Due South of Nowhere
by Gary Clifton
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Through the fire truck-to-wife connection, the new Comanche Wells Ambulance arrived in less than an hour. The paramedics loaded the injured man. John Bob leaned close to the ambulance driver. “Tell Chief Lopez to hold this guy until I get there. Maybe take a couple hours.” The driver nodded and whizzed away through the dust.
The rising sun had fully escaped the eastern horizon, generating the usual blast furnace hot southwest wind. An unmarked sedan rolled into the driveway, followed by a marked Texas Department of Public Safety crime scene van.
“Made good time from Lubbock,” John Bob grinned, glad to see reinforcements.
“Follered these two ATF agents, John Bob,” the DPS van driver gestured to the Sedan. “They was highballin’ it.” He was as out of breath as if he’d run the last mile. He pulled a plug of Day’s Work chew and cut off a corner with a Barlow knife. He offered the plug and knife to John Bob who shook his head.
Although Amarillo, on U.S. 287, was the Texas Panhandle headquarters of DPS, the ATF federal agents and a field agent from the DPS crime lab were stationed at Lubbock, a hundred miles south of Amarillo. The trip cross-country to the fire was less than a hundred miles from either city in a roughly triangular configuration. The flat, open territory was a speedway to drivers in a hurry.
“Hey, John Bob,” the taller ATF agent greeted. He was forty, with dark hair. “DPS Amarillo called us. We hooked ’em right on over here.”
“Hey, Paul... Dennis.” John Bob was particularly pleased, but not surprised at the appearance of two agents of the federal government.
Dennis, twenty-five-ish with a round, quick to smile face said, “John Bob, I’m still not used to rolling out at four a.m.”
John Bob shook both agents’ hands in the southern police custom. “Glad to see y’all.” He briefed them on the injured man’s kidnap and meth lab story. He flashed telephone camera snapshots of the two men dead in the road and the one found injured out back.
Paul, the older agent, tapped Broadus’ photo. “Maybe Hispanic, which tells us nothin’. Got no real idea who fits where.” He looked from face to face of the glut of men standing about.
The ATF agents and the crime scene tech dug through the meager remains. “No more bodies in the debris, John Bob,” Paul gestured. “Fire was set by sloshing a bucket of gasoline inside the front door.” He held up a burnt metal bucket. “Gas fumes hit the meth burner and blew. Betcha the burned guy out on the road tossed the gas and got himself roasted. We been hearin’ a meth lab was operating in this area, but we haven’t had time to run it down.” He surveyed the scene. “Looks like maybe we shoulda altered our priorities.”
“Competition?” John Bob asked, already confident the injured man’s story about two occupants fighting as the source of the fire had been a fabrication. “I’d wager somebody got away from the fire and shot the old man out there in the ditch. The man had stopped to help and took a round between the eyes for his trouble. Somebody fled the scene in his GMC. Whatever the man we just sent to the hospital was driving could be this pickup out back, or we may never learn what was his.”
They bagged and tagged the bucket and identifiable parts of the meth lab and tossed them into the DPS van next to the bodies of the two dead men. John Bob told the tech to process evidence pronto and to make sure both bodies got to the Lubbock Medical Examiner’s Office.
Daniel walked over from his squad car. “My magic computer hot sheet says that Ford pickup out back was reported stolen in Fort Worth three weeks ago.”
As they were leaving, John Bob handed the ATF agents one copy of the injured man’s fingerprints and sent his phone photos to Paul’s cellular. He thanked both and they loaded up to leave. John Bob promised to call them in Lubbock if he needed help. By late morning, John Bob was satisfied no additional dead or wounded were left behind.
In another forty-five minutes, he pulled up in front of the Comanche Wells Hospital. Dust and hot wind buffeted the eaves of the building. A uniformed Comanche Wells police officer guarded the prisoners’ hallway.
“Chief told me to stay until you say otherwise,” the officer said. His face read question. He’d been up all night and wanted to go home.
John Bob nodded but didn’t respond.
“These damned local yokels can’t keep me in here?” the patient spat angrily. A small, shaved spot with a white bandage in the center topped his head and a greasy salve, which smelled of menthol, coated his singed face. “I got rights.”
“Better talk with the doctor,” John Bob said softly, his gray eyes cold. He’d worked for years to be indifferent to lowlifes like this man but, in reality, he despised the surly character slouched on the hospital bed.
