The Maggody Militia Read online

  “I am going to the deer camp to catch him in the act of fornication.” She climbed into the four-wheel and shook a finger at him. “Fornication is a sin, and so is bearing false witness. You might step inside the Voice of the Almighty Assembly Hall and beg for forgiveness.”

  “Good idea,” said Roy. He watched her drive away, then walked down the road toward his antiques store, thinking maybe it was time to take up deep-sea fishing.

  “I got your message,” I said to McBeen as soon as he answered the phone. I’d considered driving into Farberville to talk to him at the morgue, but it seemed like things were heating up rapidly here in my own stompin’ ground. “Nicotine poisoning, right?”

  “I wouldn’t have said so if it wasn’t.”

  “Then tell me about it,” I said.

  “Nicotine has a rating of six on the toxicity scale, which is the top. That’s a frightening statistic, since it’s a legal pesticide and readily available at any garden store. There was a case awhile back when a man soaked some cigarettes in a jug of water, strained it, and used it to make iced tea for his bedridden wife. She died in a matter of days. Absorption through the skin or eye doesn’t take near that long. Based on the witnesses’ accounts, the victim in this case was sitting up one minute and dead ten minutes later.”

  “That’s what they all claimed,” I said. “Could there have been nicotine on the bullet?”

  “The state lab says not. I’ve got the body on the table, and we’ll go over every inch of it for evidence of penetration. You might ought to have another talk with the other boy who was there.”

  “He’s not available at the moment.” I listened to him snorting impatiently while I thought. “Here’s something that may help, McBeen,” I added. “The victim was facing the bluff when he got shot in the shoulder. I can’t see Kevin being implicated in the poisoning, so you probably should roll the body over and take a look at the backside.”

  After I’d hung up, I found the notes I’d taken while interviewing Jake Milliford, the only one of the witnesses who’d said he could see Dylan. He’d claimed Dylan stood up and turned around; then Kevin jumped up seconds before the rifle was fired. It seemed likely Kevin had reacted to something more significant than a squirrel breaking into chatter, but since he wasn’t around to discuss it, I’d have to settle for the less-than-lovable Jake.

  The telephone rang before I could make it out the door. I doubted McBeen had discovered anything in a scant minute, but I crossed my fingers for luck and picked up the receiver.

  “Arly!” said Eileen, her voice jolting my eardrum. “I’m over at Kevin and Dahlia’s house.”

  So the old cross-the-fingers business does work, I thought smugly. “So they’re back?”

  “No, but I found out where Dahlia is. I stopped at Raz’s shack to ask him if he’d noticed anything out of the ordinary.” She took a shuddery breath. “Dahlia showed up on his porch last night and insisted that he drive her to the low-water bridge. She wanted him to help her search for Kevin up on the ridge, but he dropped her out there and left.”

  “Oh, boy,” I said as Eileen began to cry. “Calm down, okay? I’ll go out there right now and see what’s going on. She may be doing nothing more than sitting on Estelle’s porch.”

  “It’s nearly noon. If she hasn’t had anything to eat since last night, her blood sugar must be way out of control by now. What if she’s lying in the woods in a diabetic coma?”

  “I’m on my way out the door,” I said. “As soon as I find her, I’ll take her to the hospital so they can make sure she’s okay. Stay there and I’ll call you the minute I get the chance.”

  I banged down the receiver and ran out to my car, but as I started to pull out onto the road, I realized there was no way I could drive very far up onto Cotter’s Ridge without tearing off the bottom of the car. I sure as hell couldn’t park at the low-water bridge, go on foot to find her, and then carry all three hundred plus pounds of her back down.

  “Shit!” I said, shaking the steering wheel as I tried to think. It would take at least an hour to borrow a Jeep from the sheriff’s department compound, and with Harve out of pocket, possibly the rest of the day. Jim Bob had taken his four-wheel to the deer camp, so I couldn’t appropriate it (it would have been fun, though).

