Their lousy sense of timing finally did them in.
They’d cased out the convenience store two days before and deemed it to be an easy lick. No cameras, so silent alarms, a solitary clerk on duty after the hours of darkness.
But they didn’t know the day after their visit a van marked “Alarms R Us” pulled up in the lot to install a brand new state of the art surveillance system.
A detective recognized their faces immediately. He had an extensive selection of mugshots to compare them with.
The Dykes brothers served time in separate prisons a thousand miles apart, communicating only by an occasional letter, scrawled in barely legible handwriting by brothers who’d never really learned to write.
Danny served six years, and Billy served eight. Because Billy was the one brandishing the weapon that fateful night.
After they got out, they stumbled around from town to town, doing the only thing they ever really learned how to do: steal.
The Dykes had a bad habit of meeting new people and instantly sizing them up for what they were good for. Or what possessions they had.
Beth and Milam Sanders didn’t have much. Before the blackout they scratched out a meager living with what their ramshackle motel and tiny gas station brought in. After the blackout they survived on Beth’s garden and by slaughtering a bull or a hog occasionally. And on the goods that were in the back of the abandoned Walmart truck on the highway directly in front of their house.
But although they didn’t have much, they did have an outstanding location for the Dykes brothers to set up a criminal enterprise.
It was a Tuesday morning when the brothers, traveling to another town to escape the heat they’d felt in Wichita Falls, happened upon Beth Sanders working in her front yard.
“Well hello, ma’am. Pretty flower beds ya got there.”
“Well thank you, young man. It takes a lot of work, but it helps me pass my time. And I have a beautiful batch of gladiolas this year, don’t you think?”
Danny Dykes didn’t know a gladiola from a hole in the ground, but he’d never tell the old lady in front of them that. It would be rude. And he needed to gain her trust so he could rob her blind.
“Yes ma’am. They are beautiful indeed. Might we trouble you for a glass of water?”
Beth Sanders was as kind as she was aged, and she couldn’t turn down such a request from a couple of weary travelers.
“It’s not cold, I’m afraid. I’ve heard tales that some people out there have gotten generators to work, or are using wind power to light up their homes. But we’ve not been able to scare even a bit of electricity up. The water comes from our well. It’s clean and cool, but not as cold as I’d like it.”
“Cool water would be fine, and thank you. There don’t seem to be a lot of people around. Is this a very big town?”
Beth laughed, not out of meanness, but because the question struck her as humorous.
“No, sir. It’s not even a town, not really. It’s just my husband and me, and a couple of neighbors who are dead now. Truth be known, it never was much except a little spot on the highway for people to get gas and a soda pop and a place to lay their weary head. That’s all gone now, and it’s just my husband and I, struggling to see the sunrise each morning.”
Billy said, “My grandma, God rest her soul, used to say that any day you live to see the sun come up is a blessed day.”
“Well, your grandmother sounds like a very smart woman.”
“She’s dead now. Her sunrises ran out.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry to hear that.”
“So, you say it’s just you and your husband left?”
“Yes. That’s him over there, in the corn field. He’s out there hoeing weeds. We have to do it all by hand now, with no tractor or herbicides. It’s a lot of work, but we don’t need a lot of corn to keep the two of us fed. So we manage.”
“Will he mind if I walk out there to say hello?”
“Why no, not at all, young man. He loves to talk at least as much as I do. And we don’t get a lot of visitors these days. Especially ones as nice as you two are.”
Billy walked away from them and Beth turned her attention back to Danny. They spoke for a couple of minutes about all the work it took to maintain a quarter acre of corn without the aid of powered equipment.
The conversation stopped immediately when the shot rang out.
Beth turned just in time to see Milam, her husband of fifty one years, crumple to the ground.
Billy stood over him with an ancient .38 revolver, a tiny wisp of smoke seeping out the end of its barrel.
Beth fainted dead away, falling to the ground in much the same manner as Milam.
But she wasn’t dead. In the days and weeks that followed Milam’s murder, she wished she was many times. She was despondent and full of grief. She felt guilty for being so foolish and welcoming the strangers onto her land without even the hint of suspicion.
Her husband, the only man she’d ever really loved, was gone in an instant. Due to her own carelessness and stupidity.
Every night since that fateful day, she went to her knees before she crawled into bed and prayed the Lord God to take her away. She wouldn’t end her own life. Couldn’t, for that would be a sin. But she no longer wanted to see any more sunrises.
Chapter 31
Billy and Danny Dykes proceeded with an abundance of caution. Even after the world had gone to hell in a handbasket, their paranoia kept them on their toes. They were parolees, and knew that the law wouldn’t need much of an excuse to send them back to prison.
Granted, very few prisons were even operational anymore. But they figured they’d be two of the unlucky ones who’d manage to find one, if they weren’t careful to carry on their criminal activities with an abundance of caution.
Milam Sanders wasn’t the first man they’d killed, and probably wouldn’t be the last. But he was unique, in that he was their first murder victim they couldn’t simply walk away from. Their other murders had been committed in places they were just passing through. Or in places they really had no attachment to. After their dastardly deeds were done in the past, they always just beat feet and ran.
