Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) (4 page)

“And I thank you for that,” the sheriff told her. He was grateful, but he knew the time-and-a-half she was earning, and the chance to become the source of inside information that the local gossips would be chattering over for months, were ample recompense. “And Mad Dog?”

She nodded toward the back of the building. “Been waiting back in the jail since I came in. He do it? Wondering about that worried me a little.” She pulled open the top drawer of her desk and showed the sheriff the Glock semi-automatic she kept for personal protection. “But not too much.”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” The sheriff turned. “Let me know if you raise Wynn and tell French to get his ass in here when he calls. I’m going to have a fraternal chat with our guest.”

“Want me to get you a rubber hose?” Mrs. Kraus asked as he went back into the foyer, slipped behind the main staircase, and started down the corridor that led to the jail. Her laughter echoed hollowly, a croaking sound not unlike an asthmatic’s cough, and, no more mirthful.

***

The Jail was behind an iron door that still swung open and closed with remarkable smoothness. There was a jailer’s room on the right guarding three tiers of cells that climbed toward a distant ceiling. They were depressingly primitive, eight-by-eight-by-eight cubes with inch-thick iron bars half a foot apart, bolted into iron plate floors and iron plate ceilings. Nothing more than slop buckets and metal bunks with thin mattresses and blankets had been installed to make them habitable. The upper tier of cells was abandoned now. The roof had leaked up there too often and rust had made the attachment of bars to ceiling more a matter of faith than fact. Half the cells in the middle tier were no better and even a couple on the bottom level were out of play, locked with their keys broken or missing. The cells that remained could only be secured by chains and padlocks and were seldom occupied by anyone other than the occasional drunk. Mad Dog sat in the cell in the back corner, his body paint striped with sweat so that he blended, chameleon-like, with his surroundings. The cell door hung open. There wasn’t even a chain and padlock on that one.

The sheriff grabbed a chair out of the stack next to the door to the jailer’s office and carried it back into the musty darkness. He put it on the floor just outside the bars in the space where Mad Dog’s vacant stare was most nearly focused.

“OK Mad Dog. Tell me about it.”

***

“Wynn some, lose some” was living up to the latter half of his nickname while Mrs. Kraus and the sheriff were trying to raise him on the radio and by phone. He’d been ordered to check on Reverend Simms’ house while the sheriff and Doc Jones manhandled the body bag into the back of Doc’s Buick. Wynn had cleared the last of the spectators from the park and hopped in the black and white to go do just that. He was a very conscientious deputy, but his intentions had a way of outweighing his performances. He was carrying his radio, volume carefully turned up so he’d be sure to hear any signals over the patrol car’s noisy exhaust. Unfortunately, he’d mixed up the squelch and volume controls again and accidentally switched to a channel other than the one used by Benteen County Law Enforcement.

Wynn was not what you’d call an imaginative man. That helped make it easier for him to deal with the glimpse he’d caught of the body in the Veteran’s Memorial Park restroom. The moment he heard the Reverend hadn’t shown for morning services, Wynn decided that the body was Peter Simms. Being an officer of the law, Wynn immediately set his deductive processes to discovering the killer. The things that had been done to Simms—Wynn remained blissfully ignorant about most of them—led him to believe the killer must have hated Simms passionately, or was some sort of psycho. Benteen County was not without its eccentric citizens, but Wynn just couldn’t picture any of them being capable of that kind of butchery. It would take a legitimately crazy person—and he paused here to give Mad Dog a bit of additional consideration—to perform a deed like that.

Mad Dog had loved to badger the Reverend, posing mind-twisting theological contradictions for Simms’ explanation, none of which Wynn could remember. They were too perplexing and they troubled his soul when he pondered them. Even so, Wynn couldn’t picture Mad Dog chopping away at Peter Simms like some local Lizzie Borden in body paint.

