Bound by Mystery Page 2

  Miss Opal May and Red had only been married about a year and they were the talk of our little community, which liked a good gossip. She was pretty as a picture, her hair cut short and parted in the middle. I overheard Mama and Daddy through the screen door one day when they didn’t know I was on the porch and listening, and he called her a gold digger, whatever that was.

  Miss Opal May and Leon were close to the same age and they were acting like kids, laughing and nudging one another. Leon had on a pair of new Buster Brown shoes and he kept moving them around on the hard dirt floor beside their feed box seat like he was nervous. He probably was, if he’d gotten a good look at Red.

  I wondered why he didn’t just skedaddle out of there, but I guess the way Opal May was cuttin’ her eyes at him held Leon like a fly in a web. She reached up and smoothed a wavy strand that had slipped free of Leon’s hair oil.

  At the same time, Bob Wills finally hollered in the middle of the song. “Aw, shoot low, Sheriff, I think she’s ridin’ a Shetland, aw yes!”

  Everyone clapped and whooped except for Red Devlin who stomped past, stiff and mad. His eyes were hard like glass. He had a big chew tucked in one cheek and brown juice leaked from the corner of his mouth. The leak wasn’t because he was mad. Red always was a nasty chewer. “Leon!”

  The folks around them watched and I could tell they expected something.

  “What’s up, Red?”

  Devlin crossed his arms and spat a long brown stream onto the ground. “I don’t want you sitting there.” His voice was juicy.

  Leon rubbed his feet back and forth, gouging two small trenches. “We’re just talkin’, Red.”

  “And dancin’. I saw you. You get on somewheres else.”

  “I didn’t do nothin’.” Leon kept moving his legs all nervous an’ all, and I glanced down at my bare feet, thinkin’ that if I had a shiny pair of brand new shoes I sure wouldn’t be rubbin’ them in dirt full of dried cow shit and piss.

  Bob Wills hollered again and the folks that weren’t close by laughed and clapped.

  Red licked his lips and waved his hand upward. “Quit diggin’ holes in my barn floor with them fancy shoes of your’n. Get up f’m ’ere!”

  Opal May gave Leon’s arm a pat and batted her eyes. “Red, it’s all right for him to sit with me.”

  Leon cocked his head and didn’t look up at Red like I would have if he’d been mad at me. “I ain’t hurt’n nothin’ here.”

  “Get up, I said!” Red spit again, then used one finger to dig out his chew. He flipped it away, sucked through his nose and spit between them.

  I heard Milburn draw in his breath. It was the same thing boys did in the school yard when they were fixin’ to fight.

  The gob barely missed Leon’s shoe. He glanced up and winked. “Make me.”

  The couples standing around us backed up when Red reached up and snatched a hay hook from where it was hanging on a support post. “By God, I will!”

  You wouldn’t believe how fast things happened after that. Red charged in at the same time Leon stood up. Red swung hard with that heavy metal hook and caught him a lick on the cheek with the curved side. It knocked Leon back against the plank wall. That aged oak was like steel and his head thudded against it. Red was on him after that, slamming him in the face and head so fast, it looked like he was beating a tom-tom.

  I couldn’t believe how quickly he moved for a guy his age, but he was hard and strong from working dawn to dark every day. He’d hit Leon half a dozen times and made a backswing that buried the sharp tip of the hay hook in Leon’s skull before some of the men pulled him off. By that time blood was everywhere and Leon’s face had already turned black. His eyes rolled up in his head and his arms and legs were twitching like he was having a fit.

  Constable Pines came in from outside and slapped a pair of cuffs on Red and threw him into the backseat of his Chevrolet. By the time he got back inside, Leon was dead and folks was cryin’ and carrying on.

  Bob Wills and his Playboys packed it up and left at the same time Mama grabbed me and we headed for our truck. Daddy, who’d helped some of the men put Leon in the back of a pickup to take him to town, had blood on his starched khakis when he got in the car. Neither one of them said a word all the way home.

  Once we got in the house, he stopped to wash his hands in the dishpan. Mama latched the screen and locked the wooden door for the first time since I could remember. “Go to bed, son.”

  I knew better than to argue. It was so warm I just slid under the sheet and laid still so the springs under my cotton mattress wouldn’t squeak. The house was completely silent.

  They finally started talking and I heard Mama’s voice loud and clear, even though they were talking soft. “I swear, I don’t know how Red got so mad over his wife shinin’ up to Leon. Him and everybody else in Coffeeville knows she only married him for his money.”

  “Jealousy turned bloody pretty fast, that’s for sure,” Daddy said. “It’s a mystery to me why he didn’t just run her off, instead of killing that boy. He just lost his mind.”

  Mama’s voice caught. “Did you see the look on her face?”

  “Sure did. Her eyes were lit up like a kid at Christmas. Red’ll get the chair for murder and with him gone, she has the whole farm. She’ll be set for life, because he runs half the land in these bottoms.”

  “You really believe that’s what she wants?”

  The kitchen went dark when Daddy blew out the coal oil lamp. “Yep, and she’s got it now.”

