Shoveling Smoke (23 page)

“I hope they catch us,” I said between gasps. “I want to tell them we got caught because you spent five minutes blowing your goddamned whistle into the phone. That whistle’s going to be exhibit A in your sanity hearing.”

Stroud switched on the flashlight and swung it through the room. “This is a happy place,” he said. We were in a long, narrow, high-ceilinged room, lined on all four sides with shelves that were loaded with Mason jars. The jars contained ash, like the ones in the Rasmussen evidence box. A superfine haze of dust hung in the air, making the flashlight beam a solid, glowing shaft as it played along the sides of the jars. Under the shelves were numbered bins full of plastic freezer bags, each wrapped around bone fragments or other horse parts. Close to me at one end of the room were a couple of refrigerators. I thought about opening them, then changed my mind.

“It’s the elephants’ graveyard of horses,” I said. “There must be half a ton of defunct tissue in these jars.”

“Put all the parts together,” said Stroud, “and you would have one hell of a horse.”

Every surface in the room was coated with shaggy grit. I could feel it under my shoes. Stroud broke into a shuffling dance step. “The old soft shoe,” he said with a chuckle that turned into a sharp, barking cough.

“Put out the light!” I cried as the sheriff’s car drove past. It missed the Lincoln and rolled on up the slope. Stroud and I crept out of the barn, got into his car, and without headlights I drove up the valley road. At the house on the hill behind us, spinning lights from three patrol cars raked, red and blues, through the darkness.

“How much do you know
about the horse insurance business, Mr. Parker?” Stroud asked.

“Not much.”

We were less than half an hour from Jenks, and I was still numb with relief over our escape from the McKinney police. Stroud had been cogitating quietly in the passenger seat, the look on his face suggesting he was shifting something from the back burner to the front.

“It’s pretty cut and dried,” Stroud continued. “You buy a horse, you apply for an insurance policy on it. The carrier sends you a form to fill out describing the horse in detail, from its dollar value right down to the fuzz on its ass.”

“The dec sheet,” I said.

“Correct. You fill it out, usually by hand, send it to the carrier, and some scribe in the carrier’s office attaches the policy to it and files it away.”

“And you think something happened to the dec sheets when Bevo sent them to Stromboli,” I said. By then the same thought had occurred to me.

“That’s right. One of the wop secretaries could have attached Bevo’s dec sheets to the wrong insurance policies. It wouldn’t be the first time a mistake like that was made. Think how many policies show up in one day at a big outfit like Stromboli. Hundreds. A couple of years back, a friend of mine, Dallas Goode, got his policy back from a carrier out of Philadelphia. Dallas took a look at the contracts the carrier returned to him and found out he had insured six performing Shetland ponies instead of the brood mares he’d bought.” Stroud laughed. “He said he’d rather have had the Shetlands, for all the good he got from those mares.”

“You’re saying Stromboli accidentally mixed up the dec sheets and attached the descriptions of somebody else’s horses to Bevo’s policies?”

“I’m saying that sort of thing happens. Maybe it happened to Bevo. Bear with me here. A month after he buys them, Bevo’s horses are killed in a fire, and he sends in his claim. Stromboli contacts SWAT, and SWAT sends Pulaski to investigate and write the necropsies. Stan-the-Man does his usual thing, pours the horses into his little jars, takes the evidence back to the lab. Now, here’s where things get interesting. As a matter of course, Stromboli would have sent Pulaski a telex with all the relevant information about the horses: their ages, their sex, potential productivity, and, of course, their money value. Suppose that Pulaski, being the cocky son of a bitch that he is, does a half-assed job of analyzing the evidence. Or, better, doesn’t even look at the stuff in the jars. After all, he’s got the Stromboli telex giving him all he really needs to know about the horses. What if he writes up his necropsies solely on the basis of the info Stromboli sent him?”

“Without comparing the telex information to the physical evidence?” I asked.

“That’s right.”

“What sort of pathologist would do a thing like that?”

“A no-good, lazy-ass pathologist who thinks he’s God. Don’t forget, Mr. Parker, Pulaski has a reputation for never being wrong. His word is law. Nobody contests him anymore. He thinks anything he does is right.”

“But that’s stupid!” I replied. “It’s like a coroner basing an official autopsy on information from the dead guy’s insurance carrier.”

“That’s exactly what it’s like. And don’t think
that
doesn’t happen, either!”

“So Pulaski’s report is completely screwed up, and nobody checked it until today?” I asked.

“Nobody felt the need to look at it. After all, it’s from Sherlock Holmes Pulaski. He might not even have given a copy to Jacobs until the last day or so.”

“What you’re saying is, SWAT didn’t take this case seriously.”

