by Austin Davis
“Spotted by who?” I asked.
“Witnesses,” said Stroud, who limped around and got into the driver’s seat. Wick squeezed himself into the passenger’s side.
“Where the hell have you been?” I asked him.
“I have been reforming my character, Clay, just like you asked me to.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Barbecue!” Stroud roared as he gunned the engine and we peeled rubber down the street.
“Boo’s barbecue,” Wick explained. “Best in Texas. Our treat, Clay. But we’ve got one little thing to do first.”
Stroud drove like a B-movie gangster, swiveling the big car down city streets until they gave way to farm-to-market roads.
“You’re going to kill us!” I said, hanging on in the backseat.
“You see, Clay,” Wick said, “we’ve got to beat the ex-pilots to the Old Platte Road.”
“The who?” I asked.
“We’re on a mission, son,” said Stroud, turning around to give me a sodden wink.
Stroud was very drunk, his withered head bobbing up and down like the head of one of those spring-loaded toy dogs in the rear windows of cars. He hummed tunelessly as we scorched down the road, his eyes incandescent with drink.
“Mr. Stroud, should you be driving?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” he said, smiling at me in the rearview mirror.
“What sort of mission are we on?”
“Wait and see,” he replied.
“So how are things going in the country, Clay?” Wick asked. “How’s our new man doing?”
Bracing against the swerves, I let my employers know how I felt about the housing deal they had set up for me. Wick assured me that nobody was being hurt.
“What about the geologist who sold the house to Rasmussen?” I asked.
“He’s in China,” Wick explained. “He’s making a million dollars looking for oil for the Commie government. Don’t worry, Clay. We’ll make any mortgage payments that devolve on him, if he ever shows up and HUD comes after him. We’ll do right by him. I promise. It was Bevo’s idea in the first place,” he added.
“Bevo’s idea? To give up his house?”
“He saw it as a way to work off some of what he owes us. We’ve got fees charged to him from a couple of years back.”
“Where is Bevo living now?” I asked.
Wick shrugged. “Do you know, Gill?” he asked. Stroud ignored the question.
“I agree with Mr. Parker,” the old man grumbled from the driver’s seat. “You never should have cut that deal with Bevo Rasmussen. It looks like we’re taking advantage of a client.”
“He’s your goddamn client, Gill,” Wick replied. “I’m just trying to get some kind of remuneration out of him.”
For a few minutes as we sped down a section road they bickered about which of them was to blame for their association with Bevo Rasmussen.
“The Stromboli lawsuit was a black hole from the beginning,” Wick said. “You must have been whacked out of your mind when you took it.”
“At least I was working,” grumbled Stroud. “I wasn’t out rooting around for poontang like the distinguished head of our firm.”
They got into a fight about Wick’s involvement with Mrs. Starns, the emu lady. “Every time I look up, there’s another tart leading you around by the ying-yang,” said Stroud. “Deirdre Starns tells you to piss in the wind, and you unzip and let ’er fly.”
“At least I can control my stream,” Wick said. “At least I’m not dribbling boozy piss out my pants leg every time I sneeze.”
“Enough!” roared Stroud. The car swerved off the road, and for a moment I thought we were going over. Stroud regained control, and I let out a long sigh. Both of them looked back at me.
“We almost killed our new lawyer, Gill,” said Wick, “on his third day on the job.” They both thought that was hilarious.
Next to me on the seat was a battered rattan suitcase with which I kept colliding as the car zigzagged down the road.
“Jesus, Clay,” Wick said, “be careful with that suitcase!”
“You don’t want that thing to come open, son,” Stroud told me.
“Why not?”
“Just don’t fool with it,” Stroud replied. I pushed it away from me on the seat.
“This mission we’re on, does it have something to do with former pilots?” I asked.
Stroud thumped Chandler on the shoulder with a liver-spotted fist. “He’s a quick lad, Mr. Chandler!” The old man laughed.
Stroud turned onto another road, bordered by cultivated fields on one side and a wilderness of high grass on the other. He slowed the car down, and Wick scanned the new road in both directions.
