Dust in the Heart

by Ralph Dennis

  “Let me give you my home number,” Egan said.

  Joe turned and dug out his note pad. He took the number and placed it below the departmental number.

  “Any hour,” Egan said.

  Wilt popped the lock on the back door of the Plowden’s guest house. The place was empty. There was the smell of bacon grease in the kitchen and a crusty skillet soaked in the sink, along with the breakfast dishes.

  “What are we looking for?” Joe asked. “I mean, without a warrant, nothing we find can be used in court.”

  “I want to find his getaway cash,” Wilt said. “If it’s still here.”

  They went inside and began a thorough search. This time, without a watchful Missy, they weren’t as careful. They blew through the rooms like a storm wind down a narrow tunnel.

  When Wilt finished with the bedroom, he shifted to the living room. Joe was still in the kitchen. He was checking all the containers, all the boxes and bags, everything but the canned goods.

  Wilt left him to that and started on the living room. He dragged all the furniture to the center of the room and tipped it over to check for anything hidden behind or under or inside. He wrecked the home entertainment center in the process and came up with nothing. He manhandled the furniture back into place.

  The fireplace was next. He tossed his cap on the coffee table, set the fire screen aside and tested all the stones around the fireplace arch, seeking a loose stone. He enlarged the search to the brickwork apron that extended from the fireplace base to the edge of the rug. He ran his fingers around each brick. He tested the mortar. One brick wobbled, near the center of the apron. It was held in place, he thought, by sand rather than mortar.

  He called to Joe in the kitchen. “Bring me two kitchen knives.”

  Joe came out a moment later with the two knives and handed them to Wilt. He inserted the knives into the sand at both ends of the brick and it slid upward easily.

  There was a hollow pocket beneath the brick. Wilt reached down and grabbed a package wrapped in several layers of plastic.

  Joe stood over him while he opened the package on the coffee table. There was a banded stack of hundred-dollar bills and two stacks of twenties.

  “How much?” Joe asked.

  “I’d guess between eight and ten thousand dollars.” Wilt rewrapped the cash and tossed it in the center of his cap. “That’s number one. Let’s see if he has a second one.”

  “What makes you think there’s more?”

  “He wouldn’t put the whole nut in one hidey hole. What we’re looking for is more cash or maybe the papers to back up the new, second identity he’s put together since he moved here from New York.”

  “You act like you’re sure.”

  “What’s important to a guy on the run? Food, shelter, comfort and cash in the pocket.” Wilt knelt at the fireplace and stared at split logs stacked on the grate. “You think he’s had a fire in this?”

  Joe stepped around him and ran a hand up, out of sight, into the chimney. He turned and showed Wilt the hand. There was a smear of soot. “It’s been cleaned, maybe this summer. I’d bet a month’s pay it hasn’t been used since then.”

  Wilt leaned against the mantlepiece. “Say you had two stashes. Say you thought, on a bad day, that they might uncover one cache. What would you expect of them?”

  “Huh?”

  “If they looked for a second stash, where would you expect them to look?”

  Joe understood. “Well, first of all I’d hope they believed the one stash was all of it.”

  “Or …?”

  “The search would move on, to another part of the house. You wouldn’t expect two stashes close together.”

  It took only two or three minutes to uncover the second cache.

  Wilt unscrewed both knobs from the end rods of the fire screen. He dug around inside with a ballpoint pen until he felt a resistance. They turned the fire screen upside down. Small tight rolls of hundreds slid from the rods and plopped on the carpet. Wilt slipped the rubber bands from one roll and counted the hundreds. A thousand dollars. That times the six rolls. Six thousand dollars.

  “He’s broke now?” Joe asked.

  “Except for what he’s carrying or what’s in the bank. I’d say little money in the bank. The Feds would monitor that and question him if his bank account got too fat.” Wilt tossed the six thousand into his hat and nodded at him. “This goes in the trunk of the cruiser for now and then in the safe. I’ll need a statement that you were with me when it was found.”

  Wilt lifted his heavy outercoat off a chair.

  “We going somewhere?”

