by Bill Crider
“It seemed awfully dangerous to me,” Ivy said.
“Dangerous for them, yes. Not for anybody else, as long as the lane was clear.” Rhodes didn’t mention that he suspected the four riders of crimes a lot more serious than reckless driving. “Their day will come. Maybe I can get them for jaywalking.”
“Maybe,” Ivy said, but Rhodes could tell she didn’t like it.
The burial site looked like a picture from a magazine. The rain had freshened the grass, and the tombstones looked newly cleaned, sparkling white in the late morning sun. The little church was white too, and so close by that with its white steeple it added a note of gravity to the scene. The ground was still wet from the rain, but not muddy enough to be a bother to the men. The women in heels had a problem, however.
Everything was arranged by the time Rhodes and Ivy got to the graveside. The minister read from Ecclesiastes about the sun also arising and began his brief remarks.
Rhodes heard the motorcycles. He looked over his shoulder and saw them coming down the muddy country road.
The preacher, heeding Mrs. Ramsey’s advice from the chapel, preached on as best he could over the noise.
The motorcycles stopped beside the cars, their engines idling.
“Moreover,” the minister was saying, “though Bert Ramsey is not with us, yet his spirit lives. For God is the God of the living; He is not the God of the dead.”
Rapper’s voice cut through the air. “That’s what you think, preacher. Once you’re one of Los Muertos, you’re always one of Los Muertos. And Ramsey was sure one of us!”
Everyone had turned to watch Rapper. The four bikers revved their engines and skidded away, slinging mud from the spinning rear tires.
The minister stared after them with his mouth open. Rhodes looked at Mrs. Ramsey. Her mouth was a tight, white line in her puffy face. He looked at the Lindseys. They could hardly contain themselves. Whatever they’d seen in the last fifteen years, nothing would ever come up to this day.
The preacher finally recovered himself and finished as quickly as he decently could. The casket was being lowered into the open grave as Ivy and Rhodes made their way back to the car.
“I really wish you could do something about those men,” Ivy said when they were in the car.
“I’m not sure what I can do,” Rhodes said.
Ivy didn’t say anything.
“Since we’re so close, I might ride down and say a few words to Buster Cullens,” Rhodes said. “He might know those guys. Want to go along?”
“Do I have a choice?” Ivy was not being sarcastic. She was obviously curious.
“Sure. I can take you back to town.”
“Too much bother. I’ll just stay in the car and you can do all your interrogating.”
“Wyneva may be there. I thought she’d come back here after she left the chapel, but I guess she’d had enough.”
“I wouldn’t blame her,” Ivy said.
“I wonder how she got there?” Rhodes said. “I didn’t see hide nor hair of Buster Cullens.”
“Maybe she walked.”
“Not from here; this road’s a mess.” Rhodes wasn’t exaggerating. The road had been dusty before, but the rain had rutted it with mud, which, though not deep enough to cause a real hazard, still made driving difficult. Rhodes held the car firmly in the ruts to avoid sliding sideways into the ditch.
Rhodes saw the motorcycles in Buster Cullens’s yard before he turned in at the open gap. “Looks like Buster and Wyneva have company,” he said. He stopped the car and got out. The soil of the yard was of a different consistency from that of the road, blacker and stickier. It slopped up over Rhodes’s shoes.
“You better wait,” Rhodes told Ivy.
“That’s what I planned to do, remember?”
“Yeah.” Rhodes started toward the dilapidated house, slopping through the mud. He stopped outside the front door beside the motorcycles. “Cullens!” he yelled. “You in there?”
There was no answer. The day suddenly seemed to get warmer and more oppressive as the silence lengthened. “Cullens!” Rhodes called again. “Rapper! Who’s in there?”
There was still no reply, and Rhodes took another step closer to the door, his feet lifting from the mud with a sucking sound.
“Cullens? If you’re in there, sing out. Otherwise, I’m coming in. I don’t like standing in the mud.” Rhodes wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of going inside the house, not knowing just where Rapper was located or what, if anything, was happening to Buster Cullens.
