by Austin Davis
“You have earned your weight in chitlins, Mr. Parker,” he said. “What do you think of my little scenario?”
“Pretty far-fetched,” I replied. “Who’s going to believe burglars would steal a pathologist’s report?”
“There was a beautiful eel-skin briefcase lying on Pulaski’s desk. No—ostrich-skin! The nasty thieves could not resist it. Unfortunately, it happened to contain all of Pulaski’s papers on the Rasmussen case.”
“Come on!” I said. “Are you telling me there would be only one copy of Pulaski’s report? What about the copy Jacobs read from this afternoon on the phone?”
Stroud’s smile widened. “In light of the aspersions we cast upon it, Jacobs gave it back to Pulaski so that Stan-the-Man could check its accuracy. It was in the briefcase with Pulaski’s own copy.”
“Who in the world would buy this story?” I asked.
“Judge Wrong Tit Tidwell, for one,” said Stroud. “If Pulaski told Wrong Tit that Martians ate his report, Tidwell would smile and nod.”
“Let’s see,” I said, “incompetent pathologists, corrupt law firms, vindictive idiot judges, impossible scenarios. Seems country law works pretty much like city law.”
“Now, Mr. Parker, do you see why we took the evidence box?”
“You wanted to spend the next five to fifty years of your life behind bars?” I asked.
“Don’t go ethical on me at this late hour, son.”
I did know why we took the evidence, of course. “Without the physical evidence, Stan-the-Man cannot turn in a credible report. He would have to base his findings only on his memory. But he investigates so many fires a year that it would be impossible for him to reconstruct one fire, over a year old, totally from memory,” I said. “You would rip him to shreds on the stand, Wrong Tit Tidwell notwithstanding.”
“Very good, Mr. Parker. And can you think of any other reason why we took the box?”
“Spoliation,” I answered.
“Excellent!” he said.
The doctrine of spoliation holds that if you are party to a lawsuit and evidence is destroyed or lost while in your possession, it is presumed the evidence is unfavorable to you. The doctrine was originally intended to protect litigants in product liability cases. In such cases one lawyer or the other used to send the product in question—an oven, a seat belt, a watch crystal—back to the manufacturer for testing. In the course of such testing, the product was often unavoidably destroyed. This was unfair to the other litigant in the case, who now could not conduct his or her own tests. To protect this second party, the court, invoking the doctrine of spoliation, instructs the jury to presume that the destroyed evidence is unfavorable to the party who had it destroyed.
What this meant in our case was that the disappearance of the evidence box would count heavily against Stromboli. Add spoliation to Pulaski’s inability to submit a pathology report, and it would be next to impossible for Stromboli to win. Bevo would get his money.
“Jesus!” I said. “We’ve beaten SWAT!”
“Amazing grace, Mr. Parker,” said the old man. “We are imbued.”
“It’s not grace, Mr. Stroud. The other side screwed up worse than we did.”
“Sounds like grace to me.”
“Let’s just see if we’re imbued tomorrow morning,” I replied. “If you’re wrong about Pulaski’s report, Jacobs is going to clean our plow.”
“Clean our plow.” Stroud rolled the syllables around in his mouth. “A nice rural image. You’re catching on, Mr. Parker.”
As we neared Jenks, Stroud had me circle to the road leading out to his farmhouse. “I want to take that box of dead horses out to the pond and sink it,” Stroud said. “Pulaski will figure out that his burglars didn’t really steal the box along with the briefcase. He may put two and two together and start wondering if we somehow had something to do with it.”
“That’s a long shot, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yes, and it’s giving Pulaski credit for brains that he just doesn’t have. Still, I want to make sure that if he comes snooping over here, there’s nothing for him to find.”
“Good idea. Destroy the evidence,” I said, feeling even more like a criminal than I had when I carried the box to Stroud’s car.
Turning into the meandering dirt road that led to the house, I noticed flashes of what looked like heat lightning in the sky ahead of us. As we got closer, the flashes became more intense. Beyond the house, in the direction of the cabin, a reddish glow pulsed in the sky.
“I think maybe we just drove out of the state of grace,” I said.
