seventeen

“Would you look at the price on those strawberries? Why is everything so expensive?”

Death glanced around, but the woman seemed to be talking to him so he shrugged and answered her. “I guess because they’re out of season.”

“You can get strawberries all year round.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s because they ship them in from, like, Mexico or Chile or somewhere. Local strawberries won’t be ready until late May or June, I think.”

“Hmph! Well, I still think it’s highway robbery.”

Death and Wren were at the local super-center, waiting on a sandwich tray from the deli. The Keystone men were setting up for a big, two-day auction of farm machinery and classic cars—things far from Wren’s area of expertise. She and Death had been working at the Campbell house all morning, but stopped to take “the boys” their lunch.

Behind him, the middle-aged man stocking the produce department had greeted Wren by name.

“Hey, I just saw Eric Farrington in here,” he said. “He said you and he were dating?”

“I’ll kill him,” Wren said. “Death, give me your gun.”

“Come on, now. You know what the cops said about shooting Farrington.”

She rolled her eyes. “I know. I have to wait my turn.”

Glancing around, Death spotted the subject of their conversation leaning against a refrigerated floor bunker and openly ogling the young woman who was filling the milk case.

“Hey, Farrington! Get up here a minute!”

Eric stood and strolled toward them, half strutting. He was off duty and wearing jeans and a light jacket over a printed tee.

“Who do you think you are, ordering me around? I could arrest you for that. I’ll have you know I’m an actual, legitimate officer of the court.”

“God help the court.”

“Did you tell Bob we were dating?” Wren demanded, angry.

“Oh, no. He misunderstood. I told him that you wanted to date me, but I wasn’t interested.”

“Eric,” Death said, “not even your blow-up doll wants to date you.”

Eric turned on Wren, who was snickering. “What are you looking at?”

“A sad little man who will never have a real girlfriend.”

“That just shows what you know. I have lots of girlfriends.”

“They don’t count as girlfriends,” Death told him, “if you have to pay them.”

“I never pay them.”

“They don’t count as girlfriends if your mother pays them, either,” Wren laughed.

“You know what? This is what I got to say to you.” He pulled open his jacket and stuck his chest out at her. His tee shirt said: I’ve got the dick. I call the shots.

“Ha,” she scoffed. “I squeeze the balls. I call the shots.”

“Oh, really?” he sneered. He turned to Death. “Is that right, big guy? Do you let the little woman squeeze your balls?”

Death’s eyes lit up and he grinned a huge, face-splitting grin. He put an arm around Wren’s shoulders and pulled her close.

“Oh, yeah!”

_____

“Okay, so I know the John Deere is the yellow and green one. Was the blue one the Ford and the orange the Allis-Chalmers?”

Roy Keystone stopped beside Wren and looked over her shoulder at the list she was making on her laptop. “You know, we really can handle this, honey, if you want to go back to the Campbell house with that pretty new boyfriend of yours.”

She smiled at him. “I would, but he got a call from one of the local bail bondsmen and he thinks he might have a job lined up. He lives pretty close to the line, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. But at least he doesn’t have to sleep in his car anymore, right?” Roy grinned.

“You know about that?” She’d been dying to talk that over with someone, but out of respect for Death’s feelings, she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.

“Small town. Word gets around. Don’t tell my wife I admitted this, but a bunch of old men gossiping will put a bunch of old women to shame any day.” He leaned down and tapped her computer screen. “The ‘plow-ey thing with pulleys and buckets’ is a cultivator.”

“I knew that …”

_____

Death tapped on the door and let himself in when the voice inside invited him to. He found Warren Hagarson seated behind his desk. Hagarson was a tall, stout man with black hair going gray and a jovial smile that didn’t always reach his eyes. He had company just now, Death realized. A nervous teenager with a bad case of acne sat across from him in the hard plastic chair.

“Ah, Mr. Bogart,” Hagarson said. “Come in! Come in. Bogart, this is Ethan. Ethan tried to rob a convenience store. Not real successfully. Ethan, Mr. Bogart is a bounty hunter. Show him your license, Bogart.”

