Leo led them to Ben’s office, indicating the well-dressed one. “Larry Curtis. Here for his father’s things.” Hands at his sides, he surreptitiously lifted an index finger for Ben’s benefit, pointing at Curtis’s thin-soled shoes.
Curtis’s handshake was firm. He indicated the man with him. “My buddy Julio.”
“Sorry about your father,” said Ben. “Those things don’t happen too often around here.”
“Should make it easier for you to find whoever did it.”
“I expect so. How’s he doing?”
“I’m a bit worried, even though the doctor says he’ll come around.” Curtis looked worried, his eyes restless. “Like to get back as soon as possible, so if you’d let me have his things—”
“Of course.” Ben unlocked the drawer and tossed the plastic bag and the wallet on the desk. “You’ll have to sign.”
Leo frowned. Customary procedure demanded I.D. up to the wazoo before parting with a penny.
“I’ll also need his car keys. Where’s it parked?”
“We haven’t recovered it yet.”
“Recovered—?”
“We have bulletins out. Someone will spot it. Never carjack a distinctive vehicle.”
“Carjack?”
“What did you think happened to your father?”
Curtis looked over his shoulder at Julio. “Mugging. I was told a mugging.”
“Ah. Well, whoever told you had it wrong. The car was gone when we got there.”
Leo caught up at last. “Of course we may not find it at all. It might have been taken to a chop shop. We know there’s one operating in the county somewhere, but we haven’t located it yet.”
“Chop shop?”
“Well, that’s the way it goes,” said Ben heartily. “I have your phone number, so we’ll be in touch as soon as we know something.” He pushed a slip across the desk. “If you’ll sign—but you’ll have to count the money first. Otherwise I can’t release it.” He smiled. “Can’t have you coming back and saying we shortchanged you.”
Curtis reluctantly opened the wallet and counted. The large bill was gone.
Ben didn’t look at Leo.
Curtis counted again, spread the wallet as though looking for a secret compartment. “I don’t understand. My father liked to carry a lot of cash. Are you sure this is all he had?”
“All we found,” Ben assured him.
Curtis’s lips thinned. He wrote down the total, signed, and slid the receipt to Ben.
Pickwell entered the outer office with Freddie; a big man, close to three hundred pounds of fat undulating on a six and a half foot frame, black hair parted in the center and pigtailed. Fat he might be, but with enough strength to put a man on the floor where he could stomp him, which was how he’d earned the name Freddie the Foot.
“That’s the man who reported the carjacking,” said Ben. “You can ask him what he saw, if you like.”
Curtis crammed the wallet and change in his pocket and snapped, “Maybe later.”
“One thing more. Carjacking is a federal crime, so the Feds are on the way. I’m sure they’ll want to talk to you. I suggest you wait.”
“They can find me at the hospital.”
“Oh, they’re already there,” lied Ben smoothly. “Probably talking to your father if he’s come out of it.”
Curtis and Julio looked at each other.
Curtis shrugged, and was suddenly holding a gun; low, so that it couldn’t be seen from outside the office.
Oh hell, thought Ben. Make all the plans in the world and you run into a man with no sense.
Leo’s hands rose. “You going through three armed deputies?”
“Three armed deputies don’t mean squat when you have hostages.”
Curtis jerked his head. “Let’s go, Julio. The fat guy lied to us. If we don’t get it out of him now, we never will. Put your gun on him and take him to the car. I’ll handle the chief rube.”
One hand on Ben’s collar, the other jamming the gun into his back, he lock-stepped Ben into the outer office, Leo retreating before them.
Ben raised his hands as the deputies stared. “Just take it easy.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “I have a bad back. I’ve got to walk slow.”
He winced as the gun poked hard right above his belt.
“You’ll damned well walk as fast as I tell you.”
Julio, dragging Freddie with him, was already out the door when the Morrisey brothers, who couldn’t have helped but notice a strange man forcing Freddie along at gunpoint and decide such bizarre behavior was none of their business, came through to find Ben in the same predicament.
Now, that was too odd to ignore.
Kermit frowned. “The man’s pointing a gun at Sheriff Ben. Ain’t that illegal, George?”
“I think it is, Kerm. He’s breakin’ the law right here in the sheriff’s own office.”
Curtis waved the gun under their noses. “If you two apes don’t get the hell out of my way, I’ll shoot you both.”
Only one word penetrated the perpetual murkiness in George’s head. One big hand flashed up, immobilizing and crushing Curtis’s fingers against the steel of the gun and bending the hand back. Bones cracked.
Curtis screamed.
So did Ben—louder, higher, and more chilling as Curtis’s hand, enmeshed in his collar, twisted his back cruelly and dropped him to the floor.
Leo and Pickwell dashed by to rescue Freddie.
Freddie needed no rescue at all. Julio’s attention diverted by the dual screams, Freddie dropped him with one swing. Quivering like unconfined gelatin, The Foot was furiously stomping him while cursing and shrieking, “Teach you to pull a gun on me and call me a damned liar! The sheriff conned you, you brainless idiot!”
Inside, George knelt solicitously beside Ben, who was contemplating suicide, wondering if he’d be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and dreading the young female doctor’s baring his withered buttocks again.
“What’s wrong, Sheriff Ben? You couldna got shot. That gun din’t go off.”
Amato, cuffing a moaning Curtis to a chair, said, “He hurt his back.”
