by John Clausen
Claire stepped back and was about to turn on the other two men when the blackjack found her temple and dropped her next to the injured senator.
One of the two men looked at Boyd Cameron and shook his head slightly.
“Jesus,” he said. “Good elbow.”
Chapter 25
When it came to a lack of suspects, Jerry Guthrie was in the same boat as the deputy. The River Rat story had simmered down, Pooch Eye’s floater may or may not be real, and Harlen Ackerman’s shooting was yesterday’s news unless he could come up with a new angle. To make things even worse, he was sure that Claire Norgard was on to something important that she wasn’t about to share no matter how fond of him she may have been. And of course, there was June LeGrand, his boss at the Porterville Daily Journal. Just that morning, she had sent him a terse little email asking him where he was with the story. “The story,” Jerry said to himself. “That’s a good one. What story?”
He had a badly wounded millionaire cowboy, shots fired at the deputy sheriff, and no real direction to go in. He’d heard all of the talk about Ben Mooney being the one who shot Ackerman, but as a journalist he wanted a little more corroboration than the ranting of half a dozen barflies at Nolen’s.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that he should go out to Mooney’s cabin and interview him. Get some quotes in the bank in case it turned out that Mooney got arrested for the shooting. Of course, thinking about interviewing a guy like Ben Mooney and actually getting it done were two quite distinctly different things. He’d heard all the Ben Mooney stories from the drunks at Nolen’s, and, despite the fact that he considered a lot of the legend to be beer-inspired bullshit, he did believe the man could be dangerous. He didn’t really feel much like seeing Mooney on the street, much less actually asking him pointed questions about an attempted murder. On the other hand, he had to give June something soon or she’d pull him off the story. Worse yet, Claire might come out with something spectacular and bury him in shame. Beaten on his own turf by a news reader. He couldn’t tolerate that…no matter how good she looked.
With a troubled mind, Guthrie got in his car and headed out of town toward where he understood the Mooney cabin to be located.
It took him about half an hour to find the place. It was at the end of a quarter-mile, rutted dirt driveway that disappeared into a clump of stunted trees and overgrown pigweed. He bounced his car up the driveway, expecting any minute to draw fire from the house. The cabin had a rusty tin roof pierced by a small chimney. Smoke rose lazily from the chimney and drifted through a cottonwood tree that shaded the house. There were no dogs, chickens, pigs, goats, nor any other small barnyard livestock. This surprised Guthrie, who expected that a survivalist outdoorsman like Mooney would have made the place into a subsistence farm complete with fresh eggs and goat’s milk cheese and Mother Earth News type equipment.
He got out of the car half expecting a pack of mean dogs to descend. Instead, there was nearly total silence. Even the birds quit chirping, which gave the whole scene a kind of menacing atmosphere. As Guthrie stepped up on the small wooden porch, he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched. He knocked on the door and waited. No answer. He knocked again, somewhat louder, and still received no answer.
Puzzled and a little apprehensive, Guthrie sat down on a wooden rocking chair next to the door and pondered his options. He could stay on the porch and wait for Mooney, which could take hours or even days. Or he could pack it in and come back another day. Or he could leave a note asking Mooney to call him, although it looked like the cabin was innocent of any sort of communications devices.
He was about to exercise the leave-a-note option when he felt a slight pressure on his left shoulder. He turned around and saw Ben Mooney holding a single-shot, 20-gauge shotgun. The pressure he’d felt was the business end of the gun Mooney held to his back.
“Somebody tell you it was okay to sit on my porch?”
Jerry’s insides felt like they were made of cold water, but he knew he’d have to hold his own with a man like Mooney if he hoped to get anything but thrown off the farm.
“Nope, I was just sittin’ down to write you a note. I’m from the Porterville Daily Journal…”
“I know who you are. What you want?”
“Well…you may not know it, but there’s a lot of speculation around Tulleyville that you shot Harlen Ackerman a few days ago. Thought I’d get your side of it.”