  “I am,” Wilt said. “You’re not. I hope you don’t have plans with Charlotte for tonight.”

  “Nothing that won’t hold until tomorrow.”

  “I want you to nest in here and wait. If I miss him, my guess is he’ll head straight here for his getaway cash. So the drill is you don’t show lights, you don’t move around. And this warning. If this guy gets an edge on you, he’ll swat you like a fly.”

  “You worried about me, Wilt?”

  “A good deputy takes a while to train. In time, if you keep learning, when I’m tired of this job, I might let you have it.”

  “Big of you.”

  He waved a hand at the bedroom. “Make your excuses to Charlotte while I’m still here.”

  Joe left to make his call. Wilt opened the front door and let the cold wind blow inside, sucking the cigarette smoke outside. He wanted the house cleared of any smell that didn’t belong to Thorpe.

  After a minute or two. Joe returned. Wilt picked up the cap with the stash money inside it. “Stay alert.”

  Wilt drove past the Plowden house. In the gray early evening, the bottom floors were dark. The only light he saw was on the top floor, three lighted rooms with the brightness dimmed by curtains.

  The radio crackled at him. “You there yet, Sheriff?”

  “I’m here, Susie.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you for half an hour. You know a Billy Egan in Raleigh?”

  “I know him.”

  “He left a number where you can reach him.”

  Wilt wrote down the number. “What’s it about?”

  “He said it was about Thorpe. In his words, he said that ‘Thorpe just broke bad in my territory.’”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  At the first 7–11 store on the way to Raleigh, Wilt pulled off, found a pay phone, and dialed the number that Susie gave him.

  “Deaf Smith’s Bar and Grill.” A man answered, hard to hear over the background noise of a busy dining room.

  Wilt wondered if he’d got a wrong number. “Is Billy Egan there?”

  “He expecting a call from you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Egan came on the line. “That you, Sheriff?”

  “The Station just reached me.”

  “Your boy, Thorpe, is now on my shit list.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Not over the phone,” Egan said and gave him directions to Deaf Smith’s.

  It was dim in the bar. A long room that looked like a Boy Scout dining hall. A huge log burned in a crumbling fireplace at the back end of the room.

  “It was a dumb play on my boy’s part.” That’s how Egan began it.

  As a favor to Wilt, Egan had a man drop by the insurance office every hour or so to see if Raymond Thorpe returned. About five-thirty, one of his younger deputies, Buck McSwain, walked into the insurance office and found himself face-to-face with Thorpe.

  Like most of the young officers in a situation like that, Buck overstepped his authority and his orders. He’d been told to check and call in if Thorpe was there. Buck didn’t follow orders. He told Thorpe he was wanted for questioning. Thorpe seemed docile enough. They left the office and entered the elevator. A witness who was in the lobby saw the elevator start down, then stop and go to the fourth floor. When the elevator returned to the lobby and the doors opened Buck McSwain was balled up in pain insid
e, bleeding from a deep slash in his right kidney. Thorpe was nowhere to be seen.

  “How is McSwain?”

  “He’s losing the kidney. It’s no good to him anymore the way it is.”

  “Was he conscious enough to tell you how it happened?”

  “His version has him being real careful. Since he didn’t cuff Thorpe, he keeps a safe distance. He gets on the elevator with Thorpe. Thorpe is too close to the door. Buck tells Thorpe to punch the lobby button. Thorpe just looks at him like he doesn’t hear him. That should have been the warning. Buck was too dumb to see it. He has to make a quarter turn to reach past Thorpe and slap the button. The elevator starts to go down. That’s when Thorpe seems to lose his balance and falls toward Buck. A split-second later Buck feels the pain and the next things he knows he wakes up in the hospital.”

  “I should have warned you. This one is deadly.”

  “I was warned. The kid wasn’t smart.” Egan tipped his beer bottle and took a long swallow. “That Federal Marshal you told me about …”

  “Enos Bottoms.”

  “I got mad and put his tail in a crack.”

  “You might be sorry. You’ll have a task force investigating you.”

  “Let them. See what they find.”

  At the huge fireplace the bartender used a poker to turn the log. Sparks flew upward.

