by Bill Crider
So he started walking into the woods. It appeared that Rapper had followed a rough path that he already knew was there. Rhodes realized he might have been able to get the county car in after all, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea to try. He’d just slip along quietly and see where the trail led him. He thought he could guess.
After he’d gone about twenty yards, he stopped to listen. If Rapper was still driving, the pickup should have been making plenty of noise, but an odd silence hung over the woods. Rapper’s truck must have stopped after reaching some destination or running into a tree. Rhodes figured it was the former, even though he wished it could be the latter. Whatever had happened, the noise of the truck crashing along had scared even the squirrels and birds into silence for the time being.
It was late afternoon, and the sun was going down. It wouldn’t be dark for a while, but where Rhodes was, the shadows were deepening. The farther into the trees he went, the darker it would be.
Again he thought about waiting, but if Rapper got away, he’d never forgive himself. He kept moving forward.
The mistake he’d made was a simple one. He told himself that anybody could have made it, but he knew that wasn’t true. Rapper had outsmarted him again, which he realized as soon as Nellie stepped out behind him, stuck a pistol in his back, and said, “Hey, Sheriff. Long time no see.”
Nellie had a high opinion of his wit. Rhodes didn’t.
“Is that a shotgun in your hands,” Nellie said, “or are you just glad to see me?”
Rhodes didn’t answer. He was too busy chewing himself out for letting Rapper get the better of him. Obviously, he’d let Nellie out of the truck and kept on going. Rhodes imagined he’d said something like “That dumbass sheriff’ll be concentrating on the truck. He won’t expect you to be laying for him. Hide behind a tree and you can get the drop on him.”
And that’s what Nellie had done. The Indian Head penny hadn’t helped a bit.
“I guess it’s a shotgun,” Nellie said. “I guess you aren’t glad to see me, either.”
“I’m not,” Rhodes said.
He supposed he should have derived a little satisfaction from having been right about who was in the pickup, but somehow it just wasn’t a satisfying situation.
“Rapper said you wouldn’t be. You just put the shotgun down now. Don’t drop it. Lay it down real easy.”
Rhodes didn’t have much choice. He could have tried to spin around and shoot Nellie, but Nellie wasn’t so slow that he wouldn’t shoot first. And probably second, too. Rhodes put the gun on the ground and straightened back up.
“Walk on a couple of steps and then stop,” Nellie said.
When Rhodes had done that, Nellie picked up the shotgun and said, “This here’s a lot better than the dinky little pistol I was carrying. I appreciate you bringing it along for me to use.”
“You’re welcome,” Rhodes said. “That wouldn’t be a twenty-five-caliber pistol you’re carrying, would it?”
“What difference does it make?” Nellie said. “I got the shotgun now. I always did want to shoot somebody with one of these things just to see what’d happen to ’em. It’s a twelve-gauge, ain’t it?”
“What difference does that make?” Rhodes said.
Nellie gave a short laugh. “You’re a really funny fella, Sheriff. I always did say that. Rapper, he never will go along with me. You might not believe this, but he don’t like you a whole hell of a lot.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I bet you don’t. Well, it’s been nice to socialize with you and all like that, but now you better start walking. We got to go see Rapper. I hope he don’t take this gun away from me. I’ve always wanted to shoot somebody with one.”
“You said that already.”
“Yeah, I guess I did. Just shows I mean it. Put your hands behind your neck and lace those fingers together.”
Rhodes did as he was told. He was glad he didn’t have any cuffs with him.
“That’s the way to behave,” Nellie said. “Now you can get moving.”
Rhodes got moving.
Chapter 23
RHODES DIDN’T BELIEVE NELLIE WOULD SHOOT HIM.
Nellie might be crazy, probably was, at least by Rhodes’s standards, but Rapper wasn’t. A criminal, yes, maybe even a killer, but a shrewd one. One who knew better than to kill a lawman. There wasn’t a woods dark and deep enough to hide him and Nellie if they did that.
