by Loretta Ross
“If I cut the top seam, it’s apt to gap open and someone who kidnapped you would be more likely to see it, but if I cut an end seam I’m afraid it’ll fall out.”
“No, go with the end seam. That should be okay. The one closest to the middle of my back. That’d be easiest to get to if my hands were tied.”
“You know,” Rosie said, conversationally, “it’s a little alarming the way you two are casually planning for the next time he gets kidnapped and tied up. I mean, it’d be one thing if you were planning to tie one another up.” She studied Death and raised one eyebrow at Wren. “I’d tie him up in a heartbeat, but you’re talking about strangers doing it.”
“Well,” Death said, “in the past couple of weeks I’ve been shot at, peeping Tom’d at, and kidnapped. At this point, I figure it’s best to just be prepared for anything.”
“But what if they tie you up with your hands in front?” Wren asked. “What about this?” She took a tiny black disk from her sewing kit, pulled a piece of white paper from one side and stuck it to the other P38.
“What is that?”
“Peel and stick magnet.”
“Okay, so … ?”
With a bright smile, she reached over and unfastened his belt. He wore a plain belt with an oval buckle engraved USMC. She turned the buckle back and stuck the can opener to the underside, then buckled the belt back over it. “How does that feel?”
“Getting just a bit uncomfortable,” he admitted.
“Oh! I’m sorry. Is the can opener poking you?”
“No.” He grinned. “But the next time you unbuckle my belt, you’d better mean business.”
seventeen
“Would you look at the price on those strawberries? Why is everything so expensive?”
Death glanced around, but the woman seemed to be talking to him so he shrugged and answered her. “I guess because they’re out of season.”
“You can get strawberries all year round.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s because they ship them in from, like, Mexico or Chile or somewhere. Local strawberries won’t be ready until late May or June, I think.”
“Hmph! Well, I still think it’s highway robbery.”
Death and Wren were at the local super-center, waiting on a sandwich tray from the deli. The Keystone men were setting up for a big, two-day auction of farm machinery and classic cars—things far from Wren’s area of expertise. She and Death had been working at the Campbell house all morning, but stopped to take “the boys” their lunch.
Behind him, the middle-aged man stocking the produce department had greeted Wren by name.
“Hey, I just saw Eric Farrington in here,” he said. “He said you and he were dating?”
“I’ll kill him,” Wren said. “Death, give me your gun.”
“Come on, now. You know what the cops said about shooting Farrington.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know. I have to wait my turn.”
Glancing around, Death spotted the subject of their conversation leaning against a refrigerated floor bunker and openly ogling the young woman who was filling the milk case.
“Hey, Farrington! Get up here a minute!”
Eric stood and strolled toward them, half strutting. He was off duty and wearing jeans and a light jacket over a printed tee.
“Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I could arrest you for that. I’ll have you know I’m an actual, legitimate officer of the court.”
“God help the court.”
“Did you tell Bob we were dating?” Wren demanded, angry.
“Oh, no. He misunderstood. I told him that you wanted to date me, but I wasn’t interested.”
“Eric,” Death said, “not even your blow-up doll wants to date you.”
Eric turned on Wren, who was snickering. “What are you looking at?”
“A sad little man who will never have a real girlfriend.”
“That just shows what you know. I have lots of girlfriends.”
“They don’t count as girlfriends,” Death told him, “if you have to pay them.”
“I never pay them.”
“They don’t count as girlfriends if your mother pays them, either,” Wren laughed.
“You know what? This is what I got to say to you.” He pulled open his jacket and stuck his chest out at her. His tee shirt said: I’ve got the dick. I call the shots.
“Ha,” she scoffed. “I squeeze the balls. I call the shots.”
“Oh, really?” he sneered. He turned to Death. “Is that right, big guy? Do you let the little woman squeeze your balls?”
Death’s eyes lit up and he grinned a huge, face-splitting grin. He put an arm around Wren’s shoulders and pulled her close.
