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The Right Side of Wrong Page 8


  “She catches you at it, she’s liable to knock your fool head off.”

  O.C. chuckled. “She hasn’t noticed for the last twenty years. I don’t reckon she’ll pick up on it now.”

  Frenchie stepped up to the pass-through into the kitchen. “Four eggs, scrambled, hash, toast, bacon! Homer’s hungry this morning!”

  Potts the cook shouted from the smoky kitchen. “Comin’ up!”

  The air soon thickened once again with the aroma of frying bacon and mixed with cigar and cigarette smoke hanging low in the air.

  Only half a block from the courthouse, the cafe had been their unofficial meeting place for years. Good coffee, better hamburgers, long, dark, and narrow, it was the perfect place to visit and still keep an eye on who was coming in and out the front door. The counter was once a bar back in Chisum’s wilder days, and the mirror behind shelves full of foodstuffs and advertisements was original to the building’s construction. On good days, the bell over the wooden front door jingled every few minutes.

  The back door without a bell stayed busy as well, but the customers there were colored.

  From Ned’s position in the booth, he could see through the batwing doors and the mostly empty rough lumber tables at that time of the morning. By noon they’d be full of colored men and women laughing, talking, and eating greasy burgers, fries, and thick chicken-fried steaks covered with cream gravy. Frenchie served them the same food as her white customers, only they were required to eat in the back.

  During that busy time, she shut a solid door beyond the batwings to further divide the café, not because she wanted to, but because those in the front demanded it. The Indians from Oklahoma were also expected to eat with the coloreds, and none of it set well with the white constable who was married into a Choctaw family.

  Ned and O.C. sipped their strong, bitter coffee in silence, until Potts thumped a steaming breakfast through the order window. “Homer’s up!”

  “I heard it weren’t Doak we dug up last week,” Ned said.

  “No. That’s a fact. It was a couple of old boys from Red River County moved in to start a new business. Somebody didn’t like it, and they explained their opinion with a thirty-eight.”

  “That’ll do the job.”

  “You don’t reckon Doak had anything to do with it?”

  Instead of answering, Ned noticed dried blood all over the back of the little finger of his left hand. He’d poked a hole in his finger with a piece of bailing wire that morning while he was feeding cows. He wet his right thumb by dipping it into a small water glass on the table and rubbed at the crust. He had to repeat the process twice to get rid of the blood. When he finished, he took several long sips of coffee to rid his mouth of the coppery taste.

  O.C. waited.

  Ned finally seemed surprised he hadn’t yet answered the question. “Why no, Doak’s a lot of things, and he’s a sorry son of a bitch, but he ain’t no killer. Somebody else done for ’em.”

  “Any ideas why?”

  “Nary. Moonshiners don’t usually kill one another. This is something else. It might have been over a woman for all I know.”

  Ned watched John Washington come in out of the alley to get coffee. He waved. The uniformed deputy stepped up to the dividing entrance, but no further. “Mornin’, Mr. Ned. Mr. O.C., I’ll be by directly at your office, if that’s all right.”

  O.C. twisted around at the sound of John’s deep bass voice. “Sure ’nough, I don’t have court ’til one today. Why don’t you come have a seat and let’s talk now?”

  John shook his head with a grin. “I imagine I’ll need to come by the courthouse.” He recalled a few months earlier when he had important information for O.C. and had to come through Frenchie’s front entrance.

  Close to a panic for the first time in his life the day he learned the Skinner’s true identity, John drove to Frenchie’s café hoping to find O.C. having coffee. The Skinner had been spreading terror throughout Lamar County for months, first killing and skinning animals, and then graduating to humans. He finally set his sights on Ned’s family.

  The judge was there all right that afternoon, straddling a stool at the counter. Anxious to the point of carelessness, John nearly jerked the screen door off the hinges on his way in. The white customers bristled at his entrance, and Wilber Meyers, a mechanic at the Ford house and the toughest man on the north side of town, tried to stop John from coming in.

