Strawman's Hammock (19 page)

“(For what?)”

“(Word of the straw.)”

“(The straw?)”

“(The men bale. The women rake. Sometimes.)”

“(And who hires you?)”

Dolores averted her eyes with that question. “(I don't know. The men know.)”

“(Have you heard of Señor Loyd?)”

“(Oh, yes. He is a big man. He has much money.)”

“(Did you know that Señor Loyd hires men to work in straw?)”

She smiled coyly, as if amused at Bear's pronouncement.

“(Am I wrong in this?)” Barrett asked. “(Am I wrong when I say that Señor Loyd hires the men?)”

“(He pays them,)” Dolores responded patiently, as if explaining something to a child. “(But he does not get the work.)”

“(Who does?)”

“(El Toro,)” Dolores replied, and Barrett reached to squeeze honey into his coffee.

“The Bull?” Laura Anne asked her husband. “Have you ever heard of a man by that name?”

“It's a sobriquet, I'm sure, and yes, I've met the man. Ask the señora if all the work comes through the Bull.”

Laura Anne asked.

“Sí,”
she replied. “(Everyone who works must pay him.)”

Barrett leaned forward. “(Must pay him? How?)”

She seemed amused.

“(With money. The money you make from the bale; he takes the little bite.)”

The little bite, or
mordida,
translates from Spanish as “bribe.”

“(Why can't you refuse?)” Laura Anne asked. “(Why can't you keep your money?)”

She seemed astonished at the question. “(You say ‘no' to the Bull—!)” She drew her hand across her throat.
“Muerte.”

“We've heard that something like this might be going on,” Barrett confided to Laura Anne. “There are only a couple of balers in the county. A virtual monopoly. What's most likely happening is that Gary and Linton Loyd and the others are using this El Toro to twist arms and break legs. You either work for the wages
they
offer, or you don't work at all.”

“That's outrageous!”

Barrett nodded. “Not to mention illegal. But hard to prove. Unless we can get this El Toro to turn on his straw-boss, which I don't think is likely.”

“Or unless you can get these people,” Laura Anne inclined her head to Isabel's mother, “to testify against him.”

“Be hard,” Barrett frowned. “We'd have to gain their trust.
And
convince them we can protect their families from El Toro. It would take something pretty major to accomplish that.”

Laura Anne placed her cup on a milk crate that doubled as a server.

“Maybe I can help.”

“You?” Barrett shook his head. “You stay out of this, Laura Anne.”

“Why? Will it hurt your chances at sheriff?”

Dolores began to feel uncomfortable. “(I did not mean to begin a dispute.)”

“(There is no rancor,)” Laura Anne assured her. “(I can disagree freely with my husband.)”

Señora Hernandez greeted this last in an attitude of muted skepticism.

Laura Anne turned to Barrett. “You need this woman's trust and the trust of her family. They need you to protect a little girl who is being stalked, who may even be in danger of assault by a young man showing signs, I believe of being very disturbed. You don't have to be a politician, Bear, to see how this can work.”

“The problem isn't me, Laura Anne. It's Lou Sessions. He is the lock on the law in this county and he's not going to arrest Jerry Slade, or even seriously investigate the boy. Not on my say-so
or
yours. Not in an election year. Not without evidence so plain it can't be ignored and thick enough to insulate him from a goddamn barn-fire.”

“That's the problem?”

“It ain't football, honey. I can't run an end-around.”

Laura Anne rose from her chair.

“No,” she said. “But I can.”

Somewhere the puppy barked. Then the high laughter of children. The party wound down not long after. The same pickup that deposited Isabel and her mother came back to get them, remaining, as before, at a distance on the blacktop road.

*   *   *

Monday came with the flourishes of a busy family heading off to work—Barrett to his Live Oak office, Laura Anne and the boys to school. If Laura Anne had dwelled on the matter she might have realized she was tired. She was, after all, still working full-time over the weekend at the restaurant while finishing the last of her tenure as a substitute teacher for Deacon High. Thanksgiving was right around the corner, which brought other obligations—a recital, a church service. Not to mention the demands left over from a birthday party, a houseful of guests, and two high-voltage twins.

