A Mammoth Murder Read online

  Rhodes was surprised. He didn’t think there was anyone left without a cell phone in all of Blacklin County. Except for himself, of course.

  “I’ll drive down there and have a talk with him,” Rhodes said.

  “Ruth’s not all that far away. She could handle it.”

  “I’d rather do it myself. Maybe there’s a connection with that tooth we have in the other room.”

  “All right, then, but somebody’s gonna have to get that dead animal out of the road.”

  “Have Buddy take care of it.”

  Buddy was another of the deputies. Rhodes knew he was on patrol in that part of the county.

  “Buddy’s not fond of dead animals.”

  “Neither am I,” Rhodes said. “What this county needs is an animal control officer.”

  “If we had one, would he be in charge of the Bigfoot cases?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I get to handle all of those.”

  When he drove through Thurston, Rhodes passed by Hod Barrett’s grocery store. At one time Thurston had been a thriving town, with doctors, drugstores, variety stores, even a movie theater. That had been long ago, when cotton was still being grown on the farms that had surrounded the town. The cotton gin was gone now, and so were all the stores. Only a few buildings were still standing, and one of them was Barrett’s.

  Barrett was standing out in front, and he waved when Rhodes went by, but Rhodes thought that Barrett probably hadn’t recognized him. He’d never been one of the sheriff’s biggest fans.

  It didn’t take long to get into and out of Thurston, maybe a minute, and then Rhodes turned onto one of the county roads that led to Big Woods.

  Blacklin County wasn’t one of the state’s major population areas. There was nothing there to attract tourists except for an old restored fort and a couple of lakes that bass fishermen visited. No major industries had ever shown a desire to move there and provide employment. Most of the farms were now fallow land, and while there were some cattle ranches, they were all small operations.

  As a result, there were places in Blacklin County that had remained pretty much as they had always been. Big Woods, located in the southernmost part of the county, was one of those places. It was an area of about six square miles covered with tall trees and almost impenetrable brush. People avoided it, even the people who owned the land it covered.

  A number of years ago, a boy named Ronnie Bolton had wandered away from a family reunion at a farm near the woods and never been seen again. Rhodes had headed up the search party, which had included Bud Turley and Larry Colley, but no sign of the child had ever been found. The Bigfoot rumors had run rampant for a long time after that. The family hadn’t used the house since the reunion, and it remained vacant even now.

  The woods were home to deer and feral hogs, and it was there that Rhodes had experienced his little run-in with the hogs. The woods were home to other things, too, things just as unpleasant as the hogs. Snakes for one. Copperheads for sure, and rattlers almost certainly, though Rhodes had never seen one there. And he never wanted to. He didn’t like snakes, not even harmless hognose snakes.

  The snakes existed. No question about that. So did the hogs. Rhodes wasn’t so sure about Bigfoot. If some kind of primitive creatures really lived in those woods, why hadn’t anyone ever found any bones or other traces? Rhodes wasn’t counting the tooth that Bud had brought in as a trace. Not yet, anyway.

  The county road that Rhodes drove along was covered with white rock, but the passage of the car brought up only a small amount of dust. The summer had been dry for a good while, but when the rains had come, they’d come in force. So although it was the middle of August the weeds in the pastures were green. The trees that grew so close to the road that they hung over it in some places were even greener than the weeds. It was dry again now, and Rhodes figured they wouldn’t be having any rain for a while, not until up into the fall.

  Rhodes pulled off the road when he came to Louetta Kennedy’s store. It might have been prosperous once, back in the days when the farms in this part of the county had been producing tons of cotton every year, but now it was a dilapidated, unpainted shell of its former self. Hardly anyone even passed by there anymore.

  The front porch slanted downward at an alarming angle. The tin roof was so rusty that there wasn’t a shiny spot on it anywhere. The only concession to modern times was the Handi-Ice freezer that sat precariously on the porch. Beside the freezer there was a plastic chair where Louetta usually sat when there were no customers in the store. Rhodes wasn’t sure why she didn’t slide out of it, considering the slant of the porch.

