The Blight Way (5 page)

A white Chevy Suburban bumped across the pasture.

The vehicle stopped a few feet away. A trim, tall woman with shoulder-length, dark hair got out. She wore dark-rimmed glasses, a blue insulated jacket over jeans and leather boots. She was in fact quite a bit prettier than Tully's perky secretary. She held out her gloved hand.

“Hi, Sheriff, I'm Susan Parker. We haven't had a chance to meet.”

Tully shook her hand. Her grip was firm. “Call me Bo,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Susan. This sorry old character here is my father, Eldon Tully, former sheriff of Blight County. Everybody calls him Pap.”

“Hi, Pap,” she said, stepping around the body and shaking the old man's hand.

“Good you showed up,” Pap told her. “We got a dead body here we don't know what to do with.”

Susan took off her leather gloves and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I've seen quite a few dead bodies. This is the first one I've come across in a cow pasture, though.”

“Me, too,” said Tully. “Most of the dead bodies I find are in our local drinking establishments. With the killer at the bar bragging about his work.”

“I see he was shot,” she said. “Might have been from a semiautomatic, with two bullet holes tight together like that.”

Tully gave Pap a look. “Yeah, that's about what we figured. Probably shot sometime during the night, maybe using a night-vision scope on a small-caliber rifle. The Scraggs claim they didn't hear a thing.”

“You believe those people?” she said.

“Not ordinarily,” Tully said. “But as old Batim says, if it had been one of them there wouldn't have been an awkward situation like this. He means they would have dropped the body down a prospect hole or something equally efficient.”

“Why didn't he do that anyway?”

“Don't know. He probably thought about it, all right, but this way there's a certain amount of entertainment value for him and his clan. I'm pretty sure Batim didn't let any of the Scraggs come near the body.”

Susan snapped a dozen photos of the body while Tully watched.

“If you'll give me a hand,” she said, “let's see if we can lift him off the fence.”

Pap watched as Susan and Tully lifted the body from the fence and laid it out on the ground face up.

She's a lot stronger than she looks, Tully thought. He watched as she went through the man's pockets. She looked at the driver's license. “From Los Angeles,” she said. “Nicholas Holt. Born October 1959. Forty-one years old.”

Then she pulled out the wad of hundred-dollar bills. “Whewee! I guess we can rule out robbery as the motive. That Rolex on his wrist is probably real, too.”

“I can tell you this,” Tully said. “If the Scraggs had shot him, the money and the watch would be gone for sure. They probably had something to do with it one way or another, but I don't think they're the ones that killed him.”

She unbuttoned the man's shirt and pulled it back. “The bullets didn't exit. That's odd. We should be able
to get some markings off them to match with a weapon.”

Pap spoke up. “Might be a twenty-two rifle. Kind of odd for a murder weapon but handy. Probably every house in the county has one.”

Back by the ranch house, Buck's Explorer pulled through the gate and started working its way across the pasture.

“Buck's back,” Pap said. “Wish my driver had had enough sense to drive out here.” He looked over at Bo, who glared back at him. “Because I'm near froze to death.”

“Good heavens!” Susan said. “No wonder you're cold. Neither of you is wearing a coat.”

“Coats are for sissies,” Tully said. “And pretty ladies, of course.”

Susan gave him a tiny smile. She walked over to the Suburban and came back with an aluminum case. She took out an instrument that looked like a meat thermometer and stuck it into the liver of the corpse.

“Cripes!” Pap said. “Let me know when you're going to do stuff like that so I can look away.”

Susan smiled at him. “Some sheriff you must have been.”

“I didn't go poking dead bodies with sharp instruments, if that's what you mean. Mostly what I did was turn them into dead bodies in the first place. It's not so gross.”

Tully was glad the old man hadn't told her how many dead bodies he had done.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but I may be able to give you
an approximate time of death, even cold as it was last night.”

The Explorer pulled up behind the Suburban. Buck and Dave Perkins got out. Dave, a chunky sixty-year-old, wore his long gray hair in a single braid down his back. He wore a folded red bandana around his head, well-scuffed cowboy boots, jeans and a red-and-black-checked mackinaw over a blue wool shirt open at the collar. Tully introduced them to Susan.

“Buck Toole is one of my deputies. Dave Perkins here owns my favorite restaurant in the whole country. He used to be a pretty good tracker. We'll see if he still is.”

“All us Indians are good trackers,” Dave said. “Show us a bent blade of grass and we can tell you the person's height, weight, country of origin and telephone number.”

Susan laughed. “Well, that's certainly impressive.”

“Yes, it is,” Dave said. He took out a glasses case and put on a pair of wire-framed spectacles. “These are special tracking glasses.”

“I understand,” Susan said, smiling broadly.

Nice teeth, Tully thought.

Dave walked the length of the body until he got to the feet. Then he squatted down and studied the man's shoe and sock. He stood up and stared back across the pasture to another open field backed by a wooded area. “That field and that woods over there, I think that's part of the Littlefield ranch. The Scragg ranch got itself surrounded by Littlefield years ago.”

“Looks like the shooter might have come from over
there in the woods,” Tully said. “Probably the victim, too. Any road over there?”

