Two Bits Four Bits (26 page)

“Did you bring the TV?” I
asked Norris.

He nodded, and pointed at
one of his men, who left his post and exited the shop, returning a
few seconds later carrying a portable television with a built-in
VCR. He set it up on a workbench next to the office doorway where
there was an electrical outlet. I picked the videotape up off the
table and carried it over to the VCR and fed it into the
slot.

“Come on over here,
fellas,” I said, turning on the power. The VCR hummed and in a few
seconds a grainy image appeared of a couple that I assumed was G.
Travis Kirkland and a teenaged Eva Trout. They were sitting on a
narrow cot-like bed and talking but there was no sound on the tape.
On the screen Kirkland began to pull Eva toward him and I reached
out and hit the pause button.

“Do we all agree that this
is what you’ve been looking for?” I asked.

Both men
nodded.

“Appears to be,” Hank
said.

“Good,” I replied, hitting
the EJECT button and pulling the tape out of the player.

“Hey Norris!” I
shouted.

He walked over and removed
his mask.

“You got a business card
on you?” I asked.

He reached inside his
coveralls and pulled out a western tooled business card case and
handed me one of his cards with his name and below that his title,
Starcher County Sheriff. I passed the card to Sandy, who held it
for Hank to read.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Hank
muttered.

“The terms of our
arrangement are as follows. Hank, you and your guys are going to
saddle up and head back to wherever you came from and tell the
people holding the purse-strings that all is quiet on the western
front. Sandy, you’re going to come forth with the information you
and I discussed. We can talk about it later. And, both of you and
all of the members of your respective organizations are going to
stay as far away from Eva Trout and her friend Jimmy as you
possibly can. Understood?”

“What about that?” Hank
asked, nodding at the tape.

“Here Norris,” I said.
“Hang onto this for me, would you? In case I need it
later.”

“Sure thing, Buddy,” he
said, sliding the tape into one of the oversized pockets of his
coveralls and strolling back to the other side of the
shop.

“Do we have an
understanding?” I asked. “If anything happens to Eva, Jimmy, Kandy
Chilton or me for that matter, Norris there will open an
investigation into what’s on that tape and you can be certain all
hell will break loose.”

Sandy and Hank both looked
like they’d eaten something they wished they hadn’t.

Norris and his men herded
everyone outside and told them to stand beside their respective
vehicles. First, Norris directed Hank to get into the silver Hummer
they had arrived in. Hank climbed into the back seat, and before he
could shut the door one of the Big and Tall twins turned
around.

“Hey, what about our
guns?” he asked.

Hank looked at
me.

“File an expense report
with the campaign committee,” I suggested, closing his door for
him.

The Hummer rolled off
toward the gate and Norris’s men turned their attention to Sandy’s
men, cutting the zip ties and allowing them to drive off in the
Suburban, leaving Sandy and his Escalade behind with us.

“You ready to follow
through with that information we talked about?” I asked.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,”
Sandy answered.

“I hope you don’t forget,”
I said. “Otherwise all bets are off.”

* * * *

CHAPTER
FIFTY-TWO

“Do I want to know what’s
on that videotape?” Norris asked. He was sitting across from me at
a table inside the donut shop in Elmore. The tape lay on the table
between us.

“No, I don’t think so,” I
answered. “Just seal it in an evidence bag and keep it under lock
and key for me. If nothing happens, in a year or two you can throw
it on the fire when you’re holding one of those big cannabis
bonfires you like to invite the TV cameras to.”

“And, if something does
happen?”

“If I’m still around, I’ll
ask for it back. If I’m not, pull it out and see what’s on it.
You’ll know what to do. Listen, I really appreciate you helping me
out on such short notice.”

“No problem, compadre. It
was fun.”

“Were those your
deputies?”

“Starcher County’s finest.
Told them it was a training exercise. They thought the bad guys
were FBI agents doing some role-playing.”

“No shit? I’m glad none of
them tried to get fancy with you.”

“You and me both. I’d have
had a hell of a time explaining what we were doing out of our
jurisdiction wearing masks and dressed up like oilfield
workers.”

“You and your guys sure
helped resolve the situation and may have saved our
lives.”

“That’s what we try to
do,” he said, standing up. “I’m gonna grab a half-dozen for the
road and get back to the office. You want anything?”

“No thanks. Here, don’t
forget the tape. And, why don’t you try one of those French
crullers over there.”

“Yeah, right.”

* * * *

CHAPTER
FIFTY-THREE

The next morning, Ray and
I we were sitting in my office inside Lita’s Little Mexico
Restaurant, reminiscing about our respective trips to the
barbershop as young boys when my phone rang.

It was Sandy Doyle. “You
familiar with the Mabee Oil Field?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “About
fifteen miles east of Elmore if I remember correctly.” The Mabee
Field was an oil-rich geographic region several miles across that I
had visited with my father when I was a teenager. The whole area
was criss-crossed with a gridwork of graded roads connecting
several hundred oil wells, all laid out in a regular
pattern.

“I’m not sure where it’s
at myself, but I do know that if I were looking for who killed
Russell Chilton it might pay to look out there.”

“It would,
huh?”

“Yessir, I think you’ll
find just what you need.”

“Mabee Field? You can’t be
anymore specific than that?”

“Some detective you’ve
turned out to be,” he said, laughing. “You got a pencil and a piece
of paper? Would the goddam GPS coordinates be enough for
you?”

“Now you’re talking,” I
said.

He gave me the coordinates
and I read them back to him to be sure I’d written them down
right.

“Now, exactly what am I
going to find when I get out there?” I asked.

“Russell Chilton’s
killer,” he said.

“And I’ll be able to prove
he’s the killer how?”

