Of All Sad Words (19 page)

The top box in each stack was closed with packing tape. Rhodes took out his pocketknife and slit the tape right down the center of one of the boxes. Then he slit the tape where it overlapped the sides and flipped the top open.

Inside, there were three rows of quart mason jars. Rhodes folded his knife and slipped it back into his pocket. He didn’t even have to take the jars out of the box to know what they contained.

He counted the boxes. Six to a stack, which meant thirty-six quarts to a stack. Even his elementary school homework was coming in handy these days. He could even multiply thirty-six times three in his head and come out with 108. If he was right, that is.

Even if he was wrong, there was a lot of whiskey there, far too much for anybody to sell in Blacklin County alone. Someone was moving into the high-end trade in the cities, or had already made the move.

Kergan must have been involved somehow, since the bootleggers were using his shed, though possibly they’d started doing that only since he’d moved away. Maybe he hadn’t known what was going on, though that seemed unlikely.

Now Rhodes had another decision to make. It was too bad that Mellon wasn’t around to help him.

Rhodes didn’t know who owned the still or the whiskey. He didn’t know who’d made the whiskey, either, though he thought it must have been Rapper and Nellie. Somehow or other, the two of them were connected to the Crawfords.

Rhodes had to decide what to do. He could break up the still and the whiskey bottles, or he could wait around and see who came back to the shed.

Or he could do both.

Or neither.

He could hide in the shed and wait for Rapper and Nellie to return, or he could come back some other time and try to catch them there.

Once again, he found that he didn’t like either of the choices he was offering himself.

How likely was he to catch them if he came back later? If they realized that someone had been in the shed, they’d load up, leave, and never come back. Rhodes didn’t think he’d left any sign of his presence, but he couldn’t afford to take the chance that he had.

If he hid inside and waited, he couldn’t use the generator and the fan. Rapper and Nellie would hear the noise. And without the fan, Rhodes wouldn’t be able to stay there more than a half hour or so, not with the door closed. It was close and stuffy enough even with it open. Rhodes thought that if he touched the west wall of the building, he might burn his hand.

Even if he waited, he couldn’t be sure they’d come back that afternoon or even that night. He might just be wasting his time. He could call Hack and have someone else stake the place out, keep a twenty-four-hour watch on it. That might be the best thing to do, though it wasn’t a very cost-effective use of personnel. He didn’t have enough deputies to cover the county even when they were all on patrol.

Something else occurred to him. What if Rapper and Nellie weren’t the ones staying there at all? He didn’t have any proof that they were, just a strong suspicion. The only evidence was a scanty description provided by Seepy Benton.

Rhodes went out and closed the door of the shed. He looked at the house. He could wait there for a while. Even if the electricity was turned off and there was no air-conditioning, the house was bound to be cooler than the shed if he opened some windows. He’d have to be careful about that. He didn’t want anyone coming along to notice the open windows and realize that someone was in the house.

He’d have to hide the car, too. He could park it behind the shed, where it would be out of sight of the road.

Just as he started toward the car, he saw a cloud of dust on the road. As he watched, a black pickup came around the curve.

Well, he thought, at least I won’t have to worry about opening those windows.

Chapter 22

THE DRIVER OF THE PICKUP DIDN’T TRY TO RUN RHODES DOWN this time. He just kept right on going, passing by the house and sending dust rolling Rhodes’s way.

Rhodes was in the county car and after the pickup in seconds. The county road wasn’t graveled, and the dust flying up behind the pickup, along with the dark windows, made it impossible for Rhodes to see who was driving or even if there was a passenger. He just assumed that Rapper and Nellie were inside the cab. He got as close as he could to them while trying to keep the car on the narrow road and out of the ditches.

He also called Hack and told him to send some backup.

“Where you want me to send it?” Hack asked.

It was a good question. All Rhodes lacked was a good answer. He looked out the window and, peering through the dust, saw the gravestones and oak trees of the Plunkett Cemetery. He told Hack where he was.

“That road’s got more’n a couple of others that connect up to it,” Hack said. “That truck you’re chasin’ could take any one of ’em.”

