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  THE PRAIRIE CHICKEN KILL

  Truman Smith Mystery Series #4

  Bill Crider

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2011 / Bill Crider

  Copy-edited by: Daz Pulsford

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Background Images used under the terms of the GFDL

  LICENSE NOTES

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  OTHER CROSSROAD PRESS BOOKS BY BILL CRIDER:

  Novels:

  Dead on the Island (Truman Smith #1)

  Gator Kill (Truman Smith #2)

  When Old Men Die (Truman Smith #3)

  A Time for Hanging

  Medicine Show

  Ryan Rides Back

  As Jack MacLane:

  Blood Dreams

  Goodnight Moom

  Just Before Dark

  Keepers of the Beast

  Rest in Peace

  Collections:

  The Nighttime is the Right Time

  Find these titles at the Bill Crider link from CROSSROAD PRESS

  Unabridged Audiobooks:

  Dead on the Island

  Ryan Rides Back

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  One

  I was sitting on the frayed plastic webbing of my only aluminum lawn chair reading an old paperback copy of Tobacco Road when Dino drove up in an '81 Pontiac Bonneville that was the color of the foam on top of a Gulf wave.

  He stopped the car, got out, and crunched across the oyster shell drive to where I was sitting in the shade of one of the dark green oleander bushes that surrounded my house. Dino's house really, but he was letting me live there.

  Nameless, the big orange tomcat who shared the house with me, slipped out from under the bush where he'd been chasing a gecko and clawed at Dino's pants' leg.

  "I think he's beginning to warm up to me," Dino said.

  Nameless sat back and looked up at him, green-eyed and expectant. "Mowrr?" he said.

  "He thinks you're here to feed him," I said, slipping the business card I used for a bookmark into Tobacco Road and closing the book. "Just about the only time you come by is when I'm not here and you're taking care of him."

  Dino looked around uneasily. He didn't like being out of his house, where he spent most of his time watching television. For a while he'd been hooked on the soaps and then on talk shows, but now that the local cable franchise had added a twenty-four-hour infomercial channel, he watched it almost constantly.

  "Let's go inside," he said. "It's hot out here."

  It was a typical Sunday afternoon in spring on the Texas coast, warm and only slightly muggy. There was a breeze from the Gulf stirring the oleander leaves and pushing along the puffy flat-bottomed clouds overhead.

  "It's not so bad," I said.

  "Maybe not, but I need a place to sit down."

  It wasn't that he needed a place to sit, any more than it was the heat. It was just that Dino was never comfortable unless he was inside, and he was only marginally comfortable inside unless he was in his own house.

  I stuck the book under my arm and stood up.

  "You read some funny stuff," Dino said.

  "Some of it's pretty funny," I said, taking out the book and looking at the cover. "But not all of it."

  "You know what I mean. I bet there's nobody else in the whole country reading that book right now."

  He was probably right. Not too many people cared about Erskine Caldwell these days. Maybe that was why I was reading the book.

  "It was considered pretty hot stuff at one time," I said.

  "When was that?"

  "A long time ago. Let's go in."

  We went inside and Nameless followed in hopes that someone might give him something to eat. It wouldn't have mattered if he'd eaten only ten minutes before; he was always ready to eat again if he got the chance.

  "I'll feed you later," I told him, and he flopped down by my ratty sofa and started grooming himself, licking under his front paw and then dragging the paw across his face.

  "You want a Big Red?" I asked Dino.

  "Is that all you have? Jesus, Tru, don't you know that stuff'll kill you? I know this guy who works for the distributor, and he tells me they never keep it around the warehouse for very long after it goes in the can. He said it eats right through the aluminum."

  "If my stomach were lined with aluminum, I'd be worried. I've got ginger ale, though, if you want it."

  "I guess that'll have to do."

  The house was furnished in Early Thrift Shop. Dino sat in a recliner that wouldn't recline, and I went into the kitchen. Nameless got up, stretched, and followed me.

  "How about turning on the air?" Dino yelled.

  I didn't use the air-conditioning much. The house was made of stone and surrounded by oleander bushes, and there was always a breeze blowing in from the Gulf through the open windows. Dino would have felt better if the windows were closed.

  "I couldn't afford to pay the electric bill if I ran the air," I said, laying my book on the counter and opening the refrigerator.

  I had two liters of Big Red in a plastic bottle. As far as I could tell it hadn't eaten its way through the plastic yet; there were no tell-tale red spots on the bottom of the refrigerator. Well, to tell the truth there were a couple of red spots, but I figured them for rust.

  The ginger ale was in green-and-white cans. They weren't leaking either. I poured some Big Red in a glass and popped open one of the cans of ginger ale for Dino.

  Nameless was watching me hopefully. He said, "Mowrr?"

  "I told you I'd feed you later," I said.

