The Huckleberry Murders: A Sheriff Bo Tully Mystery (18 page)

Angie laughed. “Don’t worry, Pap. It’s only a beaver.”

“Well, that beaver’s a pretty good shot, because he dang near hit me. That bullet whizzed by about half an inch from my ear.”

Suddenly five shots were fired from the raft so fast they sounded as if they had come from an automatic weapon instead of a lever-action rifle. Tully spun around. He stared at Dave, who must have snatched his rifle from the blanket and fired. Tully had never heard a lever-action rifle fired so fast.

“I saw the muzzle flash near the top of the island,” the tracker explained. “Probably didn’t hit him but put enough lead in the air to scare him. We’re not likely to hear from him again anytime soon.”

Angie had her .38 out and pointed straight up. Any goose that surprises her now, Tully thought, is a dead goose.

THE RAFT BUMPED gently into the shore. Angie stepped off, her pistol still out and pointed straight up. Pap and Bo each grabbed rifles. Dave reloaded his with shells he dug out of his pants pockets.

“What do you want me to do, Bo?” Poke asked.

“Stay with the raft. If it drifts off, we’re stuck here.”

Angie jumped to shore and then turned around. “Dave, would you hand me my shoulder bag?”

He picked it up. “Holy cow! What do you carry in here, Angie?”

“Among other things, my entire arsenal.” She took the bag. “Thanks, Dave.”

Pap and Angie crouched low as they moved slowly up the higher ground of the island. It had once been a hill, before
the swamp backed up around it. Large evergreens cloaked its crown. Angie was in the lead. Tully moved up alongside her and whispered, “Unless the shooter has backup, he’s probably on the other side of the island by now. Must have come out by boat.”

Angie stopped and crouched. Tully crouched next to her. Pap came up behind them. “What’s the plan?” he whispered.

“Beats me,” Angie said. “What do you think, Bo?”

“I don’t know. Where’s Dave?”

“He’s over to the right.”

Tully said, “There must be something on this island somebody doesn’t want us to see.”

Pap whispered, “Well, we sure can’t see much with only moonlight. You figure we’re gonna stay here till morning, Bo?”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea. What do you think, Angie?”

“Beats me. I think we should at least push on to the top. That seems to be where the shot came from, according to Dave.”

“Okay,” Tully said, “but I’m taking the lead.”

“Be my guest.”

“Mine, too,” Pap said.

They moved slowly up the slope. The ground near the top opened up beneath the towering ponderosas. It was free of brush and covered with a thick carpet of pine needles.

“Whoever shot at us must have taken off,” Tully said from a crouch. Slowly he stood up.

“If the shooter came by boat, he’s probably in it right
now, headed back out of the swamp,” Dave said. “Or maybe he’s circling around to intercept us when we go back.”

Pap peered off through the trees and clicked the safety on his rifle. “I don’t think so.” He pointed. A white object lay in the middle of a little clearing now bright in the moonlight. They moved toward it.

A large man wearing a white T-shirt lay on his back. Tully took out a Maglite and put the beam on him. The white shirt shimmered in the light. Blood oozed from two holes in his chest.

Tully bent to check his pulse, then straightened up. “You’re some shot, Dave.”

“Thanks. I’ve never cared much for killing, though.”

Angie stared down at the body. “I’ve never killed anyone, but I’ve often wondered what it would be like.”

“Like eating raw oysters,” Pap said. “The first goes down pretty hard but the next ones are a lot easier. Pretty soon you start to like them.”

Tully looked at him and shook his head. “I can’t stand raw oysters. Cooked ones either.” He reached down and closed the dead man’s eyes. “Remind me when I last deputized you, Dave.”

“You bet. I think the last one should still be in effect.”

“We’ll refresh it if it isn’t.”

“Good.”

Angie took out a handkerchief and used it to pick up the dead man’s rifle. She held it under Tully’s Maglite to examine it.

Tully nodded at the scope. “What kind is it, anyway?”

“A good one,” Angie said. “I figured it had to be infrared, but it’s just top-of-the-line regular.”

She asked, “You think he’s the only one on the island?”

“That would be my guess,” Dave said. “He was obviously a lookout, sent here or left here to kill or scare off anybody who came poking around. I suspect he was low man on the totem pole. The top guys don’t usually stand guard.”

