Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen Page 2

  Rhodes put his foot on the first step of the fire escape. It seemed solid enough, and he started to climb.

  Then he thought better of it. Going up there alone could be a bad idea, and Rhodes had said he’d be careful. He might need backup. Ruth was busy, but Buddy, the other deputy on duty, should be available. Rhodes went down the two steps he’d taken and walked back to his car.

  Sandra leaned against her dirty Suburban, smoking another cigarette. “You find anybody?” she asked.

  “I haven’t been up there yet,” Rhodes said. He opened the car door, got in, and called Hack on the radio.

  “You got a murder on your hands?” Hack asked as soon as he heard Rhodes’s voice.

  “Could be. Send Buddy out here. I’m going to check out that old building across the street from the Beauty Shack, and I want him for backup.”

  “He’s headed down to Thurston to patrol.”

  “How far away is he?”

  “Couldn’t be far. He just left. Maybe five minutes.”

  “I’ll wait for him,” Rhodes said.

  “Did you call the ambulance yet?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “Ruth’s still working the scene. I’ll have her take care of it, though.”

  “Don’t forget to call the justice of the peace.”

  The JP would have to make a declaration of death.

  “She’ll do that, too,” Rhodes said.

  He racked the mic and got out of the car. He might as well ask Sandra a few questions while he was waiting.

  “You see anybody move around up there while I was gone?” he asked.

  Sandra took a deep drag on the cigarette, inhaled, and blew out smoke. She tossed it to the gravel and stepped on it. This time she didn’t pick it up.

  “I didn’t see anything. I guess I was watching you most of the time. You still look like Will o’ the Wisp Rhodes from a distance.”

  In his one moment of high school athletic glory, Rhodes had run a kickoff back for a touchdown. The reporter for the local paper, long since deceased, had tagged him with the nickname that Sandra had recalled. A few plays later, Rhodes had gotten the injury that ended his season, and the Will o’ the Wisp was no more, though the nickname wasn’t entirely forgotten.

  “The greater the distance,” Rhodes said, “the more I resemble that kid.”

  The truth was that it was hard even to remember those days now. They’d been a long time ago.

  “Tell me about Lynn,” he said.

  Sandra looked down at the cigarette butt. She bent over and picked it up. When she straightened, she said, “I guess I know what you mean. You’ve probably heard the stories.”

  “A few,” Rhodes said.

  “People talk,” Sandra said. “When a woman’s young and pretty.” She gave a rueful grin. “I guess they never talked much about me.”

  Rhodes grinned, too. “Jimmy did.”

  Jimmy was Sandra’s husband, James Ray Wiley, whom everyone had called Jimmy and still did. He’d been on the football team with Rhodes, but he’d played in the offensive line and had been a considerably better player. He’d even made all-district his senior year, and because of that he’d had a college scholarship. A broken leg his freshman year ended his football career. He’d dropped out of college and come home to open a car repair shop, but he’d gotten cancer and closed it a couple of years previously. The cancer was in remission, but he still wasn’t up to working.

  “Jimmy was the only one,” Sandra said.

  “I wouldn’t let that worry you,” Rhodes said. “Nobody talked much about me, either.”

  “Now, Danny,” Sandra said. “Don’t sell yourself short. All the girls went for you in a big way.”

  “Maybe for the fifteen minutes that I was a hero,” Rhodes said. “After that, it was all over. But we weren’t talking about me and you.”

  “I know.” Sandra shaded her eyes and looked at the building across the street. “I don’t like to say anything bad about somebody who’s dead.”

  “She won’t mind,” Rhodes said.

  “Lynn didn’t mind when she was alive. People talked about her even in the shop. They knew she could hear them. They wanted her to. She just laughed, and that made them mad. They never quit coming, though, most of them. One thing about us here at the Beauty Shack, we can sure cut hair.”

  She pulled a cigarette pack from the pocket of her shirt and took a butane lighter from her pants.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. She returned the pack to its place, lit the cigarette, and slipped the lighter back into her pants pocket. “I’m just nervous, that’s all. Anybody would be nervous if they came in to work and found a dead person.”

