Between the Living and the Dead (15 page)

“You weren't answerin' the radio,” Hack said.

“I'm not in the car,” Rhodes told him.

“Not in the car? You goin' over to see Mikey Burns, or ain't you?”

“I stopped by the Moore house first,” Rhodes said. “To have a look around.”

“Well, Mikey says he's gonna leave early today, and he's gettin' antsy.”

“I'll go right now,” Rhodes said.

He stuck the phone back in his pocket and walked through the yard to the car. He still couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching him. He looked around, but he didn't see any pale faces peering at him from behind broken or dusty windowpanes. He didn't see the rat, either, so he got in the car and left.

 

Chapter 12

A couple of the other county commissioners had recently built new stone buildings to house their offices. On the inside they had large modern offices and meeting rooms with comfortable chairs.

Mikey Burns hadn't followed their lead as yet. He still had his office in a big metal building with covered bays in the back for road graders and trucks and other county equipment.

Unlike his headquarters, however, Burns himself was flashy. He drove a bright red Pontiac Solstice convertible, which he'd had since it was new. It was on the way to becoming a collectible at this point, but it suited his personality. It was parked in front of the building, and Rhodes parked next to it. He was careful not to let the door of the county car touch the side of the convertible when he got out.

Going inside, Rhodes was greeted by Mrs. Wilkie, who had changed a good bit since beginning to work for the county and becoming interested in her boss. Her hair was still an unlikely color, but it wasn't the unnatural reddish orange it had been. It was styled, or so Rhodes suspected, by Lonnie Wallace or one of his assistants at the Beauty Shack. She'd recently done away with her glasses for contact lenses, and she even had an occasional kind word for Rhodes, who figured she'd finally forgiven him for marrying Ivy. She wasn't as perky as Alice King, but then nobody was as perky as Alice King.

“Good afternoon, Sheriff,” Mrs. Wilkie said when he came into the room. “The commissioner is expecting you. You go right on in.”

Rhodes did as instructed. Burns sat behind his battered old desk, and he waved Rhodes to a seat in one of the office's folding chairs. The other furniture consisted of a couple of old green filing cabinets and Burns's desk, atop which were the only fairly new objects in the office, a computer and monitor.

Burns was given to wearing aloha shirts, but the one he had on today wasn't as bright as usual. It was covered with guitars against a black background. He also wore a straw planter's hat. Hack had said he was planning to leave early, and it looked as if he was already on his way.

“We need to talk, Sheriff,” Burns said.

“That's what I'm here for,” Rhodes said. “You know something about Neil Foshee?”

“Maybe. I'll get to him in a minute. We need to talk about the drug problem in general first. The hog problem, too.”

Rhodes wasn't sure what the two problems had to do with each other, but he figured Burns would tell him.

“Okay,” Rhodes said. “Let's talk about them. You go first.”

“That was my plan.” Burns opened the middle drawer of his desk, pulled out a newspaper, and laid it on the desk. He opened it up and tapped it with his finger. “You know what this is?”

Rhodes was tempted to say it was a newspaper, but Burns probably wasn't in the mood for jokes. Rhodes couldn't see the article that Burns was tapping, so he had no idea what was in it. Either Burns thought Rhodes had better eyesight than he actually did or he expected Rhodes to get up and take a look at the paper.

Rhodes got up and looked. He saw a drawing of a circular object with four arms sticking out from its sides. The arms were topped with rotors.

“It's a drone,” Rhodes said.

“Exactly,” Burns said. “It could be the answer to our problems.”

“Which problems?” Rhodes said.

“The ones I just mentioned,” Burns said. “The druggies and the wild hogs. You get it?”

Rhodes walked back to the folding chair and sat down. The chair squeaked. Needed some WD-40 or Rhodes needed to lose a little weight. Or both.

“I think I get it,” Rhodes said, “but I'm not sure. You'd better clarify it for me.”