  On one side and to the back there was another, smaller building that was in even worse shape than the store. It leaned to the left, as if a giant had pushed it out of alignment. It was where Louetta stored cattle and chicken feed. The Sunglo feed sign on one side was so faded that it was hard to make out the original colors.

  A forty-year-old black Ford was parked in the shade of a pecan tree near the building. That was Louetta’s car, Rhodes knew. It probably didn’t have more than a few thousand miles on it. She drove it only from her house, which was less than a quarter of a mile away, to the store. And on Sundays she drove it to church.

  The only other vehicle around was a battered green GMC pickup. Rhodes figured the man who’d called about Bigfoot must be the owner. Hack had been exaggerating when he’d said the man had run all the way from Big Woods.

  Rhodes parked near the ramshackle porch and got out of the car. It was hot and humid, and he had to wipe sweat off his face by the time he’d walked the five or six steps to the building. He went up on the porch, made sure he had his balance, and went in through the rusty screen door.

  The wooden floor creaked under his feet as he entered. The boards were worn from years of footsteps and broom sweepings, and there were gaps between some of them wide enough to drop a candy bar through.

  The old wooden building wasn’t air-conditioned, but it wasn’t as hot inside as might have been expected. There was a little circulation through the front and back screens, and there were screened windows on both sides. An oscillating fan sat on a wooden box and stirred the air. The only light came from a couple of bare bulbs that hung from twisted electrical cords attached to the central rafter.

  On the left was a glass candy case that contained only hard candy, nothing that would melt in the heat. A big red and white Coca-Cola box sat down beside the case. On the right there was a counter that held an old-fashioned cast-iron cash register. Shelves ran along each wall, and they were poorly stocked with canned goods.

  Louetta Kennedy stood behind the counter. She was short and wrinkled, and she wore a pair of men’s overalls over a blue work shirt. A black baseball cap with CORNELL HURD BAND in white letters on the front covered most of her thin gray hair, though some of it stuck out around the edges.

  A man sat at the end of the counter in a wooden chair that must have been a hundred years old. He was thin and wiry, and his hands were twisting together in his lap. He wore faded jeans, a red and blue print shirt, and a black cap that said CLEARVIEW CATAMOUNTS in red letters on the front. His jaws were working rapidly. Rhodes smelled the distinctive odor of Juicy Fruit gum.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” Louetta said. “You must think this is important if you come all this way yourself instead of sendin’ a deputy.”

  “I’m always interested in Bigfoot,” Rhodes said. “Is that what you saw, Mr. Johnson?”

  The man in the chair nodded. His head bobbed on his thin neck like a fishing cork on a windy day.

  “He’s a little spooked,” Louetta said. “It’s not every day a man sees a Bigfoot.”

  Johnson kept right on nodding. Rhodes was afraid his head might come off his neck and bounce across the floor.

  “You want to tell me about it?” Rhodes said.

  Johnson couldn’t seem to stop nodding. But he didn’t stop chewing his gum, either.

  “You might want to get yourself a Coke, Sheriff
,” Louetta said.

  “He’s been like that ever since he phoned your office. Hasn’t said a word, not since he asked me for some chewing gum.”

  Rhodes went over to the cooler, which was bound to be an antique. It was, at any rate, a good bit older than anybody in the room except for Louetta. There was one other like it in the county that Rhodes knew of, and that was the one in Hod Barrett’s store. It didn’t dispense the drinks. They sat inside it in glass bottles, in cold water up almost to the top of their necks. A small pump circulated the water.

  Rhodes took hold of a Dr Pepper bottle and pulled it out of the water. Louetta handed him a cheap brown paper towel that was instantly soaked through when he wrapped it around the frigid bottle. He pulled the top off the bottle with the opener on the side of the cooler and took a drink. As far as he was concerned, you couldn’t beat the taste of an icy cold Dr Pepper in a glass bottle.

  He paid Louetta for the drink and set the bottle on the counter. He looked over at Johnson, who was still as nervous as a cat in a kennel. Whatever he’d seen, it had made quite an impression.

  “Would you like something to drink?” Rhodes asked him.

