Of All Sad Words (2 page)

“Enforcement,” Rhodes said. “Everybody loves crime-scene investigation.”

“Just like on TV,” Parry said, and they both had a laugh. Blacklin County wasn’t quite in the same league with the TV cops on the various
CSI
shows.

“What about the shooting range?” Parry said.

For years, the county officers had driven elsewhere to qualify on the shooting range, and some of the academy members had been invited to see what it was like.

“Hardly anybody actually fired a sidearm,” Rhodes said.

“Lawless did. Schwartz did.”

Parry has spies everywhere, Rhodes thought.

“Lawyers with guns,” Parry said, shaking his head. “Not a good combination.”

An old song lyric popped into Rhodes’s head: “Send lawyers, guns and money.”

“They didn’t shoot anybody,” he said. “They were pretty good on the range, though.”

“Probably have concealed-carry permits,” Parry said. “Next time there’s a stickup, they’ll do your job for you.”

Rhodes hadn’t heard anybody say stickup in a long time.

“You’ll see,” Parry went on. “This isn’t going to turn out well.”

Rhodes thought he was wrong, but he didn’t want to argue anymore. He’d been called in, he’d appeared, and Parry had had his say. Rhodes had answered as best he could, and now he was ready to leave, unless Parry had a joke for him. The judge was fond of jokes when he was in a better mood.

If he had a joke this time, he didn’t have time to tell it. The telephone on his desk rang. It was an old-fashioned black one, the kind you hardly ever saw. Rhodes wondered why Parry didn’t have a newer model. Maybe he thought he was saving money for the county.

“I told Louise not to interrupt us,” Parry said, but he picked up the phone and answered it. He listened for a second and handed the phone to Rhodes. “It’s for you.”

Rhodes took the phone and said hello.

“Sheriff?”

It was Hack Jensen, the dispatcher.

“It’s me, Hack. Go ahead.”

“You better get out to County Road Four eighty-six where it crosses the creek,” Hack said. “There’s been an accident.”

“What happened?”

“Trailer house blew up,” Hack said.

C. P. Benton lived on County Road 486. The mobile home he’d complained about was near the creek.

“The Crawford brothers,” Rhodes said.

“Yep.”

Rhodes told Hack he’d get started, then handed the phone back to Parry.

“Trouble?” Parry said, hanging up the phone.

Rhodes told him.

“See what I mean?” Parry said. “Vigilantes. That’s what that academy was good for.”

At least he never got around to the outside agitators, Rhodes thought.

Chapter 2

WHEN RHODES ARRIVED AT THE OPEN GATE ACROSS THE ROAD leading to the Crawfords’ mobile home, he stopped to look at the chain that had held it. Sure enough, the chain hung loose on the gatepost. It had been cut. The fire department had bolt cutters on all three trucks.

Rhodes got back in the county car, a big white Ford Crown Victoria, and drove up the winding dirt road through some scrappy elm and pecan trees to where the double-wide sat on top of a little hill.

Or where it had been sitting. There wasn’t much left of it now. Pieces of it lay strewn everywhere. Insulation littered the ground amid piles of burned and twisted metal. Rhodes saw part of a smoldering sofa, with a commode sitting on top of it. A TV set lay not far away. The roof was upside down on top of an old Ford that had been parked twenty yards away.

Two fire trucks, an ambulance, and several cars were parked along the road. At least I beat the newspaper, Rhodes thought, but when he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw Jennifer Loam’s little car chugging up the hill behind him. He hadn’t beaten her by much.

Rhodes parked and got out of the county car. People stood around, looking at the damage and talking things over while several firemen pumped water from the tank truck onto the smoking remains of the mobile home and onto the dead, dry grass of the field nearby.

Luckily, most of the area around the house had been nothing but hard-packed dirt, so the fire hadn’t spread and burned over the entire hill.

Rhodes took a deep breath of air. He smelled smoke and dampness and wet dirt, but nothing with the powerful tang of cat urine, which would have been a sure sign that a meth lab had exploded while someone was mixing up the drug.

Not so long ago, methamphetamine had been almost unknown in Blacklin County, but it had spread through the rural areas of East Texas like a plague.

It was a plague, Rhodes supposed, and it had become a serious problem in Blacklin County, just like it was in so many others. Anybody could cook it up with ingredients they’d bought at Wal-Mart, using a recipe they’d looked up on the Internet. As often as not, they got careless and blew up an old house or a mobile home.