“He won’t be back for two hours, they tell me.” The bandaged man slid his legs over the side of the bed.
“Thinkin’ you need to sit a spell.” John Bob handcuffed the man to a bedrail and strode out of the room. He apologized to the uniformed officer but asked him to hold on to the patient until he could confirm the man’s identity.
As he stepped out into the blustery heat, his cellular buzzed. It was Paul, the ATF agent. “John Bob, we’re back in Lubbock. We went through the computer, queried the soundex system for possible suspects, then compared fingerprints of the hits. That kidnap victim you got over there is a no-good lawyer who practiced in Lubbock before he was disbarred last year. Reportedly been trafficking meth for several years. Looks like you caught him at the crime scene. No way you coulda ID’d him without a lot of computer help.”
“No problem, Paul. We still got him. Got a name?”
“It sure ain’t Broadus. Name’s Brooks Grifford, 32. Rich kid, originally from Dallas. Sucked the family fortune up his nose, got tossed by the Bar Association for perjury.”
John Bob stepped into a boarded-up storefront, out of the wind. “I’ll hold him: suspicion of arson, possession of meth lab materials.”
“John Bob, this guy’s got a half-brother, also a doper, Lawrence Chadsey Arnold. He’s thirty. Lives down around Ft. Worth. Been in the joint for armed robbery, arrests for sale and delivery, assault, and suspected of several contract killings. They call him ‘Twister.’ Neck injury in the joint. Can’t turn his neck, so has to rotate his whole body to look sideways. I’ll e-mail photos and what records I’ve found. I’ll query Disneyland East to see what they might have in file.” John Bob recognized the slang code for ATF Headquarters in D.C.
“Mighta been him burned crispy in the middle of the road. Any idea who the woman mighta been?”
“No idea about the woman, but twister is six-foot four. That body in the road was a foot shorter. Hispanic, maybe? All records show this Twister Arnold is a straight-running psycho. Mean enough to eat the furniture.” He chuckled. “Prolly him and his brother were cookin’ meth out there, and somebody put ’em outta business with a bucket of gas in the front door.”
“So we’re probably lookin’ for this brother and a female drivin’ Billy Joe Jackson’s old GMC?”
“Prolly. I’ll set here a spell and play with the computer to see if I can come up with a license number. I find it, I’ll put out an APB.”
“Thanks, Paul.”
By telephone, John Bob learned the burned house had been repossessed by the City Bank of Comanche Wells. Current tenants had leased the property from the bank in cash two months earlier in the name Bonnie Broadus; the same last name the injured man had given.
John Bob relieved the local cop from hospital duty. Hot south wind was blowing tumbleweeds across the city square as he hauled Grifford to the county jail in the Bristol County Justice Center on the edge of town.
“Dumb-ass yokel, cowboy cop. You got nothing on me,” Grifford spat as he was being fingerprinted. “Texas Rangers,” he scoffed. “S’posed to be plenty tough. You don’t scare me. Hillbilly.”
“You shouldn’t swear, mister,” John Bob said. “And we’re gonna charge you with murder. Think that’s enough to hold you?” In earlier days, he might have backhanded this mouthy thug into a corner, but those times were long gone. Administrative policies driven by a press hostile to the police were an indelible part of John Bob’s disintegrating world.
Grifford, a tall man, with watery, doped distorted eyes, smirked beneath his singed hair.
John Bob said softly, “You lied about being kidnapped, and there’s more folks involved than the man we found burned in the road. Like maybe your brother?”
“Brother?” The smirk again. “Got no brother.”
John Bob walked down the hall to Sheriff’s Department Records. The ATF agents in Lubbock had sent Grifford’s RAP sheet, several arrest reports, and the telephone log from Grifford’s cellular.
The cell phone had called the same telephone in Fort Worth 31 times in the past ten days. Tricky, John Bob thought, for a man kidnapped.
The agent had caught the frequency of repeat calls to Ft. Worth and had penciled in an address in Fort Worth on the margin of the list. John Bob called the Ranger office in Fort Worth and requested Rangers drop by the address and verify what was there.
* * *
Larry “Twister” Arnold was big, fleshy, with greasy black hair, which ended in a scraggly ponytail at his neck. The fire had not been an accident. When the gasoline came blazing through the front door, Twister had grabbed Bonnie and his backpack, kicked out the rear door and half-carried her down the bar-ditch along the front road. He saw his half-brother Brooks escape by the same door. They’d gotten separated in the darkness when whoever had torched the house opened fire with automatic weapons.