Pap and Tully grabbed the dead man’s feet and started dragging him down the hill. Angie and Dave followed, carrying all the rifles.

When they got back to the raft, Poke said, “I didn’t hear any shots. Who killed him?”

“Dave,” Tully said. “From the raft.”

Poke’s whispered expletive was one of amazement. “I’ve never seen shooting like that in my entire life.”

Pap said, “You never will again, Poke.”

Angie looked back up toward the top of the island. “So you think our dead guy was the only person on the island.”

“Probably,” Tully said.

They built a driftwood fire in front of a log near the water and sat in a row with the blankets pulled over their shoulders. Tully said, “We should have remembered to bring hot dogs and buns.”

“And marshmallows,” Angie added. “Actually, I could go for a s’more right now.”

“What’s a s’more?” Pap asked.

“A Hershey bar and roasted marshmallow sandwiched between pieces of graham cracker,” she said.

Tully shuddered. “Sounds illegal to me. That could kill an old man like Pap.”

Pap tossed a piece of driftwood on the fire. “I was thinking the same thing, Bo. This here campfire reminds me of the time I took a prime elk steak out on a camping trip with Pinto Jack. It was pitch dark when I started cooking it over our campfire with only a flashlight to see by. I could hardly make out when the steak was done on the top side. When I turned it over it was burnt to a crisp on the bottom—worse than that. It looked like a piece of cowhide tanned too long. But the top side was perfect—juicy and tender. So we cut it up in strips and ate it like watermelon slices, gnawing off the good side. It was the best steak I ever ate.”

Poke said, “I’ve thrown away more than one piece of meat I thought was ruined, and I bet I could have sliced it up and eaten it like watermelon. You should write a cookbook, Pap.”

“I keep thinking about it, Poke.”

“Sounds illegal to me,” Tully said, “Pap writing a cookbook.”

Angie shook her head. “I hate all this talk about eating when we have a dead body lying behind us. On the other hand, is anyone interested in a turkey-and-bacon sandwich with cold curly fries?”

The three men stared at her. “You better not be just tormenting us, Angie,” Dave said.

“Nope,” she said. “I have five such sandwiches and fries, all prepared by the café at my hotel. They’re for sale at a
thousand dollars apiece. No checks, considering my present company.”

“I want to believe it but I can’t,” Pap said.

Angie pulled a brown paper sack out of her shoulder bag and distributed the sandwiches. The men bit into them and groaned with pleasure.

Dave said, “No wonder that bag of yours was so heavy, Angie! I figured you planned to set up housekeeping out here.”

“I’m afraid I forgot the glassware, Dave, but I did bring a bottle of bourbon.” She took it from her bag and handed it to Pap. “So we’ll all have to drink out of the bottle. I hope none of you have communicable diseases or are squeamish.”

“Not me,” Pap said. “But I may have to take up religion. This is a miracle!”

Later they relaxed around the campfire telling stories. Finally Tully said, “Dave’s turn. Maybe he will enlighten us as to how he learned to shoot like that and all the martial-arts moves he obviously has.”

Dave laughed. “I wouldn’t call them martial arts, but I spent a year in Japan in the company of six Japanese gentlemen a good deal smaller than Angie. Every day for a year I paid them a lot of money to beat me senseless. They struck so fast you couldn’t see them move. If you’ve ever seen a rattlesnake strike, that’s how fast they were. By the end of the year, I was one massive ache but I could take out two of them in a match. I figured that was enough. From then on I worked on fleeing, just in case more than two bad guys showed up.”

Pap laughed. “I myself have always favored fleeing right up front, so nobody gets confused about my intentions.”

One by one they dozed off, curling up on the sand next to the campfire.

•  •  •

The following morning they explored the island. On the far side they found an aluminum canoe turned upside down on the bank, with one paddle under it, the transportation the sniper had apparently used to get through the swamp.

As Tully had noticed in his flight with Pete, a large portion of the island was barren of trees and the ground appeared to be tilled. There were watering cans scattered about near endless rows of stalks cut close to the ground. They found a pole shelter, the front of which was open. There were four cots inside containing a few rumpled blankets. In the back of the structure were half a dozen bags of commercial fertilizer and a pile of empty bags. The fire pit out front contained partially burned pizza boxes and wrappers for other fast foods.

