The Blight Way

by McManus, Patrick F.

  “The L.A. guys should have known better than to mess around up here,” the patrolman said.

  “I can’t argue with that. Say, do me a favor, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “My CSI unit is going to be up here right away and . . .”

  “You got a CSI unit?” the patrolman said.

  “Yeah, his name is Lurch.”

  “Figures.”

  “Tell him to go directly east from the Jeep and he’ll find a shell casing, a shoe and several tracks marked with sticks. He is to pick up the casing and the shoe and make some dental-stone casts of the tracks.”

  The cop wrote the instructions to Lurch in his notebook. “I feel like a secretary,” he said.

  “You look like one, too,” Tully said.

  He, Pap and Dave got in the Explorer and headed to the restaurant.

  Dave said, “How do you fasten this seat belt, anyway?”

  “Funny,” Pap said. “I was going to ask the same thing.”

  Chapter 9

  Tully, Pap and Dave were seated at a table in the back of the restaurant when Buck showed up with Susan. Even though she was tall, she seemed tiny alongside the hulking deputy.

  Buck said, “I would’ve stopped and beat on Scraggs awhile, but I thought Susan here might not like the violence.”

  Pap was the only one at the table to welcome the lady properly. He rose and tipped his Stetson.

  “You are a true gentleman, Pap,” she said, beaming. “Not many of you left.”

  “I don’t think she would be all that bothered by a little violence, Buck,” Tully said.

  “A little beating might have taught the Scraggs some manners,” Susan said.

  Tully wasn’t at all sure this comment wasn’t meant for him and Dave. But he didn’t care. He was tired already and the day was just getting started. “It’s your restaurant, Dave,” he said. “What do you recommend?”

  “Let me see. Hmmm. I think I’d recommend the chicken-fried steak. Hear it’s the best in the world. It comes with gravy over the steak and hash browns.”

  “The hash browns still got that sheen of grease on them?”

  “Still do. Make them by hand right here from fresh Idaho spuds. Cover them with lots of the best grease money can buy.”

  “Good.”

  Noticing Susan rather thoughtfully perusing the menu, Tully wondered if she would go for the chicken-fried steak, too. She did. Might be my kind of woman after all, he thought. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he could get used to a woman who matter-of-factly shoved a thermometer into a dead man’s liver.

  A waitress named Shirley came and took their orders. Afterwards, Dave told Susan and Buck about the second murder scene.

  “Yeah,” Tully said, “a pool of blood on the ground back in the woods a little ways from the Jeep. Maybe Holt came out of the back seat firing a pistol and hit somebody just by chance. I don’t think the victim was a shooter, because none of the bullet holes in the Jeep came from that side. Maybe just an interested observer. Then Holt kept going. Dave traced the track from the fence to the Jeep, but never came across the pistol.”

  “Right, no pistol,” Dave said. “So I figure Holt emptied it and dropped it and it was picked up by whoever shot him. The tracker went right for him, like he knew Holt wasn’t armed anymore. Or maybe never.”

  Susan said, “You can tell that from the tracks?”

  “Pretty much. He wasn’t dodging round like somebody was taking shots at him or like he expected the guy to.”

  Tully said, “We at least know who the men in the car were and that they came from Los Angeles. But what were people like that doing up here in Blight County? And on the Last Hope Road of all places?”

  “Got to be a setup,” Buck said. “No other reason somebody would drive back on that road. I can’t guess who might have done it, but the Scraggs come to mind.”

  “Pretty hard to believe the Scraggs didn’t have something to do with it,” Pap said. “On the other hand, why would Batim call Bo to tell him he had a dead man over one of his fences?”

  “Maybe because the trail led right to that fence,” Tully said. “And there’s no way they could have cleaned up all the blood at the fence. Batim knows we’d tie the guy on the fence to the guys in the woods, even if the body was gone.”

  Two waitresses returned with their orders. The talk at the table stopped. One of the waitresses, blond and voluptuous, suddenly blurted out, “Why, Pap Tully! I thought that was you under that black Stetson.”