“It's simple,” Burns said. “If we had a couple of drones, we could surveil the whole county without having to leave this building. We'd have a couple of monitors and operators, and those two people could keep up with the whole county. We could spot the meth houses and move right in on them. We'd know who was there and what they were doing. We could find out where the hogs were holed up during the daylight hours and—” He paused. “There's a little problem with the hogs. What we'd need for them is another drone, an armed one. We'd bomb those suckers. Blow 'em up. Scatter pork parts all over the county if we had to, but we'd get rid of 'em.”

Offhand Rhodes could come up with only a couple of hundred objections to Burns's cunning plan, but he thought it would be best to start with the obvious one.

“Would the military let us have something like that?”

“Sure they would. The sheriff's department already has one down in Conroe. Lot of places have 'em that don't want it known yet.”

“Armed ones?”

“Well, maybe not armed ones, but they have surveillance drones. We're already behind the curve.”

“Expensive, aren't they?” Rhodes asked. “Plus you'd have to hire the operators. It takes a lot of training to pilot one of those from a desk.”

“Well, sure it does, but the county would benefit a lot. You have to spend money to make money.”

Rhodes didn't think any of the other commissioners would agree with anything Burns had said. “Are you going to recommend this?”

“That's where you come in,” Burns said. “You're the sheriff. You run all the law enforcement, so you're the expert on what we need. You make the recommendation, and I'll support you.”

“I'll have to study on it some first,” Rhodes said. “It's a complicated thing to deal with.”

Burns would probably forget all about the drone in a few weeks, just as he'd forgotten other things, like the M-16 he'd wanted the county to buy.

“I understand,” Burns said. “It's not something you can decide on in just a few minutes. You let me know next week. Now here's something else for you to think about, and it's an even better idea.”

Rhodes didn't see how it could be much worse. “What is it?”

“An MRAP.”

“A what?

“An MRAP, a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, and here's the best part. It won't cost us a penny. The army's giving them away.”

“Why on earth would we need a tactical vehicle like that?”

“Think about it,” Burns said. “Need to execute a warrant? One of those babies would pretty much take care of any resistance. Got somebody holed up in a house with hostages? One of those babies would take care of that, too.”

“One of those babies would take care of a zombie apocalypse,” Rhodes said, “but do we really need one? We're just a small sheriff's department, not an invading army. So far nobody's planted any IEDs to try to stop us. We haven't had to break down any concrete walls to get to a fugitive.”

Burns ignored him. “We could get one easy. I know of one town a lot smaller than Clearview in this very state that's gotten over three million dollars' worth of equipment from the army, all at no cost to them. They didn't get an MRAP, but they got all kinds of neat stuff. We might even get some grenade launchers. Other places have.” He paused, thinking something over. “You know what? We might be able to use the grenade launchers on the hogs if we don't get the drones.”

“This will take a lot of study,” Rhodes said, hoping it wouldn't take Burns long to forget about it. Rhodes didn't want to be the commander of an army or anything like it.

“You study hard,” Burns said. “And fast. Everybody's getting ahead of us. We'll look like a second-class county if we don't get our act together.”

“I'll give it a lot of thought,” Rhodes said, “and I'll let you know as soon as I can. Right now, I know you're in a hurry to get away, so tell me what you want to say about Neil Foshee before you have to leave.”

Burns leaned back in his chair. “I heard he'd been killed. You know who did it yet?”

“I'm working on it,” Rhodes said.

“You talked to Roger Allen?”

Allen sold Chevrolets at the local dealership. As far as Rhodes knew, he had nothing to do with Foshee.

“I didn't know he was connected to Foshee, so I haven't talked to him. Should I?”

“Might be a good idea. He came by here a day or so ago complaining about the drug problem in the county. He said it was personal with him. Not here exactly, but because he had a cousin over in Longview that got hooked on meth and it ruined his life. He went crazy for the stuff. Lost his business, left his wife, wound up getting killed when he tried to break into a house to get drug money. Homeowner killed him with a rifle shot to the head. Anyway, Roger was saying that if something wasn't done soon, he was going to do it himself. He didn't want this county to be overrun with drugs like some of them are and have people breaking into houses and getting killed over drug money.”

