Born Rebel and The Guns of Livingston Frost - Two Short Novels

by Ardath Mayhar

  He had brought a plastic tarp, and with Ned’s help he tied it over the truck to help preserve any prints or dust or other data that the specialists might pick up tomorrow. Then he rummaged in his wallet and pulled out a photocopy of a mug shot. “Is this the man who sold it?”

  The sun was down, and chilly darkness was creeping among the orderly rows of junk. “Cain’t see very good,” Ned said, squinting at the picture. “Come over here to the office, and I’ll take a gander at it.”

  The light in the office was all of forty watts, but it seemed enough. Ned took one glance and shook his head. “It’s kind of like him, but it’s not the same man. The one that sold the truck was a lot skinnier, face thinner, wrinkled like a turtle. He looked tired, not mean. This fella’s younger and looks a hell of a lot meaner.”

  Shipp looked at him in surprise. “You dead certain of that? This is a picture of Duson that was made the last time he was arrested. He might have lost weight.”

  Ned held the photo closer to his face. He turned it sideways, upside down, back right side up. He shook his head again. “No way this is the same man. Same type, yes. Head’s shaped some the same. But the face is wrong. The eyes are different. The chin is sharper. Just ain’t the same man, Sheriff, and that’s all I can say.”

  “Then who in hell...?” Shipp chopped off his words and sighed. “Thanks, Ned. I’ll sort this out some way, but damned if I know how, just yet. There’ll be a man out in the morning to check for fingerprints and take samples. You’ll be here?”

  “Every day ’cept Sunday, Sheriff. You just tell him to blow three times, so I’ll know it ain’t Teebo, and I’ll be out like a shot. You think you’ll ketch that bastard?”

  “I hope so. I certainly hope so. Thanks again, Ned. And good night.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Martin Fewell

  Martin had searched the house thoroughly. Not once but twice he had gone through the place; every nook and cranny (and there had been more than he cared to think about) had been explored, without result. Weary and dusty, he retired to the kitchen, where he fixed a cup of hot broth from a packet of dry mix he found in a cupboard.

  Deciding at last that it was safe to turn on a light, after pulling the old fashioned green shades over the windows, he switched on the lamp sitting on the little desk in the corner. The big kitchen seemed to be a sort of living room, and evidently Frost or Lily did household bookkeeping at the desk.

  He searched it again, without much hope, and this time he found a twist of paper tucked back in the corner of a drawer. He smoothed it out, and there he found a phone number. Beside it were two words: Aunt Alison.

  The area code was 318, and he rummaged out the phone book and found that number. The western half of Louisiana. Without much hope, he called Information and asked in what city the number would be located. To his surprise, there was no question, just a swift reply.

  He tucked the note into his pocket, glanced around to make certain there was no sign of his intrusion into the kitchen, and slid out of the back door, re-locking it behind him. He’d get to Bossier City hitch-hiking, if necessary, and then he could walk up to Plain Dealing, if he had to.

  A phone call by day might get him some directions. He could pretend to be some sort of repair man or maybe somebody about the fire insurance on the house. Everybody had that, and it had always put him where he wanted to be.

  He had recognized that name, Alison. Lily Frost had two living relatives, one her brother Livingston, the other her grandfather’s sister, whose name was Alison Vernier. Martin never forgot anything that might be useful, and that had been important information, in case Lily ever escaped from him. In the old days he would have run her down and beaten anybody to a pulp who offered to interfere. Now his purpose was different.

  Where would the Frosts have gone, except to kin? They had to be there, and he had to go too. It was his job to make up for past sins, and keeping Lily safe was more important than anything else. Since he’d heard about Duson’s attack on her, his world had shrunk to that single focus.

  He hoped to deal with Duson, in time, but first he had to safeguard Lily. Thinking about what he would do to her attacker would keep him warm all night.

  In pitch darkness, he trudged away up the oil-top road, keeping himself oriented by the distant band of stars above the flanking treetops. His small bundle of newly acquired underwear seemed heavy, and he was older than he used to be, but he didn’t let either slow his steps. He’d get to Bossier City if he had to crawl.

  As it turned out, a freelance trucker with a load of heifers for a farmer in Tennessee picked him up on the highway before he’d walked more than a dozen miles. The fellow was sleepy, for he’d been driving all night, and he needed somebody to keep him awake.

