The Double-Jack Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (Sheriff Bo Tully Mysteries)

by Patrick F. McManus

  “Flo can run it from the radio room. Herb can do whatever Herb does, but he’s to stay in the office night and day. Now get me Lurch.”

  “Lurch is up at Woods Lake doing the cabin.”

  “Okay. Where’s Thorpe?”

  “Ernie just came in.”

  “Great! Tell him to get up to Agatha’s ranch pronto. Run flat-out and emergency all the way. I want him armed to the teeth. You can tell him how to get there and to stay until he hears from me.”

  “Will do. I don’t know where Pugh is. He stopped by the murder scene at Woods Lake earlier and nobody has seen him since. I hear he was shaking with rage when he left.”

  “Don’t worry about Brian. I’ve got him busy. At least I hope I have.”

  “Be careful, Bo!”

  He could tell she was upset. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll get this under control pretty fast.”

  He punched off and dialed again. Bernice answered.

  “Bernice! Listen, I never meant to get you and Agatha and Bunny involved in this, but that maniac who’s trying to kill me, if he thinks you’re friends of mine he might try to kill you ladies just for the heck of it. If he followed us he may know where you live. Both Agatha and you know how to handle guns and maybe Bunny does, too. So get yourselves armed. He may be driving a red Humvee. And he’s probably wearing one of those stupid caps with the earmuffs tied up on top.”

  “Those caps are great, Bo! Don’t call them stupid, because I wear one myself when I’m hunting.”

  “Sorry about that, Bernice. I’m sure you look lovely in your hat. But if a guy shows up at your door wearing one, kill him.”

  “What if it’s the wrong man?”

  “I’ll take care of that later.”

  “Is that what you call the Blight Way?”

  “You got it, Bernice. The Blight Way. Another thing. I’ve got one of my deputies, Ernie Thorpe, headed up to the ranch to stay with you. He’s a young, good-looking guy and should be wearing a uniform. Don’t shoot him. He’ll stay with you until we take care of this maniac that’s running around. See you soon, Bernice.” He punched the off button.

  Pap stuck his head in the cab. “The pickup is just sitting there, Bo.”

  “Yeah, I see it. We better get up Deadman a ways and make camp. You still have enough daylight to check the creek for gold.”

  Tully almost missed the turnoff to Deadman, the road was so grown up with brush and small trees and some trees not so small. He plowed into the road anyway, then stopped. “Pap, get out and turn the hubs. We have to four-wheel it from here.”

  “How come I got to do all the work? Next time, Dave can set next to the door!” He climbed out and turned the hubs, then climbed back in and started to roll himself a cigarette, possibly as an act of revenge.

  First Kincaid and now I got Pap trying to kill me, Tully thought. The truck growled ahead through a narrow green tunnel of brush and trees, branches scraping both sides and screeching like a large animal in serious torment.

  Dave said, “After this I’ll be surprised if you have any paint left on your truck.”

  “It’s the latest style, especially in twenty-year-old Idaho pickups. I’ll sell it to you cheap when we get out of here, Dave.”

  “If we get out of here!”

  “If we don’t, I’ll sell it to you even cheaper.”

  7

  AFTER TWENTY MINUTES of plowing through brush, Tully turned the pickup down toward the creek. They suddenly emerged into a park-like area beneath giant hemlocks. Pap, grumbling, helped Tully pitch his white-wall hunting tent with the stovepipe of his sheepherder stove running up through the roof. Tully set up three cots inside, laid foam pads on top of them, and spread sleeping bags out on the pads. Dave cleaned out the old fire pit, lined it with new rocks, gathered up several armloads of dry wood, and dumped them by the pit. Pap sat on a log and bossed. With the camp set up to his satisfaction, he put on his hip boots and plodded down to the creek to try his gold dredge.

  Tully tied back the canvas door flaps to air out the tent. They were already hot from the sun. Tully loved the smell of hot canvas. Then he walked over to inspect Dave’s fire pit and woodpile.

  Dave said, “I’m wondering if it’s such a good idea for us to be sitting around a campfire at night. Kincaid could sneak in here and blast us.”