When the old man in the beat-up GMC had stopped, at first, he meant only to take the truck and run for Ft. Worth. Then the old man committed suicide by resisting, and Twister had put one between his eyes. Stupid old fool. The truck was junk.
Twister had driven through the night along the flat, straight, U.S. 287, stopping at a Wichita Falls truck stop for salve and bandages for the severe burn on Bonnie’s left foot. “That’s what you get for runnin’ around barefoot, dumbass,” he’d admonished.
Bonnie, skinny, mentally slow, plain beneath disheveled dishwater-blonde hair, nodded. Twister was sort of rough that way.
Twister suspected the fire in the meth lab was the work of the Amigos, a cartel out of Mexico, who’d been trying to push into the meth business in rural panhandle Texas. A half-dozen other individuals and groups were capable of such a violent attack, but the Amigos were the best bet.
After the two intruders had torched the place, Twister put a bullet into the one who had tossed the gasoline. The man fell and managed to set himself afire. Screaming, he’d staggered across the dusty front yard to the middle of the road and collapsed. The second assailant, after emptying his machine gun, had run to a waiting SUV down the road and fled.
As he was dragging Bonnie outside, Twister had busted a couple more caps at the man and the van but didn’t know if he’d hit pay dirt. Certain that if his brother was alive, he had undoubtedly been arrested, Twister had to find him and break him out.
Bonnie’s mama was at the house most of the time. She’d answered the telephone every time he’d driven Bonnie over toward Comanche Wells where the cell would work, and that had been a bunch. Besides, the fat old witch was too lazy to get outside in the summer heat.
Bonnie would get in the way when he started killing cartel goons or whoever else showed up to finish the job. He needed a place to stash her and get some sleep.
He found Mama’s house in the Stop Six neighborhood of East Ft. Worth just before eight a.m. The overheated GMC was easy enough to hide among other beat-up vehicles strewn about the neighborhood. He carried Bonnie piggyback to her mama’s back door.
Mama, as expected, threw a ten-minute screaming hissy fit, then lit up a Camel, opened a Budweiser, and demanded Twister take her daughter to a hospital. He handed Mama the keys to the old GMC. “Take her to John Peter Smith, Mama. Tell ’em she burned herself barbecuing or burnin’ trash and, for God’s sake don’t mention me or tell them people Bonnie’s only fourteen.”
“Ain’t got no damned money, boy,” Mama snarled.
“Law says hospital emergency room gotta take her in, dammit. Get started.”
Mama and Bonnie had been gone several hours. Twister had used Mama’s telephone to call back to Bristol County and learned the only real hospital was in Comanche Wells. A call to the hospital and a loose-mouthed telephone operator told him his brother had been a patient but had been transferred to the Criminal Justice Center. Twister would drive the hundred and eighty miles back up Highway 287 and bust Brooks outta that tin can. Then they’d kill a bunch of cartel competitors and anyone else who got in his way.
He tried to nap on the couch, his twisted neck making sleeping difficult. A little window air conditioner above his head was losing the battle with the Texas August sun. Just after midday, when he heard someone on the front porch, he started for the door to make certain Mama hadn’t brought the GMC back to the house.
Frozen in fear, through the opaque door-glass, he saw not Mama, but two Laws: big men with those ten-gallon hats and big .45’s on their hips. Twister had been handled by just about every arm of the law and he knew instinctively this pair were Texas Rangers. Some cockeyed way, they knew about the fire in the meth lab!
Twister, heart racing, melted as slowly as blind panic would allow into a closet where he waited, his .38 in hand. Rangers had a reputation for being tough customers.
For a passing second, he thought if these two dumb cowboy cops kicked in the door, he’d bushwhack both. But such macho thoughts faded quickly. If they came in, he’d run, like always. After what seemed like an hour of banging on the door, they left. They’d be back soon enough, he assumed, probably with a search warrant. And they’d probably kick his ass.
Mama, no stranger to cop habits, had driven by while the two “hats” were on her front porch. Only them damned Texas Rangers wore them hats. When Twister showed up, the law was never far behind. She knew to park the GMC on the next street.
Mama helped Bonnie in the back door. She ranted for twenty minutes until Twister cold-cocked her. Grabbing his backpack, he left Bonnie shrieking as she bent over Mama, bleeding on the kitchen floor like the fool she was. He found the old GMC and set out with a plan.
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Gary Clifton
