by Bill Crider
“I don’t care whether you call it the big house or the Graybar Hotel,” Yvonne said. “Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me.”
“And it’s not at Huntsville, either,” Linda said. “You’d be stuck out in Gatesville or somewhere. That dry weather out that way’s really bad on your skin.”
“Wouldn’t matter a whole lot, would it?” Yvonne said. “Not if I was locked up with a bunch of women. It’d be worth it, anyway, if the world was rid of you.”
Rhodes walked a few steps closer to the stand. The shelves behind the women were filled with fireworks wrapped in crinkly paper printed in bright red, yellow, blue, and shiny black. On one shelf there were stacks of black cat rockets, along with other bottle rockets and ten-ball Roman candles, some of them the whistling kind. Boxes of sparklers were stacked beside them. Above those items there were shelves filled with fountains and cones with names like Apache Firedance, Barracuda, Gargantua, and California Condor. Beside the fountains were some helicopters and airplane-shaped items, along with spinning disks. And there were firecrackers, lots of firecrackers, in all sizes: thunder bombs, silver salutes, M-80s, cherry bombs, black cats, and wolf packs.
It occurred to Rhodes that if everything went off all at once, there wouldn’t be just a fire. There would be a mushroom cloud over Blacklin County to rival those he used to see in the old black-and-white science fiction movies he watched on TV.
And there would be a great big crater right about where he was standing. It wasn’t an appealing prospect, but Rhodes wasn’t especially worried. People who talked as much as Yvonne was talking didn’t generally shoot anyone. After they’d let off enough steam, they were ready to forgive and forget and move on to something else.
“Yvonne,” he said, “you’re wrong about this whole thing. Ms. Fenton didn’t do anything, and we’re not even sure that Grat’s dead. We talked about that, remember?”
Yvonne kept her eyes on Linda Fenton when she spoke. “I remember. But Grat’s still missing, and there’s a dead body at the funeral parlor. This bitch here’s the one who did it, too. She likes to play with fire.”
“What about your husband’s girlfriend?” Linda asked.
“You better shut your mouth about that,” Yvonne said. “Grat didn’t like anybody but me.”
Rhodes was interested in hearing what Linda had to say. He hadn’t known about any girlfriend, and neither had Hack. For that matter, Hack didn’t seem to have known about Linda Fenton, either. It wasn’t usual for Hack to be so far out of the loop. Rhodes would have to ask him about that, if he ever got the chance. Yvonne was getting worked up again.
“I don’t know why you think he didn’t have a girlfriend,” Linda said. “After all, you were runnin’ around on him with half the men in the county.”
“You better stop talking like that about me,” Yvonne said. “I’m going to blow the both of us up if you don’t.”
With that, she stopped pointing the pistol at the Roman candles. She moved it up in line with the firecrackers.
Rhodes didn’t like the way things were going. He risked walking up to the fireworks stand until he was standing in the scant shade of the canopy. It was still hot, but at least the sun wasn’t burning a hole in the top of his head.
“Why don’t you just give me the pistol, Yvonne,” he said. “We can talk this over a lot better without that gun being in the way.”
“I don’t think so,” Yvonne said. “And I’m tired of talking, anyway. This bitch has started lying about Grat.”
She looked at all the firecrackers, smiled, and said, “I wonder what’ll happen when I pull the trigger?”
“You don’t really want to find out,” Rhodes said.
“Oh yes I do,” Yvonne said, and fired the pistol.
14
RHODES HIT THE DIRT AND ROLLED UNDER THE PLYWOOD COUNTER that jutted out from the front of the fireworks stand. From where he was lying, he couldn’t really see everything that happened, but he could see quite a bit more than he wanted to. And he could hear it all.
There were explosions, of course. Lots of them. They started with a string of firecrackers going off. After that everything ran together, pop-pop-pop-pop, like the .22 shots that Hack had described, only in far greater numbers. Through their rapid reports Rhodes could distinguish the much noisier blasts of the M-80s, the cherry bombs, and the larger silver salutes. He’d never been in a foxhole during wartime, but he thought the sound might be something like what he was experiencing now.
