by Bill Crider
“I’m on my way,” Rhodes said.
Wild hogs covered Blacklin County and Texas like fleas covered a stray dog. They were starting to cover a lot of the whole country, for that matter. Rhodes had seen reports of them from as far north as New York. They tore up pastures, killed calves, ruined crops, and multiplied faster than rabbits. They were beginning to move into urban areas, and Rhodes figured the damage inside a house would be considerable.
The state of Texas had tried all kinds of things to get rid of the hogs, but so far nothing had been truly effective. Rhodes had experienced plenty of problems with them himself, but this was the first time he’d heard of one being inside the Clearview city limits, much less inside someone’s house. He supposed it had been just a matter of time until it happened.
Hannah Bigelow didn’t live far from Rhodes, only about a half mile, but that put her house a half mile closer to the edge of town. Rhodes hoped he wasn’t going to have trouble with hogs in his house or yard. Speedo wouldn’t like that kind of visitor at all. Ivy wouldn’t be too thrilled about it, either. Rhodes would have to see about having the fences strengthened, not that fences stood much of a chance against a determined hog, and if there was anything the wild hogs were, it was determined. And unrelenting.
Rhodes parked in front of the Bigelow house and got out of the car. The house was an old one, built sometime during the 1920s, Rhodes thought. One Bigelow or another had owned it all that time, and they’d managed to keep it in fairly decent shape. Hannah was the last of the Bigelows, though, and she was a Bigelow only by marriage. Her husband, Lawrence, last of the true Bigelows, had been dead for a couple of years.
Hannah was waiting for Rhodes on the concrete porch outside her front door. She was short, a little over five feet tall, but stout. She wore her gray hair pulled back into a tight, neat bun at the back of her head.
“It’s about time you got here,” she said. “If my Lawrence were here, you’d have a little more snap to your service. My Lawrence wouldn’t have tolerated a slow response time like this when there’s an emergency.”
“I’m sorry I took so long,” Rhodes said. “I was working on another case. Where’s the hog?”
“Inside, like I told that Hack Jensen when I called. I’m scared to go in there with it. Do you know how dangerous those wild hogs are?”
“Yes, ma’am, I sure do.”
“Then where’s your rifle? You did bring a rifle, didn’t you? You can’t kill a hog with your bare hands.”
Rhodes heard a crash inside the house.
“That sounded like my china cabinet,” Hannah said. “You’d better get in there and put a stop to things.”
She was right, but Rhodes had to ask a question first. “How did a wild hog get inside your house?”
“You know about Donnie?”
Rhodes said that he knew. Donnie was the Bigelow family dog, or had been. He’d passed away not long after Lawrence.
“Donnie was a good dog, and we trained him to come inside through a doggie door in the back. I never thought a hog could get in through it, though.”
“So the hog’s not very big,” Rhodes said.
“I didn’t say it was big. I said it was tearing up my house. Now are you going in there or not? If my Lawrence were here, you wouldn’t be standing out here talking. You’d be right in there after that hog.”
“I’m going in,” Rhodes said.
“What about your rifle?”
“I wouldn’t want to kill a hog inside your house if I could help it. You’d have blood and hair all over the floor and the walls.”
Hannah looked thoughtful. “That would be bad. It’s bad enough he’s tearing up my house. I can see why you don’t have a gun. You better not come running out and leave him in there, though. My Lawrence wouldn’t stand for it if you didn’t get that hog.”
“I’ll get him,” Rhodes said, hoping he sounded a lot more confident than he actually was. He opened the door and went inside the house. He left the door open, in case he needed to make a quick exit, no matter what Lawrence might have thought about it. His hope, however, was that the hog would be the one making the exit.
The light in the front room was dim even with the door open because the shades, old-fashioned shades like you didn’t see much anymore, were pulled down. In the light that slanted across the room from the doorway, Rhodes could make out a bookcase, a piano, and a writing desk. A small table lay overturned by the piano, and a broken lamp lay on the floor. The breaking lamp, not the china cabinet, had probably been the crash they’d heard.
