Blanco County 03 - Flat Crazy by Ben Rehder

blowing this thing out of proportion. Maybe he wasn’t even a suspect at this point. Hell, he couldn’t blame them for wanting to question him, seeing as how Searcy had called him several times.
    And lastly, he knew now he’d have to do something about Searcy’s trophy mount. Duke had claimed he and Searcy had never hunted together, but the mount proved otherwise. He needed to get the damn thing back.
    When Rudi’s phone rang, she was in the buff, putting on mascara, swiveling her hips to the Rolling Stones song coming from the cheap clock radio on the nightstand.
    Rudi, Barry, and Chad had spent the night at a small motel in Johnson City. Not a bad place. Nothing fancy—her room was small and appeared to have been decorated by somebody’s senile grandmother—but at least it was clean.
    Johnson City itself seemed to be an okay little town. A handful of restaurants, a few dozen small businesses, a large stone courthouse, and one traffic signal. That’s all she had seen last night anyway. They had come in late, and most of the town appeared to be sleeping.
    Rudi set the mascara down and picked up the telephone.
    “Rudi, sweetheart.” It was Chad, using that horrible syrupy voice he reserved for single women. “What are you doing in there?” Rudi suddenly felt a chill and placed one arm across her breasts. Just talking to this vermin gave her goose bumps. She couldn’t remember the last time Chad had pursued a story in the field. The jerk just wanted to come along to see if he could get lucky.
    “Almost ready,” she said. “We said ten o’clock, right?” She glanced at the clock. It was five till.
    “That’s right, darling. Barry and I are waiting for you outside.”
    “Give me ten. I’ll be right out.”
    Rudi hung up and quickly finished her makeup. She followed that with a tailored pencil skirt that hit just above the knee, and a French-cuffed, polished-cotton blouse. She checked herself in the mirror. Not quite what I was ten years ago, but not too bad, she thought. Kind of a babe, actually.
    The plan today was to begin interviewing locals, maybe see if they could speak with some of the county deputies. When they had decent footage, they’d drive to Austin and send it back home via the network affiliate station. The anchors at Hard News Tonight would provide a lead-in and wrap-up to the segment. This was supposed to be the first of several reports from the land of the chupacabra. How long the reports would continue depended on whether there was any more strange activity.
    “He didn’t ask many questions, you know what I mean?” Bobby Garza said.
    Marlin was driving slowly back to the sheriff’s office. “That struck me, too. On the other hand, he’s been through the system, which might’ve taken all the curiosity right out of him. Or he might be too dense to even realize we were checking him out. But I’ll say one thing: He didn’t seem to want us to talk to Gus.”
    “Yeah, I noticed that.”
    “And just because his brother’s kind of nutty?”
    “Man, in this line of work, who do we talk to that ain’t?”
    Marlin pulled into the parking lot at the sheriff’s office. “So what next, then? Try to track down Gus?”
    “Yeah, and I guess I’ll get one of the deputies to talk to the other guides again. They checked out okay the first time around, but I think we better have another look.”
    “You want me to talk to them?” Marlin didn’t mind getting more involved now that deer season had ended.
    Garza glanced at his watch. “Actually, I had something else in mind. It’s ten-fifteen now. What’re you doing after lunch?”
    “Nothing too urgent.”
    “I’m gonna drive over to Houston and reinterview the widow. Something just isn’t clicking, and I want to dig a little deeper. You want to ride along? Maybe you can help me get something out of her.”
    “Yeah, I can do that. Tatum and Cowan already talked to her, right?”
    Rachel Cowan was a deputy who had been with the Blanco