“I think we made it,” Wick said.
Stroud stopped the car. “Mr. Parker,” he said, “could I trouble you to set that suitcase on the side of the road?”
“Carefully,” said Wick.
I opened the car door, reached over, and picked up the suitcase by the handle. Something heavy slid to the bottom of it, and I heard a muffled, low-pitched whirring noise. The suitcase pulsed with pent-up energy.
“Jesus, what’s in here?” I said. “Is this a bomb?”
“Set it upright,” Stroud instructed. “Hurry, son!”
As soon as the case stood on the asphalt, Stroud hit the gas, and I almost fell out onto the road as the Lincoln sped away. Stroud drove about fifty yards, then pulled off the road behind a thick grove of pines and oak trees that gave way to a sheer wall of grass and weeds over six feet high. He plunged the car into the grass, and we rocked crazily through the crackling stalks. In a few seconds the car stopped, and I could see that we had come to the other side of the grass patch, where a dirt road snaked along toward the woods.
“We’re here!” said Wick. “What do you think, Mr. Stroud?”
“Let us try it before the bar,” Stroud replied, shutting off the engine. They climbed out of the car and pushed their way back through the trail that the Lincoln had made in the grass. Mystified, I followed them toward the grove of trees until, just before leaving the grass, we came upon a wooden frame, maybe ten feet high, made of faded, rotting planks. It looked like a gallows. A wooden ladder was nailed to its side.
“After you, Mr. Chandler,” said Stroud.
“After you, Mr. Stroud,” Wick replied. Stroud climbed slowly, wheezing by the time he reached the top. I saw him put his aspirator in his mouth and trigger it. Wick followed him up the ladder.
“What is this thing?” I asked.
“A duck blind,” Wick said. I climbed up after him. At the top was a narrow walkway and a bench, approximately five feet long, all made of planks. A waist-high railing bowed treacherously when I took hold of it. The whole frame wobbled whenever any of us moved. I sat down slowly next to Wick on the bench. Grass shoots and tree limbs had been fastened to the railing for camouflage. My colleagues peered through the foliage at the road, and so did I. There was the suitcase, standing at the side of the road.
“Are there any ducks around here?” I asked.
“Nope,” said Wick. “We had the blind moved here last week.”
“Why?”
“You’re about to find out.”
“God almighty, it’s a hot one,” said Stroud, taking out a handkerchief and rubbing the back of his neck. The blind was shaded by oak trees, but the air was heavy and hot. Locusts sang in the trees all around us.
“Boo did a good job of setting this thing up,” Wick said.
“He might have gotten us some more shade,” Stroud griped.
“What are we doing, guys?” I asked.
“We’re here to prove a point,” Stroud replied.
“You see, Clay,” said Wick, “there’s a gentleman of our acquaintance who thinks himself an ace trapper but who is, in reality, a tenderfoot shithead of the first water.”
“An animal trapper?” I asked.
“Hah!” bellowed Stroud. “The only thing he’s ever trapp
ed is his own ass.”
“Captain Jack is one of the ex-pilots,” Wick continued. “We’re waiting for them now. They usually eat Boo’s barbecue on Thursday, and they usually take this road to get there.”
“Who are the ex-pilots?” I asked.
Stroud let out a grunt of pure disdain. “A support group for morons,” he said.
Wick filled me in. It seemed that Jenks sat on the easternmost edge of what had been one of the prime recreational areas in East Texas. The interstates made travel to and from Dallas easy, and many wealthy city types had bought land and built houses by the small man-made lakes bulldozed into the greenery. In the early eighties, these urbanites mixed on the streets of the local towns with farmers and cattle ranchers and oilmen, who were doing pretty well back then. The small area towns boomed. But along came the late eighties, and business went bust for just about everybody. The locals lost their farms, cattle, and oil, and the little towns started drying up, Jenks included. All the urbanites put their country homes up for sale and went back to the city. All, that is, except for a group of airline pilots from Braniff and TWA who had built big houses among the hills west of Jenks and couldn’t move back to Dallas because they’d all been laid off.