CHAPTER 40
I STEERED THE LINCOLN through the tall grass toward the valley where the cabin lay. Now we could see smoke straggling upward in the distance.
“Bevo Rasmussen is burning down my cabin!” Stroud cried. “That’s the last straw!”
Suddenly another car loomed in the grass, coming at us fast. It swerved aside, missing us by inches. The driver was only a blur, but I could tell that the car was a police car. In the next instant, something exploded against our windshield, and light seared my eyeballs. When I opened my eyes again, we were topping the hill overlooking the cabin and pond. With my vision clouded by the explosion’s afterburn, I could see nothing but dark shapes in the landscape and sudden blooms of sparks as other explosions erupted in the valley. I heard the explosions going off amid the popping of small-arms fire and the snarl of men’s voices shouting in panic. Rockets whined and shrieked.
“The dogs of war!” cried Stroud.
“I can’t see,” I told him.
The old man reached over and yanked the steering wheel. “Give her some gas,” he said. I did, and Stroud steered us across the top of the valley to a stand of pine trees about a hundred yards from the cabin. “We’ll be safe here, I think,” he said. I switched off the headlights and the ignition.
We sat under the trees in the car, with the valley sloping away in front of us. As my eyesight came back, I could make out distinct shapes. The cabin was still there—it had not been set on fire—but a patch of grass behind it, maybe half an acre, was burning, the flames lapping low to the ground, churning out black smoke. In front of the cabin, a battle was going on. Half a dozen cars, three of them black-and-whites from the Jenks Police Department, were swarming in the space between the cabin and the pond. Men leaned out car windows to shoot rifles and handguns at the cabin.
As we watched, two of these cars collided head-on and bounced back from each other. I heard a voice say, “Shit, Red, let me drive.” One of the cars spun off again, but white steam billowed from the hood of the other. It was finished. Three men tumbled out of it, waving frantically until a car stopped and picked them up. Two other cars sat on the slope of the valley, one smoldering, the other lying on its side in a ditch. The smoldering car was Captain Jack’s Range Rover. I could see bullet holes dotting its flank, and I wondered if they were new or if they dated from the afternoon of the bobcat ambush.
It was an oddly unfocused battle. The men in the cars were pouring ammunition into the cabin, yet there was no visible activity inside it. The clearing where the cars bounced around seemed to be the center of a mortar attack, yet we could hear no incoming shells; every few seconds a spot of ground or a bush would belch upward in a thundering explosion.
The top of the Lincoln was hit by what sounded like bullets. “Incoming!” I yelled, kicking my door open and sliding out onto the ground. Above me, there was laughter. I looked up but saw only foliage until an arm high in a tree waved at me.
“Where are you hit, Clay?” It was Wick Chandler’s voice. “Get that man into triage.” Something bounced off my forehead, and I picked it up. A pebble. To considerable snickering from above, I stood up and discovered that I had parked the car next to a duck blind identical to the one on the road to Boo’s barbecue shack. The people in the blind had tossed pebbles onto the Lincoln’s roof.
Stroud limped past me and began climbing the ladder. “Let me see!” he cried eagerl
y. I followed him up. On the platform we found Wick, Bevo, and Boo himself. Wick and Boo were watching the battle through binoculars.
“Glad to see you, Mr. Stroud!” said Bevo. “I didn’t want you to miss my little party.”
“They’ve come to arrest you, Bevo!” I told him. “They must know the place is full of stolen goods.”
“Stolen goods?” said Bevo. “Where’d you get a notion like that, Mr. Parker?”
“Somebody give me some binoculars,” Stroud said. Wick handed him his, and the old man stared through them.
“I’m sorry, Gill,” Wick said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have bailed Bevo out, after all. They’ve shot up the cabin pretty bad.”
“Bevo,” said Stroud, “the fee you owe us for getting you out of that drug deal last fall?”
“Yes, sir?” said Bevo.
“It’s forgiven. All right with you, Hard-dick?”
“Sure thing, Gill. You’re not mad?”
