Fraidy Hole: A Sheriff Lester P. Morrison Novel (19 page)

The deputy turned to his boss, his face a picture of concern.

“
Number
81 you say?
According to my buddy Jason, 81 is the star receiver on the football team.
But 81 didn’t play last night; wasn’t even on the bench.”

Lester had to think about that awhile.
“Hard to believe the boy would miss a football game unless he had a very good reason, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would,” Billy Ray
agreed
. “Sick or injured or some kind of family emergency is all I
can
think of, and the first two would be doubtful.
Most kids would have to be tied down and held for ransom not to play.
I bet we get some answers at the home.”

A block away from the address, Billy Ray blurted, “Ransom!
If someone had kidnapped Melissa,
surely
we would have had a call for ransom by now.”

Lester shook his head.
“Not necessarily.
You never know about a kidnapping.
Sometimes there is no ransom.
Could easily be a sex thing. Grab em’, use em’, and kill em’.
Happens a lot.”

“But not around here,” Billy Ray added.

“No, not around here…not yet anyway.”

The Sanchez house was a white two story with what looked to be a lot of square footage
, plenty of room for a large family
.
The yard was well cared for with two modest flower gardens on either side of the front door
, both
full of pink mums. An external garage sat to one side with the overhead door closed.
There were four cars in the gravel driveway; two Fords, a Dodge, and a Jeep Cherokee. None of them were late model and it was obvious from the faded paint and dents that all had seen some hard miles. As the lawmen stepped from their pickup, a curtain in the front part of the house parted and quickly closed.
Much to his chagrin, Harley heard the command
“
Stay!” Didn’t like it, but
as there were no squirrels or cats in sight, decided it would be a good time for a nap
and curled up in the seat.

The doorbell was a standard
ding-dong,
two-chime affair, but after three
cycles, there was no response.
“
Try knocking
,” Lester
suggested.

After a half-dozen hard raps
,
the door
slowly
opened
, but
no more than six inches or so, barely
wide enough for a
middle-aged
Hispanic woman
to
peek out and
cautiously
appraise her visitors.

“Hello there,” Lester said. We’re from the Sheriff’s Department.
I’m Sheriff Morrison. Could we please talk to the family of Carlos Sanchez?”

“Perdón, yo no hablo inglés.”

Lester and Billy Ray looked at each other as if to say
now what
?

“Let me try,” Billy Ray said.

He pointed at the woman and asked, “Carlos Sanchez madre?”

The woman hesitated but then, “Sí.”

“Carlos padre?” Billy Ray said and shrugged his shoulders.

“Yo no sé.”

“I think she means she doesn’t know where the father is. Where do I go from here?”

Lester said, “Ask her why Carlos didn’t play football last night.”

“What?
I don’t how to
say
that.”

“You were talking Spanish just now
,” Lester challenged.

“Hey, I only know a half dozen words and I’ve
all
ready used two of them.”

Lester removed his straw hat and rubbed his forehead.
“I knew it was gonna be one of those days.”
The woman had barely moved,
holding the same close gap in the door.

Lester had an idea.
“Ask her for a drink of water if you can figure out how.”

“I don’t know the word for water, aqua or maybe it’s agua?

“Take a shot at it.”

“Senora, drink, aqua?” Billy Ray asked and pantomimed drinking from a glass.

The woman
stared
at him with obvious suspicion
but finally nodded
and turned away
without closing
the door. Lester waited a few moments
, then
motioned with his head for Billy Ray to follow him inside.
Easing the door shut, neither
man
spoke,
using the opportunity to look and listen.
The interior of the home was as neat as the outside with
almost
everything in its proper place.
A pair of scuffed and paint spattered work boots sat beside an easy chair while a single cigarette butt smoldered in an ash tray, a lazy
trail of smoke
spiraling upward.
Billy Ray pointed at his ear and then at the ceiling where the smoke gathered.
Footsteps
.
Lester nodded.

Senora Sanchez returned with a glass of water, but her eyes went wide when she saw the lawmen inside her house.
Billy Ray gave her his brightest smile and drained the glass.

“Tell her thank you,” Lester said.

Billy Ray knew that one. “Gracias.”

Lester tipped his hat to the woman, murmured another
gracias
, then to Billy Ray, “Let’s go.”
Both heard the click of a lock behind them.

Back in the pickup, the men sat and thought about what they had just seen.
The black lab, confined to the middle of the seat, was
now awake and
impatient with the delay to hit the road and to
sample more interesting odors.
Lester gave him a
quick
head rub
to calm
him down.

Billy Ray broke the silence.
“Four cars in the driveway, only two people in the house that we know of
. What
do you make of that
,
Sheriff?”

