Of All Sad Words

by Bill Crider

  There’d been a time when the tank was full, though, and Rhodes would have tossed in a lure if he’d gotten the chance. He wished he had more opportunities to go fishing. It seemed as if he had none at all lately, and unless there was a gully-washing rain, he wouldn’t have any for a long time to come.

  He looked at Kergan’s little white frame house. It was deserted, and Rhodes thought no one had been there for a while. The grass was brown and dry. A couple of dead rosebushes grew in what had once been a flower bed.

  There were no near neighbors, and not another house was in sight. Fields and pastures covered the land to the left and right, with only the Gin Tank and a few small wooded areas to break the monotony of brown weeds and grass. An occasional sprig of green stuck up, a weed that didn’t know enough to die. If it doesn’t rain soon, Rhodes thought, some of the old-timers will start talking about the Dust Bowl days.

  Rhodes wondered about the renters that Barrett had mentioned. He didn’t see any sign of them. If they’d ever been there, they were gone now.

  A big sheet-metal shed sat about fifty yards behind the house. Rust stained the sides and top. It might have been used to store farm machinery at one time, maybe back when there were cotton fields. Rhodes wondered what might be inside it now.

  He reached into his pocket and touched the Indian Head penny. He’d almost forgotten he had it with him. He didn’t really believe in luck, but he did believe in the whimsical nature of things. He decided to let a flip of the coin decide whether he’d have a look inside the house first or walk back to the shed.

  “Heads, it’s the shed,” Rhodes said aloud. He flipped the coin, and as it turned over and over, he said, “Tails, it’s the house.”

  He snatched the coin out of the air with his right hand and slapped it down on top of his left wrist.

  “Heads it is,” he said.

  He put the coin back in his pocket and walked toward the shed. As he did, he noticed that the grass around it had been flattened. Someone had been driving on it. Someone had been using the shed, possibly the renters that Barrett had mentioned.

  The shed had a big metal door that slid along a track. There was a hasp at one end, but it wasn’t fastened with a padlock through the staple. Rhodes didn’t see any windows on the front of the shed, so he walked around to the side. He found a window all right, but it was too high for him to see through. A couple of panes were missing. Those that remained were covered with dust and dirt.

  He went back to the front of the shed. He could either bang on the door and ask if anyone was inside or he could pull the door open and take his chances. He didn’t like either idea, but he couldn’t come up with a better alternative.

  All three times when he’d dealt with Rapper and Nellie in the past, they’d found out-of-the-way places to stay: an abandoned house in one instance, tents in another. A shed like this would be a fine accommodation for them. It would be hot and all but suffocating. Rhodes wondered if anyone could stay inside for long.

  In the shed’s favor was its location. It was out of town, in a deserted part of the county. That was the kind of place Rapper and Nellie looked for every time.

  Bending down, Rhodes took his .38 from the ankle holster. Then he banged on the door.

  “Anybody home?” he called.

  Nobody answered. Rhodes wasn’t surprised. Using his left hand, he slid the door open.

  It didn’t slide easily. It squealed along the track, which dug into the ground beneath it. After it had slid a couple of feet, it stuck.

  Rhodes looked at the hard dirt under the door and saw a long gouge. Someone had opened the door, probably recently. Rhodes could have forced it open farther, but he would have needed both hands to do it, and he didn’t want to put away his pistol. So he stood outside, looking into the dim interior of the shed. A little light filtered in through the dirty windows and through the openings where the panes were missing, but not enough for Rhodes to see well.

  He stood there for a couple of seconds, letting the heat from the inside stream over him while straining to hear any noise and waiting for any movement. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Rapper and Nellie had suddenly appeared to open fire on him with automatic pistols, but the inside of the shed was quiet and still.

  Rhodes was investigating property that belonged to a murdered man and therefore had ample cause to enter the shed without a warrant.

  Nothing moved inside the shed except a few dust motes that floated through the sunlight coming in through the space where the panes were missing. If Nellie and Rapper had been there, they were gone now. Rhodes put his pistol back in the holster and forced the door all the way open, letting more light into the building.

