Shoveling Smoke (12 page)

It was almost five o’clock
when we reached the Jenks city limits. “Goddamn,” said Stroud as Wick pulled up in front of the law office, “what is our idiot sheriff thinking of, making Red Meachum a deputy?”

“What if Sheriff Nye deputizes the rest of that bunch? Can you imagine all of the ex-pilots as lawmen? They’ll come after us with torches in the night.”

“If they come on motorcycles, we’ll be safe,” replied Stroud.

Wick and I got out of the car, and Stroud scooted over behind the wheel. “I’m going home, boys,” he said. “We’ve done about all the good we can today.”

Wick and I watched the big car drive away. “He gets tired pretty easy these days,” said Wick. “You should have seen him a few years ago, Clay.”

“He should lay off the sauce,” I told him.

Wick clapped me on the back. “That’s what you’re here to help me do! We’re going to dry him out, like I told you yesterday.”

“And you should lay off other men’s wives,” I replied. “You are both going to kill yourselves if you keep going. His liver is going to fall out, and some husband is going to gun you down.”

Wick smiled, gestured at the office door. “Then all this would be yours.”

“I doubt it,” I replied. “I’m not sure I’ll hold out much longer than the last six or eight new guys. There’s too much weirdness here, Wick.”

“Weirder than city life? Come on, Clay.”

“I don’t think you guys can see it because you’re part of the weirdness. You
make
most of it. But it’s not just you. Jesus, it’s everything about this place. It’s Judi Rae Box. It’s bobcats in suitcases. It’s the pile of plastic body parts in a corner of your office. It’s Bevo Rasmussen...”

“It’s Sally Dean,” said Wick, “that’s what you got going.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“Sally on a horse is a lovely sight,” Wick said. “I had a try at her myself a few years back. Got shut down in eight seconds flat.”

“Tell me about Stroud and Sally,” I asked.

“It’s too hot out here,” Wick said. “Let’s go inside.” We went into his office, past Molly Tunstall, who informed me that Judi Rae Box had called to say she had decided not to divorce her husband, Layton, yet.

“She said she would give him one more chance,” Molly said. “If it doesn’t work out, she figures she’ll just shoot him and have done with it.”

“Thank God for marriage,” Wick said. “We wouldn’t have much of a practice without it.”

When we were seated in his office, Wick pulled out a bottle of Jim Beam and a couple of glasses and poured us both a stiff drink. It wasn’t what I needed, but I took it anyway. I was beginning to see the appeal of staying buzzed in the country.

“What I said at lunch about Sally being a wild kid was true,” Wick said. “She was brought in on a couple of charges when she was just twelve or thirteen—shoplifting, vandalism, that sort of thing. That’s when we met her. Gill was county attorney then. He refused to prosecute her. Then we heard of a more serious charge, out west in Travis County. Apparently there was some sort of scheme in which she would sell a calf or a horse to some idiot farm boy and then Nyman would show up after the sale and claim the animal had been stolen from him. Nyman would have a sales receipt, of course. And nobody could find the girl.”

“But wouldn’t Sally have given the buyer some sort of title document? I can’t imagine anyone buying an animal just on the say-so of a young girl.”

“Sure, but the documentation Sally left behind never held up under a close look. Nyman’s sales slip would always be better. We figured Nyman forged the papers Sally used. Anyway, Sally got picked out of a lineup, and it looked like she might be sent to the juvenile facility in Gatesville. Stroud put a word in someone’s ear and got her off. It was a stupid scam, one of Nyman’s worst.”

“Sounds like she had a tough time of it growing up,” I said.

“Yes, especially after her mother died. That was about the time Sally started acting up.” Wick told me that Sally’s mother died when she was thrown from a horse. “It was an accident, all right, but there were rumors about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nyman might have had something to do with it.”

“Nyman Scales killed his wife?” I asked.

“Nobody thinks he meant to do it. Rumor has it he was experimenting with killing horses for profit even back then. He had scraped up some money to buy and insure a show horse, then did something to it, lamed it in some way, planning to collect on the insurance. But his wife must not have known about it, because she took the horse out for a ride and wound up with a broken neck.”

“Mercy,” I said. “Does Sally know that her father might have had a hand in her mother’s death?”

