Up Jumps the Devil

27

« ^ » At this season, the country is very agreeable to sportsmen, having plenty of all sorts of game in the greatest perfection; such as deer, which are as numerous as sheep in Scotland…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773

Airport workers were stringing lights on a tall fir tree in the main lobby of the airport next day and Haywood and Isabel were laughing like Christmas morning when they came through the gate. Their friends seemed equally jovial and there were cries of “Don’t spend it all in one place, now” and “Let me know when you buy that yacht.”

“Did you get lucky?” I asked.

“You might say so,” they beamed.

We got their overnight bags stowed and I tried to hand Haywood the keys to their car, but he waved them aside.

“You better drive, if you don’t mind, shug. Everybody on the plane kept giving me and Isabel champagne. If I tried to drive, I reckon I’d just float on off the road.”

Isabel giggled and crawled into the backseat. She pulled off her shoes and stretched her legs out along the seat. “Lordy, but my head’s light as a feather.”

“What’d you do, break the bank?” I asked as we buckled up.

“Near ’bout. And here’s what you won.”

Two fifty-dollar bills landed in my lap.

“You’re kidding,” I said. “My twenty dollars won?”

“On the very last quarter, won’t it, Bel?” asked Haywood.

“Next to the last, so I still owe you a quarter, Deborah. Don’t let me forget. Anyhow, I was talking with Joan Hadley about colleges—her last son’s a senior in high school this year so I wasn’t really watching and the next thing I know, the bells and lights went off and it was a hundred dollars. You didn’t say whether or not to keep playing if you won, so I didn’t.”

“That’s fine,” I laughed, thinking of a certain pair of black suede shoes on sale at Crabtree.

“Then, after I won your hundred, I switched to the machine on the other side of Joan so I could talk better, and I hadn’t been sitting there ten minutes when I won eight hundred dollars more.”

“She really had the St. Midas touch Wednesday night,” Haywood said proudly.

“Nine hundred in one night? Hey, that’s great!”

“That’s not all,” said Isabel. “I thought I’d run up to our room and lay down a few minutes till my heart quit beating so fast. But that night, after the buffet—they have the best lobster salad, to be sure—”

“I got the roast beef,” said Haywood.

“—when we got off the elevator, there was a quarter laying on the floor. I picked it up and stuck it in the Quarter-Rama right there by the elevator and blessed if it didn’t win me another twenty-five!”

“Nine hundred and twenty-five? What are you—”

“That’s still not all,” said Isabel. “By the time we went to bed, I’d won twenty-three hundred dollars, not counting that hundred for you.”

Bemused, I said, “I’m guessing that’s still not all?”

“No, wait’ll you hear what Hay wood did.” She started giggling again. “Tell her, honey.”

“Well,” said Haywood, “I didn’t have any luck at all Wednesday night. And it won’t much better yesterday. I’d drop twenty and maybe win back five, then drop sixty and win back three. It was getting on for suppertime and like Bel says, they have them really good buffets. You don’t want to be too late for ’em, if you get my whim. I was a little over my limit, but with what Bel won, we were still more’n two thousand to the good and Bel said we might as well play till six o’clock. Guess how much I won, shug?”

“I can’t imagine,” I told him truthfully.

“Twenty-five big ones.”

“Big ones? You mean hundreds?”

“Thousands!” crowed Isabel from the back seat.

“ ’Course now, the government’s gonna take a good part of it,” Haywood warned me.

“Twenty-eight percent right off the top,” said Isabel. “Remind me to tell Seth we got to file this tax form they gave us.”

(Since Seth and Minnie keep all the communal farm records on their computer, he usually does everybody’s taxes, too.)

“Still and all,” said Isabel, “that leaves us almost twenty thousand to the good.”

Haywood sighed contentedly. “Yeah, we had us a real nice Thanksgiving. How ’bout you, shug?”

I allowed as how I’d had a right nice one myself.

By the time we hit Goldsboro, Haywood and Isabel were both sound asleep. She was curled up on the backseat, he had his head propped between the window and the headrest with his hat down over his eyes to shade them from the midday sun.

