“No thanks,” Weber said. “I’m Sheriff Weber and this is Deputy Summers. Can you tell me who’s in charge here?”
She looked around and spread her arms. “Nobody’s in charge. We’re all just here doing our thing. That’s the beauty of the whole event, don’t you see? No rules, nobody telling anybody what to do or when to do it.”
“Okay, well somebody had to organize things,” Weber said. “Who would that be?”
She just smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows? Who cares? Just enjoy the moment. It’s all good.”
“Okay, well, do you know this woman?” Weber asked her, showing her the picture of the young woman from the pharmacy on Chad’s digital camera.
She studied the image for a moment and shook her head.
“Who could we ask to find out who she is?”
The woman shook her head. “Man, we’re not into identities and all that excess baggage,” she told them. “Who needs it?”
Weber realized that he was not getting anywhere and thanked the woman for her time. He and Chad strolled around the encampment for a while, stopping occasionally to ask who might be in charge, and showing the picture to different people, but none of them seemed to have any idea who the woman was. The best they got was a couple who paused from erecting their teepee to say that the woman looked “kind of” like someone named Ruth or Truth, or maybe Ruby. But it couldn’t be her, because she died of hepatitis two years ago. Or was it cancer last year?
Eventually they spotted a large blue plastic tarp that was strung between two buses to provide a shelter, with a hand-painted sign that said First Aid. Under the tarp they found an older couple treating minor injuries, mostly sunburns and scrapes. A large cardboard box with “Practice Safe Sex” and “Free” scrawled on the side held foil wrapped condom packages.
The woman looked up from dabbing some sort of ointment on the sunburned back of a skinny teenaged girl and asked, “Can I help you?”
Weber introduced himself and showed her the picture on the camera. “Do you know this woman?”
“I have no idea. But as you can see, this whole thing is pretty loosely organized. We don’t have any sort of registration or anything. People just show up and hang out. Is she in some kind of trouble?”
“She came into the pharmacy in town stoned on something and then drank a bunch of cough syrup. She’s at the medical clinic and we just wanted somebody to know.”
“Well, there are always going to be a few people with abuse problems anyplace. If anybody comes by here looking for her, I’ll tell them where she’s at.”
She finished with the girl and told her, “There you go, Rosemary. Keep your back covered so it doesn’t get worse.”
The girl hugged her, said thank you, and walked away.
“So are you the official nurse?” Weber asked her.
She laughed, a pleasant sound that reminded the sheriff of happy children playing for some reason.
“Does anything here look “official” to you, Sheriff? No, I’m just Caroline.”
“Just Caroline?”
Caroline’s steel-gray hair hung down her back in a long braid. She had what could only be described as laughing eyes of a startling blue. Weber instinctively knew that this was a good person who enjoyed life to the fullest, no matter what situation she found herself in. She nodded. “Burt and I are just here doing whatever we can to keep everybody healthy.”
As she spoke, a very tall woman with bright purple hair and tattoos on both arms walked under the tarp, grabbed several packages of condoms and left.
The man, who was bald on top but had a fringe of white hair that hung to his shoulders, finished wrapping an elastic bandage around a man’s ankle, handed him some aspirin, then joined them.
“Burt, this is Sheriff Weber and Deputy Summers. They have a woman in town who OD’ed and they wanted to know if anybody here knew her.”
Burt looked at the photo and shook his head. “Sorry, but there are so many, I only know a few by name, or even sight. After a while they all start to blend together.”
Just then a naked man playing a flute walked past and Weber was surprised to realize that he and Chad seemed to be the only two who were surprised by such a sight. Nobody else seemed to notice, or to care.
Caroline laughed at them, that same pleasant sound, and Weber knew he liked her.
“Don’t looked so shocked, Sheriff. You act like you’ve never seen a naked man playing a flute before!”
Weber laughed with her and said, “I’m just a small town boy. I don’t get out much.”