  “He looks to me like he needs something stronger than a Coke,” Louetta said. “And I don’t sell that stuff.”

  Rhodes had another swallow of his Dr Pepper and walked down to stand in front of Johnson.

  “You’d better go ahead and tell me about it,” he said. “What’s Bigfoot look like?”

  “He … he … he’s big,” Johnson said between chews.

  “How big?”

  “W-well, I didn’t quite s-see him. J-just his s-shadow.” Rhodes took a swallow of Dr Pepper. The paper towel was so wet that it was coming apart in his hand.

  “Must have been a pretty big shadow to upset you so much,” he said.

  “Yeah. R-real big.” Johnson stopped chewing his gum and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “B-but that’s not what scared me.”

  “What did, then?”

  “The dead man,” Johnson said.

  4

  CHESTER JOHNSON’S STORY WAS THAT HE’D GONE TO BIG WOODS to hunt feral hogs on some land owned by Gerald Bolton. It was Bolton’s family that had held the reunion from which Ronnie Bolton had disappeared. He was, or had been, Gerald’s son.

  “Mr. Bolton lets me kill all the hogs I want,” Johnson said. Rhodes didn’t ask how many that might be. “He’s glad to get rid of ‘em. You know some people hunt ’em with dogs?”

  Rhodes nodded. They were still in Louetta Kennedy’s store. It didn’t seem likely that they’d be interrupted by any customers, so Rhodes figured the store was as good a place to talk as any. If there was a dead man in the woods, he’d wait there for them.

  “Well,” Johnson said, “I don’t use any dogs. They say it’s a sport, but I don’t see any sport in it, not for the dogs or the hogs either one. I hunt for the food. I eat some myself and sell the rest.”

  “When did you go to the woods today?” Rhodes asked.

  “It must have been around four o’clock when I got there. I like to go in the afternoon. They sleep in the woods in the heat of the day, and sometimes I can scare some of them up while they’re still a little groggy.”

  The call had come in to the jail about four thirty, Rhodes thought, so it had taken Johnson a little while to find the body. Johnson was a little more self-possessed than he’d been earlier. His head was no longer nodding, but he was still chewing the gum, and his hands still twisted in his lap. Rhodes was a bit surprised that a man who’d hunt feral hogs would be bothered by a little thing like a corpse.

  “Tell me about the dead man,” Rhodes said.

  “Not much to tell. I was walking along in the woods, and there he was, just lying there. I thought for a second or two that he might be sleeping. You know, like the hogs.”

  “But he wasn’t sleeping.”

  “No. And I knew he wasn’t, just as soon as I thought it. Who’d go out and fall asleep in those woods, what with the hogs and Bigfoot around?”

  When he mentioned Bigfoot, he started chewing the gum violently.

  “How long had he been dead?” Rhodes asked. “The man, I mean.”

  “Not long. The hogs hadn’t got at him yet.”

  “What about Bigfoot?”

  Johnson closed his mouth and swallowed. “W-well, I was I-looking at the man who was lying there, and I could tell right off that he was dead. He wasn’t moving the least bit, no sign at all that he was even breathing. There was blood on him, and I thought the hogs had got him.” He paused. “Damn, Sheriff—” He looked at Louetta. “Sorry about that, Miss Louetta.”

  “You should be,” Louetta said from behind the counter, where she was looking over some account books.

  Johnson turned back to Rhodes. “What I was gonna say is that we’d better get down to those woods. The hogs will tear that dead fella apart if they find him.”

  Rhodes should have thought of that himself. The dead man wasn’t going anywhere, but the hogs could do a fine job of destroying any evidence there might be. If there was a dead man at all. Anybody who saw imaginary creatures like Bigfoot might see imaginary dead men, too. Rhodes couldn’t take that chance.

  “Let’s go find him,” Rhodes said.

  He took another pull at the Dr Pepper bottle and put it down on the counter.

  “I guess I meant you’d better get down there,” Johnson said. “I don’t think I can go back, Sheriff. I j-just can’t.”

  Rhodes looked at him. “Sure you can. I won’t be able to find the dead man without you.”

  “If the hogs are at him, you’ll know about it.”

