Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (11 page)

“He hasn’t been butchered,” Doc observed, surprised and relieved he wasn’t going to have to scoop parts of another human being into plastic baggies to take back to Klausen’s.

“No,” Mad Dog agreed, “but look at his scalp.”

A small square patch was missing, Doc could see that from the foot of the stairs. “Just like his son,” Doc whispered.

“I thought so,” Mad Dog whispered back. It would probably have bothered Doc but he was on his way up the stairs by then, eyes noting details and processing them as he climbed to the corpse’s side

“Did you touch him?” Doc asked, reaching out and doing so himself.

“No,” Mad Dog said, finally providing a simple answer, now that he wasn’t dealing with a question he considered metaphysical.

The body was about the same temperature as the house. Rigor had set in and there was marked lividity in the portions of the corpse that were lower on the stairs.

“He’s been dead for some time,” Doc said, as much to himself as to Mad Dog. “Probably at least ten or twelve hours.” He took a cotton swab out of his bag and dabbed it at the missing square of scalp. The swab came away dry. “This wound didn’t bleed and it isn’t fresh. Whoever took his scalp did it after he was dead, maybe even quite awhile after.”

Mad Dog couldn’t think of anything to say so he just stood at the foot of the stairs and nodded his head. None of what Doc was telling him made much difference, metaphysically speaking.

“Go get me the stretcher out of the Buick,” Doc commanded, his mind now too occupied to be concerned with the possibility he might be talking to a killer. “I want to take him right down to Klausen’s. I’ve got a feeling whoever scalped him didn’t kill him. He maybe even died of natural causes, but I’ll need to open him up to find out. And I need to check for his scalp.”

Mad Dog went for the stretcher, but he wasn’t particularly interested in, nor relieved by, Doc’s conjecture. He was pretty sure that Old Man Simms’ murderer, as well as the killer of the Reverend Simms, was capable of acts that could be mistaken for natural causes. So, even though Mad Dog was positive he knew the murderer’s identity, he had no idea what to do about it.

***

The Sheriff slowly turned to face the voice. It was one of those things he didn’t really want to do, but for which there was no alternative. He tried to let his face relax into a friendly, non-threatening smile and merely succeeded in looking guilty and foolish.

The speaker wasn’t a big man, but he was very solid. The muscles in his arms rippled under a pelt of dark hair and olive skin as he clenched his fists. His slacks and shirt fit well enough so that the sheriff knew there was no excess flesh on the man. He had an athlete’s body and a face that looked Turkish or Greek, or maybe Spanish. He didn’t have any accent. The sheriff noticed that as the man spoke again.

“I’ve often thought about how it would be when I found you. This isn’t what I expected, but it’s appropriate. It’s all you were ever good for.”

Angry husband, the sheriff had thought. He still might be just that, though the remarks didn’t quite fit—not that this was a good time to analyze them. He was just glad the man didn’t seem to be paying him any attention as he tried to wiggle free of the naked woman who was the target of this abuse. The man didn’t seem to be armed either, though his shirt hung over his belt, not tucked into it. Almost anything that wasn’t too bulky could be hidden under there, say a knife or a razor, given what had happened to the Reverend Simms. The sheriff’s gun was only a few feet away near a pile of pungently fresh road apples. If the woman would just hold the man’s attention while he got his boot out from under her butt and crawled over there, the situation might revert to his control.

“I’m going to kill you,” the woman said as the sheriff extricated himself. He was still watching the short dark dangerous-looking man and hoped she hadn’t suddenly chosen to address him instead of the intruder. At least he knew she wasn’t armed. She didn’t have any place to hide anything.