  The big deputy snapped Wilber’s wrist like a matchstick and was drawing the heavy sap from his back pocket when Judge Rains stopped two others who mistakenly thought they could beat John senseless.

  He hadn’t been back through the front door since.

  “Nope.” Ned slid over. “Come set here with us.”

  Obviously uncomfortable, Deputy Washington came in and quickly slid his huge bulk into the booth with his back to the café, as if the giant could be inconspicuous.

  It didn’t work.

  Several of the café’s customers frowned at his entrance. “Damn niggers.” Two men in greasy coveralls threw money on the counter in disgust and left.

  John took off his Stetson, but there was no place on the table for it. He started to lay it beside one of the dirty plates when a slim hand appeared and took it from him. Frenchie placed it upside down on the counter, beside those belonging to Ned and O.C. They always put their own Stetsons there to block customers from taking the two empty stools beside their booth.

  It allowed them to talk without someone sitting close and listening.

  Frenchie set a thick white mug in front of John and returned to her counter. He ran a thick index finger through the mug’s handle with barely any room to spare. His broad face widened in a soft grin. From behind the counter, Frenchie gave him one in return.

  Daring anyone to say a word, O.C. glared down the length of the café through the cigarette and bacon smoke. The remaining customers focused their attention back to what they were doing, but the café’s buzz became ominous. “What did you have to see me about?”

  Instead of immediately answering, John glanced to the side to see how close the nearest customer might be. Ned noticed the collar of his shirt was worn through after years of scrubbing.

  Keeping his back to the café, John rested his meaty forearms on the table that groaned slightly under his weight. “I picked a feller up at Sugar Bear’s last night and took him to jail. He was drunk, but there was something else not right about him. His eyes was funny, and when I checked his car, the trunk was full of marywana.”

  “I knew that stuff was gonna make its way down here for good,” Ned said.

  O.C. grunted. “Well, it’s here all right. Mostly they’re finding one of them funny cigarettes every now and then. Except for them bales you found a while back under the creek bridge, Ned, I don’t think I’ve seen much more than a pinch of the stuff at one time.”

  “I’ve been seeing it here and there.” He ran a hand over his bald head. “But I haven’t needed to take anyone to jail over it.”

  O.C. knew Ned’s penchant for dealing with issues on his own. More times than either of them could count, Ned had the opportunity to arrest young people for their stupidity, but instead, he sent them home with a stern lecture and the threat of jail the next time they jumped the fence.

  Late one night in particular, Ned answered a call about a group of men shooting dice behind Oak Peterson’s store. He parked his car a distance away and eased through the darkness, hearing muffled laughter and the sound of bets going down. When he peeked around the corner of the store, a huddle of young men near the opposite corner were shooting dice by the glow of a pole light.

  Ned stepped into view and lit them with the flashlight in his hand. The other rested on the butt of his revolver. “All right boys, everybody set still.”

  All eight men jumped in alarm, then settled back when they recognized Ned’s voice beh
ind the light.

  “Damn! Ned, you ’bout scared us to death!”

  “Howdy, Uncle Ned.”

  He was startled to realize all eight of the crapshooters were kinfolk. He shook his head in disgust, recognizing nephews, cousins and one brother-in-law. “If this don’t beat all.”

  “You gonna take us in?”

  “I ought to, because this is the sorriest bunch of peckerheads I’ve seen in a long time.”

  He didn’t arrest any of them, but for the next three months every ditch and fence row he pointed out in Center Springs, and every yard owned by a widow woman, was mowed and trimmed to his approval. He hadn’t caught any of them shooting dice since.

  John blew across his coffee and took a careful sip. Hot and sweet. “Well, I dug around some more and found out them killin’s at the still might have something to do with this stuff. The story around our joints is them two been cookin’ whiskey both in Red River County and across the river for a while, but was run off Little River by some boys who was starting to grow marywana up there.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “Nossir, Mr. O.C., I don’t. All that’s hearsay, and a couple of them folks don’t rightly tell the whole truth all the time.”