Nellie just followed along with Rapper for the most part, with Rapper doing the thinking for both of them. That was fine with Rhodes. He didn’t want Nellie to try to think. He might sprain something in his brain and pull the trigger of the shotgun.
“Where are we going?” Rhodes asked.
Sweat ran down his temples. He couldn’t feel the slightest touch of a breeze. The dying leaves hung on the trees as if frozen in place.
“You’ll find out when we get there,” Nellie said.
In less than a minute, they came to the black pickup. It was stopped in front of a big oak tree, but to Rhodes’s disappointment, it hadn’t hit the tree. The truck had just reached the end of the trail.
“Keep going,” Nellie said, and Rhodes went around the truck and into the trees.
The shadows were thicker and darker there, and Rhodes could hardly see where he was going. When he mentioned that to Nellie, Nellie laughed.
“If you fall down, I’ll see to it that you get up. Best you try to stay on your feet, though. Might be some snakes around here.”
Rhodes knew more than he wanted to know about the snakes. He was careful not to get his feet tangled in some sticker-covered vine or to hit his head on a low-hanging limb.
“We got us a place a little farther along,” Nellie said. “You’ll see.”
Rhodes could hardly wait. He wondered if whoever was going to back him up had arrived yet. If it was Ruth, she’d know enough to follow him, but would she be able to find her way through the woods? Rhodes hoped so.
He came to a place where the trees thinned out and he could see ahead more easily. The ground slanted down sharply into a hollow where there were hardly any trees at all. There was something else, however. In the center of the hollow was a still.
This still wasn’t as small as the one now residing in the shed behind Kergan’s house. It was a full-scale operation of shiny copper. Rhodes smelled the odor of the sour mash and the smoky scent of the burned oak that fired the boiler.
“Big ’un, ain’t it?” Nellie said. “Big enough so we could throw you in there with the mash, give it a little flavor.”
“Dr Pepper’s better,” Rhodes said. “So I’ve heard.”
“That might not be bad,” Nellie said. “What do you think, Rapper?”
“Might be too sweet,” Rapper said.
“Yeah. So can we throw the sheriff in?”
“Throw him in the fire instead,” Rapper said, stepping out from behind the still. “Burn him. Be the best thing to do, don’t you think, Sheriff?”
Rapper hadn’t been named for his ability to bust a rhyme. He’d been around for a lot longer than the Hip-Hop Nation. His gray hair was thin, and he slicked it back on the top and sides to reveal a sharp widow’s peak. Rhodes noticed that he’d added a little ponytail in back, if you could call it that. It was so short that it didn’t seem to qualify.
If his hair hadn’t been so thin, he might have been able to grow it longer and cover up the mangled ear, or what was left of it. It hadn’t improved any since Rhodes had shot most of it off, and Rapper wasn’t trying to hide it.
He waggled his fingers at Rhodes to show they weren’t all there, either.
“Remember me, Sheriff?” he said.
“How could I forget?”
Rapper grinned. He was no taller than when Rhodes had last seen him, but his belly had gotten bigger. It wasn’t flabby, though. It looked hard enough to stop a bullet.
“You owe me, Sheriff,” Rapper said. “You owe me big-time.”
“You wouldn�
��t want to hurt me, Rapper. It would cause you too much trouble.”
“You never can tell,” Rapper said. “Anyway, I think I’m in plenty of trouble already if you leave here. Maybe we could arrange for you to die in some kind of accident. An exploding boiler, maybe.”
“You’re pretty good at arranging accidents and explosions, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. But blowing up the still would be a waste of good copper. We can’t have that. Throw me that shotgun, Nellie.”
The shotgun sailed past Rhodes. Rapper snatched it out of the air and pointed it at Rhodes.
“I always wanted to see somebody shot with one of those things,” Nellie said.
Rhodes wished he’d stop saying that.
“But not me,” Nellie said, stepping around Rhodes and staying well away from him. “The way that buckshot spreads, I might get hit, too.”