There was no sign of the hog, but Rhodes heard something snuffling around in another room. A crash came from the back of the house. Not much of a crash, but it was followed by renewed, and louder, snuffling. Rhodes went through a hallway with a chest of drawers and a coat tree and into a kitchen. Light came in through a window over the sink, and Rhodes spotted the rear end of a black hog.
The front end of the hog was inside a plastic trash can in which the hog was rooting around for food. The hog snuffled and snorted and kicked back its trotters as it tried to get a better grip on the slick vinyl floor and push itself deeper into the trash can. It had no idea that Rhodes was anywhere around. All it cared about was whatever it had found in the trash.
“My Lawrence would get that critter right now,” Hannah said at Rhodes’s back, and Rhodes didn’t jump more than a foot. He turned to look at her.
“What are you doing in here?”
“I thought you might need some help. Sure didn’t hear you doing anything about that hog. Next thing you know it’ll have the refrigerator open.”
The hog was still busy in the trash can and either didn’t hear them or didn’t care that they were there.
“I don’t need any help,” Rhodes said. “You go on back outside. Your Lawrence wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”
“You got that right. He always took care of me. Now that he’s gone, I have to rely on the officers of the law, and from what I’ve seen so far, there’s not much to ’em.”
“We do the best we can,” Rhodes said. “You go on back to the porch, and I’ll see what I can do about this hog.”
“You sure you don’t need my help?”
“I’m sure.”
“Well, if you say so.”
Hannah left by way of the hall, and Rhodes turned back to the hog. The bristles on the hog’s back end didn’t seem nearly as coarse as they should have, and the animal lacked the overpowering smell of the wild variety. Rhodes thought that what he had here was an impostor, someone’s pet potbellied piglet that had escaped its home and decided to see what the rest of the big wide world had to offer.
That was good news, since it meant that Rhodes wouldn’t have to kill it, not that he had anything to kill it with, and he wouldn’t have to worry about being ripped to shreds by its tusks. In fact, he very much doubted that the hog had any tusks at all.
The bad news was that he still had to do something about it. The pig might be tame, it might even be housebroken, but that didn’t mean it would be easy to handle. Rhodes wished he hadn’t asked Hannah to leave. He wished Alton Boyd were there to help him. He wished he had the telephone number of the hog’s owner. For that matter, he wished he knew who the owner was, but the wishes weren’t doing him any good. He was going to have to do something, and do it before the pig decided to come out of the trash.
He wondered if Hannah had really gone back outside.
“Hannah?” he said.
“I knew you needed some help,” she said from the hall, and she came back into the kitchen.
“Do you have any duct tape?” Rhodes asked.
“Of course I do. My Lawrence always said you could fix anything with duct tape. Duct tape and WD-40. He always had to have those two things in the house. What he couldn’t fix with one of them—”
Rhodes held up a hand. “Could you bring the duct tape in here? Fast?”
“It’s in there.” Hannah pointed to a cabinet drawer. “R
ight in there. My Lawrence said to keep it handy because you never know when you’ll need it, so that’s what I do.”
The pig lunged forward, pushing the trash can a foot or more. There must have been something really tasty down in the bottom. Rhodes didn’t think the pig would hear him, so he stepped around him and opened the cabinet drawer. Sure enough, a roll of silver duct tape lay right in front. Rhodes took the tape and went back to Hannah. While she watched, he stripped a long length of tape off the roll and tore it free. It wasn’t a quiet process, but the pig wasn’t bothered.
As Rhodes handed the length of tape to Hannah, the pig began to back out of the trash can. Rhodes tossed the roll of tape in the general direction of the stainless steel kitchen sink. It landed with a clang, and Rhodes grabbed hold of the pig’s back legs.
The pig reacted instantly, squirming and squealing. Rhodes kept his grip, forced the legs together, and upended the pig into the plastic can while bringing the can into a standing position. The pig snorted and kicked with its front feet, but without much effect since they were restrained inside the can. It tried to kick with its back feet. Rhodes held tight. The pig writhed. Rhodes pushed down and kept it in the can.
Hannah stood by calmly with the tape, watching.
