Death's Sweet Song by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The Sheriff's office was in the courthouse basement. I walked down the corridor of dirty marble and was almost sick at the steaming smell of unemptied spittoons and filthy toilets and stale cigar smoke, and I wondered why it was that the sheriffs office was always in the basement, and why it was that small-town courthouses were always so filthy. Near the end of the corridor there was a sign that said: “Otis Miller, Sheriff.”

Ray King was sitting at a desk just inside the front office. “Well, Joe, what brings you down to the courthouse?”

“Hello, Ray. I'd like to see Otis, if he's around.”

“Sheriffs tied up right now, in the back office. He ought to be free in a minute. Take a chair.”

I sat down in a straight-backed hard-oak chair, hoping that coming to the Sheriff wasn't a mistake. Mistake or not, I felt that it would be a good idea if I could find out what Otis thought about the robbery. It had been three days now and the papers had printed the same thing over and over again, and the Sheriff had said nothing, nothing at all, and there was no way of telling what he was thinking or doing. And I had to know. Before I could think of contacting Paula, I had to know.

Ray sat there grinning for a few seconds, then he pulled some papers in front of him and picked up a pen. “Excuse me a minute, Joe. Otis will be on my back if I don't get this report finished.”

“Sure. Sure.”

There was nothing else to do, so I sat back and tried to ignore the heat and watched Ray working on the white form. He didn't look much like a deputy sheriff, but the business was in his blood and it was more or less taken for granted that he would get Otis Miller's job when Otis decided it was time to step down. Ray's dad had been a U.S. marshal when Creston was just a stage stop in Oklahoma Territory, and there was a stone monument out west of town marking the place where he had been killed in a gun fight with two Territory badmen.

So it was natural enough that Ray should take up the law-enforcing business, although he looked pretty light for that kind of work. He was a lanky, easygoing sort of guy, not much older than myself. He looked more like a lawyer or a businessman than a deputy sheriff. Most of the time, when it wasn't too hot, he wore a dark, double-breasted suit. No cowboy boots and white hat for Ray King, and he never wore his gun where it would show, but he knew the business of a sheriff as well as Otis Miller did.

Maybe ten minutes passed, and finally an inner door opened and out came Pat Sully, the guy I'd paid that five dollars to that day at the box factory. That jarred me for a moment. Surely Pat hadn't suspected me! The big red-faced bastard was too dumb to put two and two together.

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