“Gill thinks she found out a few years ago, because that’s when she started straightening out like she did. It looked for a time like she was running away from home. She went to UT, got a degree, set herself up in Mule Springs. She had her last name legally changed to Dean—that was her mother’s family name. It looked like she was turning over a new leaf—that is, if you look at it from a certain direction, the one Gill favors.”

“What’s your read on Sally Dean?” I asked.

Wick finished his drink, poured another, and topped off my glass.

“Remember I told you that Nyman put the dairy in his daughter’s name? Well, he did it right after she changed her name from Scales to Dean. Now, if Sally was changing her name as a way of breaking off with her father, why would he turn right around and make her owner of one of his biggest cash projects?”

“You’re saying she may have changed her name to help her daddy rip off the government? But a simple name change wouldn’t fool a one-eyed auditor with an IQ over six.”

“Go find me a government auditor with an IQ over six, and we’ll talk.”

“But you also told me she severed her connection with the dairy, Wick. Why would she have done that if she was still in cahoots with her father?”

“She dumped the dairy just about the time she applied for a job in our firm. Think about it, Clay. She couldn’t very well have been involved in dairy fraud while applying for the job of Northeast Texas Judicial District Administrative Coordinator, could she?”

In Wick’s version of the Sally Dean story, Nyman Scales’s daughter had never reformed at all. Instead, she was just covering her tracks whenever necessary as Nyman moved her from one scheme to the next.

“So Nyman cut her loose from the dairy scam so that she could get the job she’s got now?” I said. “Tell me, Wick, how could placing Sally as district coordinator possibly pay off for Nyman as big as keeping her on as head of the largest dairy in the country?”

“Easy. In the last three years alone, Nyman Scales has been linked, either directly or indirectly, to five megabucks lawsuits. The three that went in his favor netted him something over four million dollars. With the right judges on the bench, his batting average might have been five out of five. Think what it could mean to him to be able to pick his judge whenever one of his lawsuits went to trial. Sally could help him do that.”

I was starting to get drunk again, for the second time that day. And it was a good thing, because Wick was beginning to make sense, and what he was saying would have depressed me if I had been sober.

“But Stroud says there’s no proof that Sally has ever influenced a trial in her father’s favor.”

“And he’s right. I’m just playing devil’s advocate, Clay. I don’t have any proof that Sally’s bad. But the facts line up more logically that way. Besides, Gill is smitten. He likes to think that he’s the reason why Sally reformed. In Gill’s view Sally was a tool of her evil father when she came to work for us, but thanks to the patience and interest and sterling integrity of Old Lawyer Stroud, she saw the error of her ways and took up the administrator’s job with a soul purged of sin. What a crock! Christ, think of the way he acted at lunch when her name came up. It should be obvious to you that he’s in love with her.”

“He loves her like a father,” I suggested. “Like the decent father she never had.”

“Horse hockey, Counselor. You can’t be that drunk.”

He was right. The idea of Gill Stroud as a model of fatherly decorum was ridiculous.

“And don’t think it’s platonic, either,” said Wick. “Let me tell you, Gill has a knack for picking up girls. You won’t believe this, Clay, but the old goat’s batting average is better than mine.”

“You’re right, I don’t believe you.”

“I think they want to nurse him, or maybe mother him. Or maybe they want him to father them, if you know what I mean. When you go out to his farmhouse, take a look in the closet at the top of the stairs. It’s full of cowboy boots. Women’s boots. He likes his women to parade around wearing a pair of cowboy boots and nothing else.”

I pictured Sally Dean walking down some stairs in an old farmhouse, dressed only in cowboy boots, as Stroud watched from the foot of the stairs, trembling with antediluvian lechery. No, it wasn’t possible.

Unless the crazy story Bevo fed me that morning wasn’t crazy, after all. What if Sally really was still in league with her father?

“Damn you, Wick,” I said. “This has not been a good day.”

“Love hurts, partner,” he replied.

I got up to leave, my head humming from the whiskey, then remembered Bevo’s request for me to ride with him to Dallas the next night. I told Wick about it, and about Bevo’s threat to sue us after we blew the case if we didn’t play ball with him.

“I guess you’d better go with him, then, Clay.”

“But you told me never to do anything he asks me to do,” I reminded him.

“He seems to have us over a barrel.”

“You don’t know why he’s going to Dallas, do you, Wick?”

