The Blight Way

by McManus, Patrick F.

“Redhead.”

  “What?”

  “Red. She had red hair. How would you know, anyway? You were never around all the time I was growing up. Other kids had dads that took them hunting and fishing, but not me.”

  “That’s right. And have you ever had the common human decency to thank me? No, you have not! Never once! Can you imagine how you would have turned out if you had me hanging around all the time, dragging you out to go fishing and hunting? Why, it’s almost too horrible even to contemplate.”

  Tully whipped the Explorer out around a pickup truck and blasted the driver with his horn for failing to yield to a law officer’s vehicle with flashing lights. Pap sucked his latest cigarette—flaming—halfway to his lips. “You got that hitching-back-to-town offer still open?” he asked.

  “Nope. You had your chance.”

  “We’re coming to the Scragg ranch,” Pap said. “You might want to stop driving like a maniac and slow down.”

  Unlike the Littlefield ranch, where the house and out-buildings were set back against the mountains, the main Scragg buildings were all clustered out near the highway, possibly, as Pap explained, in case the Scraggs needed to make a fast getaway, as they often did. Any paint on the two-story ranch house was now a distant memory. In addition to whatever living quarters existed inside the main house, two ancient mobile homes squatted in the weedy backyard. Tully guessed that Lem and Lister, and whatever wives or girlfriends they might have, lived in the mobile homes. Corrals, loading chutes, barns, silos, coops and ancient outbuildings staggered off toward the mountains. All were weathered gray and in disrepair, obviously no longer in use.

  Someone had built a bonfire out in the yard and assorted male Scraggs and neighbors from the area stood and hunkered around it drinking beer out of cans. Lem and Lister, both of them closing in on forty, slumped in straight-back chairs they had apparently dragged out of the house. Their long legs stretched out in front of them toward the fire. Their scraggly blond hair hung down the backs of the chairs. Batim leaned against a post that seemed to have no other function than to hold him up. Buck Toole’s red Explorer was parked in the driveway but there was no sign of the deputy. The state patrolman hadn’t arrived yet.

  Tully got out and moseyed over toward the group. Stone-faced, the Scraggs stared at him. In an instant, Lister was out of his chair and in front of Tully. He pointed over the sheriff’s shoulder. “What’s that old man doing here? You get him out of here!”

  “Stay out of his face, Lister,” Batim said, still leaning against his post. He was chewing on a wooden match-stick.

  “I told you to get him out of here!” Lister shouted.

  A familiar numb feeling moved up Tully’s right arm.

  He turned and looked back. Pap was standing next to the Explorer, the .30-30 rifle resting back over his right shoulder. His right hand was through the lever, his finger poised just outside the trigger guard. Tully turned. Lister was lying flat on his back on the ground in front of him, his long greasy hair splayed out like a halo around his head. His eyes were glazed and blood trickled from his mouth. This sort of thing always made Tully nervous. He had no recollection of hitting Lister, but he knew better than to let on.

  Still leaning against the post, Batim shook his head in disgust. He spat out the matchstick. “Lister, I told you, get out of his face. He quick like that. Next time, maybe you’ll listen to your pa. Anyway, Bo, don’t pay Lister no mind. A boy’s got to learn.”

  Tully looked among the astonished Scraggs, none of whom moved to help Lister. “I see my deputy’s car, but I don’t see Buck anywhere,” he said. “Any of you boys be kind enough to tell me where he might be?”

  An elderly man wearing an earflap cap, possibly a neighboring Scragg, pushed himself up from his hunker at the fire and pointed out into the pasture beyond the buildings. “He’s out there, Sheriff.”

  Tully looked out at the pasture. “I don’t see him.”

  “That little stand of trees about halfway out? Your deputy is up one of them trees. That tan patch. You can see the sun flashing off his badge every so often.”

  Tully squinted. “What’s he doing up there?”

  “Look just off to the left and kinda behind the trees. You see the bull? Once in a while he paws up some dirt.”

  “Oh yeah.” Tully tugged on the corner of his mustache. “I don’t suppose anyone mentioned to Buck there was a bull out in that pasture.”