But the truth was, this morning Laura Anne was pumped. She was girded for battle. She had not told Barrett what she planned.

“Better you don't know,” she said. “Just keep your cell phone handy.”

Barrett objected. Laura Anne overruled. That was that.

She went through the first four periods of the day on automatic pilot. There were assignments to give. The usual in-class commotions to censure or break up. The constant, constant effort to keep students' attention. Laura Anne usually enjoyed those challenges. But today, all she wanted was to hear the lunch bell.

Actually, a muted buzzer had long superseded the traditional bell to announce the end of morning classes. Laura Anne left her fourth-period band hall on the buzz to see doors bursting open in synchrony all up and down the hall, a host of students spilling into that long corridor with the boisterousness and élan of firefighters racing to a conflagration. A pair of hall monitors were caught in that throbbing stream. There was the school's janitor and handyman, an old Appalachian, retreating to his closet for lunch, a brown bag stained with mayonnaise in his liver-spotted hand. Laura Anne took a position near a water fountain. Students strolled or stampeded by, most without a glance in her direction.

There was Jerry Slade. He was passing something to a knot of peers. A poster? Magazine? But Laura Anne was not interested in that.

She bent over the fountain as Jerry passed. She noted the teenager's backpack. Jerry broke from his acolytes as Laura Anne saw him do every day to reach a row of lockers in the hall. It was a combination lock. He spun the dial, snicked it loose. The door opened. A shouted challenge from Harvey Koon delayed the deposit briefly, but finally Jerry tossed his bag into the locker and rejoined the swell of students headed for the cafeteria.

Laura Anne waited until the hall was empty of students or faculty. She then walked with purpose to the hall closet where Alfred Land had eaten his lunch every school day for twenty-three years.

“Hello, Mr. Alfred.”

He was wiping a smear of mayonnaise off his ham sandwich.

“Why, yes, Miz Raines. Nice to see you.”

“You, too, Mr. Alfred. I need to borrow a tool.”

The old man smiled. “Well, if I got it, you can have it.”

The hall was deserted by the time Laura Anne returned to Jerry Slade's locker. She had assured Mr. Alfred that she didn't need his help. She popped open her cell phone and dialed 911.

“Yes, please. This is Laura Anne Raines. I believe I have just witnessed the deposit of a handgun in a locker here at the high school.… Yes, I'm right here.… Yes, I can wait.”

*   *   *

Minutes later Principal Alton Folsom was trailing red-faced behind Sheriff Lou Sessions on his way down the school's long hall.

“Miz Raines, what on earth are you up to here?”

“I saw what appeared to be a handgun put into this locker,” Laura Anne replied steadily.

“Whose locker is it?” Sessions was chewing tobacco.

“I have no idea.”

“That a pair of bolt-cutters, Miz Raines?” The sheriff's mouth sealed a wad beneath his pockmarked face.

“Bolt-cutters. Yes, Sheriff. I borrowed them from Alfred.”

“Thoughtful. You sure it was a weapon?”

“Reasonably sure, Sheriff. Metal and silver. Appeared to have a barrel.”

“I don't want to start a precedent here—” the principal began.

Laura Anne cut him off. “You want to risk a shooting at school, Mr. Folsom?”

The words were directed at the principal, but Laura Anne faced Lou Sessions eye to eye.

“Do you really want to ignore a warning from a teacher that a weapon may have been concealed in a place where parents want their children to be safe? Do you want to risk a killing? Do we need another Columbine to take that prospect seriously?”

“Well, I … I…”

“It's all right, Alton.” Sessions reached for the bolt-cutters. “Cain't hurt to take a look.”

The sheriff fit the bolt-cutter's jaws over the lock's hasp. Within seconds the keep was open.

“All I see's a knapsack.”

“Yes,” Laura Anne nodded. “That's where he put it.”

“‘He?'” Lou asked and opened the sack.

For a while the sheriff just stood, frowning, as if trying to peer to the bottom of a dark well.

“Well, what's in there?” the principal blurted. The sheriff pulled out a photo.