Wick thought for a moment. “He goes club hopping a lot, but he wouldn’t need a lawyer for that. I don’t know, Clay, maybe he’s just trying to make friends with you. That or he wants to pump you for information about his case. He’s convinced we’re not telling him everything, the paranoid little son of a bitch.”

“Are we?” I asked.

“Hell, no. I’m not, anyway. I don’t know what Gill has been telling him.”

“So I’ll ride with Bevo, then,” I said, heading for the door.

“I think it might be best,” Wick replied.

“For the good of the firm?”

“For the good of the firm.”

But it would not be for the good of the firm if, as Bevo promised, he showed up with Sally Dean in the backseat of his car. If he came with Sally, I would knock his teeth down his throat. Diamond and all.

I went to the Dairy Queen for a hamburger. Lu-Anne was not there, but the little girl who waited on me must have learned her gum-popping technique from her. I sat in the booth long enough for the buzz from Wick’s bourbon to transform itself into a dull, throbbing ache in my temples. Blood will tell. That’s what Wick had told Stroud at lunch. Sally Dean was Nyman Scales’s daughter, and Nyman Scales’s blood was black.

I drove home as the last of the pink stain in the sky disappeared and the insane chatter of the locusts began to fade. There was no blue Mercedes parked at the curb tonight. I unlocked the door, cursing the locusts.

Before I could find the light switch, I was struck on the head, and my legs went out from under me. Bright squares of light exploded in my brain. I don’t think I completely lost consciousness because the lights stayed with me and I had a sensation of being dragged. The next instant, I gasped as cold water hit me in the face, and I could focus again. I was naked, dripping, duct-taped hand and foot to a kitchen chair in my bedroom. The nightstand from the side of my bed had been placed directly in front of me, its reading lamp beaming into my face, turning the room into fuzzy outlines. One of the outlines belonged to a big man with a beer gut. He wore overalls and a baseball cap over lank hair.

“Howdy,” he said in a cheery Texas drawl.

Something had been crammed
into my mouth—a sock, from the smell of it. My head got clearer, and I struggled against the silver bands of tape but found I couldn’t move at all, as if I’d been welded to the chair. My feet and hands were becoming numb from the constriction of the tape.

Ex-pilots! I thought, in a panic. Out for revenge over the Singing Pig incident.

The big man sat down in a kitchen chair to one side of the light. “We got to have us a talk, Mr. Rasmussen,” he said. “You know what it’s about.”

Mr. Rasmussen! The guy thought I was Bevo! Up to this point, I had been somewhat detached from the proceedings. I supposed I’d gone into shock. But Bevo’s name brought me fully into the picture. I hollered, trying to work the sock out of my mouth with my tongue. The man in the ball cap pushed the sock back in and halfway down my throat, so that I started to gag.

“Not yet, Mr. Rasmussen,” he said. “You’re not ready to tell me yet. Not the truth, anyway. I’ve got to get you ready for the truth.” I could read the insignia on his cap:
CR.
Ball Cap was a Colorado Rockies fan.

“Have you ever had acupuncture treatment?” he asked, untying a cloth bundle on the nightstand between us. “It’s great for treating all sorts of problems. Arthritis pain, nicotine addiction, even some forms of cancer.” He unrolled the strip of cloth to reveal a row of nee-dles, varying in size, gleaming in the light from the reading lamp.

“Acupuncture can even cure dishonesty,” Ball Cap said. He selected a wicked-looking steel sliver about six inches long and held it, point down, in his fist like a dagger. I noticed a fat silver thimble on the tip of his thumb. He scooted the nightstand away and moved closer, so that I could smell the beer on his breath, and held the needle over my leg, a couple of inches up from my knee.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve been trained by experts.” His fist thudded into my leg, and when he withdrew it, I saw the needle embedded in my flesh. A ribbon of blood began to run down both sides of my leg. There was no sharp pain, but a tremendous ache, as if I had been hit with a sledgehammer.

“Well, what do you know,” he said, “I missed the femoral artery. That’s mighty lucky for you, Mr. Rasmussen. I nick the femoral, and you’re a goner.”

I stared at the silver pin sticking out of my leg, trying to focus my thoughts. Ball Cap was looking at it, too. “Weird, isn’t it, sticking up like that?” he said. “Can’t tell how deep it is or how far it has to go to come out the other side.” He chuckled. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. I brought two hundred of the little darlings! You can make the damnedest patterns with them!”

