Blanco County 03 - Flat Crazy (3 page)

“Young fella, you okay?” Raines asked.

“Rutabagas,” Gus said flatly. “Persimmons.”

And then, just like that, the episode was over. It was even shorter than most.

Gus turned to Mr. Raines, who was eyeing him, puzzled. The old man said, “Rutabagas?”

“Uh, just thinking about lunch,” Gus said. “You ready to go?”

“Let’s do it!” Raines said enthusiastically, as if he were about to bound from the Expedition and begin a cross-country trek.

Gus stepped from the truck, opened the rear hatch, and removed Raines’s walker from the storage compartment in the back.

4

DUKE WRAPPED THE body in a plastic drop cloth and dumped it in the back of Searcy’s truck. Now the trick was getting rid of it. In the old days, Duke would have asked Gus to help, but not nowadays. He was just too damn strange—ever since the accident. Duke didn’t even like to think about the accident.

Before, Gus used to be just another good old boy like Duke. He’d hunt and fish and drink beer and chase women, just like a man ought to. He’d poach deer without a qualm in the world.

But now he was a different man. Kind of goofy, like he’d been sniffing glue. He did all kinds of weird stuff, like laughing hysterically for no reason at all, or watching the History Channel. Plus, there was that bizarre thing with the words.

It happened two years ago, when Gus was still an electrician. Gus had been rewiring a dryer, and a customer, trying to be helpful, flipped a breaker too early. Gus got lit up with 220 volts of juice, and it was his brain that got the rewiring job.

In the few weeks that followed, Duke blamed Gus’s mental haze on the fact that his brother had been damn near electrocuted. Surely the fog would lift and Gus would return to normal. But the days ticked by and the old Gus didn’t show. He started popping mints all the time, complaining that the electricity had left a coppery taste in his mouth. But that wasn’t the strange part.

A few days after the accident, Duke and Gus were sitting in a deer blind when Gus said, “Amebic dysentery.”

At that point, neither of them had spoken for an hour.

Duke turned to his brother. “What?”

“Amebic dysentery,” Gus said again. He was staring straight ahead, eyes focused on some faraway horizon.

“What about it?”

Gus turned to Duke then, blinking rapidly. “What about what?”

“Amebic dysentery.”

“Yeah?”

“You just said it. You were just sitting there, and then you said, ‘Amebic dysentery.’”

Gus smiled, but he looked embarrassed. “Did not.”

“You sure as hell did. Just out of the blue. ‘Amebic dysentery.’”

“Funny.”

It didn’t take Duke long to discover, in the days ahead, that Gus was prone to interject all sorts of random words and phrases into a conversation.

“Marsupial,” Gus would say when they were watching motocross.

“Esophagus,” he’d blurt out over dinner.

“Tort reform,” he’d state on the telephone.

Over time, Duke more or less got used to it. In fact, it would be kind of funny if it wasn’t so damn creepy. Kind of an
Exorcist
thing. And the thing that worried him: What if they got pulled over by the game warden someday and Gus said, “Poached a deer.” Or “Spotlighting tonight.” That could really screw things up.

Now Duke had a whole new reason to worry about Gus. His brother was the only one who knew Duke and Oliver Searcy had hunted together—and he wanted to keep it that way. Eventually, the cops would find records of the calls from Searcy to Duke, but that wasn’t much for them to go on. Searcy himself had said he was calling several guides in the area. So Duke knew that in order to keep the cops from focusing on him, he’d have to say they never hunted together. The bitch of it was, he’d need Gus to play along.

As Marlin maneuvered the curves of Flat Creek Road, heading back toward Johnson City, he tried to remember everything he could about the mythical chupacabra. Sightings had been reported everywhere from Puerto Rico and Nicaragua to Chile and Mexico. A few years ago, there had even been a sighting reported just five hours south, in the border town of Brownsville.

The chupacabra was known as a stalker of livestock, leaving scores of dead goats, sheep, and calves in its wake. Allegedly, the animals’ throats were punctured, the chupacabra feasting on every last drop of blood.

Descriptions of the beast varied, anywhere from a large scaly reptile with bulbous red eyes and fangs to a flying monkeylike creature with razor-sharp claws.

Despite hundreds of alleged sightings, the chupacabra had never been captured. In fact, it had never even been photographed or filmed. Not once.

