Murder Among the OWLS (14 page)

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Authors: Bill Crider

BOOK: Murder Among the OWLS
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“I'd like to know just which day he went,” Rhodes said.
Lily looked down at her clasped hands. “I'm not sure.”
“I'll bet you can remember if you think about it for a second.”
Lily looked up. “I can try.”
Rhodes thought she knew very well when Truck had paid the visit, but he gave Lily a few seconds to gather her thoughts. Then he said, “Well?”
“It must have been on Tuesday.”
Mrs. Harris hadn't been dead then, so it was a safe thing to say.
“What happened when he went to see her?” Rhodes asked.
“Nothing. She wouldn't talk about it. That made Truck even madder, but he didn't do anything about it. I know he didn't.”
“Did he tell you he didn't?”
“Yes. He said Helen wouldn't talk to him, so he got mad and left. That's what he'd do. Truck's got a temper, but he doesn't like to hurt people.”
That wasn't precisely the way Rhodes remembered things. He'd heard that when Truck was playing football, he'd much
rather run over the opposing players than run around them. Rhodes thought he was going to have to talk to Truck again.
“You're sure you don't know what Mrs. Harris found?” Rhodes said.
“I'm positive. Truck didn't know, either.”
Rhodes believed her, at least for her part. He still wasn't convinced about Truck.
“Does anybody else know that Truck went by to see Mrs. Harris?”
“I don't know. I didn't tell anybody, but I can't speak for Truck.”
Rhodes thought that Truck had kept it a secret, too. Burl would have mentioned it if he'd known.
“Can I go now?” Lily said. “I've told you all I know. You won't do anything to Truck, will you?”
Rhodes didn't make her any promises.
 
