The Legacy by Jere Cunningham

Author:Jere Cunningham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Valancourt Books
Published: 2024-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Dewey Pounds was a man of action. He spent the heat of the morning in the Dodge cruiser on county roads. At every bend or rise in the two-­lane blacktop he expected to see Chester Rawlings’ corpse propped up, ludicrously suited in funeral clothes, gaping at the road.

But the roads unwound and the hours passed and he saw nothing unusual. He was worried sick. Problems were made to lay big hands on. Criminals existed to be caught, the truth to be wrung from them. Inactivity gnawed his beer belly. It made his lips dry and his hands tense on the wheel. The locality around Bickford, his ground, was getting out of hand. He knew it looked bad. If he couldn’t get things under control and get to the bottom of the whole mess, the next election would find him pumping gas or looking for a job in another town.

First it was pets. People complaining about a dog or a cat and once even that goat disappearing. As if animals didn’t stray off on their own. Hawks and owls picked them up. Cars knocked them off the road. They got horny and wandered into the woods. But—not so many in so short a time—that was the hitch. Then, the pets were nothing compared to that little girl missing. Probably her old man killed her and hid the body before he stuck his head in the microwave. Suicides did weird things like that. Or she saw her mommy and daddy and ran off and is still lying under a pile of leaves, overlooked by the searchers where she died of exposure. Then Dave’s daddy doing himself in. Now the damned grave ripped open and the hard fact of a stolen corpse. But maybe Sam went crazy, too. Maybe he was the one who did it and hid the cadaver and shot at something he thought he saw, some hallucination, and had a stroke and—

Pounds cut speed and turned into the brick drive at White­wood. No, he thought, none of that shit makes sense. Some weird fucker or fuckers were running around. They had to be found. Satanists, maybe. Hitchhiker from out of town staying down somewhere in the woods. God only knew. Only thing for sure was he had to find out what and not take another year doing it. The specter of a gas pump haunted his daydreams. Folks laughing at the big dumb old boy who used to be sheriff. Man, when he finally got his hands on whoever it was—

Dewey edged the cruiser up the drive. The sight of the mansion, of any mansion, made him tense. He’d grown up in a one-­bedroom home with naked bulbs and pull-­down shades on the edge of Bickford. Maybe that was why he liked the hell out of David. A guy never stuck-­up because his folks had something. Damned fine quarterback in high school ball, a boy who could take a hard hit and not get all shook about it. Now he was a doctor and still the same good guy.

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