“Maybe I can he’p,” said George.
“DON’T... TOUCH... ME!”
“Only hurt for a second. Lift him on my back, Kermit.”
Kermit lifted him as though he were a sack as Ben gritted through clenched teeth to Amato, “QUICK... SHOOT... THEM... BOTH!”
Kermit placed him back to back with George, who reached back, locked arms through his, leaned forward to lift him, flexed his knees, and bounced him hard.
Gravity snapped Ben straight. Amazed to find himself upright, he gingerly moved one leg, then the other.
The pain was gone.
George grinned. “Daddy showed me. Said it been happening to people working in the fields far back as he could remember and they had to do for themselves. Weren’t no hospitals handy, were there? Just do ’er, George, he said. If she don’t work, then you boys will have to support your crippled old dad for the rest of his days. Always making jokes, Dad was. You want us to see this county attorney now, Sheriff Ben?”
Ben shuddered. Too much mental effort for George to even consider who would have to support the crippled old sheriff for the rest of his days if his homegrown therapy had failed.
“No. You two go home. I’ll be out to see you.”
The FBI came and went, taking with them Freddie the Foot, Curtis, Julio, the Cadillac, the wallet, and the bill Ben had replaced, and leaving the news that someone was entitled to a ten thousand dollar reward from the armored car company.
Leo said, “We scraped through that, didn’t we?”
“My fault. Never thought he’d pull a gun in the sheriffs office. Sometimes I think we survive only because the crooks are dumber than we are.”
“You knew he wasn’t Curtis’s son?”
“From the start. If I’d called the real one in Philadelphia, it would have taken him at least two hours to get to the medical cent
er. But when Lou called, he was already there. Then Aaron tells me about the holdup and you find that money in the trunk. Very likely he was a partner posing as the son, but why? He could have walked into the hospital as a friend.”
Leo thought. “We’d never turn the wallet and car over to a friend.”
“You’ve got it. The FBI guys took the three of them apart like they had a key to their brains. Your cast of that Italian shoe helped, of course. Proved one of them was there. Freddie always insisted on dealing with one man. Curtis was nominated. He showed him the bill so he’d know they were serious, and told him he had fifty-nine more. The other two waited outside. An army could camp in that parking lot at night without being noticed. Freddie makes a few calls, tells Curtis the best offer is fifty cents on the dollar. Curtis goes out to tell the others, runs into the Morriseys. George decks him, and they walk away. The others see it and run to help, but they’re too late. Couldn’t use their guns in a situation like that, but Julio had picked up a rock. Curtis gets up. They argue over the deal. Walters sees them. All that money gone, plus Freddie’s commission. Julio gets the bright idea to increase his share by bashing Curtis with the rock, making it a two-way split instead of three and letting the Morriseys take the rap.”
Leo frowned. “Sounds good so far, but why did they leave the money behind?” His face cleared. “They couldn’t find the car keys because Curtis had buried them in that inside coat pocket where no one ever carries car keys—”
“You get an A. Time is running out. Walters has seen them, but they don’t know that Rondayvoo patrons mind their own business. If he’d called us—”
“All they need is for a cop to find them standing over a body.” Leo grinned. “Any kind of cop.”
“They split. After all, the Caddie is going nowhere, and they’re not dealing with a crack crime team. We have no reason to search it, and they can always get their hands on it later. But they’d overlooked that thousand dollar bill in Curtis’s wallet and the questions it would raise. They call Freddie. He tells them the car is still there but Curtis is at the medical center, not the morgue.”
“At which point they must have been thinking so hard their brains were smoking,” said Leo. “Curtis recovers, he’s going to be mad enough to talk—”
“That wouldn’t bother them if they could get their hands on the Caddie before his tubes come out. One of them remembers Curtis’s son. We’ll probably call him. Better if one passes himself off at the medical center as Larry Junior. He not only may get the chance to finish Curtis, but he takes away our reason to call the real one. Then he can come up here and claim the effects. If we don’t cooperate, they take them anyway. Everything’s fine until I tell them the car’s been hijacked and there’s no bill in the wallet. Who else but Freddie? Only he knew about the money. With the Feds on the way, it’s then or never. Out come the guns.”
“And in walk the Morriseys.”
“Shows you what can happen when you don’t treat people with respect.” Ben reached for the phone. “Now I call the real Curtis and give him the good news that his father will be fine and the bad news that he’s under arrest for driving the getaway car in an armed robbery.”
Lawrence T. Curtis, Jr., was pleased about the one piece of news, and stoical about the other.
“He’s always been a crook, you know. I grew up with police chasing him through the house. I used to be ashamed until I realized that kids can’t select their parents.”
Ben hung up, thinking of the Morriseys. Parents couldn’t select their kids either, but the good ones did the best they could with what they had.
* * * *
Emily was home, his back was only a touch tender, Freddie was gone, and the Rondayvoo was closed.
She agreed the Morriseys had earned the reward, since they’d not only started it all but ended it in fine style.
“Really, though,” she said, newfound awareness gleaming in her eyes, “I’m sure there’s more here than meets the eye. Thousand dollar bills carry the portrait of Grover Cleveland. And their father was Grover Cleveland Morrisey.” She looked at him triumphantly. “Don’t you see?”
Push the buzzer, thought Ben. That’s one question he wasn’t even going to try to answer.
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