“Those nitwits getting fired was the best thing that could have happened to the friendly skies,” Stroud said.
These ex-pilots, ten or eleven in number and wealthy from their years with the airlines, formed a roving pack of disgruntled outlaws who went through phases of middle-aged despair together. During what Wick called their Guns-’n’-Ammo phase, the ex-pilots hung out at a gun repair shop that Captain Jack, their ringleader, built on his land, where they would drink all day and shoot at anything that moved in the woods.
“Delmar Spruggs lost two cows that summer,” Wick said.
“Idiots thought they were bears!” said Stroud, laughing.
Wick explained that in the spring of ’92 most of the ex-pilots bought Harley-Davidson motorcycles and took to roaring through the streets of the local towns, raising dust and irritating the natives. The Hells Angels phase of their therapy was cut short, however, by Gilliam Stroud.
Stroud was city attorney for Jenks then, and he prosecuted five of the would-be rebels for traffic violations stemming from a drunken parade they extemporized one Saturday afternoon in downtown Jenks. Gilliam Stroud was no reformer; in DWI cases he usually erred on the side of leniency, recognizing the folly of throwing stones from the porch of his own glass house. However, the arrogance of the cycling ex-pilots so incensed Stroud that he pressed the case hard and got the offenders a few days’ jail time along with their stiff fines. Captain Jack’s incarceration, brief though it was, damaged the enthusiasm of the whole group, and within two weeks they had sold their Harleys. Captain Jack and his boys had never forgiven Stroud his persecution of them. Stroud, for his part, delighted in trading insults with the ex-pilots, who were now also ex-bikers.
“I would have put them away for good,” Stroud explained, “if only they weren’t such fun to bait when you come on them in the wild.”
“Look!” said Wick. Up the Old Platte Road came an enormous Range Rover, painted in camouflage colors. It passed our hiding place, and I made out the shapes of five men inside. The duck blind made a perfect observation post.
“It’s our boys!” said Stroud.
“There’s something weird about their faces,” I said.
“It’s camouflage paint,” Wick explained. “They’re into a survivalist phase right now. They all think they’re Rambo, waiting for the end of civilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t half a dozen assault rifles in that buggy.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “We’re sitting here in this heat to play some sort of joke on a bunch of armed psychos?”
“It’s not a joke,” said Stroud, “it’s a mission. We are here to dispense a little moral instruction.”
Stroud explained that the last time they had found themselves together—in a bar, as usual—he and Captain Jack had gotten into an argument about which one of them knew more about the local fauna. Jack, who cured animal skins at his gun shop, fancied himself a trapper. He boasted that he had trapped the last bobcat in the county years ago, and Stroud had explained to him that he was full of shit.
“I take it you’re a backwoodsman yourself?” I asked Stroud.
“Hell, no,” he said, “I don’t know a goddamn thing about the goddamn woods. I didn’t even know what a bobcat looked like until I got hold of the one we put in the suitcase.”
“There’s a bobcat in that suitcase out there?”
“Yep,” said Wick. “Burl Weeks caught it for us up around Quitman. We picked it up this morning.”
“Evil-looking critter,” said Stroud.
The Range Rover slowed when it reached the suitcase, then drove on by.
“Shit and damnation,” said Wick.
“Wait a bit,” Stroud said. A hundred feet down the road, the car stopped and, after a moment, began to back up.
“Hell,” said Wick. “I forgot the camcorder.”
“A client I had once played a trick like this on his wife’s boyfriend,” Stroud said. “There’s something about a suitcase sitting all by itself on the side of the road makes it hard to ignore. Of course, that fellow put six rattlesnakes in his suitcase. And the wrong party picked it up, a couple of college boys from out of state. Ugly mess.”
“You said you were dispensing moral instruction,” I reminded him. “What’s moral about this?”
“Any truth, son, is a moral truth,” said Stroud dryly. “It is a moral truth that bobcats still frolic in these woods. Captain Jack needs to learn that truth.”
