by Allen Kent
“A man’s got a right to defend his property. And you know I was just firin’ to warn you off. Otherwise I’d a shot you dead. What you want? We ain’t got nothin’ down here that don’t belong to us.” Then to the dogs. “Shut up, you damn sons-a-bitches or I’ll blow your damn heads off!” The dogs quieted fast enough that they understood and knew he meant it.
“I’m not worried about what you might be stealing, Verl. We’ve had a death, and I need to ask you some questions about it.”
“We ain’t shot nobody, neither. Who’s been kilt?”
“I didn’t say anybody’d been killed. Just that there’s been a death I need to talk to you about.”
“You wouldn’t be comin’ out here ‘cause someone’s dropped over from no heart attack. Who’s died?”
“Your neighbor. Nettie Suskey.”
There was silence for a long minute. Then, “What kilt her?”
“We don’t know. That’s why I . . . I want to talk to you and LJ.” My voice was wearing out from all the hollering and was starting to break like I was revisiting puberty.
“You think we kilt her?”
“I don’t have any idea who killed her. But you’re her closest neighbors. I thought you might have seen or heard something that would help.”
Another long silence. “Okay. You come on down. But we’re watchin’ you!”
I walked around the Ford and looked into the drainage ditch. No sign of Joseph. Just matted grass and a few broken branches. And some smashed poison ivy. She must have made her way back up to the road.
I eased the squad car the rest of the way down the hill, scanning the trees and brush on the right for signs of the state investigator. She had disappeared.
The Greaves lived in what could best be described as a bare metal building with two doors in one end: a garage-sized roll-up, and a regular walk-though door with a faded yellow curtain pulled across its single window. Old pickup trucks, tractors, a mid-sized CAT dozer, and rusty lawnmowers covered the ground on three sides, with the bare patch of dirt in front reserved for an engine hoist and a fenced pen that held two red-eyed pit bulls. Verl and LJ stood beside the hoist, the older man with a pump action twelve-gauge shotgun, Verl with what I recognized as a Marlin 336 with a scope. LJ’s chest-length beard and grease-stained bib overalls were legend in the county, allowing folks to spot him from across the square and steer clear. Verl’s sagging belly stretched his gray, long-sleeved denim shirt down over a matching pair of faded jeans. His head was shaved slick as a cue ball, but he sported a week’s growth of dark whiskers.
I climbed slowly from the squad car, keeping my hands where both could see them.
“You boys need to be a little more careful about using those weapons. You don’t want me coming down here because you really did shoot someone.”
“This is sovereign territory, once you turn off the ridge road,” LJ growled. “We have every right to be defendin’ it. You saw the sign.”
Both men had their weapons resting on their right shoulders, fingers inside the trigger guards. I nodded and tried to look unconcerned, hand close to my own weapon. “I’m not trespassing, and you only have a right to defend yourself if someone’s threatening you. I just need a little help from those who live close to Nettie.”
“We ain’t seen or heard nothin’,” Verl growled. “We leave the old woman alone, and she don’t come near us.”
“Your land butts up with hers along the back. You haven’t heard anything unusual over there?”
LJ waved his free arm in the direction of Nettie’s trailer. “She’s near a half-mile down the creek. Less it was a shot, we wouldn’t a heard nothin’ here. Somebody shoot the old biddy?”
“I don’t think Nettie ever did any harm to anyone, LJ.”
“Nor any good, neither,” he snorted.
I glanced around at the rusted skeletons of cars and machinery. “You boys doing anything to clear things out before they flood the valley?”
“Suing the sons-a-bitches,” Verl snapped. “Ain’t right that they can just say they want this land and take it from a man.”
“May not be right. But they can do it, Verl. They should be offering you fair market value.”
His hand tightened around the stock of the Marlin. “Ain’t no fair price for a place like this. It’s been our land since Pa’s grandpa settled here. And it’s got a good fifty thousand dollars-worth of timber. How you gonna value that?”
“You got a point there, Verl. They should be taking that into account. But I’m afraid they can take it.” I looked beyond the metal building and junked vehicles to where a scraped clearing still held a stack of walnut saw logs. “I see you been cutting some, and heard you’ve already taken a couple of loads to the mill.”
LJ shuffled uneasily. “If they flood it, we gotta be gettin’ what we can from it. Can’t be waitin’ til they run us off.”
“Some of the folks up on the ridge said they hadn’t heard any cutting the last few days. You taken what you plan to?”
“We been haulin’ logs,” LJ growled. “Getting’ them over to the mill.”
“People also said they’d been hearing logging on the back of Nettie’s place. You must have at least heard that.”
LJ swung the 12-gauge from his shoulder, the barrel pointed at my feet. “By people, you must mean that spastic little bastard down the road. Hell, he can’t hold hisself steady long enough to know what he’s hearin’.”
“I didn’t say who it was, LJ. Just that I’d received a report of logging on the back of Nettie’s land.”
“You hintin’ at something, Tate? Is that why you come down here? Thinkin’ we might o’ killed the old bitch for her timber? Well, you can just be getting’ your sad ass off this property.”