  Pap, obviously pleased, grinned broadly. “Had to give the boys a hand, Deedee,” he said. “Got some unfortunate business up here north of Famine.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to be so secretive, Pap.” She reached out, lifted his Stetson and mussed his white thicket of hair in a gesture Tully thought suspiciously familiar. “Everybody in town’s heard all about the bodies in the woods and all. It’s pretty creepy, hunh? Nothing like that ever happened around Famine before.”

  “Everybody knows about the bodies?” Tully said. “How does everybody know?”

  “Well, somebody probably mentioned it down at the gas station. You know how it is, Dave, you want everyone in town to know the news, you mention it at the gas station.”

  “You bet,” Dave said.

  Susan said, “You may want to check in at the gas station, Sheriff. Maybe you can find out who the ambushers are, too?”

  Tully ignored the twinkle in her eyes. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, and dug into his hash browns and gravy. This will probably kill me, he thought. Good, though.

  “You been out to see Vern Littlefield yet?” Buck asked.

  “No,” Tully answered. “But I’m going out there to talk to him right after lunch. Been a long time since I’ve seen Vern. I worked for him summers when I was a kid, before I went off to the university.”

  “What did you do for him?” Pap asked.

  “Built fences. I guess Vern figured the fences would keep the Scraggs from rustling his cattle.”

  “That sure didn’t work, did it?” Dave said.

  “No,” Tully said, “it didn’t. That’s why I later sent both the Scragg boys, Lister and Lem, off to prison. Rustling.”

  “Prison didn’t seem to do them much good,” Pap said.

  “I’ll be darned,” Buck said.

  “What?” Tully said.

  “You went to college, Bo?”

  “Don’t hold it against him,” Pap said, grinning. “He didn’t learn nothing except how to paint pictures. They got a bunch of them up on the walls of the courthouse right now.”

  “Why, I saw them,” Buck said. He seemed about ready to offer a criticism but then thought better of it. “These sure are good hash browns, Dave.”

  Tully glanced at Susan. He could tell there was at least one person at the table impressed he’d been to college.

  “I haven’t seen your pictures yet,” she said.

  “I have to warn you,” Tully said, “that display has caused a virtual explosion of art criticism in Blight County. Folks who previously came out of the hills only to vote against school-bond issues come to town at least twice a month now, just to voice their criticism of the sheriff’s pictures.”

  “Hey,” Dave said, “I think Bo’s pictures show a lot of promise. The colors are real nice. If his art classes had just taught him something about perspective, they’d be fine.”

  “Is that why all your animals look like they’re about to fall out of their pastures?” Pap said.

  “Basically, that’s it,” said Dave. “No perspective.”

  Chapter 10

  After lunch, Dave stayed at the café, and Susan and Buck headed out to the old mining road. Tully and Pap stopped by the gas station. Ed Grange, who owned and operated the station, was out cleaning the windshield of a car being gassed up at one of the two pumps. At one end of the station were shelves of groceries, along with coolers for milk, sodas and beer. A counter ran half the length of the station. In front o
f the counter was an open area furnished with tables, chairs and a wood stove. A young woman stood behind the counter at the cash register. She looked too young to be working at the station. Tully wondered why she wasn’t in school. She greeted them with a quick little smile when they came in. They pulled up chairs next to the fire.

  “There’s something you don’t see much anymore,” Pap commented.

  “What’s that?” Tully said, thinking about the girl at the cash register.

  “A car getting its windshield cleaned at a gas station.”

  “That’s because Blight County is thirty years back in time, and Famine is at least fifty years back.”

  “Ed still charges a dollar and a half a gallon for gas,” Pap said. “I guess he’s not that far back in time.”

  “So how much did gas cost when you were a kid, Pap?” Tully thought he should ask, just to be sociable, because he knew he was about to be told anyway.