  “Lyin’ don’t know no color.” O.C. held up his near empty mug for a refill.

  “Ain’t that the truth? Anyways, he said they was a bunch workin’ for some white boy with big muscles who sold it to him. They offered him a job to deliver it over to another feller in Sugar Bear’s parking lot. If he did a good job, they’d give him a full-time job shippin’ it up here from the Valley, and that it was coming through Chisum.”

  “What does this have to do with them boys we dug up?”

  “A lot.”

  John paused when Frenchie appeared at the booth, popping her gum and giving them all a big grin. “Breakfast is over. Y’all want some pie? Fresh made.”

  “Sure do.” O.C. watched her refilling the other mugs. “I’ll have peach, if you got it.”

  “You’ll get what I bring you.” She winked and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Them two was making their shine too close to a marywana crop up there in Oklahoma. This top feller was settin’ up his own business by growin’ it in the woods up there, but he intends to get a pipeline goin’ from the Valley on somebody else’s dime, and then undercut them with his own supply. I reckon the shiners might have seen more than was healthy for them. They left and hadn’t no more than set up shop on the creek, when they was killed.”

  “Burying them right there don’t make no sense,” O.C. said. “Somebody was sure to find the still and kick around like y’all did until they ran across the grave.”

  “Maybe that’s what they wanted,” Ned suggested. “For them to be found, but after a while, when them who had been driving up and down the roads was forgot. It was a warning, and a finish to what they’d started across the river.”

  “And what they wanted to finish with Cody.” Ned still couldn’t figure how the ambush fit in, but he was sure they were connected and it was getting to him.

  “They only problem was who’s livin’ on the road.” John sipped the steaming coffee and didn’t even flinch at the hot liquid. “I’ve said it before. Folks look like y’all don’t hardly notice my people, less they want something, or they’re looking to pick ’em up. I went back and visited with one of them families we passed going in. The one y’all gave me some money for. They remember the car, and the men driving it. They described ’em to me. The same big muscled-up feller that wears shades, and one of ’em sounded like…” John checked over his shoulder again. “One of ’em sounded like J.T. Boone.”

  “Why, he’s a deputy.”

  “Yessir, but he ain’t always smelled right to me.”

  “But no one’s spoke his name?”

  “Nossir, that’s why I’m-a tellin’ you right now.”

  Ned and O.C. exchanged glances across the booth.

  “All right, then.” O.C. drummed his fingers on the table. “Y’all keep looking, and we’ll see what we find. But be careful. Anybody who’d kill two men and bury ’em for what they know ain’t nobody to trifle with.”

  Frenchie arrived at the table, balancing three thick slices of pie. John held up both hands. “No ma’am. Not for me, but thanks anyway.”

  “Go ahead on, John.”

  “Mr. O.C., I might come in here from time to time, and I might have coffee with y’all back here in the back booth, but eatin’ is a whole ’nother thing. Miss Frenchie, can I have one of them slices of coconut in the back?”

  Her eyes crinkled as she grinned at John. She slapped the other two plates between Ned and the judge. “Sure enough, hon, and it’s on the house.”

  John nodded goodbye and slid out of the booth. Ned reached out for the last slice of coconut pie. O.C. snorted and stared miserably downward. “I don’t even like cherry.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Ned left Chisum and drove across the Red River to Juarez. The people who tried to kill Cody nearly three full months ago were still running loose, and Ned intended to find out who they were and why they wanted him dead. Nothing happens in small country communities without someone knowing about it. He learned long ago there’s always a leak, and all it takes to find that leak is to poke around for a while until someone says something of interest or lets something slip.

  A word or two might lead to another source, an individual with a small scrap of information that led to still another scrap until he was able to piece together a complete quilt. He’d done so over a hundred times throughout his long career as constable of Precinct 3.

