Bitch Creek

by Tapply, William

  He topped the rise, and then he saw what was happening, and in spite of the adrenaline that was rushing through him, he felt like laughing.

  Ross and Marcus had come in Ross’s big pickup truck with the plow hitch on the front. They had backed into the end of Calhoun’s driveway just far enough to keep it out of sight from the road.

  Now Kate’s Blazer was parked in front of the truck, blocking its way, and Marcus was mindlessly ramming the front end of it with the plow hitch, smashing into it, backing up, gunning it forward again. In the truck’s headlights, Calhoun could see that Kate’s old Blazer was a wreck. But it was a big vehicle, and every time Marcus rammed it, it just skidded backward a few feet.

  Then, in one flash of Marcus’s headlights, Calhoun saw Kate’s face behind the windshield of the Blazer. Her eyes were wide and angry, and he realized that the Blazer’s engine was roaring, too, and she was in first gear, trying to drive Marcus back.

  Two big four-wheel-drive vehicles going at each other.

  Calhoun ran to the truck, yanked open the door, grabbed Marcus’s shirt, and hauled him out. They both fell in a heap. Calhoun rolled away, and when he sprang to his feet, he saw that Marcus was grappling on the ground for his rifle.

  Calhoun darted in and kicked Marcus in the chest. Marcus tumbled backward, then scrambled to his feet, breathing heavily. His pant leg was wet and shiny with blood. He crouched there glowering at Calhoun, his big arms spread wide, like a wrestler looking for his opening.

  Calhoun feinted to his left, took two quick steps, spun around, and kicked Marcus on his wounded thigh.

  Marcus howled and managed to grab onto Calhoun’s leg. He twisted Calhoun to the ground, and then he was on him, whaling away with his big fists, pounding Calhoun’s ribs and arms, heavy sledgehammer blows. One caught him flush, and Calhoun felt the side of his chest cave in and the breath gush from his lungs.

  Broken rib, he thought, his mind clear and objective.

  He squirmed on the ground and managed to twist his body so that Marcus’s heavy fists fell on his back and shoulders. Marcus climbed onto him, forced him flat onto his back and straddled him. His weight was solid and unmovable on Calhoun’s stomach. Marcus had both hands on Calhoun’s throat. Calhoun was gasping for air. Every time he tried to take a breath, it felt as if someone was shoving a butcher knife into his chest. He felt himself growing light-headed. His arms felt heavy and weak.

  An image flashed in his mind, one of those quick memory-flickers, more déjà vu, and he remembered all this from some other time. He’d fought Marcus before. Or a big strong man just like him.

  Make a move, he thought. Do it soon or it would be too late.

  He worked a hand free, and with all that was left of his strength, he rammed his stiffened fingers into Marcus’s solar plexus. Marcus gasped, and his hands slipped off Calhoun’s throat and grappled for a grip on Calhoun’s arm. Calhoun jabbed him again, and when Marcus tried to move away, Calhoun slammed upward with his knee, caught him flush between the legs, and knocked Marcus off him.

  He jumped onto Marcus’s chest, made a weapon of the side of his hand, and slashed a hard backhander against Marcus’s upper lip, right where it met his nose.

  Marcus’s eyes opened wide and he said something that sounded like “Huh?” His face suddenly blossomed in blood, and then he went limp. He lay there, sprawled on his back, motionless, with his eyes rolled up into his head.

  Calhoun was on his hands and knees, hanging his head, gasping for breath. After a minute, he lay on his back and closed his eyes.

  Sometime later—it might’ve been a few minutes or several hours—Calhoun felt a bright light on his face. He made slits of his eyes.

  The sun? Too bright for the sun.

  “You okay, Stoney?”

  It was Sheriff Dickman’s voice.

  Calhoun held his hand over his eyes. “Move the damn light, Sheriff.”

  The light shifted. Calhoun opened his eyes and blinked. Dickman was squatting beside him. “You injured, son?” he said.

  “Busted ribs, maybe,” grunted Calhoun. He rubbed his throat. “Otherwise, I think I’m okay.”

  “You got blood all over your face.”

  “Ross nicked my ear.”

  “You did a job on Marcus,” said the sheriff.

  “How bad is he hurt?”

