Hot Enough to Kill (8 page)

"Dee-Wayne Schuman as much as threatened to kill him in front of the whole city council. Dee-Wayne's been in the pen before, you know, assault or something. He doesn't seem like the shotgun type, though, more of a fist-fighter. Dee-Wayne looks like a big old hairy gorilla, and he knew BigJohn was afraid of him. Could have broken BigJohn in half with those big old hairy hands. I think BigJohn was ready to back off his permit craze. Just a bunch of silliness anyway."

"Building codes are handled by Bowman County," Jerry said.

Lucille set her coffee cup down and tapped her nails on the table. "This was a new city inspection. BigJohn decided the builders ought to have to come down to City Hall and buy a special project permit to work in 'his city.' BigJohn's Kickapoo Kingdom is what folks were calling it, and they weren't being nice."

"So what exactly happened to cause the confrontation?" Jerry asked.

Mother fiddled with an earring. "He and Dee-Wayne got crossways when BigJohn told him he couldn't build until he had a city permit and he wasn't going to get a permit unless he did away with all the carports and made them garages, or something like that. It wasn't a bad idea, really, but it would have cost Dee-Wayne a lot of money since he'd already signed contracts to sell three of the houses with carports, and nobody was going to pay any more than what they signed for. I wouldn't. Would you?"

I always think I can't be surprised by anything that happens around here, and I'm always wrong. And it didn't make a great deal of sense, particularly since Mr. Mayor had an oil field pipe and sheet metal carport out in front of his mobile home--and his isn't the only one by a long shot.

This is oil country, and in the boom years, oil field pipe pilfering was a cottage industry. Many a pipeline job was figured to include a respectable amount for resale purposes, the aforementioned carports, pole barns, pasture fencing, flatbed trailer frames or any other creative uses for welded pipe the contractor happened to come up with. Personally, I thought the chicken coop was a little over the top, but nobody asked me. And as a final aside, the word "oil," in these parts, does not rhyme with boil or coil, nor does it exactly sound like bull or full either, but some unique blending of the two. It takes practice.

Jerry turned to a fresh page and kept writing. "What about the annexing of land west of town?"

"Oh, that went through a few weeks back. Kind of happened before anybody could really do anything about it."

"None of this sounds terribly bad for the city," I said, mildly intrigued by the small town take on big city ideas. "Why was everybody so upset?"

Lucille clicked her nails on the table. "These things might have been okay for the city, and that's what everybody thought," she said, pausing for effect. "At first. Then, it started coming out that BigJohn had his own reasons for annexing everything in sight. As it turned out, BigJohn had bought a couple of lots near the water treatment plant. By annexing all the outlying areas around the city," she said, adding hand gestures to her soliloquy, "and forcing them onto city water, it would put the rest of us down to a trickle in our kitchen faucets. We don't have much of a water system anyway, but it works, or at least it does now. But with all the new houses hooked up to the system, well, it was just trouble a brewing. And then everybody started figuring out that our taxes were going up because of all this, too. Well, I can tell you I wasn't any too happy about that. I'm on a fixed income and I don't need my taxes going up. Besides, if BigJohn had left things alone, the new houses would have been on the Redwater system. Would have been better for them anyway. Half the time the water coming out of my tap is green and smelly. Nothing to brag about that's for sure."

Jerry looked up from his notepad. "So you're saying Mayor Bennett annexed land so the city would have to buy his property to build new water services facilities?"

Lucille clicked her nails together. "That's what I just said. And it wouldn't have come cheap, I'm here to tell you. BigJohn Bennett does not give away anything. If there's a dollar to be made, he'll make two."

I sipped on my second soda. "Mayor Bennett never struck me as sharp enough to figure something like this out. That's a semi-complicated scheme."

"He wasn't a complete idiot, Jolene," Lucille said, not exactly offended, just commanding. "But no, I never thought any of it was his idea in the first place."

"So whose was it?" I asked, the small-town intrigue digging a little deeper into my resolve not to be interested.

Lucille shook her head. "I have no idea. He didn't really have any friends. Acquaintances yes, but no real friends. Have you talked to the mayor pro tem?" she asked, nodding at Jerry. "BigJohn appointed him, but they never did get along. I think Giff wanted to be mayor himself." She paused. "I guess he is mayor now. Hmmm."