“No,” Stroud replied, “what I’m saying is, they treated it as routine. And anytime you allow the law to become routine, it can jump up and bite you between the buttons, as I have cause to know.” He stretched, scratched himself with a self-satisfied air. “It seems, Mr. Parker, that both parties to this particular suit have been remiss. Our adversaries, however, have proved themselves a little more remiss than we.”

“Too bad this is all just speculation,” I said.

“Is that all it is?” Stroud asked. “Why do you think there was a break-in tonight at Stan Pulaski’s house?”

“You think there’s a connection?”

“I asked you what
you
think,” replied Stroud, the old Baylor law professor. “Let’s see if you have a country lawyer’s powers of deduction.”

“Or invention,” I countered.

“Or invention,” he said, smiling.

I thought for a moment. “All right. Let’s assume the report really is screwed up. That would explain the sudden change in Jacobs’s tone of voice on the phone today. Don’t forget, he was nonplussed.”

“Nonplussed?” Stroud said. “He was abashed, Mr. Parker. He was seriously disconcerted.”

“Okay, he was abashed. He’s got two problems. first, how to stop you from making good on your threat to subpoena all of Pulaski’s notes. Second, how to fix the bogus report without the court ever getting wind of the problem.”

“And what is his solution?”

“Well, apparently, it isn’t simply to come clean and fix the report.”

“With Gilliam Stroud on his tail? He’s got no chance of that. I’ll scream foul. I’ll argue they were manufacturing evidence to work some sort of scam on our poor, innocent client. Before I’m through, I’ll have the jury believing Pulaski himself set fire to those horses. And Warren Jacobs knows it.”

“All right, then. I guess Pulaski sets up a break-in at his own house, in which the burglars take the stereo, the TV, the computer, some cheesy paintings—oh, yes, and the pathology report for Bevo Rasmussen’s suit! Then, since the original report is missing, Pulaski will petition the court to let him write a new report based on the physical evidence he has collected.”

“You have earned your weight in chitlins, Mr. Parker,” he said. “What do you think of my little scenario?”

“Pretty far-fetched,” I replied. “Who’s going to believe burglars would steal a pathologist’s report?”

“There was a beautiful eel-skin briefcase lying on Pulaski’s desk. No—ostrich-skin! The nasty thieves could not resist it. Unfortunately, it happened to contain all of Pulaski’s papers on the Rasmussen case.”

“Come on!” I said. “Are you telling me there would be only one copy of Pulaski’s report? What about the copy Jacobs read from this afternoon on the phone?”

Stroud’s smile widened. “In light of the aspersions we cast upon it, Jacobs gave it back to Pulaski so that Stan-the-Man could check its accuracy. It was in the briefcase with Pulaski’s own copy.”

“Who in the world would buy this story?” I asked.

“Judge Wrong Tit Tidwell, for one,” said Stroud. “If Pulaski told Wrong Tit that Martians ate his report, Tidwell would smile and nod.”

“Let’s see,” I said, “incompetent pathologists, corrupt law firms, vindictive idiot judges, impossible scenarios. Seems country law works pretty much like city law.”

“Now, Mr. Parker, do you see why we took the evidence box?”

“You wanted to spend the next five to fifty years of your life behind bars?” I asked.

“Don’t go ethical on me at this late hour, son.”

I did know why we took the evidence, of course. “Without the physical evidence, Stan-the-Man cannot turn in a credible report. He would have to base his findings only on his memory. But he investigates so many fires a year that it would be impossible for him to reconstruct one fire, over a year old, totally from memory,” I said. “You would rip him to shreds on the stand, Wrong Tit Tidwell notwithstanding.”

“Very good, Mr. Parker. And can you think of any other reason why we took the box?”

“Spoliation,” I answered.

“Excellent!” he said.

The doctrine of spoliation holds that if you are party to a lawsuit and evidence is destroyed or lost while in your possession, it is presumed the evidence is unfavorable to you. The doctrine was originally intended to protect litigants in product liability cases. In such cases one lawyer or the other used to send the product in question—an oven, a seat belt, a watch crystal—back to the manufacturer for testing. In the course of such testing, the product was often unavoidably destroyed. This was unfair to the other litigant in the case, who now could not conduct his or her own tests. To protect this second party, the court, invoking the doctrine of spoliation, instructs the jury to presume that the destroyed evidence is unfavorable to the party who had it destroyed.

What this meant in our case was that the disappearance of the evidence box would count heavily against Stromboli. Add spoliation to Pulaski’s inability to submit a pathology report, and it would be next to impossible for Stromboli to win. Bevo would get his money.

“Jesus!” I said. “We’ve beaten SWAT!”

“Amazing grace, Mr. Parker,” said the old man. “We are imbued.”

“It’s not grace, Mr. Stroud. The other side screwed up worse than we did.”

“Sounds like grace to me.”

