Read Mad Dog and Englishman: A Mad Dog & Englishman Mystery #1 (Mad Dog & Englishman Series) Online
Authors: J M Hayes
“No. No indeed. Fortunately for me, fund raising is left to those who are not quite so uncomfortable at asking for handouts. No, Mr., or rather just, Mad Dog, Benjamin Singleton was a former slave who, after the Civil War, inspired the ‘Negro Exodus,’ what some call the ‘Exoduster Movement.’”
“Don’t believe I’m familiar with either him or the movement, Doc.”
“He was something of a black Moses, leading his people to the promised land, bringing former slaves to establish black colonies here in Kansas. You’ve heard of Nicodemus, Kansas, no doubt.”
“Of course,” Mad Dog agreed.
“Well, that’s an example of what Singleton intended. Sadly, the result was usually less successful. After the first few colonies were established in an orderly fashion the word got out and hundreds of poverty stricken and disorganized former slaves followed on their heels. They didn’t have anything but their strong backs and their will to survive to build on. Most of their efforts led to disasters of varying magnitude. Kansas weather, as we’ve just said, tends to extremes that offsets the benefits of its rich soil.
“One of those disasters occurred right here in Benteen County, Mad Dog. Fourteen families established a community along Coyote Creek a bit east of Buffalo Springs. Nearly seventy souls marched here with only one yoke of oxen and the supplies and implements that could be carried on a single wagon and a collection of push carts. They brought yellow fever with them, endured a fearsome blizzard, two summers of drought, and one plague of locusts. The few survivors turned back east after that. Their descendants are spread all the way from Wichita to the slave states from which they’d come. There’s supposed to be a graveyard out there, almost fifty dead they left behind. I was here looking for that, Mad Dog. The Kansas State Historical Society has some interest in placing a marker and I’ve been researching this particular settlement. New Zion, they called it. That’s what I was looking for.”
Mad Dog came out and stood against the open door that led into the cell block while Neil Bowen spoke from where he’d leaned his chair against the wall to what had once been the jailer’s office.
“I have heard of the lost colony, Doc. I just never knew they were black. I even think I know the place,” Mad Dog told him. “It’s almost straight east of here. There’s a few old weathered markers and a broken stone cross in a grove of hardwoods that aren’t natural to this part of Kansas. I’d always wondered who was out there and what became of them. I’d be happy to show you the place, Doc, only right now we got some bigger troubles around here and I think I need to maybe talk to my brother, see if I can find a way to explain to him about
Tsistsistas hematasooma
and
maiyun
and
havsevama’tasooma
and that’s not gonna be easy.”
“What do Cheyenne spirits have to do with the murder of Reverend Simms?” Professor Bowen asked.
Mad Dog’s jaw dropped. “You know about that stuff? You understand Cheyenne Shamanism?”
“Well, a little,” the professor admitted. “The Cheyenne were an important part of the history of this state as well.”
“I’ll be damned!” Mad Dog exclaimed. “Then maybe you can help me undo what I think I’ve done.”
***
Judy was hysterical. After more than a dozen attempts to call the Sheriff’s Office netted her only a succession of busy signals, she lost it. She beat the phone into a heap of plastic and wires, slamming the hand set against the desktop unit until little that was recognizable was left of either.
Heather Lane was catatonic, curled up in a ball on the front porch where she’d collapsed when her father snatched Heather English, injected her with something that dropped her like the price of wheat during a good harvest, and began brandishing a knife while hustling her toward where he’d left his motorcycle under a pear tree across the street.
Boris lay at the edge of the street. He was panting heavily and fighting to keep his eyes open against the powerful tranquilizer the stranger had tossed him in an irresistible meatball.
He knew Heather needed him but wasn’t sure where she’d gone and couldn’t make his legs work well enough to get to his feet, let alone give chase.
The sheriff did a kind of stunt car stop in front of the house, going broadside the last thirty feet or so and enveloping the shady street in a fog of dust that the wind would normally have immediately cleared from view. Instead, it just hung in the air and gave the scene a kind of sepia quality like something out of an old photograph.