Sometimes they survived. Sometimes they didn’t.

“What happened, Sheriff?” Jennifer Loam said, walking up beside him.

Loam was a reporter for the
Clearview Herald.
She held her little digital recorder, and Rhodes knew it was turned on. She was short, blond, and tough, a good reporter, probably better than Clearview deserved. Rhodes liked her, but he wished she wouldn’t turn up every time something happened.

“I’d say there was an explosion,” he told her.

She looked around. “Nothing gets by you, does it?”

“That’s why I’m a successful lawman.”

One of the cars parked nearby was a gray Saturn. There were more Saturns in Clearview than there were Infinitis, but not many. Rhodes saw C. P. Benton talking to Ruth Grady.

Benton looked, as he did every time Rhodes saw him, a little disheveled. He wore an old black hat, and his gray pants were baggy. His paisley shirt, which looked like it had been new about the time the Beatles broke up, wasn’t tucked in, but it didn’t quite manage to conceal the bulge of his stomach.

Ruth Grady was short and stout, but Benton didn’t tower over her. He waved his hands while he talked, and Rhodes thought he might be describing the explosion. He walked over so he could hear. Jennifer Loam was right behind him.

“I told you this was going to happen,” Benton said, catching sight of Rhodes. “Meth labs are notoriously dangerous.”

“A meth lab?” Jennifer said. “Are you sure about that?”

“She’s a reporter,” Rhodes told Benton. “Be careful. There are laws against libel.”

Benton looked thoughtful. “Then I’m not sure what it was. I thought it might have been a meth lab, but I could have been mistaken.”

Jennifer looked disappointed in his response. Rhodes said, “Was anybody hurt?”

“I don’t think so,” Ruth said. “At least nobody we’ve found. We haven’t been able to do much looking.”

“If anybody was in that place, they’d be in pieces by now,” Benton said. “I heard the explosion all the way over at my house. It sounded like a bomb, so I called the fire department. Then I called the EMS and your office.”

The red-and-white ambulance was parked a little farther up the road. Rhodes saw some of the EMTs standing beside it. There was nothing they could do at the moment.

“The Crawford brothers live here,” Rhodes said.

“Lived,” Benton said. “Drug dealers.” He looked at Jennifer. “Or so I’ve heard. Don’t quote me. Anyway, Sheriff, I tried to tell you about this place. Cars used to come to the gate all the time. They’d stop for a while and then drive away. We learned about those signs in the academy.”

Rhodes pointed to Loam’s recorder. “That thing’s taking down every word you say.”

“The Crawfords might have been selling Amway products,” Benton said. “I don’t really know.”

“We never caught the Crawfords at anything,” Rhodes said. “Not even selling Amway.”

“I don’t think what they did matters now,” Benton said. “Not if they were inside when the place blew up.”

Rhodes didn’t have any idea if anyone had been inside or not. He stood and watched the firemen hose down the wreckage, the water making silver streams in the bright sunlight.

After a couple of seconds, Rhodes’s gaze drifted over to the trees that lined the sides of the creek flowing by the Crawfords’ property. It was late summer, just about time for school to start, and the trees suffered from the heat and the lack of rain. Their leaves had already begun to turn brown and drop off.

The creek ran all the way across the county, through the big woods on the eastern side. Rhodes had already had one bad experience along the banks of that creek, and he didn’t want to have another one.

Benton took off his hat and wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief from his back pocket. His forehead extended quite a way back. Rhodes thought that Benton was probably one of the few people in the county who wore a hat and certainly one of the few who carried a handkerchief.

As Benton returned the handkerchief to his pocket, he turned and looked back down the road. Rhodes turned, too, and saw a rust-colored pickup headed their way. Dust billowed up behind it.

The pickup’s brakes squealed as it slid to a stop. Larry Crawford jumped out and started to run toward what was left of his home. He was chubby and unathletic, and his arms flapped against his sides. He had a small mustache, which was the only thing that made it possible to know he wasn’t Terry. His eyes were wild. He was wearing a T-shirt with lettering on the front: I’M WITH STUPID. Under the words, an arrow pointed to the left.

“Terry!” Crawford yelled. “Terry!”

