Blanco County 03 - Flat Crazy (29 page)

37

 

IT WAS A beautiful day for the ceremony—sunny, cloudless, temperature in the sixties. Marlin’s face bore little reminder of the events from eleven days earlier. There was still some minor discoloration around his eyes, but his nose was feeling much better and the wound on his back was healing quickly.

“You ready for this?” Bobby Garza asked. He was sitting across from Marlin in the coffee room at the Blanco County Sheriff’s Department. Garza had been at work for eight days and had been making his way around on crutches. It was good to have him back.

They could hear a marching band torturing some unrecognizable melody on the lawn of the courthouse across the street. After that, the mayor would speak, and then John Marlin would climb to the stage. He’d volunteered to be the one to bestow the honors on Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock. The city council had conjured up something called the Superior Citizen Award, and the two poachers would be the first ever to receive it. Marlin could barely stand the irony.

But this wouldn’t close the books on it all. None of them—Marlin, Garza, Tatum and the other deputies, even Charlie and his mother—would feel a sense of closure until they knew what had happened to Duke Waldrip, who had never been found. After several days of combing the woods, the search party assumed they would stumble upon a body eventually, but they never did. Had Duke escaped? They might never know.

They knew what had happened to Kyle Dawson, though. He’d been electrocuted, most likely by the toaster that had been found with his body. The hot tub behind his house seemed the most likely scene of the crime, considering that he’d been wearing a swimsuit—and Duke Waldrip was the chief suspect. All his bullshit about Cheri just didn’t add up, and she had volunteered to take a lie-detector test. Actually, she’d taken two, and she had passed them both. There was one odd fact, though, that couldn’t be explained. Henry Jameson had lifted a number of partial fingerprints off the extension cord that presumably was used to plug the toaster in. Some matched Duke’s. Some matched Kyle’s. None matched Cheri’s. But right at the end of the cord, on the plug, Jameson found the largest print of all. And it matched Gus Waldrip’s.
Gus Waldrip.
Of course, he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d reappear someday and they could question him. For some reason, Marlin didn’t think that would ever happen.

They had no doubt it was Duke who had shot Garza, but there was never any physical evidence to support it. It was merely the most logical conclusion, and there were no other suspects. The Houston Police Department had filed that case as “open but inactive.”

Likewise, they were certain it was Duke—not Kyle—who killed Oliver Searcy. Charlie had been given a few days to recover from the trauma, and then a social services worker had gently questioned him. He’d skipped school one day—which he swore he rarely did—and that was when he’d seen Oliver Searcy with Duke Waldrip. Charlie had been in the house alone, watching television, when he’d heard a truck pull up outside. Then another. He ran to his room and peeked out the window. Duke was out there with another man in camo. Charlie had gotten a good long look, and Marlin felt the boy’s identification of Oliver Searcy was indisputable. Duke, who had come home to retrieve a rifle, never knew Charlie had been home that day. He never knew there was a witness who could verify that he
had
hunted with Searcy. He never found out, apparently, until that morning eleven days ago.

“Quit dwelling on it,” Garza said, and Marlin looked up at him. “Won’t do any good anyway.”

“Well now, those are some words of wisdom,” Marlin replied.

“Don’t get all ornery on me. All I’m saying is, we’ll find him or his body. You
know
we will.”

The band fell silent and Marlin could hear the mayor’s voice over a loudspeaker.

“Better get out there,” Garza said, “It’s redneck-appreciation time.”

Marlin slowly stood.

Garza put his weight on one leg as he hoisted himself out of the chair and onto his crutches. “I got an idea. Tonight, let’s load up some sandwiches and go hunt for the chupacabra. There’s bound to be some kind of reward, don’t you think?” He pronounced it
ree-ward.

“And right after that,” said Marlin, playing along, “we can throw a net over the Sasquatch. Maybe track down a unicorn.”

“That’s the spirit.”

They got to the front door of the building, and Marlin opened it to let Garza through. As the men walked down the sidewalk and began to cross the street, the crowd rose and began to applaud.

Epilogue

THE DAY AFTER the ceremony on the courthouse lawn, a dog returned to its home north of Macho Bueno Ranch with a bloodstained rag in its mouth. Closer examination revealed that the rag was a portion of a shirt much like the one Duke Waldrip had been wearing twelve days earlier. John Marlin, Bill Tatum, and a small group of deputies searched a wooded area behind the dog’s home the next afternoon. In a ravine half a mile away, the search party found more shredded clothing, and then a badly decomposed partial corpse. DNA testing revealed that the body was, in fact, that of Richard Anthony Waldrip. The medical examiner, Lem Tucker, noted several fang marks on the remaining bones.

