Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  After lengthy consideration (his past had to be weighed carefully—life in a county full of political enemies might be rather difficult), Swank purchased a ten-thousand-acre ranch one hour west of Austin. Swank was actually planning on semi-retirement; the ranch was a successful cattle operation and he intended to maintain its sizable herd of Red Brangus. He had even kept the former owner on as foreman for a time.

  But without the busy schedule of his previous career, Swank became restless. That is, until he rediscovered one of the great passions he enjoyed as a young adult: deer hunting. The hunting bug bit, and it bit hard. He spent the first summer on his new ranch building deer blinds, clearing brush in prime hunting areas, distributing automatic corn and protein feeders, and planting food plots such as oats and rye. It paid off the following season, as Swank harvested a beautiful twelve-point buck with a twenty-two-inch spread that tallied 133 Boone & Crockett points, the scoring standard for judging trophy bucks. Not nearly as large as the world-renowned bucks in South Texas, but a very respectable deer for the Hill Country. Several of his closest associates joined him on the ranch and had comparable success.

  Swank, never one to do anything in moderation, decided that his ranch could become one of the most successful hunting operations in Texas. By importing some key breeding stock from South Texas and Mexico, and then following proper game-management techniques, Swank set out to develop a herd of whitetails as large and robust—and with the same jaw-dropping trophy antlers—as their southern brethren.

  He had phenomenal success. After all, money was no object, and the laws and restrictions that regulated game importation and relocation melted away under Swank’s political clout. After four seasons, not only was his ranch (the Circle S) known throughout the state for trophy deer, he had actually started a lucrative business exporting deer to other ranches around the nation.

  Swank was tucked away obliviously in his four-thousand-square-foot ranch house, on the phone to one of his most valued customers, at the same moment Red O’Brien blasted unsuccessfully at a large buck in Swank’s remote southern pasture.

  “They went out on the trailer today,” Swank said in his rich timbre. He was sitting at a large mahogany desk in an immense den. A fire burned in the huge limestone fireplace, despite the warm weather. He cradled the phone with his shoulder as he reached across the desk, grabbed a bottle of expensive scotch and poured himself another glass. “Four of them. But the one you’ll be especially interested in is the ten-pointer,” Swank said as he went on to describe the “magnificent beast.”

  Swank grunted a few times, nodding. “Good. Yes, good.” Then he hung up. Swank had a habit of never saying good-bye.

  By the time he finished his conversation, a man who sounded just like Red O’Brien had already made an anonymous call to 911.

  2

  JOHN MARLIN, BLANCO County’s game warden for nineteen years, thought he had seen and heard it all.

  There was the hapless roadside poacher who shot an artificial deer eight times before Marlin stepped from his hiding spot and arrested him. The man claimed he thought it was a mountain lion.

  There was the boatload of fraternity boys who unsuccessfully tried dynamiting fish in a small lake. They sank their boat and one young Delta Sig lost three fingers. Even after all that, one of the drunk frat boys took a swing at Marlin when he confiscated the illegal fish.

  And, of course, there was the granddaddy of all his strange encounters. The hunter who shot a doe one night out of season. That wasn’t strange in itself—but when Marlin found the doe on the ground, it was wearing a garter belt and stiletto heels. The poacher had seen Marlin’s flashlight and took off, but he left behind a video camera mounted on a tripod, set to catch all of the action.

  Even so, when Marlin took this evening’s call from Jean, the dispatcher, he had a little trouble believing what he heard. “A deer suit? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “That’s what the caller said,” Jean replied. “The ambulance is already on the way. And Sheriff Mackey.”

  “Six miles down Miller Creek Loop?” Marlin was making a mental note.

  “Right. Look for the hole in the fence.”

  Marlin hung up and started to roll out of bed. Louise, still under the sheets, grabbed his arm. “You’re not going to leave me hanging, are you?” She pushed out her lower lip in a mock pout.

  “‘Fraid so. Duty calls.”