  I was grinding my teeth, when a lightbulb went on between my ears. I turned toward the Flamingo Motel, and slammed down the accelerator. When I squealed into the lot, Les came tumbling out of his car, his hand on the holster of his weapon and his expression that of someone expecting the arrival of Bonnie and Clyde. I waved him off and pounded on the door of #5.

  “What now, Chief Hanks?” said Sterling as he opened the door.

  “I need to borrow your Hummer,” I said.

  “Don’t be absurd. You have brazenly trampled all over my constitutional rights, but this time you’ve gone too far. The Fourth Amendment specifically prohibits illegal search and seizure. I insist on a warrant.”

  I forced myself to calm down and gave him a somewhat garbled explanation of the crisis, mentioning several times that he and the other members of the militia were directly responsible for the chain of events. I tossed in some malarkey about his personal liability should anything dire happen to Kevin, Dahlia, or their unborn baby.

  When he glanced over my shoulder, I turned around and saw Jake, Judy, and Barry in the doorway of #3, and Reed out on the walkway.

  “All of you will be sued,” I shouted as if I knew what I was talking about. “You’ll lose your houses, vehicles, machine guns, bazookas, torpedo launchers—and your goddamn paint pistols! What’s more, you could face charges of—of criminal negligence!”

  I really must go to law school one of these days.

  “All right,” said Sterling, “but I’ll drive. Let me get my coat and the key.”

  Having used up my allotment of adrenaline, I slumped against the wall. Barry came over and said, “Do you know for a fact that this woman is up there?”

  “No,” I admitted, making a face as I thought about the vast labyrinth of logging trails throughout the hundreds of acres comprising Cotter’s Ridge. “She should have been able to find the place where Dylan was shot, though, and she can’t have gone too far past it.”

  “Do you want me to come along?”

  “Maybe you should,” I said. “Sterling and I might not be able to lift her into the Hummer. Can you get some blankets and pillows out of your room?”

  Sterling came outside and unlocked the Hummer. As soon as Barry reappeared with a blanket and a pillow, the three of us managed to climb into the monstrosity. Don’t assume I’m a wimp; the first step was a good two feet above the ground.

  “Where precisely are we going?” asked Sterling as he drove out to the road.

  I rubbed my temples. “We need to stop at Kayleen’s and Estelle’s houses in case she’s there. If she’s not …” I studied the dashboard, which was pretty mundane for a tank. “Can you drive this thing to the spot where Dylan was shot?”

  “I can climb a sixty-percent grade,” Sterling said gruffly. “The sides of the gully, however, are much steeper than that. We could attempt to use the winch, but it might take several hours.”

  I’d forgotten about the damn gully. “There are some logging trails around there. We can drive up the one west of the area and fan out from there.”

  “You should have had Jake and Reed come along,” Barry said from the backseat.

  “To do that,” I said, choosing my words, “I’d have been compelled to bring my gun and two of my bullets, because at some point I would be unable to stop myself from shooting them. This means I’d have only one bullet left. Maggody may be a one-horse town, but plenty of jackasses come through.”

  “I resent that,” said Sterling.

  “It’s good to know you’re paying attention,” I said, then pointed out Estelle’s Hair Fantasies on the right.

  The house was locked and the garage empty. We went back to the old Wockermann place, where we found s
ome muddy tracks that were still damp, but no sign of Dahlia. I told Sterling how to get to the logging road, then rolled down the window and called Dahlia’s name as we crunched up the mountainside.

  “This thing’s like a tyrannosaurus,” I yelled above the grinding and groaning of the engine. “The sheriff ought to get one for his marijuana busts.”

  Sterling glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “He’d better stick to generic four-wheel drives. The taxpayers might object to the fifty-five-thousand-dollar price tag.”

  I was calculating our location when I saw Estelle’s station wagon. I gestured to Sterling to go around it and continue up the hill to a painfully familiar Stump County landmark—Robin Buchanon’s shack. It ranks right up there with the Washington Monument in Maggodian folklore, from fairly recent events all the way back to the beginning of the century, when Robin’s great-grandpappy shot a revenuer and disappeared onto the ridge with his common-law wife and twelve feral children.

  Barry tapped me on the shoulder. “We’ve gone too far. The bluff’s back that way.”