Death obligingly pulled out his license and held it up in front of the kid’s face.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Ethan stammered. “I don’t need to—Death?! Your name is Death?”

Death gave him a merry smile and didn’t bother to correct the pronunciation.

“And he works for me,” Hagarson said.

“Ah, yeah.” Death let the smile drop away, rubbed the back of his neck and feigned nerves of his own. “Um, what was the penalty again if I brought you someone and they weren’t, you know, actually breathing anymore?”

Hagarson put his hands up. “Bogart! Again? What happened this time?”

“Man, it totally wasn’t my fault! He was resisting arrest.”

“How?”

“He hid from me. Plus, he was whining. It was really annoying.”

Hagarson sighed. “Well, I hope it was worth it. Like I told you last time, dead bodies only fetch half the bounty.” He looked over at Ethan. “You have to be patient with Mr. Bogart. He’s a bit testy. You’re not going to make me send him after you, are you?”

“No, sir! Never, sir! Absolutely not, sir!”

“Good. Then get out of here and I will see you in court,” he consulted some papers, “a week from Thursday. Got it?”

“Yes, sir!”

Hagarson nodded and Ethan made a run for it. They stood in silence until the outer door closed behind him.

“You think he really bought that?” Death asked.

Hagarson sniffed. “Oh, yeah. I wouldn’t sit in that chair if I were you.”

Death laughed and seated himself on the corner of the desk. “I was a little surprised to hear from you. I’d heard that you always handle your own skips.”

“Usually I do.” Hagarson pushed his chair back and put his right foot up on the desk. It was in a cast. “Tripped over my wife’s pet rat.”

“Your wife has a pet rat?”

“She calls it a chihuahua.”

“Ah. I see. So what do you need from me?”

“You captured Tyrone Blount last week.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I bailed him out again. He secured the bond with a truck, title and all. Only now the truck’s been reported stolen. Thief broke into a house while the family was away, stole a bunch of papers out of a wall safe, including the title to the truck in the driveway, then stole the truck on their way out.”

“Blount,” Death said, voice flat. “And then he used the stolen truck as security for a bail bond. And he didn’t think this would come back to bite him in the ass?”

“Never said the man was a genius. You brought him in once. Think you can find him again?”

“I’d certainly be willing to try.”

_____

The farm equipment auction wasn’t until the weekend, but there was a lot of work to do to get ready. It was going to be one of the Keystone’s biggest sales of the year. Wren worked beside the family, cleaning, cataloging, double-checking inventories and planning the logistics of the auction. In the bustle of activity, no one paid much attention to the narrow, two-lane blacktop that ran by the sale sight, nor to the fallow field across the road, and certainly not to the weathered old barn that stood in the center of that field. If they had been paying attention they might have seen a hint of movement in the old hay mow, the outline of a shadowy figure or the glint of sunlight on a binocular lens.

_____

The problem with Blount, as Death already knew, was that he was paranoid. He was always on alert and he’d run at the drop of a hat. He lived in a ramshackle old two-story house on top of a high hill that gave him a clear view of the road. He claimed he couldn’t work because he had a bad back, but Death had seen him jump from the second-floor window and run for the next road over, half a mile away through deep woods. He was part of a community of low-lifes that haunted the county, a loose affiliation of petty thieves and drug dealers, and there always seemed to be someone he could call on to help him get away.

This time Death didn’t bother to drive up to the house first. He pulled into the driveway of an abandoned homestead, hid his jeep behind a massive lilac bush, and hiked down to the creek that separated Blount’s property from the rest of the world.

Last time he’d gone after Blount, Death had tried to ambush him in these woods, but he hadn’t taken his own health into account and had come off the worse for wear. He still thought this was a good place to stop him, though. There were a hundred paths through the woods, but only three places to cross the creek.