Besides the firecrackers and the bigger, louder devices, he could hear the keening of the rockets as they took off in a straight line over the counter and whistled toward the road before exploding. Rhodes hoped that Jennifer had stayed in her car.
The helicopters and spinning disks went off in all directions, gyrating and revolving as they made whirring and buzzing sounds. Some of them wobbled across the parking lot, pinged off the hood and roof of the county car, and landed on the ground, where they kept right on rotating madly, as if attempting to drill a hole in the hard-packed dirt.
The volcanoes and cones were spewing colors and noise, and balls of fire were bouncing off the underside of the roof of the stand and falling back down. Rhodes was all right under the counter, but he didn’t know about Linda Fenton and Yvonne on the other side. He thought for a second about getting up, but there was a whoomping sound like a thousand tiny mortars firing, and the Roman candles started to discharge colored balls of flame that flew out toward the road and bounced around on the dirt and gravel.
Rhodes had to admit that it was a spectacular sight, even from his vantage point. Even in the daylight. There were explosions of every color of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Well, maybe no indigo and violet, but plenty of the others.
All the burned powder smelled like the aftermath of a gun battle, and Rhodes could smell something else, too. The fireworks stand was burning.
Rhodes didn’t much feel like standing up, since the fireworks were still detonating fairly rapidly, but he supposed he didn’t have a choice. He had to see if Linda and Yvonne were all right.
He rolled forward, stood up, and eased his head above the counter. Sparklers were fizzing and sputtering brilliantly, but Rhodes didn’t have time to admire them. A Roman candle ball nearly took out his right eye, and a rocket whizzed by his left shoulder pulling a tail of sparks behind it. He ducked back down and waited a few seconds longer while the volcanoes erupted, the candles shot fire, the rockets glared red, and the firecrackers popped and blasted.
Finally things seemed to get a bit quieter. Rhodes wasn’t sure whether it was just his imagination or whether his hearing was permanently damaged, but he decided to take another look.
The sparklers had about fizzled out, and there were only a few random bursts of noise. To Rhodes’s surprise, there were still quite a few unexploded fireworks left on the shelves. He’d thought the entire contents of the stand had gone off, but only a couple of feet were missing.
Yvonne and Linda were huddled facedown on the ground, their hands over their heads. The roof of the stand was burning. Linda Fenton wasn’t moving, and neither was Yvonne. Rhodes couldn’t see the pistol.
He turned to look for Jennifer. The reporter was sitting in her car with her cell phone at her ear. She waved with her free hand to let Rhodes know she was all right.
The back of the stand was open behind the shelves, and some of the fireworks had gone out that way. Not many, but enough to set the dead johnsongrass on fire. Rhodes hoped Jennifer was calling the fire department instead of trying to find a wire service that wanted a story about the big explosion in Blacklin County.
He walked around the end of the counter to check on the two women. Linda Fenton sat up and looked around. The backs of her shirt and pants were scorched, but she seemed all right otherwise.
“What the hell happened?” she said, or something like that. Rhodes wasn’t quite sure. His ears still weren’t working properly.
> Yvonne Bilson didn’t say a word, not that Rhodes could hear. She just jumped up and started running toward the burning field. Rhodes didn’t think she’d get far, but she surprised him. She went through the barbed-wire fence as if she’d been practicing for the back-country Olympics and took off through the blazing grass like it wasn’t even on fire.
Rhodes considered yelling, “Stop, or I’ll shoot!” but he knew Yvonne wouldn’t stop, even if she could hear him, which he doubted, so there was nothing he could do but go after her.
He didn’t get through the fence nearly as quickly as Yvonne had. He’d never been extremely agile, and the barbs snagged first in the back of his shirt and then on the leg of his pants. He finally got through, but he knew the rip in his shirt couldn’t be repaired. He could probably save the pants, however.