She laughed again, and Weber said, “Okay, Caroline, fill me in. We’re not here to hassle anybody, but what the hell is this all about?”
“This?”
“All of this,” Weber said, waving his hand to indicate their surroundings. “Somebody has to be in charge.”
“Nope.”
“Nobody?”
She shook her head. “Hard to believe, isn’t it? Freedom, what a concept.”
“Freedom from what?”
Caroline smiled that smile again and waved her hands. “From everything, Sheriff. Freedom from rules, freedom from worries, just… freedom. If you want to walk around naked and play your flute, nobody cares. If you want to have a conversation with a pine cone, or sing a song, or make love, or smoke some bud, nobody cares, nobody judges.”
“Freedom, hmmm?” Weber was still skeptical. “There are a lot of people that would call that anarchy.”
Caroline laughed, and Weber thought that if he had been born twenty years earlier, he might be willing to challenge Burt for the fair Caroline’s hand.
“And do you know why people would think that, Sheriff?”
“No, Caroline, tell me why.”
“Because they have no idea what it feels like to be free!”
“Here’s the thing,” Burt said. “These people, all of us, we’re what the rest of society calls misfits. Some think of these kids here as throwaways. But they’re not. They find a sense of family here. For the first time in their lives, maybe, nobody passes judgment on them. They’re accepted. We don’t live by society’s rules. We don’t care about new cars and big screen TVs and what the neighbors think of us. Caroline and I turned 65 last year, and we don’t have any Social Security, or retirement, or 401K or any of that nonsense. But that’s okay, because we don’t care. We don’t need it. We get by, we give back what we can by doing this,” he swept his arm at the first aid tent, “and we’re happy. We wake up smiling every day, and we go to sleep smiling every night. We don’t need rules telling us how to be happy. And we don’t need rules telling us to judge what makes somebody else happy. That’s what freedom is to us.”
Weber and Chad thanked Burt and Caroline for their time and drove out of the encampment. They were almost back to Big Lake when Chad broke the silence.
“So are you happy, Jimmy?”
Weber thought about it for a while before answering. “I don’t know, Chad. Sometimes I think I am, but then I think back, and I can’t remember ever being like those folks, or Burt and Caroline. How happy are any of us, really?”
Chapter 16
“Buck naked?” Parks asked.
“Naked as a jaybird,” Chad said.
“Damn it, Sheriff, we need to get back out there! As a representative of the Federal government, I have a responsibility to see first hand what they’re doing on public land!”
“Cool your jets,” Weber told him. “You’re a growing boy and we saw stuff out there that would warp your psyche forever.”
“Well I hope to shout!” Parks said. “Let’s go, I’ll drive!”
“All three of you are incorrigible,” Mary Caitlin said from the radio console, where Judy Troutman had just handed her a dispatch slip.
“Dolan went over to the Martin place on Hopi Lane on a vandalism call a few minutes ago and he said he needs some help. The Martins got home from out of town and caught somebody digging up their backyard.”
“Is
n’t that where Tommy found the dead guy?” Parks asked.
“Yeah. Probably a couple of kids playing vulture, getting a thrill,” Weber said. But when he drove to Hopi Lane to meet Dolan, he learned how wrong he had been.
***
“Sheriff, I want this idiot locked up! Look what he did to our yard! What’s happening to this town? We go away for a few days and come back to find our home was a crime scene, and then this! ”
Charles Martin was a paunchy man of 63 with a high forehead, thick white eyebrows that looked like two caterpillars crawling across his face, and the worst breath Weber had ever experienced. The sheriff pulled his head back as the irate homeowner sputtered.
“I told ya I was willing to split with ya, 70/30. That’s a damn good deal and I’m doin’ all the work! What more do ya want?”
“Shut up,” Dolan said to George Holman, who was handcuffed, his blue jeans and white t-shirt caked with dirt.