Four days later, a fourteen-year-old named Tiffany Sloan, driving without a license, hit an animal with her mother’s car on Flat Creek Road. John Marlin and Trey Sweeney quickly identified it as a spotted hyena. After much debate, the animal was sent to the forensics laboratory at the Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin. The contents of the stomach were extracted, but testing for human remains proved inconclusive.

Immediately after the ceremony, Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock approached John Marlin and professed that their poaching days were over. “This doing the right thing is kinda cool,” O’Brien said. Billy Don nodded vigorously in agreement. One month later, John Marlin arrested them for shooting three whitetail deer out of season.

Sheriff Bobby Garza discarded the crutches after nine weeks, three weeks short of the twelve the doctor had recommended. Two months later, he began a rigorous regimen of rehabilitation therapy. Today, his limp is nearly unnoticeable.

After inheriting Kyle Dawson’s estate, Cheri quit her job at the strip club and went into a pricey rehabilitation facility. She
has
slept with most of the male counselors, but she was stone-cold sober each time. She plans to attend college and earn a teaching degree.

In November of that year, Mike Hung won Actor of the Year at the Adult Entertainment Awards. As he gave his acceptance speech, right after he thanked “all the little people,” his glass eye popped out of its socket, rolled down the stage toward the audience, and caused pandemonium as scantily clad porn starlets screamed and fled in horror. Hung and Marty Hoffenhauser went on to produce three more films together, grossing a total of more than twenty million dollars.

In February, Rudi Villarreal met John Marlin in San Antonio, just as planned. But she hadn’t been simply enjoying a long vacation; she’d struck a deal with the
Blanco County Record,
and they’d agreed to run a lengthy article, written by Rudi, about deception and dishonesty within the media. When she asked Marlin if he would be willing to be interviewed regarding the false broadcast on
Hard News Tonight,
he readily agreed. Her reputation opened many doors for her, and she was able to go on record with many high-profile politicians and celebrities who had been libeled or slandered by disreputable and legitimate media outlets alike. Her article garnered national attention and became a frontrunner for the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly afterward, she took a position with the
New York Times.
She and Marlin talk often on the phone, and Marlin is planning to visit her soon in her new apartment in Manhattan.

In the spring of that year, Kate Fulmer, a college student and part-time volunteer for an organization called People 4 People, worked ten hours a week at a soup kitchen in Lincoln, Nebraska. On her second day, she noticed a quiet man sitting by himself in one corner of the room. Kate approached him and made small talk, which became a daily routine, and the two quickly became friends. He was an odd individual, who, on occasion, would stare into space and blurt out a bizarre amalgam of words. All in all, despite his peculiarities, he seemed to be a content person, a gentle and peaceful man who smiled often. That’s why Kate was so surprised when, on his ninth day at the kitchen, he casually mentioned that he had intentionally electrocuted a man. Further, he said, he had arranged it so his brother would take the blame. Initially, Kate assumed he was either delusional or joking. He flatly said he wasn’t. Kate, starting to believe him, asked why he had done it. He said that both men had made fun of him. Also, he said, they were mean to animals, which was why he had let some of their animals loose. And then he giggled and said something confusing about sousaphones.
Maybe he is joking,
Kate thought.
You could never tell with these people.
The man continued to laugh as Kate rose and made her way back behind the counter. She wondered if she should call the police and report what the man had said. But it wouldn’t have been any use anyway. He left a few minutes later and she never saw him again.

ON FRIDAY, MAY 7, a beautiful spring morning fairly bursting with promises of hope and renewal, Texas state senator Dylan Herzog received a phone call that grabbed him by an extremely sensitive part of his anatomy and yanked him to a place he definitely didn’t want to go.

Before the unwelcome interruption, Herzog had been minding his own business, thumbing through a copy of
Esquire,
contemplating the possibility of cheek implants. A senior aide named Rusk was in Herzog’s office with him, both of them moving slowly, sort of easing into the morning. They were seriously hung over, having spent the previous afternoon on a cabin cruiser with a couple of hard-drinking lobbyists and their bikini-clad dates. These were young ladies with scruples; their tops hadn’t come off until the third round of margaritas.

“You seen this yet?” Rusk asked, hefting a document three inches thick.

But Herzog was too distracted by the article, a somewhat facetious piece on cosmetic surgery. For a price, you too could look like a Hollywood hunk! There were before-and-after shots: Some loser who’d spent a cool twenty grand for a complete makeover. Hair plugs to give him a thick mop like Hugh Grant’s. Liposuction for the trim waist of Russell Crowe. And cheek implants for the Brad Pitt look. But now, in Herzog’s opinion, the patient simply looked like a hairier, skinnier, cheekier loser.