  They were right, Red went to the chair a year later and that dirty-leg got the farm. I heard the men talking up at the store not too long after and they said when she went to clean out the bank account, there wasn’t one red cent in there.

  She didn’t know nothing about farming and before long the taxes caught up with her pretty quick. Everything Red owned was about to go into foreclosure in 1938 when she was killed in a car wreck across the Louisiana line.

  ***

  I was laying in my rack on a troopship off the coast of Japan the day after they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Ernie O’Brian was across the skinny aisle, rubbing his lucky twenty-dollar gold piece like a worry stone. “Do me a favor, J.B.”

  “It’s illegal for you to have gold.”

  He gave me his crooked grin. “What are they gonna do, send me to fight the Japs?”

  We laughed.

  “I mean it. Do something for me.”

  The fun was over and we both knew it. I shook out a Chesterfield. “Sure.”

  “They say if the Japs don’t surrender, we’re gonna have to land and kill everything in sight. Man, woman, and child. They say they’re all trained to fight us, even the kids.”

  My stomach flipped for the thousandth time since we’d boarded the ship. “So?”

  “Look, my dad told me something I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but I’m going to tell you, just in case I get killed.”

  Most of the guys on the ship had already made pacts with each other, just in case they didn’t make it. In fact, I had three letters in my duffel from other guys for the same reasons. I flicked my Zippo alight by snapping the lid open on my pant leg and dragging the wheel back across, firing it. “Sure. What is it?”

  He held up the gold piece. “My dad buried a quart jar full of these in the northwest corner of the toolshed behind the house. Mama don’t know about it, because he called it his retirement fund. If I don’t make it, tell Mama where it is.”

  “Sure.”

  He leaned across with a toonie in his lips. “Light me up?”

  I did the Zippo trick again and he drew a lungful and let it out through his nose. “Thanks.”

  I didn’t have to tell her, because they dropped a second atom bomb, named Fat Man, on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered three days later.

  ***

  I made it through the
war, and fought again in Korea before deciding come back home to East Texas and farm. I bought the original one-hundred-sixty-acre Devlin Place and married the prettiest little gal you ever saw. It was the same place old Red Devlin started with. It was all in bad shape by then, but the two of us brought it back with hard work and pinching every penny we could dig up.

  Times got better and we lived in a way we never expected, with a big house, central air conditioning, and, finally, television. The decades passed, but it seemed like we were always right on the edge of making it without ever getting over the line.

  The years finally caught up with me after she died, and I got to where I couldn’t work any longer. There was a little frame house on the far end of our land, and I moved in there so my son, Henry, and his growing family could have the big house. I told them they were in charge of things and settled back to enjoy my retirement with the rest of the Spit and Whittle Club up at the store.

  Things got tight for them after that, and one day five years later, Henry came by my little place looking like he’d lost his last friend.

  We were sitting at my kitchen table. “Dad, I tried.”

  “I know, son.” I took a sip of hot coffee. “I figured things were tight. Saw you’d sold some equipment and one of the trucks. I watch the news. Small farms are going under just like back in the Depression.”

  “We’ll have to sell this place and a few acres to make the taxes this year.”

  I looked around the neat little house and sighed. “It was only a matter of time. This drought will break soon. It has to.”

  Henry hung his head over the cup of coffee cooling between his rough hands. “You’ll have to come live with us. We’ll make it work, but I don’t know about next year.”

  “We’ll deal with that one, and the one after that, as they come.”

  “I was afraid you’d be mad.”

  “I’d never get mad at you for trying.”

  “Come eat supper with us tonight.”

  “I believe I will.” I studied his face. “You look as blue as that ocean I crossed on the way to Japan.”

  “I failed you and Casey and the kids.”

  I shook a Chesterfield out of the pack on the table, clicked the Zippo alight on my leg, and fired up. “You haven’t failed.”

  He chuckled. “I always did like that trick. You know…”

  “Right. Casey won’t let me smoke in the house when I move in.”

  “Supper’ll be ready in about an hour. I’ll come and get you.”

  He pulled out and I settled into my La-Z-Boy to think. Mentioning Japan and doing the lighter trick to make him laugh reminded me of O’Brian and his gold piece story. I took a long drag and wondered if that jar full of gold was still buried under his parents’ toolshed, and then laughed.

  We sure could use it now.

  Hell, it’s been so long, it’s probably under a shopping center by now.

  I turned on my new flat-screen HD TV and caught the end of a show on The History Channel about Bonnie and Clyde. The narrator’s voice came over a dim black-and-white movie of the death car. “They died on May 23, 1934, on a lonely two-lane road in Louisiana.”

  The barn dance that night came back sharp and clear as I closed my eyes and listened to the narrator.

  “Some historians say they were the product of the Great Depression, a time when those few banks that remained solvent were foreclosing on farms and houses across a struggling country that eventually began to distrust banks.”

  I recalled that night so long ago when Bob Wills played to a barn full of neighbors who were struggling to survive on scratch farms that barely provided enough food for their tables each night.

  My little frame house wasn’t much bigger than the one we came home to that night when Bonnie and Clyde were lying on a slab, and Mama and Daddy wondered how a man could go crazy and kill someone because the guy was talking to his cheap wife and scuffing his new shoes out of nervousness….