This isn’t happening, I told myself. You’re having a dream. Wake up! I squirmed against the tape and a burst of pain from my leg let me know that I was not dreaming. To my horror, Ball Cap picked up a second needle. This one he held at a slant, its point aimed at the center of my knee.

“I bet you feel that old dishonesty melting away, don’t you?” he asked. He reached down to the floor and picked up a hammer. “This one requires a little more force,” he said. “Maybe after it, we’ll try to talk.”

Let’s talk now!
I shouted against the soggy knot of wool in my mouth.
Now! Now! Now!
But I could not talk, could not move, could only watch in horror as Ball Cap settled the point of the needle in the skin over my kneecap and brought the hammer back. At the last moment, I closed my eyes.

As before, there was a thud, but this time it was only heard, not felt. I opened my eyes to see Ball Cap drop the hammer and collapse behind the nightstand, knocking over the reading lamp as he fell. After the glare of the lamp, the darkness was total, but I could hear someone moving close by. There was the rippling sound of duct tape being pulled off its spool, once, twice, several times. My rescuer was taping up Ball Cap where he had fallen.

finally the reading lamp was righted and, to my consternation, aimed into my eyes again. This was too much! I bellowed in rage and pain. A hand came out of the darkness and began pulling the sock out of my mouth, then stopped.

“I don’t know,” said Sally Dean’s voice, “this opens up a whole new set of possibilities.”

Sally turned on the light. “I was heading for the Quik Stop,” she said, looking down at the man she had just decked. “Ed loves Little Debbie cakes, and Gill is all out of them.” She was wearing a black T-shirt and cutoffs. Kneeling next to my wounded leg, she inspected the needle sticking out of it. “Good thing Ed’s got a sweet tooth, wouldn’t you agree?”

The bleeding seemed to have stopped. She touched the end of the needle, and pain shot up my leg. I hollered through the sock for her to ungag me, but she ignored me, going into the bathroom and coming out with a towel and a box of Band-Aids. She knelt again, grasped the needle with one hand while pressing down on the flesh around it with her other hand. Slowly she drew the needle out. It felt like she was sawing my leg off.

“Stop moaning,” she said. “I can see you’ve never spent any time on a farm. I’ve pulled bigger splinters out of a rabbit’s ass.” She stanched the blood with the towel, then, with a smile at me, she bent down to the wound and licked at a runnel of blood.

“I always wondered what a man’s blood tasted like,” she said. She made a face. “God, how do vampires do it?”

I began to gag, and Sally reached up and pulled the sock out of my mouth. “If you start hollering again,” she said, “I’ll stick it back.” The inside of my mouth felt as if it had grown a coat of hair.

“Get me out of this chair,” I gasped. Sally was strapping a Band-Aid over the black dot of the puncture wound in my leg.

“You might have a doctor look at this,” she said. “A tetanus shot might be a good idea.” She smiled at me again, and there was something else in her eyes. “You look cute, all tied up in that chair.”

“Sally, that guy was going to kill me.”

Sally looked down at him. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If he was going to do that, he wouldn’t have rigged up this light so you couldn’t see him. I think he was just planning to scare you.”

“He thought I was Bevo.”

“Well, of course he did,” Sally replied. “Who’d want to stick pins in
you?
There’s probably a bunch of folks out there wouldn’t mind ventilating Bevo.”

I couldn’t get over how calm Sally was, how nonchalantly she perched on the nightstand, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to sit chatting with a wounded man bound naked to a chair next to a thug she had just knocked unconscious. Maybe such high jinks were nothing new to the daughter of Nyman Scales.

“Looks like our little Cajun ceremony last night was a bust,” she said. “We didn’t clean out all the demons.”

A thought hit me. “This is why Bevo was happy to loan me his house!” I said. “He must have suspected some enemy might come for him, and he let Wick Chandler move me in here to take a message. The son of a bitch set me up!”

“Sounds like Bevo, all right,” Sally said. She knelt next to me. “Maybe we should try that ritual again. I’ve remembered some parts that I’d forgotten.” She ran her fingernails up my unwounded thigh, raising goosebumps.

“Sally, for God’s sake!”

“You know, Counselor, for a city boy you’re really beginning to get into the swing of things around here.” She kissed me on the kneecap.