  “I don’t think he asked,” Lem Scragg said with mock solemnity.

  The group of Scraggs and neighbors chuckled among themselves.

  Tully turned and called to Pap. “Bring that thirty-thirty up here!”

  “Good idea,” Pap said.

  “Hold on there, Bo,” Batim said, pushing away from his post. “That bull’s worth twenty thousand dollars.” Then he leaned back against the post. “But shoot it if you want. It ain’t mine, it’s Littlefield’s. Critter keeps jumping the fence onto my property. Actually, you’d be doing me a favor to shoot it.”

  “I wasn’t planning on shooting the bull,” Tully said. “I was planning on shooting Buck. Now you tell one of your kinfolk here to get that bull out of the pasture, before I start shooting Scraggs.”

  “Oh, all right,” Batim said. “Lem, run that bull into the corral.”

  “Why me, Pa?” Lem remained sprawled in his chair.

  “’Cause I say so, that’s why!”

  Languid as a cat, Lem got up and stripped off his dirty shirt. He climbed through a pole fence and walked out into the pasture, waving the shirt. “Here, bull! Here, bull!” he called out.

  The bull came for him, running hard and fast. At the last minute Lem darted into a corral and went up and over a high pole fence. The bull followed him into the corral. It slid to a stop and stood there glaring through the fence at its intended victim. While it bellowed, pawed dirt and shook strings of slobber from its muzzle, several Scraggs closed a pole gate behind it. Lem strolled back to the group, put his shirt back on, settled himself in his chair, stretched his legs out toward the fire and picked up his can of beer.

  “Durn bull,” Batim said. “Wish Littlefield would manage to keep his animals on his own property.”

  “Yeah,” Pap said. He was still holding the rifle, but had come up alongside of Tully. “Otherwise, a person might get accused of rustling.”

  “That’s right,” Batim agreed.

  Out in the grove of trees, Buck slid to the ground and walked back across the pasture. He stooped and picked up his gun, which he stuck back in his holster.

  “I suppose you want to see the body,” Batim said.

  “That’s what we came for,” Tully said.

  “Well, it’s that dark shape over the fence out beyond the trees. There’s a cross fence between here and it. The bull couldn’t get to the body.”

  “Good,” Tully said.

  Lister was sitting up now, gingerly feeling his jaw with one hand. Tully stepped around him and headed out into the pasture. Pap followed. The Scraggs turned and looked at Batim.

  “Y’all stay where you are,” he told them. “I reckon that’s a crime scene out there.”

  Chapter 4

  By the time the deputy and Tully met, Buck was still working his way through his rather large vocabulary of profanity, some of the words running to twelve or more letters. Tully had heard most of the words before, but he thought Buck might be creating some new ones for the occasion.

  “Bull nearly got me,” he told the sheriff. “I fired a couple of rounds at him and missed and then took off for the trees. Just barely made it up one of them. Almost froze to death up there, too.”

  Tully shook his head in disgust. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  They waited for Pap to catch up, then opened a wire gate and made their way out to the body. As Batim had indicated, the dead man was wearing a dark-blue pinstripe suit, a shiny black shoe on one foot and only a black sock on the other foot. He looked to be about forty-five or fifty, but in good shape. There were tw
o tiny black holes in the back of his jacket.

  “Nice suit,” Pap said.

  “Yeah,” Tully said. “Don’t see many like it around Blight County.” He reached inside the man’s jacket, pulled out a slender billfold and opened it. “The fellow seems to be Nicholas Holt from Los Angeles, California.” He ran his hand into a pants pocket and pulled out a wad of folded hundred-dollar bills fastened with a gold money clip.

  “Well, this tells me one thing,” he said.

  “He’s rich?” Buck said.

  “Maybe that, too. But for sure, he wasn’t killed by one of the Scraggs, and they sure haven’t been out here checking the body. Maybe Batim actually learned something over the years.”

  Pap squatted down and studied the ground near the body.

  “See anything?” Tully asked.

  “A couple of tracks. Looks like he was really moving when he hit the fence. Got a couple of faint shoe marks five or six feet apart. The foot with the sock on it didn’t make much of a track. The ground’s pretty hard.”

