Due South of Nowhere
by Gary Clifton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
“Checkout, Checkout, from Skyball Six. Got a ten-thirty-three. If you still back there, boy, a whole damned convoy of Smokeys on 287 between Sprott and Comanche Wells tonight. Come back.” The C.B. radio transmission was scratchy, distorted, but Checkout understood.
“Skyball Six from Checkout. Still comin’, homey. Yo mama didn’t teach you to read them speed limit signs, son? Come back.”
“Ten-Four, Checkout, them Smokeys is weight bears. If you a hundert over, better take the back way.”
Leonard Smothers, CB handle “Checkout,” was making the overnight haul from Amarillo to Fort Worth via U.S. Highway 287. The Texas Department of Public Safety weight and scale officers had recently been relentless on that stretch of highway.
He eased off the highway about twenty miles on the Amarillo side of Sprott and began a thirty-mile detour through open country back roads. Pulling a forty-foot flatbed with steel rod strapped aboard, a thousand-buck fine was a week’s pay, and that metal weighed heavy.
He spotted the aurora across the flat terrain as he crossed into San Rupert County, but it was another fifteen minutes before he reached the fire. Fully in flames, it was one of those modular units, a mobile home without wheels, common in West Texas. Only a few residences of any sort survived in the area because water was a chancy business.
The flaming heap in the middle of the asphalt caused him to slow. Then he saw it was human. He eased onto the shoulder, past the burning heap and, in trucker lingo, he boogied.
There was no cellular service in the area. Without identifying himself by his radio handle, he requested anybody who could hear him, notify the law of a fire and dead man in the center of State Highway 763.
Already in third gear, a hundred yards east of the fire, he approached the headlights of an old, white GMC pickup truck. It was stopped facing him from the opposite direction. He slowed and saw the driver, an elderly man in a straw hat leaned across talking with a man standing outside the passenger door in the ditch. Then his fleeting glimpse revealed a second person standing in the ditch, probably a woman.
Hoping other truckers would manage to pass through safely, he decided against any additional identifiable ham radio traffic and gunned the diesel. The scene soon disappeared from his mirrors.
* * *
“House fire and a burning body in the middle of Road 763 in San Rupert County, Ranger,” said the Texas Department of Public Safety dispatcher at Amarillo. “Anonymous call, prolly from a trucker.”
John Bob Price sat upright, flicked on a bedside lamp and looked at his clock. Stocky, his graying hairline slowly moving away from his eyebrows, he stretched. The constant pain in his left thigh ignored home remedy. It was 3:16 a.m. Thirty-one years with the Texas Department of Public Safety — seventeen as a Texas Ranger, an investigative arm of the Texas Department of Public Safety — he was not surprised at the call. He’d never fully gotten over the aggravation of the frequent middle of the night interruptions. Wearily, he jotted down directions and hung up.
Marilou shuffled beneath her sheet. “How bad?” She’d learned not to ask if he had to respond to a crime scene. Such calls invariably meant John Bob had to drag himself out of bed and go get involved in somebody else’s misfortune.
“House fire and a dead body in the road over in San Rupert County.” He stood and began to dress hurriedly.
A journeyman at sending her man off to battle in the wee hours, she sat upright. “I’ll fix you something.”
John Bob nodded without comment and pulled a starched white shirt from his closet, then pinned his gold Ranger badge on the left chest.
For the past fifteen years, John Bob had been assigned to Comanche Wells, the county seat of Bristol County, working crimes across the vast, flat expanse of land between Amarillo and Wichita Falls, rifle distance from Oklahoma, often said to be due south of nowhere.
In ten minutes, he was good to go. Marilou handed him the battered thermos and a sandwich in a plastic baggie. “Careful, pal,” she said softly.
He stopped and embraced her, smiling thinly.
