Dead Last (42 page)

The Starkville of Buddha Hilton’s youth was a more robust town than it is today. Before the interstate highway was built linking Dallas with Oklahoma City, Starkville was directly on one of the main routes between those two cities, and the citizens of Starkville enjoyed all the economic benefits of the traffic flowing through their area. But the motels and restaurants and shops and service stations that flourished when Buddha Hilton was first starting school are mostly boarded up these days. Along with the dwindling population came shrinking resources, including police and fire rescue services.

“We couldn’t afford to pay her nothing,” said Starkville mayor, Wally Bryant. “I told her she’d be perfect on some big city police force. I encouraged her to send her resume for some jobs in the larger towns hereabouts, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She was a Starkville girl through and through. She wanted to make sure nothing like what happened to her ever happened in this town again. Even if it meant living on next to nothing.”

In her high school years, Buddha had been a star pitcher on the Starkville Wildcats, a girl’s fast-pitch softball team. She was so talented she received scholarship offers from several colleges in the region, but turned them down because she wanted to live out her dream of keeping watch over her hometown.

One scout for the National Pro Fastpitch league was so impressed by Buddha, he offered her a contract on the spot. “She said no and no and no,” recounted Jeremy Blattner. “The girl had a seventy-mile-per-hour riseball, she could toss a two-hundred-foot frozen rope and somehow, she had the soft hands and lightning reactions of an infielder. Gritty, gutsy and quick. She could’ve made some serious money.”

But it was no and no and no to leaving Starkville. Her heart was there and her adoptive mother was there, and all her friends and neighbors were there, and even though some of the memories were bad, all her memories were there.

After graduating high school, with job opportunities scarce, Buddha spent a year in the stock room at a Wal-Mart superstore near the new interstate. “She absolutely hated that job,” said Buck Todd, a friend of Buddha’s from high school who worked alongside her at Wal-Mart and is now assistant manager of the store. “She wanted to be doing something meaningful with her time. She wanted to lend a hand to people.”

From her one year of working retail, Buddha managed to put aside enough money to pay for the laser removal of some of the facial tattoos her father applied when she was a toddler. “Those tattoos,” said Buck Todd, “they bothered her off and on, but when she tried to get some of them taken off, it bothered her even more. Not the pain, but something else.”

“I would’ve done it for free,” said Dr. Edward Molk of the Juniper Laser Clinic. “I told her that when she walked in here. ‘I’m waiving my fee. No charge for anything.’ As long as it took, I’d work for nothing. But no, sir, that wasn’t how that gal worked. If she couldn’t pay for it, she wouldn’t have it.”

Under her watchful eye, crime virtually disappeared in Starkville. But Buddha’s positive impact on the area extended beyond her duties as sheriff. A regular at the local swimming hole where drunks and daredevils routinely climbed up the eighty-foot cliffside to plummet into the icy waters of Miller’s Pond, Buddha several times saved the life of an intoxicated diver who didn’t resurface after his jump.

“Johnny Joe is a big man,” said Trixi Moffett, his wife of twenty-three years. “He’d make three of that girl. Plus he’d been drinking whiskey all afternoon that Saturday, and whiskey always sets him off.” As often happens with drowning victims, Johnny Joe Moffett panicked when Buddha pulled him to the surface. He fought against her efforts and climbed atop her and held her under, but somehow Buddha Hilton still managed to overcome this bear of a man and haul Mr. Moffett safely to the rocky shoreline. “Johnny Joe didn’t even thank that girl,” said Judy Ethridge, who’d been swimming at Miller Pond that day and witnessed Buddha’s bravery. “He just vomited a little and stomped off to his truck. But it didn’t bother her none. Buddha was like that. I never met a single person like her who’d always go the extra mile for you, no matter what. She was just born a saint, I guess.”

Like many of her fellow citizens in Starkville, Mayor Wally Bryant was shocked to learn that Sheriff Hilton had been overpowered by an assailant. “Buddha put her time in at the gym and there’s not a man in this whole county who’d voluntarily step into a boxing ring with that girl.”

Talk of Buddha’s death in Trueblood’s Café on the once-bustling main street of Starkville mostly centers on the mystery of her violent end. “The man that killed Buddha Hilton must’ve blindsided her,” said Sally Mayfield, owner and chef at the diner. Mayor Bryant had another theory of what happened that night in a Miami motel. “If Buddha had a flaw, it was probably that she could be too trusting. She thought the best of people, despite all evidence to the contrary, some of which she’d experienced firsthand when she was just a child. But despite that awful childhood, she always saw the good in people, even when there wasn’t much good to be seen.”

Services were planned to honor Buddha Hilton at the Starkville Elks Club, but the turnout was so large that at the last minute the venue was changed to the Starkville High School football stadium. Hundreds attended and over sixty of her fellow citizens came up to the microphone on the makeshift stage to pay tribute to her memory.

Also by James W. Hall

Silencer
(2010)

Hell’s Bay
(2008)

Magic City
(2007)

Forests of the Night
(2005)

Off the Chart
(2003)

Blackwater Sound
(2001)

Rough Draft
(2000)

Body Language
(1998)

Red Sky at Night
(1997)

Buzz Cut
(1996)

Gone Wild
(1995)

Mean High Tide
(1994)

Hard Aground
(1993)

Bones of Coral
(1992)

Tropical Freeze
(1990)

Under Cover of Daylight
(1987)

Essays

Hot Damn!
(2001)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James W. Hall is an Edgar and Shamus Award–winning author whose books have been translated into a dozen languages. He has written four books of poetry, a collection of short fiction, and a collection of essays. This is his seventeenth novel. He and his wife, Evelyn, divide their time between South Florida and North Carolina.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

DEAD LAST.
Copyright © 2011 by James W. Hall. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hall, James W. (James Wilson), 1947–

       Dead last / James W. Hall. — 1st ed.

            p. cm.

       e-ISBN 9781429982306

   1.  Thorn (Fictitious character)—Fiction.   2.  Serial murder investigation—Fiction.   3.  Miami (Fla.)—Fiction.   I.  Title.

       PS3558.A369D43 2011

       813'.54—dc23

2011026758

First Edition: December 2011