Truck's Trucks was located on the highway coming into Clearview from the south. Truck had opened it after he'd flunked out of college during his senior year. The way Rhodes had heard the story, Truck might have been an excellent college fullback if he'd just gone to class occasionally and tried to do well on the playing field. Instead he'd barely managed to stay eligible, never seemed to learn the playbook, and spent the majority of his time having fun, if you considered drinking and drugging fun. Truck had, and it had cost him any chance he might have had of making football a career beyond college.
So he'd come home, straightened out, and started selling used
cars and trucks. The name of his car lot was written on a full-size plywood cutout of a pickup nailed up about twelve feet above the ground between a couple of poles. The paint on the plywood was so faded that the words could hardly be read, but that didn't matter, either. Everyone in Clearview knew where Truck's Trucks was.
It started to rain again just as Rhodes drove into the place and parked. Not a heavy rain, just a thin drizzle that turned the sky a dull shade of gray.
Everywhere Rhodes looked there were old cars and pickups, some of them in great condition, some of them missing wheels and windshields and in such dire need of repair that Rhodes was sure they'd never leave the lot. Truck must have been cannibalizing them for parts.
Truck's office was in a little shack that looked almost as bad as the one Billy Joe Byron lived in, the major difference being that it had electricity.
The car lot wasn't paved, and there were holes all over it, all of them filled with water from the rain. The ground was slick, muddy, and treacherous. The drizzle didn't help things. Rhodes tried not to slip and fall as he went toward the office. He was almost there when he heard the gunshot.
THE SOUND CAME FROM SOMEWHERE NEAR THE BACK OF THE CAR lot. Rhodes went to the county car and called Hack.
“Send me some backup to Truck's Trucks,” he said when the dispatcher came on.
“You started another fight?”
“I guess so. Shots fired.”
“I'm sendin' Ruth.”
Rhodes told him that was fine, then started down the muddy, rutted track that served as a road through the cars and pickups that Truck had accumulated over the years.
The farther from the front of the lot that Rhodes went, the older and more decrepit the automobiles became, until the place resembled a junkyard more than a car lot.
It started to rain a little harder, and Rhodes stopped to wipe the water off his face, looking around to see if he could spot the source of the shot. He bent down, pulled up his pants leg, and removed
his pistol from the ankle holster. He'd switched to the holster a while back, and he still wasn't sure he liked it.
When he straightened, he heard another shot and broke into a trot. His shoes slipped on the muddy track, but he managed to keep his balance.
Near the back of the lot, he saw a man crouching down behind the rusted hulk of an old Buick, one of the really big, long ones from the 1970s. Rhodes stopped and looked for some cover of his own, moving off the track and standing beside what was left of a Plymouth Duster. He could easily see over the roof because the wheels and axles had been removed at some point. The window glass was also missing, and, as Rhodes saw when he glanced inside, so were the seats. The headliner was gone as well. The Duster was nothing more than a skeleton.
The crouching man stood up, and Rhodes could tell from his size that he couldn't be anyone but Truck. As Rhodes watched, he fired another shot. The bullet whined off the top of a car near the back fence.
The fence itself was quite a piece of work, easily ten feet tall and made of rusting sheet metal that was now slick and wet with rain. It went around three-quarters of the lot, and nobody was going to climb it. If anybody was back there, he was going to have to come by Truck to get out, and whoever tried that was likely to get shot.
Rhodes wasn't interested in seeing Truck shoot anybody, however.
“Truck,” he called. “This is Sheriff Rhodes. What's going on here.”
Truck turned around as if to be sure that Rhodes was really the one doing the talking. He must have been satisfied that it was because
he said, “There's a son of a bitch back there that wants to kill me, that's what.”
It didn't look that way to Rhodes, who pointed out that Truck was the one doing the shooting.
“Hell, yes. I keep this gun in the office in case any robbers come by. Good thing I had it, too.”
Truck turned back around and fired off another shot. This one spanged into the fence and went right on through.
“That's reckless endangerment. You don't know what's back there, Truck. You might kill somebody if you don't stop shooting right now.”
This time Truck didn't look back. “I'm gonna kill me somebody, all right. Alton Brant.”
Rhodes had heard enough. “I'm putting you under arrest, Truck. Put the pistol down on the ground, clasp your hands on your head, and come here.”
By way of an answer, Truck turned and fired a shot at Rhodes. The bullet whipped through the skeleton of the Duster and broke out a side window in an old Dodge Dart behind Rhodes, who thought that Truck's temper probably wasn't anywhere near as mild as Lily had implied.
“The charges against you are piling up, Truck, and they're getting a lot worse. You'd better put down the pistol like I told you.”
“You want to make me?”
“I guess I'll have to.”
“You and what army?”
“Well, all I have is my deputy,” Rhodes said as Ruth Grady walked up to stand beside him. “But that's two against one.”
“Damn,” Truck said. “That's not fair.”
“What's all the shooting about?” Ruth asked Rhodes.
Rhodes told her that he wasn't sure. “Truck said something about Alton Brant trying to kill him. Did you talk to Alton today?”
“I haven't been able to find him. He hasn't been at home.”
“If Truck's right, he's hunkered down back by the fence somewhere, I guess.”
“No wonder I couldn't find him. You think he's really there?”
Rhodes said that he did and called out to Truck. “You ready to put down the pistol?”
The rain clouds were so thick and black by this time that it was almost like night, making it more difficult to tell what Truck was doing, but he did bend down and put something on the ground.
“Is that his pistol?” Rhodes said.
“I think so,” Ruth said.
Rhodes nodded and repeated his instructions to Truck, who clasped his hands on his head and started toward them. When he did, a head popped up above the roofline of a car near the fence. It looked a lot like Alton Brant's head, but Rhodes couldn't be sure with the rain. He didn't say anything because he didn't want to call Truck's attention to Brant.
When Truck reached them, Ruth told him to turn around and put his hands behind his back. She used plastic cuffs on him, and Rhodes told her to take him to Truck's office while he went to retrieve the pistol.
