The Right Side of Wrong Page 19

  Tom Bell watched White turn around, barely missing the deep ditch that would have without a doubt stuck the sheriff’s car. “Your sheriff don’t seem to be a particularly friendly feller, does he?”

  “No he ain’t,” Ned rubbed his face. “I don’t give a shit about him, but he does a good job there in town, for a City Feller.”

  As if those last two words explained everything, the men working the accident scene went back to sorting out the details. Thinking, Cody stood on the solid yellow line painted down the middle of the highway. He stared down the arrow-straight ribbon of concrete that disappeared into darkness. Behind him, the hill rose sharply.

  “This is all coming to a head, and I can’t figure out what’s happening.”

  Ned joined him. “It seems to me Whitlatch is clearing his field before he plows.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tom stepped close. “He means, son, that when Whitlatch is finished, there won’t be anyone left to tie him to this drug operation, or to them they’ve killed to get rid of the competition, right? I been keeping up with what’s in the papers. Dead moonshiners, until there ain’t no more whiskey stills around here. Then the drug system is set up, and when it’s in place, them that worked on it are gone, along with anyone who knew or suspected anything about their comings and goings, like these poor folks here. It leaves only the hired hands on the bottom, Whitlatch in the middle, and Mr. I Don’t Know Who He Is on top. It ain’t nothin’ new.”

  “Tom, how the hell do you know all of this? What ain’t you tellin’ us?”

  He sighed. “Ned, I was a lawman down south. I came up here to retire and get out of misfortune such as this, but it looks like I moved smack in the middle of the exact things that made me old before my time.”

  The men standing around completely missed the dismissive comment. “What branch? Were you a constable or something?”

  An extremely private person, Tom held back even more with the Parkers. They’d find out soon enough. “Can’t say, as of yet, but you can call down south if you really want to know my bonafides. They won’t tell you much, just that I wore a badge. Now let me help you without too many more questions.”

  “Well I have a couple more, if you don’t mind.”

  Tom Bell gave Ned the briefest of nods. “I’ll answer what I can.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I been asked to follow some drugs up here from the Valley. That’s all I can say on that subject.”

  “You cain’t leave us with that. Give us a little more.”

  Tom started to say more, but then he shook his head and backed up a step, as if that distance would keep him from talking too much. “I just gave you all I got to give, right now.”

  Tilting his hat back, Ned rubbed at his forehead. “You carried a badge, but you’re out of the bidness, you know things we don’t about this marywana, but you won’t tell us no more.”

  “Only that you can trust me.”

  “All right, then, but we’re still lawmen and we have that behind us. What can you do?”

  Tom gave them a chilling look. “What you can’t.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Cody finished draining a glass of sweet iced tea just as the phone rang. He left it on the kitchen table and answered the black phone sitting in a surprisingly ornate nook in the hall. “What?”

  “You’re supposed to say ‘hello,’” the annoyed caller said. “Is this Constable Parker?”

  “One of ’em. Which one do you want?”

  “Don’t matter. I’s out off the Blake Creek road in the army camp, looking for some polk salet, when I ran across a barn out there that was falling down, and when I went in it I found a bunch of marijuana and white lightning hid under some feed sacks.”

  Cody’s ears perked up. He’d grown up, along with everyone else in Lamar County, pronouncing poke salad. The tall weed was a cheap substitute for garden-grown greens. Mostly poor folks ate the free food, but those who’d been hungry in the past still had a taste for it, cooked with fatback or neck bones, and a side of cornbread.

  Surprised the caller had properly pronounced the word, Cody absently wondered how long it would take to find Ned. “Who is this?”

  “Uh uh. Nossir. I ain’t gettin’ mixed up in no drugs and whiskey. It’s out there, though, if y’all want to go get it.”

  “Well, now wait a minute. There’s a lot of country out there and more than one barn. Tighten up on your directions a little bit and help me out here.”

  A long sigh came through the line. “Go in through Gate Five and stay on it ’til you get to the creek. Take the left fork and foller it ’til the road peters out. You’ll think you’re done, but keep follerin’ the track and you’ll see where I drove across the meader to a barn on the right. It’s might-near covered in vines and that’s where it is. Now I got to go.”

  The line clicked for a minute, and the dial tone buzzed. He kept the receiver to his ear and hung up by pushing the disconnect button with his thumb. When he let it go and heard the tone again, he dialed Ned’s house.

  “What?”

  Cody grinned. “A minute ago a man told me I was supposed to say howdy when I answered the phone.”

  “I would have, if I’d known it was you.”

  “Don’t go nowhere. I’ll be by in a few minutes to pick you up. The feller that called said he’d found some more marijuana hid out down near Blake Creek Road.”

  “That damned stuff is popping up everywhere.”

  “It’s the times.”

  Ned hung up without another word, and Cody grinned again.

  I need to tell him how to use his manners on the phone.

  ***

  Ned fidgeted once again in the passenger seat of Cody’s red-and-white El Camino. “Next time we go anywhere, we’re driving my Chevrolet.” He pronounced it Chev-a-lay.