“Oh, yeah!”
_____
“Okay, so I know the John Deere is the yellow and green one. Was the blue one the Ford and the orange the Allis-Chalmers?”
Roy Keystone stopped beside Wren and looked over her shoulder at the list she was making on her laptop. “You know, we really can handle this, honey, if you want to go back to the Campbell house with that pretty new boyfriend of yours.”
She smiled at him. “I would, but he got a call from one of the local bail bondsmen and he thinks he might have a job lined up. He lives pretty close to the line, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. But at least he doesn’t have to sleep in his car anymore, right?” Roy grinned.
“You know about that?” She’d been dying to talk that over with someone, but out of respect for Death’s feelings, she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.
“Small town. Word gets around. Don’t tell my wife I admitted this, but a bunch of old men gossiping will put a bunch of old women to shame any day.” He leaned down and tapped her computer screen. “The ‘plow-ey thing with pulleys and buckets’ is a cultivator.”
“I knew that …”
_____
Death tapped on the door and let himself in when the voice inside invited him to. He found Warren Hagarson seated behind his desk. Hagarson was a tall, stout man with black hair going gray and a jovial smile that didn’t always reach his eyes. He had company just now, Death realized. A nervous teenager with a bad case of acne sat across from him in the hard plastic chair.
“Ah, Mr. Bogart,” Hagarson said. “Come in! Come in. Bogart, this is Ethan. Ethan tried to rob a convenience store. Not real successfully. Ethan, Mr. Bogart is a bounty hunter. Show him your license, Bogart.”
Death obligingly pulled out his license and held it up in front of the kid’s face.
“Oh, that’s okay,” Ethan stammered. “I don’t need to—Death?! Your name is Death?”
Death gave him a merry smile and didn’t bother to correct the pronunciation.
“And he works for me,” Hagarson said.
“Ah, yeah.” Death let the smile drop away, rubbed the back of his neck and feigned nerves of his own. “Um, what was the penalty again if I brought you someone and they weren’t, you know, actually breathing anymore?”
Hagarson put his hands up. “Bogart! Again? What happened this time?”
“Man, it totally wasn’t my fault! He was resisting arrest.”
“How?”
“He hid from me. Plus, he was whining. It was really annoying.”
Hagarson sighed. “Well, I hope it was worth it. Like I told you last time, dead bodies only fetch half the bounty.” He looked over at Ethan. “You have to be patient with Mr. Bogart. He’s a bit testy. You’re not going to make me send him after you, are you?”
“No, sir! Never, sir! Absolutely not, sir!”
“Good. Then get out of here and I will see you in court,” he consulted some papers, “a week from Thursday. Got it?”
“Yes, sir!”
Hagarson nodded and Ethan made a run for it. They stood in silence until the outer door closed behind him.
“You think he really bought that?” Death asked.
Hagarson sniffed. “Oh, yeah. I wouldn’t sit in that chair if I were you.�
��
Death laughed and seated himself on the corner of the desk. “I was a little surprised to hear from you. I’d heard that you always handle your own skips.”
“Usually I do.” Hagarson pushed his chair back and put his right foot up on the desk. It was in a cast. “Tripped over my wife’s pet rat.”
“Your wife has a pet rat?”
“She calls it a chihuahua.”
“Ah. I see. So what do you need from me?”
“You captured Tyrone Blount last week.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I bailed him out again. He secured the bond with a truck, title and all. Only now the truck’s been reported stolen. Thief broke into a house while the family was away, stole a bunch of papers out of a wall safe, including the title to the truck in the driveway, then stole the truck on their way out.”
“Blount,” Death said, voice flat. “And then he used the stolen truck as security for a bail bond. And he didn’t think this would come back to bite him in the ass?”
“Never said the man was a genius. You brought him in once. Think you can find him again?”
“I’d certainly be willing to try.”