  “No, we haven’t,” I said with a grimace. “I just didn’t realize how close we were. I may not know what’s going on, but I know exactly where it’s going on.”

  Neither he nor Sterling looked particularly convinced by my remark, but we bounced up the road and into the expanse of weeds in front of the shack. Ruby Bee came out the door before I could drop to the ground.

  “Thank goodness you found us,” she said. “The pains are coming every two minutes, and Dahlia snarls something awful when any of us gets too close. Kayleen offered to examine her, but—”

  “Kayleen’s here?” I said.

  “Yes, and Estelle. We were chasing after the ostriches, but—”

  “Ostriches?” said Sterling.

  Ruby Bee shrugged. “Sixty thousand dollars is sixty thousand dollars, even when it hisses, but—”

  “When it hisses at you?” said Barry, having politely waited to take his turn.

  I held up my hand. “Why don’t we sort through this later? Can Dahlia hang on for another forty minutes?” I asked Ruby Bee.

  “How should I know? I suppose you’d better ask her, or Kayleen, anyway. She knows more about birthing than the rest of us.”

  We all went into the cabin and formed a huddle by the door. Kayleen, who’d been sitting on the floor at a prudent distance from Dahlia, scrabbled to her feet and clutched my arm. “There’s something wrong, but I don’t know what. We’ve got to get her to a hospital.”

  “I ain’t going nowhere without Kevvie!” Dahlia howled, then moaned and began to make peculiar noises, as if her lungs had been punctured.

  “Forty minutes, minimum,” I said to Kayleen.

  “Then let’s go.”

  I knelt next to Dahlia, whose face was thick with sweat and alarmingly white. “Kevin’s waiting for you at the hospital, along with Earl and Eileen. Can you walk, or do we need to carry you?”

  “I reckon I can walk.”

  Kayleen and I hung onto Dahlia’s massive arms as we all moved outside. Ruby Bee and Estelle brought the remains of the corncob-filled mattress and spread it out in the back of the Hummer. Halfway across the yard, Dahlia stopped and went through the “ha-ha-ha-hoo!” pattern, but eventually announced she was ready to go on—as long as Kevvie was waitin’ for her.

  I mumbled something, and while she was being settled in the back of the Hummer, asked Sterling for his car phone.

  He stuck out his jaw. “Will I be reimbursed for the cost of the call?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, then called Eileen, told her what was happening, and suggested she and Earl meet us at the hospital. In response to her question, I conceded that no one had seen Kevin.

  “Leave a note for him,” I added. “He’s liable to show up at any moment.”

  “Do you really think so?” Eileen said.

  By this time I would have lied to Mother Teresa, so I didn’t have any problem assuring her that as sure as God made little green apples, he would. I replaced the phone, did a nose count to make sure everybody was in the Hummer, and gestured imperiously to its driver.

  We careened down the logging road like a boulder in an avalanche and took off for Farberville. Sterling must have been worried about the effect a birth might have on the back floor of the Hummer, because he passed everything on the road, including a state police car.

  This had an impact on the decibel level, which already was high. Dahlia alternated between panting and demanding to know where Kevin had been all this time. Ruby Bee and Estelle squealed every time Sterling swung into the oncoming traffic lane. Kayleen was forced to shout her encouragement to be heard. The addition of the siren and flashing lights added to the excitement.

  I leaned toward Sterling and said, “Pull over and I’ll tell the trooper what’s going on.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied, honking the horn until a chicken truck edged toward the shoulder. “There’s no time to waste. I’m not admitting any culpability should the delivery have been jeopardized, but people have been sued for the most idiotic things. One of my policy owners threatened to sue me because he thought his policy protected him from getting in an accident, so therefore it was safe for him to disregard the speed limit.”

  Somehow or other, we arrived at the emergency room entrance without running over any pedestrians or Japanese imports. The state trooper was out of his car before I could get inside to find a nurse.

  “Emergency!” I shouted at him, then pushed through the glass door, grabbed the first person I saw in a white uniform, and explained the situation.