Anger suddenly overwhelmed the frustration and embarrassment I was feeling. “You can stop this,” I told her. “I’m happy enough, thank you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, kissing me on the neck and down my chest.

“Bevo thinks you’re just keeping me happy so that I won’t quit the firm like all the other new guys did and leave his case hanging.”

She laughed. “Bevo is an idiot. If I wanted to help his case—and I don’t—I could do it from the office. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of phone calls, and—” She stopped kissing me. “Do you believe Bevo, Clay?”

All my speculations about her motives vaporized in the look she gave me. “Bevo’s an idiot,” I said.

But I had missed a beat—late again! Sally stood up. “So I’m screwing you for
Bevo?”
She gave a grim little laugh that was more of a shudder.

“He’s an idiot, Sally. He’s certifiable.”

“That would make me a whore, wouldn’t it?” She looked down at me and shook her head. “You’re one smart lawyer. You have figured out that the Northeast Texas Judicial District Administrative Coordinator is part of a prostitution ring all set up just to keep you happy in your new job of defending assholes who burn horses for profit. In fact, you have deduced that the district coordinator is the head whore!” She went into the kitchen, and I heard cabinet drawers yanked open and slammed shut.

“Sally, give me a break,” I called to her. “I’m sorry. It’s been a very confusing couple of days.” As she thrashed around in the kitchen, I explained that I had learned a little about the shady elements of her past and that what I learned had thrown me. “But only for a moment,” I said.

She came back from the kitchen, her eyes flashing at me.

“So, it’s a family business,” she said. “I’m working for Nyman as well as for Bevo.” She had a carving knife in her hand.

“You’re not working for Nyman or Bevo or anybody,” I replied, watching the knife. “I know that.”

“Scales family escort service and horse exterminators,” she said. “It has a ring to it. I’ll suggest it to Nyman at the next family reunion.” She started to saw with the knife at one of the lengths of tape that bound me to the chair, then threw the carving knife across the room. “The hell with you,” she said. “You can get out of this mess yourself.” She knelt to check the binding on her captured burglar, and I couldn’t see her face. “So last night, you and I, that was just business?” she asked, yanking on the tape around Ball Cap’s wrists hard enough to make the big man groan in semiconsciousness.

“That’s Bevo’s version. It’s not mine.”

“So you talked with
Bevo
about what we did last night?”

“I’m sorry, Sally. I made a mistake. Last night was not just business. It couldn’t have been.”

When she looked up from the floor where she knelt, there was no trace of anger or confusion in her eyes, but she wore a bitter smile. “All right,” she said, “what if it was just business? Let’s assume Bevo Rasmussen is right, for the first time in his life.”

“Stop it, Sally.”

“I’m a whore, and last night had nothing to do with the way I feel about you.”

“Hold on!” I said. “The way you feel about me? Sally, we hardly know each other, and last night you were all over me!”

“The way I remember it,
you
were all over
me,”
she replied. Now there was hurt in her eyes, and anger. “I never saw a man as needy as you. It was screaming out of you, from the moment we met.”

Sally rose up on her knees, looking down at the prone, tightly bundled figure of Ball Cap, who was beginning to squirm a little against his bonds.

“Well,” she said, “if we’ve got two geniuses like you and Bevo in agreement, I guess my case is closed.” She came to me on her knees. “I tell you what, Clay...” She slid her hand up my thigh and into my crotch. “Let’s do some more business. Maybe I can make the city boy even happier.” She was massaging me with long, practiced strokes.

“Cut it out!” I demanded.

“No, sir,” she said. “I’m just a simple working girl doing my job.” Strapped to the chair as I was, there was no way I could move to stop her. I willed myself not to respond. But I did respond, despite my mental commands, despite the shock and pain of the night and the fact that we had company.

“I mean it, Sally!”

She stood, undid the snap of her cutoffs, and slid them off. She was wearing nothing underneath, and she straddled me as her hand continued to work. Pain shot up my leg from the puncture wound, but the rest of my body did not seem to notice. Pulling her T-shirt off over her head, she offered my mouth a nipple. I took it.

A moment later, as she repositioned herself, the big man coughed. Sally reached down to her jeans on the floor and pulled out what looked like an old policeman’s sap, a leather-covered finger of lead. I heard a thud, and the man didn’t make another sound.