“Let’s just see if we’re imbued tomorrow morning,” I replied. “If you’re wrong about Pulaski’s report, Jacobs is going to clean our plow.”

“Clean our plow.” Stroud rolled the syllables around in his mouth. “A nice rural image. You’re catching on, Mr. Parker.”

As we neared Jenks, Stroud had me circle to the road leading out to his farmhouse. “I want to take that box of dead horses out to the pond and sink it,” Stroud said. “Pulaski will figure out that his burglars didn’t really steal the box along with the briefcase. He may put two and two together and start wondering if we somehow had something to do with it.”

“That’s a long shot, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yes, and it’s giving Pulaski credit for brains that he just doesn’t have. Still, I want to make sure that if he comes snooping over here, there’s nothing for him to find.”

“Good idea. Destroy the evidence,” I said, feeling even more like a criminal than I had when I carried the box to Stroud’s car.

Turning into the meandering dirt road that led to the house, I noticed flashes of what looked like heat lightning in the sky ahead of us. As we got closer, the flashes became more intense. Beyond the house, in the direction of the cabin, a reddish glow pulsed in the sky.

“I think maybe we just drove out of the state of grace,” I said.

I steered the Lincoln
through the tall grass toward the valley where the cabin lay. Now we could see smoke straggling upward in the distance.

“Bevo Rasmussen is burning down my cabin!” Stroud cried. “That’s the last straw!”

Suddenly another car loomed in the grass, coming at us fast. It swerved aside, missing us by inches. The driver was only a blur, but I could tell that the car was a police car. In the next instant, something exploded against our windshield, and light seared my eyeballs. When I opened my eyes again, we were topping the hill overlooking the cabin and pond. With my vision clouded by the explosion’s afterburn, I could see nothing but dark shapes in the landscape and sudden blooms of sparks as other explosions erupted in the valley. I heard the explosions going off amid the popping of small-arms fire and the snarl of men’s voices shouting in panic. Rockets whined and shrieked.

“The dogs of war!” cried Stroud.

“I can’t see,” I told him.

The old man reached over and yanked the steering wheel. “Give her some gas,” he said. I did, and Stroud steered us across the top of the valley to a stand of pine trees about a hundred yards from the cabin. “We’ll be safe here, I think,” he said. I switched off the headlights and the ignition.

We sat under the trees in the car, with the valley sloping away in front of us. As my eyesight came back, I could make out distinct shapes. The cabin was still there—it had not been set on fire—but a patch of grass behind it, maybe half an acre, was burning, the flames lapping low to the ground, churning out black smoke. In front of the cabin, a battle was going on. Half a dozen cars, three of them black-and-whites from the Jenks Police Department, were swarming in the space between the cabin and the pond. Men leaned out car windows to shoot rifles and handguns at the cabin.

As we watched, two of these cars collided head-on and bounced back from each other. I heard a voice say, “Shit, Red, let me drive.” One of the cars spun off again, but white steam billowed from the hood of the other. It was finished. Three men tumbled out of it, waving frantically until a car stopped and picked them up. Two other cars sat on the slope of the valley, one smoldering, the other lying on its side in a ditch. The smoldering car was Captain Jack’s Range Rover. I could see bullet holes dotting its flank, and I wondered if they were new or if they dated from the afternoon of the bobcat ambush.

It was an oddly unfocused battle. The men in the cars were pouring ammunition into the cabin, yet there was no visible activity inside it. The clearing where the cars bounced around seemed to be the center of a mortar attack, yet we could hear no incoming shells; every few seconds a spot of ground or a bush would belch upward in a thundering explosion.

The top of the Lincoln was hit by what sounded like bullets. “Incoming!” I yelled, kicking my door open and sliding out onto the ground. Above me, there was laughter. I looked up but saw only foliage until an arm high in a tree waved at me.

“Where are you hit, Clay?” It was Wick Chandler’s voice. “Get that man into triage.” Something bounced off my forehead, and I picked it up. A pebble. To considerable snickering from above, I stood up and discovered that I had parked the car next to a duck blind identical to the one on the road to Boo’s barbecue shack. The people in the blind had tossed pebbles onto the Lincoln’s roof.

Stroud limped past me and began climbing the ladder. “Let me see!” he cried eagerly. I followed him up. On the platform we found Wick, Bevo, and Boo himself. Wick and Boo were watching the battle through binoculars.

“Glad to see you, Mr. Stroud!” said Bevo. “I didn’t want you to miss my little party.”

“They’ve come to arrest you, Bevo!” I told him. “They must know the place is full of stolen goods.”

“Stolen goods?” said Bevo. “Where’d you get a notion like that, Mr. Parker?”

“Somebody give me some binoculars,” Stroud said. Wick handed him his, and the old man stared through them.