He rolled off her in the direction of the pistol but she chose that moment to lunge at the newcomer, nails extended, going for his eyes. The sheriff knew how dangerous those nails could be. He’d seen Cody’s backside and he was pretty sure the wounds on his own cheek had been caused by them. There was nothing half-hearted about her attempt. She might have made it if she hadn’t tripped over the sheriff’s freshly freed boot. She fell short and incidentally knocked the sheriff’s hand away from the pistol just as his fingers were on the verge of retrieving it. It also might have saved her serious injury. The dark little man with the muscles chopped a foot into the place her face would have been if she’d been free to get there. He’d expected to make contact with the martial arts kick and he lost his balance too and then all three of them were there in the dirt and the hay and the manure and two of the three seemed bent on maiming each other and not especially concerned if the sheriff happened to get in the way.

Somebody hit him in the ribs as someone else tried to tear his left ear off, or maybe it was the same someone in both cases. The sheriff got to his hands and knees and seemed about to disengage himself when someone kicked him solidly in the butt. The kick sent him sprawling. He ended up with his face in the dirt, spitting gravel through bruised lips, but his nose was only inches from the .38. He latched onto it with the fervor of a tent meeting convert to instant salvation. He rolled and saw a whirl of clothed muscular masculinity and naked muscular femininity in search of each other’s jugulars.

“Freeze, God damn it!” he shouted, and when they didn’t, added, “Sheriff” and pumped a pair of rounds into the thick lumber of the portable feeding trough.

It worked. Two pair of taloned hands ceased searching for eyes to gouge out and a pair of bloodied faces turned toward his voice.

“What the hell’s going on here?” the sheriff demanded in an outraged tone that might have been more appropriate if asked of him by either of them at separate times a few moments earlier.

“Who are you people?” The sheriff had had a tough morning. He was tired of surprises. He wanted answers for a change.

Nobody gave him any though. They just stared at him until the man finally asked a question of his own.

“Sheriff?”

The Benteen County Sheriff’s star was attached to the pocket of his shirt. He waved a hand at it. “What do you think this is,” he said, “a merit badge for mud wrestling?”

“I see,” the dark man replied, then moved a little faster than the sheriff would have thought possible. One of his hands dipped to the vicinity of his belt and came back with something thin and sharp and shiny. The other hand grabbed the woman by her hair and the first hand put the blade at her throat as the man looked calmly at the sheriff and said, “Drop the gun, asshole. Drop the gun or I rip her throat out and maybe get blood all over your badge. I won’t do her much good either.”

That wasn’t how this was supposed to work. If you were the good guy, you got the drop on the opposition and then he just gave up or you plugged him. He didn’t grab a handy hostage to thrust between himself and your weapon and tell you to drop it and call you an asshole. What, the sheriff wondered, would Clint Eastwood do in a situation like this?

“I said drop it,” the dark little man repeated. His voice sounded just a little shriller this time. “Don’t think I won’t kill her.”

The sheriff had no reason not to believe him. He didn’t know who either of these people were, but he couldn’t see how putting his gun down would help the woman. Dirty Harry wouldn’t put the gun down. Of course, Dirty Harry wouldn’t have given the man a chance to make the demand. He’d have put a couple of fist sized holes from his magnum in the guy and dropped him in the dirt and manure. It would have made Harry’s day. The sheriff was just about angry enough to do something similar. He’d killed before, back when he was just a kid, up close and personal in those final days when Vietnam was already a lost cause but American servicemen were still going out to meet little dark skinned men who didn’t offer any choices but kill or be killed. The sheriff had had enough of it to last a lifetime. He didn’t shoot game animals anymore, or even targets. Maybe he wasn’t capable of enough anger to just blow this guy away, but he was mad enough not to obey.

“No,” the sheriff said. The little man looked surprised. “I’m keeping the gun. You cut her and I pop you. I drop the gun and you can cut her and maybe get to me or away before I can pick it up again. No, I’m gonna keep the gun and if you cut her, you’re gonna be dead before she is.”

“He won’t kill me,” the woman said, her voice a harsh whisper through a larynx constricted by the dark man’s corded arm. “At least not now. I’ve got something he wants and doesn’t know where to find. He won’t kill me now.”

The man with the muscles and the blade didn’t deny it. His eyes had suddenly begun to flash from side to side as if looking for an exit.