  “Pretty bad. You knocked out four teeth, busted his nose. He’s still unconscious.”

  “Guess that’s what I was trying to do.”

  “Don’t know where you learned to do that, my friend. You could’ve killed him.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him,” said Calhoun. “If I’d wanted to kill him . . .”

  The sheriff was looking at him as if he had never seen him before. He opened his mouth to say something, then shook his head. “You are some kind of lethal weapon, Stoney.”

  “I did things I didn’t know I could do,” said Calhoun. He took a deep, painful breath, then pushed himself up to a sitting position. He looked around. Kate was standing a little behind the sheriff, hugging herself, looking solemn. She was wearing a long full skirt and a peasant blouse. “Hi, honey,” said Calhoun.

  She smiled at him and whispered, “Hi.”

  “Where’s Ralph?” he said. “Is Ralph okay?”

  Dickman moved aside, and Calhoun saw Ralph lying on the ground beside Kate.

  Calhoun held out his hand. “Come here,” he said.

  Ralph got up slowly, limped over, and licked Calhoun’s face.

  Calhoun put his arm around Ralph’s neck. “Dammit,” he said, “when’re you going to learn to obey me? I told you to stay put there in the woods.”

  Ralph kind of shrugged, and then he lay down beside him with his chin on his paws.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  THE SHERIFF CAME OVER and squatted down beside Calhoun, who was sitting on the ground patting Ralph with one hand and holding his other arm around Kate’s shoulders. “We better get you to the hospital,” said Dickman. “Get you an X-ray, patch up that ear.”

  Calhoun shook his head. “Might’ve cracked a rib or two,” he said. “Not much they can do for that. Guess I can take care of my ear okay. I don’t need any damn hospital. I don’t care for hospitals.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’ll live,” said Calhoun. “Where’s Ross and Marcus?”

  “Ambulance already took them away. You mashed up Ross’s knee pretty good.” The sheriff glanced around. “We got a lot to do. Gonna need to talk to you. You too, ma’am,” he said to Kate.

  “Right now?” said Calhoun.

  Dickman shrugged. “No. Soon, though.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” said Calhoun. “David Ross just about admitted killing Lyle and going after Millie. Marcus did the heavy work. But he was just doing what Ross told him. Marcus saved Ralph’s life. That means something. Check Ross’s .22, Sheriff. He plugged Lyle with it, and he used it to shoot at me the other night, and my guess is, he probably killed Fred Green—Lawrence Potter—with it, too.”

  Dickman nodded. “I figured out that much all by myself. That foot you saw—”

  Calhoun nodded. “It was real. It belonged to Potter.”

  “What I don’t get,” said the sheriff, “is why. You got any thoughts on that?”

  “I guess Ross has got the answers,” said Calhoun. “I figure Potter was his target and Lyle was a witness to it. He left Lyle there, but he buried Potter so everyone’d be thinking it was Potter—Fred Green—who’d killed Lyle. All that time, we were looking for a dead man and thinking a dead man was stalking me. You might want to ask Ross about what really happened to Sam Potter back in the fire of forty-seven. Ask him why he bought the Potters’ property. Oh, and see if he’s got anything to say about buried treasure.”

  Dickman arched his eyebrows. “Buried treasure? You mean that little piece of gold you found?”

  Calhoun shrugged.

  The sheriff grunted and pushed himself to his feet. “We’l
l talk later. Assume I’ll be able to find you here?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Calhoun.

  “I called in a wrecker,” said the sheriff. “They’ll haul those two vehicles out of your way.” He turned to Kate. “Afraid yours is a goner, ma’am.”

  Kate smiled. “About time.”

  Calhoun and Kate and Ralph continued to sit there at the end of the driveway while the various official vehicles pulled away. Then they were alone.

  The stars were dimming overhead. The sky was turning silvery, and the morning chorus of forest birdsong was starting to get tuned up. Calhoun figured it was about five o’clock. Three hours since he’d first heard Marcus’s foot scraping on the leaves beside his house.

  “You okay, honey?” he said to Kate.

  She smiled. “I’m fine.”

  “Give me a hand,” he said.

  Kate stood, bent down, hooked her arm around Calhoun’s back, and helped him climb to his feet.

  His chest hurt like hell.