  The shed had no floor other than the dirt its four walls sat on. The hulk of an old tractor sat near the back on one side. A wooden workbench was closer to the front. There might have been some old tools on it. Rhodes couldn’t quite make them out. He walked over to have a look.

  The workbench was old and had been there a long time. Its surface was pitted, rough, and dust-covered. A couple of rusty wrenches lay on it, along with a piece of a screwdriver. Rhodes thought they must have been left there years ago, not by Kergan, but by some previous owner of the property.

  More interesting to him were the two cots that butted up against the wall under the broken window. Not far from them, a portable generator sat on the dirt floor. A fan was plugged into it. The fan was pointed toward the cots. It wouldn’t keep anyone very cool, but it might make the place bearable at night, when the temperature would drop into the seventies.

  Between the fan and the cots were three stacks of unmarked cardboard boxes. Rhodes didn’t know what was in them, but he was going to look.

  But the prize discovery was the still. It sat near the tractor, and, from where Rhodes stood, it appeared to be in good shape. Whoever took it hadn’t demolished it. It had just been moved from one place to another.

  Leaning against the hot metal wall near the still was a stack of bulging burlap bags. Rhodes could smell the corn chops from where he stood. He walked over and kicked the bottom bag with his toe. Dust rose from it, along with the strong smell of the corn chops.

  Rhodes took a look at the tractor, which was at least as old as the tools on the workbench. The battery had been removed and the tires were flat. A film of dust covered every part of it.

  The cots, fan, and generator were a different story. The generator wasn’t new, but it appeared to be in good working order. Rhodes opened the gas tank. It wasn’t full, but he could smell the gasoline inside it. The cots weren’t new, either, but they’d been slept on recently. The fan looked as if it had come out of the box only a day or so ago; in fact, the empty blue-and-white box lay a few feet away, leaning against the cardboard boxes Rhodes had noticed earlier.

  The top box in each stack was closed with packing tape. Rhodes took out his pocketknife and slit the tape right down the center of one of the boxes. Then he slit the tape where it overlapped the sides and flipped the top open.

  Inside, there were three rows of quart mason jars. Rhodes folded his knife and slipped it back into his pocket. He didn’t even have to take the jars out of the box to know what they contained.

  He counted the boxes. Six to a stack, which meant thirty-six quarts to a stack. Even his elementary school homework was coming in handy these days. He could even multiply thirty-six times three in his head and come out with 108. If he was right, that is.

  Even if he was wrong, there was a lot of whiskey there, far too much for anybody to sell in Blacklin County alone. Someone was moving into the high-end trade in the cities, or had already made the move.

  Kergan must have been involved somehow, since the bootleggers were using his shed, though possibly they’d started doing that only since he’d moved away. Maybe he hadn’t known what was going on, though that seemed unlikely.

  Now Rhodes had another decision to make. It was too bad that Mellon wasn’t around to help him.

  Rhodes didn�
�t know who owned the still or the whiskey. He didn’t know who’d made the whiskey, either, though he thought it must have been Rapper and Nellie. Somehow or other, the two of them were connected to the Crawfords.

  Rhodes had to decide what to do. He could break up the still and the whiskey bottles, or he could wait around and see who came back to the shed.

  Or he could do both.

  Or neither.

  He could hide in the shed and wait for Rapper and Nellie to return, or he could come back some other time and try to catch them there.

  Once again, he found that he didn’t like either of the choices he was offering himself.

  How likely was he to catch them if he came back later? If they realized that someone had been in the shed, they’d load up, leave, and never come back. Rhodes didn’t think he’d left any sign of his presence, but he couldn’t afford to take the chance that he had.

  If he hid inside and waited, he couldn’t use the generator and the fan. Rapper and Nellie would hear the noise. And without the fan, Rhodes wouldn’t be able to stay there more than a half hour or so, not with the door closed. It was close and stuffy enough even with it open. Rhodes thought that if he touched the west wall of the building, he might burn his hand.