  “You heard of our D.A., Jarvis?” Egan asked.

  “I have,” Wilt said. Jarvis had the reputation as a man who’d walk barefooted through hell to get where he wanted to be and what he wanted.

  “I called Jarvis. I told him about Buck and I told your story about the problems with Bottoms and how you think the Feds are protecting Thorpe. Jarvis got mad. You don’t want to be around Jarvis when he’s mad. He gets on the horn to the Governor, who owes him some favors. The Governor gets mad. Right away, he’s on the phone to the ranking Senator in Washington. That’s the last I heard of it. My guess is that the Senator is scorching ass over at the Justice Department.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “An hour ago. Maybe a bit more.”

  “When’ll you hear?”

  “It’s my day off. As of four this afternoon. This is my office when I’m off. Jarvis has this number.”

  “I don’t know if I can wait around with you. I need to be in my county to keep the lid on in case Thorpe returns.”

  “Billy.” The bartender shouted and waved the phone toward Egan.

  Egan took the call leaning on the bar, his back to Wilt. Wilt couldn’t read his face. But when Egan left the bar and headed for the booth he was grinning. He sat and said, “Not Jarvis, but as good. That was Bottoms and he wants to talk.”

  “He tell you what he wants?

  “A problem in communications. I think that was how he put it.”

  “That means he’s talking and we’re not listening,” Wilt said.

  The trenchcoat Bottoms wore this time was gray, of an English cut, and he wore it with the belt looped instead of buckled. The Continental method, Wilt thought as he watched Bottoms remove it, turn it inside out and fold it carefully. He placed it on the seat of the empty booth behind them. His jacket was hounds tooth and the trousers fawn gray. The jacket and the trousers had the look of money and Wilt wondered what a Federal Marshal was paid.

  Bottoms sat across the booth table from Wilt, gave him a grim look and then turned his head to Egan.

  “You’re mixing in matters you don’t understand.”

  Wilt had a swallow from his longneck and smiled at Egan. “That’s the Marshal’s favorite song. When he’s not singing it, he hums or whistles it.”

  Egan glowered at Bottoms. “I’ve got a man in the hospital missing a kidney. So I understand enough. And Drake here told me about his troubles with Thorpe.”

  “You’ve been a busy boy today,” Bottoms said to Wilt.

  “Thorpe’s been busy too.” Wilt said, then shifted his gaze to Bottoms. “Or should we call him Rayfield Bellows?”

  Bottoms’ face tightened. Wilt had scored a hit. Bottoms looked at Egan. “What proof do you have Thorpe assaulted your deputy? You got him red-handed?”

  “He’s red-handed now,” Egan said, “unless he washed his hands.”

  “You got a witness?”

  “The best kind. The one that Thorpe stuck the blade in.”

  “Your man sure of his assailant’s identity?”

  “Is that what this meeting’s about?” Wilt said. “Your laughable defense of Thorpe? If it is, you’re wasting our time.” Wilt lit a Chesterfield and saw that his hand was shaking with anger. “I think Egan ought to call Jarvis again and Jarvis can talk to the Governor and we can bump this up to Washington once more.”

  “I don’t appreciate people going over my head.” Bottoms placed his hands palm down on the booth table top.

  “Fuck what you like,” Wilt said. “What makes it your birthday every day?”

  Bottoms’ face flushed. His mouth moved but he choked off what he started to say.

  “What is it you want, Sheriff?”

  “I want Thorpe and I want you to back off.”

  “I can’t do that. I give you Thorpe and nobody’ll trust the Witness Protection program again. We need guys like Thorpe to turn or we’re powerless against the Mafia.”

  “That’s your problem,” Wilt said. “Not mine.”

  Bottoms gave Wilt a sad smile. “You’re like every redneck who ever graduated from some mail order be-a-cop course. You can’t see past your county line. There’s a bigger world out there. Things are more complex than you can comprehend.”

  Wilt turned to Egan. “You take in all of this?”

  “Every word.”

  “You hear enough?”

  Egan nodded. “I’m calling Jarvis.”

  “I wouldn’t make that call, boy,” Bottoms said to Billy Egan.