Mooney closed his eyes for a moment while Jerry considered the soft-tissue damage that a 20-gauge shotgun could do to a human torso. Presently Mooney’s eyes opened and regarded Guthrie in an almost friendly way.
“Hard question to ask when you’re looking up a shotgun barrel. You got sand, I’ll give you that…not a lot of brains, but plenty of sand.”
Mooney nodded toward the door. “Come on in.”
Guthrie followed him into the cabin, thinking that maybe journalism hadn’t been such a good career choice. He looked around and was surprised to see a relatively homey room. No lace curtains or knickknack shelves, but it was tidy and clean and had plenty of light. Not the dank, bone-strewn lair he’d expected after listening to the Mooney legends. He noticed for the first time that Mooney was carrying three dead rabbits.
Mooney saw his guest eyeing the rabbits. “Got ‘em down by the river. Cottontails. Not much meat, but better than a jackrabbit. Them things are full of disease. Cottontails always seem cleaner…taste better, too.”
Guthrie watched, fascinated as Mooney skinned the rabbits, chopped off their heads, and removed their innards. He did all three of them in mere moments, wasting no motion and barely paying attention to his task. Then he dropped them into a large pot of water that sat on the ancient stove.
“You’re awful quiet for a newspaper man.”
“Well, I gotta tell you the truth…you’re scarin’ the shit out of me with that shotgun and the knife and all those guts on the table. Not something I see every day.”
“Get your groceries in a paper sack, do you? That’s okay, most people’d quit eatin’ meat altogether if they had to pull the guts out of it first…now what you want to know?”
“If I was stupid enough to ask you if you shot Harlen Ackerman, would you do anything rash with that shotgun?”
A tight little smile played across Mooney’s face.
“I think I could hold off.”
“Okay…did you shoot Harlen Ackerman?”
“No I didn’t,” Mooney replied, looking straight into Guthrie’s eyes. “I hardly know the guy and what I do know about him seems okay. Lot of money…probably crooked, but he never took anything from me. By the way, I don’t miss much…so if I’d have done it, Ackerman would be in a casket, not in a hospital bed.”
“Any idea who did it?”
“Somebody with money…or somebody set up to get some. Poor people don’t kill rich people. Usually the other way around…and it’s usually legal. People just as dead…but nobody goes to jail. You wanna find out who shot Ackerman, look at people he knows real good.”
“What are you going to do if they come to get you?”
“Depends on who it is and how they do it. Guess if it was Gene I’d go with him. Anybody else…” Mooney trailed off his sentence and looked absently out the front window.
“How come Gene? Old friend or something?”
“Nope…he’s just like you. No brains and a lot of sand. Kinda like that in a cop…or a reporter.”
An hour later, Guthrie was on the phone to June LeGrand, telling her that he had an interview on tape with the guy most locals think did the Ackerman shooting. Mooney had not known the interview was being taped, a fact that Guthrie kept to himself.
“Have they made an arrest yet?”
“Not yet, June, but it could happen at any moment. When it does, there could be a regular old-fashioned bloodbath. This Mooney guy is the real deal. It’s a wonder I got out of there without being shotgunned. Not a guy who’d go quietly. He likes the deputy sheriff, though, a guy
named Eugene Hornsby. Maybe I ought to talk to him. Get something down on paper about both of them. Might turn out to be the OK Corral. That’d make a nice feature…both sides of the gun battle kind of thing.”
“Okay, get up with the deputy and see what you can dig up. We’ve got to have something good pretty soon, though, or you’ll have to move on.”
Guthrie knew that “you’ll have to move on” was just a June LeGrand attempt to motivate him. With a wounded millionaire and shots at a deputy, all of it unsolved and unreported, there was little or no chance he’d get assigned to something else…especially now that he had some momentum going. The fact was he hardly ever got “assigned” to anything. He pretty much made up his own assignments and kept his own schedule. She was right about one thing, though. He was going to have to come up with something good pretty soon, just to keep his reputation polished and justify his somewhat inflated salary.
