Feast for Thieves (25 page)

He hung up the phone and stared at me again. “Is why they’re chasing you have anything to do with the child?” he asked.

I nodded.

“I bet there’s more to the story—right? Is it money?”

I nodded again.

He exhaled sharply. “Will these fellas talk to reason?”

“They’re beyond that, I’d say, Sheriff. I’m real sorry about all this.”

He looked at my face again and shook his head. “Did I make a mistake about you, boy?”

“Probably.”

“Well,” he said. “We’ll sort this all out when it’s all over.”

He grabbed me by the arm and hustled down the back steps toward the jailhouse. His keys were already in the jailhouse’s front door. Once inside, he walked around the desk and headed straight to his office. He unlocked and opened the door and went to the back cabinet where he kept rifles. I stayed right behind him. He wasn’t being clear about his plans, and I thought for a moment he was going to lock me in a cell, but to my surprise he handed me a container of clips and a Garand and took three more rifles off the wall along with two more boxes of bullets.

“Consider yourself deputized,” he said. “I only got one flak jacket. I’d offer it to you, but it won’t do much against an 88.”

I said nothing. Already I was examining the M1. I sighted down the barrel and took off the sling. The standard clip for the Garand holds eight rounds. I inserted the clip, released pressure from the top round so the first bullet chambered, and snapped off the safety catch. I was ready.

Halligan’s mind was already far ahead of my action. He
scratched a note with a pencil and tacked it to the front door of the jailhouse so Deuce and Roy knew where to find us. We jumped in the sheriff’s patrol car, headed east on Main for a block, turned left, and drove a half mile north out of town. He pulled off the blacktop onto the shoulder, circled around, and parked the car across the road.

“Won’t stop a DUKW,” he said, patting the hood of the patrol car. “But at least it’ll give us something to shoot behind.”

I nodded.

Ten minutes later Deuce and Roy pulled up in Deuce’s car and jumped out.

“Deuce, you’re deputized,” Halligan said. He handed the big man one of the rifles. Roy took the other.

“What’s this all about, Sheriff?” Roy asked.

“Trouble’s coming down the road,” Halligan said. “We need to stop it.”

Roy nodded, jumped in Deuce’s car, and drove it south down the highway two hundred yards. He stopped, got out, scrawled a note on a piece of paper and affixed it to the side with a wad of gum, and ran back to us. The sign, we hoped, would alert any drivers from the south to stop.

We all had a lick of time to think just then. The four of us lined up on the south side of the patrol car and pointed our rifles north. There was nothing to do but wait. The first rays of the sun broke over the horizon, and all around us the desert lit up. The cacti in Texas have a wide range of size and color. Blooms can last until late fall. A stretch of medium-sized prickly pears spread out to our left. A plain of Golden Wave to our right. I stared at the swath of yellow and brown flowers that grow all over the roadside in these parts. My mind snapped back to the matter at hand.

Half an hour ticked by. The sun steadily rose. In another forty-five minutes or so, the plant workers who lived north of town would start trickling in, looking for breakfast at the café. Fortunately
most of them lived in the apartments and plant housing east of city hall and wouldn’t be coming toward us. Time passed on the roadway, and we didn’t see so much as a semitrailer come our way.

Deputy Roy exhaled and shifted in his boots. “You sure someone’s coming?” He was eying me warily. “Reverend Rowdy, might I ask what happened to your face?”

I looked at the man without knowing how to answer. I was finished keeping secrets, but it wasn’t the place or time to start spilling my whole story.

Deuce Gibbons gave me a head nod. “I got a jug of water in the back of my car,” he said. “I should have thought of it before now. Help yourself to as much as you’d like.”

I gave a slight smile of thanks his direction and glanced at the sheriff.

“Go ahead,” Halligan shrugged. “We’ll keep an eye out in the meantime.”

I didn’t want to leave my post, but my right eye was hurting something fierce. Deuce’s car lay two hundred yards down the road, the length of two football fields. I set off toward the car at slow jog, the M1 still under my arm.