  “We’ll hope they aren’t,” Rhodes said. “Come on.”

  Johnson got up. For just a second Rhodes thought he might bolt, but after a little chewing and head bobbing he got control of himself and said, “All right. I’m ready.”

  In the county car, Rhodes turned the air conditioner on high and let the cold air blow against his face as he followed the pickup along the graveled road. It turned in at an open gate in the barbed-wire fence that ran along the ditch beside the road. Rhodes didn’t see any cattle grazing nearby, so he didn’t bother to close the gate. It had been open for quite a while already, and any cattle that were going to get out would already have escaped. Rhodes hadn’t seen any along the road, but that didn’t mean much. They could be anywhere. Everybody who owned land had cattle. They had to keep cattle on the land to get the agricultural tax exemption.

  The pickup followed a two-rutted path through the pasture, and Rhodes trailed along behind. The weeds were as high as the windows on the county car, and they brushed the sides of it as Rhodes passed them.

  At the end of the road was Big Woods. There was no real transition from the pasture to the trees. It was as if they’d sprung up right there in a solid line.

  Rhodes had no idea why the land in that part of the county had never been cleared. Certainly most of the large wooded areas had disappeared long ago, back when most of the land had been covered with cotton farms, but this one large patch of woods had been left alone.

  Colley and Turley would have said it was because the early settlers were afraid of destroying Bigfoot’s habitat, afraid of the revenge that the monster would take on them. If they wanted to believe that, it was fine with Rhodes, but he thought there must be another reason.

  Johnson stopped his pickup near the tree line, and Rhodes parked beside him. Johnson sat in his truck for a second or two, then got out and looked into the woods, as if he was hoping to see something. Or hoping not to see something.

  The trees were so thick that it wasn’t likely Johnson would see much of anything, Rhodes thought. Then he noticed that not far from where Johnson stood there was an opening into the woods.

  “Hogs made themselves a trail,” Johnson said when he noticed where Rhodes was looking.

  Rhodes went over and looked at the ground. It was churned up by the cloven hooves of the feral hogs, and the ground,
which had been soft the last time it rained, had hardened to a thick crust that wasn’t likely to take any new impressions.

  “Is this where you went into the woods?” Rhodes asked.

  “Yeah. If we’re going in there, I’d better get my gun.”

  Rhodes told him to go ahead, and Johnson went to his pickup. He opened the door, folded down the seat, and pulled out a .30-30 rifle.

  “You got a gun?” Johnson said, slamming the pickup door.

  There was a shotgun in the county car, and Rhodes could load it with single-ought buckshot. Each individual pellet was about the size of a .32 caliber bullet, and a charge from the shotgun would cut down a small tree. Rhodes thought that Johnson had enough firepower for both of them, though.

  Johnson wasn’t so sure.

  “I’d feel better about it if you were armed,” he said. He touched his hand to the rifle he was holding in the crook of his arm. “This’ll stop a hog. I’m not sure about anything else that might be in there.”

  Rhodes nodded and walked back to the county car. He got the cartridges out of the ammo locker and loaded the shotgun. Then he pumped a cartridge into the chamber.

  “All right,” Johnson said. He sounded reassured. “I guess we’re ready.”

  They followed the hog track into the woods, and Rhodes asked if Johnson had followed that same path earlier. He said that he had.

  “‘Bout the only way to get in here,” Johnson added.

  Rhodes had to agree. The trees on both sides of the path were so thick that it would have been hard to blaze a new trail, and once you got a little way into the woods, you might as well have gone a hundred miles, or a hundred years back into the past. It was quiet and still and hot, and no breeze stirred the leaves. Hazy light filtered in, but it was almost as if twilight had come on a little early. Rhodes felt the sweat trickling down his sides under his shirt.

  Off to one side of the trail, about ten feet into the trees, there was an old deer stand that had been made of plywood and spray-painted green and black in a semblance of camouflage. It had stood up about ten feet off the ground, but now one of the legs of the stand had broken and the whole thing had collapsed. The plywood sides were rotted and falling apart. Vines grew around it, and a small tree was growing right up though the middle of it.