CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

As I was having my coffee the next morning the weatherman on the radio said the area had been without rain for sixty-seven straight days. I hadn’t counted, but I was willing to take his word for it. I knew it was drier than I ever remembered. Reservoirs across the state were reporting record low levels, and there had been almost a dozen weather-related deaths since the drought began, the last two coming during the previous week.

I got to the office and read the sheet from the night before. Domestic squabbles and car wrecks and more of the same. I whiled away the rest of the morning on paperwork and administrative duties. Since I had skipped breakfast, I called the café across the street for a hamburger as soon as it opened.

I finished my lunch, and finally Lew Feemster phoned a little after one and gave me the address. “He’s supposed to be waiting there,” he said. “He told my friend to come by about two and bring the cash for the money orders.”

I thanked him and hung up and found myself faced with a logistical problem. Calls had been coming in so thick and fast that day that I fretted all morning long about having a backup available for the raid. Now the time had come and I didn’t. The curse of small departments is that we have to cover too much territory with too few people. Linda was at the doctor’s office, Billy Don and Otis were on calls at the north end of the county, and Toby was working a big wreck out on Route 9 South where a tank truck carrying hazardous waste had turned over when it swerved to miss an old man on a tractor.

I called the city PD and found them in much the same shape. Every day-shift patrol officer they had was on a critical call and couldn’t be pulled in except for extreme emergencies.

That left Bubba Cates. Bubba had been with me from the start of my law enforcement career, and back when he was younger he’d been my best deputy. Now almost seventy, half deaf, and with eyes dimmed by incipient cataracts, he only worked part-time. The last two years I’d kept him assigned to guard the district court when it was in session because Judge MacGregor preferred him to anybody else. Both men were pipe smokers with large collections of pipes from around the world. During long recesses and jury deliberations, the two of them smoked and played chess and argued about everything under the sun. Three years earlier the commissioner’s court, responding to the nationwide lemming effect, had instituted a smoking ban on all county property. This was done, of course, with considerable publicity meant to assure the voters that their elected officials were doing their duty as guardians of Caddo County’s health and morals. Then they quietly overlooked the fact that the town’s most popular officeholder was quietly ignoring their smoking ban. Just as they overlooked the bottle of forbidden whisky in my desk drawer.

I hated the idea of putting Bubba back into the line of fire, but I could see no other choice. I threw two flak vests over my shoulder and grabbed a Remington riot gun and a bandoleer of three-inch Magnum buckshot. After passing up the elevator as too slow, I vaulted up the rotunda stairway to the third floor and was almost to the door of the district courtroom when Charlie Morton emerged from the commissioners’ office.

“What’s going on,” he asked. “Why all the hardware?”

“I’m going to get Bubba to back me up in a raid.”

“He’s not up to it, Bo.”

“I know that, but I’ve got no choice.”

He gave me an ironic grin. “Hell, you’d be better off with me.”

Something in the tone of his voice got my attention. “You were in the army, weren’t you, Charlie?”

He shook his head. “Second Marine Division, Tenth Regiment, Desert Storm.”

“You’ve been in combat?”

“You bet I have.”

“Would you be willing to cover a back door with this shotgun, or were you just joking?”

“Sure. Who’re you raiding?”

“I’ll tell you on the way. You are now officially deputized.”

I handed him the shotgun and one vest, and once we were in the car I filled him in on Scott Kimball and the tip I’d gotten. “At this point I’m pretty sure that he killed Amanda Twiller,” I said. “And the Raynes kid too.”

He shook his head sadly. “That damn boy’s never been any count. I feel sorry for his mother if it’s true. I feel sorry for her anyway.”

“I hope you don’t get hurt today, Charlie,” I said. “I called the city police, and all their people were tied up too.”

“I expect I can handle myself under fire better than any of those kids could, Bo. I don’t think a single one of them has ever been in a shooting scrape, and I’ve been in a bunch.”

“Were you scared?”

“Hell yes, I was. I’m scared right now. Aren’t you?”

“You better believe I am.”

The house was a small cottage that had been built in the 1930s only a few blocks from the garage apartment where Doyle Raynes had been arrested. I drove around the block and dropped Charlie off to cover the back door, then I parked around the corner from the front and walked slowly up the sidewalk.

I slipped my .45 auto from its holster as I went up the steps. When I knocked on the door, I heard heavy feet running somewhere inside. It was no time to stand on etiquette. I took one step back and kicked the door in, then plunged into a cluttered living room that held a fancy flat-screen TV and a sprung and battered sofa that held a young woman with a toddler clutched in her arms. The kid was howling and the woman’s eyes were full of panic. “Stay put,” I told her.

A pair of open double doors led to a messy dining room. The silhouette of a big man in a fancy wind suit appeared on the other side of the dining table and sprinted across the room. I ran after him just as he disappeared through an open doorway. A moment later I heard a screen door slam. Then I heard Charlie shout something I couldn’t make out. I raced through the kitchen and out on the back porch and kicked the screen door completely off its hinges.

Paul Arno stood in the middle of the backyard, a pistol in his hand. Charlie crouched behind an old-fashioned picket fence to the left side of the yard, the riot gun at his shoulder. “I said, drop the gun!” he yelled.

“You heard him,” I shouted. “Drop it!”

Arno appeared confused for a split second, then turned my way. I saw eyes that were coke-bright and crazy and a hand that was pointing a pistol in my direction. A tiny flash of light appeared at the pistol’s muzzle, and splinters flew off the door facing a foot from my head. That’s when I decided it was checkout time for Big Paul. My 230-grain Norma hollow-point caught him in the center of his chest just as Charlie’s charge of Magnum buckshot slammed into the right side of his head from a distance of no more than thirty feet. The two shots came so close together that we would never be able to decide who fired first. Not that it mattered.

A half a minute later the shakes hit us both, then came the laughs. We trembled and laughed and slapped each other on the back and congratulated ourselves for being alive. It’s not pretty to watch, but it often happens at such times. Not everybody can be John Wayne. If fact, John Wayne wasn’t really John Wayne.

The whole incident took less than a minute from the time I kicked in the door. The aftermath took the rest of the afternoon. Hours later Charlie and I were back at my office enjoying a drink from that bottle of whiskey Maylene disapproves of so strongly. The body had been sent off for autopsy, which was getting to be a habit, and the house was being thoroughly searched by my deputies and a DPS forensics team, which was also becoming habitual. I had called Bob Thornton, the local Texas Ranger, and he’d taken a statement from each of us, which is a mandatory procedure I’d set years ago for my department in such incidents. But I knew there would be no problems for either of us. It was a justifiable shooting if ever there was one, and I thanked Charlie profusely.

“Does this get me off the hook, Bo?” he asked.

“Why, hell no, it doesn’t. You ought to know me better than that.”

“I didn’t figure it did.”

“But I will tell you something that might make you feel better when you go to bat for me. When I was first elected, the department had three riot guns, and all three were Winchester model ninety-seven trench guns from the First World War. Fine old guns in their day, but they were pretty well worn out when the county bought them as military surplus back in the 1930s, so you can imagine what they were like forty years later. Think about that a minute. How would you have liked to have been standing behind that house this afternoon with one of those babies instead of that nice Remington you were holding? Which, by the way, I had to fight like hell to get the commissioners to buy.”

He nodded and gulped down the remainder of his drink and held out his glass for a refill. “I see your point.”