  Rhodes nodded. “You were going to tell me about her.”

  “We all liked her.” Sandra puffed on her cigarette. “Me and Lonnie and Abby, I mean. She was funny, always joking around, and she didn’t act like she was prettier than me and Abby, even if she was. Younger, too, at least younger than me.” Puff. Puff. “A lot younger.”

  Rhodes knew the feeling. He often thought that everybody was younger than he was these days.

  “She even joked about running around with men,” Sandra said. “Married ones, single ones, she didn’t care, she said, as long as they were fun to be around. Lots of women in town wouldn’t like that.”

  A car drove by. The driver slowed down and looked out the window when he noticed the county cars and the sheriff standing there. It was Billy Lee, who owned a small pharmacy, on his way to work. Rhodes lifted a hand in a wave. Lee nodded and drove on. In a little while the news that something was going on at the Beauty Shack would be all over town.

  “Did any of them dislike it enough to kill her?” Rhodes asked.

  Sandra drew so hard on the cigarette that it burned down to her fingers. She exhaled such a cloud of smoke that Rhodes had to wave it away with his hand as she tossed the butt to the gravel and crushed it.

  “I couldn’t tell you that,” Sandra said. She pointed. “Is that somebody moving up there?”

  Rhodes looked up at the window of the old hotel. He didn’t detect any movement, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any. He looked down the street and saw a county car.

  “That’s Buddy coming along,” he said. “Send him over when he gets here.”

  Rhodes trotted across the street and around the building. He didn’t want anybody to sneak down while he wasn’t watching, and he hoped they hadn’t done it already. Maybe he shouldn’t have called for backup, after all.

  Nobody was on the fire escape, and nobody was in sight other than the drivers of a couple of cars that passed a block away. Rhodes stood at the foot of the fire escape and waited for Buddy, who hustled up in a minute or so.

  “What’s going down?” Buddy asked.

  Buddy was short, wiry, and a bit fidgety, not to mention addicted to out-of-date clichés. He didn’t like crime and criminals, and he sometimes acted as if he had a personal mission to straighten out the morality of the entire county, an attitude that led to a certain overeagerness.

  “Maybe nothing,” Rhodes said. “Sandra says there might be someone upstairs.”

  “I should’ve kept on checking the place,” Buddy said. “Those dadgum squatters come in all the time.”

  “Also, somebody killed Lynn Ashton.”

  Buddy’s face turned red. He shook his head. Crimes upset him, and this was a bad one.

  “She’s over there in the Beauty Shack,” Rhodes said.

  Buddy’s voice was choked. “She … had a bad reputation.”

  “She did, but we don’t know that’s why she was killed. Could’ve been a robbery. Could’ve been something else.”

  “We’ll find out who did it,” Buddy said, without hesitation or doubt. He pointed up the fire escape. “You want me to go up there?”

  “We’ll both go,” Rhodes said. “Me first.”

  Buddy’s fingers twitched above the butt of his revolver. “Think we’ll need our sidearms?”

/>   “Not yet,” Rhodes said, and he started up the iron steps.

  The fire escape squealed a little, but it didn’t pull away from the wall. When he got to the top, Rhodes started to push aside the crooked door.

  Almost as soon as his fingertips touched it, it whipped open and two men exploded through it. They crashed into Rhodes and sent him back against the railing, fast and hard. Rusty rivets popped under the sudden strain, the thin top bar fell away, and so did Rhodes.

  Chapter 3

  Agility had never been Rhodes’s strong point, not even in his Will o’ the Wisp days, but gravity and momentum allowed him to do an acceptable flip over the low bars of the fire escape. Flailing with both hands, he managed to catch hold of the top landing. He was even able to hang on, though his arms were nearly jerked from their sockets. He had a good view of the two men who’d bowled him over as they plunged down the stairs, trampling Buddy, who lay stunned on the steps as the men pounded past him.

