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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Saturday,
August 12, 1922,
concluded
“Why’re you so hot to get the Ashleys? Not that I mind, yer Honor, but other than slippin’ through your fingers in an extradition hearing, what’d they ever do to you?”
The Judge looked him over, hard, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “Madge Emily Bell married John Reinhart Riblet in 1910, in Fort Pierce. Bob Ashley, while trying to break John out of Dade County Jail, shot and killed her husband in 1915, leaving her a widow, and their two small children orphans. Madge is my cousin on my mother’s side. My favorite cousin, you might say.”
Red remembered, Stikelether’s middle name was Bell. He also recalled how the old goat had said he was still a ladies’ man.
“You and Madge?”
The Judge was shaking his head. “Nothing like that, although despite a twenty-year difference in age, I was hell-for-leather in love with her. I knew nothing would ever come of it, have no idea if she even knows. I was pleased she’d found a fine young fellow her own age, even if her Ma and Pa might not have been, her marrying a fella with less than ample prospects. He was a storekeeper at the time and worked some on the railroad. But that boy was going places, take my word for it. Those no-good bastards stole the life they should have had. Her and the kids have been living with her sister Clara and her husband Bill Tubbs, and they’ve had to take in boarders to make ends meet. I send her a little money when I can.
“You are one small part of a plan” |
Red had already had a sneaking feeling there was more to the Judge’s grudge against the Ashleys at work here, but he really didn’t care. He needed all the help he could get, and most of all, he needed every one of those shitheels dead. If the Judge had blood on the line, so much the better.
Another niggling suspicion made Red say it: “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Grey?”
The Judge leaned his head back, closed his eyes in apparent ecstasy, and spoke in a dreamy voice. “I haven’t had this much fun since the pigs ate my little sister.”
It wasn’t until Red pulled the truck down the dirt road to the farm that he saw smoke. He raced through the gate and up the drive, jumping out with his Colt in his hand. He pounded around the farmhouse to see the corner of his shed on fire, and one scruffy little son of a bitch tryin’ to get it going even more. His back was to Red.
The distinctive sound of Red cocking the single-action pistol—clickclick—froze the man in his tracks. His hands went up by his shoulders and he looked around slowly. He wore jeans shiny with filth, with a rope to hold them up on his skeletal frame. A drab shirt made from corn sack cloth was tucked neatly into the jeans. His hair and beard ran together like some wild man from the woods, and the look on his face was that of a kid caught smoking behind the woodpile. He stunk to high heaven of old fish.
Red thundered at him. “Who the fuck’re you? Get your ass away from there!”
The man made to run, and the pistol crashed, putting a .45 slug in the dirt by his left boot.
“Move again and I’ll kill you” |
Looking at the fire, Red said, “Get that shit off of my shed.”
A few sticks and wads of old cloth were piled against the corner, and the fire had barely got hold of the structure. That didn’t matter, given the dry wood of the old shed, and the house and barn, for all of that. It wouldn’t of been ten minutes until it all would have gone up like a bonfire.
He pointed the barrel right at the man’s face. “I said get it off!”
The man shrugged and started kicking at the kindling.
“No!” Red yelled. “Use your hands!”
Now there was real fear in the look, and Red wondered if this would-be arsonist was really all there.
“I…I, I was just doin’ whut Kenny tol’ me!”
Red shoved him down, and he gingerly picked at the burning sticks and scraps and tossed them aside. “Ow! Oweee! Ow!” He started crying, sniveling really, and Red swore in disgust.
He booted the trespasser in the ass so he landed with the front of his shirt on the little bits that were still burning.
“Ahhhhhh! Help, he’s killin’ me!”
Red put his foot in the middle of the man’s back and stood on him while he shrieked like a girl. When he was good and sure the fire was out, smothered against the man’s chest, he stepped back and let the little fuck hop up.
He brushed frantically at his shirt, which was smoldering, and knocked off a few hot embers which had been stuck, burning, to his stomach and now burned his fingers.
Red ginned like a wolf. He was enjoying himself. Serves you right, you little bastard. “Now, you are gonna tell me who the fuck you are and what the fuck you think you’re doing, and who the FUCK you are doing it for!”
The little weasel nearly gibbered in fright. “I-I’m Bobby Frankenfield and I-I’m just doin’ what Kenny tol’ me to do! Said somebody was messin’ with our bidness, had no right, and said to burn this place! I don’t know nuthin’ else!”
Red was looking askance, trying to figure if this was an act, when the deep baritone of the Reverend Ezra Ezekiel Stone startled both the young men.
“Boy’s a bit slow in the head” |
He switched his ever-present shotgun from the crook of his left arm to the crook of his right. “Look at the way he’s dressed. It’s a sin and a shame, that boy hasn’t got the sense God gave a field mouse. The Frankenfields are not poor crackers, they have plenty of liquor money to feed and clothe him, but look how he is. And to send him on a mission like this, likely as not to get shot? What kind of animal does that to their kin?”
Red looked back at Bobby with narrow eyes. “So, what’a you think I ought do, Reverend? Burn him some more?”
Bobby’s eyes went wide, and his head went frantically back and forth.
“No, no, Brother Dedge, that wouldn’t be right.”
Bobby’s face went to Stone with a gaze of shining hope. Stone turned that grim face to him and looked him in the eye. “I’d just shoot him. We already know everything he knows.”
Bobby fell on the ground, cowering in fright. “No no, please no…”
Red uncocked the Colt. Clickclick.
Bobby wet his already disgusting jeans.
Reverend Ezra Ezekiel Stone turned his head and spit.
Red grabbed Frankenfield by the shirt and dragged him up. He shoved the barrel of the Colt into his left nostril. “Tell me what else you know, you little piece of shit, and tell me why I shouldn’t shoot your sorry ass right now. I could, you know. You’re a fuckin’ arsonist! Nobody would give a damn.”
From behind Bobby, Stone gave him a look, a tiny shake of the head.
Red dipped his chin in response.
“They give you the God damn electric chair for that! Why, I’ll turn you in to Sheriff Merritt myself, we’re good friends.” Stone’s head jerked back and just for a second, a look of comical surprise turned his granite features into a smiling imp.
Red frowned.
“Who’s behind all this?” |
Bobby was crying again. It was making Red sick to his stomach. For a man to grovel like that. He raised the heavy Colt to slap it across the little creep’s mouth, but even the threat of a pistol-whipping must have been enough for Bobby. Bobby started wailing.
“It’s them Ashleys! Them God damn Ashleys! They make us do ever’thang! That Middleton, he’s a sumbitch! He killed Billy Hazellief for snaggin’ one God damn truck full’a likker! Kenny been makin’ us do whut they say ever’ since they busted daddy out’a jail. I din’t have no choice! He’d’a kilt me fer sure!”
Red looked over Bobby’s shoulder at the Reverend Stone. Stone shrugged.
“’T’s why yer here, ain’t it? So’s I wouldn’t…” he nodded at Bobby, still whining.
The Reverend nodded solemnly. “Wouldn’t want you to endanger your immortal soul, Brother Dedge. Wouldn’t be neighborly.”
Red snorted. “So what do we do with the little bastard? Just turn him loose?”
Ezra grinned again, and Red thought little flakes of shale might break off his face and fall to the ground. “I believe it would be profitable, not to mention neighborly, to give Bobby a ride home.”
At Red’s look of alarm, he shook his head, a movement of perhaps a quarter of an inch. “Not you,” he said bluntly, “me.”
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
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