rain is like.”
The medevac chopper passed above them on its way to Norman.
He reached for her hand. They approached the darkening clouds in silence. Soon the crown of the storm obscured the sun. They flew in shadow the rest of the way. The sky opened as they were walking to the old Ford in Heartland Aviation’s parking lot. They stopped and let the rain wash over them. They were soon joined by others at the airport—mechanics and clerks who spread their arms and turned their faces to the sky.
Maytubby slapped his portable Bull Blaster light-and-siren unit onto the roof of the pickup and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. As they hustled through downtown to the State 3 bypass, they got some odd looks. The whole ER staff of the Chickasaw Nation Medical Center, including the admissions clerk, crowded around Jill’s exam bed. After a nurse closed the cubicle track curtains, Maytubby smiled at the scrub-pants millipede. He padded back to the waiting room in the pastel blue paper hospital slippers he was forced to wear when they came through the ER entrance. They had also given him a bandage for his foot.
As he unlocked his cell to call Scrooby, he saw a bulletin about the shooting on the waiting room television. Katz? Maytubby wondered. Hannah? His cell came to life, “OSBI” in the caller ID. Although he had been in the act of calling Scrooby just seconds before, now that Scrooby was calling him, he didn’t feel like answering.
The phone was on its last ring before voice mail when he picked up. He stared out at the blue rain. “Dan.”
“Bill. How far are you from Dove Road and State Seven?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Treepanty never came back, so our plain watched the Stoddard estate. Old Sol was apparently overcome by wanderlust. We just got a call from the Johnston sheriff to help with a murder investigation east of Milburn. I need to call the tail off for that.”
Enough of the cat was out of the bag. “Austin Love is the Milburn victim. He found Trepanier and beat the name of the Ninja out of him. Hillers. Hillers kidnapped my fiancée, Jill Fox, drove her to Nail’s Crossing on the Blue. Love chased him there. Hillers killed Love and tried to escape. OHP Renaldo and Deputy Katz crossed the Blue on foot and pursued. Hannah Bond blocked Nail’s Crossing Road and shot him off his bike. Norman Regional coptered him out. Jill is okay. I’m here at the Chickasaw Nation Medical Center with her. I’m on my way to Dove Road. Address?”
For once, Scrooby did not blow. “Rough,” he said. “I’ll call Magaw in Tishomingo and ask to use his interrogation room. Stoddard will want counsel from the city. Love was a member of the Chickasaw Nation, so I’ll call the FBI. I may have to stay the night in Tish. One-four-eight-six-two-five Dove Road. I know you don’t have to write it down. If the Skywagon is free and we have a pilot, I’ll be in Tish pretty soon. If not, two hours.”
Maytubby jogged on his paper soles down the corridor to the cubicle curtain and yanked it back. The bedside assembly stared at him. He said to Jill, “A certain pol is holed up south of Connerville. I’m going down there to watch him for OSBI.”
Jill nodded from her bed, and he pulled the curtain shut.
When he was almost to his pickup, his cell rang. The ID said it was Heartland Aviation. “Maytubby.”
“You do have pants on.”
“Yeah, Frank. I had to get my fiancée to the ER.”
“So you took your shirt and shoes off?”
“Long story. I’m on my way to get the gear.” He looked down at his blue slippers. Addled. Good thing Frank called.
Chapter 31
When he turned off State 7 onto Dove Road, Maytubby used the police set in his pickup to radio Stoddard’s tail. He described his pickup to the agent, who was
so well concealed, Maytubby saw the address on a well-painted mailbox before he saw the tail. The drive winding off behind the mailbox was paved with discarded asphalt shingles laid in perfect rows as they would be on a roof. The tail’s lights flashed up the road, and Maytubby pulled alongside the plain wrapper, which had been parked behind a blackberry patch inside a curve in the road.
“White Lexus ES?” Maytubby said. He didn’t recognize the agent—a very young man, younger than Maytubby, with a shaved head.
“Yeah.”
“Milburn is going to be a learning experience.”
“You there?”
“Yes. You’re going to need Mercator to map that crime scene.”
“What?”
“Famous cartographer.”
The agent shook his head.
“Mapmaker.”
“Oh. Okay.” A little smirk crept into the agent’s face. “See you.” He drove away.
Maytubby parked behind the blackberry bushes, which were shiny from the rain. He reached out of the cab and picked a few berries from a stem and ate them while he Googled Stoddard’s old House race donor list and the Dove Road address. Evelyn Hunter. The name meant nothing to him. He paired it with Stoddard’s in a Google search. The only useful hit was the donor list he had already seen.
Afternoon sun gilded the towering thunderheads moving eastward. Mansions of nothingness. A phrase from a poem Maytubby partly remembered. The rain would feel good to Hannah and Jake, but it would make a pig’s breakfast of the bald agent’s crime scene.
The rain had brought up mosquitoes from Tar Branch. It was still too hot to roll up the truck’s windows, so Maytubby waved and swatted at them. Less than an hour later, he saw OSBI’s big workhorse Cessna descending toward Tishomingo.
Fifteen minutes later, Magaw’s cruiser, with Scrooby riding shotgun, trundled down Dove Road. Magaw parked behind the pickup. All three men stood in the steamy afternoon.
Magaw shook his head. “Hannah called me from Milburn,” he said to Maytubby. “You and her couldn’t keep out of it.” He looked at Scrooby. Scrooby looked into the distance. “Hannah was lucky she wasn’t shot in that nonsense.”