Snake Dreams (37 page)

PISTOL DRAWN
, Officer Knox approached the ground-level door, inhaled a deep breath that swelled his barrel chest, and
bellowed loudly enough to unnerve the diner in the Grilly kitchen, “We know you’re in there, Harper!”

Harper, who was in the process of swallowing his third forkful of eggs, choked. But this did not deter him from trotting from the kitchen to the parlor and looking out the window.

Knox spotted the indistinct figure behind the glass, grinned, and shouted again. “We’ve got you surrounded, dipstick—come out with your hands in the air or we come in shooting!”

In spite of his many shortcomings, Harper was a congenial fellow. And being, in a manner of speaking, the host, he felt an obligation to be hospitable. So, though partially blinded by the setting sun, he raised his right hand high and waved at the unseen visitor. With one finger.

Eddie Knox, who was beginning to take a liking to this plucky fugitive, took time out for a “heh-heh” before bellowing, “Come out before I lose my temper and maybe I’ll go easy on you.” He’d not had so much fun since that day about fourteen years ago when he had faced down the Mexican toting a shotgun loaded with slugs. (The murder suspect had shot him in the leg, which is why Knox limps about on a prosthetic limb and occasionally feels eerie tingles from the phantom toes.)

When Harper’s blurry form disappeared from the window, Knox assumed the worst:
He’s gonna start popping lead at me and Piggy.
He used the PSRCD to alert his partner to the prickly situation, stated the obvious remedy, and was annoyed when Slocum quoted another one of those pesky rules.

“You can’t rush the guy. Eddie, you ain’t yet announced that we was the police.”

“Dammit, Pig—I’m in uniform and he saw me from the window!”

“Don’t matter. You got to
tell
him.”

Half-wit nitpicker.
“Okay. First chance I get, I’ll show him my official picture ID, read him his rights, and introduce you as my partner and official legal adviser.”

“Okay, Rocks. Hey—guess what I found back here?”

“How should I know?”

Slocum’s voice betrayed the hurt he felt. “It wouldn’t cost you nothin’ to make a guess.”

Knox sighed.
Big cabbage head.
“You found a pink rhinestone big enough to choke a rhinoceros.”

“Huh-uh.” But, satisfied with his partner’s effort, Slocum told him what.

“So you found the electric power meter. How’s that gonna help us?”

Slocum, whose daddy used to work for the Granite Creek Utilities, told him.

Knox was, well . . .
electrified
by this information. “You can do that?”

Dang right. Slocum assured his partner that it was as easy as eating apple pie for breakfast.

Eddie Knox was impressed.
Just imagine, ol’ Piggy coming up with something like that.

It was quite simple, really. E. C. Slocum was prepared to remove the power meter, which, on his partner’s signal he did.

As the lights in the big log house went out, Knox yelled, “Police!” and shouldered the downstairs door off its hinges. The brawny cop landed flat on the floor, rolled aside to take cover behind a couch, aimed his revolver at nothing in particular, and heard a loud report as Jake Harper (now stumbling around in the darkness) knocked over an excellent bronze reproduction of a Remington sculpture depicting a charging cavalry officer (six-shooter in one hand, raised saber in the other), which landed
bang!
in an antique copper pot. Not having the benefit of X-ray vision, Knox interpreted the
bang!
as a gunshot, and yelled, “Look out, Pig—he’s shootin’ at us!” He returned fire through the ceiling. There was little chance of hitting the suspect, but Knox fired two shots just to make a point.

Which it did.

Jake Harper stomped across the darkened parlor, dived through a second-level window, landed like a bushel of bricks on the redwood deck, and was over the railing and onto the ground quicker than Greta Garbo could have said, “I want to be let alone.”

Before either policeman was aware of his hasty departure, the heavyset fellow had sprinted up the mountain and across several acres of adjacent property and broken through the back door of a modest bungalow, where he took a minute or two to hyperventilate and consider his precarious situation.
I’ll have to make a run for it before those crazy cowboy cops find me here and start shooting again. I’ll need some transportation.
Full of hope, he entered the garage. It was empty. Bummer.
I’ll have to hoof it.
Which he did, but not before hurriedly filling a stolen knapsack with victuals from a well-stocked pantry and snatching an armful of blankets off the beds.

As soon as he was safely concealed in a thickish glade of quaking aspens, Harper paused to catch his breath. As he gazed into the valley, where the night lights of Granite Creek flickered mockingly, the fugitive was faced with the eternal question.
Where can I hide for a few days?
Dusty caves, smelly barns, and muddy culverts under roadways were not appealing, but . . .
If I have to, I’ll sleep in a hollow log. I’m not leaving the county without Hermann’s money bag.

FACED WITH
the fact that Jake Harper had given them the old slip, Eddie Knox was obliged to endure some of Slocum’s lip.

“I told you we oughta called for some backup.” Which the smug partner now proceeded to do.

By the time a half-dozen GCPD officers, Chief of Police Scott Parris, and a lone state-police officer had arrived on the scene, Jake Harper was miles away.