  “I wish you’d get a new car. That wreck has so many miles on it I’m surprised parts don’t fall off every time you hit a dead possum in the road.”

  “It don’t matter none. I have more room in my car, so like I said, the next time I’m driving.”

  “I might think about it, if you’d get them bullet holes patched up that Jimmy Don Foster shot in it.”

  “Most of them are covered. Rod Post ran out of Bondo before he got finished. He’ll get back to it one of these days.”

  Cody watched the trees flicker past. “He won’t do it unless you stay on him. Go by every day until he gets it done.”

  Rod Post was the community’s shade-tree mechanic that worked on everything from cars to tractors.

  “I don’t have time for that. It seems like I’ve been in the field every day since Easter.”

  “Well, it don’t look right for the constable to run around with bullet holes in his car.”

  Ned snorted. “You say that, and drive around in this?”

  “I have a car that looks good, and a truck when I need one. It’s the best of both worlds.”

  “I like my world the way it is. Do you know where we’re going?”

  “He gave me some directions, and they lead out here.”

  “I wish I knew who called you.”

  “You and me both.”

  “I don’t like it that he wouldn’t give you a name.” Ned hung his elbow out of the passenger window. “You’ll learn soon enough that about half of what we get comes from folks who don’t want to leave their names or get involved, but they want to tell us so we’ll check it out. This ain’t nothing new.”

  “Well, I still don’t like it. Especially right now with it feeling like things are coming to a head.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ don’t be careful. It could be a setup every time we get a call, and we need to know that. I’ve seen folks get careless about this kind of work, and they usually get hurt when they do. But it’s our job to
follow up on every call, so keep your eyes open and the wax out of your ears.”

  Cody left the highway and drove through Gate 5. They followed the asphalt road winding through the empty buildings of Camp Maxie, the almost defunct World War II army camp. When they were past the main areas, the road quickly took them into country being rapidly reclaimed by nature. The asphalt crumbled and as they drove deeper into the interior, it finally gave way to fine gravel, the final remaining bonding element of the low-bid paving material.

  After driving through alternating woods, pastures and open meadows, he slowed so they could peer through the overgrowth.

  “I remember there being a house-place in here somewheres,” Ned said. He recalled when the army teemed with soldiers and civilians alike during the war years. Nearly everyone in Center Springs and nearby Chisum had family that worked in some capacity in the camp, not to mention the men who went off to other camps to complete their military training. Glancing through his window, he recalled more than forty thousand soldiers who moved through the camp on their way to war.

  It was hard times, and there were even a few single women, or women whose husbands were in the army themselves, who placed red railroad lanterns on their porches or discreetly in a window, indicating they were open for “business.”

  The entire camp was still posted with warnings of live and dangerous ordinance. Unexploded shells from artillery practice were a common find by hunters and fishermen who were only recently being allowed back into the more remote reaches of the camp.

  He couldn’t help but wonder each time he considered an open meadow if it was one of the many resting places for the war supplies buried by the U.S. military after Japan’s surrender. Stories still circulated of guns still in Cosmoline, entire engine blocks, ammunition, artillery shells, and food, all buried in deep holes and covered with dirt by bulldozers.

  It wouldn’t surprise him if they’d buried the entire contents of the army camp in those fields.

  Cody stopped the car. “There it is.”

  A distinct set of car tracks cut off the road and across the long, green grass. It wove around a couple of short, ragged blackjack trees and one drooping bodark. Cody drove off the road through the grass and weeds, hoping he wouldn’t get a thorn in his tire. The day was turning off hot, and he didn’t want to be changing a wheel right then.

  Ned hug his arm out of the open window. “What did that feller say he was looking for out here?”

  “Polk salad.”

  “Stop a minute.”

  Cody braked to a stop. The smell of crushed grass filled the El Camino’s cab. The sagging barn not far ahead was covered with vines that hid more than a quarter of the walls and roof. Tall leafy plants grew waist high against to the sides. A ragged line of bodark posts marked a long gone corral.

  “What are you thinking, Ned?”

  Without taking his eyes off the barn, Ned took off his hat and ran a hand over his bald head. Rotting barns and houses were a common part of the landscape in Lamar County, but this one was different, somehow ominous, even though it slumped there in the bright sunlight. The hair rose on the back of his neck. “You notice something about these tracks?”

  “Nothing particular.”

  A cardinal cheeped and flitted across their line of sight.

  “They go one way.”

  Cody still wasn’t sure what Ned was talking about. “So.”

  “Look behind us at our tracks.”

  Cody understood what was bothering Ned. “There’s two sets, theirs and ours.”

  “That’s right. You got off of ’em a time or two. We all do. Nobody can drive directly in another set of tracks. Here on out, I see two traces. I think the car is still back behind the barn.”

  “Maybe he went out somewhere different.”

  “Might, but most everybody runs the same ruts so’s they don’t get a flat. Look over yonder, you cain’t go out no way other than this. And another thing, we’ve passed a dozen patches of polk salad since we got here. We had the chance to pick us a mess of greens without driving this far into the army camp.”