“I guess we know what was going on here,” Tully said. “They were growing marijuana. The murdered guys were the ones who took care of it, watering the plants and hoeing the weeds and so on. I figured them for farm laborers of some kind, and I guess that’s what they were.”

“Looks as if they weren’t treated too badly,” Angie said. “But there was no way off this island. They were essentially prisoners here.”

“You don’t feed prisoners pizza,” Tully said.

“Yeah,” Pap said. “And they could have got away if they wanted to. Something kept them here. My guess is they were promised a cut of the profits. So in the end the guys running the operation decided it would be cheaper to kill the help than pay them. It would also keep them from blabbing to the cops, if they got ripped off. It’s like I always say, murder is done for money or to keep someone quiet. Hey, Angie, how about killing someone because you don’t want to pay them?”

“It might seem the reasonable thing to do, if you don’t mind murdering people.”

Tully squatted down to get a closer look at some of the stubble. “If you’re so smart, Pap, what happened to the marijuana?”

“Why, they harvested it! What do you think, Bo?”

“I think a couple tons of the stuff is pretty hard to market and distribute all at once.”

“Yeah,” Dave said, “but where are you going to store a couple tons of it? Haul it to a commercial warehouse? I don’t think so.”

Angie put her hands on her hips. “Okay, Bo, I’ll say it. How about a barn?”

Tully stood up, wiping his hands on his jeans. “That’s an A for Miss FBI. And who do we know has a barn? The Poulsons! And Mr. Poulson, the owner, happens to be missing and presumed dead, and his wife has been murdered. The ranch has a very large barn out behind his house. It is watched over by an extremely smooth sociopath by the name
of Ray Porter, alias Ray Crockett, and Mr. Porter has a criminal record. Furthermore, who has been urging me to search the Poulson place for the body of Mr. Poulson? The ex–Mrs. Poulson! And what happened to her?”

“She was pushed off a bridge and killed,” Pap said. “No doubt to take heat off the ranch. I hate to admit it, Bo, but you might be on your way to making a pretty decent sheriff.”

Tully smiled. “Thanks, Pap. Maybe we’ll get this whole business wrapped up in a couple of days.”

Angie said, “And this ties into the huckleberry murders exactly how? Some evidence would be nice.”

Tully tugged on the corner of his mustache. “Well, Angie, since the FBI probably isn’t going to let us do this the Blight way, we’ll have to tie the dead huckleberry pickers to the island. Maybe we can do that with fingerprints on the watering cans and whatnot. But to really pin the murders on the guys who ran the marijuana operation, we have to track down the fourth man, the kid who escaped the murder plot, Craig Wilson.”

Angie said, “I don’t think we’ll solve anything standing around here.”

“That’s right,” Poke said. “Besides, that fellow you killed, Dave, is going to spoil pretty fast in this heat.”

“Not to mention I’m starving to death,” Angie said. “Crabbs is actually starting to sound pretty good to me.”

Tully laughed. “I hadn’t realized we were undergoing such extreme hardship, Angie. Guys, we better get back to civilization before Angie goes even more wacko on us. Anyone
who thinks Crabbs isn’t so bad is right on the brink.” He stepped backward and almost fell over something. “Hey, what’s this?”

Pap bent over and looked at the little contraption. “It’s a fogger!”

Dave scratched his head. “A fogger? What’s a fogger?”

Pap said, “It explains why there aren’t any mosquitoes in the swamp! They put the fogger in their boat when the wind is just right and drive across one side of the swamp. It puts up a big cloud of insecticide that drifts across the swamp and kills all the mosquitoes and any innocent bug who happens to be passing through. Now that we’ve got the missing-mosquito mystery solved, shouldn’t one of us paddle the canoe back?”

“Leave it for now,” Tully said. “I want all of us to stick together.”

They trooped back to the raft. They wrapped the body in one of the blankets and leaned the rifles against it. Angie and Poke took up their positions fore and aft, and Dave and Pap manned the poles. “Point the way, Poke,” Tully said.

“What you mean, ‘point the way,’ Bo? Weren’t you paying attention when you poled us in here?”

“No, I had you as a guide.”

“Hunh. Well, it was dark. Let’s see. I reckon if we head this way, it will take us back the way we came in.”

“That way!” Pap shouted. “That ain’t the way we come in.”

“Well, what way you think it was, Pap, you’re so dang smart?”

“I wasn’t paying that much attention either. I figured you were the one knew the swamp.”