In other words, it was total bullshit.

Marlin was surprised that Trey Sweeney appeared to believe it might actually exist. But then, the biologist, while brilliant, tended to exhibit a complete lack of good sense on occasion.

Why else would he hole up with a hibernating black bear?

Why else would he dress up in a deer costume and approach a massive lovesick buck?

Why else would he attempt to hand-feed a Komodo dragon?

Trey had done all these things and more, reminding Marlin that while he could trust Trey’s scientific expertise implicitly, the biologist’s judgment was another story.

Back at the scene, Sweeney had made a cast of one of the animal tracks, and he’d insisted on taking the goat carcass with him. Marlin smiled as he envisioned Sweeney asking Lem Tucker, the medical examiner, to conduct an autopsy.
Subject is an adult, uh, goat with multiple visible puncture wounds to the carotid artery.

Marlin was inclined to forget the whole thing, but he decided he’d better have a talk with Bobby Garza. After all, Marlin still hadn’t heard the facts directly from the sheriff. Maybe there was more to the witness’s account than Marlin knew so far. There had to be some reason why Garza would ask Marlin and Trey to check out a dead goat, which was an everyday occurrence in Blanco County. But then, of course, there was Garza’s Hispanic heritage to take into account—and Marlin felt a twinge of that damned political incorrectness even considering it. The truth was, the chupacabra was a bit of folklore that thrived almost exclusively among Hispanic populations. Yeah, Bobby Garza was a first-generation central Texan. But his parents were natives of Mexico, and they might have regaled Bobby with tales of the chupacabra as he was growing up. Something like that could be hard to shake. Much like the otherwise-sane people who believed in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.

Marlin turned east on Highway 290, drove into Johnson City, and pulled into the parking lot at the Blanco County Sheriff’s Department. Marlin had a small office there, though he didn’t spend much time at it. It was more or less a place to grab coffee, store some equipment, and return calls (since he still hadn’t given in and bought a cell phone).

Marlin walked into the building, said hello to a few of the deputies, and made his way to Garza’s office in the back. He stuck his head through the doorway and saw Garza concentrating on some paperwork. “What’s this wild goose chase you sent me on?” Marlin said.

Garza glanced up, saw who it was, and smiled. “So did you catch it? The notorious chupacabra?” Garza motioned at a chair and Marlin took a seat.

“Yeah, I got him in a cage in the back of my truck. I’m charging a nickel for people to see it.”

Garza laughed. “Don’t you wish. You’d be a rich man if you did. You know how many people believe in that thing?”

“Just please tell me
you
don’t.” He and Bobby Garza were old friends, and Marlin knew he didn’t need to mince words with the sheriff. “I had enough trouble keeping Trey’s imagination from running wild on this one.”

Garza rolled his eyes. “Give me a little credit, will you? No, I just wanted to get it checked out because, in case you haven’t noticed”—the sheriff lowered his voice and glanced furtively out his office door—“we got a lotta Meskins around this county.”

Marlin smiled, though he felt a twinge of guilt for thinking as he had earlier. “You don’t say.”

“No joke, though,” Garza said. “All kinds of people, not just Hispanics, believe in this stuff. We’ve gotten about two dozen calls already, mostly from people who know Jorge.”

“The guy who got hit?”

“Right. Word’s spreading fast. I was thinking at first they were concerned about him—and they are. But that isn’t why they’re all calling. It’s this chupacabra business. I was talking to one of his cousins, down in Nuevo Laredo, and when he told his grandmother what happened, she crossed herself and then fainted on the spot.”

Marlin couldn’t completely smother a smile.

“Yeah,” Garza said, “I know it sounds kinda silly, but not if you were brought up to believe in it. Anyway, I just wanted to get the jump on this thing before it got out of hand. That way, we can say no, it was just a dog or coyote, or rogue elephant, or whatever you wise old woodsmen determined that it was. So what’s the story?”

Marlin shrugged. “Looked like just another dead goat to me, probably killed by dogs or coyotes. None of the meat was eaten, and that usually means dogs got it. But this guy Jorge might have spooked a coyote just as it was sitting down to breakfast. We found some tracks that looked like a dog to me, but Trey wasn’t so sure.”

“What’d he think it was?”

“You’ll have to ask him. All he’d say is that he thought it was”—Marlin made quotation marks with his hands—“‘something different.’”