He called Hornsby and arranged to meet him at the hospital. A nice bedside interview with the deputy looking down on the victim sounded like the kind of dramatic situation he was looking for. Now if he could just pull it off without getting Claire and her camera involved.
Chapter 26
Senator Cameron sat behind his desk gingerly touching his broken, badly swollen nose. The flesh on both sides of the nose was turning interesting shades of blue and green. Right now his damaged eyes were staring narrowly at a thoroughly agitated Odell Scrum.
Scrum was using his courtroom voice.
“Let me get this straight…you kidnapped Claire Norgard, a well-known TV personality, and are holding her on property owned by my client Harlen Ackerman. Further…you assaulted Ms. Norgard’s cameraman and are also holding him on the same property that is owned by my client. Do I have that about right, senator?”
“I wouldn’t say she’s all that well known.”
“Well she will be once this gets out. I can see the headlines…senator arrested for kidnapping, senator gets life in prison, Big Hungry project scuttled due to malfeasance and felonious conduct by the major investors. Jesus, Boyd, what were you thinking? Or did thinking even enter into it?”
“Had to do something,” the senator whined. “She had it all in black and white…even transcripts of conversations between you and Harlen. Word for word, talking about money you gave me. Bad stuff, Odell. I had to do something.”
“You did something all right…you screwed us all to the wall. Ever stop to think that I could have gotten that transcript tossed out of court in about two seconds? No proof of anything there…just her word and some papers anybody could have typed up. And even if she produced the actual tapes…I’m betting they weren’t obtained legally. Sounds like they came from the Tulleyville Grill. Bet that Chinaman put some bug at the table. Never thought he’d turn on Harlen. Little bastard loyal as a dog, according to Harlen. Now he won’t even bring me a bowl of rice.”
“So it’s going to be okay, then?”
“Would have been if you hadn’t totally screwed us. I can still probably get the transcript thing to go away…but kidnapping…that’s a whole different level. You and your two gorillas are going to take a hard fall…and you’ll probably take me and Harlen along for the ride, you dumb bastard. How’d you ever get elected? Oh, yeah…Harlen bought it for you. Now you do this?”
“What am I going to do?”
“Well, as an officer of the court, all I can do is advise you to turn yourself in. A true criminal would probably say that Claire Norgard and her cameraman are going to have to disappear. Of course, that would be wrong…and I can’t advise you to do anything impulsive. So my advice to you, sir, is to turn yourself in or perhaps move to a country without an extradition treaty.”
Boyd Cameron was not the brightest man to ever visit the public trough, but he did know a veiled suggestion when he heard one.
“Thank you very much for your advice, Mr. Scrum,” he said stiffly, wondering if this conversation was also being taped. “I will take it under advisement and get back to you with any decision I make.”
“Call any time, Senator Cameron.”
Cameron hurried from Scrum’s office and drove to his own headquarters. He told his assistant to hold all his calls and then locked himself in his office with a bottle of Jack Daniels. A coward and a bribe-loving scoundrel he no doubt was…but the thought of permanently removing a couple fellow human beings, well, that was too far even for him. His mind raced from one improbably solution to another. He thought about turning state’s evidence, but sickened at the thought of the publicity and shame that would generate. He even thought about selling both of his victims into white slavery, but of course knew nothing about how such things were done. He considered taking his own life, but knew he wouldn’t have the courage. Prison time yawned in front of him. His future disgrace and his panic were palpable things, filling the room like a thick fog. Then an absurd thought entered his mind. He could blame his two associates. Sure, that was it. He would admit that he had taken bribes and all the other charges, claim he was working undercover to expose the real villains. When the two bodyguards had attacked the cameraman, he – the heroic senator – hadn’t been trying to attack Claire Norgard, he’d been trying to get her out of harm’s way so that he could save her and keep the two bad guys from further harming the cameraman. She had misinterpreted his actions and knocked him unconscious. That part would be embarrassing, but there was no other way, he thought. He was unconscious, he’d say, when the two men took her away. He had no idea where they were or what they were going to do. The woman had been knocked out before the kidnapping and would never be able to swear that Cameron was in on it or that she had heard the senator give them instructions on where to take the victims.
