Survivors Will Be Shot Again (11 page)

“They're old. They don't know anything.”

Todd and Noah hadn't had any drugs on them, so Rhodes didn't think they were too experienced with marijuana. They certainly weren't experienced with meth or cocaine. Or ashes.

At the jail Rhodes took Todd and Noah to the room that served as the juvenile processing center, which was just like the other two interview rooms. It held an old wooden table that had a scarred top and a couple of folding chairs. The walls were painted a bilious green and had gray and brown stains of undetermined origin on them. It wasn't a pleasant place, but then it wasn't supposed to be.

Rhodes got the name of the parents of Bryan and Nic, and Andy stayed with the boys while Rhodes called the parents of all four of them and told the parents of Nic and Bryan to bring in their sons.

It took more than an hour to get everything sorted out. The parents were unhappy; the boys were even more unhappy. Rhodes wasn't exactly Mr. Jolly himself. The parents raised their voices, made threats, withdrew the threats, and apologized. Finally everyone calmed down and matters were settled, at least for the time being, and Rhodes released the boys into the custody of their parents. When they'd gone, Rhodes told Hack that he was going home.

“Might make it in time to watch the news,” Hack said. “If you rush.”

“I'll rush,” Rhodes said.

*   *   *

When he got home, Rhodes and Ivy sat at the kitchen table while he ate the warmed-up chile relleno and told her what had happened at the Lansen place. Yancey, a little puffball Pomeranian, bounced around his ankles, yipping. The cats, Sam and Jerry, lay in their usual spots by the refrigerator, not in the least bothered by Yancey, whom they were experienced at ignoring, especially when they were asleep, as they were now and most of the rest of the time as well.

“It's too late to go outside and play,” Rhodes told Yancey. “Go to bed.”

Yancey continued to yip halfheartedly for a few seconds, then gave up and slunk off to his doggy bed in the spare bedroom.

“It's about time for us to go to bed, too, I guess,” Rhodes said when he'd finished telling Ivy about events of the evening and tossed the paper plate the chile relleno had been on.

“I still can't believe that boy snorted the ashes,” Ivy said, pushing back her chair and standing up.

“He didn't know what he was doing,” Rhodes said. “I'm sure he regrets it.”

“Meanwhile you have a murder to solve.”

“That's true, but I have to deal with a lot of other things at the same time. The county needs to raise my salary.” He stood up. “I'm going to take a shower.”

“I was planning to take one, too,” Ivy said. “Should we try to conserve water?”

Rhodes grinned. “We'd be fools not to,” he said.

 

Chapter 9

The next morning Rhodes was up early and didn't even take time for his usual romp in the backyard with Yancey and Speedo, the border collie who lived out back in a Styrofoam igloo.

“They're going to be upset,” Ivy said. “They expect you to play with them.”

Yancey was already standing at the back door, waiting to go outside. He hadn't started yipping yet, but it was only a matter of time.

“You'll have to take my place today,” Rhodes told Ivy. “I have other dogs to see to.”

“I hope Yancey didn't hear that,” Ivy said. “It's bad enough that you aren't going to play with him. You should eat something before you go. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

“I think they've proved that's a myth,” Rhodes said.

A couple of pieces of toast popped up in the toaster on the kitchen counter. Rhodes grabbed them and buttered them with some kind of artificial butter that Ivy favored over the real thing. It was supposed to be heart healthy, but Rhodes didn't trust it. It was, however, better than nothing.

“I'll take this toast with me,” he said, and he left the kitchen munching on a slice. Behind him, Yancey started to yip.

“Don't forget to feed him and Speedo,” Rhodes said as he made his escape.

*   *   *

Gus-Gus and Jackie acted quite excited when Rhodes showed up to feed them. As soon as he got out of the Tahoe, he heard them barking from inside the barn. He got the bag of dog food from the house and took it to the barn. The dogs were, if anything, noisier than before. They were scratching at the door and throwing themselves against it. If he hadn't seen them eat the previous afternoon, Rhodes would have thought they were starving. As it was, he just thought they were crazy.