“Now, I’m just speculating
here, but if he’s the killer, I bet he’ll have the murder weapon
with him,” he answered, just before the line went dead.

* * * *

CHAPTER
FIFTY-FOUR

Using the GPS coordinates
I had given him, Norris Jackson and his deputies found Darrell
Swain’s body in a dry lake bed at the edge of the Mabee Field. The
badly decomposed body showed signs of extreme trauma prior to
death, but the investigators were able to obtain fingerprints that
matched those on file for Darrell Swain. A test round fired from
the gun found with the body matched the slugs recovered from the
Russell Chilton shooting. The discovery of the body and gun meant
that the Elmore City homicide detectives Reese and Clemmer were
able to begin winding down their investigation while Norris opened
the books on a new murder.

The new murder wasn’t
likely to be easy to solve, though. Swain’s rap sheet showed he was
from Baltimore originally, and included enough prior arrests to
indicate the possibility of a violent death was an occupational
hazard. The list of people with a motive to kill him was probably
pretty long and went back a number of years.

Of course I thought I knew
who killed him, and I told Norris as much, off the record. I didn’t
have any evidence to support my theory that Sandy Doyle had
tortured and killed him when he discovered Swain was running his
own game behind Sandy’s back, but it seemed the most likely
scenario. Of course there was always the possibility that G. Travis
Kirkland’s man Hank had taken care of Swain instead. Whichever
party was responsible, I knew there wouldn’t be any way of tying
the crime back to them, and Norris had been in law enforcement long
enough to have developed the same cynical attitude I had about
trying to bring the killer of a killer to justice.

A couple of weeks after
Swain’s body was discovered, I was sitting in my office inside
Lita’s when there was a soft knock on the door and Eva Trout walked
in. She looked softer and more relaxed than I remembered her, and
she flashed a smile now and again as we talked.

“Are you going back to the
bank?” I asked.

“No. I talked to Jay
Bradley and apologized for disappearing like that, but I’ve got to
do something different for a while.”

“Will you be staying in
Elmore?”

“No, Monica’s
re-decorating her house in Abilene and invited me to stay with them
for a while to help. So, I thought I’d see how I like it there.
Maybe look for a job.”

“Have you talked to
Sandy?”

She nodded.

“Yeah, that’s all good. He
told me you were the one that convinced him I wasn’t involved in
that mess. I appreciate it.”

“I’m glad it worked
out.”

* * * *

CHAPTER
FIFTY-FIVE

A few weeks later, I
visited Jay Bradley at Elmore National Bank, carrying a battered
briefcase I rarely used. The board of directors had promoted
Bradley to President of the bank and he had moved into Russell
Chilton’s former office. After we caught up on the events since we
had spoken last, I reached into the briefcase and pulled out the
envelope containing the key to Kwik-Stop Convenience Stores’ safe
deposit box.

I handed it to Bradley and
he examined the sealed flap, over which we had both scribbled our
signatures. He handed it back to me. I reached in the briefcase and
pulled out a pair of rusty bolt cutters I had found hanging on my
folks’ garage wall. I tore open the envelope and carefully cut the
safe deposit key into thirds, giving the two ends to Jay and
tossing the middle piece into the briefcase along with the bolt
cutters. I’d made the cuts so that the two ends by themselves would
be useless in trying to make a duplicate key, as would the center
piece. It was a simple way of keeping us both honest.

“Nobody’s asked to be let
into that box since Dayton Clark got into it a week or so after
Russell got killed.”

“They’ll probably wait a
while before they show up again,” I said. “Or, they may just walk
away from it and consider it part of the cost of doing business.
How long before the contents of a safe deposit box is classified
unclaimed property and turned over to the State?”

“That only happens if we
lose complete contact with the renter of the box for at least five
years,” he said. “As long as somebody keeps paying the rent on the
box and responding to audit confirmations we send out, the contents
can sit in there forever.”

“Have you told anybody
what’s inside that box?” I asked.

“How would I know what’s
inside it?”

“Sorry, dumb question,” I
said.

* * * *

CHAPTER
FIFTY-SIX

“I don’t know,” Angie
said, scanning the chalkboard menu one more time. “They say the
pork ribs are heavenly, but I’m not sure if I can eat them without
ending up covered in barbeque sauce.”

We were standing at the
walkup window of Benny’s BBQ, a recently-completed addition to one
end of Benny Shanks’ Pumpjack Club. There was a freshly-sodded
grassy area in front of the walkup we had our choice of three new
picnic tables. People around Elmore hadn’t quite grasped the
concept of dining ‘al fresco’ unless they were in their own
backyard or at an officially-sanctioned event like a picnic,
football game or chili cook-off. Even though it was the middle of
October, it was warm enough to sit outside and enjoy the
combination of beer, barbeque and a sunset.

“If it’ll make you feel
any better, I’ll promise to be messier than you are,” I
answered.

“In that case, I’ll have a
full-slab and share a pitcher with you.”

“My kind of girl,” I said
stepping up to the window to order.

When I finished ordering
we sat down with our pitcher of Coors and checked on the progress
of the sunset. The conditions were perfect, with high, lacy clouds
overhead and a clear spot just on the horizon for the sun to shine
through and bounce of the bottom of them. Sunsets in Elmore were
more spectacular than any other place I’d been, and for some reason
they were even more so in the fall. Some people said it was because
of all the hydrocarbons in the air, released from the thousands of
oil and gas wells. Others insisted it had more to do with the
flatness of the terrain allowing the sun rays to travel further
through the air at sundown. It didn’t really matter to me one way
or the other which theory was correct. My own personal theory was
that sharing a beer with a beautiful woman made any sunset worth
watching.