The Whiskey Baron by Jon Sealy Read Free Book Online Page B

boys were hoping for a quiet investigation and a big time bust, they’d nearly blown their cover already, before they’d even gotten out of the car. That didn’t bother Chambers much. Because of the murder, people would be guarding themselves more closely. All he wanted was for his town to run smoothly. His folks wanted to be left alone. No one wanted change, and it was up to him to make sure everything remained steady.
    He walked into the jailhouse next door to check on Shorty Bagwell. There were two prisoners right now, both in for getting drunk and causing trouble. A young troublemaker named Boots Miller showed up in town on Friday, skunk drunk and holding his belly and laughing all up and down Saluda Street. Chambers’s deputy heard the laughter through an open window, walked out, and clubbed Boots on the back of the head and dragged him to the jailhouse. Today he sat on the floor of the cell, hummed a blues without missing a beat when Chambers walked in. The sheriff moved on to the back cell where Shorty Bagwell slept on a hard cot, one arm draped over his eyes. Beyond the square of barred light at the top of Shorty’s cell, a hawk glided across the white sky. Water dripped onto bald concrete in the empty cell across the hall, its unmetered splat the only timekeeper for those inside. On the floor of the cell was an uneaten pimento cheese sandwich slathered in potato gravy, gorged on by flies.
    “Shorty,” Chambers said, rousing the man from his slumber.
    Shorty started and sat up, a chubby tub of a man whose feet barely touched the ground from the cot. “Well hey, Sheriff.”
    Chambers clanked the keys in the lock and twisted the rusted iron. The cell door groaned from the friction, and he said, “Let’s go, Shorty.”
    The man stared at the pimento cheese sandwich, said, “I was enjoying some of the county’s fine hospitality, thanks.”
    Chambers led him down the concrete hall and out into the sunlight. In the sheriff’s office, Chambers sat across from the grimy man and stared at him. “How long you got left in there?”
    “Well Sheriff, you ought to know as well as I would.”
    “I could look up the exact date.”
    “Unless Miss Meacham’s changed her mind and forgiven me for defiling her flowerbeds.”
    Chambers laughed, said, “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.”
    “I don’t believe it is, either,” Shorty said.
    In the spring, he and Mary Jane had been riding around too fast through town, and they’d plowed into Miss Meacham’s flowers and knocked over a fence. Miss Meacham lived in one of the York Street mansions, and her poor lawn had been a blemish much discussed among the women in town ever since. She’d barked at Chambers over the phone to come out and arrest those liquored-up yahoos before she took a notion to take the law into her own hands. He came out to find her—one of the town’s oldest residents—out on her lawn raising high hell, shouting about sin and tarnation, so much that Chambers even felt a little sorry for Shorty and Mary Jane, leaning on her car and saying, yes ma’am, yes ma’am, while she carried on. The both of them sober and bleary-eyed, it seemed at first like they would come in peaceably enough, but then Shorty, still drunk no doubt, decided to grab the deputy’s billyclub and start an all-out riot on Main Street. Chambers still had a pink scar on his knuckles from where he’d tackled Shorty and smashed his hand into the pavement.
    Chambers quit laughing about it and leaned back in his chair. Shorty rolled his eyes and said, “I got another five days.”
    “And then what are you going to do?” When Shorty didn’t answer, he said, “You got to do something. Make money somehow.”
    “Maybe I’ll get on out at the Bell. I’ve done that before.”
    “That’s good work. Honest. Beats running whiskey, that’s for sure.”
    “Aw, Sheriff, you know I ain’t—”
    “What? You ain’t running whiskey?”
    “Wouldn’t think of