The Blight Way

by McManus, Patrick F.

  “Pap and I’ll drive over there and look around,” Tully said. “You see if you can pick up any trail and we’ll meet you at the road. Buck, you stay with Susan, in case she needs help.”

  Tully and Pap started walking back to the Explorer.

  “Not a bad looker,” Pap said, glancing back at the medical examiner.

  “Dave’s all right but nothing special,” Tully said.

  Pap responded with a seven-letter obscenity.

  Chapter 6

  The crowd at Batim’s house had diminished to three. None of the Scraggs was out in the yard. A couple of women and several small children watched them out a window. The men in the yard were apparently neighbors, curious about the murder.

  “How’s it going?” Tully said.

  “Not bad,” one of the men said. “Hear you got a murder out there, Sheriff.”

  “Appears that way,” Tully said.

  He and Pap got in the Explorer and drove off.

  Pap rolled and lit a cigarette.

  “I liked the way you put down that Lister Scragg,” he said. “You’re about as quick a man as I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thanks. So what was it between you and Lister that got him so riled up? I’m the one put him in prison.”

  “Kind of a long story,” Pap said. “Lister must be about forty now. It would have been fifteen or so years ago. That boy does hold a grudge. It was the second time that he’d put that itsy-bitsy wife of his in the hospital. But she refused to press charges. Scared, I guess. He’d blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw, but she was afraid of him. I was so mad I drove out to the Scragg ranch and walked in the house. They was all sitting around the dinner table. I grabbed Lister, jerked him out of his chair and threw him up against the wall. Put the cuffs on him in front, because I knew what I was gonna do. Old Batim was shouting, ‘You got a warrant, you got a warrant? What’s the charge?’ I told him to shut up, that he didn’t know anything about the law just because he’d been in prison a couple of times. I pushed Lister out the door and into my pickup. He’s yelling and hollering about his rights, and I says, ‘I’m driving you into the next county. You ain’t got no rights over there.’ I drove him up the West Branch Road way out in the woods till we come to that old horse-packing camp out there. The meat pole for hanging deer carcasses is about eight feet high, and I hauled Lister out of the truck, tied a rope to the handcuffs and tossed it up over the top of the meat pole. Then I pulled the pickup around to the other side and tied the rope to the pickup’s winch. I winched Lister up till he was standing on his tippy toes.

  “It’s dark by now so I have the lights turned on him. He’s yelling and bellowing and waking up all the coyotes in the entire canyon and they’re all howling. A big October moon was just coming up, probably about like last night, and it’s beautiful, but it’s all kinds of eerie, too. I walked over to the river bank and cut me an eight-foot willow a little thicker than my thumb. Then I sat down on the bumper of the truck and started to shave the bark off that willow with my knife, Lister straining around and watching every stroke. ‘What you aimin’ to do with that willow?’ Lister croaked out. I said, ‘You ever heard of caning, Lister?’ He said no he hadn’t, which is about what I expected, because Lister ain’t never heard of nothing. Lem is pretty intelligent but Lister is dumb as stone. So I explained it to him. I says I ain’t never experienced it personally myself but I read an account about a fella who did, over in one of them Asian countries, and he said the pain of the first whack exploded like a bomb in his head, and then it got a whole lot worse from then on. Well, you never heard such carrying on as come from Lister when I told him that. By then I had all the bark whittled off the willow and I got up and went around and undid Lister’s belt and let his pants drop around his ankles. He was wearing long johns with that flap in the back that buttons up. I undid the buttons so that his skinny old rear end was sticking out there in the moonlight pale as a peeled egg. By now he’s dancing around on his tippy toes and really whooping it up. So I stepped over to one side with my willow cane held up in both hands and . . .”

  “I don’t want to hear this!” Tully said.

  “You’re gonna hear it, so shut up and listen!”

  Pap took a final drag on his cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray.