Running through a grassfire on a hot day wasn’t Rhodes’s idea of a good time. The fire hadn’t really gotten started good, but Rhodes still felt as if the soles of his shoes were burning, and he was sure he didn’t have to worry about the snag in the shirt any longer. It was going to be burned and scorched so much that no one would ever notice the rip. He slapped at a spark that landed on the pocket.
The acrid smoke was biting into Rhodes’s lungs with every breath, and he knew that before long there would be a dark gray tower that could be seen from most parts of the county.
Rhodes ran out of the fire quickly, but it was following right along behind him as surely as he was following Yvonne. He was moving faster than the fire, because luckily enough there wasn’t much wind to spread it. Maybe it wouldn’t get to the trees before the fire trucks got there. Assuming that Jennifer had called for them.
Yvonne was going to get to the trees, however. Rhodes would never have thought she could run so fast. He thought that smoking was supposed to be bad for the lungs, but Yvonne smoked a lot, and it didn’t seem to have had any effect on her. Of course with all the smoke he’d inhaled as he ran, he might as well have smoked a pack a day for the past year or so.
Maybe, he thought, it wasn’t that Yvonne was running fast so much as that he was running slowly. Either way, she was gaining on him. The problem wasn’t the fire now. It was the grass, which was thick and high and hard to run through. Even though it was mostly dead, it slashed at Rhodes’s hands and arms, and occasionally even at his face.
Just as Yvonne got to the edge of the trees she stopped. Rhodes thought for a second that she was out of breath, and he felt a little surge of pride to think that he wasn’t really breathing so hard himself. No harder than if he’d run about ten hundred-yard dashes back-to-back while carrying a refrigerator on his shoulders.
But Yvonne wasn’t out of breath, and Rhodes learned where the pistol was.
She still had it, and it was in her hand.
And now she was shooting at him.
Rhodes didn’t actually hear the shot, but he saw a puff of smoke from the pistol barrel. He had no idea where the bullet went. All he knew was that it didn’t hit him, so he kept on going.
Yvonne fired again, but that shot didn’t hit Rhodes either. Yvonne said something, or Rhodes thought she did. He could see her mouth move. Probably something involving “son of a bitch,” Rhodes thought.
Yvonne didn’t say anything else. She turned and ran for the trees. She was into them quickly, but Rhodes wasn’t as far behind as he had been. He’d managed to gain a little ground while she was shooting at him.
When he got to the trees, he stopped for a second. It wouldn’t do to go rushing right into the little woods. It wasn’t that he needed to catch his breath, he told himself. He was stopping for safety reasons. He had to be careful. For all he knew Yvonne wasn’t any more than ten feet away, hiding behind the trunk of some patchy old elm or hickory nut tree, just waiting for him.
He looked back over his shoulder. The fire was still spreading but not rapidly. The smoke was floating lazily upward, and Rhodes thought he could see a billow of dust on the country road that might mean the fire trucks were on the way. If so, he’d have to thank Jennifer for her quick thinking.
He turned back to the trees. His breathing wasn’t so ragged now, and his lungs weren’t burning so much from the smoke.
Rhodes wondered how far the woods extended. Most of the land in this part of the county had been cleared long ago, and it was unlikely that there were woods of any size left. Yvonne had entered the woods at about the midpoint, and they extended for about a quarter of a mile in either direction. They probably weren’t more than a quarter of a mile deep, either, certainly no more than a half. Unfortunately that meant there were plenty of hiding places.
“Yvonne,” Rhodes called out. His voice sounded hollow and strange in his ears. “Are you in there?”
There was no answer. Or maybe there was, and he just couldn’t hear it. He pulled out his own pistol and started into the trees.
15
RHODES DIDN’T HEAR THE SHOT THIS TIME, EITHER, BUT IT WHACKED the bark off a tree near his right cheek, and he felt the sting as the chips of wood hit his face, narrowly missing his right eye. First the rocket, now the wood chips. Rhodes figured that the way things were going, he’d be lucky if he got home with both eyes intact.
