rearview mirror. He had the accelerator pressed to the floor but the Pontiac would do no more than forty and it was all over the road. On the radio Larry Underwood had been replaced by Madonna. Madonna was asserting that she was a material girl.
The Ford swung around the Bonneville and for one second of crystal hope the photographer thought it was going to keep right on going, to just disappear over the desolate horizon and let him alone.
Then it pulled back in, and the Pontiac’s wildly jittering nose caught its mudguard. There was a scream of pulling metal. The photographer’s head flew forward into the wheel and blood sprayed from his nose.
Throwing terrified, creaky-necked glances back over his shoulder, he slid across the warm plastic seat as if it were grease and got out on the passenger’s side. He ran down the shoulder. There was a barbed wire fence and he leaped over it, sailing up and up like a blimp, and he thought:
He fell down on the other side with his leg caught in the barbs. Screaming at the sky, he was still trying to free his pants and dimpled white flesh when the two young men came down the shoulder with their guns in their hands.
Why, he tried to ask them, but all that came out of him was a low and helpless squawk and then his brains exited the back of his head.
There was no published report of disease or any other trouble in Sipe Springs, Texas, that day.
Chapter 18
Nick opened the door between Sheriff Baker’s office and the jail cells and they started razzing him right off. Vincent Hogan and Billy Warner were in the two Saltine-box cells on Nick’s left. Mike Childress was in one of the two on the right. The other was empty and it was empty because Ray Booth, he of the purple LSU fraternity ring, had flown the coop.
“Hey, dummy!” Childress called. “Hey, you fuckin dummy! What’s gonna happen to you when we get outta here? Huh? What the fuck’s gonna happen to you?”
“I’m personally gonna rip your balls off and stuff em down your throat until you strangle on em,” Billy Warner told him. “You understand me?”
Only Vince Hogan didn’t participate in the razzing. Mike and Billy didn’t have too much use for him on this day, June 23, when they were to be taken up to the Calhoun County seat and jugged pending trial. Sheriff Baker had leaned on Vince and Vince had spilled his yellow guts. Baker had told Nick he could get an indictment against these ole boys, but when it got to a jury trial, it was going to be Nick’s word against these three—four, if they picked up Ray Booth.
Nick had gained a healthy respect for Sheriff John Baker these last couple of days. He was a two-hundred- and-fifty-pound ex-farmer who was predictably called Big Bad John by his constituents. The respect Nick felt for him was not because Baker had given him this job swamping out the holding area to make up for his lost week’s pay, but because he had gone after the men who had beaten and robbed Nick. He had done it as if Nick were a member of one of the oldest and most respected families in town instead of just a deaf-mute drifter. There were plenty of sheriffs here in the border South, Nick knew, who would have seen him on a work farm or roadgang for six months instead.
They had driven out to the sawmill where Vince Hogan worked, taking Baker’s private car, a Power Wagon, instead of the county prowler car. There was a shotgun under the dash (“Always locked up and always loaded,” Baker said) and a bubble light Baker put on the dash when he was on police business. He put it up there when they swung into the lumberyard parking area, two days ago now. Baker had hawked, spat out the window, blew his nose, and dabbed at his red eyes with a handkerchief. His voice had acquired a nasal foghorn quality. Nick couldn’t hear it, of course, but he didn’t need to. It was clear enough that the man had a nasty cold.
“Now, when we see him, I’ll grab him by the arm,” Baker said. “I’ll ask you, ‘Is this one of em?’ You give me a big nod yes. I don’t care if it was or not. You just nod. Get it?”
Nick nodded. He got it.
Vince was working the board planer, feeding rough planks into the machine, standing in sawdust almost to the top of his workboots. He gave John Baker a nervous smile, and his eyes flicked uneasily to Nick standing beside the sheriff. Nick’s face was thin and battered and still too pale.
“Hi, Big John, what you doin out with the workin folk?”
The other men in the crew were watching all this, their eyes shifting gravely from Nick to Vince to Baker and then back the other way like men watching some complicated new version of tennis. One of them spat a stream of Honey Cut into the fresh sawdust and wiped off his chin with the heel of his hand.
Baker grabbed Vince Hogan by one flabby, sunburned arm and pulled him forward.
“Hey! What’s the idea, Big John?”
Baker turned his head so Nick could see his lips. “Is this one of em?”
Nick nodded firmly, and pointed at Vince for good measure.
“What
“Then how come you know he’s a dummy? Come on, Vince, you’re going to the cooler. Toot-sweet. You can send one of these boys to get your toothbrush.”
Protesting, Vince was led to the Power Wagon and deposited inside. Protesting, he was taken back to town. Protesting, he was locked up and left to stew for a couple of hours. Baker didn’t bother with reading him his rights. “Damn fool’d just get confused,” he told Nick. When Baker went back around noon, Vince was too hungry and too scared to do any more protesting. He just spilled everything.
Mike Childress was in the jug by one o’clock, and Baker got Billy Warner at his house just as Billy was packing up his old Chrysler to go someplace—along piece from the look of all the packed liquor-store boxes and strapped- together luggage. But somebody had talked to Ray Booth, and Ray had been just smart enough to move a little quicker.
Baker took Nick home to meet his wife and have some supper. In the car Nick wrote on the memo pad: “I am sure sorry it’s her brother. How is she taking it?”
“She’s bearing up,” Baker said, both his voice and the set of his body almost formal. “I guess she’s done some crying over him, but she knew what he was. And she knows you can’t pick your relatives like you do your friends.”
Jane Baker was a small, pretty woman who had indeed been crying. Looking at her deeply socketed eyes made Nick uncomfortable. But she shook his hand warmly and said; “I’m pleased to know you, Nick. And I apologize deeply for your trouble. I feel responsible, with one of mine being a part of it and all.”
Nick shook his head and shuffled his feet awkwardly.
“I offered him a job around the place,” Baker said. “Station’s gone right to hell since Bradley moved up to Little Rock. Painting and picking up, mostly. He’s gonna have to stick around for a while anyway—for the… you know.”
“The trial, yes,” she said.
There was a moment then in which the silence was so heavy even Nick found it painful.
Then, with forced gaiety, she said, “I hope you eat redeye ham, Nick. That’s what there is, along with some corn and a big bowl of slaw. My slaw’s never been up to what his mother used to make. That’s what
Nick rubbed his stomach and smiled.
Over dessert (a strawberry shortcake—Nick, who had been on short rations during the last couple of weeks, had two helpings), Jane Baker said to her husband: “Your cold sounds worse. You’ve been taking too much on, John Baker. And you didn’t eat enough to keep a fly alive.”
Baker looked guiltily at his plate for a moment, then shrugged. “I can afford to miss a meal now and then,” he said, and palpated his double chin.
Nick, watching them, wondered how two people of such radically different size got along in bed. I guess they manage, he thought with an interior grin. They sure look comfortable enough with each other. And not that it’s any of my business anyway.
“You’re flushed, too. You carrying a fever?”
Baker shrugged. “Nope… well. Maybe a touch.”
“Well, you’re not going out again tonight. That’s final.”
“My dear, I have prisoners. If they don’t specially need to be watched, they
