Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen (3 page)

The fire escape squealed a little, but it didn't pull away from the wall. When he got to the top, Rhodes started to push aside the crooked door.

Almost as soon as his fingertips touched it, it whipped open and two men exploded through it. They crashed into Rhodes and sent him back against the railing, fast and hard. Rusty rivets popped under the sudden strain, the thin top bar fell away, and so did Rhodes.

Chapter 3

Agility had never been Rhodes's strong point, not even in his Will o' the Wisp days, but gravity and momentum allowed him to do an acceptable flip over the low bars of the fire escape. Flailing with both hands, he managed to catch hold of the top landing. He was even able to hang on, though his arms were nearly jerked from their sockets. He had a good view of the two men who'd bowled him over as they plunged down the stairs, trampling Buddy, who lay stunned on the steps as the men pounded past him.

Rhodes didn't have long to contemplate his options. Maybe there'd been a time when he was young and slim and nimble enough to pull himself back onto the landing, but that time was long gone. How far could it be to the ground, anyway?

He let go.

He hit the hard ground and let his legs go limp as they absorbed some of the impact, though not enough of it. He wound up in a heap. He would have liked to spring catlike to his feet, but instead it was something of a struggle to stand. He did stand, though, and began to run after the fleeing men.

“Running” was something of an exaggeration. Rhodes wasn't sure of the right word. “Shambling,” maybe, not that it mattered. The two men were gaining on him.

They passed the mesquite tree and turned toward the railroad tracks that were only a block away. Rhodes heard a train whistle and looked to the north. Sure enough, a freight train was barreling along the tracks. It had two more crossings to make before it got to the one on the street the two men were running down, but it wouldn't take long for it to get there. Rhodes kept going.

So did the two men. It was obvious that they were going to try to make it across the tracks before the train arrived. It was going to be close, and while Rhodes thought they could do it, he knew he couldn't.

The engineer must have seen the runners at about that time, because the whistle shrilled without a break. The engineer didn't try to stop the train. It was far too late for that.

Just then, Buddy passed Rhodes, waving his revolver.

“Stop or I'll shoot!” Buddy yelled, though the men couldn't possibly hear him. They kept right on going and crossed the tracks not ten feet in front of the train as it rumbled by, the whistle still screaming.

Buddy stopped and holstered his revolver as Rhodes caught up with him. Rhodes was glad to stand and catch his breath as the boxcars whipped by, the wind of their passing rushing over him as the ground vibrated under his feet.

The train was a short one, only ten or twelve cars, and as soon as it was past, Buddy took off.

“Hold on,” Rhodes called, because the two men had disappeared.

Buddy stopped. He might not have heard Rhodes, but he didn't have anyone to chase now. He looked back, as if waiting for Rhodes to give him an order.

Rhodes walked to meet him. On the left side of the crumbling street was a long-abandoned warehouse that had once been used to store cotton bales. A railroad siding beside the building had allowed the dropping-off of boxcars to be filled, but there hadn't been a bale of cotton made in Blacklin County in more years than Rhodes could remember.

On the other side of the street there had once been a cotton gin, one of many in the county, but they were all gone now. The property was currently being used by a business known as the Blacklin County Environmental Reclamation Center, which Rhodes thought was a mighty fancy name for a junkyard.

Behind a rust-stained sheet-metal fence some of the old gin buildings still stood, but the entire block was covered with scrap metal of all kinds, old auto bodies, defunct washing machines and dryers, stoves, engines, lawn mowers, air-conditioning units, and things Rhodes couldn't begin to name. It looked a little like the set of some postapocalypse movie, just before the rise of the machines. Rhodes wouldn't have been surprised if some of the seemingly inanimate components had reassembled themselves and gone off in search of Sarah Connor.

Outside the fence were several big metal Dumpsters, some of them overflowing with bagged trash. Junk cars took up most of the rest of the space, but Rhodes also saw an old tractor and a hay-bailing machine.

