Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 08 - Winning Can Be Murder

WINNING CAN BE MURDER

Book Eight of the Dan Rhodes Mysteries

By Bill Crider

A Gordian Knot Mystery

Gordian Knot is an imprint of Crossroad Press

Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / Bill Crider

Cover images courtesy of:

Nicolas Raymond
(Texas flag image)

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Meet the Author

BILL CRIDER
is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island.  He won the Golden Duck award for “best juvenile science fiction novel” for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror.  He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.”  His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award for best short story.

Check out his homepage at: http://
www.billcrider.com
or take a look at his peculiar blog at
http://billcrider.blogspot.com

Book List

Novels:

The Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery Series

Too Late to Die

Shotgun Saturday Night

Cursed to Death

Death on the Move

Evil at the Root

Booked for a Hanging

Murder Most Fowl

Winning Can Be Murder

Death by Accident

A Ghost of a Chance

A Romantic Way to Die

Red, White, and Blue Murder

“The Empty Manger,” (novella in the collection entitled
Murder, Mayhem, and Mistletoe
.)

A Mammoth Murder

Murder Among the O.W.L.S.

Of All Sad Words

Murder in Four Parts

Murder in the Air

The Wild Hog Murders

The Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen

Compound Murder

The Carl Burns Mystery Series

One Dead Dean

Dying Voices

…A Dangerous Thing

Dead Soldiers

The Truman Smith Mystery Series

Dead on the Island

Gator Kill

When Old Men Die

The Prairie Chicken Kill

Murder Takes a Break

The Sally Good Mystery Series

Murder Is An Art

A Knife in the Back

A Bond with Death

The Stanley Waters Mystery Series (Willard Scott, Co-Author)

Murder under Blue Skies

Murder in the Mist

Stand-Alone Mystery and Suspense Novels

Blood Marks

The Texas Capitol Murders

Houston Homicide (with Clyde Wilson)

House-Name Spy Fiction

The Coyote Connection (a Nick Carter book, in collaboration with Jack Davis)

Western Novels

Ryan Rides Back

Galveston Gunman

A Time for Hanging

Medicine Show

Outrage at Blanco

Texas Vigilante

As Colby Jackson:

Dead Man’s Revenge

Gabby Darbins and the Slide-Rock Bolter

Horror Novels (all published under the pseudonym “Jack MacLane”)

Keepers of the Beast

Goodnight, Moom

Blood Dreams

Rest in Peace

Just before Dark

Books for Young Readers

A Vampire Named Fred

Muttketeer

Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster

Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man

Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror

Short Story Collections:

The Nighttime is the Right Time

WINNING CAN BE MURDER

Chapter One

O
n certain late fall evenings in most small Texas towns, Sheriff Dan Rhodes thought, you could actually
smell
football in the air.  It smelled like the first cool days of the season and burning leaves and popcorn and roasted peanuts and leather.

You could hear it, too.  You could hear the bands tuning up in the grandstand and then playing “Them Basses” and “March Grandioso” and the school fight song.  You could hear the play-by-play announcer’s echoing voice reminding everyone to make a trip to the concession stand sponsored by the Band Boosters Club for a refreshing soft drink before the game.

And of course you could see it.  You could see the dust motes drifting through the headlights of the last cars arriving at the field, and you could see the haze of yellow light that hung over the field itself, often the only place in town where any lights were on, since everyone was at the game.

Some people said that high school football was almost as important as religion to people in Texas, but Rhodes knew better than that.  It was
more
important.  People just didn’t want to admit it.

Rhodes, however, didn’t think that Billy Graham at the height of his powers, or even a tag-team duo of Graham and Billy Sunday, could have filled the high school stadiums in every city and town in Texas for ten weeks every fall, not for fifty or sixty years in a row; but high school football could.  And did.  It didn’t even matter whether the home team had a winning record.  The crowds came out just the same.

On this particular fall evening, practically everyone in Clearview, and for that matter in most of Blacklin County, with the exception of the sheriff, was riding the wave of the kind of elation that comes to small towns only occasionally in their history — when the high school team is headed for the state play-offs.