The Reverend hadn’t been close to his family, none of whom shared his evangelical passion. Old Man Simms, whose farm was nearby, was too infirm for something like this, whatever he might have felt about his youngest son. Peter Simms’ older brother ran a custom wheat-cutting operation out of Crawford on the far side of the County and didn’t have much to do with either his brother or his father. Besides, he was probably somewhere in North Texas or Oklahoma about now. Wynn thought he remembered hearing that Simms had a little sister who’d been shipped off to school somewhere years ago. Wynn hadn’t heard about her being in the county since. As far as Wynn knew, none of them, nor anybody else, loathed the Reverend enough to explain what had happened in the park. And so, he decided, with sudden intuition, the killer had to be an outsider.

Those thoughts occupied Wynn as he cruised down Peach Street toward where the Reverend’s simple frame house sat three doors from where the street dead ended. That was when he saw the black man.

The black man was walking along Peach near the corner of Adams. He was a slender figure in a pair of worn hiking boots, faded jeans, and a dusty polo shirt. He turned to watch Wynn pass with a sort of guilty stoop that made Wynn check his face carefully. It wasn’t one Wynn recognized. With only three black families in Buffalo Springs, and probably no more than a dozen in the entire county, it sparked a blazing leap of conviction within Wynn’s normally placid imagination. He’d found the killer!

He hit the brakes, twirled the wheel, and spun the cruiser to a broadside stop in the middle of Peach Street. The black man’s eyes got noticeably larger and he crouched a little at the sight of a police car making such a violent turn. Wynn reached down and flipped the switches that would turn on the lights and siren. The siren didn’t obey, the little yellow wire that had a tendency to slip off its connector under the dash apparently having done so again, but the lights made an impressive display. Flashes of red and blue and amber strobed the street as Wynn put the throttle to the floor and the back tires threw up a pair of rooster tails of dust that obscured the houses on the south side of the street. As the patrol car began fishtailing wildly in his direction, the black man turned and ran.

He didn’t stay on the street. If he had, Wynn might have run him down on the excuse he was exercising necessary force to stop a fleeing felon. The man hopped a hedge instead, trampled through a flower bed, and ducked around the Thorn’s house, hurdling a succession of little Jimmy Thorn’s toys as he disappeared from Wynn’s view.

Wynn locked up the brakes again and slid dramatically over the Thorn’s hedge and halfway across their lawn. He threw open his door and bolted out of the vehicle, drawing his .357 magnum as he ran. When he got to the Thorn’s back yard, the fugitive was nowhere to be seen. It had been a dry spring coming hard on the heels of a dry winter, and since little Jimmy had a penchant for digging up anything that grew or was any shade of green, there was plenty of dust to show Wynn clear evidence of the man’s trail. It led towards Reverend Simms’ place by way of a succession of back yards.

The second one over had a four-foot wooden fence, designed to keep three- and four-year-olds from wandering when their mother was occupied with their younger siblings. Wynn was about halfway to the fence when his prey vaulted its twin on the other side of the yard. Wynn tried to draw down on him, but the man was out of sight before he could do it. Wynn ran to the fence and started climbing. The man hopped a third fence further down. Wynn shouted the dramatic, “Stop or I’ll shoot!” phrase while he struggled to find solid purchase from which to aim, but the man slid out of sight again. Wynn resumed his climb, and once more, the man cleared another fence, this time into what should be Simms’ back yard. Again, he had chosen the very moment when Wynn was least able to maintain his balance and aim his pistol. He had also gained a couple of back yards while the deputy was trying to negotiate his first fence.

Wynn fired a wild shot in frustration and killed a stuffed teddy bear someone had left lying in the dust as he tumbled, ass over magnum, into the dirt. This wasn’t working. Wynn rushed to the next fence, careful not to examine how his slug had eviscerated the bear. The black man was nowhere to be seen. Wynn turned on his heel, raced back to the black and white, and began a mobile patrol of the neighborhood. As he drove past Simms’ house, he could hear a phone ringing inside. Mrs. Kraus was still trying to locate him. The possibility never occurred to Wynn. The killer was out there and he was, by God, going to get his man. The patrol car, light bar colorfully competing with the sun, cruised streets and rolled down alleys, cut across yards. Wynn’s .357 trained from the driver’s window at every corner, every shrub, every hiding place until it proved clear. The murderer stubbornly refused to surrender, or even be sighted.