“Wrap the legs!” Rhodes said. The struggling pig was dragging him away from her. “Wrap the legs!”
“Oh,” Hannah said.
She stepped over, and Rhodes tried to hold himself away from the legs so she could pass the tape around them. After she’d made a couple of rounds, Rhodes squeezed the legs closer together. Hannah made three more rounds. It wasn’t easy, as the pig never gave up. Its exertions carried Rhodes to the right and to the left, and he slid around the kitchen, with Hannah calmly following along and continuing to wrap the legs.
Rhodes knew they weren’t going to get the front legs wrapped. There was just no way. Maybe if they’d had the defensive line of the Houston Texans with them they could’ve managed it, but he and Hannah weren’t up to the job.
Hannah had finished the wrapping, but Rhodes couldn’t let go. He said, “Call the sheriff’s department. When you get Hack Jensen, hand me the phone.”
“You have your hands full already,” Hannah said.
“Don’t worry about that. Just make the call.”
An old black handset hung on the wall beside the refrigerator. Rhodes wouldn’t have been surprised to see a dial on it, but when Hannah took the receiver off the hook, he saw the pushbuttons.
“What’s the number?” Hannah asked.
Rhodes gave it to her, speaking up to be heard over the squealing of the pig, and she punched it in. When Hack answered, she said, “Mr. Jensen, this is Hannah Bigelow again.”
She listened for a moment and then said, “Yes, the sheriff is here. He’s holding on to the wild hog right now, but he wants to talk to you.”
“Never mind,” Rhodes said as the pig surged to the side, pulling Rhodes right along. “Just ask him if anybody’s called in about a missing potbellied pig.”
“What’s a potbellied pig?”
“It’s what I have my hands full of. Just ask him, please.”
Hannah asked Hack, listened, and turned to Rhodes. “He says yes, someone’s just called in about a missing pig.”
“Ask who it was,” Rhodes said.
He was a little short of breath now, and sweating as much as he had when he’d chased Ike Terrell. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold on to the pig.
Hannah asked Hack about the owner. “He says it’s Paul Wooton.”
Wooton lived not far from the Bigelow house, about a block closer to town.
“Have him call Wooton and tell him to come get his pig,” Rhodes said. “Tell him to bring a rope and to make it snappy.”
“My Lawrence used to say that. ‘Make it snappy, Hannah,’ he’d say.” Hannah’s eyes got a faraway look. “I haven’t heard that expression in years.”
Sweat ran out of Rhodes’s hair and down his forehead. “Just tell Hack.” The pig jerked him to the left. “Please.”
Hannah spoke into the phone again and hung up. “He says he’ll do it. He doesn’t know how long it might take Mr. Wooton to get here.”
Wooton couldn’t come too soon for Rhodes. He wasn’t going to be able to hold on to the pig for much longer. Wild or not, it wasn’t happy inside the trash can now. Rhodes had to try something different.
“Go open the back door,” he told Hannah. “I’m going into the yard.”
Hannah didn’t question him. “This way,” she said.
She opened the kitchen door and went out onto a screened-in porch. Rhodes followed her, holding the pig’s legs tight against his chest and pushing the trash can along in front of him on the vinyl flooring as if it were a wheelbarrow. Once on the porch, he saw the back door with the doggie door in the bottom.
“You should nail that thing shut,” Rhodes said, “or replace the whole door.”
Hannah gave him a sad smile. “My Lawrence would do that if he were here. He was handy with things like that. He’s the one who put the doggie door there in the first place. But he’s not here.”
She opened the door, and Rhodes pushed and dragged the pig out onto a small porch. He wasn’t sure he could bump the plastic trash can down the steps without breaking it, and if he did that, the pig would escape for sure.
Only three steps, he told himself. You can do it.
He did, but when he got to the bottom, he had to sit down on the steps while the pig struggled madly inside the trash basket as Rhodes clung to its legs.
Hannah stood on the porch above him. “What’s a potbellied pig?” she asked again.
“It’s a kind of miniature pig that people have as pets,” Rhodes said. “Lots of people have them. Not here in Clearview, but other places.”