He set the dog food down and thought about how he was going to go about opening the barn door. He didn't want to let the dogs outside because he was afraid he wouldn't be able to get them back into the barn, so he had to be careful, especially as they were growing more and more agitated. They jumped against the door, and their barking was continuous.

Rhodes opened the door so that only a sliver of space showed between the edge of it and the wall. It was enough. The dogs both hit the door at once, hard, jerking it out of Rhodes's hand. He stumbled backward, trying to catch his balance, but the dogs hit him at the run and knocked him down. He fell against the food bag, expecting them to maul him as they ripped it open, but they weren't interested in him or the food. They ran right over him as if they didn't even know he was there.

Rhodes pushed himself away from the food bag and stood up, thinking of a line from a Sherlock Holmes movie he'd seen on television long ago, something about the footprints of a gigantic hound. Now Rhodes had one right in the middle of his chest.

The dogs turned the corner of the barn, and Rhodes went after them. They were headed for the woods in full cry, and if they got into the trees he might never catch them, not that there was much hope of catching them even if they didn't. Rhodes didn't think of himself as a runner, and even if he had been, he wouldn't have been able to catch up to the dogs if they didn't want him to. Dogs were just naturally faster than humans, and they didn't seem to have nearly as much trouble running over rough ground and through the weeds.

After about a hundred yards, Rhodes slowed down and began to walk. He thought he might as well go back to the house and see if there was anything there that would help him in finding out who killed Melvin. The dogs would come back by themselves when they got hungry, or he'd come back and see about finding them later.

He'd taken only a few steps back toward the house when something else occurred to him. The dogs knew him, so his presence wouldn't have stirred them up. They might have been hungry, but they ignored the food bag. Something else had gotten them excited. Or someone else, someone who might have been there when Rhodes arrived, someone who had come to look around the house, too. Rhodes had showed up, and whoever it was had left quickly and gone through the woods. That's what had upset the dogs. That's who they were after.

Or not. Maybe they were just having fun, but Rhodes didn't think so. He turned around again and started to run. The dogs were well into the woods when Rhodes got there, but he could hear them barking. They didn't seem to be moving, so he thought he could catch up to them.

When he did, he found them standing on the bank of Crockett's Creek, still barking, although there was nothing to bark at except for the trees along the bank, a stump sticking up out of the dark water, and a turtle sunning himself on the stump. A smell of mud and dampness came up from the creek.

Considering the rain they'd had earlier in the year, the creek was flowing up near the top of the bank. It hadn't been that full for a long time, and it was good to see it that way. Rhodes watched the turtle. He liked turtles and tortoises. The turtle was still as a stone for a minute. Then it slipped off the stump into the water with no sound at all and hardly a ripple. The dogs continued to bark.

“What's the problem?” Rhodes asked the dogs, who, while they didn't have an answer for him, at least stopped barking. They turned and gave him quizzical looks, as if he might tell them what or whom they'd been chasing because it had slipped their minds.

“I don't know who it was,” Rhodes said, but he thought he knew what had stopped them in their pursuit. Whoever they'd been chasing had gone into the water, and they'd lost the scent.

“You two go on back home,” Rhodes said. “I'll look around and see if I can figure out what's going on here.”

That comment got pretty much the reaction Rhodes had expected. Gus-Gus and Jackie looked at him, panting a little, their tongues lolled out. They didn't make any move toward going home. Rhodes wondered if he could stare them down and intimidate them into bending to his will. He didn't think it was likely.

“All right,” he said. “I'm going to take a look around. You can come with me.”

He looked along the edge of the creek bank, and a little farther along he saw deep impressions in the mud leading to the water. He didn't want to get into the water himself to see if the person of interest to the dogs had come out on the other side, if he'd even crossed. The tracks could be a trick.

The creek was about twenty yards wide from bank to bank, so he couldn't jump it. Even if it had been twenty feet, he couldn't have jumped it. Twenty inches maybe would've been possible. As it was, Rhodes would have to look for a place to cross or forget it and hope the person had come back out on this side, or stayed on it.