He squatted down, but Yvonne didn’t fire again. He wondered if she was counting her shots. He was. She’d fired four, and she’d been carrying what looked like a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, the regulation police model with a three-inch barrel. It had probably belonged to Grat, not that it mattered. What mattered was how many cartridges were in the chambers. The pistol held six. Had Yvonne (or Grat, whoever had loaded it) left an empty chamber under the hammer? There was no way of knowing at the moment. What Rhodes did know was that Yvonne had either one or two shots left. So far she hadn’t proved to be accurate enough to scare him, but you never knew when a poor shot might get lucky. Even a blind hog rooted up an acorn now and then, as Dan Rather might say in the heat of presidential election coverage.
Not only did Rhodes not want to get shot himself, he didn’t want to have to shoot Yvonne. He didn’t like shooting people, especially people like Yvonne, who were grief-stricken and didn’t really know what they were doing. He’d seldom been forced to shoot anyone in his career as sheriff, and he was glad of it. Still, he kept his pistol in his hand. Maybe it would scare Yvonne, though Rhodes didn’t think that anything would scare her, not while she was in her current state of mind.
It was much cooler in the trees than in the field, thanks both to the shade and to the fact that the fire was still a hundred yards or more away. Rhodes couldn’t hear any birds or animals, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. There was no breeze at all to stir the leaves or to cool the sweat on Rhodes’s face.
Rhodes stood up, careful to keep the trunk of a tree between himself and where he thought Yvonne might be. He turned and looked back across the field and saw the pumper trucks from the fire department pulling up beside the fireworks stand. He hoped they’d get the fire under control quickly.
He tried to think about where Yvonne might be. She could be hiding or she could be running. He couldn’t hear her even if she was making a lot of noise, thanks to the ringing in his ears. He decided that running was probably the more likely option for her to choose. She hadn’t waited around for anything at the fireworks stand. Rhodes started walking, looking to his left and right, hoping that he would see Yvonne before she saw him, assuming she was still around to see him.
The sunlight that filtered down through the trees was just as hot as it had been out in the field, and Rhodes wished he had a drink of cool water to soothe his scratchy throat. He brushed his left hand across his sweaty face and looked at his fingers. They were dark with soot and dirt.
If Rhodes had been an expert woodsman, he might have been able to track Yvonne, but he wasn’t an expert. He could read obvious signs, like torn cloth stuck to a tree branch, and he could tell if someone had broken a limb off a bush, but that was about the extent of his skills. There was no piece of cloth a
nywhere, and there were no broken branches, so Rhodes had to hope that Yvonne would make some kind of mistake and lead him to her.
She didn’t. Rhodes came out of the trees without finding her, and walked into an open field. There was no sign of Yvonne anywhere. There was nothing but a stock tank with a low earthen dam and a few cattle grazing nearby, or trying to. This field had been kept clear. There was hardly any grass for the cattle to eat, and there was no place for Yvonne to have hidden herself. Rhodes thought she must still be in the woods. She’d gone sideways instead of through.
He started to head back to the trees when he thought he’d better check the tank. There was a chance that Yvonne might be hunkered down on the other side of the dam.
Rhodes couldn’t decide whether to walk around to one side of the dam or to go up over the top. There was a scraggly little willow tree on top, just about dead from lack of water. Its leaves were a sickly yellow, and quite a few of them were lying on top of the dirt around the bottom of the tree. As scrawny as the tree was, however, it would provide a bit of cover, so Rhodes thought he might as well go that way.
The dam wasn’t too steep, and Rhodes climbed it easily. He walked up behind the willow and eased his way through the sparse leaves until he could see the other side of the dam.
The little stock tank was nearly dry. The water had receded to a hole in the middle of where the tank had once been, and all around there was thick, cracked mud, dry on top but sloppy underneath. It was broken by trails the cattle had made as they went for a drink. Rhodes thought it was lucky that none of them had gotten mired down.
There was no sign of Yvonne, but there was a row of little bushes that stood down where the waterline had once been. She might be hidden behind one of them. Rhodes tried to get a little closer and have a look without leaving the partial concealment of the willow tree.