They couldn’t do that in this case. For they had plans for the Sanders place. They wanted to make it their own.
The small cluster of three buildings: the gas station, the motel and Beth and Milam’s house, were in the ideal location.
Miles from civilization, this so-called “town” wasn’t a town at all. As Beth had said, it was little more than a way station. And it was isolated enough to fit the brothers’ needs perfectly.
The first thing they had to do, though, was to dispose of Milam’s body, completely and without a trace, in case the law ever came calling.
It was Billy who’d decided on the plan. While in prison he’d developed a friendship with his cellmate, who was doing twenty years for aggravated assault on a police officer, but who was guilty of even more dastardly crimes.
“The dumb bastards were happy to send me away for twenty, and never even thought to ask why the mass murders going on in their county stopped the same day I was arrested.”
“That was you, behind all those hookers that disappeared?”
“Hell yes. And I’ll never get caught, either.”
At that point his cellie clammed up, afraid he’d talked too much. Eventually, though, he learned to trust Billy enough to share the rest of his story.
“The reason I said they’ll never catch me is because they’ll never find the bodies. I was an expert at getting rid of them.”
“How? I mean, it’s hard as hell to hide a body.”
“Not if you take it deep into the woods and dispose of it properly. If you just take it there and dump it, then a hunter will eventually find it, and they might get enough DNA off of it to fry your ass. If you bury it, you’re still taking a chance. That same hunter might come across the disturbed ground before the grass has a chance to grow back over it.”
�
��So how’d you get rid of them?”
“By lugging a can of gasoline with me. I dug a grave, but not a full sized one. Three feet square and three feet deep. Then I’d stuff her body into it, and at night, when no one is out wandering through the woods, I’d douse her with gasoline and set her ablaze. Then I’d sit there and roast marshmallows while she burned.
“Eventually the fire would go out and I’d douse her again. Then I’d set her ablaze again. By daybreak she’d be reduced to ashes and a few bits of bone. No DNA. I’d use most of the dirt to fill the hole back up, and the dirt I had left over I’d use to make a firebreak circle around the grave. Then I’d put some firewood on top of it and burn the wood.”
“Wow, that’s pretty smart. So anybody that happened upon it would think it was just an old hunter’s campfire.”
“Exactly. And nobody’s gonna waste time digging up an old campfire to see if there’s a body underneath it.”
“That’s a great idea!”
“You don’t know the half of it, Billy. When all them prostitutes went missing, the cops sent search parties into the woods. Sometimes they were so isolated the search parties spent the night in the woods and resumed their searches the next day. And I found out that the idiots used my campfire pits to light their own fires. They were right there next to the bodies and were too stupid to know it.”
The pair laughed about that, and it was a lesson that Billy never forgot. It’s been said that prisons aren’t a way to rehabilitate men. It’s just a way for criminals to learn to be better criminals. That was true, at least, for Billy, who left prison with new insight on how to dispose of a human body.
They’d made Beth watch as they dragged Milam into his hole and set him on fire.
“Either you continue to live, but you cook and clean and grow food for us. But you never, ever talk to another human being. If anyone approaches the house, you go immediately to your bedroom upstairs and lock yourself in until we tell you to come out.
“Or, I’ll hand you my gun here and now, and you can blow your brains out. We can burn you with the old codger, so y’all can go to heaven together. Or hell, or wherever you expect to go.”
Beth, as distraught as she’d ever been in her life, almost took Danny up on his offer. But the killing of another human being was a sin in the eyes of God. And it didn’t matter whether the person she killed was someone else or herself. Suicide was a sin nonetheless. She firmly believed that, and had lived her life on a righteous path. She wouldn’t make her final act on earth a sin.
So she chose to live, although admittedly it wasn’t much of a life. She followed Danny’s instructions to the letter, and became nothing more than an indentured servant in her own house.
And every night she cried herself to sleep.
Chapter 32
It had been five months since the day Beth watched old Milam burn and made her choice to live.
Five months to the day, in fact, when Red Poston unrolled her bedroll within sight of Beth’s old gas station and lay down upon it to catch some sleep.
It had been a long night. Red had covered twelve miles, on the shoulder of the highway not far from the tree line. The night vision goggles made it easy to see several hundred yards in front of her, but they were useless up close. They were lousy at differentiating between different elevations in the soil, or distinguishing large rocks the same color as the ground in front of her. Traveling at night overland was a risky business. She’d tripped a couple of times over obstacles in her path, and almost turned her ankle when she suddenly stepped into an almost invisible hole.
Still, she pressed on, hoping against hope to stumble across two tied horses that would tell her Luna was bedded down and sleeping somewhere nearby.
In the early morning light, as she lay waiting to fall asleep, she wondered who might occupy the tiny gas station two hundred yards in front of her. And whether they’d tell her if they’d seen a tall thin man on horseback, trailing a pack horse.
And how many days ahead of her he was.