“I never heard of such a thing. I thought it was a wild hog, like we have roaming all over the county. Why would anybody want a pet pig?”
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Wooton,” Rhodes said. “Why don’t you go out front and see if he’s here yet.”
Hannah walked down the steps, past Rhodes and the canned pig, and down the driveway to the front of the house. Rhodes sat on the step and thought about pork chops, baby back ribs, ham, and bacon.
He wasn’t sure how long it was until Wooton arrived, maybe five more minutes. Wooton was a small man with a wrinkled face and faded jeans that were too long for his legs. They drooped over the tops of his shoes and dragged on the ground. He held a loop of white nylon rope in his right hand. At the end of the rope was a metal clasp.
“That my pig you got in that trash can?” he asked.
“I hope so,” Rhodes said. “We can worry about the identification later. Let’s see if we can get it out of this thing.”
“Pig’s name is Susie,” Wooton said. “’Cause of how people call pigs. Soooooeeeeee. Like that. So I named her Susie. Name’s on her collar, if that’s her.”
“The pig has a collar?” Rhodes asked.
“Sure. So I’ll know it’s my pig if it happens to wander off.”
Rhodes wondered how many pigs Wooton thought wandered off in Clearview.
“You’re going to need a better fence,” Rhodes said. “We can’t have pigs strolling around the neighborhood.”
“Thought I’d locked my gate. Hadn’t. I’d pull that trash can off ’er, but you got ’er mighty stirred up. She might not know me.”
Rhodes didn’t think it mattered if Susie knew Wooton or not. As soon as the can was off, she was going to make a break for it.
“Her front legs aren’t taped,” Rhodes told Wooton.
“Figgered they weren’t. You hang on to the back ones, and I’ll snap this clasp on her collar. Then we’ll be all set.”
Rhodes had his doubts about that, but he didn’t see that he had much choice in the matter. He renewed his grip on Susie’s back legs, and Wooton pulled on the trash can. The pig was wedged inside tightly enough so that Wooton had to strain a little. Wh
en the can popped off, bits of paper scattered. There wasn’t much else left inside the can. Whatever had been in there was now inside Susie, who emitted a high-pitched squeal and tried to run as soon as her head cleared the trash can. Her front trotters didn’t get much traction on the driveway, however, so Rhodes was able to hang on while Wooton snapped the clasp to a silver ring on the metal-studded collar.
When the clasp was secure, Wooton wrapped the rope around his arm. He reached into his pocket and came out with a knife. He pitched it to Rhodes and said, “Cut the tape.”
Rhodes caught the knife in one hand, keeping one arm wrapped around Susie’s legs. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Go on. It’ll be okay.”
Rhodes let go of the legs. He opened the blade and sliced through the tape. Susie’s legs snapped apart, and she kicked backward, narrowly missing Rhodes, who’d quickly leaned to one side. Susie’s hooves hit the ground, and she plunged forward, jerking Wooton nearly off his feet.
Wooton held on to the rope and talked to Susie in what Rhodes assumed were supposed to be soothing tones as she dragged him along.
“It’s all right, Susie,” Wooton said. “It’s all right. The mean sheriff won’t hurt you any more.”
Rhodes folded the knife blade into the handle. He didn’t mind that Wooton wanted to calm Susie, but he did resent the “mean sheriff” crack somewhat. He stood up and watched the pig drag Wooton around the yard.
“What about my damages?” Hannah asked. “Who’s going to pay me for that?”
“That’s between you and Mr. Wooton,” Rhodes said.
“I’ll pay,” Wooton said. “You just send me a bill.”
He had Susie almost under control now and was guiding her down the driveway toward the front of the house. Or maybe she was dragging him. It was hard to tell. Rhodes followed along behind. Hannah was beside him.
“You heard him, Sheriff,” she said. “He’s going to pay. You’re my witness.”
“All right,” Rhodes said. “I’ll hold him to it.”
“You see that you do. My Lawrence would hold him to it if he were here, but he’s not. So I need all the help I can get.”