Hail Storme

by W L Ripley

  “When we’re done, asshole,” said Fatbeard. “Come back later.”

  “You tell him I was an asshole?” Chick asked me.

  “No,” I said, keeping my eyes on them. “Maybe he’s intuitive.”

  Jawline had the whiskey bottle. We could just walk away and come back later, but I was tired and it was my truck. And I wanted to drive it. Now. Personality quirk.

  “He don’t look intuitive to me,” said Chick. “Just another fat drunk. Plenty of those.”

  “One more time,” I said. “No trouble. Just want to get in the truck, then we’ll drive away. That’s all.”

  “Who’s he callin’ fat?” asked Fatbeard, jerking his head in Chick’s direction. “Who you callin’ fat, boy?”

  “Certainly not you, Twiggy. When you go to the movies do you stand at the back, or do they knock out an armrest?”

  “What’re you guys doing here, anyway?” asked the ferret.

  “We’re from the EPA,” I said. “We’re checking reports of creeping slime. You need to turn yourselves in. Go easier for you if you do.”

  Jawline lifted the bottle to his lips as Shit Happens reached into his jacket. Fatso started toward Chick. “You boys want some shit—” he began before he was interrupted by a left hand that snaked from Chick Easton, catching the bearded man in the throat. With the heel of my hand I smacked the bottom of the tilted whiskey bottle, ramming the hard glass into Jawline’s mouth. The glass cracked against the cowboy’s teeth, a sickening sound, and his head snapped back. He yelped, dropping the bottle, and it shattered on the asphalt. I kicked him in the shin and he screamed. Chick jumped up and kicked Ferret Face below the left shoulder, where the man was reaching into his jacket. The kick pinned the hand inside the jacket. There was a distinct pop, like marbles clacking together. The little man screamed and bent over, cradling the damaged arm.

  Before Jawline could straighten, I brought an elbow up alongside his jaw, a big target. He staggered back but didn’t go down. He was tough. I aimed a left jab at his throat, which missed and bounced off his shoulder. He rolled away, tried to cover with his arms, and set himself. I shot another left at his head and caught him on the ear. He shook his head, sending droplets of blood flying from his mouth. There was a half-moon cut out of his upper lip, and his teeth were pink with blood. He came at me, bony fists flailing. I took the blows on my arms and shoulders, but they still hurt. He was no boxer, but he’d been in plenty of street fights. The kind of guy willing to take punishment in order to get in his licks and hurt you. But he had too much booze in him. His feet and body rhythm were out of sync, betraying him. I kept him away with jabs and body shots.

  Finally, I faked to his midsection with a left, which caused him to drop his arms to cover, then I looped a left hook over his arms that caught him on the point of the chin. It spun him a quarter turn, and I drove a right uppercut into his solar plexus. It felt as good as a three-hundred-yard tee shot. His breath exploded from him in a shower of saliva and blood and he sat down hard on the pavement, blood running from his mouth and nose. He held up a hand. “No more,” he said, wheezing through split and swollen lips. “ ‘Nuff.”

  I stepped away from him, and he scrambled to his feet and ran away. He was smarter than his fat friend. The heavy drunk swung wildly at Chick, who leaned away from the impotent punches and slapped him—once, then again. The fat man winced, shook his head, and swung again. Slow learner. Chick slapped his hand away absently, then cuffed him on the ears, left, right, left, right. “Quit,” Chick said. “I can do this all day.”

  The ferret tried to get behind Chick, but I grabbed him by the collar and kicked him behind the knee. He didn’t weigh much, and I had him off his feet, using the momentum of his collapse to drive him against the fender of the Bronco. He thudded into the unforgiving metal and slumped to the pavement, moaning.

  Chick finished off the big man with a jump kick, the impact snapping his head back. His legs folded under him like paper, and the back of his head cracked against the pavement.

  Chick dropped his hands to his sides. Wasn’t even breathing hard. “These are some tough guys,” he said, fishing in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Need to be more careful where we hang out.”

  I grabbed the ferret by the front of his jacket and sat him against the tire. “Can you walk?” I asked him.

  His face was puckered up in a grimace. “My hand. It’s broke. Motherfucker broke my hand.”