“It’s beautiful,” said Stroud. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He lowered the binoculars and to my astonishment I saw tears in the old man’s eyes.
Bevo explained that he had been setting up the ex-pilots for weeks. “Bunch of assholes,” he sniffed.
“Tell ’em about them guys bustin’ up our still,” Boo suggested.
“Two stills, Uncle Boo,” Bevo reminded him. “Don’t forget that one over by the five-D Ranch a couple of years ago. It’s getting so you can’t take a shit in the woods without one of them idiots tripping over you.”
“So you weren’t fencing stolen goods?” I asked him.
Bevo gave me his wolf’s smile. “All them boxes stacked in the cabin is empty. Let’s just say I planted some hints, and sure enough, old Jack and his pals came sniffing. Red Meachum deputized ’em this morning. Guess where they went to plan the raid?” He clapped his uncle on the back.
“The Singing Pig?” I asked.
“They come in for lunch,” said Boo, beaming at us. “I heard every goddamn thing they said. Boy howdy, they hate you, Mr. Stroud. They was planning to catch Bevo with a load of goods and then knock down your door. They got a search warrant.” A jagged nicotine laugh barked out of the little man. “I hope they like what they found.”
Bevo reached down and picked up a small metal box with a crank handle and posts for connecting electric wires. “Give me another one, Uncle Boo,” he said. Boo ripped a piece of tape off the duck blind’s guardrail, then handed Bevo the ends of two wires that had been secured under the tape. I saw that the wires led down one leg of the platform, into the darkness. Several more pairs of wires were taped to the rail. Bevo wrapped the two leads around the posts on the box, then handed the box to Stroud.
“Would you care to do the honors?” Bevo asked. Stroud took the detonator. Bevo pointed to a dried bush fifty feet from the cabin door. “Now, wait for a car to get close, and crank that sumbitch.”
Stroud clutched the box, his hand on the crank, until one of the patrol cars veered toward the bush. He gave the crank a swift turn, and the bush burst into flame. The driver jerked the steering wheel to miss the explosion, and the car rose on two wheels, balanced precariously, then crashed down on all fours again.
Stroud howled. “It’s Christmas! It’s my fucking birthday!”
“Boo is a man of hidden talents,” Wick told us. “He did most of this with that old black powder we kept in the cabin. That and some leftover fireworks.”
“Where’d you learn explosives, Boo?” I asked.
“Seabees,” he said. “Out in the Pacific. Nineteen and forty-four. I blew up an entire island once. An aye-toll. ’Course, it’s good to find a use for the old skills, now and then.”
“I don’t understand why they don’t just get out of their cars and charge the house,” I said. “Nobody’s in there.”
“That’s not what they think,” said Bevo. “We had the lights on, till those guys shot ’em out. And every once in a while, we give ’em a burst of machine-gun fire.”
“How?” I asked.
Bevo handed me another box, like the first one. “Want to shake ’em up? It’s only firecrackers.”
I took the box, cranked the handle.
In a few seconds a series of flat, popping noises stuttered out of a cabin window, accompanied by occasional sparks.
“Sounds like an M-16,” said Wick.
“Try that one,” Bevo said to me. I cranked the handle on a third box, and a comet’s tail screamed out of a cabin window, bouncing twice in the valley grass before bursting into a mass of silvery tracers that arced and died in the air.
“That must have been what hit the Lincoln,” I told Stroud.
“If we only had Roman candles,” the old man replied, “we could hold them off for a week.”
“These idiots are gonna catch on pretty soon,” Bevo said. He turned to his uncle. “How many charges we got left?”
Boo shook his head. “Only one or two. There’s one over to the side of the house. Then, of course, there’s the house itself.”
“You wired the cabin?” Wick asked.
“Of course,” said Bevo. “When you do a job, you do it thorough.”
“I didn’t know about that, Gill,” Wick apologized.
But the old man was watching through the binoculars. “Blow it up, burn it down,” he said. “This is its finest hour.”
Bevo and Boo worked on the detonator box for a moment, then handed it to Stroud.
“Mr. Stroud,” said Bevo, “I’m sorry for our little set-to in the jail today. I was crazy from the way those cops had been beating on me.”
