“Your own sister?”
“My own damnfool sister. She had no sense. But she had more sense than this.”
“Somebody put this rig in. She had to know about it.”
“Must have,” Ralston agreed. “Must have. But what do I know? I’m no investigator. I’m a spoiled newspaper man. My job’s explaining what the sheriff thought he said.”
Feet hammered down the stairway. A deputy in a dripping slicker thumped into the basement, excitement patching his face red. He yelped, “Nick, we found Fleming.”
Broucel snapped, “Where the hell's he…"
“He's in his car, quarter of a mile down the road. Tucked in behind the brush. Rittenhoff saw it. Fleming’s shot right through the head.”
Broucel sucked in his breath. He became a little more thin, a little more gray. “Dead?”
“Dead, yeah. He’s getting stiff.”
“Oh, my God,” Broucel said. His mouth twitched. He put two fingers over his lips, as his eyes jerked around to Ralston.
Who said, with hard satisfaction, “I guess we’re going to have to interrupt the sheriff’s vacation.”
He drove his blue Honda fast across twelve miles of back-county road. A thick gray sky, seamed with deeper gray and black, wallowed overhead. Thunder complained behind the pines.
He felt anger turn in him, an orange-red ball hot behind his ribs. Not anger about Sue. That part remained cold, sealed, separate. It’s Piggott’s doing, he thought. Piggott, Piggott, Piggott the beer runner and liquor trucker, the gambler, briber, the sheriff's poker-playing buddy. Now blackmailer. What else? And Sue’s very particular good friend, thank you.
Whatever Piggott suggested, she would, bright-eyed, laughing, follow. No thought. No foresight. Do what you want today, ha ha. More fun again tomorrow.
When he last visited her, they had quarreled about Piggott.
“He’s lots of fun,” she said loudly. Her voice always rose with her temper. “He’s interesting. He’s different all the time. You never know with him.”
“You always know. He’ll always go for the crooked buck. He handles beer for six dry counties. He owns better than two hundred shot houses. He’s broke heads all over the state. Even a blond lunatic knows better than to climb the sty to kiss the pig.”
It ended in a shouting match. She told Piggott the next day, with quotations, and Piggott told Ralston and the sheriff the day after.
“A full-time liar and a postage-stamp Capone.” Piggott pushed back in his leather chair and yelled with laughter. “I swear, Ed, I didn’t know I was that good.”
“Hardly good,” Ralston said.
The sheriff’s eyes, like frosted glass, glared silence.
Ralston said, “Look, Piggott, Sue’s just a nice, empty-headed kid. She sees the fun, but she don’t smell the dirt. She’s got no sense of self-protection. She’s different.”
Piggott swabbed his laughing mouth with a handkerchief and straightened in his old leather chair. Amusement warmed his face. “I know she’s different I’m going to marry her, Ed.”
The Honda reeled on the road. He jerked the wheel straight It was not quite nine o’clock in the morning and cold, and the road twisted as complexly as his thoughts.
Two miles from the highway the fields smoothed out bordered by white fencing that might have been transplanted from a Kentucky horse farm. When the fence reared to an elaborate entrance, he turned right along a crushed-gravel road gray with rain. A square, big house loomed sternly white behind evergreen and magnolia. In the parking lot two Continentals and a dark green BMW sat like all the money in the world. Rain sprinkled his glasses. As he walked across the road to a porch set with frigid white ornamental-iron chairs, the front door swung open to meet him. A slight man with very light blue eyes and a chin like a knife point waved him in.
“Out early, Ed.”
Ralston nodded. “I need the sheriff bad, Elmer.”
“He just got to bed.”
“Tough. Tell him it’s official and urgent.”
The man behind Elmer snorted and showed his teeth. “Official and urgent” he said, arrogantly contemptuous. He was thick-shouldered, heavy-bodied, round-faced, and scowled at Ralston with raw dislike.
Elmer said, “I can’t promise. The game lasted all night You and Buddy mind waiting here?”
He stepped quietly away down a high white hallway lined with mirrors and horse paintings. The hall, running the length of the house, was intercepted halfway by a broad staircase. Beyond lounged a man with a newspaper, his presence signifying that Piggott was in.
A sharp blow jarred his arm. He turned to see Buddy’s cocked fist.
“We got time for a couple of rounds, Champ.”
Ralston said, “Crap off.”
Buddy, hunched over shuffling feet, punched again. “Ain’t he bad this morning.” Malice rose from him like visible fumes. “The sheriff’s little champ’s real bad. Couple of rounds do you good. You lucked out that last time.”
“You got a glass jaw,” Ralston said.
Elmer appeared on the stairway to the second floor. He jerked his hand, called, “Come on up.”
Ralston walked around Buddy, not looking at him. Buddy, clenching his hands, said distinctly, “You and me’s going have a little talk, sometime.”
The second floor was carpeted, dim, silent expensive, and smelled sourly of cigars. Eddie pointed to a carved wooden door, said, “In there,” wheeled back down the hall.
Ralston pushed open the door and looked at Tom Huber, Sheriff of Pinton County, sitting on an unmade bed. The sheriff wore a white cotton undershirt tight over the hairy width of his chest, and vivid green and yellow undershorts. Hangover sallowed his face. He was a solid, hard-muscled old roughneck, with a hawk-nosed look of competence that had been worth eighty thousand votes in the last four elections.
He said, “Talk to me slow, son, I’m still drunk.”
Easing the door shut, Ralston said, “Last night, Fleming was shot dead. In his own car. In the country. With his own gun, couple of inches from the right temple. Gun in car. Wiped off. Far as we know, he wasn't on duty. You need to show up out there. Broucel’s in charge, and he’s got the white shakes.”
“Fleming shot?” A slow grin spread the sheriff’s mouth. “So that grease-faced little potlicker went and got himself killed. That’s not worth getting a man out of bed for. Let Broucel fumble it.”
“Fleming was your chief deputy,” Ralston said sharply. “You have to make a show. The media’s going crawl all over this. You got to talk to the TV — sheriff swears vengeance. Hell, we got an election coming.”
“There’s that.” The sheriff touched his eyes and shuddered. “Lord a mighty, I didn’t hardly get to sleep. Cards went my way all night.”
In a neutral tone, Ralston said, “You don’t ever lose, playing at Piggott’s.”
“That's why I play at Piggott’s.” He got up carefully. “God, what a head. Well, now, that’s one less candidate for the high office of Pinton County Sheriff. Ain’t it a shame about poor old Lloyd Fleming?”
He moved heavily into the bathroom to slop water on his head and guzzle from the faucet. Ralston drifted around the bedroom, face somber, peering about curiously, fingering the telephone, light fixtures, pictures.
The sheriff emerged, toweling his head. “I’m scrambling along, Ed. Don’t prance around like a mare in heat.”
Ralston said, “I need to tell you a little more. But I’ll save it. Too many bugs here.”
“I counted one,” Huber said pleasantly.
"Two, anyhow.” He knelt to reach under the airspace of a dresser and jerk. His fingers emerged holding a microphone button and line. It seemed a twin of the one on Sue’s shelf. “These may be dummies to fake you off an open phone tap.”