“Dammit, John Bob, you gotta get over the boy. You had no choice.” Early fifties, her slender shape was gradually losing its delineation. Marilou was in her thirteenth year as the third-grade teacher in the Comanche Wells elementary school. As her face grew relentlessly more weathered, she remained an energetic, supportive ally. She had grown to hate her husband’s dangerous and often stifling job. Never did she watch his stocky back as he limped out to the service vehicle that she wasn’t tormented by the horror that this was the day she’d receive the call. But stoic supporter that she was, no word would ever be spoken of the matter.
John Bob, after a lifetime of dealing with total strangers, was painfully aware that she was by and large, the only real friend he had. He nodded and walked to the shiny new unmarked Department of Public Safety Dodge parked in the rear of their single-story house on the western edge of Comanche Wells.
The permanent limp and the sharp pain as he slid into the car was the result of a .44 slug in the left femur from a prison escapee six years earlier. After a routine traffic stop, the felon had failed to murder John Bob. He’d served five years of a fifty-year sentence and was now in the wind. The limp however, remained.
The sticky heat from the previous sweltering day still held the night air prisoner. Tired, sleepy, John Bob roared away into the night and into the barren, endless expanse of prairie. A jolt of strong, hot coffee from the thermos didn’t help. He couldn’t get the kid off his mind, and Marilou knew it. He also knew how badly she wanted him to retire.
* * *
Deeply religious, John Bob had watched the relentless onset of crime in the church- and family-oriented arid, rural plains. Cattle, wheat, and irrigated crops had long sustained the land. He sped through the night, the deteriorating decline gnawing at his mind. He recalled criminals retreating at the very appearance of a Ranger compared to the current rampant hatred and violent disregard for the law. Now methamphetamine, indifference, and violent crime were destroying the fiber of rural Texas, a situation he could neither fully comprehend nor do much about.
Two months ago, a glut of hippy college-age protesters, many of whom, it had been determined, had never held a job, had held a “Defund the Police” rally in Amarillo. Amarillo, Texas?!
A week later, a young man had barged into an elementary school in the sleepy south Texas community of Uvalde and murdered a score of helpless kids and teachers. Nearly four hundred cops stood idly, making no attempt to intervene. How the hell did that many cops accumulate in sparsely populated Uvalde and then collectively fail so completely?
Several months before the Amarillo demonstrations and the Uvalde massacre, a seventeen-year old high school student down in Balderas County, stoned and disoriented, had walked into the local bank and shot four people. The lone city cop had called for the Rangers, and John Bob ended up confronting the wild-eyed youth, who was holding his pistol to the head of a terrified hostage.
For over an hour, with four victims bleeding out on the floor, John Bob had begged the youth to lay down the gun. When the boy diverted to fire a round into the ceiling, John Bob put a round into the boy’s heart. John Bob had never repeated that the kid’s dying expression was as if he’d just been told there was no Santa.
John Bob had shot men before; men that was, not confused kids who’d attended church with their mother the Sunday before. It hadn’t helped that the mother had appeared at the coroner’s inquest and had shrieked that John Bob was a murderer until the judge had her removed from the courtroom.
After thirty days on administrative leave while a hostile media demanded he be charged with murder, a grand jury eventually declined to indict.
Now, months later, John Bob struggled to go a whole afternoon without seeing the glassy, lost eyes of the youngster. He no more comprehended the strung-out kid in the bank than he did nuclear physics, nor tattooed kids with guns and green hair, nor the insane craving for methamphetamine and fentanyl sweeping the territory.
He’d attended the funeral of Ranger Wendel Forrest down in Waco two weeks ago. Wendel had been shot in the back of the head when he stumbled into a convenience store armed robbery in progress. Two of his longtime fellow Rangers stationed in other parts of the state had left the service for jobs outside law enforcement before they were eligible for pension.
John Bob’s benefits were fully vested, but he’d always been driven by sense of duty; the deteriorating crime situation needed him. Although he recognized he was in the throes of terminal burnout, his sense of duty just couldn’t allow to himself pull the plug.