  Rhodes didn’t have long to contemplate his options. Maybe there’d been a time when he was young and slim and nimble enough to pull himself back onto the landing, but that time was long gone. How far could it be to the ground, anyway?

  He let go.

  He hit the hard ground and let his legs go limp as they absorbed some of the impact, though not enough of it. He wound up in a heap. He would have liked to spring catlike to his feet, but instead it was something of a struggle to stand. He did stand, though, and began to run after the fleeing men.

  “Running” was something of an exaggeration. Rhodes wasn’t sure of the right word. “Shambling,” maybe, not that it mattered. The two men were gaining on him.

  They passed the mesquite tree and turned toward the railroad tracks that were only a block away. Rhodes heard a train whistle and looked to the north. Sure enough, a freight train was barreling along the tracks. It had two more crossings to make before it got to the one on the street the two men were running down, but it wouldn’t take long for it to get there. Rhodes kept going.

  So did the two men. It was obvious that they were going to try to make it across the tracks before the train arrived. It was going to be close, and while Rhodes thought they could do it, he knew he couldn’t.

  The engineer must have seen the runners at about that time, because the whistle shrilled without a break. The engineer didn’t try to stop the train. It was far too late for that.

  Just then, Buddy passed Rhodes, waving his revolver.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Buddy yelled, though the men couldn’t possibly hear him. They kept right on going and crossed the tracks not ten feet in front of the train as it rumbled by, the whistle still screaming.

  Buddy stopped and holstered his revolver as Rhodes caught up with him. Rhodes was glad to stand and catch his breath as the boxcars whipped by, the wind of their passing rushing over him as the ground vibrated under his feet.

  The train was a short one, only ten or twelve cars, and as soon as it was past, Buddy took off.

  “Hold on,” Rhodes called, because the two men had disappeared.

  Buddy stopped. He might not have heard Rhodes, but he didn’t have anyone to chase now. He looked back, as if waiting for Rhodes to give him an order.

  Rhodes walked to meet him. On the left side of the crumbling street was a long-abandoned warehouse that had once been used to store cotton bales. A railroad siding beside the building had allowed the dropping-off of boxcars to be filled, but there hadn’t been a bale of cotton made in Blacklin County in more years than Rhodes could remember.

  On the other side of the street there had once been a cotton gin, one of many in the county, but they were all gone now. The property was currently being used by a business known as the Blacklin County Environmental Reclamation Center, which Rhodes thought was a mighty fancy name for a junkyard.

  Behind a rust-stained sheet-metal fence some of the old gin buildings still stood, but the entire block was covered with scrap metal of all kinds, old auto bodies, defunct washing machines and dryers, stoves, engines, lawn mowers, air-conditioning units, and things Rhodes couldn’t begin to name. It looked a little like the set of some postapocalypse movie, just before the rise of the machines. Rhodes wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the seemingly inanimate components had reassembled themselves and gone off in search of Sarah Connor.

  Outside the fence were several big metal Dumpsters, some of them overflowing with bagged trash. Junk cars took up most of the rest of the space, but Rhodes also saw an old tractor and a hay-bailing machine.

  The warehouse was an extension of the junkyard, but Rhodes had no idea what was inside it. Nothing valuable, he supposed, since the big doors were wide open. Outside sat more junk cars and pickups and an oil well pump. The side of the center facing the railroad held a jumble of large rusted metal tanks big enough to hold two or three cars’ worth of thousands of gallons of oil or gas.

  “Where do you think those two fellas went?” Buddy asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Rhodes said. “You want the junkyard or the warehouse?”

  “Sure is dark in the warehouse,” Buddy said, “and you don’t have a flashlight. I do.” He touched a small Maglite LED flashlight dangling from his belt. “So I’ll take the warehouse.”

  “You be careful in there,” Rhodes said, “and don’t shoot anybody you don’t have to.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I can handle myself.”

  “I know you can,” Rhodes said, and Buddy went across the street to the warehouse.