Life in the fast lane can be exhausting.

Haywood and Isabel live a little less than a mile past the homeplace. I retrieved my car from Stevie (no dings and he’d even waxed it for me) and started back to Dobbs. As I drove along the heavily wooded road that runs past Jimmy White’s garage and serves as a shortcut over to Forty-Eight, I saw the blue lights of a patrol car up ahead parked on the left shoulder behind a gleaming white truck with lots of chrome.

Reese’s truck.

It had straddled the ditch at a cockeyed angle that made my heart stand still. I swung my car in nose to nose with it and hit the shoulder running, almost tripping over one of those yellow road signs that was broken off at the ground. Reese’s fancy chrome front bumper was crumpled and the right headlight was shattered. Despite the big wheels, the truck was far enough down in the ditch that the cab was almost level with the roadbed and both doors were open.

Reese was slumped inside the cab, still in his seat belt, head back and his eyes closed. He was covered in blood.

I pushed in beside the trooper. “What happened? Is he all right?”

“Judge Knott?”

The trooper was Ollie Harrold, someone familiar to me from traffic court. “Ma’am, you shouldn’t—”

“He’s my nephew. Is he alive?”

I touched Reese’s face and a fresh trickle of blood ran down from a cut on his chin. “Reese?”

“Deborah?” Reese’s eyes opened a crack. “Oh shit,” he groaned. “Just what I need.”

“What happened, honey?”

He closed his eyes and his face got that mulish look.

The exterior of the truck wasn’t badly damaged, but the interior looked as if it’d been vandalized. The radio and CD player could have been hit with a hammer, and the padded dash and soft vinyl upholstery were slashed to tatters. Blood and mud were everywhere.

I looked at the trooper. “Who did this?”

“That’s what I’m trying to ascertain, ma’am. I just got here myself, but he don’t want to tell me.”

“Reese Knott,” I said sternly. “You better say what happened here and I mean it.”

“Oh shit,” he groaned again. When he touched his face, his hand came away with more blood. “I’m gonna have to get a goddamn tetanus shot, ain’t I?”

“Reese!”

“Look, I didn’t know it was going to end up like this, okay? But this buck come jumping out of the woods and fell down right in front of me.” His eyes fell on his smashed CD. “Oh Jesus, look at that! Cost me almost four hundred dollars to get it installed.”

“Forget about the damn player. What about the deer? Did you hit it?”

“No. Some hunter must’ve shot him, and he got that far before he went down. I thought jumping the ditch must have finished him off. He had an eight-point rack, Deb’rah. The one A.K. took doesn’t have but six.”

“And?”

“Well, I couldn’t hear nobody coming after him. Deer can run miles sometimes from where they get shot. Everybody knows that. And why should I leave him there for the buzzards to pick? So I got out my tarp and wrapped it around him and stuck him up here in the cab.”

“Why not in back?”

“It’s full of light fixtures I just picked up from our wholesaler in Makely.” His eyes met mine and he gave a shamefaced shrug. “Besides, I was afraid the guy that shot him might come along and spot the antlers.”

He closed his eyes again and I gave him a poke.

“I swear to God I thought he was dead, okay? But I hadn’t hardly turned on this road when he rared up under that tarp and started tearing hell out of things. Out of me, too. You ever think about how sharp them damn hooves are?” He touched a torn and bloody spot on his upper thigh where the jeans were ripped “Oh, God, I bet I have to get stitches. I hate getting stitches. He just wouldn’t be still, kept kicking and raring, antlers flying—it’s a pure wonder he didn’t poke my eyes out with them antlers. God knows he poked me everywhere else. I tried to turn him out, but I couldn’t reach around him to open the door ’cause he was trying to come through the window on my side. Next thing I know, the truck does a one-eighty into that signpost and I’m sitting here in the ditch before I finally get the damn door open.”

“Oh, Reese, you idiot.”

“Look at my head liner,” he moaned. “Look at these seats! I’ll have to get the whole inside—you know what it’s gonna cost? And I bet my damn insurance—”

Trooper Harrold had trouble keeping a straight face when I turned to him.

