Blanco County 04 - Guilt Trip (9 page)

Buford shook his head, thinking,
What is this guy made of?

“Man paid me to do it,” Joe explained. “Bums was hanging around outside his office at night, getting wasted, pissing all over the place. Somebody finally broke in, so the guy’d had enough. I didn’t want to lay hands on those nasty bastards, so I figgered I’d holler at ‘em and run ‘em off with the paintball gun. The thing was, I figgered the cops couldn’t get me on assault for something like that. Not touching them or nothing. Stupid me.”

They’d both posted bail the next day, and Little Joe had asked for a ride.

“Where to?” Buford asked.

“Wherever you’re going.”

Joe turned out to be a pretty good little assistant, running details down for Buford, spelling him on stakeouts. Buford got used to having the extra set of ears and eyes real quick, so they had worked up a loose employment agreement. Buford decided, since he was the one with contacts and experience, they’d split the dollars three to one. Joe didn’t have a problem with it. It had worked out real nice so far.

Joe was holding the bottle with one hand, thumbing nonstop through the channels with the other. “You got a plan yet?”

“Working on it.”

“Which way’s Colby’s ranch?”

“Down 281, right on Miller Creek Loop. About ten minutes to get there.”

“KINDA CHILLY THIS morning,” Phil Colby said.

“Yep,” Marlin replied. “Don’t you worry. It’ll warm up quick.”

“No doubt. So what’s the plan?”

It was minutes after sunrise, and they were parked side by side near the low-water crossing into the Mucho Loco subdivision. Just the two of them, no more volunteers.

“I’ll cross to the other side, then we’ll just walk the banks downstream. Let’s keep an eye on each other, and just holler if you see anything.”

Colby nodded and pulled his truck onto a grassy area beside the road. Marlin drove slowly across the bridge; the water was low enough now that it barely reached his hubcaps.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was wasting his time, but he couldn’t give up the search yet with so many unanswered questions. Suppose Scofield had been driving the Corvette and Stephanie Waring had been following, maybe an hour later, in the SUV? But what if the water had risen too high by then and she had been swept away? Scofield might’ve waited for her at some meeting place and, when she didn’t show, figured she had changed her mind. He’d think,
Well, she didn’t want to run away with me after all.
Then he’d hit the road alone.

Who the hell knows?

Any number of scenarios were plausible, and several of them ended with a body in the river. That’s why Marlin had to keep looking.

Ernie and Nicole were starting from scratch, speaking to the same people they had already interviewed, hoping to learn where Scofield might have gone. But last night, after talking to Rita Sue Metzger, Bobby Garza had warned Marlin that he couldn’t commit much manpower to the investigation. “We’ve got two possible scenarios,” Garza had said. “Somebody drowned in Scofield’s vehicle, in which case there’s not a lot we can do at this point. Or Scofield took off in the Vette, with or without Stephanie Waring, and there’s not a lot we can do there either, except wait and see. Until we can find out
why
the SUV ended up in the river, we don’t even know that a crime has been committed.”

“What about the stolen Corvette?” Marlin had asked.

“I talked to a guy at the dealership, and they don’t want to report it as stolen yet. They want to wait and see if Scofield turns up with it. That means all we’ve got on it is a BOLO.”

So Marlin parked his truck on the far side of the river and began to trudge along the soggy banks. Colby matched his pace on the other side, roughly eighty yards away. Marlin couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the river this ugly, with all kinds of trash and debris snagged in trees and brush along the banks. It was slow going, stepping through mud that tried to suck his boots off, crossing over, under, or through barbwire fences, stopping to inspect items that offered promise, anything that might reveal who had been in Scofield’s vehicle.

After covering less than three miles in two hours, Marlin was getting discouraged. Then he heard a shout from across the river.

He looked up and saw that Colby was pointing downstream.

A buzzard was drifting lazily above the water.

Then Marlin saw another…and another. Two hundred yards downriver, five or six of the scavengers circled, with a dozen more perched in the upper branches of a sycamore tree. Marlin knew from experience, the larger the carcass, the more buzzards that showed up to feast.

He lifted his binoculars but couldn’t see what had attracted the birds’ interest. He continued his hike.

Sitting in a Denny’s in Miami, Lucas had to decide how he was going to approach this whole car business. He needed to dump the Corvette, but he had to be careful how he went about it. You don’t just walk right up to somebody and say, “Hey, you wanna buy a stolen car? I’ll make you a hell of a deal.” They needed the money, though. He didn’t have much left, less than a thousand bucks.

Stephanie was having waffles, but she’d eaten just a few bites. She seemed depressed. Or maybe just tired. They hadn’t spoken much this morning.

“So, my hair looks okay?” Lucas was no longer a blonde. His hair, according to the package, was now “chestnut brown,” and his goatee was coming in quickly. Stephanie had refused to do anything to her appearance.