He didn’t seem to see Rhodes or the others. Rhodes stepped in front of him and put out a hand to stop him. Crawford ran right on past, knocking Rhodes’s arm aside.

“I’ll get him,” Ruth said.

She ran along after him, then reached out and grabbed his belt. He dragged her for a couple of steps before he came to a stop.

He turned and looked at her. “My brother was in that trailer. I gotta get him.”

“You’ll have to wait,” Ruth told him. “It’s not safe right now.”

Crawford turned his round bald head and stared at the smoking remains of his home.

“What if he’s hurt? We gotta help him!”

“That’s what the EMTs are for,” Rhodes said, walking up to them, followed by Loam and Benton. “If there’s anything to be done for your brother, they’ll do it.” Rhodes paused. “You’re lucky you weren’t here.”

“I had to go to Wal-Mart to get some groceries. Terry wanted to go with me, but I told him to stay here. I gotta find him.”

He tried to run toward the double-wide again, but Ruth still had hold of his belt. His feet slipped in the sand.

“If your brother was in there, you won’t be much help to him now,” Rhodes said.

Crawford’s shoulders sagged. “Goddammit,” he said.

“You shouldn’t talk that way in front of women,” Benton said. “It’s not polite.”

Crawford looked at Benton the way he might have looked at a Martian had one walked up.

“You’re that nosy asshole who lives down the road,” he said.

“Usually only my students call me that,” Benton said. “Mainly the ones who have trouble with fractions.”

Crawford glared at him. “I’ve never been any student of yours. And I might not know much about fractions, either, but I know I can kick your ass.”

Benton gave him a superior smile. “I don’t think so.” He struck a pose that looked to Rhodes like something out of
The Karate Kid.
“I’m a master of the martial arts.”

Rhodes hoped Ruth had a good hold on Crawford’s belt. Otherwise, he’d probably kill Benton right then and there. Not that Rhodes didn’t respect the martial arts. He just didn’t believe Benton knew anything about them.

“I also play guitar,” Benton went on. Rhodes noticed that he was looking at Ruth, not Crawford. He raised up on his toes and sank back down a couple of times. “And I do fifty push-ups every morning. Except when I do a hundred.”

Crawford struggled to get to him, dragging Ruth along, but she managed to hold him back. After a few seconds, he relaxed, and Benton dropped his pose.

“I just want to find my brother,” Crawford said.

“We’ll take care of that,” Rhodes told him.

But they didn’t. After they got Crawford calmed down and after there was no more danger of fire, they determined that there was no body to be found, not unless it was covered by some of the wreckage that was too heavy and hot to lift, which was always a possibility.

Crawford twitched with agitation. “I don’t know where Terry could’ve got off to. He has to have been in there. He wasn’t one to go wandering around.”

“Do you have another car?” Jennifer asked.

“Just that old Ford.” Crawford looked at the car crushed under the roof of the mobile home. “Nobody’s going anywhere in that.”

“Terry will show up,” Ruth said.

Crawford shook his head. “I wish he was here right now.”

“Where will you stay?” Rhodes asked him.

He wanted to know, because if it was determined that there had been a meth lab in the mobile home, as Rhodes suspected was the case, Crawford might be subject to arrest.

“I got a cousin out at Obert,” Crawford said. “Jamey Hamilton. I can stay with him.”

Rhodes knew Hamilton. He had a one-chair barbershop in Obert. He’d been written up a time or two for traffic violations, nothing serious. As far as Rhodes knew, he’d never had anything to do with drugs.

“We’ll let you know if we find anything,” Rhodes said.

“I just don’t believe he’d wander off,” Crawford said. “That wasn’t his way.”

“You should be glad he did.”

“I am. I am. But it don’t seem right to me. Something’s wrong about this, Sheriff. I mean, I can see how the propane tank might blow up, but we were always careful with it. And where’s Terry?”

“Propane tank?” Jennifer said.

“Sure. That’s what blew up. It had to be.”

Rhodes almost smiled. Crawford was already getting his cover-up established.

Jennifer questioned him some more, but Rhodes didn’t listen. He wondered himself what might have happened to Terry. He had an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. How had Terry gotten out of the house? Or, if he’d been out when the explosion occurred, where had he gone?

Crawford left after awhile. Rhodes walked to the pickup with him. The bed was littered with junk: a tire, a hubcap, a crowbar, and a couple of wrenches. The cab wasn’t much cleaner.