“Yeah, I was down south for a while,” he said.
“You also got a limp.”
“Can’t get one past you,” Pilate said. “Running a race I pulled a muscle. Half marathon.”
“On purpose?” Scovill said, his squinting right eye crinkled further by mirth.
The men sat down and regarded each other across the table.
“Can I get you something? Coke?”
Scovill shook his head. “No thanks. That kidney I lost doing our Butch and Sundance routine is making life rough, and I already had the diabetes to deal with.” Scovill lost the kidney after being shot in the gun battle at Nathaniel Mortuary. He and Pilate saved each other’s lives in a firefight with Cross mayor and crime lord Ollie Olafson and Olafson’s son Craig.
“Sorry to hear that,” Pilate said. “You doing okay otherwise? It can’t be easy to be a former sheriff among people you incarcerated.”
He shrugged. “I’m in genpop, but nobody’s messed with me much. There was one dude I locked up a few years ago for possession who got it in his head to get a little revenge.” Scovill’s eyebrow danced mischievously over his squinting eye. “He instantly regretted that.”
“That’s good, that you dealt with him.”
“Oh, and Olafson’s people have made a few threats, but I got some folks who have my back.”
“Olafson’s people?” Pilate said, leaning closer over the table.
Scovill smiled. “So you got married to Kate,” he said. “Good for you both. I always liked her. Seen her in here a couple of times visiting Grif. She not with you?”
“She was planning to come along, but Kara got a fever…probably just a summer cold.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Scovill said. “I hear Grif’s getting out in a couple more months. That’s good. This hole has been tough on him.”
“Tough on just him?”
“I got chunks in my stool bigger than this place,” he snickered under his breath, his face flushed. “I make it okay.”
“So,” Pilate looked around at the inmates talking with their families at tables nearby. “You say Olafson has people in here?”
“He’s got people everywhere,” Scovill said.
“But are they…you know…” Pilate whispered conspiratorially.
Scovill raised an eyebrow. “Organized?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Hell, I don’t know. They weren’t all that organized before you came along and they did pretty well. I’d say there are one or two of ‘em who are picking up where old Ollie left off. But they’re being smart about it. Not arousing too much suspicion from my erstwhile replacement.”
“Welliver.”
“Yeah, ain’t that a kick? He wasn’t even CLEET certified until last year. Damn paper pushin’ politician. Hell, you’re more of a sheriff to Cross than he’ll ever be. You certainly have more brains and balls than that dipstick.”
“Well, thanks. Though I hear Welliver was a reserve cop in Goss City,” Pilate said, smiling.
“Uh huh. That and a buck fifty gets you exactly squat,” Scovill said, his face flushed again, more crimson than before. “Sorry, just don’t like thinking about that guy sitting in my dad’s chair.”
“It was your chair last.”
Scovill’s notoriously squinting right eye zeroed in on Pilate’s face.
“Why you here, John?”
Pilate sighed. “Just seeing how you are.”
“Is this for the book? I don’t see a tape recorder,” Scovill said.
“No, book’s finished. Comes out around September.”
“What’s it called?”
“No idea. Publisher decides. Probably be something pretty terrible.”
“I hope you didn’t make me out to be the stereotype crooked sheriff,” Scovill said, his fingers worrying a piece of rubber trim on the old table. “Roscoe P. Coltrane or that jackass from the James Bond movies.”
“No, I didn’t,” Pilate said quietly. “I told it like I saw it. A good man pinned to a tarnished badge.”
“How poetic,” he whispered, his eyes sweeping the tabletop.
“Sheriff…”
Scovill looked up, his face pained.
“Sorry. Morgan. I’ll be straight up. I need…”
“I guess you heard about that coward Jack Lindstrom French kissing a shotgun.”
Pilate sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I was in Florida when he did it.”
“No shit?”
“A couple hundred miles south,” Pilate said.
“Leave it to old Jackie boy to take the easy way out,” Scovill said. “If he had been patient like Dick Shefler he might have found a way out of prison in a year or two.”