Rhodes walked along, with the dogs trotting behind him, to the side of him, and occasionally out in front of him, snuffling and sniffing at every tree and mound of dirt. Soon Rhodes came to a place he recognized. It didn't have an official name, but when he'd been a kid everyone had called it the Deep Hole. It wasn't really very deep, but it was deeper than the rest of the creek, and it had been a good place to fish. Rhodes remembered that once when he was four or five, not long before the family had moved to town, his father and several other men had decided to seine the hole.

Rhodes hadn't been allowed in the water, but he'd been allowed to stand on the bank and watch. The men came up with some fine big bass and catfish in the seine, and there had been a fish fry that night for everybody within a radius of several miles. The men put mealed filets of fish into wire-mesh baskets, tossed in some hush puppies, and lowered the baskets into big black pots of boiling oil. They brought the filets and hush puppies out hot and crisp, and Rhodes could still remember the taste. He'd never eaten any better fish than that, or better hush puppies, either.

But what he remembered even more than the food was that one of the fish in the seine had been a grinnell, a long, odd-looking fish, almost prehistoric in appearance. Rhodes had never seen one before, and he'd never seen one since, but he sure remembered that one. The men tossed it back into the water. They said it wasn't an “eating fish.”

Rhodes remembered something else, too, a water moccasin. Rhodes didn't like snakes any more than Indiana Jones did, and he especially didn't like water moccasins. He didn't like their thick black bodies, their flat, triangular heads, or the whiteness inside their mouths. This particular snake had become tangled in the seine, and nobody wanted to touch it to get it out. Rhodes didn't blame them, then or now.

Finally, after some discussion, Rhodes's father had said he'd take care of it, and he'd calmly grasped it behind the head and patiently unraveled it. When it was free of the seine, he'd grabbed its thrashing tail and swung it around his head like a bullwhip before giving it a final pop that separated its head from its body and sent the head flying toward a couple of the men, who scrambled and yelled and splashed to get out of the way. One of them fell face first into the creek, which gave everyone a good laugh. Rhodes still considered it one of the most amazing things he'd ever seen anyone do.

Gus-Gus and Jackie barked and brought Rhodes back to the present. He was reminiscing a lot more than usual lately and wondered whether it was the surroundings he found himself in or if he was getting old. He looked around for the dogs and found that they'd run ahead of him and were eating something they'd found at the base of a tree. It might have been better not to wonder what it was, but Rhodes was curious. However, by the time he got to the dogs, they'd consumed whatever it was and hadn't left a trace that he could see.

For all he knew they might have found the remains of a dead squirrel or just some interesting dirt. You never could tell with dogs.

Rhodes looked around. A dead tree had fallen over across the creek, and while it would've been tricky for someone to walk across the creek on the trunk and onto the bank by hanging onto the dead branches, it would have been possible. It might even have been simple for someone with good coordination and balance. Rhodes wouldn't have wanted to try it himself, but he thought he could do it if he had to. Rhodes didn't see any tracks anywhere around, but that didn't mean a thing.

Rhodes called the dogs over. They no longer seemed interested in tracking anybody, and although they sniffed around the uprooted tree for a few seconds, they didn't strike a scent. Or if they did, they didn't care.

A squirrel chittered up in a tree, and some leaves drifted down, turning slowly as they fell. This distracted the dogs. They ran over to bark at the leaves and the squirrel, and Rhodes looked around for signs that someone had walked around the uprooted tree. Maybe if he'd been Kit Carson or Daniel Boone, he could have spotted something significant, a broken twig or a crushed leaf, but he wasn't a frontiersman or a tracker, and he didn't find a thing.

He walked along the bank staring at the ground. The dogs gave up on the squirrel and ranged well ahead of him, not caring where they went. Rhodes kept hoping that he'd find a sign of some kind. A considerate person would have left a clue or two, he thought, but the people Rhodes dealt with were rarely considerate. He was about to give up and turn back on his search when the dogs began to bark. He saw them turn away from the creek and run through the trees, so he followed them.