The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,70
rubbed his chin real thoughtful. “Well, Shurf,” he says. “That’s what we’re all tryin’ to do, find that there girl. Why don’t we just all pitch in together an’ look for her? We been waitin’ all day for you to get down here on the job an’ do somethin’ about tryin’ to locate her.”
“You—you—” the sheriff says. He was beginning to fizz and sputter again.
“Why, shucks,” Uncle Sagamore went on. “I don’t see nothin’ for us to do, but keep on looking. You got lots of help. An’ it don’t seem to me like you’d want to start raisin’ no stink about the reward. You want to have all them people goin’ around sayin’ mebbe that shurf don’t even care whether that there girl’s found or not? Why, they might get real violent.”
The sheriff lunged out and caught the leashes of the other three hounds. “Give me them dogs,” he snarled at the man. “Let’s go.” Then he looked around at me. “Billy, you come along and show us where you hid in them ferns.”
The dogs barked. They had a real deep, rumbling sort of bark. They lunged on the leashes and almost pulled the sheriff off his feet again.
“Damn it—” he says.
And just then there was another voice behind us. We whirled around and Baby Collins was standing in the door of the trailer, leaning against the door frame with a cigarette in her hand. She was wearing a wrap-around sort of thing made out of some lacy black stuff you could see right through, with one bare leg slanting a little out of the front of it.
“Hi, honey,” she says to the sheriff. “Why don’t you tie up your dogs and come in out of the sun? We’ll open a box of cornflakes.”
Sixteen
The sheriff got a little darker red in the face, and Uncle Sagamore says to Baby Collins, “I’d like to make you acquainted with the shurf. He’s a real busy man, though.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s too bad. But I’m glad to meet you, sheriff. Drop in and see us any time you’re out this way, and bring your scrabble board.”
She smiled at all of us and went back to the trailer.
The big hounds was lunging on the leashes again, about to pull the sheriff over, and there was so much uproar when he finally was able to talk again you couldn’t tell whether it was Uncle Sagamore he was cussing or the dogs. Sig Freed got mixed up in it too. He’d bark at the hounds and then run around in a circle and jump up on me, just to be sure I was still there to back him up in case they got mad. Any one of ‘em could have swallowed him with one bite.
We started off down past the house, but all of a sudden the sheriff stopped. “Oh, hell,” he says. “We got to have something of hers for the dawgs to get the scent.”
“That’s right,” the other man says. It was the first time he’d even opened his mouth. I guess he was a new deputy. He was a kind of sandy-haired man with a long neck and weak blue eyes.
The sheriff waved an arm. “Run up there to that trailer they was livin’ in and see if you can find a pair of her shoes, or some clothes. The trailer’s off there somewhere in that mess of cars.”
“Hey wait,” I says. “I just remember Uncle Sagamore had had some clothes of hers last night. “Uncle Sagamore had—”
The whole thing happened so fast then it was like something blowing up in your face. I think Sig Freed was starting to leap up on me again, or was already in the air, but anyway Pop lunged and grabbed me and hoisted me up, and at the same time he cried, “Did you see that? That dam’ dawg tried to bite Billy—”
“He did?” Uncle Sagamore says. He made a lunge at Sig Freed and waved his hat at him. “Git. Shoo! Scat, you goddam dawg!”
Everybody was excited and yelling. The sheriff says, “What the hell?” I tried to tell Pop that Sig Freed wasn’t trying to bite, that he was just playing, but his hand was over my mouth the way he was holding me, and then he was running towards the house with me on his shoulder, yelling, “We better see if he broke the skin. Might have hydrophoby.”
He was cussing Sig Freed so loud all the time he was running I couldn’t