Shefler was Lindstrom’s right-hand man, staring at a prison stretch of his own.
“What do you mean ‘be patient’?”
“Shit, Mr. Pilate, you’ve been writing a book about all this and you don’t keep up with the news? From what I hear, the prosecutors don’t have enough on Shefler for him to do any real jail time.”
“Well, I knew he turned state’s evidence.”
“He was careful, and now Jack’s death makes it easy for Dick to say ‘Jack did it!’ He’ll probably walk with time served.”
“Hell,” Pilate said. “Do you think he’s dangerous?”
“Dangerous. Huh.” Scovill clasped his meaty fingers over his belly and cocked his head at Pilate. “How so?”
“I don’t know,” Pilate looked at the table, then around the room again. “Maybe he would look for revenge, make threats.”
Scovill laughed. “Shit, that punk? Threats? After he gets out of the federal pen, he’ll probably do his best to figure out a safe place to hide from the people who picked up Olafson’s business. They’re gonna want some payback.”
Pilate looked at Scovill, watching the former sheriff’s grin fade.
“You heard me. Payback.”
“As in?”
“As in if I were you, Mr. Pilate, I’d pack my shit and move your sweet little wife and daughter out of Cross. Go someplace where the roads are less dangerous.”
“Yes, they do like to run people into the ditch,” Pilate said. A favorite tactic of the Olafson crew was to run people off the road. It happened to Pilate, and it happened to Kate’s first husband. Pilate had survived; Richard Nathaniel had not been so lucky.
“You got a big red X painted on your ass.”
Great news. Simon said. “But really, I wonder if you can trust a crooked cop?”
“Great.”
“You got a lot of light on you right now,” he said. “That book comes out there’ll be s’more. But remember,” he wagged a finger slowly at Pilate. “Spotlights have a tendency to move on to the next big thing, and before you know it you’ll be standing there in the dark. That’s when they’ll catch up to you.”
A guard walked past, nodding almost imperceptibly at Scovill. Scovill nodded back just as slightly.
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Cousins. As you may recall everybody in the county is related to everybody else. Olafson has cousins in at least a dozen families around here. Then again, most of ‘em don’t have the IQ of a bag of hammers,” he cleared his throat. “I’d say, if I were a bettin’ man, that either the Mankells or the Thurmans are your winners.”
“Mankells or Thurmans?”
“Yeah, from up in Minnesota. I guess it’s probably the Thurmans now that I think about it. Mankells went straight a generation ago. I think one of them is a cop up in St. Paul. Yep. Thurmans. Most likely.”
Scovill looked like his old self for a moment, even without a badge on his chest or a cinnamon toothpick jutting from the corner of his mouth.
“Yeah, Mr. Pilate. Now that Ollie and Craig are taking the dirt nap, I think it’s safe to say Hilmer Thurman is moving in.” Scovill leaned forward in his seat, his hands clasped together. “And he’ll probably want you out of the picture.”
“Not smart business, is it? Stirring the pot again? Killing
a guy who helped bring down Ollie and his gang?”
“I hope you’re right, Mr. Pilate, and you may be,” he said, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms over his belly again. “But what do you want most? To be right or alive?”
“I get your point. So, uh, this may sound crazy…”
“Coming from you? Nah,” Scovill said.
“Ha. Do you think - I mean, just let’s speculate a minute. Blue sky thinking, all right?”
Scovill nodded, amused. “Better than SportsCenter or reruns of Matlock.”
“Do you think there’s any chance Jack Lindstrom is alive?”
Scovill’s squinty eye opened as wide as the other and a huge smile erupted on his face. Laughter followed.
“Why is that so funny?”
“Well, once again,” he wiped a tear from his eye. “You’re using your imagination. On the other hand, maybe it’s using you. What, you think Jack faked his death?”
Pilate gave an earnest shrug.