A couple of neighbors stood on porches but nobody rushed to the sheriff’s side as he tumbled out of the truck with his .38 drawn and sprinted toward the house. He stopped at Heather Lane long enough to determine that she had no obvious injuries and seemed in no immediate danger, and just barely long enough to realize this person looked like his daughter but was someone else. He found Judy on her hands and knees in front of the remains of the phone, trying to fit pieces back together that were far beyond salvage.
“Judy,” he demanded, and, when she didn’t even look his way, bent and pulled her to her feet and shook her until her eyes finally focused on him.
“Damn you, your line was busy,” she said.
“Where’s Heather?”
And then the tears came. “Oh God, Englishman, I don’t know,” she wailed. “This guy came out of nowhere. He must have been waiting on the porch. The first I knew was when Heather screamed. I dropped my packages and came running and Heather was fighting him and he did something to her and she went limp. I threw myself at him and he just pushed me aside like I was nothing. He had some kind of plastic things and he looped them around Heather’s wrists and ankles and drew them together and then just kind of threw her over his shoulder as casually as I would a purse. I remembered the pepper spray I’ve got about then. I grabbed for it but he kicked it out of my hand and waved a knife at me and said something like ‘she’s mine and nobody’s ever going to take her away from me again’ and then he ran down off the porch and poor Boris tried to stop him but he couldn’t even get up. Boris kind of fell a few steps closer to the street and made the most miserable sound, kind of like a howl, and I suppose I was screaming cause the next thing I remember I was standing in the middle of the road watching him do a block long wheelie on that motorcycle with our daughter swung over his shoulder before he put the bike practically over on its side and just barely kept Heather from scraping the dirt as he took the corner down there at Lincoln and then all I could hear was that thing screaming up through the gears. And then the damn phone was busy and busy and busy and…God damn you Englishman, where were you when I needed you?”
***
“Someone has kidnapped Heather!” Mrs. Kraus cried as she burst through the iron door and into the jail. It was an effective conversation stopper. Mad Dog and Professor Bowen looked up with equally stupefied expressions.
“Heather? Englishman’s daughter?” Mad Dog managed to stammer.
Mrs. Kraus was nodding her head wildly. “Kidnapped,” she reaffirmed.
Mad Dog turned to Bowen. “My niece,” he explained. “You see, this makes an awful kind of sense and fits right in. The evil magic often reflects back on the friends and family of the incompetent sorcerer.”
“Harvey Mad Dog, will you shut up.” Mrs. Kraus stomped her foot like an infuriated school teacher. If she’d had a ruler his knuckles would have been in danger. “You stop this foolishness right now. Your brother needs you. Your niece needs you. Heather was stolen off Judy’s porch just minutes ago by a madman on a motorcycle and he’s getting away. Wynn’s not here and not competent. French’s somewhere on the road between here and Crawford. You’ve got a car. You can help find him.”
“Which way did he go?” Mad Dog asked, sounding like a bad line from a worse movie.
“Went down to Lincoln and turned left, the sheriff said. Lincoln only goes five blocks so he must have turned again, but the sheriff doesn’t know where. Says he didn’t see any motorcycles on his way in from Sourdough Ranch to the Texaco, nor from there direct to Judy’s.”
Mad Dog could still move fast for a big man. He managed to get around Mrs. Kraus at almost a full run without knocking her down just as Professor Bowen was saying, “Is there anything I can do to help?” Mad Dog crashed through the iron door, streaked through the foyer, and went over Mrs. Kraus’ desk like a halfback breaking through the defensive line and hurdling a linebacker. The gossips broke and flew for the exit like a flushed covey of quail as Mad Dog tore open his brother’s desk and ransacked drawers until he found the leather container he was looking for. And then he was out of the Sheriff’s Office on the gossips’ heels, almost faster than they could clear the way, carrying the leather case and the radio he’d grabbed from Mrs. Kraus’ desk. He didn’t head for the front doors, though. He cut back left just as Mrs. Kraus and Professor Bowen emerged from the jail in time to see him dash up the stairs toward the second floor of the courthouse.
