Two Bits Four Bits (8 page)

“Well, if you do, you’d
better not let Puckett find out. He’s liable to go off on you and
get physical. That boy’s got a temper that’s gotten him in trouble
more than once.”

“Chip on his
shoulder?”

“More like ‘roids in his
bloodstream, I hear. He spends most of his free time down at
Hardbodies watching himself in the mirror while he pumps iron.
Clemmer does a pretty good job of keeping him in line though. And,
Clemmer is a tough old bastard himself, but only brings it out when
he needs to. Stays pretty low-key most of the time
though.”

“Are they
clean?”

Norris
shrugged.

“As far as I know. But,
that doesn’t mean much. Being a dirty cop isn’t something that
people gossip about over coffee down at Lita’s. Is there a chance
they might be taking some money from Benny Shanks or Sandy Doyle’s
Odessa bunch to look the other way? Sure there is. That’s the
nature of the job. But, back when we had the Trans Pecos Drug Task
Force, I worked with them on a few operations and they never seemed
to hold back anything. And, for the most part, we were successful
at getting pretty big quantities of product when we conduct our
raids, which probably wouldn’t have been the case if they were
tipping people off in advance.”

“That’s true,” I
said.

By the time we parked back
at the Sheriff’s Office, I had decided to pay Benny Shanks a visit,
since his name kept coming up. I thanked Norris for the visit and
told him I’d be in touch when he offered his help if I needed it
during my time in Elmore.

* * * *

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

The Pumpjack Club was
located on the outskirts of town on Highway 385 leading to Odessa.
The building was a large fabricated metal building that could have
easily been mistaken for a farm implement dealership were it not
for the big neon sign out front that mimicked the motions of a
working pumpjack with a cowboy riding it. Mounted along the side of
the building at regular intervals there were three large,
industrial-size evaporative air conditioners, euphemistically
called “swamp coolers”, sitting on stands constructed from
four-inch pipe. There were blacked-out plate glass windows along
the front of the building, and a glass front door also blacked out.
A piece of plywood had been taped to one of the front windows in a
makeshift attempt to repair a shattered portion near the
bottom—probably the result of a late-night eviction by the club’s
bouncer. Half a dozen empty beer cans and a flattened straw cowboy
hat littered the dirt parking lot, and there were only two cars,
both of them parked in front of a windowless steel door close to
the rear of the building. One was a late model silver Lincoln
Navigator with dark-tinted windows and the other a dust-covered
Toyota with a baby-seat in the back.

I parked in front of the
building and tried the blacked-out front door. The air inside
smelled like stale beer and smoke and was only slightly cooler than
outside. There was a noticeable humidity created by the swamp
coolers, which filled the space with a quiet roar. A thin woman in
her thirties emerged from a doorway behind the bar as I pulled up a
stool. Her hair was an unnatural shade of black and teased on the
top the way women used to wear it when my parents were young. She
was wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt bearing a large green
marijuana leaf and the words What Would Willie Smoke? Someone had
used a pair of scissors to crudely cut the neck opening of the
shirt to make it larger and lower, so that the wearer revealed an
ample supply of what appeared to be store-bought cleavage. She was
too thin to have that much fat on her chest naturally.

“Hi there, can I get you
something?” she asked.

I ordered a Shiner Bock
and laid a twenty on the counter. She reached down and slid open
the hatch to a refrigerator chest between us, in a practiced move
that seemed designed to reveal a glimpse down the front of her
T-shirt. She smiled as she pulled up a dripping longneck bottle and
put it down in front of me after removing the cap.

“You want a glass with
that, sugar?”

“No that’s okay,” I said,
taking a pull from the cold bottle.

She busied herself with
straightening up the area behind the bar while I took a few more
sips.

“Looked like you might be
closed from outside,” I said. “Am I the first customer of the
day?”

“You sure are, honey. I
guess you get the door-prize,” she said, smiling at me in the
mirrored back wall as she straightened the bottles of liquor that
lined it.

“Hot damn, I knew this was
my lucky day,” I said. “Hey, somebody told me Benny Shanks ran this
club.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, isn’t that
something. You know, Benny probably sold me my first beer, back
when I was a teenager. And here I am, still buying beer from
him.”

“Is that right? He’s back
there in the office watching the baseball game,” she said, nodding
towards the doorway she had come out of earlier.

“Are you sure I wouldn’t
be bothering him?”

“Hell no, you won’t be
bothering him. The Rangers is losing anyway. It’ll help him take
his mind off his troubles,” she laughed.

I picked up my beer and
stepped around the end of the bar and into a short hallway that led
to a small room with an old metal desk on one end and a large
flat-screen TV affixed to the opposite wall. There was a dark brown
leather couch and matching chair in front of the TV, with a
glass-topped coffee table bearing a stack of dog-eared magazines
and a couple of overflowing ashtrays. The volume was turned low and
the Texas Rangers were at bat against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Benny looked up from the desk as I knocked gently on the
doorway.

“The young lady out front
said you might need some help with these Rangers,” I said,
gesturing towards the television with my beer bottle.

“Well, hell. Unless you’re
God himself, I don’t know that you can do any good for those sorry
sons of bitches.”

“Buddy Griffin,” I said,
stepping over to the desk and extending my hand.

“Well, I’ll be shit,” he
said, giving my hand a squeeze. “I remember when you were just a
kid running up and down the sidelines at the Elmore High football
games. I lost so much goddamn money when you were playing it wasn’t
even funny.”

“Uh oh. I’m sorry about
that. We were doing the best we could.”

“I know goddammit. That’s
why I lost. I was betting against y’all!” he roared, erupting into
a wheezing laugh followed by a fit of coughing that turned his face
purple.