  “Anything’s possible,” Tully said. “You get out away from the hemlocks, though, and the terrain is steep and thick with brush and generally pretty nasty, even for Kincaid.” He pointed through a narrow opening in the trees to a bare ridge overlooking the camp. “My guess is he would slip in up there. The shot would be three hundred yards but a piece of cake for Kincaid. He would have a clear shot and probably could even fix himself up a rest for the rifle. But you have to remember it’s me he’s after. With the three of us sitting around the campfire at night, he wouldn’t be able to tell me from you or Pap. Say he shoots you first by mistake, Dave. Pap and I would dive for cover and grab our rifles.”

  “Why me?”

  “Why do you think I brought you along?”

  “I did wonder.”

  Tully laughed. “I’m not letting Kincaid or anybody else prevent us from enjoying our campfire. If he’s even following us, it would be well into the night before he reached the ridge. It’s a rough climb to get up there, but it’s the only place he would have a clear shot at us.”

  Dave looked up at the ridge. “That’s a pretty long shot. You sure Kincaid could make it?”

  “He could make it, all right. That’s why I was thinking of letting you wear my vest.”

  “Your bullet-proof vest? Mighty thoughtful of you, Bo.”

  “No, my regular sheriff’s vest, the one with the big star on it. You would look good in it, Dave.”

  “That’s about what I expected.”

  Pap came tramping into camp. He laid his gold dredge down on the ground, flopped into a camp chair, and began rolling down his hip waders. “Nary a speck of gold. I sucked sand and gravel out of the cracks of a big old flat rock that practically spans the whole creek. If any gold washed down Deadman’s in the last thousand years, I would have picked up a bit of color at least. Nothing.”

  “Maybe some other prospector sucked it out before you,” Dave said.

  “Naw, they never get it all. I’d have got a speck or two, at least.”

  “We’re not up here to get gold anyway,” Dave said.

  “That’s not the idea,” Tully said. “Tom and the boy would have panned the creek to see if they could find any gold. If they found some, they would work their way up the drainage until the color ran out. Then they would have started looking around on the side hills to see where it was coming from, the mother lode so to speak. Obviously, they found it. That’s where Agatha’s chunk of quartz came from. If Pap can’t suck up any sign of gold in Deadman that means we’re in the wrong drainage.”

  “So I guess we’ll move camp tomorrow.”

  “Naw, we’ll keep it right here. This is the perfect spot.”

  “You’re getting weirder every day, Bo. So who brought the single malt this time?”

  As Tully explained, Pap was in charge of bringing the whiskey and cigars because he was rich. He also brought the steaks and potatoes, wrapping the latter in foil, sliced and buttered and alternated with onions for roasting in the fire. They sat around the fire and sipped Bushmills and smoked cigars after finishing supper.

  “I think these cigars are Cuban, Pap,” Dave said. “Don’t you know they’re illegal?”

  “I never heard that. You heard that, Bo?”

  “Can’t say I have, Pap, but I’ll check on it as soon as I get back to the office. If they turn out to be contraband, I’ll have to put you in prison and confiscate all your cigars.”

  Before they went to sleep that night, they heard an owl hoot. Pap said he’d once heard an owl call his name.

  “That’s bad news,” Tully said. “That means you’re going to die.”

  “I was three
years old and I ain’t dead yet. What do you think of that?”

  “Maybe it meant the owl would die.”

  “Well, if this one hoots all night, he’s going to die.”

  Tully was awakened later in the night by what he first thought was a large animal attacking a small woodland creature. Loud snarls followed by pitiful squealing filled the tent. Then he realized it was Pap and Dave snoring. He pulled his sleeping bag over his head and went back to sleep.

  • • •

  Tully got up early the next morning and caught a dozen small rainbow trout for breakfast. He grated three large potatoes into his cast-iron frying pan, chopped up a large onion, mixed it in with the potatoes, and made hash browns. Then he spread a dozen strips of bacon into another frying pan and cooked it crisp. He forked the bacon out onto a paper plate, rolled the trout in flour, salted and peppered them, laid them in the hot bacon grease, and cooked them until they were golden brown.

  Pap came yawning out of the tent. “I thought I smelled bacon frying. Yup, by golly, I did. Fish! You know how to lift an old man’s spirits, Bo, I have to admit that. You must have got up at the crack of dawn.”