  “It will do you some good, Bo,” he said. “So I told Lister, ‘I figure you got at least fifteen licks coming for each time you put that wife of yours in the hospital. But right now I’m putting them all on hold. If I ever hear tell of you laying a finger on her again, I’m gonna bring you out here and collect all of them plus another fifteen. You hear?’ Lister kinda nodded that he’d heard. All the way driving back to the Scragg ranch he sat slumped in the seat like a big pile of mush. He never said a word but every once in a while he let out this little moan, like I had beat him half to death. I pulled up in the Scragg yard, took off the cuffs and shoved him out. He just laid there on the ground, like he was so tuckered out he couldn’t move.”

  “I’m about that tuckered out myself,” Tully said, “and I just heard the story.”

  “About the time his wife healed up, she ran off with some fella she’d met at the hospital. Probably never even knew the favor I done her. She was a pretty little thing, cute as a bug’s ear.”

  Tully slowed the Explorer and pointed to an opening in the brush. A small piece of orange fluorescent tape was tied to a branch near the opening.

  “Looks like somebody marked the road,” he said, pointing to the tape. He could see car tracks disappearing into the brush.

  “Hunters sometimes use that tape to mark the way back to a deer they got down,” Pap said.

  “Yeah,” Tully said. “But this time I think it only marks the road.”

  “Fresh car tracks, probably made last night, all right,” Pap said.

  “You sure we want to find out?”

  “No, but I expect we better.”

  Chapter 7

  Tully eased the Explorer through the brush that covered the road’s entrance. Within a hundred yards, he came to a stream. He punched the button to engage the Explorer’s four-wheel drive. The SUV plowed through the shallow water and up the bank on the far side. Here the brush closed in even tighter, like a leafy tunnel. The woods were thick with snowberry, Oregon grape, wild rose, alders, birch, quaking aspen and young cottonwoods. Tully thought he might come over here in the summer to look for dewberries. His mother still made dewberry jam every summer.

  “Good place to get brush scratches on a new vehicle,” Pap said.

  “Scratched up this rig long ago,” Tully said.

  “The car ahead of us probably wasn’t. I’d never do this to a car, less’n it happened to be a rental. Or owned by the county. There’s still only one track. You know what that means.”

  “There was only one car, I suppose.”

  “No, it means they’re still up here. Or found another way out. And I don’t think there’s another way out.”

  Pap held the .30-30 upright between his legs. He worked the lever, jacking a shell into the chamber, then lowered the hammer back down.

  Tully stopped, the wet brakes grabbing and squeaking. He took the keys from the ignition, reached over and unlocked the glove compartment. He took out the Glock and removed it from the holster. He pulled the slide back and closed it, chambering a round. “How far to the end of the road do you think?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Pap said. “I remember it now, though. Years ago I hunted it for grouse and even then it had a big berm of dirt and rock across it just below where it started up the mountain.”

  “We better walk,” Tully said. “I don’t like the idea of driving up on whoever’s in that car.”

  “I hate walking,” Pap said.

  “These could be hunters,” Tully said. “But I’d rather not be a sitting target if they’re not.”

  They got out of the Explorer and pressed the doors closed behind them. They walked up the road, ducking beneath the overhanging brush and
tree limbs. The day was warming up and the frost on the brush was melting and starting to drip. Every so often an icy drip slithered down the back of Tully’s neck and reminded him that he could have been wearing his cowboy hat. He noticed that his father moved through the brush effortlessly without making a sound. Occasionally he would see where a vehicle had scraped a rock in the road or taken the bark off part of a small tree growing up between the tracks. He was pretty sure it had to be a four-wheel drive. As they neared the place where the mountain rose abruptly out of the woods, he saw the shiny black shape of a car roof. He signaled to Pap. The old man nodded back. He had already seen it. Tully moved over close to him.

  “Both doors are closed on this side,” Pap whispered.

  “Rear door is open on the left side,” Tully whispered back.

  “Don’t hear anybody talking.”

  “Yeah. Pretty quiet. Move up real slow.”