“I observed him driving erratically,” he told me as formally as if we were back in court. “Before I could put on my blue light though, he landed in the ditch and I saw a buck go bounding up the ditch bank. I thought at first he’d swerved to miss it and—”

He was interrupted by the sound of sirens and more flashing emergency lights.

Dwight Bryant pulled his departmental cruiser up behind Reese’s truck and a rescue ambulance stopped a few feet away.

A tall, strongly built woman slid out from behind the wheel. A stethoscope dangled from her neck and she carried a cervical collar. “Want to give me some room here?” she said, motioning us away from the cab of the truck. “Is this the victim?”

“Victim?”

“Somebody called in and said a man out here in a white truck’s been shot. He the one?”

“I reported the accident,” said Harrold, “but I didn’t call for an ambulance yet and he wasn’t shot.” He looked at the paramedic who had strapped the cervical collar around Reese’s neck as a precaution before taking his vital signs. “Was he?”

“Not that I can see.” She gave an exasperated twitch of her head. “People call in the wrong things all the time.”

“We got the same call,” said Dwight. “What happened? Reese take that curve too sharp?”

I started to tell him but we had to step back out of the road as a pickup drove slowly by. All of a sudden, it screeched on brakes and two angry hunters jumped out. Both were dressed in brown camouflage jumpsuits and bright orange hunting caps and one of them slammed the hood of Reese’s truck with the flat of his hand so hard that it left a dent.

“This is the bastard, all right. See them diamond treads? Where’s my buck, you dickhead?”

Dwight and Trooper Harrold both moved forward to intercept him, but the hunter banged the truck hood again. “We found where it come out of the woods and saw the blood where somebody stopped and picked him up. Same tire marks. What’d you do with it, asshole?”

His buddy pulled at his sleeve and pointed up on the bank about thirty feet away. To the casual eye, the sticklike object projecting up out of the dead weeds might’ve looked like fallen twigs, but the hunters recognized antlers and they headed up the bank.

The door of yet another pickup banged and I saw the familiar uniform of a wildlife officer. “You find it?” he called to the hunters.

“Yeah, this is it,” they called back.

The EMS paramedic had signaled for the stretcher.

“He’s probably okay,” she told me as her assistant maneuvered the stretcher into place, “but that cut on his face needs stitches and so does the one on his thigh, so I want to transport him to the hospital.”

“Have I got to go?” Reese asked her anxiously.

“I strongly advise it, sir,” she said. “In my opinion, you may have sustained internal injuries and you could have a closed head injury. You don’t want to risk a blood clot, do you?”

Reese started to argue, but about that time his eyes landed on the wildlife officer who was approaching and he clutched at the paramedic’s arm. “Yeah, I’ll go with you.”

The officer walked over to us and he seemed surprised as he spotted me. He’d testified in my court just this week. “You know this boy, Judge?”

“My nephew,” I said as they eased Reese out of the cab and strapped him onto the stretcher.

“He able to talk to me a minute?”

The paramedic nodded and the officer leaned over and looked at Reese.

“Son,” he said, “you got a permit to take deer?”

Reese moaned and closed his eyes.

“Which hospital y’all taking him to?” I asked.

“Dobbs Memorial,” the paramedic said and briskly trundled the stretcher over to the waiting ambulance.

I gave the warden Reese’s name and address and he scribbled out a citation.

“I need to see his driver’s license,” said Trooper Harrold.

“You’re not going to charge him, too, are you?” I objected.

Harrold thought about it a minute. “One-vehicle accident? No property damage except to himself? I guess there’s really not a whole lot I can charge him with unless it’s operating a vehicle with a loose deer in the cab.”

“Seat belt violation?” Dwight suggested helpfully. “Passengers are supposed to be fastened in.”

“Naw,” said Harrold. “I’ll let ol’ Ranger Rick here have him. That boy’s got so much damage on his truck, any ticket I give him wouldn’t add much to his worries.”

I went over to tuck the citation in Reese’s pocket and told him I’d call his parents.

