Hog Heaven (26 page)

Every 10 or 15 seconds or so, Marlin would catch a glimpse of the GMC’s taillights in the distance—and then they’d disappear around a curve. Marlin wasn’t sure if he was losing any ground on the narrow county road, but he definitely wasn’t gaining any. That’s because Weems was driving like a man with a lot to lose. Marlin couldn’t push his own truck any harder—not without losing control, and it wasn’t worth it. If he couldn’t catch Weems tonight, Weems would get caught eventually—tomorrow, the next day, or next week.

On the other hand, the chase wasn’t over yet—and Marlin had one distinct advantage. He’d driven every back road in Blanco County, including this one, hundreds of times. He knew every inch of pavement, every cattle guard, every low-water crossing, every patched pothole.

And every unmarked ninety-degree left-hand turn.

Gilbert Weems couldn’t help but grin. Every so often he’d sneak a peek in the rearview mirror, and he could see that the game warden couldn’t keep up. What a wimp. Too chicken to push the limits. Didn’t have the balls to—

Holy hell!

With no warning, the road took a sharp and sudden left, and Weems had no choice but to whip the wheel violently. And he knew immediately the truck couldn’t hold the road.

The tires were squealing—screaming bloody murder as the truck began to slide sideways—and then the tires went silent as they lost contact with the pavement.

Weems had a sickening feeling in his stomach as he realized the truck was beginning to roll.

Marlin saw it happen.

He was eighty yards back when Weems approached the hard curve much too fast, and then there was a wild jumble of lights twirling and tumbling. The GMC had left the road and was rolling several times.

Marlin applied the brakes and eased to a stop. Then he grabbed the microphone and told Darrell to send EMS as quickly as possible.

He jumped from his truck and jogged toward the dog runners’ truck, which had come to a rest upside-down, its roof partially crumpled, all windows shattered.

As Marlin got within ten feet, he heard, “Son of a bitch!”

Weems was alive.

But Marlin could see an orange glow coming from the engine compartment. Flames. The wind carried the acrid scent of burning oil and rubber.

He bent to one knee beside the driver’s door and peered inside with a flashlight. Weems was making a feeble effort to crawl out of the cab, but he was obviously disoriented—and possibly injured.

The fire was growing more intense, and now black smoke was swirling in the air. Time was short. Hell if Marlin was going to put himself at risk for long for this idiot.

He got down on all fours, then reached inside and grabbed Weems by the collar. He pulled, and out Weems came. The adrenaline was definitely flowing, because Weems felt no heavier than a fifty-pound bag of feed.

“Fuck. Ow. Let me go,” Weems said, but he made no effort to stand. He obviously couldn’t.

Marlin kept dragging him, across rocks and possibly cactus, and now flames were beginning to erupt from the engine compartment. The men were twenty yards from the truck, but that wasn’t far enough.

Marlin dragged him some more.

“Goddammit! Asshole. Gonna kick your ass.”

Finally, a good forty yards away, and with his arms beginning to ache, Marlin stopped. This would have to do. He quickly assessed Weems for injuries and saw nothing obvious—except for a bloody bandage across his nose. Looked like somebody had clocked him earlier. But Weems appeared to have survived the wreck unscathed. Lucky bastard.

Marlin glanced at the truck and saw that the fire had spread to the passenger compartment. It wouldn’t be long before the entire vehicle was engulfed in flames.

Suddenly Marlin realized that Gilbert Weems was up on his feet. Swaying, but on his feet. Before Marlin could take a step backward, Weems threw a slow, lazy haymaker directed at the side of Marlin’s head. Marlin ducked and Weems’s fist swept the air above him.

Without even considering other options, Marlin responded by delivering a crisp overhand right to the bridge of Weems’s injured nose.

Weems yelped in pain and dropped to his knees, cradling his face. He said something that sounded like, “Fuck! That hurts!”

Marlin pulled his handcuffs from the back of his belt, saying, “I can’t tell you how much I’m going to enjoy this.”

Red woke at seven o’clock the next morning, still sitting in his recliner, and with a half-empty beer can still wedged in his crotch. Correction: It wasn’t half empty, it was half full. Life was good. Damn good.