What was going on here, the sheriff wondered. This was starting to sound like something from a Bogart movie. When would the fat man and his gunsel put in an appearance? These two would do for Brigid and Cairo. Maybe he should ask them about the black bird?

“Maybe you should let her go,” the sheriff suggested.

“Shit,” the man said. “You’re both idiots if you think I’m going back to jail.”

Jail? What was this about going back to jail? And what did the little man want worse than killing this beautiful woman, something he’d given every indication he was seriously interested in doing.

The man began backing away. “Stay put,” he ordered the sheriff, who immediately disobeyed.

She didn’t exactly fight him, but she didn’t cooperate either. It made his retreat awkward and slow. Too slow to bear. About ten feet before the sheriff had decided he’d do exactly that, the man suddenly lifted and shoved the woman back at him and whirled and dove for the entrance to the stables. The sheriff wasn’t quite ready for it. He managed to avoid being knocked down but he couldn’t have gotten off a clean shot even if he wanted, and he wasn’t ready to risk killing someone over something he clearly didn’t understand.

“Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!” the sheriff shouted, hurdling the naked woman and flailing his arms to help keep his feet under him. The angry little man didn’t halt and the sheriff didn’t shoot and by the time the sheriff got through the stable and into the parking lot a motorcycle had been kicked to life and was showering everything in the vicinity with rocks and gravel.

The Chevy made its own dust cloud and the sheriff did some creative steering to keep it from spinning out and going ass first into the ditch across from Sourdough’s entrance. He went airborne as he crossed the bridge at Sweetwater creek, the 350 howling in frustration at losing contact with the earth and the traction it needed to continue to accelerate. The sheriff was doing better than seventy at the first intersection and close to a hundred by the second but the motorcycle was getting away. The Chevy could go faster still, but not on this washboard and sand country road. The sheriff was just beginning to recall the RPM limits and moderate speeds he was supposed to keep his new truck under during its break-in period when the back end started going squirrelly on him and he knew he’d blown a tire as well as maybe voiding a warranty. By the time he got it stopped between two empty wheat fields, he couldn’t even hear the scream of the motorcycle’s exhaust anymore. Nothing but dust remained as the bike carried yet another mystery out of his control and back into Benteen County where it could do all manner of harm to his chances of being elected to another term, to say nothing of its possible impact on the life expectancy of the local population.

***

OK. So where was the jack? The sheriff knew his spare was hanging under the bed just in front of the recently remodeled chrome step bumper. He leaned over and opened the glove box and grabbed his owner’s manual. A plastic baggy containing a package of M&Ms and a note fell into his lap.

“If you find this it will probably mean your new truck isn’t as trouble free as it should be. In that case, we’d like you to remind you that Heather favored the ‘way cool’ Dodge and I thought a Ford would be more reliable. We told you so, but your problems will best be faced knowing you are loved and have chocolate. Thus, this care package and our affection. XOXO!”

It was Judy’s handwriting. The sheriff shook his head and tore open a corner of the package and poured some M&Ms into his hand. Having spent the day baking inside the cab of his pickup, they defied their slogan and melted in his hand as well as his mouth.

He’d been so angry that she hadn’t waited at the ranch he’d thought he might never speak to her again. And now…. He munched another handful of the nearly liquid candy and began thumbing through the manual’s index. He found what he needed to know about the jack, but for the more confusing topic of Judy, there was no entry.

***

“You should have killed him,” she told the sheriff as she emerged from the doorway to the stable. She was back in her spandex outfit and shorts. It did more to confine things than hide them. There wasn’t much point in not staring at what was already familiar, so when the sheriff looked up, he didn’t bother just focusing on her eyes.

The little man who’d gotten away on a motorcycle had been wearing an expensive pair of athletic shoes with interesting waffled soles. Since returning to the Sourdough, the sheriff had been fruitlessly examining the gravel parking lot for a good impression to compare with his memory of the prints he’d found in Peter Simms’ backyard. While he was eyeing her, he checked. She was wearing sandals.