Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Read Online Free PDF Page B

outside pulling a rag from his pocket, his name on his shirt. Short brown hair, cap pulled too low over his ears.
    Lucky you.
    But you wouldn’t know his reputation. That, in high school, a girl who lived up the road from Larry had gone to the drive-in movie with him and nobody had seen her again. It had been big news, locally. Her stepfather tried to have Larry arrested but no body was found and Larry never confessed.
    Silas looked at his watch then sat a moment longer. He had known Cindy Walker, too. The missing girl. In a way, Larry had introduced them.
    He glanced up the road.
    Where the hell was Larry? Probably sitting at home, reading Stephen King. Maybe he finally took a day off. Or gave up.
    But still the gnawing. What if some relation of the current missing girl, Tina Rutherford, dwelling on Larry’s reputation, had taken it upon himself to pay Larry a visit?
    Look at you, 32 Jones, he thought. You done ignored the poor fucker all this time and now all the sudden you care?
    “32?” The radio.
    “Yeah, Miss Voncille?”
    “You need to get over to Fourteenth and West. It’s a rattlesnake in somebody’s mailbox.”
    “Say what?”
    “Rattler,” she repeated. “Mailbox.”
    “Was the flag up?”
    “Ha-ha. Mail carrier reported it. It being, you know, in the box? That makes it a federal crime.”
    “How you know that?”
    “32,” she said. “You only been in that uniform two years. You know how long I been setting in this chair?”
    “So it’s happened before?”
    “You don’t even want to know. I’ll call Shannon.”
    He signed off, glad Voncille would contact the police reporter. Anytime he got his picture or name in the paper, it raised his profile, which might boost his salary at evaluation time. Enough good PR he could be a black Buford Pusser, maybe run at sheriff himself in ten years.
    He could head over to Larry’s house later, he thought, cranking the Jeep. But then he got a better idea and flipped his cell phone open.
    “32,” Angie said. “You ain’t got another decomposing corpse, do you?”
    “Hope not,” he said. “What’s going on?”
    Not much, she reported. Wrapping up a one-car on 5, no injuries except the dead deer. Trooper had already split. Tab and the guy who’d hit the deer were field dressing it, planning to split the meat. “Tab say you want a tenderloin?”
    “Angie,” he said. “You know Larry Ott?”
    Her phone crackled. “Scary Larry?”
    “Yeah. Feel like following a hunch?”
    “May be, baby. Tell me more.”
    “I need yall to run out there when you got a minute. Little dirt road in Chabot, off Campground Cemetery Road.”
    “I know where he stays. How come?”
    “Just when you got a minute. See if the place looks clean. It ain’t far from where yall at now.”
    “Hang on,” she said.
    He pulled to the edge of the highway and waited for a log truck, the Jeep shaking as the truck thundered past with its logs bouncing.
    “Angie?”
    “All right,” she said. “But 32?”
    “Yeah?”
    “This means you going to church with me on Sunday.”
    “We’ll talk,” he said. “And save me that tenderloin.”
    HE COULD COVER his jurisdiction one end to the other, Dump Road to the catfish farm, in fifteen minutes if he stuck his light on and hauled ass, like today, and soon he’d neared Fourteenth Avenue. Silas thought of it as White Trash Ave., a hilly red clay road with eight or ten houses and trailers clustered along the left side and Rutherford land on the right, fenced off and posted every fifty yards, an attempt to keep the rednecks from shooting deer and turkeys in the woods. Wildlife was good for the mill’s image. You rode through the pines braking for deer, sometimes fawns on clumsy legs, rare red foxes, bobcats, you almost forgot for a moment the trees were a crop.
    He patrolled through here once or twice a week, different times, keeping his eye on an Airstream trailer out behind one of the houses, half blocked from the road by a shed. The