  Nerves jangling, Cody waited, and examined the barn as a wave of fear made his chest ache. The barn suddenly reminded him of the Cotton Exchange, where he and John Washington nearly died only months before.

  “There ain’t none growing anywheres around the barn.” Ned felt the back of his neck tickle, instincts thrumming like live wires. “It likes fence rows, or turned dirt. I’d expect it to be growing near the corral, or on the north side of the barn. There ain’t none there.”

  “So you think this is a setup?”

  “I don’t know what to think, but I don’t like it.”

  A light breeze waved the grass.

  “Nossir, I don’t like this one little bit. Call the sheriff’s office and get us some help out here…” Ned stopped abruptly as the noise of a starting engine cut the quiet. An Impala shot through the weeds from where it was hidden by the barn. “That’s what I thought! We set here so long they got spooked and flushed. Get ‘im, Cody!”

  Without a word, Cody handed Ned the microphone to keep both hands free. He tromped the accelerator and spun the wheel. The Impala already had a running start and was on the decaying road in a flash. A thick cloud of dust boiled from underneath as they shot away.

  Cody fought the wheel, dodging scrub trees and doing his best to avoid the gopher mounds that felt like boulders under the El Camino’s tires. Invisible limbs and rocks rattled against the undercarriage with the sound of shrapnel against metal.

  Ned bounced in the passenger seat as he keyed the microphone and grabbed the dash for support. “Martha, you there!?”

  The sheriff’s department dispatcher and Ned went to school together. “Go ahead Ned.”

  “Me and Cody need some help out here in the army camp. We’re runnin’ down a Chev-a-lay and likely heading for Gate Five.”

  “Okay, Ned. Help’s on the way.”

  Cody hit a high spot and Ned bounced against the ceiling, crushing the Stetson down around his ears. “Son of a bitch!”

  “Hang on, Ned!” They hit the dirt road and punched through the dust cloud left by the fleeing car.

  When the Chevrolet reached the broken asphalt leading toward the highway, it shot away at an angle.

  “What are they doing running deeper into the camp?”

  Cody glanced at the speedometer and was surprised to see the needle rising past seventy. Gravel rattled against the undercarriage. “I bet they know something we don’t. What’s going on?”

  “It was another ambush by them sneaky sonsabitches.” Ned held tightly to the arm rest on the door as Cody jerked into a sharp left. For a moment they were out of the dust with a clear view of the car running ahead. “Them cowards were waitin’ on us!”

  Four men rode two in the front and back. One of the backseat passengers twisted to look out of the open window and Cody had a clear look at him.

  So did Ned. “That’s one of ’em I tangled with in your joint a while back.”

  Cody finished the turn. The car sloughed to the side and they were immediately engulfed in dust once again. He gripped the wheel tightly with both hands. “You sure?”

  “You’re damn right I’m sure. You got close to these boys and they think you know something. I bet you a dollar they’re the ones who shot at you the night you wrecked the car.”

  The Motorola crackled. “Ned, help’s on the way. They’re turning into the camp now.”

  The El Camino bottomed out with a bang, throwing them against the roof once again. Ned threw up an arm against the ceiling.

  Cody grunted at the impact. “What are them buildings up there?”

  Ned’s shoulders were hunched like a turtle pulling back in his shell. “The soldiers called it German Town. They built it to practice fighting in villages during the war.”


  “Looks more like a ghost town to me.”

  The Impala made a hard right and rocketed into the crumbling “streets.” Essentially a movie set composed of false-fronted buildings, twenty years of northeast Texas weather had taken its toll. The movie set streets were full of scrub brush and tall grass. Vines covered many rotting structures and the whole thing was rickety enough to fall over in a strong gust of wind.

  Cody slowed, not wanting to run into the car that suddenly disappeared into a pretend village covering one hundred acres or more. He stopped in a cloud of dust only a few feet inside the artificial town. Warped boards peeled away from disintegrating walls like curls. A gaping window opened onto a parallel street, providing an open sightline through the building and out the other side.

  “Uh uh. Not going in there.”

  “Nope.” Ned agreed. “They’re most likely out of that car and a-waitin’ on us. They tried to lead us into a trap. Back up quick and get us out of here!”

  Cody threw it into reverse and gunned the engine. The back tires spun. They had barely moved when the sharp blast of a rifle shot echoed from building to building. Both men knew it was a large caliber weapon by the heavy thump. Cody threw his arm over the seat and drove by looking over his shoulder, not trusting his ability to back up quickly by using the rear view mirror.

  They found themselves rocketing back down the same dusty road, only in reverse. Another shot rang out, this time from a different weapon and most likely a handgun, then a flurry of scattered bangs chased the fleeing El Camino.

  Ned drew his pistol, wishing he had the shotgun standing in the corner of the living room back home, but he was slung around so fiercely that there was no way to return fire. He needed to save his ammunition, anyway. He only had six extra cartridges in his pocket, in addition to the five loaded in the chambers.

  Cody left his .45 automatic in the holster for the time being. He quickly shifted into neutral, spun the wheel and they made an abrupt 180-degree bootlegger turn. Before the car finished the maneuver, Cody quickly shifted again and the engine roared as the back tires caught traction.