The Wild Hog Murders by Bill Crider Read Free Book Online Page A

retro book, too.”
    “You’re a poet and don’t know it,” Rhodes said.
    Ballinger grinned. “Sure I know it. Anyway, lots of the old stuff’s being reprinted now. Good thing, too, since I can’t find much in garage sales anymore. People are buying all the old books and trying to sell ’em on eBay, and they bring more than the new ones do. It’s a shame if you ask me. Takes all the fun out of it.”
    “You’re still reading, though,” Rhodes said.
    Ballinger put the book down on his desk. “Why would I quit? Finding the books might not be any fun now, but reading them still is.”
    Rhodes nodded. “Murder in books is always more fun than the real thing.”
    “Like the guy you sent here yesterday,” Ballinger said. “He was murdered, right?”
    “Right.”
    Ballinger opened a drawer on the side of his desk and brought out Dr. White’s report. He handed it to Rhodes and picked up his book.
    Rhodes read through the report. He didn’t see anything he didn’t expect to find. The victim had been in good general health and had died of two gunshot wounds, one of them to his heart. The bullets had been recovered from the body and had been fired from a .38. The bullets were now in a locker in the autopsy room.
    The victim’s only identifying mark noted was a large mole on his right shoulder. There were no personal effects except some car keys that had no doubt belonged to the person the car was stolen from. According to the report on the car, it had been stolen a couple of months earlier. The owner had left the keys in it while buying a lottery ticket at a convenience store. The victim must have liked to steal things at convenience stores.
    “Any help there?” Ballinger asked when he saw that Rhodes was finished with his reading.
    “Not a bit,” Rhodes said.
    “Milton Munday says you’ll never catch the killer,” Ballinger told him. “He doesn’t like you much.”
    “He doesn’t even know me,” Rhodes said.
    “You’ve met him, though, haven’t you?”
    “Only once, and we didn’t talk long.”
    “He’s sure livened up the radio in this little county,” Ballinger said. “Nearly everybody in town listens to him.”
    “Not me,” Rhodes said.
    “I’ll bet the commissioners don’t listen, either, or the mayor. Munday does love to criticize the power structure.”
    “You think I’m part of the power structure?”
    “Well, sure. You’re the sheriff. We all know you’ve single-handedly brought law and order to this small frontier village.”
    “I didn’t think you read Westerns,” Rhodes said.
    “Now and then I do. Some of those old writers I like wrote Westerns and mysteries, too, but I like those Sage Barton books better.”
    Rhodes didn’t want to talk about Sage Barton, a character created by two women who’d come to Blacklin County to attend a writers’ workshop in the small town of Obert. There’d been some trouble at the workshop, and a man had been killed. Rhodes had solved the crime, and the two women had written a novel about a tough, good-looking Texas sheriff they’d called Sage Barton. The book had sold and so had the sequel, and people liked to tease Rhodes by saying that the Barton character was based on him.
    Barton’s life, however, was considerably more colorful than Rhodes’s. Barton had weapons that would make Mikey Burns’s dream of an M-16 seem like a paltry thing. He romanced FBI agents in pursuit of terrorist masterminds. He didn’t chase criminals in a car, either. Instead, he used the county helicopter, which he piloted himself. Barton made Navy SEALs look like sissies by comparison. He could probably strangle a feral hog with his bare hands.
    “I don’t read those books,” Rhodes said, though it wasn’t strictly the truth. He’d scanned them, and Ivy had read both of them and reported to Rhodes on their contents.
    “You should give ’em a try,” Ballinger said. “You might pick up some pointers.”
    Rhodes said he didn’t think so.
    “Well,