Rhodes tried to get the county’s geography straight in his head.

“This road comes out on the county road that goes past Louetta Kennedy’s store, doesn’t it?”

“Louetta’s dead. Store’s closed.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You don’t have to get irritable.” Hack paused. “Yeah, if you keep on goin’, you’ll come out about a half mile up the road from Louetta’s old place. Turn right, you’ll go past the store and wind up in the Big Woods. Turn left, you’ll go back to Thurston.”

Rhodes didn’t think Rapper and Nellie would be going back to Thurston.

“Send somebody to the Big Woods,” he said, and signed off.

It made sense that Rapper and Nellie would head for the woods. In fact, if they were making whiskey, the woods would be a good place for them to do it. It was a good bet that they could find a place there where they wouldn’t be bothered by passersby.

The Big Woods was a throwback to earlier times. The trees had never been cut, and the place was like the famous Big Thicket in deep East Texas, only smaller. It was the kind of place where feral pigs took shelter from hunters. Rhodes sometimes thought an ivory-billed woodpecker might be hiding in there, though no one had ever searched for one.

Rhodes remembered yet another snippet of a poem from his high school days. It wasn’t one that he’d had to memorize, but somehow a line had stuck in his mind. He hadn’t thought of it in years, something about a woods that was “lovely, dark and deep.” The Big Woods qualified on the last two counts, but as far as Rhodes was concerned, there wasn’t anything lovely about them. The poem had also involved snow, Rhodes recalled, but there wasn’t likely to be any of that, either.

Rhodes had had experiences in the Big Woods before, and those experiences hadn’t been good ones. Far from it. One of them had started out all right, with the discovery of some mammoth bones, but it had all been downhill from there. Before it was over, Rhodes had tangled with things like snakes, wild hogs, and murderers. Rapper was as bad as any of those things, and a little worse than a couple of them, at least in Rhodes’s estimation.

The county car hit a rut and bounced so hard that Rhodes’s head almost hit the roof. He jerked the wheel to keep the car going straight and told himself not to let his mind wander if he hoped to get to the woods in one piece.

It didn’t take long to get there, no more than ten minutes. The pickup slowed and made the turn toward the woods, picking up speed on the better road. Rhodes stayed right behind. He hadn’t turned on the light bar and siren earlier, but he did now. He didn’t think the lights and noise would slow Rapper down or even give him a second thought, but it might serve as a warning to any cars they might meet.

They roared past Louetta Kennedy’s store and past the place where the mammoth bones had been found on the bank of a creek. The bones had created a little excitement in the beginning, but in the end nothing had ever come of the find. Most of the bones had proved too brittle to preserve, and the creek had flooded, making removing them too difficult.

That had been a few years earlier. Rhodes wished the creek would flood again, and soon.

The road didn’t go into the woods. It curved off and bypassed them, but Rapper didn’t seem to know that. He wasn’t slowing down for the curve.

Rhodes soon saw why. Rapper was going into the woods, and he was going to drive there. The pickup went off the road and down the bank of the creek, rocking from side to side. Rhodes thought it might flip over, but it didn’t. It hit the creek bed hard, bottomed out, and rebounded, throwing up a little water from the trickle that was there. Then, with its tires chewing dirt and dead grass and throwing them out behind, it climbed the opposite bank.

Rhodes wasn’t sure the county car was built to take the punishment the truck could, but it was too late for him to do anything but give it a try. He careened into the ditch, bouncing around like a rubber ball. When the car hit the creek bed, it almost stalled out, but Rhodes somehow gave it a jolt of gas at just the right time and it shot forward. For a second, Rhodes thought the car was going to stick nose-first into the bank, and he actually pulled back on the wheel. His arms strained and the tendons stood out in his neck. It was as if he believed he could lift the front end of the car up by his own power. Maybe he succeeded, because the hood bounced up, the back tires caught, and the car plowed up the bank.

Rhodes saw that Rapper wasn’t going to stop at the tree line. With the big brush guard on the truck, he wouldn’t have to. He could sweep past the smaller trees and even run over some of them.