The warehouse was an extension of the junkyard, but Rhodes had no idea what was inside it. Nothing valuable, he supposed, since the big doors were wide open. Outside sat more junk cars and pickups and an oil well pump. The side of the center facing the railroad held a jumble of large rusted metal tanks big enough to hold two or three cars' worth of thousands of gallons of oil or gas.

“Where do you think those two fellas went?” Buddy asked.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Rhodes said. “You want the junkyard or the warehouse?”

“Sure is dark in the warehouse,” Buddy said, “and you don't have a flashlight. I do.” He touched a small Maglite LED flashlight dangling from his belt. “So I'll take the warehouse.”

“You be careful in there,” Rhodes said, “and don't shoot anybody you don't have to.”

“Don't worry about me. I can handle myself.”

“I know you can,” Rhodes said, and Buddy went across the street to the warehouse.

Rhodes went to the gate of the recycling center. Nobody was around in the yard, but that was no surprise. It was still early. The gate was open, however, and so there was probably someone in the office, a low building that had seen better days. It looked so old that it could very well have served as the office for the cotton gin.

Rhodes walked up to the door and knocked. The man who opened the door was about three inches taller than Rhodes and twice as broad. He looked so hard that he might have been carved out of some of his own scrap metal. He wore a khaki work shirt with the name
AL
stitched in red on the right side.

“Yeah?” Al asked.

Rhodes showed his badge. “Sheriff Dan Rhodes. I'm looking for two men. Did you see anybody come inside here?”

“I've been looking at the books, not out the window.”

Al wasn't a friendly sort, then, and not prone to introductions, but Rhodes didn't mind. Liking the local sheriff wasn't a requirement to live in the county.

“I'm sure you're busy,” Rhodes said. “Mind if I look around?”

Al stared over Rhodes's head and didn't say anything for a while.

“I guess it's okay,” he said at last.

“Got a deputy checking across the street,” Rhodes said. “That all right, too?”

“Long as there's no shooting.”

“I don't plan to shoot anybody,” Rhodes said.

He couldn't speak for Buddy, but he hoped the deputy didn't get carried away. He couldn't speak for the men he was chasing, either. He didn't think they were armed, but it would be a mistake to assume they weren't. Rhodes figured it was best just to keep quiet about that kind of thing.

“Go ahead,” Al said. “No shooting, though.”

He went back inside and closed the door. Something was bothering him, for sure, but he wasn't the type to unburden himself to an officer of the law.

Rhodes had paid more than one official visit to that office, though he'd never encountered that man before. Maybe there was something going on that Rhodes should be interested in, but he'd worry about that later, if ever. Right now he needed to find the men he was looking for.

There were plenty of places to hide in the junkyard, but Rhodes wondered if the two men had bothered. They could just as easily have worked their way through the scrap and headed in any direction. The place wasn't even fenced on two sides. If the run had tired the men out as much as it had him, however, they'd have found a place to hole up and rest. They were younger than Rhodes, but they'd run faster, too. He was betting they'd need the rest.

Rhodes looked at the ground, but the trails that led through the junkyard maze were too hard to take footprints. He looked up. The stacks of metal all around offered plenty of concealment, but if Rhodes had been the one choosing a hiding place, he'd have picked the big metal building that loomed over everything else. He didn't know what purpose it had served, but it had a tower on one end that was several stories high. The top of the tower was stained dark, as if it might have been burned, or as if something had been burned inside it. The discoloration was more likely just corrosion, though.

Rhodes walked over to the building to see if it had an open doorway. Sure enough, it did. At one time a big sheet-metal sliding door had covered the opening in the building's side, but the door now lay on the packed earth outside. It had been there a long time and was rusted through in spots. A droopy weed poked through one of the spots, looking as if it had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Rhodes bent over, pulled up his pants leg, and got the little Kel-Tec .32 out of the holster. Rhodes had carried a .38 for a long time, but it was too evident and bulky, so he'd looked around for something smaller. The Kel-Tec was what he'd come up with. It was like a little Glock, but with a better trigger. It was light, it held seven hollow-point bullets, and as long as Rhodes wasn't involved in a serious firefight, it would do just fine. It wouldn't stop a charging rhino, but it would stop most anybody Rhodes was likely to encounter.