  Egan touched Wilt on the shoulder. “Let me out.”

  Wilt got to his feet. He took a step back to allow Egan to pass him. Egan was two steps past Wilt, headed for the bar, when Bottoms moved. The move was so sudden that it surprised him.

  Bottoms, hardly seeming to move from the booth, hit Egan with a right to his adam’s apple. Egan grabbed his throat and sat down. He’d have fallen backwards but two drinkers at a nearby table rushed to him and caught him by the arms and shoulders. Egan gasped for breath. For a split second, Bottoms took his eyes off Wilt and looked at Egan to see how much he’d hurt him.

  Wilt took one step forward. He gripped the booth table top to brace him and give him a springboard. He hit Bottoms with his best shot. All his weight was behind the punch. The fist caught Bottoms flush on the jaw and snapped back his head. The force of the blow threw Bottoms against the booth back and stretched him out on the seat.

  Wilt dragged his right leg and tried to put his weight on it. Before he could settle the weight there, his left hip jerked and trembled. He lost a valuable second or two and when he leaned in to try to finish it, he walked into a left from Bottoms that staggered him and numbed the whole right side of his face.

  He wobbled back a step. Hands, from a closeby table clutched at him and steadied him.

  Egan was on his feet again. He tried to step in front of Wilt. “Mine,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  Wilt pulled Egan aside, “No.”

  Bottoms gripped the table top and drew himself into a sitting position. His jaw was hurt but he could still talk. “Both of you at the same time for all I care.”

  “Me.” Wilt set himself. “Here I am, Bottoms.”

  He knew he was outmanned. The hip would fail him somewhere down the line and that would be it. Unless he could end it quickly and do as much damage as he could before Bottoms knew how bad the hip really was.

  Bottoms pushed up from the booth. His eyes were clear now. He did a little slip-slip to one side, circling toward the cleared center of the bar.

  Wilt moved after him. Bottoms retreated, flicking a left at him. Wilt hunched a shoulder and batted the fist a
way. He moved in. He saw the right coming. It seemed lower, he thought, than Bottoms wanted it to be. Wilt swung his body and let the right slide past his kidney.

  The miss, the force behind it, threw Bottoms off balance. Bottoms leaned forward. It was more than Wilt could wish for. He threw a right and jammed it in the soft tissue under Bottoms’ chin.

  Bottoms staggered, his knees buckled. Wilt went after him. He threw another right, this one searching upward for the belly.

  Wilt felt the stab of pain in his left hip. He had to make his move now or it would be too late.

  He stepped in closer and grabbed Bottoms by the sides of his face. The moment Bottoms lifted his face toward him, Wilt jerked his head downward and butted him in his nose with his forehead.

  Wilt heard the bones crunch. There was a blast of spit and breath against his face and a gasp of pain. When Wilt leaned away, he saw the first gush of blood from Bottoms’ nostrils.

  Once more. That would end it.

  Wilt lifted Bottoms’ face to him and butted him on the nose a second time. It wasn’t a gasp this time. It was closer to a scream that poured from Bottoms’ throat.

  Wilt released him and staggered back. Bottoms didn’t fall. He was dazed. The pain drew his mouth into a straight line. His hands fumbled as he tried to lift them.

  “Go down, God damn it.” Wilt threw a wild roundhouse right that struck Bottoms on the side of his face.

  The Marshal’s knees gave and he felt for the bar behind him. He caught the bar edge and hung there. He shook his head and blood splattered in a half circle in front of him.

  Wilt cocked his right and took a step forward. That was when hands caught him and pulled him away.

  “That’s enough,” Egan said. He supported Wilt to a chair and eased him into it. “Willis, bring me a big shot.”

  The bartender protested. “You know I don’t have a license to sell hard stuff.”

  “Bring it,” Egan yelled.

  Wilt watched Egan walk toward Bottoms. He grabbed Bottoms under the arms and turned him and half-carried, half-dragged him to another chair that one of the customers pulled away from a table. Wilt and Bottoms faced each other across a space about six feet in length. Willis brought Wilt a beer glass with about four fingers of whiskey in it.