  “Back in the forties, everything cost fifteen cents,” Pap said. “Didn’t make no difference what, a hamburger, a pound of bacon, a gallon of gas. I don’t know why fifteen cents was the magic number, but it was.”

  Tully expressed the appropriate amazement.

  Ed put the finishing touches on the windshield, then came into the station and shook hands. “Pap complaining about the price of gas?” he said.

  “Naw,” Tully said. “He was just telling me how nice it was back in the olden days, back when folks plugged an artery they got death instead of a bypass. The doctor got fifteen cents.”

  “Didn’t say nothing like that,” Pap said. “But in some ways it was better back then. What do you think, Ed?”

  Ed took off his hat and hung it on a peg near the stove. The few hairs on his head were combed over from ear to ear and glued to his scalp with some kind of spray. He wore clean striped overalls with a blue work shirt showing at the neck. “I think you’re right about that, Pap. Seems to me everything is going haywire these days.”

  “Which brings me to the problem at hand,” Tully said, tugging on the corner of his mustache. “Deedee down at the café tells us that everyone in town knows about the killing out on the old mine road.”

  “Reckon that’s true. I figure it takes maybe an hour for a newsbreak here at the station to reach everyone in town.”

  “Newsbreak?” Tully said. “I thought this was a gas station, not a radio station. Anyway, who dropped the word here?”

  “Lem Scragg. There were three or four guys hanging around shooting the breeze when Lem come in and said there was a dead guy up at the ranch and he’d heard there were two more over at the Last Hope Mine Road. Next thing I know there was just Lem and me standing here. The others had gone to spread the word. Been a long time since we’ve had any decent news like that.”

  Pap said, “I figure the Scraggs had to be involved in this some way.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past any of the Scraggs,” Ed said.

  “But if you guys said anything about it on the police radio, old Batim would have heard. He got himself a police scanner last year. Anymore, we get most of our police news through Batim.”

  “It was Buck, I bet anything,” Pap said. “Probably blabbing everything over the radio.”

  “Doesn’t rule out the Scraggs being involved in this thing,” Tully said.

  “It sure doesn’t,” Ed agreed.

  Tully said, “You hear anything, Ed, anything that might give us a lead into this mess, call my cell phone.”

  “Sure. Hey, how come you brought Pap along?”

  “Not for his social amenities, that’s for sure,” Tully said. “Mostly, he knows quite a bit about Scraggs and murder.”

  “Yep,” Pap agreed. “I got to admit, though, that this trip has pretty much satiated my appetite for both.”

  “Mine, too,” Tully said. “I’ve got my Crime Scene Investigation Unit headed up here. A state patrolman’s guarding the site now. How long before the whole town knows that, Ed?”

  “Take about an hour. We do what we can with limited resources.”

  Tully and Pap went out and got in the Explorer.

  Pap rolled and lit another cigarette. Tully didn’t complain. It wouldn’t do him any good, anyway. The Explorer’s ashtray was already full.

  The old man said, “You know that orange fluorescent tape at the opening to the mining road? Well, whoever put that up was probably directing the boys in the Jeep into the ambush.”

  “You may be right,” Tully said. “Otherwise it would be hard to spot that road entrance in the dark.”

  “There might be a useful fingerprint on that tape,” Pap said.

  “We should have cut it down. Thanks for telling me now.”

  That’s why he had brought the old man along. Tully couldn’t believe his own stupidity, except he had been a bit overloaded. He braked hard, made a bootlegger’s turn on the highway, and headed back through Famine toward the old mine road. Details! he thought. I hate the details.

  The radio squawked. It was Florence, the 911 operator, back at the office. “We got the local press here demanding we tell it what’s going on.”

  He pressed the talk button. “Copy, Florence. Thanks. Put Barney on.”

  Barney’s voice came over the radio.

  “Hi, Bo!”

  “Hi, Barney. What do you need to know?”

  “We heard you had a murder up there at Famine. Eliot won’t tell me anything.”

  “That’s what Eliot is supposed to do, not tell you anything. We had three murders in fact. But I can’t tell you much over the radio. Give me your cell phone number and I’ll call you later.”

