Ghost of a Chance (22 page)

Rhodes didn’t want to give anything away, not on the radio. So he just said, “Enough.”

“Speaking of knowing,” Hack said, “since you didn’t ask, I guess you don’t want to hear what me and Buddy found out. I’ll just send him on his way.”

“Hold on,” Rhodes said. “Of course I want to know what you found out. I thought it might take you longer to analyze the information.”

“It’s just a bunch of names. How long could it take?”

“What I meant was I didn’t think Buddy would come up with anything this soon.”

“How do you know it was Buddy that came up with it? It could’ve been me.”

Rhodes got a tight grip on his patience and said, “Was it you?”

“Well, no, it wasn’t. It was Buddy. But it could’ve been me.”

“You’re right. I’m surprised it wasn’t, considering how smart you are. Now, are you going to tell me what it was, or are you going to make me come back to the jail?”

“I think you better come back here,” Hack said. “You wouldn’t want this goin’ out over the air.”

“Ruth and I have to go somewhere else,” Rhodes said. “I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”

“Where you gonna be?” Hack asked.

“I wouldn’t want that going out over the air,” Rhodes said.

The way Rhodes figured it, there was only one kind of school the Packers would be interested in attending, and that was the kind that might be run by a couple of guys like Rapper and Nellie. Rhodes had heard of a number of cases where people with the know-how were more than willing to teach others to use the Nazi cook method of making methamphetamine, but the tuition would be high. According to what Rhodes had read, it could run as high as ten thousand dollars a person, though Rapper might be willing to give group discounts to people like the Packers.

And of course the Packers, never having done an honest day’s work in their lives, would be ideal candidates for
enrollment in a class on drug making. The only problem they’d have would be coming up with the tuition. As far as Rhodes knew, there weren’t any financial aid programs for courses in cooking up drugs. The Packers were, however, nothing if not resourceful. They’d figure out a way to get the money for the class, even if it meant stealing from cemeteries.

Burt Trask might be interested in attending class, too, but a guy like Burt would want to try the merchandise first. For all Rhodes knew, the Packers had tried it, too. Rapper wouldn’t mind giving out a free sample, not as long as he thought he had a prospective student on the hook.

Rhodes knew things might not work out to be exactly the way he had them figured, but it all seemed right to him. Drugs, Rapper, the Packers: it all fit.

And the idea of the classes fit, too. Rapper would be wary of selling drugs, considering his previous experiences, but he wouldn’t be doing the actual selling. He’d just be making them, in his newly created role of Professor of Kitchen Chemistry. He’d think that teaching others to make the drugs and then letting them take the risks of selling the final product would be a lot safer than selling them himself.

Naturally he’d think he could get away with it in Blacklin County. After all, he’d gotten away with just about everything else he’d tried there, if you didn’t count little things like a couple of missing fingers and a permanent limp.

Rhodes explained all that to Ruth, who agreed it made sense.

“And you think they’re out there at that house near Milsby, cooking up a batch right now?” she said.

“I’d say it’s a good possibility.”

“You want to go see if you’re right?”

“I can’t think of a better way to find out,” Rhodes said.

“Then let’s go.”

“We’ll take the shortcut,” Rhodes said.

There were two ways to get from Obert to Milsby. One of them was to go back to Clearview first, traveling only the highways. That was the easy way.

The shortcut, on the other hand, meant traveling on graveled county roads. It had the advantage of being considerably more scenic, and it didn’t take quite as long, unless you got behind someone driving a tractor or harvester, in which case it could take a lot longer. Rhodes thought it was worth taking a chance.

The road led by the old college that had long ago fallen into near-ruin. Several people had tried unsuccessfully to restore it, and recently a man named Wendell Anders had finally finished the job. The sun shone on the worn stone walls, and Rhodes wondered what Anders had planned for the building.

Rhodes remembered that the building was where he had encountered what someone had reported to him as a ghost. It hadn’t been a ghost, of course, but the memory made Rhodes think about the latest ghostly sightings. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but he believed in what he could see himself. And he’d certainly seen
something
in the Clearview Cemetery. So had those teenagers.

But what had they seen? Rhodes didn’t have an answer for that one. Not yet. Something was itching at the back of his mind, and he could almost make the connections. But not quite. He’d have to keep worrying at it.

When Rhodes arrived about a quarter of a mile from the house that Rapper was leasing, he was a little disappointed. He could see no cars or trucks parked anywhere around the house. If Rapper had any pupils, they were keeping their transportation out of sight. For a second Rhodes entertained the idea of Rapper driving a big yellow school bus around the county to pick everyone up, making sure they all had their lunches in little brown bags and that everyone got to class on time.

Rhodes pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. Ruth stopped behind him, and they got out.

“What do you think?” Ruth asked.

“I don’t see any cars,” Rhodes said.