  Even if he waited, he couldn’t be sure they’d come back that afternoon or even that night. He might just be wasting his time. He could call Hack and have someone else stake the place out, keep a twenty-four-hour watch on it. That might be the best thing to do, though it wasn’t a very cost-effective use of personnel. He didn’t have enough deputies to cover the county even when they were all on patrol.

  Something else occurred to him. What if Rapper and Nellie weren’t the ones staying there at all? He didn’t have any proof that they were, just a strong suspicion. The only evidence was a scanty description provided by Seepy Benton.

  Rhodes went out and closed the door of the shed. He looked at the house. He could wait there for a while. Even if the electricity was turned off and there was no air-conditioning, the house was bound to be cooler than the shed if he opened some windows. He’d have to be careful about that. He didn’t want anyone coming along to notice the open windows and realize that someone was in the house.

  He’d have to hide the car, too. He could park it behind the shed, where it would be out of sight of the road.

  Just as he started toward the car, he saw a cloud of dust on the road. As he watched, a black pickup came around the curve.

  Well, he thought, at least I won’t have to worry about opening those windows.

  Chapter 22

  THE DRIVER OF THE PICKUP DIDN’T TRY TO RUN RHODES DOWN this time. He just kept right on going, passing by the house and sending dust rolling Rhodes’s way.

  Rhodes was in the county car and after the pickup in seconds. The county road wasn’t graveled, and the dust flying up behind the pickup, along with the dark windows, made it impossible for Rhodes to see who was driving or even if there was a passenger. He just assumed that Rapper and Nellie were inside the cab. He got as close as he could to them while trying to keep the car on the narrow road and out of the ditches.

  He also called Hack and told him to send some backup.

  “Where you want me to send it?” Hack asked.

  It was a good question. All Rhodes lacked was a good answer. He looked out the window and, peering through the dust, saw the gravestones and oak trees of the Plunkett Cemetery. He told Hack where he was.

  “That road’s got more’n a couple of others that connect up to it,” Hack said. “That truck you’re chasin’ could take any one of ’em.”

  Rhodes tried to get the county’s geography straight in his head.

  “This road comes out on the county road that goes past Louetta Kennedy’s store, doesn’t it?”

  “Louetta’s dead. Store’s closed.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You don’t have to get irritable.” Hack paused. “Yeah, if you keep on goin’, you’ll come out about a half mile up the road from Louetta’s old place. Turn right, you’ll go past the store and wind up in the Big Woods. Turn left, you’ll go back to Thurston.”

  Rhodes didn’t think Rapper and Nellie would be going back to Thurston.

  “Send somebody to the Big Woods,” he said, and signed off.

  It made sense that Rapper and Nellie would head for the woods. In fact, if they were making whiskey, the woods would be a good place for them to do it. It was a good bet that they could find a place there where they wouldn’t be bothered by passersby.

  The Big Woods was a throwback to earlier times. The trees had never been cut, and the place was like the famous Big Thicket in deep East Texas, only smaller. It was the kind of place where feral pigs took shelter from hunters. Rhodes sometimes thought an ivory-billed woodpecker might be hiding in there, though no one had ever searched for one.

  Rhodes remembered yet another snippet of a poem from his high school days. It wasn’t one that he’d had to memorize, but somehow a line had stuck in his mind. He hadn’t thought of it in years, something about a woods that was “lovely, dark and deep.” The Big Woods qualified on the last two counts, but as far as Rhodes was concerned, there wasn’t anything lovely about them. The poem had also involved snow, Rhodes recalled, but there wasn’t likely to be any of that, either.

  Rhodes had had experiences in the Big Woods before, and those experiences hadn’t been good ones. Far from it. One of them had started out all right, with the discovery of some mammoth bones, but it had all been downhill from there. Before it was over, Rhodes had tangled with things like snakes, wild hogs, and murderers. Rapper was as bad as any of those things, and a little worse than a couple of them, at least in Rhodes’s estimation.