  “Dirty names,” said Chick, shaking his head. “And I don’t even know your mother. Quit whining and give it to me.” Chick held out his hand, palm up, flexed his fingers as if calling for something. “Come on, let’s have it.”

  “What?” said the ferret. His hat was sideways on his head. His eyes were furtive.

  “Don’t play games with me. You still got one hand left. Want a matched set? I want what’s in the jacket.”

  “Who are you guys?” He was perplexed. One minute he was drinking whiskey, talking tough, terrorizing the parking lot, and the next thing he knows he’s sitting in the chat with a broken hand, his day screwed up, and two strangers standing over him.

  “I’m Butch Cassidy, and this here’s the Sundance Kid. Now gimme. Everything in your pocket. Pronto.”

  The ferret reached into his jacket with his good hand, mumbling to himself. His right hand had an obscene knot on it. He didn’t look Chick in the eye when he handed him the wheel-shaped disk and the small lump of aluminum foil. The disk was a Japanese throwing star. Chick looked at it and smiled, then his shoulders began to bounce up and down merrily. He held the star up and squinted at it.

  “We were in serious danger here,” Chick said. “This man has been trained in the martial arts.” He looked at the man on the ground, whose face was turning red. “Where’d you get it, shit-for-brains? Comic book ad? And what’s this?” He rustled the tinfoil. “Ex-Lax? Looks like rock candy. What do you think, Storme?” He handed me the tinfoil, and I looked at the crystal, the cousin to the ones I’d recovered in the woods where a dog lay dead and a man with an arrow wound had run away from a million-dollar field of dreams.

  “It ain’t nothin’,” the man said, licking his lips with a sharp tongue. “Give it back.”

  I shook my head and closed my fist around the rock. “Believe we’ll keep it.” The ferret started to protest, changed his mind, then started again.

  “You’re pissing on the wrong guy, buddy,” he said. “I got friends’ll fuck up your life.”

  “I doubt you have all that many friends,” I said, helping him to his feet. “So peddle that crap somewhere else.” I straightened his hat on his head and made sure he could walk on his own. He forgot to thank me. We got into the Bronco and left him and Fatso to lick their wounds. He gave us the finger as we drove away. Another new friend.

  “Let’s get something to eat,” Chick said. “Slapping creeps around always gives me an appetite.”

  “It’ll wait.” My hands hurt. The left one was swelling. “Have to stop by the sheriff’s office first.”

  “What’s in the foil?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t. But it wasn’t rock candy.

  THREE

  The Paradise County sheriff’s office was a new building. Gray brick and aluminum and glass. Landscaped lawn. No potbellied stove with a speckled coffeepot on top. No oak racks of Winchesters on the wall or skeleton keys on a big iron ring. No hardwood floors bleached with use and spur-pocked. No character. No ambience. Progress. Antiseptic and way overrated. A deputy with corporal’s stripes manned the desk. The name on his pocket nametag was Simmons. I asked to see the sheriff.

  “He’s out. We got a call from the Silver Spur, a bar. Fight or something. He should be back soon. Can I help you?”

  I looked at Chick. He shrugged his shoulders. “No,” I said. “We’ll wait. He said to ask for him.”

  Corporal Simmons led us to a small waiting lounge. There was an instant coffee machine, a Coca-Cola machine, and a large windowed snack-and-candy m
achine, the kind with the corkscrew dispensers to push the candy out. I put two quarters in the big red Coke machine and a scarlet-and-white can clattered out onto the silver lip. Chick shook his head at the offered can and lit a cigarette. I sat on an aluminum-framed davenport with cheap cushions. Drank my Coke. Read a year-old copy of Sports Afield. Black cigarette burn marks pocked the sofa, and the air was rank with the soaked-in aroma of stale tobacco. After a few minutes I closed the magazine.

  “Where’d you learn that stuff?” I asked Chick.

  “What stuff?”

  “Karate.”

  “Oh, that. I watch a lot of television.”

  I waited for more, but there was no more forthcoming. Okay, so he wasn’t going to say. Fine with me. He had his reasons. I had mine. Been a long time since I’d seen anyone move so quickly, so fluidly. Not since I quit playing football, anyway. Maybe it was the unexpectedness of it. Thought he was a burnout. The boilermakers he’d knocked back hardly affected him. The guy had instincts. I had bruises all over my upper body, swollen hands, and a cut along my neck. They hadn’t laid a finger on him.