He'd said he didn't plan to shoot anybody, but he remembered some poem he'd read in high school about how plans sometimes, or maybe it was often, went wrong.

With the pistol at the ready, he looked around the edge of the doorway. Thin shafts of sunlight came into the building through holes in the walls and roof, and dust motes drifted through the light. Scrap metal was heaped all around, but no one was in sight.

Rhodes stepped inside. The place smelled of oil and gasoline. The concrete floors, where they weren't covered with scrap, were stained by petroleum products and rust.

A couple of yellow jackets buzzed around a nest that they were starting just above the door. If the men were in the building, they were going to be hard to find, and it was going to be dangerous to look for them. Rhodes glanced at the yellow jackets. They were dangerous, too.

Danger is my business,
Rhodes thought. That was why they paid him the mediocre bucks, so he started down the snaky aisle to his left. In places the metal was higher than his head, with piles of engine blocks, car fenders, refrigerators, air conditioners that had been gutted for their copper, metal lockers, army surplus ammo boxes, and anything else that was made of metal. There were a couple of piles of plastic and paper. Rhodes saw plastic buckets, bags of bottles, cookie containers, and even some flowerpots in huge clear-plastic bags. The back wall was lined with batteries from trucks, cars, and tractors.

Rhodes stood still and listened. He didn't hear a thing, not the sound of the yellow jackets, not the clink of a shoe against a tie rod, nothing. Maybe the yellow jackets had been frightened by his pistol.

“I guess there's nobody here, Deputy,” he said, a little too loudly. “Let's check the outside.”

It was an old trick, one that had been used since long before Rhodes was born, but it had been around for so many years because sometimes it worked.

Rhodes started for the door, but just before he got there he stepped behind a couple of refrigerators without doors and stopped. He squatted down to wait, thinking about the two men he'd chased. He hadn't had a good look at either of them, but they were both Hispanic and both young. Odds were that they didn't have green cards and were just passing through town on their way to somewhere else. Otherwise they'd have found better accommodations.

He could understand why they'd run. They wouldn't want to have any dealings with the law, whether they'd had anything to do with Lynn Ashton's death or not. Rhodes thought it was likely that they hadn't. If they'd killed her, they wouldn't have stayed around, and they certainly wouldn't have stayed right across the street.

They might have seen something, however, if not a person, then a car or a pickup. Any information would help.

Rhodes thought about Buddy, searching the dark warehouse. It seemed to Rhodes that the men wouldn't have gone there. They wouldn't have been familiar with it, and they wouldn't have wanted to stumble around in the dark. They were in the junkyard, all right, either in the building where Rhodes waited or nearby, if they hadn't already gone on somewhere else.

A bird that Rhodes hadn't seen earlier fluttered near the roof and flew out a broken window. Something must have spooked it, and just as Rhodes had that thought, he heard a soft noise that sounded like the scrape of a shoe on concrete. He straightened a bit but not far enough that his head showed above the refrigerator.

Someone whispered, but Rhodes couldn't make out the words. He waited. The seconds stretched out. Someone whispered again, closer. This time Rhodes could hear enough to know that the language was Spanish.

Two men edged into sight.
“Buenos días,”
Rhodes said as they passed by the refrigerator. He held his pistol so they could see it.
“¿Cómo están ustedes?”

“Mierda,”
one of the men said, which wasn't the polite answer that Rhodes had hoped for.

The speaker was the taller of the two men. His black hair was mostly covered with a Texas Rangers baseball cap, and he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the Rangers emblem. The other man also wore a T-shirt, but it had a faded Bugs Bunny on the front.

Both men looked at Rhodes as if they couldn't quite decide whether to run, jump him, or just give up.

They didn't appear to be impressed with his pistol, but Rhodes thought they would have given up anyway, if the shooting hadn't started.