Hog Heaven (18 page)

Roy Ballard parked several rows away and watched Leigh Anne Beech enter the restaurant by herself. He had binoculars, and he was lucky that the restaurant was fronted with a wall of windows. He watched from seventy yards as she was shown to a table where two women—attractive, of course, and about the same age as Leigh Anne—were already seated. They rose to greet her and air kisses were exchanged all around.

Roy grabbed one of his cameras—one with a superzoom lens—and took several shots of the women. Chances were good he would never need the photos for anything, but taking photos didn’t cost anything.

While the threesome had lunch, so did he: a turkey-and-avocado sandwich he pulled from a small ice chest, plus a bag of chips and a can of root beer. He was done in about ten minutes, whereas the ladies stretched their lunch to an hour and a half. Then they appeared to request that the waiter provide separate tickets for each of them.

Finally, out they came for some animated chat on the sidewalk, followed by more air kisses, and then Leigh Anne Beech got back into her BMW and went west once again on Loop 1604. Not going home just yet. She exited a few minutes later and pulled into a shopping center called the Shops at La Cantera.

It was only when a Lexus parked next to the BMW that Roy realized one of the other ladies from lunch had followed Leigh Anne Beech over to the shopping center. She had to have been behind Roy on the way over, and that made him feel sloppy. He could have been spotted. Fortunately, these women weren’t trained surveillance experts, and Roy’s aging beige minivan was all but invisible to anyone in these ladies’ tax bracket.

They shopped for about two hours, which resulted in Leigh Anne Beech carrying one small bag from a place called bebe. All lowercase letters. Marketing geniuses. Roy noticed that the women lingered in front of Victoria’s Secret, looking into the windows, but they didn’t go inside. Darn the luck.

Just before rush hour, the ladies went their separate ways. Leigh Anne Beech drove her BMW straight home.

“This asshole is really starting to piss me off,” Nicole said.

She and Marlin were sitting on the porch swing, beer bottles in hand, an hour before dark. Geist was lying in the yard, twenty feet away, enjoying a patch of weak sunlight. Marlin had just finished recounting his experience at the café that afternoon, including Weems’s veiled threats.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come closer to losing my cool,” Marlin said.

“That’s what he wanted you to do.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m proud that you didn’t.”

“Thanks. Both of us need to be careful. Keep our eyes and ears open.”

“We will.”

“I have to admit, I’m feeling a little, I don’t know—like I should’ve...”

“Broken his nose? Kicked him in the teeth? Ruptured his kidney?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I know you know better than that. That would’ve been a disaster.”

Marlin took a long drink from the bottle of beer in his hand. “Sure would’ve felt good.”

“Besides,” she said, “if it comes to that, I get first crack.”

He looked at her. “You’re really worked up, huh?”

“What he did to Armando Salazar should put him in prison for years. That poor guy absolutely did not deserve what happened to him. Gilbert Weems is an animal and he should be locked up.”

“Agreed—if it was him.” She whirled toward him with her mouth open and her eyes wide, and he said, “Hold on, take it easy. I’m not saying it wasn’t him, but we still need to prove it.”

The next morning, Marlin met Bobby Garza and chief deputy Bill Tatum in the conference room at the sheriff’s office. Garza had texted them both the evening before to arrange the meeting. The sheriff arrived a few minutes late, but he was carrying a box of glazed donuts, which he set in the center of the table.

“Breakfast of champions,” Tatum said.

“Only the best,” Garza said.

Marlin took one and set it on a napkin. He already had a mug of hot coffee.

“Okay,” Garza said. “I wanted to sit down and talk for a minute about both the Sammy Beech case and the walking crime wave known as Gilbert Weems. Both of these cases are going nowhere, and frankly, it’s starting to piss me off. So let’s do some brainstorming and see if that gets us anywhere.”

“Can’t hurt,” Tatum said.

“John,” Garza said. “Tell Bill about your run-in yesterday with Weems.”

Marlin had called the sheriff the previous afternoon and given him the highlights of his encounter at the café, but now he described it in detail for the chief deputy, including the veiled threat about paying Nicole a visit while Marlin was on patrol.

“Kudos for keeping your cool,” Tatum said. “I bet you wanted to knock him cold.”

“It crossed my mind.”

“He just loves to provoke, doesn’t he?” Tatum said.