  Louise was a tall, blonde waitress at the Kountry Kitchen in Blanco. For six months, she and Marlin had enjoyed a series of passionate trysts. No strings attached—an arrangement that suited them both.

  Marlin pulled on his khaki pants and his short-sleeved warden’s shirt. It was late October, but the evening temperatures still averaged in the low seventies. As he looked for his boots, he told Louise what the dispatcher had reported.

  She was equally intrigued. “That’s over by the Circle S, right?”

  “Yep. Miller Creek Loop is the southern border of the ranch, all the way out to the Pedernales River. From what Jean said, the guy’s lying in one of Roy Swank’s pastures.”

  Louise could pick up a trace of sadness in John Marlin’s voice. Setting foot on that ranch, even at night, would bring back some bittersweet memories.

  “You think Roy will be out there?” Louise asked.

  “No idea. Don’t really care.” Marlin said as he strapped on his holster. Even without his revolver, Marlin was an imposing figure. Just over six foot two, with a broad chest and thick arms. Getting a little thick through the middle in the last few years, but he could still feel the hard muscles underneath. He had short black hair, a square jaw, and eyes that could make a veteran poacher drop a stringer of fish and run.

  Marlin bent down to kiss Louise, who let the sheet fall to her waist. She grabbed one of his hands and playfully placed it on her breast. “Hey, that’s not fair,” Marlin said softly.

  “It’s your choice. Roam around in the woods playing lawman, or stay here and write me up for some kind of violation.” She put special emphasis on the word “violation.”

  Marlin smiled. “You know you can stay here if you want.” He always offered. She always passed. Just the way they both wanted it.

  Louise told him to be careful. Then John Marlin went outside, climbed in his state-issued Dodge Ram pickup, and headed out for the Circle S Ranch.

  Ten minutes after John Marlin left, Louise let herself out, locking the door behind her. She got into her ten-year-old Toyota hatchback, checked herself in the mirror, and drove away.

  Five minutes after that, a small, wiry man with a handlebar mustache slithered out from the crawl space underneath Marlin’s small frame house. Marlin had a pair of floodlights at every corner of his house, so a passerby could have easily spotted the intruder. But the quiet country lane Marlin lived on was sparsely populated, so nobody saw the man.

  He started at the front of the house, checking the doors and windows. Finding them all locked, he circled around the house and climbed the four steps to the back door. Standing on the small porch, he turned the knob and gently shoved the door with his shoulder, trying to force it open. No luck. He tried a little harder. The door wouldn’t give. Pretty soon, the man began throwing himself against the door.

  He stopped and took a breath, hands on his knees. After a minute, he faced the door again. He raised his right Wolverine workboot to waist level and began to kick the door with the bottom of his foot. The wooden porch shook with each blow.

  With each kick, the man was backing up a little farther to get maximum force. On what was to be his last effort (whether he intended it that way or not), the man accidentally stepped backward off the porch, windmilling his arms wildly as he tumbled down the stairs. He landed hard, his head bouncing smartly on a large limestone rock in Marlin’s rustic backyard. Anyone listening would have said the impact sounded like a shopper thumping a ripe melon.

  At ten-fifteen P.M. on Thursday, October 28, Barney Weaver, Louise’s ex-husband, lay unconscious at Jo
hn Marlin’s back door.

  The first thing John Marlin saw after winding his way down the familiar county road was a gauntlet of deputies’ cars, volunteer firefighters’ trucks, and two ambulances, one on each side of the road. Pulling through the chain of vehicles, he saw Sheriff Herbert Mackey leaning over the hood of his cruiser, leveling a rifle at the oat field on the Circle S Ranch. A deputy was training a spotlight on a massive white-tailed buck, not fifty yards away, prancing around in the field.

  Marlin parked his truck and climbed out. As he approached the crowd surrounding the sheriff, he heard Mackey say, “Gentlemen, you’re about to learn something about the fine art of marksmanship.” Several of the men murmured their approval.

  “What’s up?” Marlin said to the crowd in general.