“Mad Dog, you damn fool,” Mrs. Kraus shouted after him. “The kidnapper’s not gone up there, and just where do you think you’re going with my radio?”
Mad Dog didn’t answer. He pelted down the main hall between empty courtrooms and offices, most of them abandoned for want of much needed repairs. At the end of the hall there was a solid wooden door with an ancient brass handle. It bore a faded sign that Mad Dog knew had once read
stair
.
The attic rooms were mostly unfinished, empty but for boxes of ancient files that had been ruined by a roof that seeped in more than a few places and pigeons that had found entry through windows broken in some long ago hail storm. The center of the attic was occupied by a six-by-six foot cistern into which water had once been hand pumped so that the building’s primitive facilities and its fire hose could be served with gravity powered running water. Yet another crude staircase, this one metal, circled the cistern and led to the tower. It was the highest spot in Buffalo Springs, or Benteen County, for that matter, until the co-op constructed its grain elevator beside the railroad tracks. When the courthouse was new, the tower had been quite an attraction to a populace to whom the idea of a flat earth still seemed rational based on their personal observations. As the building deteriorated, the tower had been officially closed to the public. Empty beer cans and a pair of discarded pantyhose indicated that it still got occasional use.
“Englishman, this is Mad Dog, you hear me?” he asked the radio as he began scanning a horizon that promoted thoughts of eternity because it seemed to reach that far. He popped open the leather container with his other hand and put the binoculars to his eyes, making clumsy adjustments while he spoke to the radio again.
“Englishman, can you hear me?”
“Mad Dog,” a tinny voice replied. “Go ahead.”
“I’m in the tower of the courthouse,” Mad Dog said. “He can’t have got far yet, and I can see more than ten miles from up here. You got any clue which way he went?”
“Turned right when he hit the highway. West. That’s all I know so far.”
“Hold on then,” Mad Dog said and set the radio down and steadied himself against one of the tower rails. The highway stretched with Euclidian precision toward the purple mountains’ majesty half a day’s drive away.
“Nothing to the west,” Mad Dog reported. “Just a semi coming in from Barnett’s Corner and an orange pickup maybe a mile behind.”
“He could have turned either way on the north-south blacktop,” the sheriff observed, his voice and his personal involvement sounding equally remote, “or maybe on Adams if he knows his way around.
“Tow truck two miles north,” Mad Dog said, not realizing he was reporting the location of Deputy Wynn, who might have contributed his own observations if he hadn’t left his radio in the custody of sheep earlier in the day. “Then, something way off and going, but it’s definitely a car, not a motorcycle.”
Mad Dog changed positions. “South is clear as far as I can see. There are two cars and one truck coming and a pair of cars going East, but no motorcycles. There’d be dust if he took Adams out of town and I don’t see any. He’s either pulled off the highway somewhere outside of town or he’s still here.”
“You see any suspicious dust anywhere else?” the sheriff asked.
Mad Dog pulled the glasses down to scan the horizon. He wouldn’t need binoculars to spot dust. Miraculously, there wasn’t any. At that particular moment, and for the last quarter hour or so, it appeared that not a single citizen of Benteen County had driven along a dirt road within a ten mile radius of Buffalo Springs, except maybe to the southwest. That was the one direction in which Mad Dog’s inspired observation post failed. Between the Benteen County Courthouse and that wedge of flat and endless horizon, stood an even loftier skyscraper.
“Nothing, Englishman,” Mad Dog said. “There’s not a bit of dust out there anywhere I can see. He’s either still in town or he’s gone southwest. I can’t see through that damn grain elevator.”
“Southwest,” the sheriff echoed. “I’m on my way.” Mad Dog heard the distant sound of tires squealing as they bit pavement and the roar of a V-8 being stressed. Through the trees that lined Main Street, Mad Dog saw his brother’s new pickup flash by on its way around the only obstacle that might be between his daughter and rescue.
“Go get him,” Mad Dog whispered, though not as hopefully as he could have and not into the radio. Just in case, he started at the east edge of the elevator and began to sweep the horizon again. His results were the same as what the sheriff discovered on the far side of the Buffalo Springs Co-op. No dust, no motorcycle, nothing.