  “Somebody was after him. This guy was hunted down. How far across to that other fence you reckon?”

  “Hundred yards or so,” Pap said.

  “Probably hit with a semiautomatic, don’t you think?”

  Pap straightened up and blew on his hands to warm them. “Probably. I’d guess both slugs hit him just as he got to the fence. Pop pop! Otherwise, the first one would have knocked him down out in the pasture. Must have used a rifle at that distance. Otherwise, he was one terrific pistol shot, to put two bullets in this guy that close together.”

  “I don’t get it,” Buck said. “The Scraggs say they didn’t hear a thing during the night.”

  “What Scraggs say doesn’t mean much,” Tully said.

  Pap studied the far fence. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was shot from there,” he said, pointing. “Full moon last night. Pretty bright out. Could have shot without a night scope. Probably had a night scope anyway.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt if we got ourselves a tracker,” Tully said. “See if we can pick up a trail of some kind.”

  “How about Dave Perkins?” Buck said. “He claims to be an Indian.”

  “Dave is about as Indian as I am,” Pap said. “That doesn’t stop him from talking about opening a casino on his reservation.”

  Tully turned from examining the body. “His reservation? What’s his reservation?”

  “I guess it’s what Dave’s House of Fry sits on,” Buck said. “About five acres. Dave claims not only is it the ‘Home of the World’s Best and Biggest Chicken-Fried Steak,’ it’s also the world’s smallest Indian reservation.”

  “I suppose he has a tribe, too,” Tully said.

  “Oh yeah,” Buck said. “The Dave Tribe.”

  “Figures. Buck, go see if you can get him out here. Tell him the Sheriff’s Department will even pay him for his services this time.”

  “They paying for my services, too?” Pap said.

  “No.”

  “How did I guess that?”

  Chapter 5

  Tully slipped the roll of cash back into the dead man’s pocket and the billfold back into the suit jacket.

  “I hate to see a law officer do something that stupid,” Pap said.

  Tully smiled. “Not many guys around here carry their cash like that. A wad in their pocket.”

  “For one thing, they don’t have cash like that,” Pap said. “If they did, they’d still keep it in their billfold and the billfold in their hip pocket. They keep all their money and important papers in their billfolds. Most of them look like they got some kind of growth on their butt even without the cash.”

  “So why do you figure a guy like this would be out here in the middle of the night?”

  “Beats me. He sure don’t look like a rustler, but there ain’t nothing around here except a bunch of cows. Hey, here comes the new medical examiner now, I bet.”

  A white Chevy Suburban bumped across the pasture.

  The vehicle stopped a few feet away. A trim, tall woman with shoulder-length, dark hair got out. She wore dark-rimmed glasses, a blue insulated jacket over jeans and leather boots. She was in fact quite a bit prettier than Tully’s perky secretary. She held out her gloved hand.

  “Hi, Sheriff, I’m Susan Parker. We haven’t had a chance to meet.”

  Tully shook her hand. Her grip was firm. “Call me Bo,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Susan. This sorry old character here is my father, Eldon Tully, former sheriff of Blight County. Everybody calls him Pap.”

  “Hi, Pap,” she said, stepping around the body and shaking the old man’s hand.

  “Good you showed up,” Pap told her. “We got a dead body here we don’t know what to do with.”

  Susan took off her leather gloves and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I’ve seen quite a few dead bodies. This is the first one I’ve come across in a cow pasture, though.”

  “Me, too,” said Tully. “Most of the dead bodies I find are in our local drinking establishments. With the killer at the bar bragging about his work.”

  “I see he was shot,” she said. “Might have been from a semiautomatic, with two bullet holes tight together like that.”

  Tully gave Pap a look. “Yeah, that’s about what we figured. Probably shot sometime during the night, maybe using a night-vision scope on a small-caliber rifle. The Scraggs claim they didn’t hear a thing.”

  “You believe those people?” she said.