Lester said nothing, but continued to watch the curtains and doors of the house.
Billy Ray raised one eyebrow
,
waited for a reply, didn’t get one, and wished he hadn’t answered the phone this morning.
The deputy had enough time to find his pocket knife and clean the fingernails of one hand before Lester
eventually answered the question.
“It wouldn’t be much
of an assumption to figure the
re are
people in that house that don’t want to be seen. And, since we’re assumin’ those people are probably of Mexican descent
, one
could also
assume
, that there’s a possibility one or more doesn’t have a green card.
But that’s a lot of assumin’ for no more than we know.
Fact is, Billy Ray, at this point in time, I don’t give a hoot about any illegal residents
in
that particular abode, not while that child is missing anyway. But it’s something to keep in mind.”

“
Too bad Mrs. Sanchez doesn’t
speak English,” Billy Ray said.
“I’d
su
r
e
like to know why her boy didn’t show up at the game last night.”

Lester smiled, “Oh, she could speak it all right, or at least understand it.
Carlos spoke English very well when I talked with him.
You can’t tell me she didn’t pick up some of that
ingles
from her son.”

“But how do you know they live together?
Maybe the boy and his mother don’t get along.
He could be
staying with a relative
,
or his father
for that matter
.”

“Good point,” Lester admitted.
“
I didn’t think that through. ”

Billy Ray said, “
Way too much assumin’ going on around here.”

Lester grinned.
He gave it another ten minutes, shrugged, and eased out of the driveway.

Chapter 15

Earl Redman had a bucket of dirty water and a mop, swabbing up the
sticky
from the
spilled beer
the night before. He had been at the Pirate’s Den since ten-forty five after silently slipping out of the house and away from Marilyn’s strident blather. Earl was hoping to
have the Den
cleaned up, or as clean as he could get it, before the first football game of the day came on TV at eleven, Notre Dame at Pitt if he remembered right.
Saturday was almost always Earl’s busiest day and this was especially true during football season. A lot of
Cimarron County’s
good-old-boys
, mostly the younger ones,
liked to drop by the bar for a few brewskies with their buddies and
watch the
games on Earl’s
big Hi-Def
TV. If OU or Oklahoma State happened to playing, beer sales would double
and sometimes triple
. The TV had been a good investment, paying for itself in one season.
For a while, Earl had subscribed to the Playboy Channel for the enjoyment of his late night customers
(not that he didn’t watch it himself
) but when
Jim Barnum’s wife came
stomping
in, looking for her husband, and threatened to report him for showing porn in a public place, the subscription
was abruptly cancelled
. In view of the previous trouble from serving a few teenagers, Earl had decided not to press it.
Damn shame too
, he’d thought,
I was just starting to build a
late night
crowd
.

Both the front and back doors of the bar were propped open in a
hopeless
attempt to air out the stench, when a shadow blocked the light.
J.O. Mecham shuffled in and took his customary stool.

“Getting your usual early start today J.O.?” Earl called out.

“Don’t give me any shit barkeep.
Just get me a beer.”

“My, my, aren’t we the cheery one today? What’s the matter, did that sheriff hurt your feelings last night?”

“One of these days, that son of a bitch is gonna push me too far. I don’t give a good goddamn if he does have a star on his chest.
I’m only gonna take so much of that bullshit of his.
Dragging me out of here right in front of those Mexicans; that was embarrassing.”

Earl didn’t understand what the Mexicans had to do with anything, but made no comment on J.O.’s perceived social stigmas, and popped the top on a Bud for his first customer of the day.
Returning to the cleaning chores, Earl took a 32 gallon trashcan from beneath the bar and went around to the booths and tables collecting cigarette butts and empty beer bottles.
He made a half-hearted pass over the tables with a bar rag to knock the ashes off and called it good.
Back from the dumpster, he saw that J.O.’s bottle was empty. Earl didn’t ask
if he wanted another
, didn’t need to.
With J.O. you just kept them coming until he
slid off his stool and
went home.
The man had an unbelievable capacity for the suds. If he weren’t such a profitable customer, Earl would have barred him from the Pirate’s Den long ago.

It wasn’t that J.O. went looking for trouble, but he didn’t avoid it either.
J.O. Mecham let nothing pass, no matter how slight.
Where most patrons would excuse an inadvertent bump from a man on his way to the bathroom and a little wobbly on his feet, J.O. took it as a personal affront.
Derogatory words would follow, usually something that referred to the man’s ancestry or certain parts of his anatomy such as “Hey Asshole, watch where you’re goin’ you son of a bitch!” The conversation usually went downhill from there.
Either the offending party shrugged it off—easy to do considering J.O.’s bulk and menacing scowl—or some liquid courage entered into the proceedings with blows following soon after.
The regulars knew of J.O.’s personality, or lack thereof, and cut a wide path around J.O.’s stool at the end of the bar.
But newcomers passed at their own risk.
Of course, anyone with the slightest bit of fighting experience or who knew how to move, could have taken J.O. with some well placed jabs and left the fat man with a bloody nose and gasping for air, but to date, that hadn’t happened.