Officer Knox was a stand-up guy. He confessed that his partner had urged him to call for backup when they arrived on the scene, and took all the flak, which amounted to nothing more than a dark scowl from Chief of Police Parris. Despite the fact that the suspect in the Wetzel homicide had escaped capture, Officers Knox and Slocum had discovered Harper’s hideout, which was the first big break in the murder case.

The Tip

“Just
looking
for somebody to hammer.” This was how one of Scott Parris’s subordinates at the GCPD described the chief of police to a fellow officer, with this warning: “Stay out of the boss’s way.”

If Parris was in an intemperate mood, it was understandable. The prime suspect in the murder of a local citizen had evaded arrest for the second time. Parris’s statement days ago to the local media that the shooter would be apprehended “within a few hours” had turned out to be—as one of his more generous critics had observed in today’s newspaper editorial—“somewhat optimistic.” More polite than “really a dumb thing to say, which makes both of us look damned silly,” which was how District Attorney Bill “Pug” Bullett had put it. Desperate for anything that even smelled like a lead, the harried cop was pleased to receive a telephone call from the elderly spinster.

“Mr. Parris, this is Millicent Muntz. You asked me to contact you if I happened to think of anything that might prove useful in your investigation of Mr. Wetzel’s untimely death.”

“Yes ma’am, I remember that all right.” The edgy man drummed the fingers of his free hand on the desk. “What’ve you got for me?”

“Probably nothing of any importance, but I thought it was my civic duty to call and let you know.”

His phone-gripping hand was beginning to show white
knuckles. “Just take your time, and tell me what’s on your mind.” The finger-drumming hand snatched a ballpoint pen, made ready to take notes.

“I don’t think I should tell you over the telephone.”

He scratched a big
X
on a yellow notepad. “You don’t, huh?”

“Under the circumstances, it might prove to be indiscreet. Also, I’m in my car now, headed into town.” A nervous little titter of a laugh. “But I’m not driving while using my cell phone—I want to make that quite clear. I pulled over to the curb before placing the call.”

Parris closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and recalled how his mother had warned him that a career in law enforcement would be stressful. “If you want to drop by the police station, I’ll be in my office—”

“I am on my way to Sunburst Pizza. I suggest that you meet me at that location.”

“Why there?”

“For one thing, I have some business to conduct at that establishment.” She whispered, “And Sunburst is where I am virtually
certain
that I saw the suspect.”

“If you’ve spotted Jake Harper, the first thing I need to know is—”

“I do not wish to appear rude, Mr. Parris, but I really must be going.”

“But—”

“As it happens, I am parked in front of the fire station and a big red truck has just pulled out and the young man driving it is gesturing and suggesting—quite vehemently, I might add—that I should move my automobile out of the way.” She waved at the distraught fireman. “If you wish to meet me at Sunburst Pizza, that will be fine. Otherwise, we must continue this conversation at another time. Good day.”
Click
.

Parris slammed the phone into the cradle, grabbed his battered felt hat off the coat rack, exited his office at a dead run, went down the stairway considerably faster than was sensible for a man of his bulk and coordination, made it to the bottom
unscathed, and figured he could make it to the pizza joint in six minutes flat. Which he will. With twenty-odd seconds to spare.

But before the chief constable arrives at his destination, an interesting coincidence deserves mention.

AS PARRIS
was speeding down Beechwood toward the Sunburst Pizza Restaurant, passing motorists left and right, one such citizen was behind the wheel of a dusty old Chevrolet Camearo he had stolen that very morning from a trail head where a hiker had left it.

Imagine Jake Harper’s panic when, on his way to take a gander at the Wetzel house in preparation for still another try at grabbing Hermann’s money bag, he glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the GCPD black-and-white coming up fast behind him, emergency lights flashing. Presuming that he was about to be either arrested or shot dead, the felon uttered a coarse expletive, and appended this addendum: “How’d they get on to me so damn fast?”

The burglar was numb with relief when the chief of police roared around him and
kept on going.
As the wanted man recovered from this unsettling experience, he took note of the fact that the police car had pulled into the Sunburst Pizza parking lot. As he passed by, Harper also noticed that the cop was chatting with an elderly woman standing by a Buick. Both the woman and the automobile looked awfully familiar. Not a half block away, he remembered.
It’s that ditzy old landlady I thought was going to flush me out of Wetzel’s closet when she was there with that ditzy old Indian woman.
Which raised a troubling possibility:
Maybe the landlady found the place where I cut and mended that yellow police tape across the back door. She knows someone’s been inside Hermann’s house and that’s what she’s yakking to that big cop about.
His brow wrinkled.
But why are her and the cop at the pizza joint?
A sudden flash of insight.
I bet the old lady saw me talking to Nance that night and she’s telling the cop all about it.
One
worry begets another.
And maybe Nance told the landlady some other stuff about me. Something that would help the cops pin the shooting on me.