  Tully expected an ambush at any moment. He was peering ahead through the trees and brush on each side of the road, and he was glad he had brought Pap along. Pap was old for this sort of thing but still better than most.

  Pap crossed over to him and whispered. “I don’t see nobody moving around.”

  Tully stopped and took a deep breath. “I hear birds and squirrels. I don’t think there’s anybody up there.”

  Tully and Pap moved cautiously into the clearing. The mountain reared straight up directly in front of a black Jeep Grand Cherokee. The Jeep’s front bumper rested against the berm, now grown over with brush.

  Bullet holes riddled the car on the right side. The back seat was empty. There was no sign of blood on the seat, but the right rear door was full of bullet holes. The glass had been shot out. No one could have avoided that spray of lead, Tully thought.

  “Two dead guys in the front seat,” Pap said.

  He took out a handkerchief and used it to open the right front door.

  “This one’s got a gun,” he whispered. “Never got it out of his shoulder holster.”

  Tully went around to the driver’s side of the car. He tucked the Glock in the rear waistband of his pants, wrapped his handkerchief around his hand and opened the front door a crack. The car was still in drive and had drifted ahead until stopped by the berm. The driver was slumped against the door. Tully pushed him back into the front seat. He too had a gun in a shoulder holster. The fuel gauge was on empty. He turned off the ignition key. The headlights were on. He wrapped the handkerchief around his left hand and turned the lights off. He walked around to the front of the vehicle and opened the hood. He lay his hand on the radiator cap. He leaped back, shaking his hand and bellowing.

  Pap smiled. “I thought you didn’t allow your department people to use any obscenities, particularly that one.”

  “When they burn themselves on a radiator cap, they can,” Tully said, examining his hand.

  “We can stop whispering now,” Pap said. “These two fellas are dead. If the killers were still here, we’d probably be dead, too.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Tully said. Even their own voices sounded a bit spooky in the silence of the woods.

  The driver wore a white shirt and tie without a suit jacket.

  “You think they’re feds?” Tully asked.

  Pap had opened the lift gate at the rear of the Jeep.

  “Naw,” Pap said. “Too well dressed for feds. There are two suit jackets folded up back here.”

  Tully was going through a billfold. “Here’s a driver’s license. He’s from L.A., too. Probably mob. Both these fellows are pretty beefy. I bet they were bodyguards.”

  “Probably,” Pap said.

  “The guy at the fence, Holt, had to be riding in the back seat,” Tully said. “He probably came flying out of the car and made it into the woods. Then one or more of the shooters hunted him down. But with all the bullets sprayed into the back seat, I can’t figure out how he managed to get away.”

  “He probably was a lot smarter, or more suspicious, than the guys in the front seat.”

  Tully shut the car door and worked his way into the woods to the left of the car. He came to where someone had stood back in the trees, matting down the dried ferns.

  A pool of blood glistened darkly next to the matted-down area.

  “Got a lot of blood over here,” Tully said.

  He knew the blood couldn’t have come from Holt. There was too much of it.

  Pap came around the rear of the Jeep. “The grass and ferns are all trampled down back in the woods over there,” he said. “You can see where the shooters stood. Two of them. They waited a good while for the Jeep to show up. I can see where they was sitting down and even laying down.”

  “Any other sign?”

  “They left a couple of shell casings. Nine millimeter. Probably picked up most of them but couldn’t find them all in the dark.”

  “Yeah,” Tully said. “You leave the casings where you found them?”

  “Yup. Picked one up with a little stick to check the caliber. Marked each casing with a stick.”

  “Got to be automatics.”

  “Yup.”

  “At least we’ll have the ejector and firing-pin marks on the casings to identify the murder weapons, if we ever find them.”

  Tully walked back to the car and bent down, looking in the driver’s window. “The clothes these guys are wearing, pretty spiffy, wouldn’t you say? There’s nobody around here dresses like that. Shirts must have cost a hundred dollars each, probably more. I don’t think anybody in all Idaho dresses like that.”