Nellie didn’t look much different from the last time Rhodes had seen him, except that he appeared to have stopped dyeing his hair, which was now pretty solidly gray. Whatever he had used on it before had given it an odd greenish tint, and Rhodes wondered if that was why he’d given up the dye.
“How are the ribs, Nellie?” Rhodes asked.
“Shoot him, Rapper,” Nellie said. “Splatter him a little bit.”
“Wouldn’t be prudent at this time,” Rapper said in a fair imitation of David Spade imitating the first George Bush.
Rhodes thought Rapper had a better sense of humor than Nellie, but not by much.
“Well, then, we oughta burn him up, like you said. Or throw him in the mash.”
“We don’t want anybody getting sick from drinking our wares,” Rapper said. “That wouldn’t do our business any good.”
“He’s gonna ruin our business anyway. We should’ve started up in some other county. He’s always getting in our way.”
Rhodes thought the same thing. It seemed like bad planning on Rapper’s part to come back to a place where he’d had so much trouble in the past. He could understand the still, though. They could make money with it, and it wasn’t nearly as risky as a meth lab.
“You know why we came here, Nellie,” Rapper said. “But it looks like we’ll have to be leaving now, and that’s too bad. We had things set up pretty nice.”
“If you’re not gonna kill him,” Nellie said, his disappointment evident in the tone of his voice, “what’re you gonna do with him?”
“I don’t quite have that figured out yet.”
“Can we at least hurt him a little?”
Rhodes had never liked Nellie much. He was liking him less with every passing second.
“I’m going to put my hands down,” he said.
His shoulder hurt, and he was tired of standing there like a prisoner, even if he was one. He didn’t wait for Rapper’s response. He just lowered his arms to his sides.
“I guess that’s all right,” Rapper said.
Nellie twitched. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, swinging his body in time to some tune Rhodes couldn’t hear.
“Better watch him, Rapper,” Nellie said. “He’s sneaky.”
“Yeah. We’d better tie him up while we decide what to do about him. Get some rope.”
Nellie stuck his pistol in the waistband of his worn jeans and walked over to a small stack of oak barrels. A piece of rope lay on top of one of them.
“Think this is long enough?” he said, holding it up.
“It’ll do,” Rapper told him. “Sheriff, you go sit down by that tree over there.” He pointed the barrel of the shotgun at a young hackberry tree with a trunk about six inches in diameter. “You slide down the trunk real slow, with your hands behind you and your wrists crossed. Nellie, you tie his hands together when he sits down.”
Rhodes went over to the tree and turned so his back was scraping the trunk. He wondered where his backup was. He remembered that the last time Ruth had come out this way to help him, she’d gotten lost. It could have happened again. She might be wandering around in the woods, looking for him. Or maybe her wrist was bothering her and she couldn’t drive so well.
For whatever reason, she wasn’t on the scene now, and Rhodes was worried that if she didn’t come soon, he’d be beyond needing her help. Even if Rapper didn’t kill him, he’d get away clean again, and Rhodes wanted to prevent that.
He supposed that in the absence of backup he’d have to help himself, so it was a good thing that Rapper and Nellie had made it easier for him.
Because Rhodes had been carrying the shotgun and because he didn’t have a sidearm in plain sight, Nellie, who wasn’t exactly the sharpest tack in the box, must have assumed he wasn’t carrying another weapon. Rapper, on the other hand, must have figured that Nellie would have checked.
For once, Rhodes was glad he’d been using the ankle holster. If he’d been wearing a conventional rig, even Nellie couldn’t have missed it.
The trick would be getting to the pistol before Rapper could cut him in half with the twelve-gauge. Rhodes knew it wouldn’t be easy.
Then Nellie helped him out again. Instead of walking wide and circling around behind the tree, Nellie walked straight toward Rhodes. He was going to pass right in front of Rapper for a split second.
“Watch it!” Rapper said, realizing too late what was about to happen.
“What?” Nellie said, turning to face him.
Rhodes flung himself to the side, hit the ground, and rolled over twice. His shoulder twinged painfully, but he hardly noticed.