“Nice of Phil Colby to say some of the things you couldn’t,” Garza said. “You talk to him since then?”

“Phil?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Apparently, he had a few words with Weems in the parking lot,” Garza said.

“Huh. I hadn’t heard about that.” Marlin remembered now that Phil had seemed to linger in his truck after lunch. Obviously, he wanted Marlin to leave so he could confront Weems by himself.

Garza said, “At this point, I gotta be honest—unless something shakes lose, Weems is gonna skate on two felony charges.”

“Still putting pressure on Dustin Bryant?” Marlin asked.

“Yeah. He hasn’t gone for it yet. I’ll keep after him, but I really thought he’d break by now. I said we had video of the assault, but in hindsight that might’ve been a mistake. Easy enough for him to go back to the store and see if there are surveillance cameras, at which point he’d know I was lying.”

Marlin said, “Did you say the video was from a surveillance camera?”

Garza paused, thinking, then smiled. “No, I said it was all on video, that’s all. So it could be video from someone’s phone. That’s where you were going, right?”

“Exactly.”

“So maybe I give him one more push, saying not only is it on video, but we have a witness to boot. I mean, we’d have to have a witness, if someone shot it on their phone.”

“The only flaw with that,” Tatum said, “is why would someone be shooting video of Weems or Salazar prior to the assault? We know from Sharon Greene that the assault was sudden. There wasn’t an argument or confrontation beforehand. So why would someone be recording the scene? Just random coincidence? That seems like a stretch. And if we did have video, why wouldn’t we have already arrested Weems?”

“Yeah,” Garza said, deflating. “Those are good points.”

“On the other hand,” Marlin said, “if Bryant thinks you lied to him about having video, what’s the harm in pushing it further? You come right out and say it’s a cell-phone video, but it’s not that great, so we’re working on getting it cleaned up. That means now’s the time for Bryant to come forth as a witness himself, while he still has a chance. Maybe that will push him over the edge. With luck, he won’t even wonder why anyone was shooting video. Or maybe he’ll think you’re stretching the facts—that you do have video, but it’s of the moments right after the assault. He’d have to call your bluff to find out.”

Armando jerked awake from a nightmare and the sudden movement made his head throb. But he hardly noticed it, because the content of the nightmare was lingering as he woke, and he was trying to prevent it from slipping away.

Armando had just been assaulted again in his dream.

By a redheaded man.
The
redheaded man, theoretically.

It seemed so real. Armando had pulled into the convenience store, parked, then dialed Sharon’s number. He stepped from his Prius, phone to his ear, and began to go inside. He wasn’t paying much attention to his surroundings, but this was Johnson City, not some big, dangerous city. Nothing to worry about out here, right?

Sharon answered, and Armando said hello, and then—

Fucking faggot.

Armando heard it, looked up, and—

WHAM!

A massive jolt, and then he was on the pavement, head spinning. What in the hell had just happened? It had had the startling force and impact of a car wreck. He put his hand to his face to staunch the flow of blood that was dripping from his face. He could feel split skin. Teeth missing.

He realized there was a man towering over him.

Armando looked up—way up—and there he was. The redheaded man. Armando saw his face. Not clearly, but he got a sense of it. The shape, the proportions, the angle of the jaw.

Lying in the hospital bed, Armando concentrated on that face. Trying to hold on to it. Memorize it as best he could. And he was wondering—was this entire dream, including the face, something his imagination had conjured up to fill in the blanks? Or was it an accurate memory? Could he trust it? After the assault, had he come to just long enough to see the man’s face? More important, if his memory was coming back, would the details become sharper and crisper over time? Would that face come into focus?

“What’s the latest with the mysterious Russian woman?” Garza asked.

“Aleksandra Babikova,” Marlin said. He was tempted to grab another donut, but he resisted.

“Right.”

“Don’t know anything new about her, but I managed to track down her sister on Facebook. She got back to me once, and now I’m waiting to hear back again. With luck, she’ll give me a phone number.”

“Does the sister live in Dallas, too?”

“No, still in Russia, according to her Facebook account.”

“Didn’t you tell me the other day that you have an address for Aleksandra in Dallas?”

“Yeah, if it’s current.”

Marlin knew what Garza was thinking. He’d been thinking the same thing himself. Like it or not, it might be time for a road trip.