If there were two people in the county I knew would shoot me as soon as spit on me, I was looking at them. I forced what I hoped looked like a relaxed grin and wondered what the hell had happened to Mara Joseph.
“I’m not hinting at anything, LJ. I was just saying that I’d think if anyone was cutting timber on the back of Nettie’s place, you’d of heard it. And I didn’t see any roads cut in from behind her house. That would mean whoever was cutting must have come in from this end.”
Verl eased the Marlin around and pointed it just below my belt, still holding it with one hand. He hadn’t chambered a round while I’d been facing them, but I guessed one had replaced the bullet that shattered the sassafras.
“People been known to disappear round here for accusin’ people of less than that, Tate. Why don’t you just be puttin’ that handgun of yours on the ground in front of you. I ain’t sure we can be havin’ you spreadin’ gossip around about us, with Nettie bein’ dead.”
“Do you think me disappearing’s going to keep someone else from coming down here to question you guys? I’m not here to check on Nettie’s trees. I’m just trying to find out what happened to the old lady.”
“You’re just makin’ it sound like maybe we had something to do with it,” LJ said, pumping a shell into the chamber of the 12-gauge. “You’re trespassing on sovereign land that’s been posted, and I’d say now we’re feelin’ threatened.”
There’s no sound quite as distinctive and quite as disconcerting as that of a pump-action shotgun chambering a round—unless it’s the thump and whistle of an incoming IRAM round. I’d been conditioned in Iraq to duck and cover at the sound of a mortar, but I’d walked too far from the squad car to see any good cover if LJ got serious with the shotgun.
There was motion at the corner of the metal building behind the men at the same instant I heard her command.
“Put those weapons down. Now!” she ordered. “And if one of you so much as turns, I’ll drop you both.” For a small woman, the voice was hard as flint and edged with conviction. Both men stood frozen with uncertainty.
“I’d do what she says,” I suggested. “She’s got a 9-millimeter pointed right at the middle of your back.” I didn’t indicate whose back.
I swept out my own weapon and trained it on Verl’s chest as he bent toward the rifle. “Don’t do it, Verl,” I barked, and he pulled back.
LJ writhed with enough pain that it was clear his wound wasn’t mortal. “Keep Verl covered and I’ll see if I can stop up the bleeding,” I said to Joseph. “Then you’d better drive up to the ridge road and call for an ambulance.”
She skirted the younger man, picked up the rifle and shotgun, and tossed them into the back of the patrol car. LJ was conscious enough to follow her with a string of expletives. “You blew half my side off,” he screamed after her, followed by a list of descriptors that hung in the air like blue fog. She returned to Verl, cuffed his hands behind him to a brace of the engine hoist, and holstered her weapon.
“You think you can keep LJ there from beating you unconscious with his good arm while I call this in?” she asked with a cynical grin.
“I think I can handle it,” I said. She kept an eye on the three of us as she swung the Ford around in the clearing and gunned it up the hill toward clear reception.
6
Grace came out to drive Verl into the jail. Chase followed in his ambulance to pick up LJ. Two paramedics in a red pumper truck reached the holler about the same time. One rode with Chase in the ambulance to drip a little blood back into the old man during the hour and a half drive to Springfield.
“I’ve got a ‘Do Not Revive’ order out on that old bastard,” Joseph called to the medic as she slid back into the passenger side of the cruiser. “If you seem to be losing him, let him go.”
“Such hostility!” I said with a chuckle. “You’d think you were the one with the barrel pointed at your crotch.”
Her dark eyes stared daggers. “What were you going to do, Tate? Chat until one of them got worried enough to shut you up?
“They wouldn’t have shot me.”
“You were looking like you thought they might.”
“I was just getting ready to back away. They’d have let me go.” I saw no reason to tell her I was considering Frankie’s “drop, draw, and roll,” maneuver.
“That old man sure as hell was intent on shooting me!”
“Yeah, but you surprised him. And you’re not from around here. And a woman. Three strikes, all at once. Nice shot, by the way. You brought him down without killing him.”
“A foot left of where I intended.”
“Good thing. This saves us a coroner’s inquest and all kinds of paperwork.”
She shook her head. “There will be plenty as it is. What charges do you plan to bring?”
I was driving again and we were turning back onto the ridge road. “Against Verl? None. LJ’s going to be stoved up for a few weeks and for your sake, we’ll need to charge him with attempted assault. We’ll let Verl sit in jail while we check out the logging claim. That’s likely to get a judge more riled up around here than LJ turning a gun on you when you were on his place. And you were the one who got off a shot.”
“Damn it, Tate. We’re law enforcement officers, following up on a homicide lead. And the bastard turned his weapon on me.”
“Hey. I’m with you. But we were on posted, private land without a warrant, Joseph. They’d told me to leave. As much as people around here have no room for the Greaves, they have a lot less for people who don’t respect their property rights if there’s no warrant. And mean as they are, the old boys don’t have any history of shooting anybody.”
“You don’t think he would have shot me?”
“Oh, he would have shot you. But only because you came up behind them with a weapon. Castle doctrine, stand your ground, and all that stuff. Both will say they told me to leave, and you came up with a weapon drawn.”