“How so? Based on what?”

“Just on the tracks. And I guess on the eyewitness. I think Trey figured any idiot would recognize a dog or a coyote right off the bat. Speaking of which, what exactly
did
Jorge say?”

Garza took a breath and leaned back in his chair. “Man, I don’t know. He was pretty rattled. Said he saw a creature with big fangs and a real long neck. And a huge head, too, like a lion. Oh, I almost forgot: It had the face of the devil. That’s what he said. That should narrow it down some.”

Marlin was glad Garza was showing a sense of humor about this thing. “So any animal wandering around looking like Satan, we can be pretty sure that’s him?”

Garza winked. “Do me a favor. Let me handle the press, okay?”

“You really think there’ll be any interest?”

Garza gave a slight nod toward his office door. Out in the main room, Susannah Branson, a reporter with the
Blanco County Record,
was making her way toward Garza’s office.

When Red and Billy Don got back to Red’s trailer that evening, all four of their traps had squirrels in them. That was the only good news of the day. The rest of the day had been a total loss. Red was still plenty pissed at the wetback—and at Billy Don, for that matter, for choosing that crazy Meskin.

Mr. Pierce, the barbecue king, had canceled the job after he found out what had happened. Said his wife was just too distraught by the whole thing to worry about the rock work right now. He gave Red two hundred bucks in cash and thanked him for his time.

Red’s first inclination was to take the money and head straight to the electric cooperative and pay off his growing bill. But he and Billy Don kind of got sidetracked and ended up at the Friendly Bar, playing dominoes and consuming large quantities of beer and pork rinds.

Red grabbed a water hose and began to fill the kiddie pool he’d stolen from the Save Mart that summer. (He couldn’t believe they’d just leave the pools out on the sidewalk like that. It was almost like they were
daring
him to throw one in the bed of his truck and drive off.) As soon as the water was high enough, he’d submerge the traps, drown the squirrels, and clean them for dinner. Red felt like a humanitarian for drowning the squirrels rather than shooting them, since it was painless. Plus, it saved ammo.

Billy Don was sitting in a nearby lawn chair, drinking a tallboy. Red, still intoxicated, couldn’t resist taking another stab at the huge redneck. “Just had to pick that particular Meskin, didn’t ya?” he muttered for about the tenth time.

Billy Don glared at him. “Don’t get crossways with me, Red. Let it lie.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Red said, wanting to get the last word in, “we’re gonna need to come up with some cash pretty soon. The bills are piling up. Plus, you still owe me rent.” Billy Don had moved into Red’s trailer the previous fall.

“Yeah, but you said you’d just take the rent out of the money I’d earn from your great new masonry company. Remember?”

Red was quiet for a moment. In fact, he
did
remember saying that. He just didn’t think Billy Don would remember it. “Well, like I said, if you hadn’t gotten us a suicidal wetback with the runs—”

Billy Don growled and crumpled the beer can against the side of his skull.

Red decided to let the topic drop.

5

BARRY GRUBBMAN, AN assistant producer for
Hard News Tonight,
came into work early on Monday morning because he had a lot hanging over his head. He needed a good scoop, and he needed it bad. Something big and wild and juicy enough to get him back into his boss’s good graces.

Last Friday, Chad Reeves, the show’s arrogant executive producer, had made it clear that Barry’s job was on the line. No, Chad hadn’t come right out and said it, but Barry wasn’t an idiot. He didn’t need it spelled out for him.

Barry had pitched some segment ideas, but Chad had not been receptive whatsoever.

“I got a stringer with footage of Madonna sunbathing topless, rubbing oil on her … uh … herself,” Barry had offered.

“Bor-ring,” Chad replied in that annoying singsong voice of his. It was something he did when he wanted to be condescending.

Barry clumsily thumbed through some notes.

“A woman who claims to be the Pope’s illegitimate daughter?”

Chad sighed heavily.

“How about a hiker in Michigan who got lost and ate his own dog?”

“Move along.”

“Rap star Heavy Dogg Joe arrested during a drug bust?”

Chad shook his head.

“But … the guy was dressed in drag.”

“I’ll pass.”

Barry was starting to get discouraged. “A blind lesbian in Georgia who became the surrogate mother for her brother’s quadriplegic wife?”