Jerry flipped through his notes. "That would be Gifford Geller. Yes, he would be acting as mayor now. I haven't spoken with him yet, but Deputy Harper did yesterday."

I marveled at Jerry's tact. He didn't even glance at Lucille when he spoke of the deputy, who we all knew was the first one who Lucille had accosted.

"Well, Miz Jackson," Jerry said. "You've been very helpful today."

Lucille had the good grace to blush, but not enough to apologize for her behavior yesterday--or explain her generous cooperation today. "I'm just glad to have been able to help. Now, if you've nothing further, I'd like to be excused so I can powder my nose." She pushed back from the table and stood.

Crash, chink, clatter, scream, thump.

Everything seemed to happen at once. The bay window behind Lucille exploded, spraying glass across the kitchen. She shrieked, grabbed her arm and fell forward against the table. I jumped up and jerked her down behind the kitchen cabinets. Hot air gushed in from the broken window.

I heard another thump and looked back to where Jerry had been sitting at the far end of the table. He wasn't there, and neither was the chair. Below the edge of the tablecloth, I could see the overturned chair and Jerry's legs. He wasn't moving. "Jerry?" I said, scrambling toward him. "Oh, God, no."

He was lying on his side on the floor. Dark stains spread across his chest and trickled down onto the linoleum in rhythmic bursts.

"Jerry? Are you okay? Jerry?"

Oh, God, was he still alive, he had to be, had to be okay. Panic clawed at my chest, but I refused to let it take over. I leaned toward Jerry and tried to focus on the basics of first aid. The first rule was to stay calm and I was trying, God was I trying. Okay, do the ABCs--airway, breathing, circulation.

I touched Jerry's chin, ready to check for airway obstructions and he moaned a little. "Jerry?"

His eyelids fluttered but didn't open. "Jo?" he said, his voice fading in a wheeze.

Okay, he could breath, but the airway didn't sound too good, and circulation was going downhill rapidly. The pulsing blood meant arterial damage. He needed help fast. "Jerry, listen to me. You're going to be all right. I'm here and I'm going to help you. Jerry, can you hear me?"

He didn't answer. A very bad sign.

"Stop the bleeding," I muttered. "Need something...."

Glass covered the floor so I stood into a crouch and hurried to the cabinets.

Lucille was sitting on the floor where I'd left her, still staring blankly. She was in shock, and her arm was covered in blood. I scrambled to the drawer that held the dish towels and grabbed them all. She had a gouge in her arm that looked to be about three or four inches long and deep enough to need stitches--a lot of them. I quickly wrapped a towel over the wound and tied it as best I could. "Mother, listen to me. We've got to help Jerry. Go call nine-one-one."

She didn't answer, and from the paleness of her face and the glaze in her eyes, I doubted she could stand much less anything else. "Okay, Mother, listen, we need to move over by Jerry," I said, shoving as much glass out of the way as I could with my hand.

She blinked a few times and took a few ragged breaths but said nothing. She did, however, let me scoot her toward the end of the table. I brushed aside more glass and situated Lucille beside Jerry. I knew to elevate the injured area above the heart, but in this case the injured area was the heart. A cold shiver went through me but I refused to even think of how bad it could be. I pressed a stack of towels to his chest and placed Lucille's hand on it. "You've got to keep pressure here, Mother," I said, looking directly into her eyes. "Do you understand?"

She blinked and swallowed, then took a couple quick short breaths and nodded.

"Pressure, Mother. Push down hard on the towels. I'm going to call for an ambulance. I'll be right back."

I jumped up, ran across the room, grabbed the phone off the wall and punched in 9-1-1.

Even before the recorded voice came on, I remembered: 911 doesn't mean a damn thing in Kickapoo, Texas.

Chapter
6

Deputy Leroy Harper finally caught up with me about six hours later outside the intensive care ward at the Redwater Falls General Hospital. He'd been picking at me like a determined magpie, and after a half-hour, his charm was wearing mighty thin. Thin enough that I had gone from really annoyed to seriously pissed.

"Dammit, Leroy, I've told you at least eight times what happened. Unless you were playing with yourself instead of writing down what I said, you can read your notes--again and again if it turns you on. Now, go away."