“An old mine road but not much else. Used to be a bridge over a little crick, but it washed out years ago. You can drive across when the water's low like it is now. The road used to go up to the Last Hope Mine, but the owners dynamited the mine shut after it closed. Then they plowed up a berm to block the road.”

“Pap and I'll drive over there and look around,” Tully said. “You see if you can pick up any trail and we'll meet you at the road. Buck, you stay with Susan, in case she needs help.”

Tully and Pap started walking back to the Explorer.

“Not a bad looker,” Pap said, glancing back at the medical examiner.

“Dave's all right but nothing special,” Tully said.

Pap responded with a seven-letter obscenity.

Chapter 6

The crowd at Batim's house had diminished to three. None of the Scraggs was out in the yard. A couple of women and several small children watched them out a window. The men in the yard were apparently neighbors, curious about the murder.

“How's it going?” Tully said.

“Not bad,” one of the men said. “Hear you got a murder out there, Sheriff.”

“Appears that way,” Tully said.

He and Pap got in the Explorer and drove off.

Pap rolled and lit a cigarette.

“I liked the way you put down that Lister Scragg,” he said. “You're about as quick a man as I've ever seen.”

“Thanks. So what was it between you and Lister that got him so riled up? I'm the one put him in prison.”

“Kind of a long story,” Pap said. “Lister must be about forty now. It would have been fifteen or so years
ago. That boy does hold a grudge. It was the second time that he'd put that itsy-bitsy wife of his in the hospital. But she refused to press charges. Scared, I guess. He'd blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw, but she was afraid of him. I was so mad I drove out to the Scragg ranch and walked in the house. They was all sitting around the dinner table. I grabbed Lister, jerked him out of his chair and threw him up against the wall. Put the cuffs on him in front, because I knew what I was gonna do. Old Batim was shouting, ‘You got a warrant, you got a warrant? What's the charge?' I told him to shut up, that he didn't know anything about the law just because he'd been in prison a couple of times. I pushed Lister out the door and into my pickup. He's yelling and hollering about his rights, and I says, ‘I'm driving you into the next county. You ain't got no rights over there.' I drove him up the West Branch Road way out in the woods till we come to that old horse-packing camp out there. The meat pole for hanging deer carcasses is about eight feet high, and I hauled Lister out of the truck, tied a rope to the handcuffs and tossed it up over the top of the meat pole. Then I pulled the pickup around to the other side and tied the rope to the pickup's winch. I winched Lister up till he was standing on his tippy toes.

“It's dark by now so I have the lights turned on him. He's yelling and bellowing and waking up all the coyotes in the entire canyon and they're all howling. A big October moon was just coming up, probably about like last night, and it's beautiful, but it's all kinds of eerie, too. I walked over to the river bank and cut me an eight-foot willow a little thicker than my thumb. Then I sat down
on the bumper of the truck and started to shave the bark off that willow with my knife, Lister straining around and watching every stroke. ‘What you aimin' to do with that willow?' Lister croaked out. I said, ‘You ever heard of caning, Lister?' He said no he hadn't, which is about what I expected, because Lister ain't never heard of nothing. Lem is pretty intelligent but Lister is dumb as stone. So I explained it to him. I says I ain't never experienced it personally myself but I read an account about a fella who did, over in one of them Asian countries, and he said the pain of the first whack exploded like a bomb in his head, and then it got a whole lot worse from then on. Well, you never heard such carrying on as come from Lister when I told him that. By then I had all the bark whittled off the willow and I got up and went around and undid Lister's belt and let his pants drop around his ankles. He was wearing long johns with that flap in the back that buttons up. I undid the buttons so that his skinny old rear end was sticking out there in the moonlight pale as a peeled egg. By now he's dancing around on his tippy toes and really whooping it up. So I stepped over to one side with my willow cane held up in both hands and . . .”

“I don't want to hear this!” Tully said.

“You're gonna hear it, so shut up and listen!”

Pap took a final drag on his cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray.

“It will do you some good, Bo,” he said. “So I told Lister, ‘I figure you got at least fifteen licks coming for each time you put that wife of yours in the hospital. But right now I'm putting them all on hold. If I ever hear tell
of you laying a finger on her again, I'm gonna bring you out here and collect all of them plus another fifteen. You hear?' Lister kinda nodded that he'd heard. All the way driving back to the Scragg ranch he sat slumped in the seat like a big pile of mush. He never said a word but every once in a while he let out this little moan, like I had beat him half to death. I pulled up in the Scragg yard, took off the cuffs and shoved him out. He just laid there on the ground, like he was so tuckered out he couldn't move.”

“I'm about that tuckered out myself,” Tully said, “and I just heard the story.”

“About the time his wife healed up, she ran off with some fella she'd met at the hospital. Probably never even knew the favor I done her. She was a pretty little thing, cute as a bug's ear.”

Tully slowed the Explorer and pointed to an opening in the brush. A small piece of orange fluorescent tape was tied to a branch near the opening.

“Looks like somebody marked the road,” he said, pointing to the tape. He could see car tracks disappearing into the brush.

“Hunters sometimes use that tape to mark the way back to a deer they got down,” Pap said.

“Yeah,” Tully said. “But this time I think it only marks the road.”

“Fresh car tracks, probably made last night, all right,” Pap said.

“You sure we want to find out?”

“No, but I expect we better.”

Chapter 7