Sure enough, his trunk was open. A jug of water lay inside. The cork snapped off in a jiffy with a
thunk
, and I started pouring water on my face, down my throat, and then on my face again. A rag lay in his trunk. It looked to be clean enough. So I soaked it with water to keep with me, set the cork back in the jug with the heel of my hand, and closed the trunk.

“Rowdy! Hey—Rowdy! Come quick!” A yell from the sheriff flew toward me.

The DUKW appeared on the horizon, and I started to run up the highway back toward the patrol car. A cloud of dust formed behind the DUKW, and as the vehicle came better into view I saw the DUKW wasn’t alone. Following Crazy Ake and Rance was a whole host of patrol cars—Rancho Springs’ finest, I wouldn’t
doubt—some driving on the road, some driving closer to the shoulders of the road. They were keeping their distance, same as we were trying to keep ours. The law had caught up to Crazy Ake and Rance. We were on one side. The lawmen from Rancho Springs was on the other. The DUKW was smack-dab in the middle.

What happened next happened so fast, I could scarcely see it to believe it. Rance and Crazy Ake must have had a lot of time during the slow car chase to plan their next move.

The DUKW pulled within fifty yards of us, screeched on its brakes, and jackknifed with the trailer across the highway. The lawmen from Rancho Springs screeched to a stop behind them, piled out of their cars, and lined up, their rifles pointed at the DUKW.

Rance came out of the cab in a jiffy shooting his rifle both directions. Lawmen on either side opened up. Smoke erupted. I reached Halligan’s patrol car, ducked low, and aimed the M1, trying to get a bead on the action ahead. Crazy Ake was outside the DUKW, working on the 88’s jacks. I spotted him toss a shell in the chamber. The gun was pointed straight toward us. I realized the grave danger we were in.

“Run!” Deputy Roy yelled. He had his eyes on the big gun the whole time and found his voice first.

We all sprinted south.

Kaboom!

None of us were more than twenty yards away from Halligan’s patrol car when the artillery hit. The patrol car rolled up in a giant ball of fire and exploded. Deuce Gibbons was ten steps ahead of me, already facedown in the ditch by the side of the highway. I dived in the ditch behind his feet like a baseball player for home plate. Halligan and Deputy Roy were on the other side of the highway.

The bullets flew now.
Rat-a-tat-tat
. Some eager beaver from
Rancho Springs had brought a surplus machine gun with him. Smoke and dust flew all around. The boys from the north were throwing everything they had toward the DUKW. There was nothing our side could do with all that lead spewing our way except bury our heads in the weeds.

In six or seven minutes the fire died down. One loan jasper fired off a last single shot, and silence covered the desert.

“We’re coming out!” Halligan yelled. “Hold your fire.” I hoped the lawmen from the north could hear him.

Gingerly, the four of us inched out of our respective ditches. The boys from Rancho Springs were already at the DUKW. We lowered our rifles and headed up the road. Halligan’s squad car was flipped over on its roof, still blazing, a hole the size of a city’s septic field pipe blown through the side door.

The noble DUKW was likewise shot to smithereens. All tires were flattened. The steering wheel was shot clean away. The side plates and armor were pierced like a sieve.

Rance Chicory lay in front of the DUKW. The back of his head was blown away. I wasn’t sorry to see that man dead, although I did mourn for what he might have been. Sally Jo would get along fine without him. Undoubtedly she’d keep running the pigsty on her own.

“Sheriff Barker,” called out a voice. It was the sheriff from the north. They shook hands and surveyed the scene.

“Where’s the other fellow?” Halligan asked. “You got him in the back of your car already?”

“We thought you had him,” said the other lawman.

The two looked at each other with blank stares.

It was true.

Dead or alive, Crazy Ake was nowhere to be seen.

TWENTY-TWO

T
he boys from the north wanted to take me to their jail right away. Deputy Roy was all too eager to see me go with them, but Halligan said no. He told everybody to back off—he was taking me to the Cut Eye jail, and he was doing it personally to make sure I got there safely. The DUKW was registered in my name and messed up in the thick of the crime, there was no question of that, and some early riser in Rancho Springs was an eyewitness to seeing a third man flee from the scene of the bank robbery who matched my description, so that further cast suspicion my way.

