The Blight Way (2 page)

“You are
so quick!”
Daisy said, watching him from her desk.

“Thanks,” he said. He tipped the swatter and rolled the fly onto the windowsill. Aside from being dead, the fly was still in good shape. He gave the sill two sharp raps with the wire handle of the swatter. Then he stood his index finger up straight as a sentinel in front of the fly. Wallace scurried out from his lair behind the gray metal filing cabinet, stopping in front of Tully's finger. It could have gone around either side and grabbed the fly, but Wallace knew the rules. Trembling with eagerness, the spider waited, twitching ever so slightly forward, until the sheriff slowly raised his finger to a full stop.
Only then did Wallace rush in, grab the fly and haul it back behind the filing cabinet. Tully imagined Wallace smacking his lips. If he had lips. If he was a he. This was a fairly choice fly.

“I wish you'd stop fooling with that spider,” Daisy said. “It gives me the creeps. One of these days it's going to nip your finger. It could kill you, Sheriff, if it's one of them Hobo things.”

“Danger's my game,” Tully said. “Besides, I like getting into a spider's mind. Gives me an edge on our clientele.”

“Speaking of spiders,” Daisy said. “If you have a moment for some law enforcement, Batim Scragg's on the phone. Says he's got to talk to you right away. Line one.”

Batim Scragg. Tully had once put Batim in prison. Later he had done the same for Batim's two sons, Lem and Lister. He picked up the phone.

“Sheriff Bo Tully here. How you doing, Batim?”

“Doing fine, Bo. How you?”

“Fair to middling. To what do I owe the honor?”

“Well, I kinda got this situation out here at the ranch. Fust thing I got to tell you, though, me and the boys we ain't got nothing to do with it. Hey, we'd done it, there wouldn't be no awkward situation at all, you get my drift.”

Tully tugged on the corner of his mustache. “I get your drift, Batim. So what is this situation?”

“We got a dead body draped over one of our pasture fences.”

There was a pause at Tully's end.

Batim said, “Bo?”

“Yeah, go on, Batim, I was just thinking.”

“I know what you was thinking. But if me or the boys had anything to do with it, there wouldn't be no body hanging over one of our fences. You know that. I wouldn't be on the phone discussing the matter with you neither.”

“Exactly my thought, Batim. So what kind of body is it?”

“We ain't been near it. Course the boys wanted to go fool with it, but I said no, it might be a crime scene and the sheriff won't want you messin' round out there. That's what I told them, Bo.”

“Good for you, Batim.”

“But I did take a look with the binoculars and it appears to be a white male dressed in a dark-blue pinstripe suit. Got a shiny black shoe on one foot and only a black sock on the other.”

Crime scene. White male. Batim was up on his TV police jargon. Everyone in the whole country talked that way now.

“Pinstripe suit,” Tully said. “Doesn't sound much like any of our local characters. Make sure nobody goes out there, and I'll get a deputy over to secure the scene. Buck Toole's up near Famine right now. Should be there in half an hour. I'll be up pretty quick myself. You tell the boys they better not mess with Buck, they know what's good for them.”

“You got it, Bo.”

Tully hung up. “Daisy, get in here and bring your pad!”

Daisy scooted in, lowered herself into a gray metal chair, her back straight, pencil poised.

“Okay, we apparently got a body draped over a fence out at the Scragg ranch. Batim certainly knows a dead body when he sees one. Get Florence to radio Buck Toole and tell him to get over to the Scragg ranch up past Famine. Pronto. Tell him to let us know right away what he finds out.”

Herb Eliot had come over from his cubicle and leaned against the door frame, listening. “You letting Buck go onto the Scragg ranch all by himself? He's the dumbest guy we got. Which is saying something!”

Tully tugged on his mustache. “Herb, you of all people should know this, but there are times for dumb in law enforcement. This is one of them. You can't get just anybody to go on the Scragg ranch all by himself. Anyway, Daisy, you better alert that new medical examiner that we have some work for her. What's her name again?”