  He was intuitive and likable and had that strange smile—a world-weary smile that seemed to speak of thousands of miles of knowing that life was, at best, a tough bargain entered into by fools and madmen.

  A big deputy with sergeant’s stripes and a beechwood-aged gut hanging over a tooled-leather belt stepped into the room. He wore cowboy boots and had a Colt .45 Government Model strapped to his side. His shirt collar was open and his pants pockets were smudged. His nametag, which said BAXTER, was crooked over his shirt pocket. All he needed was a pair of mirrored sunglasses or a bulge of chewing tobacco in his cheek to complete the picture.

  “Bet he’s got a pouch of Red Man in his desk drawer,” Chick said, reading my thoughts.

  “You the guys waiting for Sheriff Kennedy?” asked Deputy Baxter. He dug at a back molar with a finger.

  “Not me,” Chick said. “I’m just here to study crime-stopper techniques.”

  The deputy’s jaw tightened. “You think you’re some kind of comic? You look like you been drinking, too.”

  “Never touch the stuff, officer,” Chick said, flashing his disarming smile. “Drink the crap out of it, but I never touch it.”

  This wasn’t going too well. Easton was not a first-impression kind of guy. I said, “We’re here to see Kennedy.”

  The big county cop gave Chick one more look, then said, “The sheriff ain’t here, so you can talk to me. My office is just down the hall. C’mon along.” He jerked his head in the direction of the doors down the hall.

  “Thanks anyway. We’ll wait for the sheriff.”

  “You look familiar.” He cocked his head to look at me. The look was reptilian. Greasy. One eye didn’t track as well as the other, as though a nerve or a tendon had been damaged. His nose had been broken before. Often. The knuckles of his right hand were gnarled and misshapen. Probably a thumper. “I seen you before?”

  I shook my head.

  “You two come along with me and I’ll get your statements,” he said, ignoring my preference to talk with the sheriff.

  “Sorry. The sheriff said to ask for him.”

  “Well, he ain’t here right now, is he?” He was used to getting his way. Move too slowly getting into the patrol car on a lonely road and you got a knee in the gut. I didn’t like him. “So I guess you’ll just have to talk to me.”

  I said, “No.”

  His hand rested on the butt of the .45. “You got somethin’ in your ears? I said for you to come along, and you damn well better.”

  “Dale Carnegie grad, right?” said Chick.

  He turned his gaze to Chick. “What’s your name, fella?”

  “Randolph Scott,” said Chick. “You’ve probably seen my movies.”

  “Funny guy, huh? Had ’em in here before. You ever hear of obstruction of justice?”

  “Wasn’t Steven Seagal in that?”

  Baxter’s face turned crimson, then purple. The bad eye went blotchy, like the eye of a vulture. If he had any molars left they were superbly enameled. It was time to leave. A good plan. I stood to do so just as a tall man whose nametag said kennedy entered the waiting room. He looked at the three of us, sized up the situation, then spoke to me. “You the guy?” he asked. “One that called?”

  I nodded. To Easton, he said, “You with him?” Easton nodded also. The reticence twins. Kennedy was taller than me, slightly overweight, but with a formidable pair of shoulders. Early fifties, some scar tissue along his right eye. Somewhere along the line he had forced his will upon someone—or resisted someone else’s. I was glad we weren’t still in the parking lot when he answered the call. He led us into his office. Deputy Baxter didn’t look very happy. Maybe I’d send him a Christmas card. Make it up to him.

  In the sheriff’s office we sat in aluminum chairs padded with vinyl, similar to those in the lounge only without the cigarette burns. Probably not wise to burn holes in Kennedy’s furniture. On the walls were pictures of other officers—fresh-faced deputies with square jaws and bright eyes, older-looking constables with weathered jowls and straw cowboy hats, men who looked like they meant what they said. There were other pictures. A teen-aged boy in a football uniform. The same boy-face in a Marine uniform. Had his father’s eyes. A picture of a girl with neither her father’s eyes nor bulk—teenaged and slender in a cheerleader’s outfit. She had straight teeth and a melt-your-heart smile. Apple of Daddy’s eye. No wife pictures. A diploma from the University of Missouri—criminal justice. They didn’t give those things away for cereal box tops. The guy was no rube. His desk was large, neat. Everything in its place, though it spoke of great activity.

