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  MURDER MOST FOWL

  Book Seven of the Dan Rhodes Mysteries

  By Bill Crider

  A Gordian Knot Mystery

  Gordian Knot is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright © 2014 / Bill Crider

  Cover images courtesy of:

  Nicolas Raymond (Texas flag image)

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  Meet the Author

  BILL CRIDER is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for “best juvenile science fiction novel” for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award for best short story.

  Check out his homepage at: http:// www.billcrider.com or take a look at his peculiar blog at http://billcrider.blogspot.com

  Book List

  Novels:

  The Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery Series

  Too Late to Die

  Shotgun Saturday Night

  Cursed to Death

  Death on the Move

  Evil at the Root

  Booked for a Hanging

  Murder Most Fowl

  Winning Can Be Murder

  Death by Accident

  A Ghost of a Chance

  A Romantic Way to Die

  Red, White, and Blue Murder

  “The Empty Manger,” (novella in the collection entitled Murder, Mayhem, and Mistletoe.)

  A Mammoth Murder

  Murder Among the O.W.L.S.

  Of All Sad Words

  Murder in Four Parts

  Murder in the Air

  The Wild Hog Murders

  The Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen

  Compound Murder

  The Carl Burns Mystery Series

  One Dead Dean

  Dying Voices

  …A Dangerous Thing

  Dead Soldiers

  The Truman Smith Mystery Series

  Dead on the Island

  Gator Kill

  When Old Men Die

  The Prairie Chicken Kill

  Murder Takes a Break

  The Sally Good Mystery Series

  Murder Is An Art

  A Knife in the Back

  A Bond with Death

  The Stanley Waters Mystery Series (Willard Scott, Co-Author)

  Murder under Blue Skies

  Murder in the Mist

  Stand-Alone Mystery and Suspense Novels

  Blood Marks

  The Texas Capitol Murders

  Houston Homicide (with Clyde Wilson)

  House-Name Spy Fiction

  The Coyote Connection (a Nick Carter book, in collaboration with Jack Davis)

  Western Novels

  Ryan Rides Back

  Galveston Gunman

  A Time for Hanging

  Medicine Show

  Outrage at Blanco

  Texas Vigilante

  As Colby Jackson:

  Dead Man’s Revenge

  Gabby Darbins and the Slide-Rock Bolter

  Horror Novels (all published under the pseudonym “Jack MacLane”)

  Keepers of the Beast

  Goodnight, Moom

  Blood Dreams

  Rest in Peace

  Just before Dark

  Books for Young Readers

  A Vampire Named Fred

  Muttketeer

  Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster

  Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man

  Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror

  Short Story Collections:

  The Nighttime is the Right Time

  For Louise Carr and Melva Harvey Turner

  who should admit that I never threw the dominoes

  MURDER MOST FOWL

  Chapter One

  Elijah Ward had chained himself to the exit door at Wal-Mart again. It was the second time in the last couple of months.

  Ward was about sixty years old. He was six feet, four inches tall, and despite his first name, he didn’t look much like an Old Testament prophet except for the gleam of fanaticism in his dark eyes. He had a red, leathery face and black hair with just a touch of gray in it.

  Besides about twenty feet of towing chain, he was wearing a pair of faded blue denim pants and a short-sleeved blue shirt that showed the bulging muscles in his upper arms. His unruly hair was only partially covered by a Houston Astros cap.

  “You can get in, but you can’t get out,” Ward told the crowd that had gathered in the glassed-in entranceway.

  “That’s right,” a woman said. It was Ward’s wife, Rayjean, who was no more than five feet tall and as thin as a pick handle. She had thin lips and a thin, foxy face. Her thin brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun. “You can get in, but you can’t get out!”

  She was holding a sign tacked onto a piece of wood that might have been a fence picket at one time. The sign had been printed by hand with a black marker. Whoever had made it had taken the time to do it right:

  WAL-MART

  IS

  UNFAIR TO

  THE SMALLTOWN

  MERCHANT!

  “They’ve ruined your downtown,” Ward told the curious crowd. “Look at all the empty buildings you’ve got, nothin’ in ’em but pigeon nests. Think of all your neighbors that went broke there, just tryin’ to make an honest livin’.”

  “You can get in,” his wife said waving her sign toward the doors that opened into the store, “but you can’t get out!”

  No one was trying to get in, however. Everyone was too interested in seeing what would happen to the Wards.

  Even the store employees were interested. Most of them had left their positions behind the cash registers and in the departments where they worked to come see what all the commotion was about. They were all wearing their blue Wal-Mart vests, and they stood just inside the closed glass doors, looking out at the crowd and at the Wards.

  Elijah Ward rattled his chains. “You can get in, but —”

  “—you can’t get out!” Rayjean said.

  “You can get in, but —”

  “They can get out through the back door in the automotive department,” Sheriff Dan Rhodes said, as the crowd made way for him. “Or the manager will just let them out through the ‘in’ doors, the way he did the last time you tried this.”