He and Billy Don had done some cautious celebrating last night. They’d sat on Red’s porch, drinking beer and waiting for the deputies to show up. It would only be a matter of time, right? The redheaded hick from East Texas would report the theft of the pig, give the cops a description of the perpetrators, and the cops would know immediately who did it. And they’d investigate right away, before Red and Billy Don had a chance to hide the pig.

Except the hours passed, a case of beer slowly disappeared, and the cops never showed. Long about midnight, Billy Don said, “Think we’re home free?”

Red said, “I hate to get our hopes up too much, but... it’s starting to look that way. For sure I’d say if the cops don’t come snooping around tomorrow, then it’s a done deal. The pig is all ours.”

“Ours?” Billy Don said. “I’m the one who grabbed it.” Red swung his head around, surprised, and Billy Don said, “Joking. We’ll split it right down the middle. I figure my getaway driver deserves half.”

Not long after that, Billy Don had walked home—too drunk to drive, and not stupid enough to call Betty Jean at that hour—after they’d agreed they’d wait until five o’clock this afternoon to claim the bounty. “By then,” Red had said, “we can be goddamn certain they ain’t reportin’ it.”

Red could hardly allow himself to think it was coming true.

Twenty-five thousand dollars. He’d never had that much money to his name in his life. He’d be one-quarter of a hundred-thousandaire.

Then he thought:
What about taxes?
He figured the goddamn IRS would want a chunk for sure, because, well, when
didn’t
they want a chunk? No way of dodging it, either, since the bounty had been so well publicized. He figured the winner would be, too. Probably some sort of write-up in the newspaper. Maybe some interviews on the Austin or San Antonio news.

Then he had a brainstorm. What if he and Billy Don could parlay this slim bit of upcoming fame into a larger career as some sort of pair of pig-hunting experts? Didn’t really matter that they hadn’t actually killed the pig, because who would know? Maybe they could get some sort of TV show. There was already one pig-hunting show on TV, and there was probably room for another. Viewers today loved watching shows about country people, like that one about that Louisiana family who made millions of dollars on duck calls.

It was exciting to think about it. Five o’clock couldn’t come fast enough.

It was a beautiful morning: temperature in the mid-seventies, low humidity, a light southerly breeze, and not a cloud in the sky. Marlin rode in the passenger seat of Garza’s cruiser with the windows down. Bill Tatum was in the back. All three men remained quiet, simply enjoying the silence.

Marlin had slept for less than three hours, but he’d found upon waking that his lower back was tight. Not sore, but tight—from dragging Weems away from the burning truck. Weems had initially been charged with attempted assault of a peace officer, evading arrest, auto theft, and driving while intoxicated. Then, late last night, the Bryant brothers had surprised everyone by spilling their stories—about Weems shooting at Marlin, and then assaulting Armando Salazar—and now Weems was facing a veritable tidal wave of legal trouble. He was looking at multiple convictions on a range of charges, and if Salazar could identify Weems in a lineup, that would be the icing on the cake. Nicole said victims often gained some measure of closure by playing a direct role in sending the perpetrator to prison. It gave them a sense of control. Regardless, Marlin was thrilled that Weems wouldn’t be walking the streets anytime soon.

Something else that had tickled Marlin to no end. Weems had told some wild tales once he arrived in cuffs at the station. First he said that Phil Colby had assaulted him in the parking lot of El Charro late yesterday afternoon. Said Colby punched him in the nose for no reason at all. Then Weems claimed he and the Bryant brothers had shot the bounty pig yesterday evening, and that two men—whose descriptions matched a couple of local rednecks named Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock—had assaulted Weems and stolen the pig from the bed of Bryant’s GMC truck.

Funny thing is, the Bryant brothers denied that any of those events had taken place. Both of them said Weems was a pathological liar. Marlin sensed it was the Bryants who were lying in this case—probably simply because they had grown sick and tired of Weems. Good enough. Nobody would, or could, take Weems’s word for any of it. Weems insisted that Marlin could find pig blood in the back of the GMC but, well, now it was nothing but a burned-up shell. If there had been any blood back there, it was long gone.