The angle taken was disorienting, at first. The photo was stolen from a height, looking down at white panties pulled over brown ankles. Isabel Hernandez's startled face, framed with bows, looked up at her photographer.

“Whose bin is this?” Sessions growled.

Alton stammered some kind of equivocation.

“Is there a camera in the knapsack, Sheriff?” Laura Anne interrupted.

He groped inside and pulled out a silver shape of metal. A camera.

“That was what I took for a weapon,” Laura Anne stated without apology. “It belongs, as I'm sure Mr. Folsom can confirm for you, to Jerry Slade.”

After a short consult with the sheriff, Pricipal Folsom seemed suddenly determined to take action. Laura Anne was between classes when she saw Jerry Slade emerge from the principal's office in the sheriff's custody.

“You bitch.” The teenager cast the epithet calmly, with no heat. “You nigger bitch.”

“But she nailed your ass, didn't she, Jerry?” The sheriff grabbed him by the belt. And then, facing Laura Anne, “Didn't she now?”

*   *   *

The day after Thanksgiving Jerry Slade went with his father before the elected county judge where mandatory counseling and probation were meted out.

“This will not,” Thurman Shaw informed his client's father brusquely, “absolve you or your son from civil action.”

“Civil? Civil what?”

“The family has the legal right to sue, Rolly. I just want you to be aware that your legal obligations do not end with a first offense and a slap on the wrist. And you need to understand the terms of the restraining order on your boy, here.”

“Jerry's not gonna take any more pictures.”

“He'd better not. And I am informing the school's so-called principal myself that Jerry is prohibited by courts order from any chore that would take him anywhere on the elementary side of the school. And do I need to tell you where to put that camera?”

“Who you working for anyway, Thurman?”

“You'll be back before the judge in one month. I'd advise you to come with a report from your chosen therapist to assure His Honor that counseling has been ongoing.”

“Is there anything else a man can do?” Rolly was white with fury.

“Yes.” Thurman loosened his tie. “Let your one remaining dog off that damned chain. And take some time with your son.”

Stacy Kline covered the entire affair, playing as much as possible on the fact that Laura Anne was wife to an acting lawman and a potential candidate for sheriff, asking if Barrett had counseled Laura Anne regarding the legal propriety of her actions.

“No.” Laura Anne offered a one-word response to that question and refused further comment. The community was split over her initiative, half the citizens voicing fury at her invasion of a teenager's privacy, the other half relieved that a school pornographer had been caught. Even if the victim were only Mexican.

No one seemed to challenge the idea that the smooth-metaled implement might have been mistaken for a weapon.

No one, that is, except Sheriff Lou Sessions.

“Your wife set that boy up.” Sheriff Sessions detained Bear after a Wednesday briefing. “She couldn't get Alton to do anything, so she just figured herself out a way to get me down there.”

“You had probable cause, Sheriff. It was a legal search.”

“She jerked my goddamn chain to get it. And you try and tell me you didn't know a thing about it?”

“Lou. Not everybody thinks, or acts, or feels the way you do. If you don't figure that out, and quick, you're gonna lose a whole lot more than some damned election.”

Barrett was heading out of the sheriff's dungeon when the lawman spoke up.

“She did the right thing.”

“What?” Barrett was not sure he had heard correctly.

“Laura Anne.” Lou nodded from his desk. “She did exactly the right thing. Same thing I'd've done.”

“You think so?” Barrett was too surprised to offer more.

The sheriff nodded. “Yep. I'd've done it. Question, Bear: Would you?”

Barrett thought a long moment.

“I don't know whether Laura Anne lied or not to get you into that locker, Sheriff. But she's not taken an oath to protect and defend. She's not an officer of the court. You and I—we have different rules.”

“And you never break 'em?” The seamed and hardened sheriff asked it quietly.

“Tell you what, Lou. We get some trust between us. Put some bad guys in jail. I might feel better about answering that question.”

For the first time in a long time Barrett saw some genuine warmth on the face of the county's sheriff.

“Fair enough,” Lou said. “What are you and that Canuck gonna be doing after you leave here?”