The Rover stopped beside the suitcase. A door opened, and the suitcase disappeared. The Rover zoomed away.
“But they’ll know it was you!” I said. “This Captain Jack will remember your conversation in the bar. They’ll know!”
“I was under the impression that you were a lawyer, Mr. Parker,” said Stroud. “There’s a mighty big gulf between knowing and proving.”
“This is the stupidest thing I have ever seen two grown men do!” I protested.
“Three,” said Stroud, mocking me with a sly grin. “Three grown men.”
Suddenly the Range Rover went into a skid and stopped, blocking both lanes of the Old Platte Road. All four doors blew open, and five camouflaged men tumbled out. One of them fell onto the asphalt surface, jumped up, and ran screaming into the grass on our side of the road. Two of the men had rifles and started shooting at the car. Sustained bursts of gunfire chewed up the sides of the Rover, shattering windows and blowing out a tire.
“See there,” said Wick, “I told you they had automatic weapons!”
Another man started yelling at the riflemen, waving at them to stop shooting.
“That would be Captain Jack,” Wick said. “It’s his car.” As soon as the rifle fire stopped, a small shape bolted from the front seat of the car and into the grass near where the screaming man had disappeared. One of the riflemen fired a burst after it but missed. The man who had run into the grass came running out, screaming at the rifleman. There was a fistfight on the roadside, which eventually involved four of the ex-pilots.
“I’ve seen enough,” said Stroud. “Let’s go get some barbecue.”
As we climbed down, Wick asked his partner, “Do you think Captain Jack knew it was a bobcat?”
“I think he knew it wasn’t a field mouse,” Stroud replied. We reached the Lincoln, and Stroud got into the driver’s seat. Wick and I pushed the car the few feet from the grass to the dirt road, which sloped enough for the car to run along a couple of hundred yards without power. We did not want the ex-pilots to hear us making our getaway.
“We’d better call Burl to come and trap the cat again,” said Wick as we glided down the dirt road without power. “It might eat an ostrich.”
“You promised you were going to reform,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he
said sheepishly. “I guess I’d better start over.”
CHAPTER 17
STROUD SEEMED TO HAVE SOBERED UP a little during his vigil in the duck blind, but his hold on the road was still pretty loose.
“Can we talk about the Rasmussen case?” I asked, hoping to steady him. “What are we going to do? We’ve only got seven days until the trial.”
“Fourteen days,” Stroud said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We have fourteen days until the trial.”
“The file says seven,” I said.
“The file is not up to date,” Stroud said. “SWAT asked for an extension, claiming scheduling problems. We have fourteen days.”
“That’s a relief,” said Wick.
“Not much of one,” I countered. “Tell me, Mr. Stroud, is the file out of date in any other ways? Did you, perhaps, remember to send answers to the SWAT interrogatories and neglect to enclose a copy in the files?”
“No,” Stroud replied. “The interrogatories are a problem.”
“You aren’t planning to plead a fake heart attack to get more time, are you?” I asked him.
Stroud glared at Wick. “I told you, Hard-dick. Never again!”he said.
“It was just a thought,” Wick replied.
“I wonder what kind of scheduling problems SWAT had that made them ask for a delay?” I asked.
“They wanted an extra week to sharpen their axes,” Wick said. “They plan to chop us into lawyer pâté.”
A couple of minutes later Stroud pulled the big car into a gravel parking lot, next to a shack with a roof sagging under a buzzing, spitting neon sign that read The Singing Pig. It was a little after two o’clock, and the only occupants of the Singing Pig were the owner and his wife, Boo and Betty, a leathery little couple who looked as if they’d been smoked in their own smokehouse. Wick Chandler bellowed a greeting at them, and Stroud limped up to Betty, took her hand, and asked in his deepest, most splendid voice if he could compare her to a summer’s day.
“You can tell me what you want to eat,” she suggested in a dry voice, but there was an amused light in her eye. “The only way I’m like a summer’s day is I’m hot and dusty.”