of Wally Johnson’s reputation for a short temper and violent bent.
She was fully aware of it now.
Which was why Gert had left her husband to tend to a middling crowd and had taken back roads out into the countryside to where two clear-running, spring-fed creeks converged, making it an ideal spot for one of the Johnson family’s distilleries.
Wally was the family member assigned to operate and protect this particular still. Sometimes a kid cousin helped out with heavy lifting or needed repairs, but Wally preferred to work alone.
He lived in a lean-to tucked beneath a shelf of limestone, which helped shelter him from the elements. The geological configuration also hid the fire required to keep the sour mash cooking at a low boil, thus making the still unlikely to be detected. Wally’s great-granddaddy Hiram had chosen the location for just that reason. The still had been producing corn liquor uninterrupted for decades.
When she was still a distance away, Gert rolled her Model T to a halt and blinked her headlights twice, slowly, then three times in rapid succession, signaling that she was a customer and not a hostile competitor or the law.
Wally emerged from his lean-to, cradling a rifle in the crook of his elbow, but, having recognized Gert’s vehicle, motioned her forward. She drove up to within yards of where he stood, stopped, and climbed out.
She motioned toward the still. “Why ain’t you cookin’ tonight?”
“Didn’t have a mind to,” Wally replied. “You bring my money?”
She planted her hands on her broad hips. “Dammit, Wally, I’m as pissed off at you as I can be at a person, and that’s sayin’ somethin’.”
“What for?”
“What for? I’ll tell you what for. Thanks to you, I got a whore who’s out of commission.”
“You told me to do something that’d guarantee getting Doc Driscoll out to the roadhouse, and that’s what I did. Saw him arrive myself.”
“I told you to rough up the girl a little. You broke her arm, her jaw’s out of whack, and her eye’s all swole up and ain’t sittin’ right.”
“She told me she’d as soon fuck a bat as me. Which I reminded her of, she said.”
Gert gave a snort. “You’ve heard worse.”
He held out his hand, palm up. “Twenty bucks, Gert.”
“I ought to subtract what her ruint appearance will cost me in lost revenue.” She looked over at his stockpile of moonshine. “But, because I’m a forgivin’ person, I’ll take a jar for the road, and we’ll call it even.”
He cursed her under his breath, but went over to a straw-lined crate, lifted out a mason jar of white lightning, and brought it back to her. She screwed off the lid and took a swallow. “You’re one ugly son of a bitch, Wally, but you do make good ’shine.”
“Twenty bucks.” He held out his hand again.
Gert screwed the lid back onto the mason jar and tucked it in her left armpit, then reached into the pocket of her dress, took out a pistol, and shot Wally in the forehead. She bent over his supine form, stuck the bore of the pistol into one of his ears, and fired again.
As she was getting back into her car, she muttered, “Pissant cost me a week’s worth of work out of that girl.”
Sixteen
Shortly after noon the next day, Harold came to Thatcher’s cell.
His looks hadn’t improved since Thatcher had last seen him. He might have explained that he’d mistaken him for a German soldier and apologized for messing up his face, but the deputy radiated so much hostility as he said, “They want to see you” that Thatcher didn’t bother.
After being handcuffed, he was prodded out of the cell block and into the main room.
Mayor Croft was standing in front of a window, a position that cast him in silhouette, obscured his face, and made him the most imposing presence in the room, which Thatcher figured was his intention. If he thought Thatcher would be intimidated by either his public office or his bootlegging, he was wrong. Thatcher looked him square in the eye.
Sheriff Amos motioned Thatcher into a chair. “Coffee?”
Thatcher accepted.
The sheriff filled a mug from a pot simmering on a hot plate, then brought it over. When he bent down to place the mug in Thatcher’s bound hands, he said under his breath, “Don’t volunteer anything.”
Then he straightened up, sat down on the corner of his desk, and commenced another interrogation. Beginning with the fight and Thatcher’s leap from the freight train, they rehashed Thatcher’s account of that day.