Ghost of a Chance (15 page)

“The word’s out all over town,” Lawton said.

“Yep,” Hack said. “Surprised you ain’t heard about it.”

“I haven’t, though,” Rhodes said. “And I’m beginning to wonder if I ever will.”

Lawton gave Hack a significant look. “Touchy, ain’t he? Wonder if ever’thing’s all right at home.”

Hack sighed and looked at Rhodes. “I hope so. I like Ivy a lot. I’d hate to see anything bust you two up.”

“The ghost,” Rhodes said. “Tell me about the ghost.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, it’s the same ghost. It’s just that the word on the street is that Ty Berry’s come back to haunt the graveyard. Folks’re sayin’ he’ll walk the night until his killer’s been brought to justice. They say he told you that last night in the graveyard.”

“Told me? When would he do that?”

“When you went out there to talk to him after those kids spotted him. Seems you two had quite a conversation.”

“Good grief,” Rhodes said.

“Yep,” Lawton said. “That’s kinda what I thought. But you know how people are, ‘specially when something supernatural shows up in the cemetery. Ty’s ghost is the talk of the town.”

“That’s just great,” Rhodes said. “I don’t suppose you have any other good news you forgot to mention to me.”

“Don’t think so,” Hack said. “Not unless you mean the dope.”

Rhodes sat up straighter in his chair. “Dope? What dope? As in drugs?”

“You said you weren’t gonna count them wrecks,” Hack said. “Remember?”

Someday, Rhodes thought, he was probably going to strangle Hack. But when he did, what would the county do for a dispatcher? They were never going to find someone like Hack, someone who didn’t have much of a life outside the jail, who was willing to work for a small wage, and who even slept in the jail most nights to be sure he was there when the calls came in. So Rhodes would control himself.

“Maybe I made a mistake,” he said.

“Could be,” Lawton said.

“Sure could,” Hack said to Rhodes. “You never know what’s gonna be in some car that’s been in a wreck. I remember one time you found a pistol lyin’ in the front seat of a car that’d had a little fender bender, and while you were there at the scene you got a call that somebody’d robbed a convenience store just before the wreck. Didn’t take you long to figure that one out.”

“But Ruth didn’t find any guns this time,” Lawton said. “Just that dope.”

Hack nodded. “That’s right. As in drugs.”

A less patient man would just shoot them both, Rhodes thought. But he couldn’t do that. It wasn’t that he was so patient. It was just that he was sworn to uphold the law,
even in the face of the aggravation provided by two old men.

“So Ruth found some drugs,” he said. “Where, when, what kind?”

“In a car,” Lawton said.

“That was in a wreck,” Hack added.

Rhodes took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “I gathered that much. Where in the car and what kind of drugs?”

“Meth,” Hack said.

“Ice,” Lawton chimed in.

“Crank.”

“Speed.”

Hack grinned. “Crystal.”

“This isn’t a synonym game,” Rhodes told them.

Hack tried to twist his face into a contrite look and didn’t quite make it.

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Ruth said the stuff was in plain sight, thanks to the glove box falling open in the crash. It was in a little-bitty plastic bag.”

“How much was there?” Rhodes asked.

“Ruth’s gonna bring it in. She said maybe a quarter pound.”

That would have been worth around two hundred and fifty dollars or so, Rhodes thought, and it was probably cut. Meth dealers would cut the powder with whatever they happened to have, anything from talcum to rat poison to dog-worming pills.

“Did she test it?” Rhodes asked.

“Yep. With that little portable deal y’all carry in the cars. It’s the real thing, all right.”

“What about the driver?”

“Ruth says he didn’t notice at first it was lyin’ there, but when he did, he took off runnin’, faster than if his hair was on fire.”

Rhodes thought about the way amphetamines could affect someone’s body chemistry. He thought about how fast the ghost had been running.

“Ruth couldn’t go after him,” Hack went on, “because there was still somebody in the other car. But she got his license. Name’s Burt Trask.”