Holman gave the deputy a wounded look, and said, “I’m on to you, Deputy Reed. You’re the one wrote me that last DUI that cost me my license!”
George Holman was a local ne'er-do-well who was well known to the sheriff’s office. He was convinced that he was much smarter than most people and that if the rest of the world would just understand that and listen to him, everybody would be a lot better off. The fact that the harder he worked at demonstrating his vast knowledge, the less the world was convinced, greatly aggrieved him.
Holman was one of those individuals who felt very put upon, and he was sure most of the bad things that happened to him in life were the result of jealousy by inferior people. The fact that he had lost his drivers license and his job driving a garbage truck after his third conviction for drunken driving had nothing to do with the fact that he was guilty and everything to do with envy on the part of the sheriff’s deputies. Dismissal from the four jobs he had before that was always because his bosses resented the fact that he knew much more about how to operate a business than they did. Since when was it a crime to tell a man that he was doing everything wrong?
Weber turned his back on Holman and asked, “What’s going on here?”
“What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on! Better yet, take a look and see for yourself,” Martin said, gesturing to the wooden gate that led to his back yard.
Weber followed him into the yard, where four deep holes were dug into the otherwise well manicured lawn, the dirt piled beside them. A series of wooden stakes with plastic orange flags was stuck in the grass in various other places.
“Just look at this mess,” Martin said. “I take a lot of pride in my yard, Sheriff, and what happens? I go away for a few days and I come back to this!”
“George did this?” Weber asked. “Why?”
“He told me he was looking for buried treasure,” Martin told him.
“And he's not the only one,” Dolan told the sheriff. “Mrs. Delaney next door said she caught a couple of guys digging in her yard last night, but when she turned the porch light on they took off running.”
Weber walked to the wooden fence that surrounded the property and looked into the next yard, where he saw another hole.
“And there are a couple of holes in the utility easement between the properties” Dolan said.
“I ain’t responsible for any of those,” Holman said. “Those was done by amateurs who have no idea what they're doing. Me, I approach things in a scientific method. You can see that just by the way I staked the property out.”
“But what the hell were you doing?” Weber asked him.
“Like I said, he told me he was looking for buried treasure,” Martin said.
“What buried treasure?”
“I ain’t at liberty to discuss it,” Holman said.
“Well, you'd better start discussing something,” Weber told him. “Because I’m about to lock you up and throw away the key!”
“For what? A man's got a right to search for lost treasure, don't he?”
“Not when he's trespassing and vandalizing somebody else's private property,” Weber told him.
“I offered to give him 30% of whatever I found! And I’m the one did all the research and I’m the one doin’ all the work! He’s just bein’ greedy and wants a bigger share of the proceeds. But I know the law, an I got Emnet Domain on my side. That’s right, Emnet Domain. Says I can go wherever I want and dig wherever I want to, ’cause it’s for the greater good of the public.”
“I think he means Imminent Domain,” Dolan suggested.
“Don’t you go trying to put words in my mouth,” Holman said. “I know my rights.”
“Okay, whatever, you can’t go digging up other people’s property without permission,” Weber told him.
Holman shook his head in patient frustration and tried to explain again. “Oh yes I can. Emnet Domain, I keep telling ya. It’s for the greater good. Ya can look it up. I know my laws!”
“What’s for the greater good?” Weber asked him.
“Why, recovering that dead convict’s loot! Putting that money back into circulation, giving the economy a boost. See, if I was to buy a new truck, let’s say. Not only does Mike Hall over at the dealership make money, but so does the folks at the state who send out the license plates and such. And so does my insurance agent when I buy a policy. But it don’t end there, no sir! The people back in Detroit who made that truck, why they keep right on workin’. Same for the truck driver who delivered the truck to the dealer. It’s what they call your trickle down effect. The greater good.”
Weber shook his head in amazement. “And you think that gives you the right to dig up somebody else’s property without permission?”