  “Maybe so,” Ward said, unconcerned about Rhodes’ intervention. “But if they come through the front, they’ll have to duck down under that little bar they’ve got across there to keep people from sneakin’ out that way. Got ’em a guard there, too, that they call a ‘greeter.’ Guard is more like it. They don’t trust folks like I did, back when I had a store.”

  “Things aren’t like the way they were then,” Rhodes said.

  “They sure aren’t,” Ward agreed. “You might as well leave me alone, Sheriff. I’m not leavin’ this time. I’m willin’ to go to jail for my beliefs.”

  “Me, too,” Rayjean said, pumping her sign up and down. “Take me to the pokey, Sheriff. That’s the only way you’ll get me out of here.”

  She was probably serious, Rhodes thought.
The last time this had happened, he had been able to talk the Wards into going home peacefully. It looked as if this time might turn out to be different.

  “People don’t realize what this store’s done to Clearview,” Ward said, shaking the chain, which clinked against the glass of the door. “They think it’s just a good place to buy things on the cheap, and they don’t think about all those empty downtown buildin’s where stores used to be.”

  As Rhodes was well aware, one of those empty buildings had been occupied by Ward’s own hardware store, but after ten years of trying to compete with discount prices, Ward had been forced to close his doors. While his profits had declined, along with those of the two clothing stores, the drug store, and the five and dime store, he had watched a steady stream of his former customers driving to the big new Wal-Mart on the outskirts of town.

  “It’s competition,” Rhodes told him. “It’s the American way.”

  “Not the way the big boys do it,” Ward said. “The way they do it, there wasn’t any way I could compete with ’em.”

  There was a bit of mumbling in the crowd, and Rhodes wondered if some of them were beginning to agree with Ward. Ward seemed to think so, and he followed up his advantage.

  “They’ve run us small merchants out of business,” he said. “And now they’ve got it all.” He looked around at the crowd. “Look there. There’s Willard Ames. You oughta be ashamed of yourself, Willard, comin’ out here. Your daddy traded with me from the time I first opened up. Bought all his fishin’ rods from me. Lures, too.”

  Ames was a young man in his early twenties, and he looked down at the floor as he spoke. “Well, you don’t have a store anymore, Mr. Ward. And I needed me a light fixture.”

  “You’ll get it, too,” said a man at Rhodes’ back. It was the Wal-Mart manager, Hal Keene, a nervous-looking man with a fringe of graying hair and a pot belly. He was carrying a pair of bolt cutters that he handed to Rhodes. “Here, Sheriff. You cut that chain and arrest that man.”

  Rhodes took the bolt cutters, feeling vaguely guilty. He’d bought a lot of Old Roy dog food at Wal-Mart. Maybe he’d contributed to Ward’s delinquency.

  “You won’t be able to cut this chain,” Ward said, rattling it. “It’s not that cheesy Japanese stuff that you can cut with a dinner knife. It’s good American chain, left over from my store.”

  Rhodes walked to the door handle and applied the cutters to a link of chain. He pressed down on the long handles and sheared through the chain.

  “Looks like that good old American chain won’t stand up to a solid pair of bolt cutters,” the manager said. He looked around at the crowd. “Made right here in the U. S. of A. We’ve got ’em for sale in our hardware department.”

  Rhodes started to unthread the chain from the door handles. “I’m going to have to take you to the jail,” he told Ward.

  “That’s just all right with me,” Ward said. “I told you I was willin’ to go.”

  “What’s the charge?” Rayjean demanded, menacing Rhodes with the sign. “Since when is it a crime to stand up for what’s right?”

  “You’ll have to come, too,” Rhodes told her.

  Rayjean drew back the sign. “You bet I will. That way we can both sue you for false arrest.”

  “I’m takin’ my chain with me,” Ward said. “You can’t take my chain away from me.”

  “I’ll have to confiscate it,” Rhodes said, gathering it up. “It’s evidence.” He looked at Ward. “Are you coming?”

  “I guess,” Ward said. “Come on, Rayjean.”

  The two of them walked ahead of Rhodes out to the county car. Some of the crowd trailed along behind, while others went on into the store to get their light fixtures or bolt cutters or whatever it was they thought they needed.

  Rhodes put the chain in the trunk of the car. Then he took Rayjean’s sign and put it in there as well. After that, he got the Wards seated in the back and closed the doors.

  Before he got into the car himself, Rhodes turned to say a few words to the people who had come out of the store to watch.

  “You can all go on back inside,” he said. “Nothing else is going to happen here.”

  Hal Keene was standing in the door to the entranceway. “We’ve got a special on Sam’s Cola,” he told the crowd. “You’ll need to stock up on it for the hot summer days that’re coming up.”

  The word special worked like magic, and forgetting about the Wards, the rest of the crowd turned back toward the store, everyone eager to get a good deal on Sam’s Cola.

