Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident by Bill Crider Read Free Book Online

soap opera.
    “Yeldell didn’t draw the line at married women, either,” Ruth said.  “According to one of his cousins, there’re quite a few married men who won’t be too upset to hear the news of the drowning.”
    “What cousin would that be?” Rhodes asked.
    “Gary Heckethorn.  He works at the Mini Market out on the Thurston highway.”
    “Did he give you any names?”
    Ruth handed Rhodes a piece of paper torn from a small spiral notebook.  “I wrote them down.”
    Rhodes glanced at the paper.  He didn’t recognize any of the names.  He folded the paper and stuck it in his shirt pocket. 
    “Did Heckethorn say whether Yeldell knew John West?” he asked.
    “He said West’s name was familiar, but that’s all.  He said maybe West was somebody Yeldell met out at The County Line.  Heckethorn went there with Yeldell some, and he says they might have met West there.  But he’s not sure.  They met a lot of people at The County Line.”
    “We might have to talk to Heckethorn again,” Rhodes said.  “And Tuffy West.”
    “I wish we could find John West’s car,” Ruth said.  “That still worries me.”
    It worried Rhodes, too.  There was no reason for the car not to have turned up by now.  He had put out an A. P. B. on it, but it hadn’t been reported.
    “That car could be in Russia by now,” Hack said.  He turned off his TV set, no longer interested in the soap opera.  “I read an article in the paper just the other day about how all the big-time Russian criminals have come over here to the U. S. A. now that the Soviet Union’s collapsed.  They’re gonna be bigger than the Mafia, is what the article said.  One thing they’re doin’ is stealin’ cars and sendin’ ’em clear back over there to Russia.  What kinda car did West have?”
    “It wasn’t a car, exactly,” Rhodes said.  “It was a Jeep Cherokee.”
    “There you go, then,” Hack said.  “That’s the very model those Russians like the best of all.  It’s prob’ly mushin’ through the snow drifts up there in Siberia right now.”
    Somehow Rhodes found it hard to believe that a car stolen in Blacklin County, Texas, could have found its way to Russia.  Mexico, maybe, but not Russia.
    “If it sat out on one of those county roads very long,” Hack said, “it was fair game for anybody that came along and wanted it.  It’d be just like some Russian gang to take it.  I haven’t trusted Russians since they pulled the wool over F. D. R.’s eyes at Yalta after World War Two.”
    “I looked for the car that night,” Rhodes said.  “It wasn’t anywhere around.”
    “Must not’ve looked very good,” Hack said.
    “I looked good.  And Ruth looked with me the next day.”
    “Too late by then.  Russians already had it.”
    “I thought the Russians were pretty much confined to the eastern part of the country,” Ruth said.
    Hack gave her a pitying look.  “That’s what they’d like you to believe.”
    “Let’s assume just for a minute that the Russians don’t have the Cherokee,” Rhodes said.  “What else could have happened to it?”
    “ Somebody’s got it,” Hack said.  “You can laugh about the Russians if you want to, but somebody’s got that car.  It’s too nice a ride to be sittin’ in some bar ditch somewhere.”
    That was a point Rhodes could agree with.
    “Maybe we’ve just been looking in the wrong places,” Ruth said.
    That was another point Rhodes could agree with.  He just didn’t know where else to look.
    Ruth didn’t either, but she had another idea.
    “What if he was with someone that night?  Have we considered that possibility?”
    “No,” Rhodes said. “But if he was with someone, why was he carrying a gas can?”
    “It didn’t have to be his car that ran out of gas,” Ruth said.
     

Chapter Nine
     
    “I already told you,” Tuffy West said.  “I was with John at The County Line that night.  We had a couple of beers, maybe three, and that was it.