Then Rhodes heard a high-pitched groan and the sound of something falling to the floor. He didn’t wait any longer. He stepped up on the porch and opened the screen door. When he stepped into the house, his short-barreled.38 was in his hand. The dog! he thought. What about the dog? Then something hit him on the back, hard, and he was on the floor. The gun was no longer in his hand, and something hit him again.
“Kill him!” someone yelled. “Kill the sonofabitch!”
It was Rapper.
Chapter 11
Rhodes had no intention of letting anyone kill him, not with Ivy sitting in the car, not if he could help it. He rolled over on his back, which he hoped wasn’t broken, just in time to see Jayse swinging an axe handle at him. He put up his hands to take the blow and was able to get a grip on the handle. Pulling with the force of the blow, he threw Jayse off balance.
Jayse stumbled and Rhodes kicked upward at his stomach. It wasn’t much of a kick, but Jayse lost his hold on the handle. Rhodes didn’t. He got himself into a sitting position and swung the handle at Jayse’s shins as if he were Reggie Jackson trying for one more long ball. He got the left one.
The sound was horrible, but not as horrible as the scream Jayse let out before he collapsed on the floor. He screamed and cried as Rhodes struggled to his feet and through the door into the back room.
Rapper, Nellie, and the fourth man were there. Buster Cullens was on the floor, a gag around his head. Rhodes couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. He wasn’t moving.
When Rhodes came through the door with the axe handle, the scene appeared frozen. Obviously, the three men were expecting Jayse. They didn’t know who was yelling in the next room, but they’d thought it was Rhodes. When they realized it wasn’t, they went into motion.
Nellie and the other man charged Rhodes, who swung the handle. It hit the man whose name Rhodes hadn’t learned in the head with a sound like hitting a watermelon with a drumstick. The man dropped like a sack of horse and mule feed, but Nellie caught Rhodes on his follow-through and drove him back into the room where Jayse lay clutching his shin and whimpering.
Rhodes smashed into the wall hard enough to bring a shower of dust and dirt from the ceiling overhead. Pain shot through his already sore back, and he was momentarily stunned, unable to move or even lift the axe handle.
Nellie was looking around the bare room for something to hit him with when his eyes fell on Rhodes’s pistol. He started for it just as Rapper came into the room. “Let me have it,” Rapper said, stooping to pick it up. His face was red and distorted. He looked dangerously out of control.
Rhodes got his breath and stepped up to hit Nellie, who was between him and Rapper. But Rhodes was still stunned, and Nellie had other ideas. He stepped under Rhodes’s feeble swing and hit Rhodes in the stomach. Hard.
Rhodes staggered backward, but this time he missed the wall. Instead, he hit the screen door, which, because it was hinged to swing out, offered no resistance at all.
Rhodes tried to gain his balance, but it was as if his feet were no longer under the direction of his brain. He staggered on to the small porch and over the edge, falling flat on his back in the mud.
Nellie and Rapper were right behind him. Rhodes managed to get his feet under him somehow, but he slipped back in the mud almost at once, which was just as well, since the three shots that Rapper fired zipped over him. Rhodes heard three loud clanking and clanging noises, and the bullets plowed into the grille a
nd radiator and fan and probably the engine block of the county car.
“Goddamngoddamngoddamn!” Rapper yelled, the words running together in his rage. He sounded as if he might be strangling.
Rhodes heard two more shots. The first smacked solidly into the mud beside him. The second shattered glass. Ivy!
There were no more bullets. Rhodes stood up, and Nellie dived on him. As they were going down, Rhodes heard a car door slam. Ivy was all right, he thought. Then he heard her yelling. The door slammed again. Then he and Nellie were wrestling in the mud, rolling around, trying to get a hold or a solid lick. Rhodes had lost the axe handle.
Rhodes and Nellie rolled over and over. They were slick as pond scum, covered with mud. Finally, Rhodes got on top and managed a hard pop at Nellie’s jaw. Then Rapper threw a body block into him and he sailed off.
