Blind Tiger by Sandra Brown

“They didn’t amount to much.”

“They did to the men who lost.”

“If they couldn’t afford to lose, then they shouldn’t’ve been gambling.”

The sheriff snuffled. “True enough.” He studied Thatcher as he thoughtfully stroked his mustache. “Irv seemed to have taken a dislike to you. How come?”

“I have no idea.”

“Y’all didn’t have a run-in of some kind yesterday?”

“I never even saw him. When I got there, Mrs. Plummer was in the yard hanging out her wash. I didn’t know for certain that anyone else was around until he called to her from inside the house. He didn’t show himself.”

Deliberately he neglected to tell the sheriff about the shotgun, although he couldn’t say where his reluctance to mention it came from. “Do you think the baby will be all right?”

“My boy had croup a couple of times when he was little. Sounds worse than it is.”

“What’s Plummer do for a living?”

“He’s a handyman. Drives an old truck.”

“It was parked in the yard.”

“It’s full of tools and gadgets, jangling around. You can hear him coming from a mile away. He’s quite a character.”

“I gathered.” Thatcher debated whether or not to leave it there, but decided to be up-front. “I know that Mrs. Plummer’s husband died by his own hand just a few months ago. Mrs. Driscoll told me.” He recounted how that conversation had come about. “She didn’t go into detail. Told me only that he shot himself.”

“He put a Colt forty-five under his chin and pulled the trigger.”

Jesus. Thatcher hoped Mrs. Plummer hadn’t been the one who found him. “That was an awful thing to do to his family. He leave a note?”

“No.” The sheriff lowered his head and stared at a spot on the floor between him and the cell. “When I questioned Mrs. Plummer about it, she told me her husband had come back from the war a different man, that he never recovered from his service over there, and that’s what drove him to kill himself.”

“It can happen.”

The sheriff kept his head down but lifted his gaze to Thatcher, looking at him from under a pair of eyebrows that matched his salt-and-pepper mustache. “Did it happen to you? See, Mr. Hutton, I recognize the buttons on your coat. My boy wore the same uniform.”

He lowered his gaze to the floor again. “I know the name of the town in France where he’s buried. Can’t pronounce it, but I can’t see it matters much. I doubt I’ll ever get there.

“And, anyway, if I were to, there’s a bunch of Company B boys all buried together. They couldn’t really tell one from the other, they said. Made separate graves… Well, impractical, I guess.”

He coughed behind his fist. Thatcher heard him swallow. Then he raised his head and looked Thatcher in the eye. “Were you witness to atrocities like that?”

“Damn near every day. Even after the armistice, I was left over there to clean up messes that folks who haven’t seen can’t imagine.”

“You didn’t feel the effects of seeing things like mass graves stuffed with unidentified body parts?”

“Yes, Mr. Amos, I felt the effects, all right. But they didn’t make me lose my mind, or tempt me to blow my brains out, or drive me to abduct women.” His hands closed around two of the bars. “Seeing all that death only made me determined to get back home and go on living out the rest of my life as best I can.”

Their gazes stayed locked for a time. The sheriff was the first to break away. He turned and started down the corridor. “Try to get some shut-eye.”

“How long can you hold me without charging me?”

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about it.”

“With all due respect, I do worry about it.”

Bill Amos stopped and turned. He subjected Thatcher to a long, assessing stare. “There’s a lot about you I’m trying to figure out. But it’s occurred to me to wonder why you would spend ten minutes or more with a young woman who you thought was all alone way out yonder, and leave politely without laying a hand on her, then walk five more miles, on a hot day that topped eighty, meet another woman who’s seven months pregnant, and decide to sneak back in the dead of night and carry her off. On foot.”





Thirteen



Laurel spent an anxious hour pacing the waiting area of the doctor’s office, trying to comfort Pearl. Her coughing spasms were relieved only when she could draw enough breath to wail.

When they finally were called into the examination room, the elderly physician peered at them through his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and asked, “What seems to be the problem?”

Laurel wanted to smack him.

With a maddening lack of urgency, he went about examining the screaming baby while asking Laurel pertinent questions. In the hope of moving things along, she kept her answers brief and precise.

He listened to Pearl’s chest and, when he removed the earpieces of the stethoscope, asked if she’d been born early.

“By three weeks.”

He ruminated on that, then used a medicine dropper to dose Pearl with powdered aspirin dissolved in water. “This will bring down her fever. And this,” he said as he similarly administered a dose of sweet smelling syrup, “will help with her cough.” He gave Laurel a small bottle of the cough remedy and a packet of the aspirin to take with her.