Winning a state championship meant something to a town.  You could tell it when you saw the signs erected at the city limits of every town whose team had won one.  Some of the school colors on the signs were faded by time, the metal flecked with rust, but the signs were still there:

WELCOME TO MEXIA

HOME OF THE
MEXIA BLACKCATS!

TEXAS HIGH SCHOOL STATE 3-A FOOTBALL CHAMPIONS

1988!

A state championship was something that up until this year people in Clearview had only dreamed of.  The Clearview High team had never won one.  A team had come close once, in 1949, and people still talked about it at Lee’s drugstore on Saturday mornings where the town’s biggest fans met the coaches for coffee and hashed over the previous evening’s game.  They remembered the players’ names, their numbers, and all the ways in which the big game had gone wrong for Clearview.

The game had been played somewhere in the Texas Panhandle, and while Rhodes had once known the name of the winning school well, he could no longer recall it.  He had been too young to go to the game, but his father had gone and had talked about what had happened for weeks afterward.  Clearview had lost, fifty-four to seven.

“When those Panhandle boys ran out on the field,” he’d said, “I thought they were going to kill our boys.”

“You don’t mean that,” Rhodes’ mother said.  “You shouldn’t exaggerate so much.”

She was standing at the stove, Rhodes recalled, wearing a white apron with blue stitching as she fried chicken in a heavy iron skillet.

“I do mean it,” his father said.  “I really thought they were going to kill our boys.”

Rhodes’ father always came into the kitchen to talk to his wife while supper was being prepared.  Sometimes they listened to
One Man’s Family
on the radio, but mostly they talked.

“They were so big,” he went on, “they made our boys look like pee-wee leaguers.  I swear there were two or three of ’em that looked like they were thirty years old.  Every one of them probably has to shave twice a day with an Eversharp Schick.”

Rhodes’ mother turned over a piece of chicken in the skillet with a long two-pronged fork.  Grease popped and hissed.

“It’ll be a long time before we get that far in the play-offs again,” Rhodes’ father said, shaking his head.  “A long, long time.”

It had been longer than anyone had really thought, more than forty years, but it looked as if the time had come at last, the time for Clearview to erase the memory of a humiliation that had lasted for generations.

Which explained why everyone in town, everyone in the whole county, was elated.

Except Rhodes.  To the sheriff, the fact that the Clearview Catamounts had won every district game except the last, the one that was being played this evening, meant something quite different, especially on Friday nights.

It meant minors consuming alcoholic beverages; it meant too many arrests for DWI; it meant gambling, often enough right out in the open, right out in the parking lot near the stadium; it meant fights at every club in town; it meant making sure that the rivalries on the field didn’t spill across the sidelines, onto the benches and into the stands; it meant pulling his deputies in from patrol on Friday nights so they could police the parking lot and the stadium.

It also meant a considerable bit of worry about something that so far as Rhodes knew had never happened anywhere in Texas.  If anyone wanted to burglarize on a large scale, a Friday night like this one would be the perfect time.  There probably were more deserted homes in most small towns than there were occupied ones.

In fact, Rhodes wondered why whole towns hadn’t been looted before now.  Even the stores and banks were practically begging to be robbed.  Maybe, he thought, it hadn’t happened because all the crooks were football fans, too.  They were probably at the games.

Even if they were, Rhodes still didn’t like the possibilities, though he had to admit to himself as he walked toward the stadium that he did like the games, and this one promised to be a good one.

The Catamounts had won all their district games to this point by an average of something like twenty points.  Their opponents tonight, the Garton Greyhounds, who were favored to win by a touchdown, were also undefeated in the district, and they had outscored their opposition by an even wider margin than the Catamounts, thanks to a running back who had averaged nearly two hundred yards a game and had college recruiters from California to Florida and all points north drooling on their scouting reports.

Now the last car was parked and Rhodes could hear the cheers of the crowd building in intensity.  Any second now, the Garton band would play its school song, which would be followed by the Clearview song and then “The Star-Spangled Banner.”  It was time for Rhodes to make a last circuit of the stands and then meet Ivy at the main gate.  If he hurried, he might make it in time for the kick-off.