“He's never complained to my office,” Rhodes said. He was starting to feel like Hack about nobody telling him anything. First Wade Clement and now Roger Allen.

“I don't want you to get the wrong idea about what I told him,” Burns said. “I told him this county had less trouble with drugs than just about any county in the state and that was because you and your department were doing such a good job. I told him it was wrong to be thinking about taking the law into his own hands. I don't think he meant he'd really do it. He was just wound up, but he mentioned the Foshee boys by name. Everybody's heard about that big arrest you made on them, and then they bonded out. What got Roger started, though, besides the Foshees being back on the street, was some young guy asking around town about drugs. Seemed to think there was a problem here, and he was going to write it up for some college paper or something.”

“Wade Clement,” Rhodes said.

“Who?” Burns said.

“The mayor's nephew. That's who talked to Roger. Wade's a college student in town for a visit with his uncle. He's majoring in criminology in college, and he claims he's writing a paper for some class about small-town drug problems. I think he's causing more problems than we had before he got here. I've talked to him about it.”

“I hope so. We don't need that kind of thing. You better talk to Roger, too. He's got a temper. I wouldn't put it past him to decide to go after those Foshees on his own, even if I tried to calm him down.”

Rhodes stood up. “I'll talk to him.”

Burns stood up as well. “I don't think he killed Neil, understand. I just think you need to talk to him.”

Rhodes nodded. “Right. That's what I'll do.”

“You think about those drones, too. Your recommendation would sell the idea. I'll recommend the MRAP myself. It's free, it's tactical, and it looks great. That thing could drive right over a car if it had to. We could sure use one.”

“I'll give it a lot of thought,” Rhodes lied, wondering why anybody would want to drive over a car. “You're in a hurry to get away, so I'll go on now and talk to Roger Allen. Thanks for the tip.”

“Always glad to help,” Burns said.

Rhodes went on out and saw that Mrs. Wilkie was getting her purse out of the bottom drawer of her desk. He wondered if she and Burns were going to leave early together, not that it was any of his business. He gave her a wave and a smile and left.

*   *   *

Rhodes thought he had time to visit the Chevy dealership before he went home for dinner, so he drove out the highway toward Walmart where so many of the local businesses had relocated. Clearview's downtown might have died, but businesses all along the highway leading up to Walmart on the east side of town had been thriving.

The Chevy dealership was no exception. It covered a couple of acres of ground, and Rhodes didn't even want to think about the value of the inventory of new and used cars. If Mikey Burns's drone malfunctioned and bombed the dealership instead of a bunch of hogs, the county would never be able to pay off the lawsuit the insurance company would bring against it, and that was if there were no casualties. Burns was the one who needed to do more thinking about what he was asking for, not Rhodes. Rhodes had already made up his mind.

Rhodes wound through the cars situated where people could see them from the highway and parked in front of the dealership's building, which was at least half a block long. The entire front was made up of windows and big glass doors. Cars were parked inside the building as well as outside in front of the windows. Rhodes parked in one of the spots reserved for visitors, and he was barely out of the county car before Roger Allen came bounding out of the building to meet him.

Roger had been a football player for the Clearview Catamounts a good many years before, not long after Rhodes's own inglorious athletic career. Roger had been a lineman, big and fast, as Rhodes recalled, but he hadn't kept in shape. He was still big, but he didn't look fast, and he'd gained some weight that wasn't as well distributed as it might have been. Not that Rhodes hadn't done the same. He was no longer “Will o' the Wisp” Dan Rhodes. Never had been, really, but it had been nice to be thought of that way even for a short time.

“You here about the Tahoes, Sheriff?” Roger asked, sticking out his hand.

Roger had a salesman's jovial tone and a smile to go with it. He was dressed casually in cotton slacks and an open-necked shirt. Although it was late afternoon, he was closely shaved, and not just his face. Roger was completely bald, and his head was shaved as close as his chin.