“Mr. Pilate, Jack Lindstrom was a lot of things, but a criminal mastermind he was not,” Scovill said. “He always thought he was the smartest guy in the room. And maybe in some tiny rooms that was true. But I just don’t think he could’ve pulled it off.”
“They didn’t do an autopsy,” Pilate said, raising his eyebrow for effect.
“Well, that’s unusual but not unheard of if everything else looks clean.”
“No fingerprints on record,” Pilate said.
“What?” Scovill sat up straighter in his chair. “What do you mean? They didn’t fingerprint the body?”
“Coroner said they did, but the records got lost,” Pilate made air quotes around “got lost.”
“Oh that’s some bullshit there,” Scovill said. “Humph. That’s damn peculiar I must say.”
“And they cremated the body, so now there’s no way to check.”
“Oh boy, well, that is kind of a strange set of circumstances. Here we go again, another dead guy from Cross, turned to ashes,” he snorted. “OK, no prints, no autopsy…it’s possible. But I doubt it. He’d be on the run the rest of his life. All it’s gonna take is for him to slip up once and he’ll get nabbed.”
“Like calling people he knows?”
“Sure,” Scovill snorted. “He could call his wife, but from what I hear she’s so pissed she’d be the first to turn him in.”
“What if he called me?” Pilate said, his voice low.
“You off your meds?”
“I’m serious.”
“He called you. Jack Lindstrom called you.” Scovill said, his forehead wrinkled from his nonplussed expression.
“Well, somebody has been calling since I was in Florida, making veiled threats.”
“And you think it’s Lindstrom?”
Pilate scratched his ear. “Well, I thought it might be, until I talked to you.”
Scovill scratched his own ear, flicking some dried soap off his fingers onto the floor. “Doesn’t make sense for Thurman to threaten you. His folks won’t bother to threaten you. Serves no purpose. They’ll just kill you. Somebody who calls and makes threats is out to do one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Terrorize you, pure and simple,” he said. “Why else call and make threats? It’s been my experience that it’s the ones who don’t call that you have to worry about the most.”
Pilate felt his gut turn over. “Well, that’s terribly helpful. I need to worry about people I don’t know about who don’t call, not the whack job who calls and sings me nursery rhymes.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“I think you need to take a few deep breaths here. You’re getting worked up over somebody who probably saw you in the newspaper or on 60 Seconds or whatever and wants to give you a hard time.”
“Morgan, somebody took a shot at me the other day.”
Scovill didn’t blink. “Where?”
“I was running that race. I was out near the bridge…”
“Over the river?”
Pilate nodded. “Not far from where they found that boy’s body in the car.”
“Patterson Point.”
“Right. I got this scratch on my face from a piece of tree bark that one of the bullets loosed.”
Scovill blinked a couple of times, and then rose slowly to his feet. “If they were shooting at you, you should be dead. Thurman’s people aren’t hillbilly heroin addicts prone to missing what they aim at. They’re professionals. Way more so than Ollie’s folks. For some reason they let you live.”
“But you said…”
“I know what I said. But maybe they are warning you off. Just giving you a little nudge. Damn generous of them.”
“Oh I feel the love all right,” Pilate said, getting to his feet.
“Or maybe somebody got bored minding the store,” he said quietly, as if thinking aloud.
“What?”
He ignored Pilate’s question. “Or, Jack Lindstrom is alive and lost his mind,” he said. “And he’s stupid and crazy enough to stalk you.” He stared into Pilate’s eyes for a moment, his face stony. “Nah. I’m screwing with ya. Lindstrom isn’t around. This is something else.”
“Comforting, I guess.”
“They’re getting ready to turn all you good citizen visitors out,” he said, gesturing towards the guards at the door. “So at the risk of repeating myself, let me leave you with this one thought: get out of Cross.”
He turned to leave.
“Thanks, Sheriff,” Pilate said.
Scovill stopped and turned back around. “Like I said, I’m not the sheriff anymore, John. You are.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Pilate’s mind reeled at the possibilities as the countryside zoomed past his windshield.