  The county car hit a rut and bounced so hard that Rhodes’s head almost hit the roof. He jerked the wheel to keep the car going straight and told himself not to let his mind wander if he hoped to get to the woods in one piece.

  It didn’t take long to get there, no more than ten minutes. The pickup slowed and made the turn toward the woods, picking up speed on the better road. Rhodes stayed right behind. He hadn’t turned on the light bar and siren earlier, but he did now. He didn’t think the lights and noise would slow Rapper down or even give him a second thought, but it might serve as a warning to any cars they might meet.

  They roared past Louetta Kennedy’s store and past the place where the mammoth bones had been found on the bank of a creek. The bones had created a little excitement in the beginning, but in the end nothing had ever come of the find. Most of the bones had proved too brittle to preserve, and the creek had flooded, making removing them too difficult.

  That had been a few years earlier. Rhodes wished the creek would flood again, and soon.

  The road didn’t go into the woods. It curved off and bypassed them, but Rapper didn’t seem to know that. He wasn’t slowing down for the curve.

  Rhodes soon saw why. Rapper was going into the woods, and he was going to drive there. The pickup went off the road and down the bank of the creek, rocking from side to side. Rhodes thought it might flip over, but it didn’t. It hit the creek bed hard, bottomed out, and rebounded, throwing up a little water from the trickle that was there. Then, with its tires chewing dirt and dead grass and throwing them out behind, it climbed the opposite bank.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure the county car was built to take the punishment the truck could, but it was too late for him to do anything but give it a try. He careened into the ditch, bouncing around like a rubber ball. When the car hit the creek bed, it almost stalled out, but Rhodes somehow gave it a jolt of gas at just the right time and it shot forward. For a second, Rhodes thought the car was going to stick nose-first into the bank, and he actually pulled back on the wheel. His arms strained and the tendons stood out in his neck. It was as if he believed he could lift the front end of the car up by his own power. Maybe he succeeded, because the hood bounced up, the back tires caught, and the car plowed up the bank.

  Rhod
es saw that Rapper wasn’t going to stop at the tree line. With the big brush guard on the truck, he wouldn’t have to. He could sweep past the smaller trees and even run over some of them.

  Rhodes, however, could not. There were just some things the county car couldn’t stand up to. Rapper might blaze a trail, but it wouldn’t do for Rhodes to try to follow it. He was going to have to go after Rapper on foot.

  The pickup crashed into the trees and went right on, but Rhodes stopped his car and got out. He unlocked the shotgun from the rack and looked into the trees where the pickup had disappeared.

  Rhodes remembered three things. One was the last time he’d chased Rapper into some woods. That hadn’t worked out too well for Rapper, but it had been a close call for Rhodes, as well. That was one thing.

  The second had happened not long after the mammoth bones had been discovered by a man named Bud Turley. Rhodes had followed Turley into these same woods. Turley had left in even worse shape than Rapper had been in when Rhodes had finished with him. In Turley’s case, however, Rhodes hadn’t done the major part of the damage. A snake had.

  The third time had been the earliest, and Rhodes had suffered an unfortunate encounter with some feral hogs. He’d wound up in the hospital himself that time, and he’d never felt the same about bacon since.

  Rhodes didn’t want to go through any of those things again, and he certainly didn’t want to wind up with a copperhead snake hanging from some part of his anatomy. He disliked snakes even more than he disliked feral hogs.

  What worried him almost as much as the possibility of encountering snakes and hogs was that Rapper was smarter than Turley, and Rapper had company. Nellie, while not exactly a mental giant, tipped the odds in Rapper’s favor.

  Rhodes knew that waiting for backup would be the smart thing. He also knew that if he waited too long, Rapper might smash his way right through the Big Woods and out the other side, or just abandon the truck and run for it, after which he’d disappear again, maybe for a few years, maybe forever. Rhodes really wanted to get him this time.