Fraidy Hole: A Sheriff Lester P. Morrison Novel Read online

  FRAIDY HOLE

  By

  Warren Williams

  Copyright © 2012 by Warren Williams

  All rights reserved

  Cover Photo and Design

  by Warren Williams

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  To M. Jane Merdian, without whose help

  this book would not have been possible.

  To my wife Ruth, for being there.

  Chapter 1

  Faint images, like an out of focus slide show, flickered across her mind’s eye; a bar, drunken men, a night sky, wet grass, then falling…falling. Suddenly, as if the projector lamp had popped, the mental screen went dark, the dream giving way to emerging consciousness. The girl lay in a fetal position, legs curled, knees drawn high, her elbows and arms tight against her chest. She stirred, shivered, and reached out for a blanket only to feel a sharp pain knife through her shoulder and ribs. There was no blanket, no sheet, only small, strange objects that felt light and crinkly, objects completely foreign to her normally safe and warm bed at home. Her brain began to poll the other senses, to make some sense of time and place. One eyelid, the left, twitched and opened, but the eye saw nothing, no light, not even a shimmer, no shapes, no shadows, only blackness. The girl sensed that there was something wrong with the right eye and she slowly brought her hand up to touch it, to explore the problem, then winced at the touch of swollen flesh. There was no sound, the silence absolute, except for a faint and rhythmic thumping. It took a moment to realize she was hearing the beat of her own heart.

  The surface she was lying on, whatever it was, felt rock hard and cold, definitely not her mattress, she was sure of that, and there was that odd smell, damp and moldy, as if she had somehow fallen asleep on a forest floor somewhere deep in the woods. She wrinkled her nose as she caught a whiff of her own breath, foul and rancid with the odor of vomit. The thing to do, she decided, was to get up, find a light switch and the bathroom, and try figure out just where she was and how she got there. A drink of water and a toothbrush, that would help.She rolled to her stomach, got a foot under her for balance, and pushed herself upright. It was a big mistake.

  The pain exploded from her groin in a tsunami of fire, flooding her abdomen, crashing upward across her rib cage and shoulder and down her right arm. The great wave of pain crested, meeting a torrent of misery from a sudden blinding headache in a crescendo of breathtaking, mind numbing pain unlike anything Melissa had experienced in her short life. She swam in the pain, her body weaving, bobbing, sinking beneath the surface of consciousness, only to re-emerge, fighting for her life. Like a tightrope walker, she spread her arms, struggling for balance, fighting the dizziness and nausea, wondering if she were about to die.

  The first trace of panic hit her in the pit of her stomach. Adrenaline surged, her pulse quickened as her blood pressure began to rise. Her throat constricted as she sucked in more air, feeding the fear. Arms in front now, fingers waving, she took a tentative step—very small—then another, not knowing if the next would send her over an unseen precipice, plunging into the void of a black hell.

  A noise. Something moved, something on the floor, close to her feet, something small and quick.

  Her screams bounced off the concrete walls, reverberating in the hollowness, the echo ringing in her ears, the sound of her own cries more terrifying than the darkness. She hopped from one bare foot to the other fearing the touch, or worse, the bite of whatever was there with her. A spider web brushed her cheek. She flailed at the darkness, new fear suppressing the pain, her arms wind-milling in fright. Her brain said run but where, what direction? Then, a hint of illumination above and to her left, a faint rectangle of light, a thin halo of daylight and possible safety. Stumbling, shuffling, feeling with her feet, arms extended, she moved toward the light, inching her way across the cold floor. One big toe collided with something hard and made her grimace. She leaned forward, searching, probing, and made contact with…a board, that’s what it felt like anyway. It was solid and flat and damp. It was a step, and there was one more above that, and another. It was a flight of stairs. She could barely make it out, but it was there, a reality, not a dream. And at the top, a door, or a hatch of some kind, a way out, a door to freedom and sanity. She pushed. The door was heavy—metal probably—and moved no more than a couple of inches, just enough to see dirt, weeds, and glorious sunshine, but then banged against something solid. She pushed again, harder, harder still, straining, feeling the pull in her gut and her ribs, aggravating the pre-existing pain and causing her to cry out in agony. But the door would not open. Just the two inches, maybe three, but no more.

  Breathing hard, Melissa took two steps down and stopped, straining to see the floor beneath her, searching for the thing that made the noise. But there was nothing to see, or hear, no movement, nothing alive with claw or fang. It was still there, whatever it was, had to be. It was only a matter of time, she knew, before it sprang from the darkness and sank its teeth into her bare flesh.