  “Yeah, I did. As a matter of fact I was awake long before dawn cracked. Your and Dave’s snoring kept me awake most of the night. I think you were the little woodland creature and Dave was the huge beast tearing the little guy to pieces.”

  “You must have been dreaming,” Dave said, coming through the tent flaps. “I’ve never snored in my entire life. If you want to call those pitiful squeaks and squeals that come out of Pap snoring, well I guess you’ve never been in the army and lived in a barracks.”

  “I’m afraid I came up between the wars. It wasn’t easy. You’ve got to have good judgment about when to get born these days. So how many trout, Dave?”

  “Three and a small mountain of those hash browns. They look yummy.”

  “Yummy! I’ve never heard a grown man say ‘yummy.’”

  “You have to be awfully tough and mean to say ‘yummy,’ Bo. I’ve been places where saying ‘yummy’ could get you killed.”

  “You’re close to being in one of them right now.” Bo slid three small trout and a mound of hash browns onto Dave’s plate. The trout were brown and crisp.

  “You eat them like French fries, Dave.”

  “I already figured that out. They’re about the size of fries.”

  Pap had been paying serious attention to his own plate of bacon, trout, and hash browns. He looked up. “I just had an idea.”

  Tully and Dave looked at him as if this might have been Pap’s first idea in years.

  “So?” Tully said.

  “You know that mine that was marked on the map? That’s the Finch Mine. It’s only a couple of miles from here. Why don’t we go take a look at it?”

  “Let’s see,” Tully said. “Well, it’s within the range we figured out. But you said there’s a chain across the road and No Trespassing signs all over the place.”

  “I told you I snuck a bolt cutter into the back of the pickup. We can just snip the lock off and drive on in. It won’t hurt nothing and I can look around and see if I can find where I buried the bottle of gold.”

  “You sure that’s the same mine Gramps worked?”

  “Yeah. It won’t hurt nothing for us to go in and take a look. We’re just messing around anyway. You know there ain’t no way we’re ever going to find out what happened to Agatha’s pappy and that boy. It’s over eighty years since they disappeared.”

  Tully tugged on the droopy corner of his mustache while he mulled this over. “I’ll tell you what, Pap. I’ll call Agatha and see if she can tell me where the Finches live. If she can, we’ll go ask them if we can look around the mine.”

  “There’s one big drawback to that approach. They might say no.”

  Tully took out his phone and dialed Agatha.

  “Bo?” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “I thought you’d be calling. Your deputy showed up last night. I almost shot him, but he’s much too good looking.”

  “Despite Ernie’s looks, he’s a pretty good deputy. He’ll stay there until we get Kincaid run down. He won’t be much of a bother.”

  “Oh no, he’s a lovely young man. He and Bunny have hit it off, too.”

  “What! Put Ernie on. I need to have a word with him.”

  “He and Bunny are out by the creek. I’ll have him call you when they come in.”

  “Yeah, please do, Agatha. Oh, the reason I called—can you tell me where the Finches live?”

  “Why, yes, Teddy and Margaret Finch are good friends of ours. They’re a lovely couple. You would never know they’re filthy rich. They own thousands of acres of prime timber land and they keep their woods like a park. A year or two ago, Teddy got some ecological award for his stewardship of the land or some such thing. They know all about you, too, Bo. They’re some of your biggest fans.”

  “My sheriffing? I didn’t know law enforcement had fans.”

  “Of course not, silly. I mean your painting!”

  “Oh, good. Maybe they’ll let us go in and check out their mine. By the way, tell Ernie I don’t hold with poaching.”

  “Poaching? What on earth do you mean?”

  “Ernie will know. So tell me how to get to the Finches’ place.”

  “It’s about three miles on the other side of Angst, a huge white house with a white board fence out front that encloses about twenty acres. You can’t miss it.”

  “That their pasture?”

  “No, dear. It’s their front yard.”

  “Thanks, Agatha. Talk to you later.” He closed his phone.

  Pap was finishing off the hash browns. “She tell you how to get to the Finches?”

  “Yep. Saddle up and let’s go.”