  “California,” Pap said. “Los Angeles. Jeep’s a rental from Spokane International. I checked the papers in the glove compartment. They picked it up at ten last night.”

  A branch cracked back in the woods. Then another one.

  “Somebody’s coming,” Tully said.

  “Probably Dave the Indian,” Pap said. “I never been around anybody made so much noise walking through the woods as Dave the Indian.”

  Chapter 8

  Dave stopped and stared at the bullet-riddled Jeep and the bodies. “I never expected this,” he said.

  “Us neither,” Pap said.

  “You find anything?” Tully asked.

  “Yep. Looks like our man was trailed by one guy,” Dave said. “Shot the victim twice with a small-caliber rifle, just like you thought, Bo. Probably a two-twenty-three caliber. No exit wounds. That’s according to your medical examiner. The shooter was about a hundred yards away. There’s a big pasture gate there with a tall post on each end. I think he used the right post for a rest. He may have picked up one of the shell casings, but I found the other one in the tall grass near the post. It’s a two-twenty-three. And I found Holt’s shoe, too. The lace came loose and he must have run right out of it. I think the shooter picked it up, too, and then flung it off to one side. I marked it with a stick. Might have some prints on it. There’s some soft spots out there, and I think you can get some good casts of the shooter’s tracks. From the looks of them, I’d say he was wearing rubber boots.”

  “Good job,” Tully said.

  “One more thing,” Dave said. “The shooter walked over and checked the victim, probably to make sure he was dead.”

  “Notice anything else out there?”

  “Not much. Except I sure wouldn’t want this killer after me. He just walked steadily along tracking the guy through the grass. Every once in a while the victim would hunker down in tall grass, maybe to rest or hide, but then he’d see this guy coming after him through the moonlight and he’d take off running. The guy just kept after him, hardly ever even breaking stride, waiting for his shot. He got it at the big gate, when the vic started to climb over that fence.”

  “The shooter doesn’t sound anything like our local screw-ups,” Tully said.

  “No, he doesn’t,” Dave said. He glanced at his watch. “Hey, it’s past lunchtime. These fellows aren’t going anywhere. Let’s head over to the restaurant and I’ll buy you all lunch.”

  “
Sounds good to me,” Tully said. “But the county buys.”

  “Let me think about that,” Dave said. “Okay.”

  Tully walked back to the Explorer and drove it up closer to the Jeep. The three of them circled the area with crime-scene tape.

  Tully called the Idaho State Police on the radio to find out what had happened to the patrolman who was supposed to be sent up. The ISP radio person said he was waiting at the entrance to the Last Hope Mine Road.

  Then he called Buck on the radio. “You about got things wrapped up there?”

  “Yeah, Blight City Ambulance is here now. They’re loading up the victim.”

  “Good. Take care of that, then meet us at Dave’s House of Fry for lunch. Ask that medical examiner to come along, too.”

  “You got it.”

  He called the office on his cell phone. Daisy answered.

  “How’s it going up there?” she asked.

  “Bad,” he said. “Really bad. We may be up here a couple days. You’ll remember to feed Wallace, right?”

  “Oh, I suppose. But I’m not sticking my finger in front of him like you do.”

  “Good. Otherwise he might take a liking to you, show up at your house some night. Lurch still hunched over his computer?”

  “Where else?”

  “Tell him I need him up here right away.” He gave her the directions to pass on to his CSI. “We’ve got blood, bodies, tracks and a car riddled with bullets. Should make him happy.”

  “Sounds awful,” she said. “I’ll get the unit on its way right now.”

  The ISP patrolman was sitting in his car at the entrance to the road. While Pap and Dave strung more yellow crime-scene tape across the road, Tully explained to the patrolman that they were going to grab some lunch and would be back with the medical examiner shortly. “So what happened in there?” the patrolman asked.

  “It appears that three guys from Los Angeles came up here to get something, and somebody up here in Blight County didn’t want them to have it. That’s my guess, anyway. So the three guys from L.A. are now dead.”