  “I’m Sheriff Kennedy,” he said, sitting down. “What’d you say your name was again?”

  He was good. “I didn’t,” I said.

  He turned his attention to Chick. “You got a name?”

  “Clayton Moore.”

  “You give that name to Baxter?”

  “No, I gave him my stage name.”

  He looked us over. “I could book you both on suspicion. Make you ID yourselves.”

  “You’ve got more important things to do,” I said.

  “Or, I could arrest you for disturbing the peace. Better get some ice on that hand. You slam a door on it?” He picked a pipe out of a round walnut pipe rack and settled back in his chair. He didn’t light it, just stuck it between his teeth and chewed on the stem. “Wonder if I call Citizens Memorial if they’ll tell me if they’ve had anyone in the ER the past hour with bruises, lacerations, loose teeth? That kind of thing. Like they’d been in a fight.” He took the pipe from his lips and pointed the bit at me. “How’d you get that cut on your neck?”

  “I could say the dog did it.” He was very good. We each knew what the other was thinking.

  He filled the pipe from a leather-covered humidor. “Tell you what I’ve got, gentlemen. Coming in I got a report of three guys at ER. One broken hand. One with a concussion. All had multiple cuts and lacerations. Three local punks. I’ve had ’em all in our little hotel for one thing or another. Assault, public intoxication, pimping out at the truck stop, possession of controlled substances. Solid citizens. Lawyer, name of Winston, always manages to get them off or reduce the penalty. Frustration runs high in this job. These three guys imagine themselves tough. Some people around here would agree with them. Can’t imagine anyone around here that could bounce ’em around like that. Doc Collins said they look like they fell in a blender.” He’d bitten down hard on the pipestem when he mentioned the lawyer, but smiled when he related the condition of our three buddies.

  He continued. “Funny thing, there was nobody at the Silver Spur who saw anything. There’s blood all over the parking lot. Some on you two, also. I’ve got an anonymous phone caller says he took out a rifleman and a Doberman with a bow and arrow like he was Robin Hood…” Chick looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Then, I got a skip-tracker with a fat federal dossi
er, but I can’t look at it and the feds aren’t sharing. Why are the feds keeping a tab on you, Easton?”

  If Chick was surprised, he didn’t show it. “I tore one of those tags off my mattress.”

  “Made you a couple days ago,” Kennedy said. He lighted the pipe with a wooden kitchen match. Folksy. Taking his time. Letting us think about it. “Checked on you. You got some papers on a skip named Prescott. Then the suits show up. For some reason they’re interested in you, Easton.” He shook the match out. “Why?”

  Chick shrugged. “They think I’m the lost Lindbergh baby.”

  They looked at each other across the desk. Kennedy’s eyes burned a hole through the plume of blue smoke hanging in the air between them. Easton looked amused. Calm. “Long as you don’t screw up in my county I got no problem with you.” The county badge turned his attention back to me. “Who are you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’ll leave your name out of this,” he said. “Yours, too, Easton.” He didn’t say anything hokey like he promised or “word of honor.” Just looked at us with intense, whiskey-brown eyes and said it.

  “Storme,” I said. “Wyatt Storme.”

  “The football player?” He settled back in his chair, appraising me. I wasn’t going to help him out. “Yeah. You’re him. Walked out, didn’t you? Didn’t hold a press conference. Just called in and told them you weren’t coming. They thought it was a holdout trick. Press beat the bushes for months. No drumroll. No interviews. Just faded away. I like that. Now, here you sit in my office.”

  I waited.

  “Tell me about the marijuana field.”

  I told him. About the field, about the dog, about the rifle in my truck and the guy with the arrow wound. Told him about our parking lot prayer meeting with his three friends. Gave him exact directions to the field of Cannabis sativa. He didn’t interrupt. Occasionally nodded. Smiled when I told him how Chick broke Shit Happens’s hand.