“Looks fine,” she said.

“You all right?”

She nodded and yawned. “Just wanna get there.”

They’d covered less than three hundred miles yesterday, mostly because Stephanie had started bitching about riding in the car. She’d wanted to take a break. They could’ve been in Key West by now, but he didn’t bring that up. He managed a smile. “We’ll sell the car, then we won’t have to worry about nothing.” Nothing except money, a place to stay, and a phony ID for him, maybe for her. “It’s gonna be great, Steph, I promise.” How many times had he told her that in the last three days?

Stephanie picked at her waffles, then stopped. “If we sell the car, how we gonna get to Key West?”

He knew that question would come up, and he’d been trying to think of an answer. There were a couple of possibilities. “I was thinking maybe a bus.”

Her face scrunched up. “A bus? We gotta ride a fuckin’ bus?”

For the first time, Lucas was starting to get seriously angry. He leaned forward and said, “In case you don’t remember, you came along on your own. Nobody forced you.”

She laughed sarcastically “I must’ve been really drunk.”

“Oh, come on, Stephanie. Vance treated you like shit. He wasn’t ever gonna marry you, you know that. And the scumbag was
cheating
on you. You don’t deserve that kind of crap.”

“Yeah, but I was cheating on
him,
too. With you.” She said it like an accusation. Like it was his fault.

“That was different. That was only ‘cause you already knew what he was doing.” Lucas knew it sounded lame.

She shook her head and sat in silence.

Lucas could hear dishes clanking back in the kitchen, the sound of a microwave. An old man a few tables away was griping about his eggs to the waitress.

“Man, I bet Vance is royally pissed,” Stephanie said.

Lucas had no idea at all how to respond to that.

“Especially since you were working together,” she said. “Now he’ll have to find someone else.”

“He’ll be okay.” He hated himself for lying.

“And you were making good money. Now what? We’re gonna run out of cash sooner or later. Can’t use our credit cards, can’t write checks.”

Lucas knew Stephanie was wavering, ready to change her mind and scrap the whole plan. He just had to get her to Key West before her spirits sank completely. He dug into his pocket and came out with two small tablets, which he placed on the table.

She saw the Ecstasy and her eyes lit up. She even smiled a little.

He said, “I was kind of saving these for a celebration. For when we got there. But I figure we’re close enough.”

It was a dead cow, bloated and ripe and stinking in the sun on Marlin’s side of the river. He could smell it from fifty yards away.

Here, the river shot straight and true for a good half mile, and Marlin shook his head in frustration. How many more miles was it to Lake Travis? Maybe twenty-five? He couldn’t possibly comb the entire length of the Pedernales.

And if the body
had
reached the lake, the odds were really stacked against him. Then he’d have to rely on pure chance, on an observant boater noticing something odd floating in the water, or a fisherman stumbling across a gruesome discovery on the shore.

He looked across the river at Colby, who raised his arms, his body language asking,
What now?

Marlin pointed back the way they had come. Back to the trucks. It was time to come at this from a different angle, the one that assumed nobody had been in Scofield’s SUV after all. Maybe Bobby Garza’s intuition was right.

Buford drove slowly past the entrance to Phil Colby’s place, the Circle S Ranch. Just doing a little reconnaissance, getting a good look-see. He couldn’t spot a house anywhere back there off the road, but he didn’t expect to. Place was big, and the house was likely smack in the middle, maybe a mile or two inside the ranch. Could be a challenge.

The radio was playing a Derailers tune, those boys smooth as silk with that mix of Bakersfield, back-to-basics honky-tonk, and a little swing thrown in. But Little Joe was singing along, off key, tone-deaf for sure.

“I figure we’ll try this the easy way first,” Buford said, working a cigar in his mouth. “Get inside the house and have a look around. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“Works for me.”

Buford found a gravel driveway and turned the big Caddy around, cruising past the ranch entrance again.

The tricky part was, how could they get onto the ranch without causing a stir?

“We could say we’re deer hunters,” Joe said, as if Buford had asked the question out loud. “We already know he leases the place out.”

Joe was onto something. The Internet search had revealed all kinds of things about Phil Colby. For one thing, the boy had caused a big ruckus in the hunting community. Colby hated high fences and had sued a man over it. The more Buford had read, the more he was certain they had found their man. Now they just needed to find the negatives.

“Thanks for your help,” Marlin said, sitting on the tailgate of his Dodge, uneasy about what he was about to say next. Colby was next to him, sipping from a plastic bottle of Gatorade. It was nearly noon now, the temperature in the upper seventies. A beautiful day, with high cirrus clouds rippling the sky as if a stone had been tossed into still water.

“No prob,” Colby said, wiping his mouth with a sleeve. “Sorry we didn’t turn anything up.”