  In the old days, Martin thought wryly, nobody in his right mind would have picked him up, because he used to be so big and tough and mean-looking. Now he only looked weary, as he had noted in Lily’s mirror: no threat to anyone. He was so thin and stooped that he didn’t even seem big any more. He talked randomly about all sorts of things as they bored through the night toward Shreveport. When they hit the Interstate west of Shreveport, he ran out of talk, and besides it was time to change off. It never paid to stick too long with one ride, even when you were going to do something honest.

  “If you can let me off close to the airport, that’d be real nice,” he said.

  The man nodded, wakeful now that daylight had come and there was enough traffic to keep him alert. “Will do. Been nice to hear your stories. I never got to travel. Just covered ground with the truck loaded and come back empty, like a yo-yo on a string. You okay for cash?”

  Martin was startled. He’d forgotten, in all his years of muscle work and con-games, that people sometimes cared to help each other.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “Got an old aunt lives close to the airport, and that’s where I’m goin’. Much obliged for the ride. Helped me out a lot.”

  He watched the rig pull away into the rising sun. Then he headed for Bossier on foot, using streets he remembered from his youth.

  He’d actually had an aunt, once, who lived somewhere near this place. Things had changed, even in the few years since he’d come this way, but he knew where he was going and how to get there.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Washington Shipp

  The sheriff had dreamed about that pickup. He was out at the junk yard as soon as he’d checked the office and done the few major jobs waiting for him. Following him in a shiny van was Phil Taylor, on loan from the state, who had the equipment to examine the truck from stem to stern.

  “If there’s a hair or a print or even a grain of dust there, I’ll find it,” he promised, as he approached the plastic-veiled vehicle. “As it’s crossed the state line, the Feds may be interested too. I’ll keep you posted, Sheriff.”

  Wash nodded as he backed out of the drive and headed back toward town. He had a feeling about that truck. If the driver wasn’t Duson, who in hell could it be? With the impact of inspiration, he had an idea that propelled him toward his office with the sort of speed he often chided his deputies for using.

  Lily had thought Duson was Martin Fewell, when he came into her kitchen. There had to be some resemblance between them.

  Ned said Duson’s picture was similar to the man he’d seen, but definitely not the same person. Could, somehow, Martin Fewell have reentered the field? How? Why? For what reason? There was only one way to find out.

  He entered the building in an uncharacteristic rush and leaned over the desk where Amy worked. “Amy, call Miz Vernier, will you? I need to talk to Lily,” he said. “I’ll be in my office.”

  When the call came through he was staring at his file cabinet as if to burn a hole in its gray-painted side. Something was bugging him, and he wasn’t quite able to pin it down.

  “Lily? Hi, there. Yes, things seem pretty quiet here, too. Listen, do you have a picture of Martin Fewell? I mean, here at the house where I
might use the key you left to pick it up?”

  “Why, no, Wash,” she said. “I think I burned them all. But wouldn’t you have one someplace in your files? He was wanted for quite a few years before they sent him up.” She sounded worried, and he knew that old fear must be chipping away at her new-found balance.

  “Now why didn’t I think of that? Of course—there ought to be something in the books. He was arrested here at least once, and if not, I can get a picture out of the morgue at the paper. Thanks, Lily-bird. You and Stony keep your noses clean, you hear?”

  “Aunt Alison is carrying her pistol in her pocket. She may be ninety, but she’ll take care of us if it kills her.” To his relief there was a hint of laughter in her voice.

  He rummaged in the back files for the year when Fewell had run afoul of the law in Nichayac County. It wasn’t all that far back, and he soon had the thin sheaf of paperwork in hand. There was a mug shot, but it didn’t even look like the Fewell that Shipp had known at the time.

  It took all morning to find a news photo that looked anything like the man. But he located one at last in the dusty files of the Courier and had Sue-Ann, the reporter-cum dogbody there, run him a photocopy that was passable. Then he headed back for the junk yard.

  When he handed Ned the punched-up photo copy, the junk dealer nodded. “Yep, that’s him. A bit younger and not so tired and skinny, but that’s the man.”

  Something inside Wash resonated to his words. Somehow he had known that Fewell was going to come back into the picture, and here he was. But how did he fit? Was he acquainted with Myron Duson? Were they in cahoots?