“Never heard of him,” Rhodes said.

“He’s from out of the county, but it’s a good bet he bought the stuff around here. When you catch up with him, you can ask him. That’s assumin’ you can catch him. From the way Ruth talked, he might be runnin’ yet. Heck, he might be in Mexico by now.”

“Panama, maybe,” Lawton said.

Hack nodded. “Brazil.”

“What about an APB?” Rhodes asked.

“Ruth already got me to do that,” Hack told him.

“I bet I know just about where Trask got that stuff,” Lawton said.

Rhodes didn’t take the bet.

“Rapper,” he said.

20

M
ETHAMPHETAMINE HAD NEVER REALLY BEEN A PROBLEM
in Blacklin County, but Rhodes knew about it, all right. For years, the drug had been made mostly in rural areas because the labs for its manufacture created a powerful smell that was a dead giveaway. Meth labs were easy to find in cities, but in the open country, it was a different matter. They were easy to find if you got close to them, but first you had to get close.

The smell wasn’t the only drawback. The manufacturing process also created large amounts of toxic waste. In a city it could be poured into the storm drains and sewers, but that could also lead to getting caught. In the country, you could put it in fifty-five-gallon drums and stack them in a barn.

The fumes that resulted from cooking the meth could be poisonous. More than one meth lab had been shut down not because it was discovered by the law but because the amateur chemists inside it had all died from inhaling their
product. It was easier to get good ventilation in the country.

And besides the smell, the toxic waste, and the fumes, there was something else: the labs had a tendency to blow up. City cops noticed things like explosions, even if they occurred in a supposedly abandoned warehouse.

All in all, the country was the best place to run a meth lab, but nowhere was safe. Blacklin County hadn’t had any large-scale labs, but meth was getting easier to make, which was a problem for cities, and also for places like Clearview.

Enterprising drug entrepreneurs had rediscovered what was being called the “Nazi cook,” a method of making amphetamines that had originated shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, with German scientists who’d been looking for a stimulant that soldiers could cook up themselves while out in the field.

The Nazi cook didn’t produce nearly as much meth in one batch as the other method, but it wasn’t nearly as dangerous, either. You could find the recipe if you had the time to search the Internet, and you could buy all the ingredients at your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart. You could make up a small batch in coffee cups if you wanted to, and you could do it in a couple of hours. Less, if you knew what you were doing.

The old labs had required an organization, but they could turn out around a hundred and fifty pounds of the drug in one cooking.

The Nazi method required next to no organization at all. One person could do it. Two people like Rapper and Nellie could make a lot of money at it, even if they got only two pounds from a cooking. They could cut that two pounds to make it ten pounds and get ten thousand dollars for it. Maybe more, if they sold it in small lots.

Rhodes didn’t have any doubt at all that the two bikers were in Blacklin County to sell drugs, and he figured that their drug of choice this time was methamphetamine.

Proving it, however, wouldn’t be easy, thanks to the absence of fumes and toxic waste in the Nazi cook method. Rhodes couldn’t arrest someone for possession of lithium batteries, Styrofoam cups, or any of the other necessary ingredients. He’d have to catch them in the process of cooking the drugs.

“I’m going home and have some supper,” he told Hack. “Give me a call if Trask is arrested.”

“I’ll do that,” Hack said.

Rhodes hated to admit it, but he actually liked veggie lasagna. Even the low-fat sauce was good. And mozzarella cheese was naturally low in fat, so there was plenty of it. Rhodes felt very self-righteous, eating food that was good for him and enjoying it. And it made him feel better about having sneaked those Vienna sausages for lunch.

Yancey was lying in wait under Rhodes’s chair, hoping that Rhodes would drop something on the floor, but Rhodes was too careful for that. He didn’t want Yancey to get used to eating table scraps, not even very small ones.

Rhodes had told Ivy about his day, and she was interested in all of it. She’d met Rapper and Nellie before, so naturally she wanted to hear Rhodes’s theories about the drug lab. But what really interested her was the ghost.