Holman nodded his head. “Yes sir, it does. Emnet Doman, just like I told ya.”
“And what loot are you talking about anyway?”
“I already told you, the money that escaped convict hid somewhere around here. Why else was he here in Big Lake except to dig up the money he had buried here from all those bank robberies?”
“What makes you think that was why he was here?”
“I ain’t at liberty to reveal my sources,” Holman said.
“Okay, lock him up,” Weber told Dolan.
“Now wait just a minute! I got a right…”
“Shut up,” Dolan told him as he led Holman to his car and opened the back door.
“Okay, okay! I’ll talk. But this goes no farther then here, okay? Else everybody will be hornin’ in on the action.”
“I’m listening,” Weber said, arms folded across his chest.
“Ralph Flowers told everybody down at the Pour House about seeing the shovel that was in the back of that convict’s car. So I put two and two together and figured it out. I guess someone else did too, ’cause of them other holes that got dug.”
“Ralph Flowers?”
“He’s the busybody that lives across the street,” Charles Martin said. “Whatever he saw, you can bet he was sitting on a barstool the next day telling the whole world about it.”
Weber remembered the small crowd of neighbors that had gathered while they were investigating the discovery of the Nissan and the body found in its trunk. He also remembered a folding military-style entrenching tool that was in the trunk of the car, along with a jack, lug wrench, and a collection of trash and empty cans. At the time, he had not given the small shovel any thought. Now he wondered if it was possible that Jerry Lee Chandler had come to Big Lake to recover money hidden from one of his crimes.
“Okay, listen up, George. I don’t care what your so-called knowledge of the law is, you can’t go digging up someone’s property without their permission.”
“You’re wrong, Sheriff. I told you….”
Weber cut him off with an upheld hand and turned to Martin. “If you want, I can charge him with trespassing and vandalism. That means you’ll have to go to court to testify. Is that what you want?”
“I’m a busy man, Sheriff. I don’t have time for all that nonsense. I want those holes in
my yard filled in, and I don’t want him or anybody else tearing up my property.”
“I understand that,” Weber told him. “If I make him fill in the holes and order him to stay away from here, will that work for you?”
Martin nodded his head. “That sounds fair enough, I guess.”
Weber turned back to George Holman, “What do you say, George? It’s either that or a trip to jail.”
Holman scowled and said, “I know exactly what’s gonna happen. As soon as I’m gone, he’s gonna dig up that money and I won’t get one red cent. And I did all the research!”
“Time’s running out,” Weber told him. “Which is it going to be?”
Holman shrugged in resignation. “Okay, I’ll do it. But it ain’t right. An honest man can’t catch a break in this town.”
***
After looking at the hole in the Delaney yard next door and speaking to the homeowner, who could only tell him it was dark and all she saw were two men or teenage boys, Weber walked down the utility easement at the back of the properties, where he came across three more freshly dug holes.
Seeing nothing else, he got in his Explorer and drove around the neighborhood. In the easement a block over, which separated Navajo and Zuni Lanes, he spotted a beat up old white Chevrolet pickup. Parking at the end of the street, Weber walked down the easement until he heard voices in a yard and looked over the fence to find two young men busy with shovels. The gate was open and Weber stepped through it.
“Hello, gentlemen. What are you up to?”
They looked up and froze for a moment, then bolted. The taller of the two ran toward the front of the property and escaped by running around the side of the house. The other one, who had closely cropped dark hair and a sparse beard, tried to vault over the fence but didn’t make it, catching a foot on the top and falling face first into the easement. As he started to raise himself up with his hands, Weber planted a boot in the middle of his back and pushed him back down.
“Stay put, you’re under arrest.”
He used his handheld radio to call in a description of the other man. By the time he had his prisoner handcuffed and had led him back to his Explorer and put him in the back seat, Dolan radioed to say he had apprehended the other suspect and was on his way to Weber’s location.
9 More Killer Thrillers Page 170