Rapper jerked Nellie out of the mud and they lurched toward the motorcycles. Rhodes got up and looked toward the car. Ivy opened the door and got out.
The bikes started and Rapper and Nellie roared away, slewing through the mud. They headed across the field rather than toward the road.
“The car’s had it,” Rhodes said. “The radio. . ”
“That man tried to get in and rip out the mike,” Ivy said. “But I slammed the door. Got it locked, too. Then he broke the aerial off.”
“Damn,” Rhodes said. “There’s no way to get them now.” He looked at the other two bikes. “First time I ever wanted to be able to ride one of those things. Never learned how.”
“I did,” Ivy said. “Come on.”
“What?”
“I can ride one. My brother had one. Come on.” Rhodes watched in amazement as Ivy walked over to the nearest motorcycle, hiked her skirt up to her hips, and straddled it. “Come on!” she said again. “They’ll get completely away!”
He walked over, still not sure he wasn’t dreaming. On the way he stooped to pick up his pistol, which Rapper had dropped. The thought occurred to him that Ivy’s legs were even better than he would have guessed. He straddled the bike behind her, and even his thoughts were drowned out by its roar as she started it.
As they sped out of the yard in pursuit of Rapper and Nellie, Rhodes began to think he was living in a bad remake of Born Losers. “Are you sure. .?” he yelled in Ivy’s ear.
“Put your arms around me,” she yelled back. “I’m sure.”
Rhodes did as he was told.
The fields across which they were riding had not been plowed in years, but it was still rough and rutted. At times, the motorcycle seemed to leave the ground by several feet, and every time it landed, Rhodes felt the shock from the base of his spine, right up through his sore back, and on up through the top of his head. He hung on tight.
After only a minute, he could tell that Ivy was actually gaining on Rapper and Nellie. He wasn’t surprised. They were only criminals. They weren’t crazy, which you had to be to drive like Ivy was.
Then the two men came to a barbed wire fence. They made a sharp right turn. Ivy didn’t slow down.
Rhodes closed his eyes. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to hit the fence.
“Lean with me!” Ivy yelled. Rhodes felt her weight shift and shifted his own to match it. They made a sharp right turn, throwing up a raft of mud against the fence post which seemed to Rhodes to be within inches of the wheel. As they straightened out and headed down the fence row, Rhodes realized that he had been thinking of the wrong movie. This wasn’t Born Losers. He was in fact hanging on to Steve McQueen during his race for life in The Great Escape. He hoped that Ivy didn’t plan to try jumping the fence.
Rapper and Nellie, however, were planning exactly that. They hooked another right, then another, heading back the way they’d come, except that they were about a hundred yards from the fence. By the time that Ivy had made another turn, they were gunning straight for the fence, or more accurately for a small rise of dirt just in front of it, which they must have spotted earlier.
Rapper’s bike was in the lead. He hit the rise, elevating his front wheel, and took off as if on a ramp. He sailed over the fence, Nellie right behind him. Their bikes hit, slewed wildly through the mud, righted, and took off.
Ivy slowed to a stop. “I can’t make it with two of us,” she said.
Rhodes was quietly thankful. He might have fired after them if he’d had time to load his gun before they were out of sight, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “Let’s go on back to the house and see what we can find out.”
The trip back was not quite so hectic, and Rhodes had time to marvel at Ivy’s hidden talents. She was also a lot tougher than he’d thought. He should have known better than to judge her.
When they got back to the house, Jayse was still lying on the floor. He was no longer moaning or whimpering, however. He had passed out. Rhodes had broken his leg.
The man in the back room, the one whose name Rhodes hadn’t learned, had returned to consciousness, but only barely.
Buster Cullens lay where he had fallen. He was dead.
Ivy helped Rhodes search the house. The other two rooms contained nearly nothing. There was a bed, surprisingly neatly made up. There was a chest of drawers containing a few changes of clothing for Cullens and Wyneva. That was it. No place to cook. Nothing else. There was no form of identification for Cullens, not even in his pants pockets. There was a little money, about fifteen dollars. That was all.