“Well, you probably made
up for what you lost after the game with what you charged us for
those cases of warm beer.”

He nodded as he regained
his breath.

“You’ve probably got me
there,” he said. “What have you been doing since then? You still
live here?”

“No, I’ve been living in
Austin. I just came back for a class reunion.”

“Well, y’all need some
beer to celebrate with? I can fix you right up,” he said, with a
mischievous wink.

I laughed. “No, I think
we’re doing okay. It’s been sort of quiet to tell you the truth.
That fella who got shot, Russell Chilton, he was married to one of
our classmates. You heard about that didn’t you?”

“I sure did,” Benny said,
shaking his head, his expression one of sad amazement. “That was a
terrible shame. He was president of the bank, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “I
only met him the night before for the first time, but he seemed
like a real nice guy. Did you know him?”

“Only to say hello to on
the street, really,” he answered. “We didn’t exactly run in the
same circles, if you know what I mean. All my businesses take care
of the working man, and his tended to take care of the upper
class.”

“What kind of businesses
you got?” I asked. “Still got that pawn shop you had back in the
80’s?”

“Yeah, it’s still open but
my wife’s nephew runs it now. I’ve got an employment agency and a
furniture rental outfit that keeps me too busy to write pawn
tickets. Say, didn’t you get a scholarship to play ball at UT or
something? Seems like I remember something about that.”

“Oh, yeah I was all set
until I got hurt during summer practice. They dropped me like a hot
potato and I had to tend bar to pay for the rest of my
school.”

“Hey, nothing wrong with
the liquor business,” he said. “It’s been pretty good to
me.”

“Yeah, me too. I can’t
complain about the way things worked out. Bartending taught me a
lot about people, which came in handy later on.”

“So, what did you go into
after college?” he asked. “Sales?”

“Something like that. Who
do you reckon would want to shoot Russell Chilton?” I asked,
draining the last of my beer.

“No idea. Like you said,
he seemed to be a real nice guy. Real civic-minded.”

“I guess you never really
know what people are really like, though,” I offered. “Down deep
inside I mean. He may have been up to his eyeballs in meanness for
all we know. Might have just been a crook in a three-piece
suit.”

“Might have been,” Benny
answered, nodding. “He wouldn’t have been the first one around
here. It’s the ones wearing the suits you’ve got to watch out for
the most.”

“I hear that,” I laughed.
I stepped to the desk and offered my hand again.

“Well sir,” I said. “It
sure was good to see you again. I’ll run along and let you get back
to your game.”

“Aw, don’t worry about it.
These bastards don’t get a run pretty soon, I’m gonna switch over
to The Home Shopping Network, or some other damn thing.”

We shook hands and I
exited the office, stopping to set my empty bottle on top of the
twenty that I’d left on the bar. The bartender looked up from a
magazine she was reading as I started away.

“You want some change,
honey?”

“No, you keep it,” I said
as crossed the room.

“Well, thank you, sweetie.
You come back any time you want to win the door prize again. You
hear?”

* * * *

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

There’s a saying about
Texas funerals that has been making the rounds via the internet and
e-mail the last few years. It goes: If you’re attending a funeral
in Texas, remember, we stay until the last shovel of dirt is thrown
on and the tent is torn down. That may not be the way they do
things in Dallas or Houston these days, but the saying still holds
true in most small towns in the Lone Star State, and Elmore was no
exception.

The ritual typically
begins in the morning, at the funeral home where the departed’s
body has been available for visitation for at least a couple of
days, usually with the casket lid propped open. The family and
those close to them will gather an hour or two before services are
scheduled and visit in whispered voices, as if speaking in a normal
tone might awake the central player. They’ll usually make comments
about how “good” the decedent looks, as if St. Peter acted more
like a doorman with a velvet rope, preventing anyone who looked
“bad” from entering Club Heaven.

At some point, those
gathered will decide to make their way to the church, where they
will sit and listen to organ music and shush any children in
attendance. Meanwhile, the staff of the funeral home will transport
the casket across town and roll it into place at the front of the
church. The church is where the largest crowd will gather, and will
usually include many who were only slightly acquainted with the
departed, and those whose only connection was through a family
member.

Once those gathered fill
up the church pews, the older men in the crowd will surrender their
seats to the fairer sex and stand at the rear of the church,
quietly talking football to each other. Eventually, the preacher
will make his entrance and preach a sermon that will mention the
fact that the departed had a relationship with The Lord, and invite
those in the gathered crowd who don’t to search their hearts and do
the same, the implication being that as long as you’re still alive
it isn’t too late to purchase an eternal life insurance
policy.

After the sermon is
finished, the organist will play a few more songs and then the
preacher will announce the location of the burial. After filing
outside to watch the pallbearers load the casket into the hearse,
those in attendance will form a procession of vehicles that will
snake through the streets of town on their way to the cemetery.
Those who are only attending the services out of social courtesy
will sit and watch the line of cars form and depart, and then take
an alternate route back to their homes or businesses, feeling just
a tinge of guilt that they didn’t make the trip to the
cemetery.

The local police force
will have formed a funeral detail that will race ahead of the
procession to block traffic at major intersections, and follow
behind the last car in line as a marker of where the procession
ends and regular traffic begins, lest any freeloaders try to run
the red lights with the rest of the mourners. All along the route,
old-timers that aren’t part of the procession will pull their
vehicles to the side of the road as a sign of respect, even if they
are in the oncoming lane of traffic. Farmers in coveralls will step
out of their pickups and stand beside the fender with their hats
removed and held over their hearts as they watch the line of cars
pass.