A couple things troubled him, though. Eventually, even the dumbest investigator would ask him why he hadn’t called the cops. He thought about this for a while and decided that the kidnappers had left him a note saying that they’d kill her if he alerted the police. Also, any competent investigator would ask him who the two guys were. He’d just have to tell them that they were two bodyguards assigned to him by Odell Scrum. He didn’t know them, he’d say…and he was shocked and deeply saddened at what they had done. Didn’t have a clue why they had reacted so violently. Try to work in the idea that Scrum had the kidnapping in mind all along.
Reviewing the story, Cameron knew it was close to complete hogwash. Few people would believe him, but perhaps he could muddy the waters enough to create some doubt. His constituents had swallowed less probable stories in the past and still voted him into office. There was a good chance he could make it happen again. He congratulated himself with a final shot of Jack Daniels, put the top back on the bottle, and pondered his next move.
Chapter 27
Jerry Guthrie woke with a sense of purpose. He was scheduled for an early morning interview with Eugene Hornsby. This would probably allow him to lash together enough of a story to keep June LeGrand from taking drastic measures. Then, in the afternoon, he planned to locate Claire Norgard and find out where she was in the Big Hungry Recreational Project investigation.
He knew it wouldn’t be easy to get her to divulge anything; she had a sense of competition that was almost scary. Nevertheless, he would rely on his boyish charm and hope for the best.
Teddy was waiting for him in the kitchen. This was somewhat unusual. Most of the dog’s life was spent outdoors. He slept on an old blanket next to the front steps of the house. Guthrie wanted him to be available for guard duty and free to make his impromptu patrols at any time of the day or night. But he also wanted to let the dog in the house any time he wished to enter. To make that possible, Guthrie had removed the bottom panel in the two-panel front door, installed a hinge at the top and made a “doggie door” that took up half the door. It looked like a regular door, but if anyone put a small amount of pressure on the lower panel it would swing open with enough clearance for the giant Teddy to pass through. It was probably not the most secure front door in the world, he�
�d reasoned, but with Teddy on duty he could have left the front door wide open with no serious breach of home security.
Right now, Ted was standing in the kitchen casting his eyes between the stove and Guthrie, a sure sign that the behemoth canine thought it was time for some warm breakfast. Guthrie often indulged him with a plate of scrambled eggs, complete with toast and sprinkled with chili patins, a ground-up hot pepper he received regularly from an old friend who owned a ranch in Texas just north of the Mexican border. The dog loved those peppers and could eat them without so much as a grimace. Guthrie liked them as well and sprinkled them liberally on his own plate of eggs while he mentally prepared himself for the Hornsby interview.
About an hour later, Guthrie arrived at the deputy’s modest office in Tulleyville. The reporter, who had covered crime stories in the rougher parts of Kansas City, was always amused at the “Mayberry” style of the little outpost. Besides housing Hornsby’s desk and files and a couple worn-out chairs, the office included a jail cell about the size of the walk-in closet in Harlen Ackerman’s master bedroom. The jail’s overnight accommodations consisted of a narrow set of bunk beds, a sink, and an old-fashioned toilet. Hornsby kept the cell scrupulously clean, with clean sheets on the beds and a relatively fresh towel on the rack by the sink. Whenever he traveled, Hornsby would collect free hotel soap chips to use in the jail. He didn’t travel much, but even a short trip would provide enough soap to last several months. There wasn’t much traffic through the facility and when “guests” did materialize, they often weren’t the sort obsessed with personal hygiene.