  It might be that Lily Frost would know. Her lover might have talked about his convict friends, and they had been in the same penitentiary for at least a couple of years that overlapped. His investigations into Duson’s career had told him that.

  Wash returned to his office and dropped into his chair absentmindedly. He had no authority in Bossier Parish. The sheriff there was an unknown quantity. Going himself would be officious and his Louisiana counterpart would make that clear, he was certain.

  However, it might have been Fewell instead of Duson under that bush at the Frost house that night. And if so, he might have picked up some clue as to the whereabouts of the Frosts.

  That same instinct told him that Alison Vernier’s farm wasn’t going to be as secure a hideout as they had all thought, but he had no proof, not even a real clue. How did you tell a skeptical official you’d never met that you have a hunch there’s going to be trouble in his vicinity?

  “With great difficulty,” he replied to himself. Then he dialed the Vernier number himself, not wanting Amy to be a witness to his humiliation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Myron Duson

  The new roads up the country made Duson’s trip much shorter than it would have been in the days when the highways seemed to go right through every pea-turkey little town and around their squares twice. Duson had lifted a nice little Toyota in San Augustine; it was parked behind a gas station just waiting for its owner to show up after having it serviced and gassed. Now he whizzed along through the pine woods, noting the thin screens of standing timber that hid the devastation of loggers behind their scanty ranks.

  He’d robbed a few loggers in his time, but they never had anything but grease and sweat on them. It had always puzzled Duson why anybody would work so hard for so little, when it was so easy to take what others sweated to earn. But he guessed it took all kinds, which made it nice for him. There wasn’t all that much competition in his trade, and his stints in the slammer hadn’t been all that bad. He’d made contacts, though the way this last job had turned out, he was about to decide that the quality of convicts was going down. It wasn’t easy to get good help, and that was a fact. The idiots couldn’t even hit a woman over the head and kill her, any more.

  After a while he pulled over into a rest stop and studied his road map. Plain Dealing...it was a dinky little place, but not hard to find, and very close to Shreveport.

  As it was about time to change cars again, he waited, hiding behind a picnic table, until a couple pulled up in a newish Ford and headed, both at the same time, for the rest rooms. All you had to do was wait, he’d always known.

  He sighed. At last things were going right again. He jiggered the lock with his special device and hot-wired the ignition in less time than he could have done the job with the keys. He slid out of the park and into traffic, already looking for the turnoff he wanted.

  Once he was headed for Plain Dealing, he got cautious and took back roads, blessing his long experience with dodging the law in these parts. To his surprise, he passed two county cars on the way, both driven by men who seemed to be watching for somebody.

  He’d changed vehicles just in time, he realized. Probably was some local problem that had them stirred up like a nest of hornets.

  THE GUNS OF LIVINGSTON FROST

  CONCLUSION

  Summary of ending:

  Now Myron Duson is heading for the Vernier farm in Louisiana. So is Martin Fewell on foot, and Washington Shipp has alerted the local sheriff to the potential danger facing the Frosts. Deputies are on their way.

  Alison is armed, as is Stony, and Lily has gained enough confidence to defend herself as well. They all will come together in an explosive encounter, which will leave an astonished Myron Duson wounded and in custody and poor Martin Fewell dead. However, the Frosts survive and return to their lives, both sister and brother now assured of care and affection from each other and their aged aunt.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The author of seventy books, more than forty of them published commercially, Ardath Mayhar began her career in the early eighties with science fiction novels from Doubleday and TSR. Atheneum published several of her young adult and children’s novels. Changing focus, she wrote westerns (as Frank Cannon) and mountain man novels (as John Killdeer), four prehistoric Indian books under her own name, and historical western High Mountain Winter under the byline Frances Hurst.

  Recently she has been working with on-line publishers. A Road of Stars was her first original novel to appear in print-on-demand format. Many of her out-of-print titles are now available from e-publishers fictionwise.com and renebooks.com; many other novels are being published by the Borgo Press Imprint of Wildside Press.

  Now eighty, Mayhar was widowed in 1999, after forty-one years of marriage, and has four grown sons. She works at home, writing short fiction and nonfiction, and doing book doctoring professionally. Her web pages can be found at: w2.netdot.com/ardathm/ and http://ofearna.us/books/mayhar.html