Red O’Brien was acutely aware of his own shortcomings. His IQ landed in a disappointing part of the bell curve. He had very few unique professional skills or qualifications. Neither his looks nor his personality had ever garnered him any great success with the ladies. He was admittedly a slacker in the area of personal hygiene. He couldn’t sing, dance, write, draw, or even tell a joke particularly well. He tended to associate with persons of questionable character. Hell, his own character was questionable—which explained the dozens of citations, fines, garnishments, indictments, levies, and other assorted penalties and sanctions imposed on him by various federal, state, county, and city agencies and organizations over the years.

But he did have a finely honed bullshit detector.

He saw this as a major strength that he had grown to heed and respect. Whether this ability was borne of an innate skepticism or a learned distrust, Red could identify bullshit like nobody’s business. Which wasn’t to say that he could spot every last bit of bullshit he ever heard. That was nearly impossible. Some bullshit slipped past him, but that bullshit tended to be trivial.

For instance, if someone mentioned that Keystone Light was on sale at the Super S, it was doubtful that Red’s bullshit detector would go off, because why would someone make something like that up? And if they did, what would they gain? And what would it matter if Red believed them? So, yeah, someone could bullshit about that if they really wanted to, and Red might not know it.

But if that same person said they were selling a 15-year-old Ford F-150 with only seventy thousand miles on it—and that person wasn’t a little old lady, a shut-in, or a hermit—Red’s bullshit detector would go on high alert. If one of Red’s friends said they’d hit three doves with one shotgun blast, another alert. If a drunk in a bar bragged about the time he whipped two bikers at once without even spitting out his cigarette, Red could almost hear the bells and whistles going off.

Conversely, someone could have a fantastic reason to bullshit, but Red would think they were telling the truth—and later he’d learn that he was right. Like with Grady Beech and the tattooed pig. When Armando had pointed out that the whole thing might be bullshit, Red was concerned. But they had later learned that it wasn’t bullshit, and Red had realized in hindsight that his bullshit detector hadn’t gone off.

Honestly, Red didn’t know why it worked. He wasn’t sure why some things set the detector off and others didn’t, but he figured it was a complicated formula having to do with the level of plausibility of the alleged occurrence, minus the incentive for someone to make it up, divided by the reputation of the person making the claim, multiplied by the personal price Red might pay for believing it. Or who the hell knows, but it worked, and that was the important thing.

So, the previous afternoon and evening, after Jack Chambers had said that the bounty pig had been shot, when Red’s bullshit detector began to give a faint but persistent ping, Red listened. And he began to think. Wouldn’t it make sense that someone would spread that rumor eventually? Red had been listening to the local and regional radio stations ever since, waiting to hear it from a reliable source, but nobody had been able to confirm it. Lots of talk, but no details.
Why isn’t the winner coming forward?
everyone was asking.
Why wait?
Red figured that was because there wasn’t—

“Where the hell you going?” Billy Don asked.

They were in Red’s truck on Highway 281 heading south. They’d passed the sheriff’s office and El Charro Mexican Restaurant and Whittington’s Jerky, and Red had kept on going past the city limits, because he was preoccupied, and because he was growing tired of the search for the redheaded man.

“Jesus, how long do you wanna keep driving around?” Red asked, pulling into the left lane for a U-turn at the next crossover.

“As long as it takes,” Billy Don replied. “He’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

They’d visited nearly every retail business in town, and quite a few waitresses and cashiers had reported seeing the guy. But Red and Billy Don hadn’t seen him yet themselves. Red had had the smart idea to visit the only two motels in Johnson City, but that was a dead end. At the first motel—the Best Western—the clerk said they didn’t have a guy like that staying there. At the second motel—a little mom-and-pop place called the Hill Country Inn—the clerk, a kid no older than twenty, said, “Sorry, but it’s against policy to reveal information about our guests.”

“So he is a guest?” Red said.

“I didn’t say that.”

“So he isn’t a guest?”

“Didn’t say that either.”

“Well, it’s one or the other,” Red said.

“Obviously.”

Smart-aleck punk.

Red tried another tack, slipping a bill from his pocket and discreetly placing it on the counter. “How ’bout you blink twice if the guy is staying here?”

The kid looked at the bill and laughed. “Is that a joke?”