“There’s a little stand of trees on down the road,” Ruth said. “They could be parked in there. If they drove them in far enough, they’d be hidden from the road. They’d have to walk a little way, but they wouldn’t mind that.”

“We could check,” Rhodes said. “If we do that, though, they’ll see us when we drive by.”

Ruth shrugged. “No use in giving them a warning like that. Let’s just drive up in the yard and say hello.”

Rhodes thought it over and came up with what he thought was a better idea.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You go down to the trees and see if the cars are there. If they are, stay there and watch them. I’ll try the house.”

“All right,” Ruth said. “But be careful. You never can tell what someone like Rapper might do.”

“I know,” Rhodes said. “That’s what makes this job so much fun.”

The word
fun
gave Rhodes another idea that he decided was worth a try. After Ruth swung her car around his and headed for the trees, he let her get a good head start. Then he turned on his light bar and siren and floored the accelerator, throwing gravel and mud against the car’s undercarriage and sending it spewing out behind him. The car rocked and bounced along the road. When Rhodes wrenched it into the turn into Rapper’s yard, the tires lost all traction. The car slewed around a hundred and eighty degrees, slopping a wave of mud two or three feet high across the yard.

The flamboyant entrance had the effect Rhodes hoped for. He didn’t have a warrant, and he was sure Rapper would never have let him inside the house. If everyone had kept quiet, Rhodes might never have been sure what was going on in there.

But surprise and panic were wonderful partners when they were combined with a house full of guilty consciences. By the time Rhodes had gotten out of the car and drawn his pistol, people were jumping out of windows and doors and running for their lives.

Rhodes fired a shot into the air.

“Everybody freeze!” he yelled.

No one paid any attention, but Rhodes hadn’t really expected them to. He wasn’t too worried that they’d get away. Ruth was at the cars, or she was if they’d guessed correctly, so no one would be going anywhere.

Except for Rapper and Nellie. Rhodes had forgotten about the motorcycles, and, sure enough, he heard them fire up inside the chicken house, the noise of their engines reverberating off the tin walls like thunder.

The two bikers came roaring out of the chicken house while everyone else scattered across the field. Rhodes had nearly been run down by Rapper more than once, so he got behind his car, where Rapper would find it almost impossible to run over him.

Rapper didn’t even try. He and Nellie zoomed past the car, mud flying away from the spinning wheels of their bikes. They took off down the road without so much as a backward glance at Rhodes.

Rhodes watched them go. He could catch up with them later. Right now he wanted to deal with the people who were running across the field toward the trees. He’d recognized several of them, including Ferrell and Dude Packer.

But one of them was someone he hadn’t been expecting: Nard King. Obviously the emu business was even worse than Rhodes had thought. And Nard was willing to take a little trip over to the shady side in order to make a financial recovery. When he thought about his previous dealings with Nard, Rhodes wasn’t at all surprised.

But Nard wasn’t the same kind of criminal that the Packers were. Rhodes thought he might be the weak link, so he started after him on foot. Rhodes thought he could catch up with King, and there was no use taking a chance of getting the county car stuck in a muddy field.

He’d gotten about halfway across the yard when the house exploded.

Rhodes almost had time to think that Rapper had outsmarted him again, but everything happened too fast for that. Rhodes barely glimpsed the orange fireball that lifted the roof and bulged the walls of the house outward. Then the force of the blast picked him up and threw him away.

30

T
HE NEXT THING RHODES KNEW, HE WAS LYING FLAT ON
his back in the mud, looking up at the blue sky. A buzzard was making wide, lazy circles, high and far away.

There was a railroad track running right through the middle of Rhodes’s head, and the afternoon freight was rumbling along the steel rails and clicking over the crossties, right on time.

Except that it had been years since there’d been an afternoon freight in Blacklin County, and even if there had been, the tracks wouldn’t have been in Rhodes’s head.

Rhodes sat up and looked around. There were a few shards of glass sticking out of the mud, and Rhodes knew he was lucky that one of them hadn’t hit some vital part of his anatomy. A few loose boards and some shingles lay nearby.

The house that Rapper and his pals had so recently deserted was blazing, and Rhodes felt the heat burn his face. He struggled to his feet and moved farther away. He
thought about calling the Clearview Volunteer Fire Department, but the house was nothing but old, dry wood, and Rhodes knew that there would be nothing left of it but smoldering ash by the time he reached his car radio.

He knew, too, that the flames should be making a crackling sound and that he should be able to hear the popping of the burning wood, but all he could hear was a steady roar.

Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe he was simply hearing nothing at all. He wondered what kind of explosive Rapper had used, not that it mattered. Whatever it had been, it had been very effective, and it had undoubtedly destroyed everything in the old house, including any signs of drug manufacture. So Rapper wouldn’t be arrested for drugs, and unless there was some way to prove what he’d done to the house, he’d get away with that, too.