  Bill Tatum, one of the sheriff’s deputies, answered. “Got a crazy buck on our hands, John. Wounded, too.”

  Marlin looked out at the buck. The animal seemed to know that a rifle was being aimed at it. The big deer would run quickly back and forth across the field and then come to an abrupt stop. Then it would bound on all four legs like a kid on a pogo stick. Marlin could occasionally glimpse a thin trail of dark-red blood running down one of the animals forelegs.

  “Looks like a flesh wound to me,” Marlin said to nobody in particular. When no one responded, Marlin walked over and stood next to Sheriff Mackey. “Do you really think this is necessary, Herb?”

  Marlin knew it bothered Sheriff Mackey when he called him by his abbreviated first name rather than his official title.

  Mackey raised his large belly off the hood of his Chevy, spit a stream of tobacco juice at Marlin’s feet and said, “Don’t see as how I got a choice. Damn buck’s gone nuts. Nearly gored us all when we were fetching Trey.”

  “Trey Sweeney?” Marlin wished someone would tell him the full story.

  Bill Tatum spoke up again. “You know about the nine-one-one caller, right? Well, Trey’s the one in the deer costume.” Tatum nodded toward one of the ambulances just departing. “He took a pretty good hit across the ribs, but he should be all right.”

  Marlin shook his head and grinned. Trey Sweeney was a state wildlife biologist and Blanco County native. Known for his eccentric behavior, Sweeney had gained national attention when he traveled to Yellowstone Park and holed up for three days with a hibernating black bear. His intention was to prove that the bears are not territorial and will attack only when their cubs or their food supply is threatened. After three days, Trey was certain that his theory was correct. Then the bear, apparently unaware of Trey’s presence for the first seventy-two hours, awoke with a yawn, scratched his privates, and tore Trey’s right ear off. (The chief reason Trey wore his hair long nowadays.) Trey still counted the whole episode as a victory, maintaining that the bear was only exhibiting post-hibernation playfulness. Nationally recognized wildlife authorities disagreed.

  “So what’s the story on the buck?” Marlin asked.

  “Trey told us it was one of his test deer,” Tatum said, referring to the small radio collars Trey had fitted on several deer on the ranch years earlier. The biologist had been conducting an ongoing study on the nocturnal movements of whitetails. “That’s all he said. Except for asking us not to shoot it.”

  The crowd turned toward Sheriff Mackey, still holding his rifle. “That deer is obviously a danger to the community,” Mackey said, feeling a little foolish as he looked around the isolated pasture.

  Yeah, and he’d look damn good on your living-room wall, Marlin thought.

  The sheriff shifted uneasily as the crowd remained silent. Most of the men were hunters and couldn’t stand to see a deer killed in such an unsporting manner.

  Finally the sheriff asked bitterly, “All right, then. Anyone else got any brilliant ideas?”

  “I say we tranquilize him.” Marlin said.

  “You gotta be kidding. Then what? You gonna play like Sigman Fraud and ask him what’s troubling him?” Several of the men smiled.

  Marlin started to reply when one of the deputies spoke up. “Sheriff, I got Roy Swank on my cellular.”

  The sheriff opened his mouth as if to say something, then shuffled over to the deputy’s car and grabbed the phone. The men could not hear the ensuing conversation, but Mackey gestured wildly several times. After a couple of moments, the sheriff returned with a tense look on his face.

  “You win, smart boy,” he said to Marlin. “That’s one of Swank’s trophies and he don’t want it killed.”

  Marlin tried not to gloat, but he felt a sense of relief. Just being around Sheriff Mackey made him a little edgy. The man was obstinate, obnoxious, and downright rude. More than once they had butted heads over the finer letters of the hunting laws, chiefly because Mackey was one of the county’s biggest poachers.

  Wordlessly, Marlin walked over to his vehicle and reached into the backseat of the extended cab. He took out a hard-sided gun case and removed the tranquilizer rifle inside. After loading it properly, he walked up to the fence, took aim, and made a perfect shot.