  “Two minutes apart?” she said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean the baby’s coming any second. Can the expectant mother walk?”

  “She might need a wheelchair,” I said, then went back outside as Earl and Eileen drove up. The tailgate had been opened. Dahlia was still lying on the remains of the mattress, her lips pumping away. A crowd was gathering, either in response to the flashing lights and sirens, or to the massive bulk of the Hummer.

  The state trooper had pretty much figured out what was going on, but he wasn’t happy. “Why didn’t you pull over?” he asked me. “You could have gotten yourselves and a lot of innocent bystanders killed.”

  “I suggested it, but the driver was caught up in the melodrama of the moment.”

  The trooper shrugged. “Yeah, it happens. What the hell is this thing?”

  I aimed him at Sterling, watched a pair of orderlies load Dahlia into a wheelchair, and joined Earl and Eileen. “She and the baby will be fine,” I said. “The doctor will have her blood sugar tested and get it up to where it needs to be. The rest just sort of happens, so I’ve been told.”

  Eileen had Dahlia’s overnight bag in one hand. She looked down at it and sighed. “I hope so.”

  “What about Kevin?” asked Earl.

  Dahlia smacked at the orderlies until they backed away from the wheelchair, then looked up at me. “Kevvie ain’t really here, is he?”

  “I’ll do everything possible to find him and get him here before the baby comes,” I said.

  “I found a clue while I was in the woods,” she said, digging around in her pocket. She thrust a wadded piece of paper at me. “This proves Kevvie was there.”

  I took her offering. “We didn’t really have a chance to search for him. I’ll go back and comb the ridge all night, if necessary.”

  “I’m comin’ with you,” said Earl. “The women can keep Eileen company in the waiting room.”

  I went over to Sterling, who was explaining all the features of the Hummer to a large group composed of orderlies, bloodied and battered people waiting to be attended to in the emergency room, and the trooper. “Are you up for a real-life paramilitary exercise?”

  Chapter 17

  I was thinking how best to organize my very own Maggody militia when Kevin crashed into the rear end of the Hummer in his 1970s vintage car. None of us quite knew what to say, so what ensued might best be described
as a stunned silence.

  Dahlia rallied first. “Kevvie!” she screamed. “Where have you been? Doncha know I’m having the baby?”

  He staggered out of the car, wiped a trickle of blood off his forehead, smiled at her, and collapsed on the pavement. It was not a pretty sight.

  There was a great to-do as a gurney was brought out and Kevin and Dahlia were wheeled away. Eileen and Earl were as agitated as fleas on a poodle, but followed the orderlies inside. The crowd, having gotten more than its collective money’s worth, drifted away to treat or be treated, depending on their roles in the overall scheme of the emergency room. Ruby Bee and Estelle had scurried after Eileen, which left me with Sterling, Barry, and Kayleen.

  “You might as well go on back to the motel,” I told them. “Thanks for what you did today.”

  Sterling squared his shoulders as if awaiting presentation of the Congressional Medal of Honor. “It was the least we could do, Chief Hanks. We do not despise the government, but merely resent the perverted direction it has taken since its original founders took it upon themselves to—”

  “Can it,” I said, “and market it as chicken noodle shit.”

  This, for obvious reasons, was not well received and the three climbed into the Hummer and drove away. I went into the emergency room, where Earl, Eileen, Estelle, and Ruby Bee were standing in a corner, conversing in low voices.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Eileen stepped forward and said, “Dahlia’s been admitted to the maternity ward, and Kevin’s being seen to down here. I’m sure he’ll be allowed to join her once his cut has been stitched up. I think he just banged his head when he hit the Hummer.”

  I took in the paleness of their faces. “You all go to the cafeteria and get some coffee, then go up to the waiting room on the maternity floor. I’ll make sure Kevin gets to Dahlia’s bedside.”

  Once they’d departed in the elevator, I went through another set of doors and down a corridor, poking my head into curtained cubicles in search of my quarry.

  He was sitting on the gurney, wan but gaining color and holding a gauze pad to his forehead. He waved at me as I came around the corner, and said, “How’s Dahlia doing?”