Rhodes, however, could not. There were just some things the county car couldn’t stand up to. Rapper might blaze a trail, but it wouldn’t do for Rhodes to try to follow it. He was going to have to go after Rapper on foot.

The pickup crashed into the trees and went right on, but Rhodes stopped his car and got out. He unlocked the shotgun from the rack and looked into the trees where the pickup had disappeared.

Rhodes remembered three things. One was the last time he’d chased Rapper into some woods. That hadn’t worked out too well for Rapper, but it had been a close call for Rhodes, as well. That was one thing.

The second had happened not long after the mammoth bones had been discovered by a man named Bud Turley. Rhodes had followed Turley into these same woods. Turley had left in even worse shape than Rapper had been in when Rhodes had finished with him. In Turley’s case, however, Rhodes hadn’t done the major part of the damage. A snake had.

The third time had been the earliest, and Rhodes had suffered an unfortunate encounter with some feral hogs. He’d wound up in the hospital himself that time, and he’d never felt the same about bacon since.

Rhodes didn’t want to go through any of those things again, and he certainly didn’t want to wind up with a copperhead snake hanging from some part of his anatomy. He disliked snakes even more than he disliked feral hogs.

What worried him almost as much as the possibility of encountering snakes and hogs was that Rapper was smarter than Turley, and Rapper had company. Nellie, while not exactly a mental giant, tipped the odds in Rapper’s favor.

Rhodes knew that waiting for backup would be the smart thing. He also knew that if he waited too long, Rapper might smash his way right through the Big Woods and out the other side, or just abandon the truck and run for it, after which he’d disappear again, maybe for a few years, maybe forever. Rhodes really wanted to get him this time.

So he started walking into the woods. It appeared that Rapper had followed a rough path that he already knew was there. Rhodes realized he might have been able to get the county car in after all, but he didn’t think it would be a good idea to try. He’d just slip along quietly and see where the trail led him. He thought he could guess.

After he’d gone about twenty yards, he stopped to listen. If Rapper was still driving, the pickup should have been making plenty of noise, but an odd silence hung over the woods. Rapper’s truck must have stopped after reaching some destination or running into a tree. Rhodes figured it was the former, even though he wished it could be the latter. Whatever had happened, the noise of the truck crashing along had scared even the squirrels and birds into silence for the time being.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was going down. It wouldn’t be dark for a while, but where Rhodes was, the shadows were deepening. The farther into the trees he went, the darker it would be.

Again he thought about waiting, but if Rapper got away, he’d never forgive himself. He kept moving forward.

The mistake he’d made was a simple one. He told himself that anybody could have made it, but he knew that wasn’t true. Rapper had outsmarted him again, which he realized as soon as Nellie stepped out behind him, stuck a pistol in his back, and said, “Hey, Sheriff. Long time no see.”

Nellie had a high opinion of his wit. Rhodes didn’t.

“Is that a shotgun in your hands,” Nellie said, “or are you just glad to see me?”

Rhodes didn’t answer. He was too busy chewing himself out for letting Rapper get the better of him. Obviously, he’d let Nellie out of the truck and kept on going. Rhodes imagined he’d said something like “That dumbass sheriff’ll be concentrating on the truck. He won’t expect you to be laying for him. Hide behind a tree and you can get the drop on him.”

And that’s what Nellie had done. The Indian Head penny hadn’t helped a bit.

“I guess it’s a shotgun,” Nellie said. “I guess you aren’t glad to see me, either.”

“I’m not,” Rhodes said.

He supposed he should have derived a little satisfaction from having been right about who was in the pickup, but somehow it just wasn’t a satisfying situation.

“Rapper said you wouldn’t be. You just put the shotgun down now. Don’t drop it. Lay it down real easy.”

Rhodes didn’t have much choice. He could have tried to spin around and shoot Nellie, but Nellie wasn’t so slow that he wouldn’t shoot first. And probably second, too. Rhodes put the gun on the ground and straightened back up.

“Walk on a couple of steps and then stop,” Nellie said.

When Rhodes had done that, Nellie picked up the shotgun and said, “This here’s a lot better than the dinky little pistol I was carrying. I appreciate you bringing it along for me to use.”