Garza took a right on a residential street, then another right, followed by a left, and now they could see Milstead’s house, with the white truck parked out front—just as one of the reserve deputies had said it was when he’d driven past in his personal vehicle ten minutes earlier. Not surprising. Where was Milstead going to go? Probably too ashamed—or afraid—to show his face anywhere.

Deputy Ernie Turpin sat across the conference room table from Armando Salazar and Nicole Marlin. He had a manila folder in front of him.

Turpin said, “I’m going to show you a series of photographs, one after the other. If you see anyone you recognize, please tell me.”

Salazar nodded.

Turpin opened the folder and removed a single photo of a redheaded man. Was it the suspect? Turpin himself didn’t know, which prevented him from giving any unintentional nonverbal cues to Salazar. This was known as a sequential, double-blind lineup, which helped eliminate cases of mistaken identity.

Salazar studied the photo and shook his head. Turpin placed a second photo on the table.

“That’s him,” Salazar said immediately. “Without a doubt.”

“Where do you recognize him from?”

“That’s the man who assaulted me outside the convenience store.”

When Kurt Milstead opened his front door, Bobby Garza said, “Coach, don’t worry—we’re not here to ask you any questions. You’ve already made it clear you don’t want to talk. But we have a search warrant for your truck, and in about five minutes, a flatbed trailer is going to show up and haul it away. See, what nobody outside of my staff knows is that Sammy Beech used his phone to shoot video of the vehicle that chased him. It’s not a great video—you can’t make out the vehicle itself—but Sammy dropped his phone, and it captured the sound of the vehicle passing by. I’ll be happy to show you that video if you’re interested in seeing it. But here’s the point. That audio—the sound of the vehicle passing by—is very useful to us. What we can do is make a similar recording of your vehicle passing by, then get an audio expert to compare the two clips. The software they have nowadays for audio pattern matching and signal analysis is incredible. It’s just like matching two voice recordings to see if it’s the same person. You see what I’m getting at?”

Garza finally paused. Milstead remained silent. His expression was a total blank, but Marlin noticed that the blood had drained from the coach’s face.

Everything Garza had just told Milstead was a gamble. It was true that one audio recording of a passing vehicle might very well be matched to a second recording—if all the conditions were right. But the audio from Sammy’s phone almost certainly wasn’t good enough to allow any conclusive findings.

Now Garza said, “We also have a shell casing with a fingerprint on it that we can’t identify. It came from a nine-millimeter handgun, and it turns out you have a concealed-carry permit for a nine-millimeter. That’s why we also have a search warrant for your home.”

Milstead was visibly trembling, and Marlin almost felt sorry for him.

Garza said, “Now, at this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t find that handgun in your house. But we don’t need it, really. All we need is your fingerprints, and that will—”

“Stop,” Milstead said.

Garza went quiet.

What the sheriff and Marlin and Tatum wanted—what they
needed
—was a confession. A good defense attorney could explain away a shell casing found on the side of a rural county road. Maybe it bounced out of the bed of the coach’s truck. Maybe Milstead couldn’t resist shooting at a speed-limit sign. There were all sorts of possibilities that could be offered up. And since the audio from Sammy’s phone wasn’t nearly as valuable as Garza made it out to be, and since Grady Beech’s recording of Milstead’s confession almost certainly wouldn’t be admissible in court, that didn’t leave much on which to build a case. Yes, Grady’s recording had humiliated Milstead, and it would hound him for the rest of his life, but it wouldn’t convict him.

Milstead was beginning to shake his head ever so slightly, but he didn’t say anything. He needed one more nudge.

So Garza, in a soft voice, said, “Kurt, we understand you didn’t intend for Sammy to get hurt. Everybody knows that. It was a tragedy. But you need to own up to what happened, or people will always wonder whether you have any remorse at all. Do the right thing. Your players are counting on you. Show them how a man handles adversity. It doesn’t have to wreck your life forever. You can set things right.”

A tear ran down Milstead’s cheek. After a very long moment, he nodded. “I’ve been carrying this damn thing around inside me for two months. I can’t do it anymore.”