_____
The farm equipment auction wasn’t until the weekend, but there was a lot of work to do to get ready. It was going to be one of the Keystone’s biggest sales of the year. Wren worked beside the family, cleaning, cataloging, double-checking inventories and planning the logistics of the auction. In the bustle of activity, no one paid much attention to the narrow, two-lane blacktop that ran by the sale sight, nor to the fallow field across the road, and certainly not to the weathered old barn that stood in the center of that field. If they had been paying attention they might have seen a hint of movement in the old hay mow, the outline of a shadowy figure or the glint of sunlight on a binocular lens.
_____
The problem with Blount, as Death already knew, was that he was paranoid. He was always on alert and he’d run at the drop of a hat. He lived in a ramshackle old two-story house on top of a high hill that gave him a clear view of the road. He claimed he couldn’t work because he had a bad back, but Death had seen him jump from the second-floor window and run for the next road over, half a mile away through deep woods. He was part of a community of low-lifes that haunted the county, a loose affiliation of petty thieves and drug dealers, and there always seemed to be someone he could call on to help him get away.
This time Death didn’t bother to drive up to the house first. He pulled into the driveway of an abandoned homestead, hid his jeep behind a massive lilac bush, and hiked down to the creek that separated Blount’s property from the rest of the world.
Last time he’d gone after Blount, Death had tried to ambush him in these woods, but he hadn’t taken his own health into account and had come off the worse for wear. He still thought this was a good place to stop him, though. There were a hundred paths through the woods, but only three places to cross the creek.
From his time in the Corps, Death knew a dozen different booby traps. He wracked his brain now, trying to come up with one that wasn’t lethal. The three paths across the creek consisted of a shallow ford, a line of stepping stones, and a downed tree that formed a makeshift bridge. He could, of course, booby trap all three, but he felt his chances of success would increase if he could eliminate two of the options, funneling Blount into a bottleneck of his own choosing.
The ford was the simplest and most straightforward route across the stream and would be the hardest to sabotage, but it would also be the worst place to set a trap. The path down the bank was narrow but too steep to safely trap anyone. Blount was a criminal and a creep and a fool, but Death still didn’t want to hurt him.
He studied the path leading down to the ford. He could dig it out a little without too much exertion, but it was already nearly vertical, and a man who’d jump out a second-story window wouldn’t hesitate to jump six feet. On the opposite side of the stream, the ground rose eight feet or more in a steep bluff, concave at some places and impossible to climb. The only way up was to follow a gully, where runoff from years of rainstorms had worn a path down to bedrock. At the head of the gully … Death looked up and smiled.
A massive tree loomed over him, once majestic but now dead and listing toward the creek. The scar of a lightning strike snaked down one side. Its roots had lost their grip on the soil and erosion had begun to carve a cave beneath it. It was only a matter of time until the ancient forest giant gave in to gravity and fell.
With a backpack full of supplies over his shoulder, Death crossed the creek and carefully climbed the gully, circling the tree gingerly, lest it topple before he was ready for it to. Once he was safe on the opposite side, he took a small hand saw from his pack and cut through the three largest roots still anchoring the tree. A smaller fallen tree served as a fulcrum and a long limb made for an effective lever. He wedged the lever under the edge of the dead tree and threw his full weight against the other end, and with a deep groan and a mighty crash, the old tree fell.
The tree’s corpse filled the gully, crossed the creek and blocked the path on Blount’s side as well. To clear the tree away, or even fashion it into another bridge that could be used, would require days of work with a heavy-duty chainsaw.
It had been a noisy operation, and Death could well imagine that the sound of the tree falling would attract the attention of the paranoid and hyper-vigilant man at the top of the hill. He stayed out of sight behind the upthrust root ball. After some ten minutes of waiting, his excess caution paid off.
Blount was a good woodsman, Death had to give him that, but Death had no trouble spotting the smaller man and following his progress down the hill. Blount moved cautiously, sticking to cover and watching warily for any sign of an intruder. He saw the fallen tree and blocked path and hesitated, studying the situation. His mouth was moving, talking to himself, Death thought. He was too far away to read his lips, but he could tell, from Blount’s body language, the exact second he gave it up as an act of God. Coming out of hiding, he looked the fallen tree over one last time and then casually made his way back up the hill.