***

“Hey Mad Dog!” the sheriff said it louder after his first effort failed to produce a reaction. Mad Dog’s eyes seemed to be focused on something far away. Was he tripping on the remains of some bad acid he’d dropped back when he was a flower child in the ’60s? The sheriff waved a hand in front of him, wondering for just a second if maybe….

Mad Dog blinked, shook his head the way a dog shakes itself free of water. “Englishman,” he said in a tone of pleased recognition.

The sheriff nodded. Maybe this was a time to be gentle.

“It was Simms, right?” Mad Dog asked. “And everyone thinks I’m the one who killed him, don’t they?” Mad Dog’s eyes were alert now, searching his brother’s face.

“Some folks, maybe. Most just wonder what you were doing out there in war paint and not much else.”

Mad Dog leaned his massive shoulders back against the bars, a couple of which gave a little. He was a big man, what you might expect of a former football star, only trimmer than someone his age had any right to be. He was eleven years older than the sheriff. It was part of why they were less close than many brothers. He’d been English’s hero while the sheriff was a boy, but he was out of the house and living on his own before the sheriff entered the third grade. When Mad Dog underwent his sudden conversion from jock to hippie, from shit kicker to pacifist, it had been hard for English to accept, especially since Mad Dog, who never had much time for his little brother, suddenly had even less.

“I already told you.” Mad Dog strained for patience.

“Yeah, you did, but why that particular spot. I always thought a man was supposed to climb a sacred mountain or something when he was seeking a vision, not sit in the grass at the edge of a public park.”

“Makes me feel kind of guilty,” Mad Dog admitted. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out just where I should do this. By the way, seeking a vision wasn’t exactly what I was attempting. It’s kind of hard to explain.” He looked down at his feet and sucked on his lower lip for a moment while he decided how to put it.

“You don’t have to tell me that part if you don’t want to, at least not right now.”

“But it’s all linked, you see.” Mad Dog leaned forward and ran his fingers through nonexistent hair in exasperation. “I drove over to Wichita last week. That’s where I got the body paint and the Speedos and all. But what I went for was to hit some bookstores and spend some time in the Wichita State University library. You know I’ve gotten pretty serious about our heritage. Anyway, I found some really interesting articles on
Tsistsistas
Shamanism.

“I spent the day plowing through a bunch of journals and a couple of books, made pages of notes. And I had an epiphany. The bottom line, Englishman, is that the Cheyenne world view is superior to western civilization’s world view because ours allows recognition of theirs while the reverse isn’t true. Rationalism, civilization’s version, ethnocentrically rejects what it can’t explain. The Cheyenne understood power and its spiritual potencies, spirits and the soul, both of which have unrestricted access to that cosmological power. They aren’t limited by time or space. They’re normally invisible but they can take on physical form, manifest themselves to us, control physical phenomena. We, the Cheyenne, used to be able to participate in the interplay between the spiritual and the physical. We could step outside of space and time or manipulate that power to suit our needs. That’s what I was trying to do. Bring my
hematasooma
, my soul, into contact with others, or call up a
maiyun
, a spirit. I know this sounds weird, but I was trying to take a first step toward making the world right again.”

“Do you understand what you’re talking about?”

“Hell, I don’t know. It all makes a kind of crazy wonderful sense to me. Understand it, no, not really, but I’m trying. Trying to know and learn and make it work the way it used to.”

“What, and bring back the buffalo?” The sheriff was starting to lose it. “Get rid of the White Man?”.

Mad Dog was so impractical. Sometimes that infuriated the sheriff. His older brother had inherited a full section of prime bottom land, the old Maddox farm, and mismanaged it to near bankruptcy. Then, all of a sudden, he was sitting on the only oil strike in the county, half a dozen producing wells and a nice steady progression of royalty checks that made it unnecessary for Mad Dog to work for a living. It didn’t seem fair, but what really galled the sheriff was the way his brother squandered all the freedom that income gave him on half-baked notions and screwball schemes.