  She hugged him gently for a minute, then said, “Come on. Let’s patch you up.”

  He hobbled back down the driveway, leaning on her. Ralph shuffled along beside them.

  “I thought we agreed that you were going to steer clear of me,” said Calhoun.

  “I was worried about you.”

  “You’re as bad as Ralph,” he said. “Won’t stay put when I tell you to.”

  “Problem is, we both love you.”

  He turned to her. “You’re looking mighty pretty, honey,” he said. “I can hardly breathe, looking at you.”

  “You can hardly breathe,” she said, “because you got busted ribs.”

  Back at the house, Kate washed Calhoun’s ear, doused it with antiseptic, and taped a clumsy bandage over it. The bullet had just nicked it, she said. With all the blood, it looked worse than it was.

  Then Calhoun went outside, got out his garden hose, and washed down the side where Marcus had drenched it with gasoline, soaking it thoroughly until he figured it was safe.

  When he rejoined Kate and Ralph inside, she had the coffee ready. They took their mugs out onto the deck, held hands, and watched the new day arrive.

  “Millie says we should go to a restaurant,” said Calhoun. “Make a public appearance. Stop sneaking around. Millie says everyone knows about us anyway.”

  Kate gave his hand a squeeze. “Maybe Millie’s right. Walter’s been saying the same thing.”

  “What are you going to do about Walter?”

  She shook her head. “Take care of him as best I can, Stoney. I owe him that.”

  Calhoun nodded. “I guess you do.”

  “I care about Walter,” she said. “He’s a good man, and I used to love him.” She hesitated. “Guess I still do love him.” She lifted Calhoun’s hand and held it against her face. “But not like I love you.”

  “When Millie gets out of the hospital, suppose we go to Juniper’s, the three of us? Would that be okay with you?”

  “A woman on each arm,” she said. “What a show-off. You feel like going to bed?”

  “I’m not very tired.”

  “So?”

  Eventually, they slept.

  Calhoun woke up sometime in the middle of the afternoon. When he started to roll over, it felt as if Marcus had broken every bone in his body. It took him several minutes to summon up the courage to sit, ease his legs over the side of the bed, and push himself to his feet.

  The blankets were all shoved down to the foot of the bed, and Kate was sprawled naked on her belly, hugging a pillow, her glossy black hair fanned out over her back. He looked down at her, admiring the smoothness of her skin, the taper of her waist, the flare of her hips, the length of her legs. Then he smiled, let out a long breath, and pulled the sheet up over her.

  He hobbled into the kitchen, put on some more coffee, and collapsed into a chair.

  Ralph had followed him out of the bedroom. Ralph was hobbling, too.

  Calhoun scratched the top of his head. “We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

  Ralph sighed and curled up beside Calhoun’s chair.

  A few minutes later Ralph growled, and then Calhoun heard a car pulling into the yard. A door slammed, and he didn’t bother getting up when he heard footsteps on the porch. “Come on in,” he said.

  Sheriff Dickman pushed open the door and stood there holding his hat.

  “Kate’s sleeping,” said Calhoun.

  Dickman nodded and jerked his head toward the deck. “Let’s talk.”

  “Pour us some coffee,” said Calhoun, “and bring it out.”

  They sat in the rockers, sipping coffee. Ralph lay on the deck between them.

  Dickman held his hat on his lap and propped his heels on the deck railing. “We talked with Ross and Marcus,” he said. “They were both cooperative.”

  “Can you tell me?” said Calhoun.

  “Don’t see why not. Ross signed a confession. He was full of remorse for killing Lyle and hurting Millie. At the same time, he kept saying he had no choice.” Dickman gazed down toward the creek. “As you already figured out, David Ross’s name was Raczwenc in nineteen thirty-eight when Sam and Emily Potter bought the property across the street, built themselves a house deep in the woods, and moved in. The Raczwencs were Jewish, and Sam Potter was an old-fashioned southern bigot and a raging anti-Semite to boot. He’d been in the war, and his platoon had gone in to liberate one of the death camps. He saw that horror firsthand and it just made him worse. Sam Potter was a sick, paranoid, haunted man, no doubt about that. Anyway, after the Potters moved in, things began to happen to the Raczwencs. They began to find their livestock dead. Goats and cows with their throats slashed, ears cut off, bellies slit open. Once they woke up in the middle of the night with a cross burning in front of their house.”