  “I’d like to talk to you a minute,” Rhodes told Keene as the manager started to follow the crowd back inside.

  “What?” Keene said. “You want me to go down and swear out a complaint? I’ll be glad to.”

  “I’d just as soon you didn’t,” Rhodes said. “What I want you to do is take the outside handles off those exit doors, like I told you to the last time Lige did this. You don’t need handles there, anyway.”

  Keene looked miffed. “He’d just chain himself to the entrance doors if I did that.”

  “Maybe not,” Rhodes said. “I’ll have a little talk with him.”

  Keene pulled a handkerchief out of his back pants pocket and wiped his face and the top of his head. “Lot of good that’ll do.”

  “We’ll see,” Rhodes said.

  He left Keene and went back to the car. When he got in, he turned to the Wards, speaking to them through the screen that separated the front and back seats. “Disturbing the peace, creating a nuisance —”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?” Ward said.

  “The charges,” Rhodes told him. “You asked about the charges.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Rayjean said. “I did. Anyway, those things are just picky little misdemeanors. You can’t keep us in jail for ’em.”

  She was right, so Rhodes didn’t bother to answer her. He started the engine and turned on the air-conditioner. The cool air hit him in the face, drying the sweat. He put the car in gear.

  “Wait a second, Sheriff,” Ward said before the car got rolling.

  Rhodes turned in the seat. “What’s the matter?”

  “Look at the parking lot,” Ward said. “Not a vacant parkin’ space in sight. People so thick you couldn’t stir ’em with a stick.”

  Rhodes admitted that the lot was crowded.

  “Now look over there at that grocery store,” Ward said. “Covered up, right?”

  The supermarket was almost as crowded as the discount store. There was hardly a vacant space in its parking lot, either.

  “Remember what it used to be like downtown on a Saturday?” Ward asked. “Two big grocery stores, the A & P and a Safeway, both of ’em doin’ a land office business, with the Piggly Wiggly goin’ strong too. Not to mention the mom and pop stores all over town. How many of those are left?”

  Rayjean didn’t give Rhodes time to answer. “Just one,” she said. “Where the Safeway used to be, but it’s an H.E.B. now. All those little stores, there’s not a one of them left.”

  “That’s right,” Ward said. “And you remember Duke and Ayres and Perry Brothers? Gone. And the J. C. Penney? That’s gone, too, just a vacant buildin’ there in the middle of the block. There were four drug stores, but there’s just one of ’em left. And the Western Auto’s gone. Used to be, you could hardly walk on the sidewalks downtown on a Saturday, but you go down there now, there won’t be a single soul. They’re all out here at the Wal-Mart.”

  “And what about that preacher?” Rayjean asked. “The one that used to set up on the corner downtown and set that speaker out on his car hood and preach all afternoon. You think anybody’d listen to him if he set up out here?”

  “Probably not,” Rhodes said. He wasn’t too sure that anyone had listened to the preacher even in the old days.

  “The world’s changed,” Ward said. “And it ain’t changed for the better, you can bet on that. There’s not any downtowns anymore. There’s not anywhere that you can go and walk around a
nd see your friends. There’s not anywhere a man can set up a small business and sell to his neighbors. The big boys have put a stop to all that.”

  “Maybe so,” Rhodes said, “and maybe it’s not all for the good. But that doesn’t mean you can go chaining yourself to the doors and try to drive away the customers.”

  Ward sighed. “I guess you’re right about that. I guess we can’t ever go back to the way it was.”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “We can’t.”

  “It’s a damn shame, though,” Ward said. “Don’t you think it’s a damn shame, Sheriff?”

  It was a good question, and Rhodes was sorry that he didn’t have an answer for it. He backed the car up and drove out of the parking lot.

  “I don’t see why you just let ’em go like that,” Hack Jensen said. He was the dispatcher for the Blacklin County Sheriff’s department, and he liked to have a say in the way things were done. Seeing the Wards get off with a visit to the Justice of the Peace and a fine didn’t sit right. “That Lige Ward’s been nothin’ but trouble since he closed his store. He oughta get himself a job. That way he’d have somethin’ to do instead of causin’ problems for other folks.”

  Hack had a point, Rhodes thought. Not only had Ward chained himself to the Wal-Mart doors twice now, he’d been in a fight at the Palm Club one Saturday night, and Rhodes had gone out to Ward’s place in the country twice, responding to complaints by Ward’s neighbor, Press Yardley.

  “Hack’s right,” Lawton said. Lawton was the county jailor, and Rhodes knew he was in trouble as soon as Lawton took Hack’s part. Most of the time, the two old men didn’t agree on anything. “Lige is headin’ for trouble.”

  Hack nodded. “You better listen to what we’re tellin’ you, Sheriff.”

  Lawton leaned his broom against the wall. “Yep. If you don’t do somethin’ about Lige now, he’s gonna get in some real trouble later on, if he’s not already.”