“I’m sorry, Gill,” Wick said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have bailed Bevo out, after all. They’ve shot up the cabin pretty bad.”

“Bevo,” said Stroud, “the fee you owe us for getting you out of that drug deal last fall?”

“Yes, sir?” said Bevo.

“It’s forgiven. All right with you, Hard-dick?”

“Sure thing, Gill. You’re not mad?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Stroud. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He lowered the binoculars and to my astonishment I saw tears in the old man’s eyes.

Bevo explained that he had been setting up the ex-pilots for weeks. “Bunch of assholes,” he sniffed.

“Tell ’em about them guys bustin’ up our still,” Boo suggested.

“Two stills, Uncle Boo,” Bevo reminded him. “Don’t forget that one over by the five-D Ranch a couple of years ago. It’s getting so you can’t take a shit in the woods without one of them idiots tripping over you.”

“So you weren’t fencing stolen goods?” I asked him.

Bevo gave me his wolf’s smile. “All them boxes stacked in the cabin is empty. Let’s just say I planted some hints, and sure enough, old Jack and his pals came sniffing. Red Meachum deputized ’em this morning. Guess where they went to plan the raid?” He clapped his uncle on the back.

“The Singing Pig?” I asked.

“They come in for lunch,” said Boo, beaming at us. “I heard every goddamn thing they said. Boy howdy, they hate you, Mr. Stroud. They was planning to catch Bevo with a load of goods and then knock down your door. They got a search warrant.” A jagged nicotine laugh barked out of the little man. “I hope they like what they found.”

Bevo reached down and picked up a small metal box with a crank handle and posts for connecting electric wires. “Give me another one, Uncle Boo,” he said. Boo ripped a piece of tape off the duck blind’s guardrail, then handed Bevo the ends of two wires that had been secured under the tape. I saw that the wires led down one leg of the platform, into the darkness. Several more pairs of wires were taped to the rail. Bevo wrapped the two leads around the posts on the box, then handed the box to Stroud.

“Would you care to do the honors?” Bevo asked. Stroud took the detonator. Bevo pointed to a dried bush fifty feet from the cabin door. “Now, wait for a car to get close, and crank that sumbitch.”

Stroud clutched the box, his hand on the crank, until one of the patrol cars veered toward the bush. He gave the crank a swift turn, and the bush burst into flame. The driver jerked the steering wheel to miss the explosion, and the car rose on two wheels, balanced precariously, then crashed down on all fours again.

Stroud howled. “It’s Christmas! It’s my fucking birthday!”

“Boo is a man of hidden talents,” Wick told us. “He did most of this with that old black powder we kept in the cabin. That and some leftover fireworks.”

“Where’d you learn explosives, Boo?” I asked.

“Seabees,” he said. “Out in the Pacific. Nineteen and forty-four. I blew up an entire island once. An aye-toll. ’Course, it’s good to find a use for the old skills, now and then.”

“I don’t understand why they don’t just get out of their cars and charge the house,” I said. “Nobody’s in there.”

“That’s not what they think,” said Bevo. “We had the lights on, till those guys shot ’em out. And every once in a while, we give ’em a burst of machine-gun fire.”

“How?” I asked.

Bevo handed me another box, like the first one. “Want to shake ’em up? It’s only firecrackers.”

I took the box, cranked the handle.

In a few seconds a series of flat, popping noises stuttered out of a cabin window, accompanied by occasional sparks.

“Sounds like an M-16,” said Wick.

“Try that one,” Bevo said to me. I cranked the handle on a third box, and a comet’s tail screamed out of a cabin window, bouncing twice in the valley grass before bursting into a mass of silvery tracers that arced and died in the air.

“That must have been what hit the Lincoln,” I told Stroud.

“If we only had Roman candles,” the old man replied, “we could hold them off for a week.”

“These idiots are gonna catch on pretty soon,” Bevo said. He turned to his uncle. “How many charges we got left?”

Boo shook his head. “Only one or two. There’s one over to the side of the house. Then, of course, there’s the house itself.”

“You wired the cabin?” Wick asked.

“Of course,” said Bevo. “When you do a job, you do it thorough.”

“I didn’t know about that, Gill,” Wick apologized.

But the old man was watching through the binoculars. “Blow it up, burn it down,” he said. “This is its finest hour.”

Bevo and Boo worked on the detonator box for a moment, then handed it to Stroud.

“Mr. Stroud,” said Bevo, “I’m sorry for our little set-to in the jail today. I was crazy from the way those cops had been beating on me.”

“All is forgiven, Bevo,” replied the old man. He cranked the handle on the box, and the front wall of the cabin blew out, the roof collapsing and catching fire. Debris spewed into the night sky. The force of the explosion made the duck blind wobble.

“Good one, Uncle Boo,” said Bevo.

“Makes a man kinda sentimental,” Boo replied.