Points West (A Butterscotch Jones Mystery Book 5) (7 page)

Chuck Goodhead sat on a stool at the bar in the Lonesome
Moose watching as the townsfolk of McIntyre’s Gulch filed through the doors to
find seats of their own. Once through the doors, most of the populace had a
tendency to wander and chat rather than organize themselves in preparation for
the meeting. Many stopped by to exchange greetings with the Mountie who had
long since become and accepted member of the community.

This was the first official meeting of the entire
municipality that Chuck had attended. As he’d expected, it didn’t start on
time. One hour late, also known as spot-on Gulch time, Big John appeared from a
back room to stand behind a crude wooden lectern that he’d banged together out
of some old logs out back for just such an occasion. He’d even made a crude gavel
which he pounded on the lectern to get everyone’s attention. The pounding had
no effect on the milling, raucous crowd. Eventually the head flew off the gavel
which at least solicited some laughter.

Though Big John was a big man with an equally big voice, he
was surprisingly inept at garnering the attention of his citizenry. Many would
say that though he had the voice to command respect, he lacked the words.

“
Oy
!”
Samuel Levine-Jones called.
“
Oy
!”

Samuel was the only known Jewish resident in town. As was frequently
the case at town meetings, it was his annoying voice upon which Big John had to
depend to get his audience’s attention. Several more boisterous
Oys
and the still
milling group of people began to settle down. Most also wiggled their fingers
in their ears in an attempt to stop the ringing in their head which Samuel’s
plaintive plea produced as a side effect.

“Thank you, Samuel. Would everyone please find a seat? Is
everyone here?” Big John asked.

“No,” a voice called. “I think Denny the Diesel is trapped
in the lavvy.”

“
Playin
’ the skin flute again?”
someone wanted to know.

“No, this time he’s
ridin
’ out the
ill effects from
orderin
’ Big John’s house special
last night.”

The room burst into laughter and individual conversations
resumed.

“
Oy
!”
Samuel called.
“
Oy
!”

“Okay, okay,” Zeke Jones called back as things began to
settle down. “We’ll stop
jawin
’ if you’ll stop
squealin
’, Samuel.”

Finally there was relative peace and quiet. Big John jumped
in with his introduction before things were once more able to get out of hand.

“
Oidche
mhath
.
Thank you for coming,” he began. “As you all know, we have important business
to discuss today.”

“Aye, we do,” Harry McIntyre called back. “What are we going
to do about people’s livestock let loose to trample my greenhouse?”

“You know I do my best to keep my cows in their paddock,”
Billy Jones called back.

“Paddock, is that what you call it? Besides, who would be
fool enough to try to start a dairy farm in the Canadian outback?” Harry
taunted.

“And who’d be fool enough to try
farmin
’?”
Billy shot back. “Besides, you’ll be thankful for the fresh milk as soon as it
starts
flowin
’.”

“Milk?”
Harry barked. “Your cows spend so much energy
fightin
’
off the cold they have nothing left to produce milk.”

By this time everyone in the room had chimed in on one side
of the issue or the other, completely drowning out the two primary combatants.
Eventually, each person began shouting their own pet concerns as potential
topics of conversation. Big John searched furiously for the head of his gavel
on the floor, but once he found it he was unable to reattach it to the handle.
Frustrated, he cast the handle aside and began banging on the lectern with the
heavy block of wood until a leg fell off the lectern, sending it crashing to
the floor.

It was a pistol shot ringing out in such a confined space
that finally got everyone’s attention. Pistols and rifles appeared in people’s
hands, hammers cocked, before the armed citizenry of the Gulch noticed the
Flowers standing in the back of the room holding a still smoking pistol high in
the air. Chuck had even gone for his firearm, which he’d forgotten to wear, in
response to the surprise discharge. As Big John stood looking up at yet another
hole in his ceiling that he would have to patch, Chuck jumped down off his
stool and strode before the audience to explain the situation before things
deteriorated back into mayhem.

“People, I’m Charles Goodhead, Canadian Mountie,” Chuck
announced. “Most of you know me. I have some news that I’d like to share with you.”

“Go ahead, Mountie,” Big John said, still looking up.

No doubt Big John had already devised a mental picture of
the perfect board out back with which to cover the new hole in his ceiling.

“We have a dead man in our town, an outsider, who died under
suspicious circumstances,” Chuck began. “The Bones has examined him.”

*
 
*
 
*

As Sasha pulled the truck into town, he noticed that the
streets were deserted with the exception of a handful of people still trying to
file into the Lonesome Moose. Recognizing that the meeting he was instructed to
keep Horace Goodhead from attending was still underway, he pulled the truck up
short at the outskirts of town.

“What is it? Why are we stopping?” Horace wanted to know.

“Horace, would you have fun with me?” Sasha asked
,
having devised a plan for killing a little time until the
meeting was over.

“What did you have in mind?” Horace asked suspiciously.

“The explosives we talked about.”

“Yes?”

“Would it be a fun time to use some to say hello?”

“I still don’t follow you.”

“Hop out of truck and wait. I will be back with hello
presents.”

Still confused by Sasha’s veiled hints, Horace nonetheless
hopped out of the truck to await Sasha’s return. Sasha drove to the back of the
Lonesome Moose and slipped inside to gather the cardboard box of goodies he
kept hidden in the back of the shed. Returning in a matter of minutes, Sasha
climbed out of the truck to share his secret stash.