  Barney gave him the cell phone number.

  Tully pulled out his cell phone and called Buck on his.

  “You and Susan out at the mining road yet?”

  “Just got here.”

  “You see a little orange fluorescent ribbon right by the road entrance?”

  “No.”

  “It’s off to the left and up pretty high, about six inches long.”

  “Not there, boss.”

  “Okay, thanks, Buck.”

  “Just thought I’d mention the tape,” Pap said, puffing his skinny little cigarette out the corner of his mouth. “You want me to mention something else?”

  Tully nodded, a brief, irritable dip of his head.

  “The ambushers had to have some kind of transportation. It’s possible they came in over the mountain and walked in from the other side of the berm. But if they’re locals, I don’t think they like walking that much. I bet there’s a trail back in the woods someplace and they rode ATVs in there, three- or four-wheelers.”

  “Possible,” Tully said.

  “You probably noticed there wasn’t any blood on the trail where they drug out the guy that got hit on the left side of the car. I think they must have rolled him up in a tarp or something. Otherwise there would have been a blood trail. They probably drug him over to the ATVs and hauled him out on one of those. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to haul a dead deer on one of those contraptions, and it’s even harder to haul a dead man. I suspect some blood may have leaked out on the machine and probably on the trail, too.”

  “Find the trail and the machine and we’ll check it out,” Tully said.

  “Never can tell,” the old man said.

  Two state patrolmen were standing next to their cars, which they had used to block the entrance to the road. They were talking to Buck. Susan was sitting in the Suburban.

  Tully said to the patrolmen, “You guys see anybody come by and take a piece of fluorescent tape off that tree over there?”

  “Matter of fact we did,” said one of the patrolmen. “An old guy in bib overalls. Had on one of those earflap caps. Probably lives in Famine. Said he’d marked the road because he’d killed a deer back in there. I’d recognize him if I saw him again.”

  “Deer season doesn’t open until next week,” Pap said.

  “I suppose,” the officer said. “But folks get confused.
”

  Tully nodded. About half the population of Famine was old and wore bib overalls. He wasn’t sure about earflap caps. He turned to Pap. “You and Buck drive back in the Explorer. Take Susan with you. Lurch should be along pretty quick, too. You might see if you can find that ATV trail while you’re waiting.”

  “Where you going?”

  “To see Vern Littlefield. Not much happens in this part of Blight County he doesn’t know about.”

  Chapter 11

  The half-mile-long driveway from the highway into the Littlefield ranch house was heavily graveled but smooth as a dance floor.

  A Super Cub plane was parked in front of a hangar a short ways from the house. Tully could see the nose of a two-engine plane through the open hangar door. The asphalted landing strip stretched away from the hangar and diminished across a hayfield larger than most of the other ranches in the area. A young woman came out onto the porch of the ranch house and watched as Tully walked up.

  “You Mrs. Littlefield?” Tully asked.

  “I am. Call me Cindy, please. You have to be Sheriff Bo Tully.”

  “I am. I heard that old dog Littlefield got married again, but nobody told me he had married a teenager.”

  “Thirty-four hard years actually. But I appreciate the compliment.” She laughed. Her voice was husky and incongruous with her youthful appearance. Now that he was closer, he noticed a tiny scar above the upper lip on the left side of her mouth.

  Something he found somewhat sexy was that she was able to move her breasts beneath her white, short-sleeved blouse. He tried not to stare but had never before witnessed anything quite like this. He wondered if possibly Littlefield had found her in a circus sideshow. Suddenly a tiny, furry head poked out of the sleeve of her blouse. Tully jumped.

  “I guess you’ve never seen a ferret before, Sheriff.”

  “Never crawling around inside a woman’s blouse, I haven’t,” Tully said, embarrassed. “I thought maybe you had an unusual talent.”

  Cindy laughed. “No, just a ferret. His name’s Oscar.”

  “So how long have you and Vern been married?”