“They must have eaten out a lot,” Rhodes said.
Ivy looked at him and laughed.
“What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You know when that man was trying to get in the car? You were rolling around in all that mud, and all I could think of was the fight scene in North to Alaska. You should see yourself now.”
“You like North to Alaska?”
“Even Fabian.”
Rhodes felt mud crack on his face as he grinned. “I knew you were a woman of taste,” he said. “Now there’s a little favor I have to ask.”
“First the compliment, then the favors,” Ivy said.
“Well, for that matter you aren’t so clean yourself,” Rhodes said.
“Never mind. What’s the favor?”
“Ride that thing down to Mrs. Ramsey’s and call the J.P., the ambulance, and Hack. I’ll stay here and watch things.”
“I could watch.”
“Don’t start,” Rhodes said. “Nobody likes a smart aleck.”
“All right, I’ll make your calls. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Bring back the bike. It’s evidence.”
They went outside. Standing off to one side, his tail between his legs, was the dog. He eyed them with suspicion.
Rhodes knelt on the porch and whistled. The dog came forward a step or two, then stopped. “C’mon, boy,” Rhodes said.
After continued coaxing, he managed to get the dog to come to him. He ran his hand over its head. There was a large lump. “That Jayse sure liked that axe handle,” Rhodes said. He rubbed the dog.
“Is he one of the men you hurt?” Ivy asked.
“Yeah, the one in the front room.”
“Good,” Ivy said. She walked over to the motorcycle. “I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time,” Rhodes said. “I won’t be going anywhere.”
Back in the house, Rhodes inspected Cullens’s body. Bruises had formed around his kidneys and abdomen where he’d been repeatedly struck. Rhodes wondered if Rapper had been taking revenge because of Wyneva. Maybe she was like Bert Ramsey. Once you were one of the dead, you were always one of the dead. Rapper seemed just the kind of man to kill out of jealousy or revenge.
This was clearly different from Bert Ramsey’s death, though. Cullens had been tortured. There was generally only one reason for torture, and that was to gain information. What information did Cullens have that Rapper wanted? And had Rapper gotten it?
Rhodes tied up the nameless man with a belt he found in the chest of drawers. Jayse was still out. He hoped they’d be able to a
nswer his questions. He’d give a lot, sometimes, to be like the stereotypical Texas sheriff in movies and cheap novels, with a sadistic deputy and a cattle prod to use on recalcitrant prisoners. Unfortunately, he couldn’t work like that.
He went back out on the porch. The dog was still there, and he rubbed its head. He figured the dog could tell him a lot if it could only discuss things with him. It could probably have told him, for instance, where Wyneva was. Obviously, she hadn’t come back here after the funeral fiasco at Ballinger’s chapel, which was probably for the best. Rapper might have finished her off, too. He might be looking for her even now.
Rhodes’s back ached. He knew he’d have a huge bruise on it by the next day. Besides, he was covered with mud. If Cullens had had indoor plumbing, Rhodes would have washed off, but there was only an old well in the backyard.
Thinking of the well put another, much less pleasant, thought in Rhodes’s mind. He went around to the back, the dog at his heels. When he got to the well, he lifted the cover off and looked down. It was just a well, and he could see light reflect off the water below. For a minute, he’d been afraid that Rapper had thrown Wyneva down there.
Since he was already there, Rhodes let down the galvanized bucket and drew it back up. The water was clear and cold, and he washed off his hands and face as best he could.
Then he heard the motorcycle returning and went back around to the front. He still found it a little hard to believe that Ivy could ride the bike so well.
She came to a stop near the porch, got off, and reported. “Hack’s sending Ruth Grady, and the ambulance and J.P. are on the way.”
“Good,” Rhodes said. “I’d like to get this all settled out.”
“I’ll bet,” Ivy said. “Easier said than done.”
“Maybe,” Rhodes said. A pain shot across his back and he winced. “I seem to get a lot of roughing up without getting very good results.”