“Here! Gaze in wonderment.”

“Oh boy,” Horace exclaimed. “I haven’t seen this much
ordinance all in one place since I was loading bombs onto B-17s during the big
war.”

“Nor I since war in Chechnya,” Sasha admitted with a smile.
“Those were happy days.”

Horace held up an ugly-looking ball of nails stuck together
with pitch and raised a questioning eyebrow toward Sasha.

“Antipersonnel,” Sasha explained.

Horace put the nail bomb back and had to use both hands to
lift the largest of the homemade explosives.

“Good Lord, would you look at the size of this one,” he
declared.

“Good for clearing forest of trees or leveling buildings,”
Sasha explained.

“Boy oh boy, I sure would like to be around when this one
goes off,” Horace said, rotating the bomb in his hands while admiring it.

“As you wish,” Sasha replied.

Sasha bent forward and began rummaging through the cardboard
box.

“Sasha, you aren’t really planning on setting off this big
boy in town, are you?”

“Why not?”
Sasha replied in surprise.
“Will make firewood of dead
trees.”

“For one thing, we’ll have to be at least a hundred yards
away to be safe.”

“Is no problem,” Sasha replied, retrieving a homemade fuse
from his box.

Sasha held the extremely short segment of fuse up so the two
of them could examine it.

“That’s not long enough,” Horace said with a gulp.

“We will run fast,” Sasha replied, flashing a mischievous
smile.
“But first, vodka.”

Sasha produced a flask. He unscrewed the lid and offered it
to Horace. He felt giddy. He smiled back and nodded his head in excitement.

“
Slainte
!
”
Horace said, remembering this Gaelic word because Fiddling
Thomas had used it several times. He took a large hit and then passed the flask
back.

“
Slainte
,”
Sasha agreed.
“Now to work.”

The two men paced one hundred yards out of town then bent to
plant the blockbuster in the snow. Sasha inserted the short piece of fuse and looked
up into Horace’s excited eyes. It was a pleasure to find someone else who liked
explosives.

“Ready?” he asked.

“You bet I am!” Horace replied.

Sasha lit the fuse and the two men took off running for the
cover of the town hall.

*
 
*
 
*

“The man was found shot, but the Bones assures us that he
didn’t die from his gunshot wounds. Instead, he died of some form of poisoning,
most likely introduced intravenously,” Chuck continued.

“I heard he was contagious,” someone hollered to murmurs of
agreement. “It’s a biological weapon!”

“One of the reasons for having this meeting is to put such
rumors to rest,” Chuck added before the conference could break down again. “He
is not contagious. There appears to be no danger from being near the body or
from anyone who was near the body.”

“What about the other body?” another person chimed in.

“In addition to the man who was shot, we found that hand of
a woman who had been consumed by a bear. And wolves,” he added contentiously.
“We’d like to have a vote on whether we should have a short funeral to bury the
hand.”

“Seems silly to me, having a funeral for a hand,” was the
first opinion.

“I have a jewelry box you can use for a casket,” someone
else offered. “I just love funerals. When I don’t know the people,” the woman
added.

“We could have a wake!”

Chuck knew that wakes were a fun social event in the Gulch.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” was shouted another opinion.

“Everyone in favor of having a funeral for the hand, please
raise theirs,” the Mountie ordered.

Most of the hands in the room shot skyward in support of the
ownerless hand.

“Good enough,” Chuck said, “it looks like we’ll be having
ourselves a funeral.”

“And a wake!”

With this pronouncement the Mountie lost control of the
audience,
which broke down into spirited debate over the vote
and bickering over local pet peeves.
Meanwhile, Big John had succeeded
in righting his lectern and propping the broken leg back into place so that it
would once more stand upright.

“If there are no objections,” Big John hollered, “then I
declare this meeting adjourned. Let’s get to the
eatin
’.”

Big John brought the head of his gavel down on the lectern
to the accompaniment of a massive explosion. Chuck wasn’t positive, but he
thought that the entire floor lifted several feet off the ground before
dropping back down. Dust and big hunks of filler were blasted from the chinks
between the logs of the structure to rain down on the townsfolk. The lectern
fell to the floor again and Chuck had to balance himself against the wall to keep
from joining the damaged piece of furniture on the floor.

“What was that?” Big John asked, suspiciously examining his
gavel as if that had been the source of the blast.

Chuck was the first out the door of the building, followed
in quick succession by the others in attendance. He was too late to witness the
huge fireball that accompanied the explosion, but in plenty of time to become
enveloped by the resulting choking plume of smoke that spread over Main Street.

*
 
*
 
*

Sasha pulled his face out of the
snowbank
in which he’d landed headfirst to take a mighty inhalation of breath. He’d had
all of the wind knocked out of him by the concussive impact of the explosion
which had launched him thirty feet through the air. Pushing himself upright, he
was able to quickly assess that his body was in good working order. His next
concern was for his new friend.

“Horace!” he called, looking all around him for any sign of
a body.

He didn’t see a body, but he did see something burning not
ten feet away. It wasn’t until he’d approached that he was able to identify the
back of Horace’s down jacket blazing away in the snow. Sasha rushed to Horace’s
coat and shoveled snow onto it to douse the flames. With the fire out, he was
able to discern that there was the body of a man beneath the coat. He reached
underneath and flipped the body over in fear for what he might find.