  He followed me back into the living room. I handed Dino his drink and sat on the sofa. A spring gave a muffled twang, but it didn't break through the cushion. Nameless sat by my foot and resumed his grooming, a process that could last for as little as ten seconds or as long as a quarter of an hour depending on when he fell asleep.

  "You didn't have a glass for me?" Dino asked.

  "I washed off the top of the can," I lied. "It's clean."

  He looked at the can suspiciously and took a sip of the ginger ale. Then he made a face and said, "I wish you had something a little stronger."

  "I thought you liked to stay in shape."

  "I do. I got me one of those Health Riders and an Ab-Flex. My gut's like iron. A little whiskey wouldn't hurt me."

  He did look fit, his shoulders broad and his stomach flat. He was probably right about the whiskey not hurting him, but I didn't have any. Big Red was about as wild as I got.

  "So why are you here?" I asked him. "Nameless doesn't need you to feed him, and you're not exactly in the habit of making social calls."

  He set the ginger ale can on top of the low coffee table I'd bought at a garage sale. "Maybe I'm changing my habits. Maybe I just wanted to come by, see my old buddy Truman, see if he's doing all right. Maybe I wanted to see your stupid cat."

  "I doubt it," I said without making any attempt to defend Nameless' intelligence. Nameless didn't care; he was already asleep, his head turned to one side, his paw thrown over his eye. "I hope i
t's not like the last time you came looking for me."

  "When was that?"

  He knew very well when that had been, but I said, "When Outside Harry disappeared."

  "Oh. Yeah." He picked up the ginger ale can and took a swallow.

  "Evelyn was with you that time. How's she doing?"

  "She's doing great. We get together a couple of times a week now, go out and have some laughs."

  I tried to imagine that. I couldn't.

  "Where do you go?"

  "Just around. We went to Moody Gardens and saw that 3-D IMAX movie, the one they filmed under water. It was like the fish were swimming in my lap."

  I couldn't picture Dino at Moody Gardens or anywhere else in Galveston, but maybe he was actually getting better about leaving his house.

  "You didn't come here to tell me about the movie, though, did you?"

  "Hey, you like to fish. You oughta go see it. That cat of yours would love it."

  For just a second or two I had an image of Nameless sitting in my lap and wearing a specially-made little pair of wrap-around polarized glasses. I smiled, and Dino said, "What's so funny?"

  "Nothing." I swirled what was left of my Big Red around in the bottom of my glass. "Now why don't you tell me what you came out here for."

  "Geez, Tru, can't we just have a little conversation, like old times?"

  "Sure we can. Later, maybe. But right now you might as well get to the point."

  He sighed and set the ginger ale can back on the coffee table. "All right. I got a call today from Lance Garrison. He wants to talk to you."

  "Lance Garrison wants to talk to me?" That was about as likely as Nameless in 3-D glasses. Garrison and I hadn't seen each other or spoken in more than twenty years. "What about?"

  "He didn't say. He just asked me if I'd bring you by his house this afternoon."

  "I'm not going to find anybody for him if that's what he wants."

  Finding people had been my job once, and sometimes people still asked me to do it. I'd come back to Galveston a few years ago to find my sister, and it hadn't worked out. I didn't like to find people anymore.

  "I don't know what he wants," Dino said. "I owe him a favor or two, so I said I'd ask you."

  "I never liked him much."

  "He knows that. That's why he called me instead of you. You gonna go with me or not?"

  I thought about it for a second. "I went looking for Outside Harry because you asked me to. It didn't turn out so well."

  "Hey, it turned out all right. Besides, Lance probably doesn't want you to find anybody. Maybe he just wants to talk over old times."

  "Not with me, he doesn't."

  Dino stood up. "OK. I asked, and you turned me down. I don't blame you. I never liked Lance much, myself."

  "He made you some money, though, I hear."

  "Who told you that?"

  "It's just one of those things people talk about," I said. "Is it true?"

  "Yeah, it's true. That's why I owe him a favor or two."

  "All right," I said. "I'll talk to him."

  "But you won't look for anybody, right?"

  "Right."

  "I don't blame you," Dino said.

  Two

  Lance Garrison had done the one thing that no real Galvestonian could forgive him for: he'd been Born on the Island, but he'd moved to Houston and gotten rich.

  That wasn't why I didn't like him, but there were plenty of others who held it against him. After all, the animosity between Galveston and Houston went back more than a hundred years. Galveston had been the jewel of the Gulf Coast in the nineteenth century, but after Houston dug a ship channel to the Gulf, Galveston went into a decline that in some ways continued even now.

  That was just fine with me. There was a genteel, seedy charm to Galveston that Houston could never match; its traffic-choked freeways and its smoggy skies give it all the ambience of a back-room poker game at a life-insurance sales convention. You had to feel sorry for a place like that, not hate it. Other BOI's didn't see it that way, however. They hated Houston and always would.