  Rhodes went to the gate of the recycling center. Nobody was around in the yard, but that was no surprise. It was still early. The gate was open, however, and so there was probably someone in the office, a low building that had seen better days. It looked so old that it could very well have served as the office for the cotton gin.

  Rhodes walked up to the door and knocked. The man who opened the door was about three inches taller than Rhodes and twice as broad. He looked so hard that he might have been carved out of some of his own scrap metal. He wore a khaki work shirt with the name AL stitched in red on the right side.

  “Yeah?” Al asked.

  Rhodes showed his badge. “Sheriff Dan Rhodes. I’m looking for two men. Did you see anybody come inside here?”

  “I’ve been looking at the books, not out the window.”

  Al wasn’t a friendly sort, then, and not prone to introductions, but Rhodes didn’t mind. Liking the local sheriff wasn’t a requirement to live in the county.

  “I’m sure you’re busy,” Rhodes said. “Mind if I look around?”

  Al stared over Rhodes’s head and didn’t say anything for a while.

  “I guess it’s okay,” he said at last.

  “Got a deputy checking across the street,” Rhodes said. “That all right, too?”

  “Long as there’s no shooting.”

  “I don’t plan to shoot anybody,” Rhodes said.

  He couldn’t speak for Buddy, but he hoped the deputy didn’t get carried away. He couldn’t speak for the men he was chasing, either. He didn’t think they were armed, but it would be a mistake to assume they weren’t. Rhodes figured it was best just to keep quiet about that kind of thing.

  “Go ahead,” Al said. “No shooting, though.”

  He went back inside and closed the door. Something was bothering him, for sure, but he wasn’t the type to unburden himself to an officer of the law.

  Rhodes had paid more than one official visit to that office, though he’d never encountered that man before. Maybe there was something going on that Rhodes should be interested in, but he’d worry about that later, if ever. Right now he needed to find the men he was looking for.

  There were plenty of places to hide in the junkyard, but Rhodes wondered if the two men had bothered. They could just as easily have worked their way through the scrap and headed in any direction. The place wasn’t even fenced on two sides. If the run had tired the men out as much as it had him, however, they’d have found
a place to hole up and rest. They were younger than Rhodes, but they’d run faster, too. He was betting they’d need the rest.

  Rhodes looked at the ground, but the trails that led through the junkyard maze were too hard to take footprints. He looked up. The stacks of metal all around offered plenty of concealment, but if Rhodes had been the one choosing a hiding place, he’d have picked the big metal building that loomed over everything else. He didn’t know what purpose it had served, but it had a tower on one end that was several stories high. The top of the tower was stained dark, as if it might have been burned, or as if something had been burned inside it. The discoloration was more likely just corrosion, though.

  Rhodes walked over to the building to see if it had an open doorway. Sure enough, it did. At one time a big sheet-metal sliding door had covered the opening in the building’s side, but the door now lay on the packed earth outside. It had been there a long time and was rusted through in spots. A droopy weed poked through one of the spots, looking as if it had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

  Rhodes bent over, pulled up his pants leg, and got the little Kel-Tec .32 out of the holster. Rhodes had carried a .38 for a long time, but it was too evident and bulky, so he’d looked around for something smaller. The Kel-Tec was what he’d come up with. It was like a little Glock, but with a better trigger. It was light, it held seven hollow-point bullets, and as long as Rhodes wasn’t involved in a serious firefight, it would do just fine. It wouldn’t stop a charging rhino, but it would stop most anybody Rhodes was likely to encounter.

  He’d said he didn’t plan to shoot anybody, but he remembered some poem he’d read in high school about how plans sometimes, or maybe it was often, went wrong.

  With the pistol at the ready, he looked around the edge of the doorway. Thin shafts of sunlight came into the building through holes in the walls and roof, and dust motes drifted through the light. Scrap metal was heaped all around, but no one was in sight.

  Rhodes stepped inside. The place smelled of oil and gasoline. The concrete floors, where they weren’t covered with scrap, were stained by petroleum products and rust.