  Juarez, nicknamed after the border town south of the Rio Grande, was a scattered settlement of stark cinder-block honky-tonks on the north bank of the river in Oklahoma, only five miles from Center Springs. Positioned to the right of the highway, across the bridge that marked the state line, Cody’s squatty joint was smack in the middle of several dives with sawdust floors, financed by generations of hard-drinking, hard-fighting men who worked a variety of jobs twenty-five miles along either side of the river bottoms.

  The rough joints were magnets for trouble. Men were beaten or sometimes killed in the dirt parking lots amid haphazardly-parked cars, or inside the ugly buildings themselves, where sawdust covered the filthy floors and soaked up the blood spilled in fights and cuttings that happened nearly every weekend.

  Of course Ned was out of his jurisdiction in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t the first time he’d crossed over to investigate Texas crimes. A river dividing the states didn’t do a thing to keep criminals on one side or the other. Ned was seven years of age when Oklahoma was still considered Indian Territory, and a lawman uncle told him it was a well-known fact that a man could get killed quick as lightning once he crossed the river.

  Lamar Country residents cut their teeth on stories of outlaws and Indians who fought, hid out, and died up in the rough, lawless territories. Ned, whose family ties reached back to Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, the famous Comanche warrior, had long ago lost count of the men he helped arrest in Oklahoma towns as far north as Tulsa.

  He killed the engine in front of The Sportsman’s Lounge and listened to the sedan’s hood tick as it cooled. Against the advice of his family, Cody bought the bar right after he came home from Vietnam only eighteen months earlier, but kept it after he was elected constable.

  Few constables could live on what the county paid.

  Ned farmed. Cody ran a joint.

  He considered taking his shotgun in, but since he wasn’t after any specific person and it was full daylight, Ned settled for the .38 on his hip and the little star pinned onto his shirt pocket. The pump twelve meant business, and he wasn’t in that particular mood right then.

  The jukebox was blaring a new Buck Owens song about having a tiger by the tail when Ned stepped through the metal door into th
e dim, smoky interior. He moved to the right so he wouldn’t be silhouetted in the bright doorway.

  Ned waited as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  A dozen men were scattered in the smoke-filled room that reeked of spilled beer, stale cigarettes, and unwashed bodies. One was so drunk he could barely lift his head.

  Low-wattage fixtures and colorful neon lights advertising Jax, Hamms, and Miller Highlife flickered behind the bar and on the walls.

  Bar hounds were always easy to identify, in Ned’s opinion. Greasy hair, khaki pants, cigarettes rolled into t-shirt sleeves or bulging the pockets of western snap shirts, and scuffed brogans were common.

  Faces always registered their time spent drinking. Eyes wrinkled and squinted by cigarette smoke gave them a sorry look that said they had no use for anything or anyone outside the joint.

  Nothing felt right from the moment Ned walked in, and it raised goose bumps on the back of his neck.

  The bartender glanced at the Texas constable, and then cut his eyes to the only guy in the honky-tonk wearing a flattop.

  Bulging with muscles, the man wore a tight western shirt with the sleeves rolled over thick forearms. He slipped on a pair of dark shades before crossing his arms over a massive chest in both a challenge and a show of indifference to the constable’s presence.

  Two customers at the bar watched the mirror behind the bartender to check who was coming in. Recognizing Ned, they returned to their half-finished beers. Leaning back in a chair behind them was Philip Fuller, a no’count who lived in Garrett’s Bluff, west of Center Springs. At least four times in the past two years, Ned had arrested Philip for drunk driving, trying to get home through Center Springs after spending all his money there in Juarez.

  Philip glared at the constable for a long moment before thumping his chair down on all four legs and wrapping both hands around a sweating can of beer. He ran shaky fingers through black Vitalis-slick hair before breaking eye contact.

  Ned didn’t recognize Philip’s companion, or most of the other men sprinkled around the tables. They watched Ned from the corners of their eyes.