Bill Crider - Too Late to Die

Mrs. Wilkie hurried over to cut him off, and for once Rhodes almost found himself liking her. But it was too late. Her frantic “No questions, no questions. This is not a debate. .” was interrupted by the short man’s voice cutting through like a table saw.

“I’d just like to ask the sheriff one thing,” he said. “I’d like to know if it’s a custom in all counties where the prisoners are treated well for the deputies to beat up on them for no reason.” He pointed to his face, which even Rhodes had to admit looked pretty battered. Maybe even more battered than it had that morning. Good lord, Rhodes thought, could it be possible that Claymore had actually staged the whole thing? Could Johnny Sherman have been framed?

“That’s right,” the man went on, to the crowd now, “my buddy and I got whipped up on for no reason at all this morning, while we were just. .”

“Wait a minute now,” Rhodes said, his voice louder than he usually allowed it to get, which caused the makeshift mike to whistle and squeal once again. “Just hold on,” he said in a normal tone. “You were arrested by a county officer in the course of his normal patrol. You were fighting with another man, and you refused. .”

“That’s bull, and you know it. You laws are all alike, and you stick together when it comes to something like this, but we’ll see. I’m going to sue you and that deputy of yours, and the whole county. Then people will know what things’re really like in that jail of yours.”

Then, before anyone realized what he was doing, the man turned and stalked the length of the cafeteria and out the door.

Rhodes made a few more remarks intended to assure his listeners that things weren’t what they seemed, but there was so much buzzing of talk that he doubted they’d heard a word.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Claymore sitting in his chair, his legs crossed to show off his Tony Lama boots, a slight smile lingering on the corners of his mouth.

There was another fiddle player after that, but hardly anyone paid any attention. “I take it that this is hardly the high spot of your political career,” Jack Parry whispered to Rhodes when he returned to his seat.

“You might say that,” Rhodes said. “I guess it could be worse, though.”

“Yeah,” Parry said. “They might have caught you performing an unnatural act with the Baptist minister’s wife in the choir loft.”

Rhodes grinned. “Or with the minister himself,” he said. “Even you’ll have to admit that between him and his wife there’s not much to choose.”

“Too right,” Parry said. “Well, I’m getting out of here before you get surrounded and questioned. Someone might think to ask me why the county judge is so friendly with a low-down skunk like you.”

Rhodes saw that several of the people from the crowd were making their way toward him. He turned to answer them as best he could. At least, he thought, everything else was pretty much under control.

When the meeting finally broke up and Rhodes got back by the jail, they told him that Billy Joe Byron had escaped.

Rhodes was not a man who lost his temper often. Most of the time he was, at least outwardly, in complete control of his emotions. This, however, was not one of those times.

“Goddammit,” he exploded. “Billy Joe Byron hasn’t got any more sense than a tame turkey! How in the hell could he escape? I just wish that someone would please explain that to me.”

Hack Jensen was sitting by his radio looking sheepish, while old Lawton was taking the worst of Rhodes’s anger. Lawton’s smooth, unlined face was very red, and it looked as if he might cry at any minute. As the jailer, he was the one responsible for what had happened.

“I don’t understand it, Sheriff,” Lawton said. “Maybe I’m gettin’ too old for the job. I could have swore that everything was all right, but the door to his cell is wide open, like it wasn’t ever locked. I fed Billy Joe about six-thirty, took his food right in like I always do for someone harmless like that, and I thought for sure I’d locked that door when I came out. Maybe I did, because he was still there when I picked up his tray at seven o’clock. That must be when I left the door open.”

Rhodes suddenly felt sorry for the old man. They all thought that Billy Joe was a harmless prisoner. But what if he hadn’t been? Or what if he wasn’t? That blood test still hadn’t come back.

“Why didn’t you call me?” Rhodes asked. He didn’t add that he would very much have appreciated being called away from the Milsby candidates’ forum and cake auction. He hadn’t mentioned what went on there.

“We would’ve put out a call, Sheriff,” Hack said, “but we just found out Billy Joe was gone.”

“Just found out?” Rhodes was puzzled.

“Yeah, he hasn’t been gone long,” Lawton said. “I checked the cells right before Johnny came in. Then when Johnny went out I checked again. He was gone then.”

“Well, that’s something. Is Johnny looking for him? He can’t have gotten too far.

“Johnny said something about looking for him, but he figured that he couldn’t look too long. Said he had to make his run.”

“OK. I’ll look for a while, too, but I’m going home and get some sleep if I don’t find him pretty quick. I have a feeling that tomorrow’s going to be a long day.”

“They all are, lately,” Hack said, and Lawton nodded in agreement.

It was nearly twelve o’clock when Rhodes drove up to Billy Joe Byron’s shack. It was located on a dirt road about a mile out of town, not far from the former site of one of Clearview’s sanitary landfills. Or dump grounds, to those less inclined to euphemism.

The shack had only one room and a narrow porch, and its roof sagged in the middle as if something huge had walked across it. The walls were scrap planks held together by rusty nails and covered with tar paper and shingles that Billy Joe had picked up at building sites after the houses were completed but before clean-up had begun. All around the house were scattered the remains of other people’s trash that Billy Joe had scavenged in the years that the dump ground had been in operation-various mismatched leather shoes, their toes and soles curving upward, cracked and wrinkled from years of rain and sun, a headless plastic horse that had once been joined to a frame with springs, any number of aluminum lawn chairs, bent at crazy angles and missing all but a few tatters of their plastic webbing, glass bottles of all kinds, television picture tubes and empty radio cabinets, an exercise bicycle with no wheels.

“There’s no place like home,” Rhodes said aloud, to no one in particular. “Billy Joe,” he called, “you in there?”

There was no answer, and Rhodes mounted the porch by means of a concrete block which served as a step.

There was a moon which gave quite a bit of light to the area around the house and lit up Billy Joe’s trash collection with an eerie silver light, but the light didn’t penetrate the interior of the house. It had been put together without the benefit of windows, and the low-hanging porch roof effectively cut off all illumination from the outside, in spite of the fact that there was no door.

“You’d have thought someone would have thrown away a door,” Rhodes muttered. “Billy Joe! Come out if you’re in there.”

Again there was no response. Rhodes stepped through the empty doorway without hesitation, and the house fell in on him.

Or that’s what it felt like, a sudden overwhelming crashing down on his head that sent him stunned and reeling through the dark. Something hit him again and he collapsed on the floor, struggled to rise, and then fell face down. He heard footsteps hollow on the porch, then the sound of a car engine.