  When he got out of college Lance Garrison found a job with a brokerage firm there and discovered that he had a real knack for picking stocks that were ready to explode. His clients started making money, real money, and they made it fast. Lance was investing right along with them, beginning with Wal-Mart before anyone else had heard of it, and a software company that now dominated the market.

  He'd done so well that he'd owned a chunk of the Houston Astros at one time, then sold it for a large profit. But his smartest move recently had been to invest heavily in a Houston-based computer firm that had outdistanced IBM and nearly everyone else in the PC field.

  How long a winning streak like Lance's could last was anyone's guess, but it had been going on for so many years now that no one really thought it would ever end. The rumor on the Island was that he'd made so much money that he wouldn't have time to spend it all even if he lived forever.

  And as if that weren't bad enough, he'd done something even worse. He'd moved back to Galveston.

  He hadn't moved back as a resident, though. That was the bad part. Instead he'd built a week-end home in one of the upscale developments on the western end of the Island, where the streets had names like Jolly Roger Lane and Crossbones Avenue. There wasn't a Tobacco Road anywhere in the bunch.

  Sometimes the people who owned these homes jokingly called them "bait camps," as if they were places out of the Island's past, places that smelled of shrimp and mullet and squid, where the floors and cabinets were slippery with fish scales and blood, where there were no screens on the doors or windows to impede the breeze or the mosquitoes, and where you had to watch your step to avoid crunching the shells of the hermit crabs that scuttled across floors gritty with sand tracked in from the beach.

  The houses weren't like that at all, of course. There were pseudo-Victorian houses, pseudo-Queen Anne houses, and houses that would look right at home on the shores of the Mediterranean; there were houses in a southwestern style straight from Santa Fe, and there were houses that looked as if they might have been flown in intact from the French wine country.

  They were all built up on stilts, and they were two, three, and four stories tall, with neat green lawns and plenty of oleanders, hibiscus, and palm trees all around. I'd heard that before the developers would allow you to fork over $200,000 for a lot, you had to sign a pledge stating that you'd plant at least four palm trees. The oleanders and hibiscus, on the other hand, were optional.

  When we turned off Stewart Road toward the development, there was a startlingly green golf course on our left where a couple of golfers from the development stood beside a red and white golf cart and wiped their foreheads while they swigged some kind of designer water from plastic bottles. On our right there was a small ranch with cattle grazing under oak trees and in an open pasture.

  "You'd think the ranch owners would just sell out," Dino said. "The way cattle prices are right now, they could make a lot more money by selling their land than they can from raising cows."

  "They could make a lot more money by selling out even if cattle prices doubled," I said. "Or tripled. Maybe they just like working with cattle better than playing golf."

  Dino grinned. "Yeah."

  He liked money, but he didn't like golf. You had to play it outside. Of course you had to go outside to take care of cattle, too, but if Dino owned a ranch he could hire someone to do all the work. He could probably have hired someone to play golf for him, too, but it wouldn't have been the same.

  We turned left into the development, and I could see all the Jaguars parked beneath the houses. Lexus, Infiniti, and Mercedes were well represented, though BMW didn't seem as popular as it once had. There was even a Cadillac or two.

  I didn't see any other 1981 Pontiac Bonnevilles.

  Canals leading to the bay ran beside most of the houses, and there were boats pulled up in slings, ready to drop down in the water at a moment's notice whenever the own
er wanted a short cruise.

  Garrison's house was on the Bay side of the Island, which I assumed was his one concession to being a native. A lot of real Galvestonians pride themselves on how seldom they actually see the Gulf. The house was located right on the bay front so that there wouldn't be anything between it and the sunset.

  It was pretty impressive, very modernist, with shadows hiding in the sharp angles and the sun glinting off what seemed like acres of glass. Not to mention palm trees. There were a lot more than four. I counted ten before I stopped. No hibiscus, though.

  The house sat on two lots instead of one, and figuring that construction costs ran somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars a square foot, we were looking at a house that had cost Lance about six hundred thousand bucks. Throw in the cost of the lots, and Garrison had spent something like a cool million on his little bait camp. That was quite a bit to a guy like me, but not much more than everyone else around him had laid out. I wondered if any of them had ever considered the risks.

  Of course the Jags and other luxury cars would no doubt be somewhere inland if a hurricane blew across the island, but I thought it was a little foolish to spend six hundred grand for a house that could be toppled in seconds by a Force 2 gale. The stilts might keep the carpet dry when the storm surge came, but not if the house was already sinking in the bay. I wondered if the insurance carriers ever spent any sleepless nights thinking about what even a moderate storm could do. Probably not.

  There was a black Acura Legend and a red Toyota MR-3 parked under Lance's house. Dino pulled in behind the Acura and said, "This is the place."

  "You come here often?"

  He gave me a look. "I asked for directions when Lance called me. I might not get out much, but I can follow directions."

  "Getting a little touchy, are we?"

  Dino didn't answer. He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.