He nodded in weary resignation and then he grabbed my hand. “You reckon you could get Jimmy White to tow my truck over to his place?”

“Sure,” I said. “One condition, though.”

“What?”

“Tell me what really happened Saturday morning.”

If possible, he slumped down into the stretcher even more dispiritedly, then nodded his head toward the EMS team. “Make ’em step back?”

“Give me a minute?” I asked the paramedic.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll start the paperwork.”

I turned back to Reese.

He swallowed hard. “Billy Wall didn’t kill Mr. Jap.”

My nerves knotted in fear. “Not you?”

He shook his head impatiently and more blood oozed from the cut on his chin. “Remember how I told you nobody was there when I went past his shop the first time?”

“Yes.”

“He was there when I came back out. I saw his truck and I had that sticky valve so I tooted my horn and went inside and—” He took another deep breath. “He was already dead, Deb’rah. Laying there on the floor.”

“With the safe open?”

“No. Billy must’ve done that. It was a little after eleven-thirty. Say eleven-forty, maybe? Soon as I saw Mr. Jap laying there with that tire iron, I knew somebody’d killed him and it scared the shit out of me. I wasn’t supposed to be there anyhow, so I just took off. Soon as I was out on the road and straightened up good, I looked back in my rearview mirror and I seen Billy turn in. He might’ve taken the money, but he never killed him.”

“You’ll have to tell Dwight,” I said, looking around for him.

“No!” said Reese. “You tell him. Please?”

“Listen, ma’am,” said the paramedic. “If we’re going to transport him, we need to do it now.”

Reluctantly, I stepped back and they finished loading him into the ambulance and headed back to Dobbs minus the siren and flashing lights.

I walked over to where Dwight was watching the hunters. Still muttering angrily, the two men carried the tagged and now thoroughly dead buck down across the ditch and put it in the back of their own truck.

“Eight points,” Dwight said admiringly.

I nodded. “No wonder Reese was tempted.”

The wildlife officer was a friend of Kidd’s and apologized for having to cite my nephew for unlawful possession of a deer, but I assured him there would be no hard feelings on my part.

He and the hunters drove away. Trooper Harrold was finishing up his report in his cruiser and Dwight walked with me over to Reese’s truck.

When we were alone, I told him what Reese had just told me about Saturday morning.

Dwight gave a sour laugh. “Zack Young hauled Billy Wall down to my office last thing Wednesday evening. Billy wanted to confess that he’d kept the money and burned open the safe to get at the chits Jap was holding on him, but he said Jap was dead when he got there. I’m not real sure Zack believed him any more than I did.

“Dammit, Deb’rah! Why the hell did Reese run? And why didn’t he tell me this when I first talked to him?”

“Probably for the same reason he picked up a stunned buck and put it inside his truck,” I said wearily. “Congenital stupidity.”

Dwight closed and locked the far door of the truck. I pulled the keys from the ignition and lifted Reese’s Winchester from the gun rack.

“I’d better take this with me,” I said and stowed it in the trunk of my car.

“You want me to run with you over to Jimmy’s?” asked Dwight. “If he’s not there—”

His radio crackled and he reached in and turned it up. “Yeah, Laurie?”

The dispatcher’s voice came through clearly. “Jack just called in about that shooting. Guy in a white truck on Pleasant Road near Old Forty-Eight? He wants to know how come you’re not there yet.”

Dwight looked at me. We were on Pleasant Road, near Old Forty-Eight, beside Reese’s white truck.

“Where on Pleasant Road?” Dwight asked.

“Between the west side of Old Forty-Eight and Pleasant’s Crossroads.”

We were on the east side of that highway.

“On my way,” said Dwight. “See you, Deb’rah.”

As he pulled even with Trooper Harrold’s cruiser, he paused and relayed the information.

Many people would have chased right after Dwight and the trooper to see who’d been shot, but I’m a responsible adult. I did a three-point turn and drove sedately over to Jimmy’s. I arranged to have Reese’s truck towed. I called Nadine to say that her son was on his way to Dobbs in an ambulance.

Then I chased back toward Pleasant’s Crossroads.