From his time in the Corps, Death knew a dozen different booby traps. He wracked his brain now, trying to come up with one that wasn’t lethal. The three paths across the creek consisted of a shallow ford, a line of stepping stones, and a downed tree that formed a makeshift bridge. He could, of course, booby trap all three, but he felt his chances of success would increase if he could eliminate two of the options, funneling Blount into a bottleneck of his own choosing.

The ford was the simplest and most straightforward route across the stream and would be the hardest to sabotage, but it would also be the worst place to set a trap. The path down the bank was narrow but too steep to safely trap anyone. Blount was a criminal and a creep and a fool, but Death still didn’t want to hurt him.

He studied the path leading down to the ford. He could dig it out a little without too much exertion, but it was already nearly vertical, and a man who’d jump out a second-story window wouldn’t hesitate to jump six feet. On the opposite side of the stream, the ground rose eight feet or more in a steep bluff, concave at some places and impossible to climb. The only way up was to follow a gully, where runoff from years of rainstorms had worn a path down to bedrock. At the head of the gully … Death looked up and smiled.

A massive tree loomed over him, once majestic but now dead and listing toward the creek. The scar of a lightning strike snaked down one side. Its roots had lost their grip on the soil and erosion had begun to carve a cave beneath it. It was only a matter of time until the ancient forest giant gave in to gravity and fell.

With a backpack full of supplies over his shoulder, Death crossed the creek and carefully climbed the gully, circling the tree gingerly, lest it topple before he was ready for it to. Once he was safe on the opposite side, he took a small hand saw from his pack and cut through the three largest roots still anchoring the tree. A smaller fallen tree served as a fulcrum and a long limb made for an effective lever. He wedged the lever under the edge of the dead tree and threw his full weight against the other end, and with a deep groan and a mighty crash, the old tree fell.

The tree’s corpse filled the gully, crossed the creek and blocked the path on Blount’s side as well. To clear the tree away, or even fashion it into another bridge that could be used, would require days of work with a heavy-duty chainsaw.

It had been a noisy operation, and Death could well imagine that the sound of the tree falling would attract the attention of the paranoid and hyper-vigilant man at the top of the hill. He stayed out of sight behind the upthrust root ball. After some ten minutes of waiting, his excess caution paid off.

Blount was a good woodsman, Death had to give him that, but Death had no trouble spotting the smaller man and following his progress down the hill. Blount moved cautiously, sticking to cover and watching warily for any sign of an intruder. He saw the fallen tree and blocked path and hesitated, studying the situation. His mouth was moving, talking to himself, Death thought. He was too far away to read his lips, but he could tell, from Blount’s body language, the exact second he gave it up as an act of God. Coming out of hiding, he looked the fallen tree over one last time and then casually made his way back up the hill.

When he was safely out of sight, Death made his own way upstream to the northernmost crossing, the steppingstones. Here, five irregularly-spaced boulders made a hopscotch pattern across a wide section of the stream where the water ran swift and deep. Death had brought his lever with him and as he crossed he shifted each stone behind him, so that they no longer formed a usable path.

That left only the fallen log, and here he would set his trap. Hidden from suspicious eyes on the hillside by the rising bank behind him and the thick branches overhead, he dropped his pack on the sandy shore. Kneeling beside the near-end of the log, he reached under with his cupped hands and began to scoop out a shallow depression.

_____

“Hello?” Wren stood up, pressed her phone closer to her ear and walked away from the massive combine she was scrubbing. “No, I’m sorry. You’re breaking up. I can hardly hear you … Death? Death’s not here. What? What … sorry? Death? Oh, this is Death? Is this you? I’m sorry, I can barely hear you. What? You want me to … what? Go where? Meet you? The Campbell house? Okay. Okay. I’ll be right there.”

She hung up the phone and returned it to her pocket. “I need to go,” she told Doris, who was working next to her. “Death wants me to meet him at the Campbell house. He says he thinks he has an idea.”

“Okay, honey. Go on and have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t like to do.”