“Parker. Susan Parker. Came up from Boise yesterday. Very pretty.”

“Really? How pretty?”

“About half as pretty as I am.”

“All right then!”

Daisy laughed, obviously pleased.

“Next, get hold of the old man and tell him to throw together his camp kit. And a bunch of those smoked elk sausages he makes. We may be spending a few days roughing it.”

Eliot said, “You taking Pap?”

“Yeah, it's the sorry old devil's seventy-fifth birthday. No present he'd like better than a good juicy murder.

But don't say anything about a body, Daisy. I want to surprise him. His birthday and all. Plus he knows the Scraggs inside and out.”

“Geez, seventy-five,” Daisy said. “He sure doesn't look it. Shoot, I'd date him myself.”

“A lot of women have lived to regret those very words,” Tully said. “Oh, and I don't want him armed. He shows up with a gun, he ain't going, you tell him that.”

“You bet.”

“One more thing. Call Bill Fetch at the State Police. Tell him we seem to have a dead body up at the Scragg ranch a couple miles north of Famine. Ask him to get one of his troopers up there soon as he can, to protect the scene. Be sure to tell him we got Buck on the way. Bill will understand the need for haste.”

He got up and walked to the door of his office and yelled across at the Crime Scene Investigation Unit. “Lurch, I want you to stay in the office all day. I may need you up at Famine.”

“I'll stick around all day, Sheriff. All night, too, if you need me.”

Tully went back to his desk and finished off the doughnut as he replayed Batim's phone call in his head. This was probably the first time in his life Batim Scragg had cooperated with the law. Probably the first time any Scragg in the whole history of the world had cooperated with the law. But Batim didn't fool him for one second. If there was a murder, Tully would simply sort Scraggs until he found the culprit.

He unlocked his office gun safe and took out a Winchester .30-30 carbine, a 12-gauge Remington 1100
semiautomatic shotgun and a Glock 9 mm with belt holster. He loaded them and put extra shells for each in a leather gym bag, including a box of Number 8 bird shot.

Herb gave him a puzzled look. “Eights?”

“Yeah. Never know when you might run into a flock of quail either going or coming from the Scragg ranch. Got to work in your hunting where you find it. Number eights work pretty well for getting a Scragg's attention, too.”

“I guess. Wouldn't tear one of them up terribly much, at least if he had enough sense to be running away.”

As an afterthought, Tully added a Colt Woodsman .22 pistol that he sometimes liked to tuck in the back waistband of his pants, or even down one boot, just in case. He checked the clips of each pistol. Full. Before replacing the clips, he pulled back the slides to make sure the chambers were empty. People were all the time shooting themselves and others because they forgot to check the chambers on their auto pistols. He slipped the Colt into the pocket of his suede sports jacket.

One of the few perks of being sheriff was that Tully could dress pretty much any way he liked. Today he wore cowboy boots, jeans and the suede jacket over a tattersall shirt open at the collar. He wore his sheriff's uniform only when the county commissioners required the department to march in a parade, on which occasions he and his deputies looked like a strange assortment of disgruntled Gene Autrys who had lost their horses.

Tully didn't know who had come up with the design
for the uniform, but he suspected his own father, Eldon “Pap” Tully. Pap had always fancied himself something of a cowboy. Tully had worn the uniform for five years himself, before he replaced Pap as sheriff. Tullys had been sheriffs of Blight County for over a century, except for a couple of brief intervals when the voters had suffered a lapse of sanity.

The rifle hanging by its sling from his shoulder, the shotgun in one hand and the bag in the other, Tully walked out through the briefing room. Eliot had gone back to his newspaper. “Hold down the fort, Herb!” Tully yelled at him. “And don't do any thinking on your own, okay?”

Daisy stifled a giggle. Lurch did his snaggletoothed grin.