  3

  THE POACHERS WERE holed up in Red’s mobile home. Billy Don was sprawled on the couch underneath the velvet Willie Nelson painting as Red bent over him, using pliers to pull cactus thorns out of his left hand.

  “What’d you have to go and push me for?” Billy Don glowered at Red.

  “Because you couldn’t get your fat ass back through that fence. Somebody needs a little help from Jenny Craig,” Red said as he plucked at a particularly stubborn thorn.

  “Damn, that hurts! Take it easy, will ya?”

  “Hold on. You need a little medicine.” Red stumbled into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of tequila. He unscrewed the cap and took a gulp. Then he shuddered from head to toe, like a dog shaking water off its back. He passed the bottle to Billy Don. “Take a few swigs of that.”

  Billy Don tipped the bottle to his lips and took a mouthful. “What is this shit, Clorox?” He took another big drink.

  Red sat down on the coffee table, which used to be a packing crate, and stared hard at Billy Don. He knew he’d have to spell things out for him. “Now, I don’t know exactly what happened out there tonight. But I do know we could be in deep shit for it.”

  Billy Don said nothing as he tipped the bottle again.

  Red watched him closely. “You and me known each other for a long time, Billy Don. I wanna know, can I trust you?”

  “ ‘Course you can. What’re you talking about?”

  “If word gets around what we done, we could both be in trouble. But especially me, since I did the shootin’.”

  Billy Don nodded at him with liquor-moistened eyes.

  “But you’re in it, too, ‘cause you was there and you helped me,” Red continued. “So both our asses are on the line.”

  “How we gonna get caught? Wasn’t nobody around to see us.”

  “But still, we should have a good story. Just in case anything comes up. You follow me?”

  “My momma didn’t raise no dummies.”

  “All right, then here’s the plan.” Red leaned back and smiled, like he’d just authored the theory of relativity. “We was here all night watchin’ ‘rasslin’ on the TV.”

  Billy Don shook his head. “Shit no. Everybody knows that’s all fake.”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?”

  “That pro ‘rasslin’s a buncha crap.”

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  “The hell are you, some kind of expert?”

  “They punch like a bunch of faggots and that ain’t blood, that’s Karo syrup with food coloring in it.”

  “The hell it is, I seen the Big Bomber versus Iron Man down at the Coliseum and they punch harder’n hell and goddamn, Billy Don, what in the hell are we talkin’ about? Just listen to me. We gotta have a story. You back me up, I back you up.”

  “I ain’t gonna tell no story about watchin’ ‘rasslin’ ‘cause everybody knows that shit’s all fake. People will think I�
�m some kinda dullard. Plus they’ll know we’re lying.”

  Red took a deep breath. Sometimes talking to Billy Don could be as taxing as talking to the foreigners who ran the convenience stores in Austin. As far as Red was concerned, if you can’t speak the language, you shouldn’t be let in the country. He often thought all of the immigrants should be tested on their communication capabilities, and if they couldn’t understand such basic terms as “I need a pack of Red Man, Pedro,” or “Give me some Marlboro Lights, Habib,” then they should be deported.

  But this was his friend, so he paused for a minute and then smiled at Billy Don and said, “Okay, no ‘rasslin’. What do you think we oughta say?”

  “How about the Nashville Network? We just say we was watchin’ music videos all night.” Billy Don lifted the bottle once again. “I like that Shania Twain.”

  Red thought it over. He had to admit, it was a good idea. There wasn’t a single video they hadn’t seen, so they could easily describe several of them if asked. Of course, Red wasn’t a fan of Shania Twain because she was Canadian. Talk about fake. Red shuddered to think about the future of our great country when something as sacred as country music was being taken over by foreigners.

  “That’s perfect.” Red clapped Billy Don on the shoulder. “Just you and me and Shania all night long.”

  But Billy Don had already passed out on the couch, still clutching the bottle of tequila in his uninjured right hand.