  The sheriff shook his head, glanced at Calhoun, sipped his coffee, returned his gaze to the creek. “David Raczwenc was a teenager. The Potters had two kids, a boy and a girl. The boy—Lawrence—was a few years younger than David, but he still taunted David every chance he got. Told him he was a dirty Jew, a Christ-killer, the usual vile shit. Bragged how his daddy was going to get them, how he’d seen the Jews in the concentration camps. The boy’s head was full of all that poison. Lawrence Potter liked to brag how his father had smuggled treasure home from the war. Souvenirs from that death camp, he said.”

  The sheriff stopped and looked up over Calhoun’s shoulder. Calhoun turned. Kate was standing in the doorway wearing a pair of Calhoun’s sweatpants and one of his T-shirts.

  “Come sit down, honey,” said Calhoun. “You might as well hear this.”

  She hitched herself up onto the deck rail, hooked her heels around the bottom rail, and perched there facing them. “I heard part of it,” she said. “I heard the part about treasure.”

  “Lawrence Potter told David that his daddy had brought home a rucksack full of Jews’ teeth,” said the sheriff. “Gold crowns and inlays and bridges that the Nazis pulled from the mouths of those poor souls. That was the treasure.”

  “How horrible,” breathed Kate.

  Dickman blew out a long breath. “One day the summer before the fire, young David came home from school and found Saul, his father, with a rope around his neck, hanging from a rafter in their barn, blood dripping off him. He was dead, of course. They ended up calling it a suicide, even though the man had cuts on his arms and face. There were a lot of rumors going around about Sam Potter killing Saul, and the county sheriff took the case, but nothing ever came of it.

  “David Raczwenc was positive Sam Potter killed his father, not that he wasn’t already boiling with hatred of the Potters. So on that day in October of forty-seven, when that fire came sweeping through the woods and looked like it was going to burn ‘em all to hell, he saw his opportunity. He snuck over to the Potter’s place—”

  “And he killed Sam Potter,” said Calhoun.

  Dickman nodded. “Yes. He shot Sam with his twenty-two, set fire to the place,
and went on home. The Potter kids—Lawrence and Martha—they were at school that day, and their mother was off somewhere, otherwise David would’ve killed them all.” Dickman shook his head. “At the time, no one doubted that Sam Potter was the victim of the fire. David Ross was the only person on earth who knew what really happened. He grew up, got married, raised two kids, and got old, and not a day passed when he didn’t think about Sam Potter killing his father, and that awful treasure Lawrence Potter had bragged about. He waited close to sixty years for Lawrence to come back. David changed his name to Ross soon as he was old enough. He bought the Potter property when the state took it for taxes, kept watch over it, waiting for the day. Said he never doubted Lawrence would show up. Recognized him the minute he stepped out of Lyle’s old Power Wagon. Said it was the ears. Lawrence Potter had funny ears, even as a kid.”

  “So he snuck down there, killed Lawrence, and Lyle was a witness to it,” said Calhoun.

  “Yup. When Ross got to the pond, Lyle was fishing, minding his own business, and Potter was coming down the hill with his treasure. Potter had come with Lyle, and he would’ve left with Lyle. By Ross’s way of thinking, that meant he had no choice but to kill Lyle, too. So he did. He killed them both, then called Jacob, said he had some work for Marcus, and the two of them dragged Lawrence down the hill and buried him. They stowed Lyle’s truck in David’s barn, and the next night Ross drove it to the back of the grammar school in South Riley. Marcus followed along behind and gave David a lift back home. David said he wanted it to look like the mysterious Fred Green had shot Lyle. Keep us looking for Green, knowing we’d never find him.”

  “Except Ralph found his foot,” said Calhoun.

  The sheriff looked at him and smiled. “You were right, Stoney. That was a real foot.”

  “I admit I had my doubts,” said Calhoun.

  Dickman smiled. “Anyway, Ross saw you come out of there that night with your dog, started to worry about somebody finding the body. So he got Marcus to come over to help him move it. By the time we got back there that night it was gone, and by the next day, the rain had washed away all the scent.”