* * *
He made the fire scene in thirty-five minutes. Red and blue lights were flashing, and a marked DPS unit was parked in mid-road, shielding the burned body.
“John Bob,” the Trooper greeted. DPS trooper Daniel Richardson had been out of the academy less than a year. Newly married with a pregnant wife, John Bob wondered if the youngster shouldn’t find non-law enforcement employment.
Tall, with protruding ears, Richardson had been a standout high school athlete at San Rosa Junction, in Paradise County, forty miles north. This night, he was visibly nervous, which was perfectly normal for a rookie.
“Mornin’, Daniel.”
A passing trucker slowed, pointed back the direction he’d come, and shouted something about “body” before he accelerated westward, hoping the laws had not gotten his license numbers. Leaving his emergency lights flashing to protect the body in the road, the trooper slid into John Bob’s passenger seat. Cruising slowly, they found another body.
John Bob recognized the dead man in the ditch. Elderly Billy Joe Jackson lived in Comanche Wells and delivered rural newspapers in his old white GMC pickup. The bullet entry wound was dead center in his forehead; his blood spattered white straw-hat resting on the edge of the asphalt. His GMC was nowhere in sight.
A pumper-truck from a rural volunteer fire department with two men aboard rolled up. The firefighters quickly knocked down the dwindling flames. One firefighter had a radio tower at his home, which he could reach from the truck. His wife’s voice crackled over the radio that she would relay information by telephone to and from DPS in Amarillo or Lubbock. A crude system, but it would have to make do in a harsh land.
The eastern sky was showing a hint of daylight as John Bob, the trooper, and the volunteer firemen spread out to search the surrounding area. On a rise of ground a hundred yards behind the burned structure, they came upon a dazed man of about thirty lying in the dust. Fully dressed, his clothes and black, shoulder-length hair and brushy mustache were singed.
“Water,” the prostrate man gasped. A firefighter gave the man a pull from a canteen on his belt. “Kidnapped,” the man blurted. “Damn fools was gonna kill me.” As he reached for the canteen, John Bob saw that both forearms were covered with poor-quality tattoos. The amateur penitentiary craftsmanship was apparent.
John Bob studied the man’s face by flashlight. “What unit were you in, partner, when you were in the joint? And what’s your name?”
“I’m Cecil Broadus,” the man gasped, ignoring the penitentiary question. “Live south of Ft. Worth. Had car trouble out front last week. These animals been holding me since. Said they was gonna kill me,” he sobbed. “They stole all my cards and ID stuff.”
“What did they do with your car, Mr. Broadus?” John Bob’s wary eyes studied the surrounding terrain in the gathering light, mindful that other fugitives from the devasted house might be lingering just out of sight in the dark with assault weapons.
“Uh... dunno, exactly. Uh, they had a guy come by and drive it off. Prolly in a junkyard in Ft. Worth by now.”
John Bob swept the area reachable by flashlight. A nearly new Ford pickup was visible. “How did the man who drove off in your car get here, sir?”
He gestured slightly. “He, uh, prolly come in that truck. Them others didn’t have no other ride. Reason for killin’ me, I guess, was to get holta my car.”
His description of his lost car was sketchy and hesitant, and he couldn’t recall his license tag number. He swore he didn’t know the abductors, but he recognized they were using the house as a methamphetamine lab. The two males and lone female had brawled, and the ether tank was knocked into a vat of lysergic acid while meth was cooking, then exploded. He’d escaped and had no idea what had happened to the others.
John Bob knew the chances of a citizen recognizing a meth lab were reasonable enough, but to name lysergic acid was highly unlikely for anyone outside the meth business. He walked back to his car and retrieved a field fingerprint kit. The injured man objected to the process, but with the assistance of Trooper Daniel, they quickly had two sets of crude, but classifiable sets of the man’s fingerprints.
Copyright © 2022 by Gary Clifton