It was no matter. I wasn’t holding on to my secrets this time. The bulk of the stolen money was still sitting in the back of Crazy Ake’s truck, which was still sitting in Halligan’s driveway, and I wanted to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I also wanted Halligan’s help in telling it so as best not to hurt him, the church, or the town.

The sheriff drove me back to the jailhouse in Deuce’s car and put me in cell number three, the one nearest the window. The door to the cell he left open while he telephoned Martha at the switchboard to tell the doctor to come over and attend to my wounds. I sat on a lower bunk and stared at the wall. When the phone call was over, Halligan brought me a blanket, then walked across the street to the café to bring me a meal. Augusta was still out of commission, tending to Cisco at the state hospital, but their
cooks were on duty at the café, and Halligan brought me a bowl of oatmeal, a grilled cheese sandwich, a thermos of coffee, and a slice of apple pie. Only then did he close the door to my cell and lock it, pull up a chair outside it with a pad of paper in his hand, and say, “Okay Rowdy, let’s hear it from the beginning.”

I told the sheriff my entire story from start to finish. Not a detail I held back. He took notes most of the time. Sometimes he scratched his head. A few times he chuckled under his chin. A few times he growled. A few times he said, “That’s real tough circumstances, Rowdy, real tough indeed.”

Funny, but I was the only man in that jailhouse this time, I couldn’t help but notice. Sure, it was a Wednesday morning, but it cheered my heart a mite to see a stark contrast to when I’d first viewed the jail cells of Cut Eye, so full and overcrowded.

At 8 a.m. sharp, the middle-aged gal with the thick glasses took her place at the front desk, and the jailhouse officially opened for the day. By then, Halligan had heard my story to the end. He patted me on the arm through the cell bars, said we’d work something out, and shuffled back to his office to begin paperwork. The stolen money in the back of the truck was easy to return to Rancho Springs. Not a dollar was missing, so that was a plus. The hole in their bank wall and its vault would take some doing to repair. There was a heap of overtime needed to pay all their lawmen, as well as all the aggravation our gang had put them through. There was the matter of a dead man and the trouble it took to notify his next of kin. Then there was the frightening matter of having one armed robber still on the loose. Rancho Springs organized a manhunt right away, but by mid-afternoon when I woke up from the nap I took in my cell, the gal at the front desk said the fugitive Akan Fordmire still hadn’t been found.

Gummer Lopez was the first to visit. He came in the front door, insisted to anyone within earshot that I had nothing to do with the crime, wept over the lost DUKW, and promised he’d find
me another vehicle as soon as he could.

Several of the elderly ladies from the church came in after him. They spit in my eye, insisted I’d been preaching heresy all along, and left in a huff.

Luna-Mae visited before her shift started at the tavern, along with Ava-Louise, who brought me a basket of cornbread. Both said they hoped I’d be back preaching real soon. Their particular business was way down since I’d started my job at the church, but they was actually quite happy to see that, yes sir, they was.

In early afternoon, Deuce Gibbons hobbled in on a crutch. He’d taken a small piece of shrapnel in the back of his right leg. The doc had fixed up the big man in no time, and Deuce shook my hand and for at least half an hour we talked about sharpshooting and the right types of bullets. He’d been in the crowd when I shot the revolver out of Cisco Wayman’s hand at thirty yards, and he insisted he winged Rance Chicory just below the shoulder blade right before one of the lawmen from the south blew the man’s head away. I was getting to like Deuce Gibbons real fine as a friend, particularly seeing as how he and I weren’t pasting each other in the jaw anymore.

Deputy Roy filed in and out of the jailhouse most of the day. His patrol car was now fixed, thanks to Gummer’s understanding of the insides of an engine, and Roy and Deuce were heading south to go pick up another patrol car for Halligan before the day’s end. Insurance would pick up the tab for the new car, Roy grinned the news to me. But the deputy’s grin was about far more than insurance money, he said so as much. “I’m happy any time I see a wild-at-heart man such as yourself behind bars, Rowdy Slater. I’ve never trusted your kind, and you’ve never been a minister I looked up to, that’s for sure.”