When he was safely out of sight, Death made his own way upstream to the northernmost crossing, the steppingstones. Here, five irregularly-spaced boulders made a hopscotch pattern across a wide section of the stream where the water ran swift and deep. Death had brought his lever with him and as he crossed he shifted each stone behind him, so that they no longer formed a usable path.
That left only the fallen log, and here he would set his trap. Hidden from suspicious eyes on the hillside by the rising bank behind him and the thick branches overhead, he dropped his pack on the sandy shore. Kneeling beside the near-end of the log, he reached under with his cupped hands and began to scoop out a shallow depression.
_____
“Hello?” Wren stood up, pressed her phone closer to her ear and walked away from the massive combine she was scrubbing. “No, I’m sorry. You’re breaking up. I can hardly hear you … Death? Death’s not here. What? What … sorry? Death? Oh, this is Death? Is this you? I’m sorry, I can barely hear you. What? You want me to … what? Go where? Meet you? The Campbell house? Okay. Okay. I’ll be right there.”
She hung up the phone and returned it to her pocket. “I need to go,” she told Doris, who was working next to her. “Death wants me to meet him at the Campbell house. He says he thinks he has an idea.”
“Okay, honey. Go on and have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t like to do.”
eighteen
Tyrone Blount lived on the barter system. The three downstairs rooms in the house he claimed (but did not actually own) were filled to bursting with a random assortment of things he had collected to trade. There was furniture—none of it the antiques he boasted of—old appliances, car parts, bits and pieces of mowers and garden equipment, dishes, knickknacks, jars of coins, books of stamps, and other ephemera too strange and too varied to detail.
The sole upstairs room, more an at
tic really, held an old army cot, a broken-down recliner, a third-hand television with a battered VCR, and a collection of much-watched porn videos. He had a small refrigerator and an electric burner where he cooked things that could either blow up or put him in prison for life if his luck ever turned really bad.
There were long windows to the east and west and a pair of dormer windows facing south. The north wall was originally a blind spot, but with the ingenuity of the truly paranoid, Blount had drilled out a small, circular hole and inserted the scope from a deer rifle. He fitted it with a rubber bushing so he could move it around to sweep the horizon.
He was lounging in his chair, drinking a beer and watching his favorite titty flick when he heard the sound of a motor. Setting the beer down, he sidled up to the west window, standing beside it so he could peer out without making himself a target. A silver-gray Jeep was making its way up his driveway, and he immediately recognized it as belonging to the bounty hunter who’d caught him last time.
With a sharp curse, he ran across the room, wrenched open the east window, lowered himself until he was hanging by his fingertips, and dropped to the ground. With a little luck the guy would stop to search his maze of a house first. By the time he realized Blount wasn’t there, Tyrone could be miles away, drinking beer with one of his buddies and laughing about how stupid the law and its minions were.
He loped easily down the hill, the steep grade increasing his speed. The woods began two-thirds of the way down. Instinctively, he took the path for the ford, but at the last minute he remembered that the lightning-blasted tree had fallen and blocked the way. Hesitating for only an instant, he turned right and followed a less well-traveled trail.
He ran across the narrow shelf between the bottom of the hill and the top of the deeper hollow that the creek had worn through the valley. Up a slight rise and then down a gentle slope and he came out in a small clearing where an older fallen tree made a sturdy bridge across the water.
He stepped on the end of the bridge and it gave beneath him, bouncing a little. There was a swift rustling in the grass and a loop of rope came up and closed around his ankles, drawing tight. He braced himself, expecting to be swung off his feet into the trees like in the movies, but the rope merely tightened and stopped. One end ran off to his left and was knotted around a tree. The other ran up and disappeared into the branches overhead.