Truck trudged off through the rain with Ruth behind him. Rhodes headed for the pistol, keeping an eye out for Brant.
“Are you back there, Mr. Brant?” Rhodes said when he got to where the pistol lay. He picked it up and stuck it in a pants pocket.
“Is he gone?” Brant said from behind a car.
“He's gone. You seem to have turned into a serious menace. I should have locked you up for that fight with Leo Thorpe.”
“He was the one with the chain saw,” Brant said, coming out from behind the car and walking toward Rhodes. “Not me.”
“Be sure I can see your hands,” Rhodes said, not a bit sure that he trusted Brant any longer. He might have served his country with honor in a long-gone war, but that didn't mean he hadn't changed over the years.
“I don't have a weapon,” Brant said, but he kept his hands in plain sight, or as plain a sight as Rhodes could have through the curtain of rain.
“We ought to get inside,” Rhodes said as Brant approached him. “You just walk on by. I'll be right behind you.”
“You're not going to arrest me?”
“Not yet. We'll go have a talk with Truck and see if we can get this straightened out some way.”
Brant passed Rhodes by and continued walking through the rain. Rhodes returned his pistol to the ankle holster and fell in behind him. They followed the little road back to the front of the lot. By the time they got to the building that served as Truck's office, Rhodes was thoroughly soaked, and his shoes were caked with mud.
Brant climbed up on the little porch and went inside. Rhodes followed him, glad to get under a roof. He stopped on the porch and scraped his shoes on the edge, trying to remove some of the mud. He didn't have much success, so he went on inside. It was Truck's own fault if the floor got muddy.
The building had only one room. Its walls were covered with calendars, most of them years old, given to Truck by various auto-parts and tool companies. Truck sat at his desk, an old rolltop that might have been an antique but that was in such bad shape that no antique dealer would touch it. Truck's well-oiled hair was plastered
flat to his head, and he was wetter than Rhodes if that was possible.
For that matter all of them were wet. Water dripped from their clothes to the muddy floor and created little puddles. Rhodes looked around for something to dry off with, but there was nothing. He wiped water from his face with his hand and wiped his hand on his wet pants without much effect.
“Well?” He looked at Brant. “Let's hear your side of it first.”
“He doesn't have a side,” Truck said. “Son of a bitch wanted to kill me.”
Rhodes looked at Brant. “Well?”
“He's right. I was upset.”
“You seem to get upset awfully easily,” Ruth said.
“Only when I think someone's killed a woman I cared about.”
“You think Truck killed Mrs. Harris?” Rhodes said.
“I know he was at her house. I was going to ask him about it nicely, but he got upset. The next thing I knew he'd grabbed a pistol out of a drawer and was pointing it at me.”
“Man comes in here accusing me of murder,” Truck said, “you better believe I'm getting my hands on a gun.”
“I didn't have one,” Brant pointed out.
“How was I to know that?”
Truck could have killed Brant with his bare hands without breaking a sweat, but Rhodes wasn't interested in hearing them argue. He said, “Truck went to Mrs. Harris's house to get her to tell him what she'd found on an outing with the Rusty Nuggets. Isn't that right, Truck?”
Truck nodded, and water ran out of his hair and down his face. He couldn't brush it off because his hands were cuffed behind him.
“So what I want to know,” Rhodes said to Brant, “is if she told you what she found.”
“No. I wasn't interested in metal detecting, so we never talked about it much.”
“She seemed awfully proud of that find,” Rhodes said. “I thought she might have mentioned it.”
“She didn't, though.” Brant paused. “She did seem pretty pleased about something lately. I didn't know what it was, and when I asked her, she just said it was the gas wells and the money she'd be getting.”
“What she found wasn't any gas well,” Truck said. “It was something little enough for her to stick in a pocket.”
Brant shrugged. “I wouldn't know. She never said a thing about it to me.”
Rhodes didn't know whether to believe him or not, but he was inclining toward the
not
. He didn't get to think any further about it because Truck lurched up out of his chair, knocked Ruth to one side with his shoulder, hit Brant and spun him around with the other shoulder, and ran right over Rhodes, flattening him to the floor.
Truck was out the door and off the porch by the time Rhodes recovered. He jumped up and went outside, where Truck was running awkwardly toward the highway.
Rhodes went after him.
A slight incline led up from the car lot to the highway. Truck slipped going up it, and his feet slid out from under him. He fell face forward onto the slick mud.
Rhodes reached him and pulled him up. Mud covered his shirt and stuck to his face. Rhodes had almost as much on himself, having
picked it up from the floor when Truck had knocked him down.
“That wasn't very smart, Truck. What did you plan to do, hitch a ride?”
Truck didn't say anything.
“You didn't have a free thumb. You'd just have gotten run over.”
“Might be the best thing,” Truck said in a sorrowful voice. “I've really screwed up this time.”
Rhodes turned him around and marched him back toward the office. “Maybe not so much. It's your first offense, so you'll probably get off light. All you've done is assault an officer, resist arrest, attempt murder, and for all I know engage in mopery.”
“What the hell is mopery?”
“I never figured that out, myself.” Rhodes told him, helping him up on the porch. “But even if you're guilty of it, it's better than running out on the highway and getting flattened by an eighteen-wheeler.”
Instead of taking him back inside, Rhodes put him into the backseat of Ruth's car. Ruth was standing on the porch, and he asked if she was all right.
“Sure. I bounced off the wall, but I wasn't hurt. Mr. Brant's okay, too. He's inside.”
“You take Truck to the jail and book him,” Rhodes said. “I'll have a few more words with Mr. Brant.”
“What if he tries to escape again?”
She was probably thinking of Thorpe. “Shoot him.”
“How about if I just pistol-whip him?”
“I guess that would be all right,” Rhodes said.
Ruth came down off the porch. “All this because of one murder. I wish I knew what was going on.”
“You're not the only one,” Rhodes told her.
 
Brant was sitting in the chair when Rhodes went back into the office. He was a lot drier than Rhodes now, and a lot less muddy, but there wasn't anything Rhodes could do about his appearance.
“I think you know more than you've been letting on,” Rhodes said.

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