“They were talking like they weren’t going to let you leave.”
“They’d have let me go. They knew other people knew we were at their place.”
“You don’t think they killed Nettie?”
Now there, I wasn’t so sure. If she had caught them cutting her trees and threatened to report them, one might easily have followed her home and suffocated the old woman. “I’m not ready to say that,” I confessed. “But we’ve got a few things to take care of before we do more to follow up.” I gave her a quick onceover to estimate the damage. “For one thing, when you bailed from the car back there, you rolled into a patch of poison ivy. I’m going to drop you at my place and you can shower and run your clothes through the wash before you do anything else. And I’d keep your hands off your jacket and pants until we get you cleaned up.”
Joseph’s hands flew out in front of her like she was about to catch a beachball. She looked down, wide-eyed at her uniform.
I suppressed a smile. “Your hands and face are the only exposed skin. If you got it on you there, you’ll probably break out. It needs to be washed off with soap within about fifteen minutes, max. If it’s just on your clothes, we can clean them up.”
“If it’s on my skin, we can’t do anything about it now?”
“I’ve got some stuff that can reduce the rash and itching. But once the oil gets into the skin, it’s nasty.” She sat for the next five minutes, hands extended and neck stretched away from her collar.
I live in a modest place on fifteen acres of woods overlooking the same stream that flows past the Greaves’ and Nettie’s place. I’m a good two miles upstream from where they plan to put the dam and, if anything, it’s going to be good for me. I figure the creek will be about twice as wide and half again as deep where it flows below the house. Perfect for smallmouth and crappie. The drive is gravel and a quarter-mile long, but I keep it graded and think of it as a nice rustic introduction to my kind of country living.
The house is sided in rough-cut cedar with windows covering the half that opens onto a wide covered deck facing south and overlooking the creek. I don’t have much time for yard work and have stuck with a patch of grass in front I can manage in fifteen minutes with a push mower. Hostas and azaleas crowd against the house on the shady north. A path of rust-colored flagstones runs from the concrete pad in front of the garage to the main porch, then around the side and though an arbor of wisteria to steps that climb onto the deck. I heard a light gasp from Joseph as we pulled up.”
“What a lovely place!” She didn’t sound at all like the gun-toting inspector who had just dropped LJ Greaves.
“Pretty basic,” I said. “But it does have a spare room with shower and a pretty good washer and dryer. Why don’t you let me come around and let you out. After I get you in the house, I’ll wipe down the vehicle.”
I led her into the front vestibule and suggested she ease off her jacket and turn it inside out. “I’ll take it into town with me and drop it at the cleaners when I go file my reports.”
She glanced curiously about the cedar-paneled entryway while she stripped off the jacket, her gaze settling on a painting of two dog-tired Civil War soldiers, one in blue, one gray, collapsed against opposite sides of a broken stone wall.
“One of Darnell’s paintings?”
“Yup. One of his early ones.”
“Amazing detail. You can see how beat these men are.”
“Beat and sad,” I agreed. “It’s a reminder when I come in each day of the futility of war—and violence in general.”
“You’re in a strange line of work for a pacifist,” Joseph said with a wry grin.
“If we work together very long, you’ll see I’m hardly a pacifist. And you can be in this job because you hate violence.”
“I guess that’s why we’re tracking down Nettie’s killer,” she agreed.
She followed me down a short hall to the spare room and bath on the right, but continued left into the main part of the ho
use. It’s basically open, a kitchen and dining area separated from the living room by a waist-high bar of polished walnut, open at both ends. Rustic tile in the eating areas. Tongue and groove oak flooring in the living room. My bedroom and bath go off the living room toward the back, opposite sliding doors that open out onto the deck.
Joseph stopped a step into the kitchen and swept the space with a critical eye.
“Did you design this?”
“I modified a plan I found somewhere. The bar was a wall in the original plan.”
“I love it. And these rugs? You brought them back from Iraq?”
“There, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.”
“I think of Middle Eastern carpets as being mainly red and black. But these are mostly grays and earth tones.”
“They’re actually Persian, traded into those other counties. That one’s a Nain.” I pointed at an elaborately patterned carpet in creams and browns beneath a rustic walnut coffee table. “And that one’s a Tabriz.”
“You know a lot about carpets.”
“Not really. I got what I liked and learned about them when I got home.”
“They look valuable. And I noticed your house wasn’t locked.”
“What for? If someone wants to break in, they’ll break in. I’m a quarter-mile from anyone and four miles out of town. No one would hear an alarm if I had one. Plus, where are you going to fence something like these rugs? They’d steal the coffeemaker and TV.”
She headed for the doors out onto the deck.
“Would you mind giving your hands a good scrub before you start touching everything? That’s why we came by here. Remember?”
She detoured to the sink, pushed the faucet arm up with an elbow, and squirted soap onto one hand with the other wrist. While she scrubbed, I wiped down the faucet she’d just contaminated and the top of the soap dispenser, then slid open the sliding doors to save her the trouble. She stepped out onto the deck, drying her hands on a paper towel. The slope dropped away steeply to the creek below, leaving an open view of a wide pasture beyond that filled the rest of the valley.