Shefler will probably get released. Nevertheless, right now he’s locked up and unable to make threatening calls. Besides, he’s consumed with his legal defense, so it can’t be him. He’s not exactly Renfield to Lindstrom’s Dracula, anyway. As soon as Lindstrom lost everything, Shefler turned.
His cell rang, startling him. Lincoln’s cell towers worked far better than the one serving Cross Township.
“Hello?”
“Hi. How did it go?” Kate asked.
“Hi babe,” he said. “How’s Kara?”
“She’s good. Her fever broke. She’s been eating chicken soup and watching Madeline. What did Scovill say?”
“Well, a lot, actually,” Pilate said. “More than our taciturn former sheriff usually does.”
“Being locked up will do that to you, I’m sure,” she said.
“Yeah. He’s not looking too good. Kidney problems and diabetes. “
“I’m genuinely sorry to hear that.”
“Me too,” Pilate said. “He said a few interesting things. I’ll tell you when I get home. Should be there around five or so.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll be here. Drive carefully. “
He ended the call and went back to ruminating.
Thurman. Hilmer Thurman is taking over Ollie Olafson’s meth and pot business.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” Simon said.
Pilate glanced at the fields of soybeans as he sped down US-75. He turned it over in his mind. Thurman will want revenge. Hmm. Nevertheless, he could have killed me easily many times over by now. He’s not trying to warn me off is he? This doesn’t make sense.
“Perhaps Thurman didn’t take a shot at you. Maybe Thurman hasn’t called,” Simon said.
“Well, if it wasn’t Thurman, and it wasn’t Shefler, then who was it?”
“I think you can safely say you don’t know Jack about this,” Simon said.
“You can say that again.”
“I think you can safely say you—”
Pilate sighed.
Less than thirty miles outside of Cross, Pilate’s phone rang again.
“Hello?”
“Hey buddy, what’s shaking?” It was the energetic, unmistakable voice of Taters
Malley, the charter boat captain who became Pilate’s fast friend and ally in Key West. He had helped Pilate navigate dangerous waters surrounding a mysterious poker chip, a bloody murder and an oversexed cop.
“Taters! Great to hear your voice. What’s up? Jordan finally throw your old ass out?”
“Keep wishin’, buddy,” he said. “No, just checking on you.” Taters had called a few times since Pilate returned to Cross. Taters would unfailingly say he was “checking” on Pilate.
“I’m fine.”
“I figured you were,” he said. “Good to be back in your old digs?”
“Well, inasmuch as Cross Township can be considered my digs, I guess so.” He slowed for a combine as it crossed the road a quarter mile ahead.
“You still thinkin’ of moving?”
“Yeah, but things are a little…complicated.”
“Are things ever uncomplicated around you?” Taters laughed. Pilate heard seagulls.
“You on the boat?”
“Yup,” Taters said. “The TenFortyEZ is good as new even after the run of bad luck you brought her.”
“Good to hear. So what are you doing?”
“Today I’m just sitting in the harbor, drinking a Modelo and watching the world go by.”
“No charter?”
“Not today,” Taters cleared his throat. “Nobody but me and a few beers today.”
Pilate couldn’t quite place the significance until he realized that this was an annual ritual of Taters Malley’s. Every year on his late wife’s birthday, Taters sat alone on his boat. No charters, no other people. His new wife Jordan respected it and never said a word.
“You okay, pal?” Pilate said.
“Just fine,” he said. “A damn shame is all. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy and Jordan is fantastic. Just a…” His voice trailed off.
“I know, man. A damn shame.”
Taters cleared his throat and swigged some beer. “Well listen, when you get tired of Iowa…”
“Nebraska, but close enough,” Pilate chimed in.
“Or wherever the hell you are, come on back down. We miss y’all. You can even bring that old goat Trevathan. Drove by his shack yesterday. All shut tight. Not the same without you guys.”
Pilate's Ghost Page 4