Bloody River Blues: A Location Scout Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

park.”
    “What?”
    “Put the car in park and move over,” he responded with exasperation. “I’ll drive.” He climbed in and signaled and made a careful, slow U-turn.
    “What happened?”
    “Have to wait.”
    “You didn’t do it?”
    “Excuse me?” Ralph Bales asked with mock astonishment. “You just said you didn’t hear any shots.”
    “Man! Scared the living crap out of me. I mean, bang, bang, bang, on the window. I thought you were a cop. What the hell happened?”
    Ralph Bales didn’t answer for a moment. “There were a bunch of people around.”
    “There were?” They now drove past the deserted campground. Stevie protested, “I don’t see anybody.”
    “You wanted me to do it right in front of a dozen witnesses?”
    Stevie swiveled around. “What was it, like a bus drove past or something?”
    “Yeah. It was like a bus.”
    SAMUEL CLEMENS ONCE stayed in the town of Maddox, Missouri, and supposedly wrote part of Tom Sawyer here. The Maddox Historical Society implied that the caverns outside of town were the true inspiration for Injun Joe’s cave, despite evidence—and the assertion of a more credible tourist board (Hannibal, Missouri)—to the contrary. Other claims to fame were pretty sparse. In 1908 William Jennings Bryan gave a speech here (standing on a real soapbox to do so), and Maddox was cited by FDR in a Fireside Chat as an example of towns decimated by the Depression. One of the now defunct metalwork mills in town had the distinction of fabricating part of the housing used in what would have been the third atomic bomb dropped in World War II.
    But these honors aside, Maddox was essentially a stillborn Detroit.
    Unlike Jefferson City, which sat genteel and majestic on gnarled stone bluffs above the Missouri, Maddox squatted on the river’s muddy banks just north of where the wide water was swallowed by the wider Mississippi. No malls, no downtown rehab, no landscaped condos.
    Maddox was now a town of about thirty thousand. The downtown was a gloomy array of pre-1950 retail stores and two-story office buildings, none of which was fully occupied. Outside of this grim core were two or three dozen factories, about half of them still working at varying degrees of capacity. Unemployment was at 28 percent, the town’s per capita income was among the lowest in Missouri, and alcoholism and crime were at record highs. The city was continually in and out of insolvency and the one fire company in town sometimes had to make heartbreaking decisions about which of two or three simultaneous blazes it was going to fight. Residents lived in decrepit housing projects and minuscule nineteenth-century bungalows hemmed in by neighbors and uncut grass and kudzu, amid yards decorated with doorless refrigerators, rusted tricycles, cardboard boxes. On every block were scorched circles, like primitive sacrifice sites, where trash—whose collection the city was often unable to undertake—was illegally burned.
    Maddox, Missouri, was a dark river beside the darker rust of storage tanks. Maddox was rats nosing boldly over greasy, indestructible U.S. centennial cobblestones, Maddox was wiry grass pushing through rotting wooden loading docks and BB craters in plate glass and collapsed grain elevators. Maddox was no more or less than what you saw just beyond the Welcome To sign on River Road: the skeleton of a rusted-out Chevy one-ton pickup not worth selling for scrap.
    But for John Pellam, Maddox was heaven.
    A month earlier, he had just finished scouting locations in Montana. He had been sitting outside of the Winnebago, his brown Noconas stretched out in frontof him and pointing more or less at the spot where George Armstrong Custer’s ego finally caught up with him. Pellam had been drinking beer when his cellular phone had started buzzing.
    He hadn’t more than answered it before the speaker was barraging him with a story about two young lovers who become robbers. A machine gun of facts, as if the caller