“Right, Sheriff!” Herb yelled back without looking up from his paper.

As Tully ambled over to his parking spot behind the courthouse, some of the current residents of the jail stopped shooting baskets long enough to give him their hard stares through the wire mesh of the exercise cage.

He held up the shotgun. “Expect some company, boys!”

Sorry nincompoops. Nobody ever told them you can't be dumb. Half of them wouldn't live to see thirty, done in by booze, drugs, cars, AIDS, guns, knives, pool cues, enemies and friends. Mostly friends. The inmates intensified their hard stares. The stares were meant to tell him that as soon as they got out they'd settle the score with him. Two former inmates had actually tried. They hadn't made it to thirty.

He climbed into the mud-coated, red Ford Explorer and clamped the shotgun upright in its clip on the dash. He slid the .30-30 into a gun rack attached to the heavy wire screen that separated the front seat from the back. The gun rack also contained a fly rod, separated into its two sections but rigged with leader and fly, a size fourteen Dave's Hopper. A man had to be ready. He locked both handguns in the glove compartment. As he drove out of the parking lot, he grinned at the inmates hanging against the wire. They didn't grin back.

Chapter 2

Pap was sitting in a rocker on his covered front porch. He was medium height and lean with a thick shock of pure white hair protruding around the edges of his battered black Stetson. A classic wood-and-canvas pack frame was propped against a white porch column. An insulated cooler sat next to it.

Pap lived alone in the huge house that sat on a hill overlooking what Pap had once clearly thought of as his domain. Probably still did. Visitors to Blight County might wonder how a person earning a sheriff's salary for nearly forty years could afford such a fine house. The residents of the county, on the other hand, had no doubt.

Pap walked out to the Explorer and loaded his pack into the rear luggage area. He went back and got the cooler and put it inside the SUV. Then, grunting a bit too graphically to suit Tully, he hoisted himself up into the front seat.

“You practically need a ladder to get into this rig,” he complained.

“You better not have a gun stashed in that pack,” Tully said.

“Course I ain't. And what's the idea of you having that saucy little broad of yours tell me what I can bring and what I can't! What I need a gun for, anyway?”

“What difference has that ever made?”

Tully watched his father fuss with the seat belt.

“How you fasten this infernal thing?”

“Like this, for the thousandth time!” Tully reached over and snapped the belt latch shut. What was it with old people and seat belts? He'd never met an old person yet who could fasten one. Pap could tear apart a car and put it back together blindfolded but couldn't figure out how to fasten a seat belt.

“Happy seventy-fifth, Pap.”

“Thanks. So what did you get me?”

“Same as every year. Nothing. Which is more than you deserve. Actually, I do have something.”

“I probably won't like it.”

“Oh, you'll like it all right. We apparently got ourselves a murder up by Famine. Batim Scragg called up this morning and said he had a body hanging over one of his fences.”

“Awful thing,” the old man said. “Murder.” Beneath the stormy white brows, the hard little eyes sparkled with sudden delight. “Thanks, Bo. For taking me along. Been a while since I've had a good murder. Couldn't be more pleased if you'd bought me something.”

“I figured you might like it.”

“I hope it's an actual murder, not just a killing. It would be nice there was something for me to solve. I hate it when all you got to do is go down to the nearest bar and arrest the guy that's bragging about the killing.”

“Hey, you're talking about my life,” Tully said. He had to admit, though, that a real murder might be a nice change of pace.

He turned the Explorer out onto the highway and headed north toward Famine.

The valley stretched away on either side of the highway with the Blight River meandering a parallel course far off across mildly undulating grasslands. The river banks were lined with cottonwoods, their fall leaves now only tatters dancing in the wind. Tully thought of the leaves as Cadmium Yellow Light. Beyond the river, to the east, the Snowy Range of the Rockies surged up abruptly from the valley floor. To the west, the ragged granite peaks and ridges of the Hoodoo Range protruded above the banks of morning fog.