  “I’ll be damned.” I took another drag on the cigarette and dug the cell phone from my pocket. “Son, come and get me.”

  ***

  I pointed at a shovel hanging on the plank wall. “Take and bring that with us.”

  “What are we doing, Dad?”

  We walked the length of the old barn where Bob Wills made music the night a jealous old man killed a feller who was paying too much attention to his young bride who thought their empty bank account was full of money.

  Only that wasn’t what happened.

  “You remember me telling you about a man who was killed in here when I was a kid?”

  “Yeah, you said it was over Red Devlin’s wife, but I don’t remember much more about it.”

  “That’s what everyone said, all right.”

  “So?”

  I pointed at the timeworn tack box Opal May and Leon had been setting on. “Pull that box out of the way.”

  “Okie doke.” Jeff tugged and grunted it across the packed floor. “Now what?”

  “Dig right there where Leon was scuffing his feet.”

  “What? Who?”

  I kicked a dried cow chip. “Right there. Dig.”

  Jeff planted the shovel’s blade and pushed with his foot. “Damn. This ground’s hard as a rock.”

  “Give it to me, then.”

  “No, Dad. I’ll do it.”

  He made two jabs before the blade bit with the sound of crunching glass. “Something’s buried here.”

  I snapped the Zippo alive on my leg and lit the last Chesterfield in the pack. “There sure is.”

  Gone Phishing

  Tim Maleeny

  All authors start off as voracious readers, so once they sit behind a keyboard, they try to write stories that they would want to read. I grew up reading crime fiction, so those were the stories I wanted to write. After my short stories started getting some attention, I found the confidence to finish my first novel, Stealing the Dragon. I put everything I love about the genre into that novel, then twisted things around to make it unlike anything I’d ever read before.

  Once I started to meet other writers, attend conferences, and visit independent booksellers, I had the good fortune to meet Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald at their legendary bookstore, The Poisoned Pen. All the writers I knew told me Barbara is one of the smartest editors in the business, and Poisoned Pen Press is known for publishing consistently great novels, so I would’ve killed to write for the Press. And that’s exactly what I did—I killed someone in the first chapter of my next novel, and Barbara and Rob seemed to like it. I’ve lost track of how many bodies have piled up since, but I’ve loved every minute of writing mysteries for PPP.

  —T.M.

  ***

  The body bobbed to the surface like a fishing float—one of those white-and-red plastic balls designed to suspend bait at a specific depth, so the fish will stay curious and the fisherman can stay lazy.

  The body was also white and red, exsanguinated flesh crisscrossed with pale crimson lines. You didn’t have to be a medical examiner to know the poor slob had been tortured before he was killed. The expression on his face removed any doubt that he’d died in agony.

  My Uncle Ben used to take me fishing when I was a kid, and then when I got older, he taught me how to phish.

  phish-ing

  /’fiSHiNG/

  noun:

  the activity of defrauding a person of private financial information such as security codes, passwords, and account numbers, either by calling the person under false pretenses or tricking them into clicking on a malicious link that directs them to a bogus replica of a legitimate website

  a homophone of fishing

  Ben was small-time, running enough scams on the side to pay off his own credit card debt. But at heart he was a working man. Bartender by night and plumber by day. Had a grip like
a vise. I remember him sitting at my mom’s kitchen table cracking walnuts with one hand, and I once saw him shape a pipe with his bare hands because he was too hungover to find the right wrench. Anytime my grades slipped, he wouldn’t say a word, just look me in the eye and squeeze my shoulder hard enough to make me feel like one of those walnuts.

  I loved my uncle, so after my dad took off, Ben was who I wanted to be when I grew up.

  But then I grew up. Unlike my uncle, I wasn’t a hard-working guy with a blue collar and calloused hands. I had a knack for computers, could make anything connected to the Internet give up its secrets like a lonely drunk. I may speak English with a Long Island accent and know just enough Italian to order off the menu, but expose me to any programming language in the morning and I’ll be fluent by the end of the day. I could hack my way into the Pentagon and make it look like the Secretary of State had pulled the job.

  And it turns out I’m a charming bastard. I can sweet-talk a mother’s maiden name from even the most skeptical person, especially if their caller ID identifies me as their credit card company.

  “…calling about a data breach, wanted to alert all our customers. No, your account wasn’t compromised, but others were; we’re just taking precautions. Yes, we will need to send you a new card. It should arrive in a few days, but you can keep using your existing card until it does. No, thank you for being a cardholder…”

  By the time they realize their new card never arrived, I’ve gone online and skimmed hundreds or even thousands of dollars from their account. And when they get their statement and refuse to the pay the charges, the credit card company eats the loss.

  Nobody gets hurt.

  Except for the dead guy in the river. He got hurt, and then he got killed. And I was pretty sure it was my fault.

  Even from the bank of the river I recognized him. We’d never met, but I’d seen his face daily for weeks, every time I sent out an e-mail using his name. I’d stolen his identity over a month ago.

  Anyone looking for me would have found their way to him.