He closed his little spiral notebook and stuffed it into the back pocket of his brown uniform pants. "You've sure gotten yourself a filthy mouth since you left here, Jolene."

"Maybe I've just been hanging out with the wrong crowd for about the last thirty minutes."

He snorted as if he recognized he was being insulted, but not confidently enough that he knew the specifics. "You always did think you were so uppity. You and that Kathleen Jessup did nothing but make fun of me all through school. But she ain't here to pal up with you against me. No, ma'am, you ain't so uppity now. You have to answer to me, Jolene Jackson. It's the law."

I hadn't thought about Kat in ages, although I knew she was one of the few others who had escaped Kickapoo. Last I'd heard she was an attorney in Dallas. A big move on all levels, and a connection I was going to need if I became compelled to shut Leroy Harper's mouth for him.

At about six-two and two-hundred-fifty pounds, Leroy had made a fine linebacker for the Kickapoo Coyotes, but somebody needed to tell him that the game ended twenty-five years ago and he could quit mauling everybody in his path. He hadn't exactly been ugly back then, but not cute either. A big old, pale blond-headed kid with way more brawn than brains would be a kind description. If you put it that way, he really hadn't changed much, except that now he was an adult redneck on a power trip. He also carried a gun. And even after all these years, he still had me lined up in his cross hairs.

"Don't you have something better to do than stand around here and annoy me?" I said for at least the fifteenth time.

Leroy crossed his big fat arms and stepped his ham hock thighs apart. "Funny, ain't it? You thought you were such hot shit back then and now you'll be jumping whenever I say so." He grinned, exposing an amazingly intact set of tobacco-stained teeth.

A year ahead of me in school, Leroy always thought rather highly of himself. I, however, thought he was an idiot, and would have rather dated the Pillsbury Dough Boy. My mistake was in telling him so. And Leroy had not forgotten. "Tell you what, Leroy," I'm going to try this one more time, so listen real careful-like, 'kay?" I ignored his glare. "Turn around, walk out the door, get on the elevator--"

"I'm acting sheriff, Jolene. I can stay here all day if I want, and I might just do that because I think you're holding out on me."

"What exactly could I be holding out, Leroy? That I saw a man in the bushes wearing a ski mask, but he took it off after he blew out the window and said, 'Pardon me, ma'am?'"

He thought about that for a minute then said, "You sure you didn't see anything at all, or maybe hear something out the window?"

"Leroy, if I had seen anything or heard anything, I'd tell you! Now why don't you go get busy finding out who tried to kill Jerry. You don't even seem to care about him. And what about some sort of real investigation? This is the second incident in two days. There's a killer out there, Leroy. Do something about it!"

He looked away for a second and I had the feeling that I'd made a slight point with him, but only a slight one. If I had, he got over his really short guilt trip and looked back at me, shaking his head. "Jerry got nailed with a thirty-eight, Jolene," he said as if talking to a two-year-old. "The mayor was killed with a shotgun. The shootings aren't related."

"Silly me. I thought 'gunshot through a window' and 'gunshot through a window' sounded sort of alike. What was I thinking?"

Amazingly my sarcasm did not escape him and he frowned. "I don't have to put up with your smartass remarks anymore. I ask you a question, you answer it right."

I started to mention that I had just been making a comment, not answering his question, but what was the point. I rubbed my hands across my face, pushed my hair back and sighed heavily. "All right Mister Almighty Powerful Deputy Person, just what is it that I need to say or do to get you to leave me alone?"

"I'm the acting sheriff, and there's nothing you can do about it. And if you know what's good for you, you'll be watching what you get yourself into. You don't live around here anymore so you don't know how things are now. I do. Don't go stirring up trouble. You've always been too nosy for your own good anyhow. You get in my way and you'll find yourself in a worse place than the superintendent's office."

Leroy Harper was cleverly referring to my dogged pursuit of a perverted high school principal, or more accurately the removal of said pervert. I took exception to being pounced and kissed in front of the entire student council by a forty-something-year-old fool and promptly told the school superintendent. Since it was the seventies, which in Kickapoo is more relative to the Pleistocene Age, I didn't get any support from the big man, who no doubt believed that I had been "asking for it." The end result was that I had to resign as president of the student council since the pervert was the sponsor. I didn't go quietly, and as I also happened to be the editor of the school newspaper, well, it got a little ugly.