“All is forgiven, Bevo,” replied the old man. He cranked the handle on the box, and the front wall of the cabin blew out, the roof collapsing and catching fire. Debris spewed into the night sky. The force of the explosion made the duck blind wobble.
“Good one, Uncle Boo,” said Bevo.
“Makes a man kinda sentimental,” Boo replied.
CHAPTER 41
THE NEXT MORNING PULASKI WAS LATE for the deposition. We sat in the courtroom waiting for him, Stroud next to Bevo at the defendant’s table. Stroud hummed his tuneless song and winked at the court reporter, a young woman who would not smile back at him. Stroud looked a little worn but was still in high spirits from the night before. It certainly had been an interesting evening. Shortly after the roof of Stroud’s cabin collapsed, Sheriff Nye had arrived on the scene. He de-deputized the whole smoldering troop of ex-pilots and threw them in jail around ten p.m. “Those boys will be walking softly around us for a long time to come,” Wick had said that morning as the three of us drove into Mule Springs. “Gill had to use higher math to explain to Nye the kind of lawsuit we could file against the city.”
Wick was the picture of health and energy, his ruby throat swelling above a crisp collar and a striking silk tie. “Nothing like a little nighttime jamboree to clear out the cobwebs,” he whispered.
Vincenzo Laspari, the Stromboli company representative, was seated at the plaintiff’s table cultivating a look of genteel boredom. Next to him sat Warren Jacobs, cool and collected. Jacobs’s self-possession worried me. How could he look so calm if his case was in shreds? I voiced my concern to Wick, who shrugged and looked uneasy, too.
“So you’re from Naples, Mr. Laspari,” Stroud said.
“Yes,” returned Laspari.
“What sort of weather they having out there?”
“It is very hot.” Laspari gave Stroud a half-millimeter smile and a slight nod of dismissal, as if to signal the end of their conversation.
But Stroud would not be shaken off. “Hotter than here?” he asked.
“No...Perhaps as hot.”
“What about the humidity?”
“The...?”
“You know, the water in the air. They must have humidity in Naples.”
“Ah, l’umidità. It can be bad.”
Stroud nodded at the Italian, and there was a moment of silence.
“Too bad it’s
falling into the sea,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I say it’s too bad Naples is falling into the sea.”
“You are thinking of Venice, Signore Stroud.”
“You’re right, Mr. Laspari. My apologies.”
The baiting continued, Stroud rattling off skewed snippets of tourist lore, Laspari correcting him, his Continental reserve beginning to fray a little. finally Pulaski arrived, to the relief of all in the room. A tall, broad-shouldered man with a distinguished head of amber hair going picturesquely gray at the sideburns, he resembled Stewart Granger in one of his African movies, right down to the khaki safari jacket.
Stroud saw him first, leaped to his feet, and walked up the aisle to shake his hand. “Stan-the-Man,” he said, conducting Pulaski to the chair placed for him in front of the judge’s dais. “How’s it hanging?”
Stroud’s joviality seemed to confuse Pulaski, who sat down slowly in the chair. He looked around the room until his eyes fell on Warren Jacobs.
“Mr. Jacobs,” Pulaski said in a low voice, leaning toward the SWAT lawyer, “might I have a word with you?”
“Okay if we start, gentlemen?” Stroud asked, making a show of looking at his wristwatch. “We’ve already been here awhile.”
“By all means,” Jacobs replied.
“Warren,” said Pulaski, rising from his chair, “I need to speak to you.”
There was an edge in Pulaski’s voice that escaped Jacobs’s notice. “I don’t think we should keep these good people any longer than we already have, Stan,” Jacobs replied.
Pulaski sat back down. “Very well, I have an announcement to make.” He spoke disdainfully, as if angry at everyone in the room. “Last night my house was broken into. Whoever did it took a number of items, including all my notes on Mr. Rasmussen’s horses.”
“Burglars?” said Stroud. “My, my. That’s a shame, Stan. But you still have your report, I trust?”
“That’s another thing,” Pulaski said. “They—the burglars—took my report, too.”