Marlin started talking before he decided to delay it yet again. “Hey, listen. You remember Max Thayer?”

“Yeah, sure. That warden down in San Antonio. We met up with him at the Spurs game last year.”

“Uh-huh. Well, he’s retiring.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, and moving down to Corpus.”

“Good for him. He seemed like a really nice guy.”

“He is.” Marlin paused for just a moment, all raw nerves now, then simply blurted it out. “They’re looking for someone to transfer into his place. I’m thinking about putting in for it.”

Colby stopped with the bottle halfway to his mouth, his eyes locked on Marlin’s. “You gotta be shittin’ me.”

“Nope. It’d be a promotion to captain. More pay. I’d be in charge of seven counties.”

Colby shook his head, staring at Marlin as if he’d just announced that he liked accordion music. “But San Antonio? Living in a big city like that?”

“Not San Antonio. I could live anywhere I wanted in that region, out where it’s quiet.”

“But what—” A look of realization spread across his face. “This is about the wedding, isn’t it?” He laughed.

“No, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”

“It was the wedding,” Colby repeated. “It brought on some kind of midlife crap, and now, well, now you’re fixing to do something really stupid.”

“Thanks for your support.”

“Man, you don’t need my support, you need a shrink. Picking up and moving ain’t gonna help.”

“I’m burned out, Phil. I need to make a change.”

Colby stared at the river.

“My parents are long gone,” Marlin said. “I don’t have a family. There’s nothing keeping me here.”

It was the wrong choice of words, and he could immediately see the hurt in Colby’s eyes.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” Marlin said.

Colby shook his head again and drained the last of the Gatorade. He tossed the empty bottle into the bed of Marlin’s truck. “Yeah, whatever. I personally think you’re insane.” He reached for the keys in his front pocket.

“I’ve been here all my life,” Marlin said. “Maybe it’s time for me to try something new.”

“Yeah, like Prozac,” Colby said, then turned for his truck. “I’ll catch you later, John. I’ve got work to do.”

Bubba Parker was a mere five minutes away from finishing a transmission job, but he stopped what he was doing because it was seven minutes before twelve. Without exception, he broke for lunch at seven till twelve every day. If there was one thing in Bubba’s life that didn’t vary, that was it. Seven minutes gave him just enough time to wash up and get ready.

Today, as always, he wiped the bulk of the grease and oil off his hands with a red shop rag, then went to the restroom sink and scrubbed off the rest. He made his way to his small office in the back of the shop, closed the door, and lowered the blinds in the two large windows facing the hydraulic lifts.

The four employees of Bubba’s Foreign and Domestic Auto Repair knew better than to disturb the owner during the next sixty minutes. As far as they knew, Bubba was in there taking his daily nap, and he was as grouchy as a hungry coyote if you bothered him. In fact, Bubba had once fired a guy for knocking on the door during lunch hour, wanting to get Bubba’s input on an engine rebuild. Of course, Bubba had rehired the guy the next day, but still, he had made his point. Nobody dared intrude.

In the corner of Bubba’s office was a tiny refrigerator, and from it Bubba removed his sack lunch and a Mountain Dew. He sat behind his desk, then opened the top drawer and took out a small set of headphones, which he plugged into the thirteen-inch color TV resting on his desktop.

At precisely twelve o’clock, he turned the TV on.

And there she was, in all her glory.

A goddess among mortals.

The most intriguing and captivating woman on the planet.

Erica Kane.

Boy, was she beautiful, and what an exciting life she’d led! Actress. Model. Discotheque owner. Author. And she’d done it all from the remote little town of Pine Valley.

Yeah, sure, Erica had her problems. She’d been married, what, nine times now? Or was it ten? Let’s see, there was Jeff, Phil, Tom, Adam (twice), Travis (also twice), and Dimitri (again, twice). She been engaged a bunch of times, too, sometimes to men who were worthy of her, other times to total sleazeballs. But Erica stood fast and continued to search for her one true love. Erica had had her share of legal troubles, too. She’d been suspected of murdering her boy friend Kent, which caused her, naturally, to go on the run disguised as a nun, but in the end it was proven that the death was accidental. Later, she went on trial for the attempted murder of her husband Dimitri, but she managed to slip out of that one, too, as well as another trial for the murder of Frankie, the lesbian lover of Erica’s daughter Bianca. Then there was that whole nightmare when Erica delivered Maria’s baby inside a remote cabin, then attempted to rush the newborn to the hospital but had a horrible wreck along the way. The baby was presumed dead, washed away in the river, but Erica later discovered that it had been found by some deranged lady living in the woods. So Erica did what many women would do in a similar situation; she claimed it as her own, of course. But the cops figured it out and she had to give the baby back. It was all very awkward.