The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,69
really. One of em was a copy of the hand bill me and Pop had printed up, and the other was a folded newspaper. He held the newspaper out in front of Uncle Sagamore with one hand and started slapping the front of it with the other, still not saying words but just going on with that sort of wheezing. I stood on tiptoes and craned my neck a little so I could see the front of the paper. And doggone if it wasn’t a real big picture of Miss Harrington. I mean Miss Caroline. She didn’t have anything on but her diamonds, but this time there was three patches of them. She was posed in front of a great big fan or something that looked like it was made out of ostrich feathers. And it seemed like the whole first page of the paper was about her. The headline said:
SOUGHT IN WILDS...
SCANTILY CLAD DANCER
OBJECT OF FRENZIED SEARCH
I tried to read what it said, but the way the sheriff was waving it around and slapping it with his other hand I couldn’t get any more than snatches of it. “...most fantastic manhunt in history... Wild confusion... Stampede fanned by rumors of reward... The already fabulous Choo-Choo Caroline, beautiful missing witness in gangland murder case...sweetheart of late gang leader...alleged to have fled almost nude into swamp...”
I didn’t know what a lot of the big words meant, but it sure looked as if everybody was interested in her.
Uncle Sagamore took the paper out of the sheriff’s hand and studied it. “Well sir,” he says, “that there’s a right nice picture of her, ain’t it, Shurf?”
The sheriff took another deep breath. He rubbed both hands up over his face and then down again, and this time the log jam of words inside him got straightened out and he began talking. It wasn’t loud, or anything. He talked real calm and low, like a man that was trying to hold his breath at the same time he was saying words. It was more like a whisper.
“Sagamore Noonan,” he says, “if there was any way the moral law would let me, I’d pull a gun right here an’ kill you. I’d shoot you, an’ then I’d go running up the road laughing like a hyena, an’ they’d let me go. They wouldn’t do a thing to me. At the very worse they’d just lace me up in a straitjacket or put me in a padded cell, an’ I’d have all the rest of my life with nothing to do but just stand there with my head stuck out through the bars and laugh about never being the sheriff again of a county that had you in it.”
“Listen,” he says, still whispering. “They got all the highway patrol cars in this end of the state out there on that road south of town, tryin’ to untangle the snarl. It’ll be two o’clock this afternoon before they can get any traffic across it. That’s just the highway. From here out to the highway, there’s four solid miles of abandoned cars jammed bumper to bumper in the road. They just got out and left ‘em, and took the keys. You can’t get round ‘em, and you can’t move ‘em without a wrecker—or twenty wreckers. And we can’t even get the wreckers to ‘em until they get that highway open.
“I walked in here from two miles this side of town. That’s the only way you can get in here, or out. The woods is swarming with newspaper reporters and photographers and radio news people that tried to make it on foot and got lost.”
He took another deep breath, and went on, “There’s whole towns as far as fifty miles from here that ain’t got a man left in ‘em. The stores are closed. The buses have stopped running. Construction jobs are deserted. Whole communities is empty except for women and the women is raving. I got relays of girls answering the phone, tryin’ to tell people there ain’t been any reward offered for that girl. Ain’t none of ‘em been able to stick it out more’n two hours. They can’t stand the language.
“And now that you’ve turned this place into a honky tonk, I never will get ‘em out of here until we find that there girl and show ‘em she’s been found. They wouldn’t leave, even if they could get there cars out.”
Uncle Sagamore pursed his lips like he was going to spit, only he didn’t, and he