She was still debating with herself when a yellowjacket landed on her forearm.
She wouldn’t have swatted it. It happened all the time, and she knew the best course of action was just to wait until it flew away.
But for some reason, the mean little bastard stung her.
He paid a heavy price. She squashed him quickly, making bug juice of him, and then demanded, “Damn it! Why’d you do that?”
She got no answer, and didn’t really expect one.
Perhaps it was because her muscles tensed involuntarily when she saw the insect land on her. Maybe he saw that as a threat.
Or maybe he just hadn’t had his tiny cup of coffee yet. Maybe his little yellowjacket wife didn’t give him any the night before and he was in a sour mood.
It didn’t really matter. He was deader than a doornail, and Red’s arm was beginning to swell.
But at least her decision was made for her. She wouldn’t be getting any sleep anytime soon now. So she might as well get up and walk over to the gas station to inquire about Luna.
Maybe they’d have something for yellowjacket stings.
As she approached the station, a man emerged.
Red was an excellent judge of character. She couldn’t say why, exactly, but she didn’t like the man.
Oh, he appeared friendly enough. But then again, in Red’s experience most men were friendly to her. At least until they determined that the beautiful redhead wasn’t interested in sharing any of her charms with them.
“Well hello, ma’am. What’s a pretty little thing like yourself doing, traveling all alone in this big bad world?”
“Good morning. I prefer traveling alone. Every time I take on traveling partners they start getting the wrong idea about me and I have to shoot them dead.”
Danny Dykes took the hint and shifted into business mode.
“The shelves are all stocked if you’re in the market to buy anything. Gold, silver or jewelry only, of course.”
“You got any white vinegar?”
“Gee, I don’t know. We might. I don’t remember seeing any in particular, but it’s my partner who stocks the shelves and we’ve got one or two of a lot of different things. You planning on doing any cooking, or jarring up some pickles?”
“Neither. Vinegar is good for bee stings. I’m hoping it works well for yellowjackets as well.”
“Gotta watch out for those yellow jackets. They’re mean as hell around here.”
“Yeah. I already found that out. I also need some band-aids for my blistered feet.”
“Band-aids I know for sure we have. Follow me.”
As he led the way into the back of the tiny gas station, Danny kicked around the idea of getting the drop on the pretty redhead. She was armed, but if she turned her back to him he could draw his own sidearm and hold her at gunpoint.
Sex was best when the woman struggled a bit. It made the reward that much sweeter.
She seemed to read his thoughts, though, or maybe sensed his mood. She never turned her back or took her eyes off of him, and the strap across her handgun was unhooked.
He got the feeling that maybe this was a wildcat, and decided it probably wasn’t worth the chance.
Red did find a single bottle of white vinegar on one of the shelves, and picked up a box of band-aids as well.
“How much for these?”
“If you have a gold bar or a silver dollar, I’ll shave a little off the side. Or a piece of jewelry. A silver ring, maybe, or a pair of silver earrings.”
“Sounds like your pricing is a bit on the subjective side.”
Danny had no clue what she meant, and didn’t know whether she was finding fault with his pricing policy or complimenting him on it. Her face was noncommittal and didn’t help.
He just agreed.
“Yep. Will there be anything else for you?”
“No, that’s it. I notice you have a lot of Walmart brands on the shelves. I’d almost expect to see a big blue
sign out front. I guess this stuff came from that big Walmart truck out front, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“So what’s to keep me from just bypassing your little store and rummaging through the truck myself?”
“You wouldn’t find much. It’s been picked clean, of everything except cat food and baby diapers. And there aren’t any more trucks like it for at least ten more miles to the west. So you’d best get what you need from us.”
Red pulled an old Morgan silver dollar from the watch pocket of her jeans. More than a quarter of it had already been shaved off, and used for goods she’d purchased from Crazy Eddie and others. It was no longer round, but rather egg-shaped. Virtually all of Lady Liberty’s crown and locks were gone, but her face remained intact. It was as though everyone who’d shaved the coin wanted to leave its most beautiful part for last.
She handed it to Danny, who pulled out a sharp knife from his pocket.
“Don’t go too crazy, or you can have your stuff back.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Red said. You can keep the whole thing if you can give me some information.”
Danny folded the knife and cocked an eyebrow.
“What information, specifically?”
I’m tracking a tall man. With two horses. Should have been through here the last few days. One of his horses was a brown Bay. If you can describe the other horse, and the man, and tell me how long ago he passed through, the coin is yours.
Danny didn’t miss a beat.
“His second horse was a mare. A Pinto. Right pretty one too. He was skinny, like he hadn’t eaten a good meal in a while. Pock-marked face. Dark hair. Came through three days ago. Sold him some stale cigarettes and a couple of pairs of socks. He paid in gold.”
It was Luna, there was no doubt. And it confirmed that he’d passed her by. And with her afoot, and both of his horses still alive, she’d never catch him before he got to Lubbock.
She was a bit disgusted, but not surprised.
Too Tough To Tame: Red: Book 2 Page 11