  8

  THE FINCH PLACE had about half a mile of paved drive-way. On one side was the Finch lawn and on the other was a pasture with a dozen or more beautiful horses prancing about. Tully hated horses, but if he ever started to like them he thought he would probably like one of these.

  Pap said, “If Finch sold those horses he could buy the whole town of Blight City.”

  “If he sold one of them,” Dave said, “he could buy the whole town of Blight City.”

  “I wonder where Teddy made his money,” Tully said.

  “He didn’t make it at all,” Pap said, squishing out a hand-rolled in the ashtray. “His daddy didn’t make it, either. It was his granddaddy, Jack Finch, made all of it on that gold mine we’re going up to see. He took millions and millions and millions in gold out of that mine. When the ore played out, his son and grandson invested the money in timber. Got their own sawmill around here someplace. One of the few mills in the country that still turns out prime lumber.”

  “How come you know so much about it?” Tully asked.

  “I’ll tell you how come. Back when your granddad was sheriff, old Jack Finch apparently got the notion that some of his business associates was trying to kill him. He talked to my daddy about it and paid him a sizable fee and your grand-pap took care of the problem. I don’t know how exactly, but your grandpap wasn’t nothing like you, Bo.”

  “That’s what I understand. As a matter of fact, you’re nothing like me either, Pap.”

  “I didn’t want to say it, knowing how tender your feelings are.”

  Tully got out of the pickup and walked up to the front entrance. A tall, slim, white-haired man answered the chimes. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m Sheriff Bo Tully of Blight County and—”

  “Good heavens!” The man called over his shoulder. “Margaret, we have a celebrity right here at our own front door— Bo Tully!”

  “I don’t believe it!” the woman cried. “Bo Tully, the artist?”

  “I don’t imagine there’s more than one Bo Tully. Come in, sir, come in! Oh, I see you have a couple of folks in the truck. Tell them to come in, too.”

  Tully signaled Pap and Dave t
o join him. The man stuck out his hand. Tully shook it. The grip was surprisingly strong.

  “I’m Teddy Finch. This is my wife, Margaret.” Mrs. Finch was tall and willowy, with her silver hair wrapped up in a bun and held with a pin.

  Mrs. Finch said, “We are so delighted, Mr. Tully. We have been fans of your painting for many years. You can’t believe what an honor it is to finally meet you!”

  Tully introduced Pap and Dave, who now seemed somewhat subdued to be in the company of such a famous person.

  Mrs. Finch said, “Come in, come in, please, gentlemen. Teddy will show you into the sitting room and I’ll go fix a pot of tea.” She disappeared into the vast spaces of the house. Tully had expected a butler to appear at any moment, along with a maid in a short black dress and a white frilly apron. Apparently, Finch read the expression on his face. “You’re wondering why two old people are living in this gigantic house alone. It wasn’t so large when we had our five children here and my father and mother, both of whom passed on quite a few years ago. Back then we did have some service people, mostly for my dad to torment—at least that was my opinion at the time—but now it’s just Margaret and me. We prefer it that way, as long as we can do for ourselves.”

  Dave took Pap’s hat off his head and handed it to him. The three of them sat down on a couch across from Finch. “What brings you all the way up here, Sheriff Tully? I hope we haven’t broken any laws.”

  “Not at all, sir. Actually, the three of us are up here on vacation,” Tully said. “My father here is an amateur gold prospector and is fascinated by old gold mines. He was wondering if you would give us permission to look around the old Finch Mine.”

  “I don’t see why not, as long as you promise not to sue me if you fall down an empty shaft. Seriously, the whole underground system is rotten. There may still be some gold down there, but it would be too expensive to get to. I’m not a miner anyway.”

  “Oh, we just want to look around,” Tully said. “My dad lived in one of the houses up there when his dad worked in the mine back in the thirties.”

  They went on discussing the mine until Mrs. Finch came in with the tea and some crumb cake. “You all had the good fortune to arrive on one of the few days I happened to do some baking,” she said. “When we’re done with the tea, I want to show you some of the Bo Tully watercolors we have bought over the years. We just love your paintings, Mr. Tully. When are you ever going to give up law enforcement and become a full-time painter?”