Chad drummed his fingers on his desk.

Dejected, Barry said, “That’s all I’ve got right now.”

Chad leaned forward and made eye contact with Barry. It was somehow unsettling, the sense of intimacy too great. Barry struggled to maintain eye contact but failed. Chad spoke softly: “Let me ask you something, Barry. Let’s say you just got home from a long day at work. You’ve been selling shoes or teaching first graders, or whatever the fuck you’ve been doing. Now you’re tired, you’ve got a glass of booze in your hand, and you’re looking for a little entertainment. Do any of those stories sound even mildly entertaining to you?”

The truth was, Barry thought they did. Madonna’s hooters? Let me at ’em! A man who barbecued his own yellow Lab? Hell yeah!

“No, I guess they don’t,” Barry said quietly.

Chad rose from his chair and began to pace, a signal to Barry that a lecture was coming. “You know how I got my big break in this business, Barry?”

Oh God. Not this one again.

“I was on a flight from L.A. to New York—riding first-class, naturally—and as luck would have it, Jessica Hyatt was sitting right next to me.”

Jessica Hyatt had achieved worldwide fame in the early nineties as a hip-swiveling, midriff-baring pop superstar before she drove her Ferrari into a tree at eighty miles per hour. She had been affectionately known to her fans as J Hi. Her death had made her an instant legend.

“Now, riding next to J Hi wasn’t news in itself, of course,” Chad said. “But as we reached cruising altitude and she began moaning and clutching her chest, I knew something was wrong. When it became apparent that her new breast implants had exploded, I knew I was onto a huge story. As soon as we landed, I got on my cell phone, made a few calls, and the rest is history.”

There was a long pause, and Barry knew from experience that if he tried to say something, Chad would immediately interrupt him.

Barry said, “So you—”

“My point is,” Chad said, “you have to have a nose for this business. You have to be able to spot the big story and react instantly. Not everyone has that gift. No, I’m afraid that sort of intuition is reserved for just a precious few.”

Long pause.

Barry said, “And what—”

“I want you to do something for me, Barry. This weekend, I want you to take a long hard look at yourself … and decide whether this is the career for you. Figure out whether you have that special gift or not. Will you do that for me?”

Another pause. Barry wasn’t sure if he was really supposed to answer.

He said, “Well, if you think—”

“That’s my boy!” Chad placed a hand on Barry’s shoulder, steering him toward the door.

That meeting had taken place last week. Now it was Monday, and Barry had to come up with some killer ideas fast.

He turned to the Internet, expecting to slog from one useless site to another. But as it turned out, he found something that caught his eye in about five minutes.

“Got a call this morning—maybe something you can help out with,” Bobby Garza said.

John Marlin was sitting across from him at Ronnie’s Ice House & Barbecue in Johnson City. Marlin was waiting on a sliced beef sandwich, Garza for a rib plate. The rich aromas in the large one-room restaurant always made Marlin’s mouth water before his meal even arrived.

“What’s up?”

“Well, about a half hour ago, we got a call from a woman in Houston. Said her husband had come out this way yesterday to talk to a hunting guide. He was supposed to be home last night, but he never showed.”

“Which guide?” Marlin knew most of them.

“That’s the problem. The woman was practically useless. Didn’t know the guide’s name, the name of the ranch, or even what part of the county her husband was hunting in. The one thing she did know was that he had hunted with the guide a few weeks ago. I asked her to check with her bank, see if there were any checks made out to names she didn’t recognize. In the meantime, I told her we’d keep an eye out, and she could file a missing person report tomorrow if she wanted.”

“Probably nothing,” Marlin said. During deer season, it wasn’t uncommon to receive a call like that, a frantic wife wondering where her husband had disappeared to. Usually, the hunter had decided to stay an extra day and either forgot to call or couldn’t get good cell phone service where he was hunting.

“Anyway,” Garza said, “the guy’s name is Oliver Searcy. Drives a blue Ford truck, couple years old. Keep an eye out, will ya?”

“Sure, no problem. I’ll be checking some camps this afternoon. I’ll ask around.”

Garza noticed Ronnie placing their orders on the counter, so he hopped up to get them while Marlin refilled their iced tea glasses.

Marlin tore into his sandwich, which was loaded with plenty of barbecue sauce. Pure heaven. On Wednesdays, Ronnie served a legendary hamburger made from three-quarters of a pound of meat—way more than Marlin could comfortably handle.