“Two people came in the office today and asked me about it,” she said. “Did it really look like Ty Berry?”

“I couldn’t tell,” Rhodes said. “I didn’t see it that well.”

“Mary West said it told you that it was going to roam
the graveyards until you caught whoever it was that was stealing from them.”

“I heard it told me it was going to walk the night until I caught Ty’s killer.”

Ivy smiled. “It’s easy to see that you talked to it for a long time.”

Rhodes forked in a mouthful of lasagna, chewed it, and said, “I didn’t talk to it at all. I barely even saw it, and I sure didn’t catch up with it.”

“How’s your head?” Ivy asked.

“Fine, as long as I don’t touch it.”

“I don’t think it’s swollen much. Your hair hides it, but if you had on a hat, it wouldn’t be noticeable at all.”

“No hats,” Rhodes said. “I don’t like hats. They cut off the circulation to my brain.”

“That wouldn’t be good,” Ivy said. “Not that you couldn’t operate as well as most people even if you didn’t have much blood flow to your brain.”

“I don’t want to risk it.”

“I don’t blame you,” Ivy said.

After supper, they cleaned up the kitchen and went into the living room to see what was on TV.

Nothing, that was what. There had been a time, not too long before, when Rhodes could find something he wanted to watch on the cable channels, but they’d gotten too sophisticated.

They never showed any of the old Italian Hercules movies, for example. Instead, they had a modern Hercules show, in full color, that was just as bad as any of the old movies. But it wasn’t the same, since it was bad on purpose and
therefore bad in all the wrong ways. Rhodes didn’t like it.

They never showed any of the old horror movies, either. Rhodes couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one of Roger Corman’s minor efforts.

Rhodes wondered if he could find a rerun of
Murder, She Wrote
. It might be a good idea to pick up some of those crime-fighting tips from Angela Lansbury.

He’d begun surfing through the channels when the telephone rang.

Ivy answered, listened for a second, then said, “He’s right here, Hack. Just a second.”

She handed the phone to Rhodes.

“You ready for action?” Hack asked.

“Always,” Rhodes said, because that was what Hack expected. To tell the truth, Rhodes wasn’t ready for anything more than an hour or so of TV watching.

“That’s good,” Hack told him, “ ‘cause Ruth needs some backup. She’s out at the Dugan Cemetery, and she’s got those grave robbers cornered.”

The Dugan Cemetery was a couple of miles southeast of Thurston, so it took Rhodes a little over twenty minutes to get there. He didn’t want to use the light bar and siren to let the grave robbers know he was coming.

Actually, they weren’t grave robbers, not in a technical sense, but Rhodes hadn’t wanted to take the time to explain that to Hack. Besides, the phrase fit the situation well enough.

According to Hack, Ruth’s county car was a quarter of a mile from the cemetery, pulled off on a side road.

“But she’ll be down by the graveyard watching the robbers,” Hack had said. “She said to let you know there’s plenty of trees around, and if you stay off the road nobody’ll spot you coming. She’ll be behind a tree somewhere. Try not to shoot her.”

In his long career as a law officer, Rhodes had shot hardly anyone at all, and he’d never come close to shooting a deputy. But he thanked Hack for the warning.

Ivy was more worried about Rhodes getting shot than about his shooting someone else.

“Remember what happened at that wrecking yard,” she had said as he was getting ready to leave.

“That’s the first time anyone’s ever shot me,” Rhodes said, wincing a little at the thought. Now and then his shoulder still twinged.

“He dropped a car on you, too,” Ivy reminded him.

“He tried. But he missed.”

“Not completely.”

Rhodes didn’t flinch at the memory, though he felt like doing so. If the car had been aimed just a little better, he might not have been able to walk quite so well. In fact, he might not have been able to walk at all. That was a thought he didn’t want to dwell on.

“I don’t think anyone at a country cemetery will be dropping a car on me,” he said.