Tagged for Murder by Jack Fredrickson

Author:Jack Fredrickson [Fredrickson, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House Publishers
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-SEVEN

The fidgets remained.

I’d learned nothing of what Herbie had stepped into, other than maybe it had gotten him three hundred thousand in cash, and for sure it had gotten him dead. Secreting away Herbie’s corpse and waving faked documents had agitated no one out into the open except perhaps a man or two with guns who’d come looking for me in Austin. All I was seeing now was Walter Dace and his receptionist lying sticky in still-drying blood.

I thought, then, of Kutz’s clearing – one of my old refuges when I was a kid – and how peaceful it would be to sit at a picnic table and ignore what I’d stuffed in Leo’s ice cream freezer and watch the river and not think of much of anything at all until it was time to head to the city garage to ask the nocturnal Booster Gibbs what his crew had encountered, finding my Jeep.

Leo’s white van was parked, as usual, next to the wienie wagon. The veterinarian’s big green van was also there, backed against the opened gate to the paddock.

Ordinarily, the scene might well have been soothing. But that day, calm was not to be found at Kutz’s clearing. It was a madhouse.

There were goats – four of them. One goat was pure white, two were pure brown. The fourth and largest of them was a mix of brown and white.

They were jumping about inside the fenced-in paddock, bleating in high-pitched falsettos like they were being accosted by hooded people with hatchets. But they were not. Only the veterinarian darted among them, attempting to soothe them with pats on the head. The man must have been a long-view optimist, for none of his patting was slowing the goats at all. They bleated and kept jumping all around him in a sort of hysterical ballet. Besides the courage to remain among so many leaping hooves, the man was surely blessed with deafness and a nose clogged solid with cement to have chauffeured four such agitated creatures to the clearing in an enclosed van.

There was other movement there as well. Five gray heads bobbed slowly along the oval’s main straightaway. Ma Brumsky and three of her friends, septuagenarians all, formed a ragged sort of line at the front. They were waving long branches out ahead of them, side to side, like prairie farm hustlers used to do, dowsing for the presence of water. Except instead of forked ends, these ladies’ branches all had silver bells jangling on red velvet ribbons at their ends.

Mrs Roshiska, Ma Brumsky’s largest and oldest friend, pushed her wheeled aluminum walker closely behind the four ladies in front. She wore her usual outfit of a pink sweatshirt and pink sweatpants, but waved no stick.

‘Amazing, right?’ Leo asked. For all the hysteria coming from the goat paddock, I hadn’t heard him sidle up beside me. Again, he wore his white chef’s toque and empty tool belt.

‘You like that hat, don’t you?’ I said.

‘Toque.’

‘Toque,’ I said. ‘What on earth

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