As Garza was gnawing on a rib, he said, “Also got a call from Trey Sweeney this morning.”

“Oh yeah?” Marlin hadn’t talked to Trey since yesterday on Flat Creek Road. “What’s Trey up to?”

“He’s decided he’s going to pen a few goats and set up one of those automatic cameras.”

In the past five years, motion-triggered cameras had become all the rage among hunters. You simply aimed the camera at your feeder or a trail, and anything that passed by was photographed. Great for scouting.

Marlin shook his head and grinned. “Man, once he gets his mind set on something…”

“Tell me about it. Like a dog with a bone.”

Marlin had seen the
Blanco County Record
that morning. Right there on the front page was the article:

CHUPACABRA REPORTED IN BLANCO COUNTY

Undocumented Immigrant Struck By Truck in Bizarre Mishap

Fortunately, Susannah Branson hadn’t taken the chupacabra angle too seriously. Marlin figured the buzz would die off quickly and that would be the end of it.

The lone coyote was white at the muzzle, old and lean, and not as fast as he used to be. He had had little success hunting for three straight days, and hunger was ravaging his insides. It ruled his existence and propelled him endlessly forward. He had found the remnants of a deer earlier in the day, but the carcass had offered little, the entrails long gone, the bones picked clean by scavengers that had been there in the preceding days.

Later, he was navigating a familiar hunting trail, the moon providing light by which to stalk, when he encountered the scent of the man. At first, his instincts—finely honed by untold generations of his forebears—told him to retreat. The coyote’s brain equated
man
with
death,
and rightly so.

But he lingered. This scent was different, somehow enticing. This man was no longer a threat.

He crept through the cedar trees, moving upwind, his senses on full alert, prepared to flee at the slightest provocation. Moments later, his eyes, still sharp, spotted the source of the scent, a shapeless bulk sprawled on the ground.

The coyote lowered his belly to the dirt, the tall grass providing cover. For a full two hours, he lay in waiting, scanning the surrounding woods for signs of danger. There was no movement, and no other animals happened by.

Finally, when he could stand it no longer, the coyote moved forward, wary and watchful. The smell was overpowering, though, and he began to salivate.

In the middle of the night, a twelve-year-old boy named Charlie Riggs woke when his dogs began whimpering in the kennel outside his window. The dogs whined, but they knew better than to bark—because when they barked, Charlie’s stepdad would go outside and kick them. Especially if he was drunk. Charlie hated when that happened. It scared him, and he knew it made his mother sad.

After a few minutes, the dogs were quiet again, and Charlie hoped they’d go back to sleep. It was probably nothing but a raccoon or possum that had wandered too close. But just as Charlie was drifting off again, the dogs began to whimper more loudly than before.

Charlie looked at the clock radio on his nightstand and saw that it was nearly 4:00
A.M.
His stepdad would likely be in bed by now and wouldn’t be able to hear the dogs.
As long as they don’t bark,
Charlie thought.
Please don’t bark.

But Scout gave in. First, Charlie could hear her growling; then she let loose with a high-pitched yap.

Charlie pulled the covers back and stepped into his slippers. He made his way down the darkened hallway and was relieved to see that the door to his parents’ bedroom was closed, no light showing through the space at the floor. He went through the kitchen to the back door, grabbing the flashlight off the counter as he walked outside.

He turned the corner of the house and approached the kennel. The dogs were quiet now, wagging their tails with excitement.

He opened the gate and stepped into the kennel, the dogs immediately nuzzling his hands and rubbing against his legs. Scout was the dominant one of the pair, a six-year-old female spaniel. Ace, a three-year-old pointer, was male, but submissive. Charlie knelt and petted each dog, calming them. They were warm and soft, and Charlie never felt more loved than when he was with his dogs.

He sat and leaned with his back against the chain link of the kennel. Ace stretched out on one side of Charlie, resting his muzzle on the boy’s thigh. But Scout stood with her nose to the fencing, staring into the darkness, whimpering softly.

“What is it, girl?” Charlie asked. “Possum?”

The dog whined for a while, but finally she settled down and lay on Charlie’s other side.

Charlie stayed in the kennel, dozing on occasion, until he began to see the glow of the sun in the east.