The shotgun boomed, and buckshot ripped leaves and limbs off the trees just above Rhodes and to his right. He pulled his knee up to his chest, causing his pants leg to rise high enough for him to get his fingers on the pistol grips.
He ripped the .38 free and fired off a round from where he lay, not thinking he’d hit anything, but hoping to confuse Rapper.
The sound of his shot was drowned out by another blast from the twelve-gauge, and Rhodes felt some of the buckshot rip through his shirt and scrape his side.
He raised his head a couple of inches and fired again. He didn’t hit Rapper. He heard the slug hit the copper boiler with a metallic twang.
Nellie was on the run, but he didn’t have the shotgun. Rhodes would worry about him later. He rolled to his left, raised up, saw Rapper turn the shotgun toward him.
Rhodes pulled the trigger of the .38. Rapper yelled and the shotgun went flying. Rapper sat down hard. It looked to Rhodes as if one of his hands was gone.
Nellie had disappeared. Rhodes scrambled to his feet, but he was only halfway off the ground when something like the world’s biggest hammer hit him in the head.
After that, he didn’t know what happened for a while.
Chapter 24
“I THOUGHT MAYBE THEY’D KILLED YOU,” RUTH GRADY SAID.
Rhodes was propped against the hackberry tree where Nellie was supposed to have tied him. His head throbbed, and when he put his hand to his head, he felt a tender knot about the size of a hen’s egg.
“Maybe they did,” he said.
“I don’t think so. You might have a concussion, though. Do you think you can walk?”
Rhodes wasn’t sure he could even stand up.
“Give me a minute,” he said. “What did I get hit with?”
“I don’t see anything,” Ruth said.
Nellie’s pistol, then, Rhodes thought, wishing he had thicker hair or could stand to wear a hat. Either one might have helped. He thought about Sage Barton. Nothing like this had happened to him in the book. Rhodes had a feeling that nothing like this ever would. Sage Barton was too smart to get outwitted by a couple of guys like Rapper and Nellie.
He turned his head so he could see the still. It hadn’t gone anywhere, and there was only one of it. That’s a good sign, he thought. He could see Ruth clearly, too. She was standing over him with a concerned look.
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“There’s blood on your shirt,” Ruth pointed
out.
Rhodes pulled his shirt up and had a look. “Just a scratch. How’s your wrist?”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about me. You’re the one who was unconscious.”
“Just a little bump. Did you see what happened?”
Ruth shook her head. “I didn’t see any of it. All I know is that I found your car and was about to follow a track into the woods, when I heard shots. I wasn’t sure where they were coming from. A couple of minutes later, I heard a car start, and the next thing I knew, that black truck was coming at me again. In reverse, this time. I barely had time to get out of the way. I thought I’d better look around and see if you were all right. You weren’t. That’s about it.”
“That was Rapper and Nellie in the truck. You remember them?”
“I remember. They’re back?”
“They’re back. That’s their still over there.”
“It’s a lot bigger than the other one.”
“Yeah. They stole that one and moved it to Jerry Kergan’s place in Thurston. I followed them here from there. They’ve been making and selling a lot of ’shine. Hauling in water, I guess, since the creek’s about dry. They could do that here and nobody would see them.” Rhodes paused. Mentioning the water had made him thirsty. He could have used a drink. “I let them get the best of me again. Rapper’s hurt, though, maybe bad enough that he’ll need some help. Am I making sense?”
“I think so.”
“I must be okay, then.”
Rhodes got to his feet. He was a little dizzy at first, but the feeling passed quickly. He looked around and saw his pistol lying nearby. The shotgun wasn’t far from where Rapper had been standing.
Rhodes told Ruth to check the shotgun. While she was doing that, he bent over to pick up the .38. He was hardly dizzy at all when he straightened up, but instead of putting the pistol back in the ankle holster, he stuck it in his waistband. No need to bend if he didn’t have to.
“This twelve-gauge is messed up,” Ruth said, holding it by the end of the barrel.