  “Not ordinarily,” Tully said. “But as old Batim says, if it had been one of them there wouldn’t have been an awkward situation like this. He means they would have dropped the body down a prospect hole or something equally efficient.”

  “Why didn’t he do that anyway?”

  “Don’t know. He probably thought about it, all right, but this way there’s a certain amount of entertainment value for him and his clan. I’m pretty sure Batim didn’t let any of the Scraggs come near the body.”

  Susan snapped a dozen photos of the body while Tully watched.

  “If you’ll give me a hand,” she said, “let’s see if we can lift him off the fence.”

  Pap watched as Susan and Tully lifted the body from the fence and laid it out on the ground face up.

  She’s a lot stronger than she looks, Tully thought. He watched as she went through the man’s pockets. She looked at the driver’s license. “From Los Angeles,” she said. “Nicholas Holt. Born October 1959. Forty-one years old.”

  Then she pulled out the wad of hundred-dollar bills. “Whewee! I guess we can rule out robbery as the motive. That Rolex on his wrist is probably real, too.”

  “I can tell you this,” Tully said. “If the Scraggs had shot him, the money and the watch would be gone for sure. They probably had something to do with it one way or another, but I don’t think they’re the ones that killed him.”

  She unbuttoned the man’s shirt and pulled it back. “The bullets didn’t exit. That’s odd. We should be able to get some markings off them to match with a weapon.”

  Pap spoke up. “Might be a twenty-two rifle. Kind of odd for a murder weapon but handy. Probably every house in the county has one.”

  Back by the ranch house, Buck’s Explorer pulled through the gate and started working its way across the pasture.

  “Buck’s back,” Pap said. “Wish my driver had had enough sense to drive out here.” He looked over at Bo, who glared back at him. “Because I’m near froze to death.”

  “Good heavens!” Susan said. “No wonder you’re cold. Neither of you is wearing a coat.”

  “Coats are for sissies,” Tully said. “And pretty ladies, of course.”

  Susan gave him a tiny smile. She walked over to the Suburban and came back with an aluminum case. She took out an instrument that looked like a meat thermometer and stuck it into the liver of the corpse.

  “Cripes!” Pap said. “Let me know when you’re going to do stuff like that so I can look away.”

  Susan smiled at him. �
�Some sheriff you must have been.”

  “I didn’t go poking dead bodies with sharp instruments, if that’s what you mean. Mostly what I did was turn them into dead bodies in the first place. It’s not so gross.”

  Tully was glad the old man hadn’t told her how many dead bodies he had done.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I may be able to give you an approximate time of death, even cold as it was last night.”

  The Explorer pulled up behind the Suburban. Buck and Dave Perkins got out. Dave, a chunky sixty-year-old, wore his long gray hair in a single braid down his back. He wore a folded red bandana around his head, well-scuffed cowboy boots, jeans and a red-and-black-checked mackinaw over a blue wool shirt open at the collar. Tully introduced them to Susan.

  “Buck Toole is one of my deputies. Dave Perkins here owns my favorite restaurant in the whole country. He used to be a pretty good tracker. We’ll see if he still is.”

  “All us Indians are good trackers,” Dave said. “Show us a bent blade of grass and we can tell you the person’s height, weight, country of origin and telephone number.”

  Susan laughed. “Well, that’s certainly impressive.”

  “Yes, it is,” Dave said. He took out a glasses case and put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles. “These are special tracking glasses.”

  “I understand,” Susan said, smiling broadly.

  Nice teeth, Tully thought.

  Dave walked the length of the body until he got to the feet. Then he squatted down and studied the man’s shoe and sock. He stood up and stared back across the pasture to another open field backed by a wooded area. “That field and that woods over there, I think that’s part of the Littlefield ranch. The Scragg ranch got itself surrounded by Littlefield years ago.”

  “Looks like the shooter might have come from over there in the woods,” Tully said. “Probably the victim, too. Any road over there?”

  “An old mine road but not much else. Used to be a bridge over a little crick, but it washed out years ago. You can drive across when the water’s low like it is now. The road used to go up to the Last Hope Mine, but the owners dynamited the mine shut after it closed. Then they plowed up a berm to block the road.”