  Minutes passed, but there was no attack, no wild creature to grab and eat her. She choked down the panic, took a breath, held it, and listened again. Leaves moved, a rustling, skittering sound, then quiet. With a fury she had never known, Melissa assaulted the door, this time with her fists, pounding and pounding with the heel of her hand until her arms ached and her muscles grew weak. She tried another tactic, this time pushing with her back and using her legs for leverage, she heaved upward, again and again, until her legs trembled, her strength sapped. She rested a moment and then with her face as close to the gap under the door as possible, began to yell, the loudest and most desperate yell of her life.

  “HELP! HELP! DOWN HERE. HELP MEEE!

  Feeling the strain on her already irritated throat, she paused and listened for a reply, but heard only the familiar southwest wind blowing across the plains. The adrenaline rush had faded along with her energy, the pain making an encore appearance, but she would just have to deal with it, she knew that now.

  Animal or no animal, she had to rest. Picking her way down the creaking steps, she hesitated at the bottom and then leaned back against the hard damp wall. Her legs buckled and she slid down, raking her back on the rough surface, her butt hitting the concrete with a thump. Another pain, but not from the sudden contact, this pain was different, deeper, internal. She touched herself under her short denim skirt and groaned. Her underwear was gone.

  Oh no, oh God no, please no, not that.

  Her head dropped to her chest as she clutched herself and shivered. Her long chestnut colored hair fell over and around her face. Melissa Parker began to cry.

  Chapter 2

  The man stood in the bow of the 17-foot aluminum boat and cast the blue artificial worm to the back of the cove where the fallen limb came off the bank. He began a slow and steady retrieve, stopping every couple of cranks to let the bait fall in a most tantalizing manner. On the second cast, he felt the tic of a black bass as it touched the worm. He leaned the tip of the rod forward, ready to set the hook.

  C’mon baby, c’mon. Come to papa. One more time. I know you’re hungry. C’mon, I’m ready.

  The bedside phone shattered the moment with its irritating two-tone electronic trill.

  “Son of a bitch,” the man mumbled, rolling over. He glanced at the clock. The oversized red numerals read 6:25. He reached for the phone.

  “Sheriff Lester P. Morrison here. Whoever is calling me at this gawd-awful hour of the morning better have a really good reason.
”

  “Sheriff, this is Nelda on dispatch. Why are you always so grouchy? ”

  “Damn it, Nelda, you scared the fish.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, what’s going on?”

  “Got a call just now from a Mrs. Parker, lives out east of town a ways, over by Keyes?”

  “I don’t know her, Nelda. What did Mrs. Parker want?”

  “She says their teenage daughter, Melissa, had an argument with her father last night.”

  “Nelda, that’s no reason to wake a man up at this time of day. What else did she say?”

  “Said Melissa stormed out of the house and took off walkin’ down the road. Said her and her dad fight a lot and this has happened before. Said she usually walks down to her friend Becky’s house and sometimes spends the night. Mrs. Parker said her and her husband went to bed—it was around ten o’clock she thinks—but when they woke up this morning, Melissa wasn’t in her bed and it hadn’t been slept in. Mrs. Parker called Becky’s house, but Becky said she hadn’t seen Melissa since they got out of school yesterday afternoon.”

  The Sheriff sighed. “All right, I’ll go out there and talk to ‘em, but the chances are real good the girl will show up before I finish my first cup of coffee. Get me an address and directions. Go ahead and call Billy Ray, no sense him sleeping if I can’t. Tell him to meet me here at the house.”

  “I’ll do that, Sheriff, but what was that about a fish?”

  “It was a dream, Nelda, a fantasy, just like I have about you sometimes.”

  “I doubt that, Sheriff. I’m overweight and happily married, you know that.”

  “But you got a cute face and a great personality. Goodbye, Nelda.”

  Lester rolled his lean, hundred and sixty-five pound body out of bed and stared at himself in the mirror over the dresser. The morning light fell on a head of gray, close-cropped hair, and cast shadows along the wrinkles around his eyes.

  “Getting too old for this shit,” he said, as he did at least once or twice a day. He stood, grimaced at the chronic ache in his lower back, and looked out the window. September leaves gleamed in the sun, green turning to gold, hinting of the colder weather to come. The Oklahoma Panhandle was usually the first part of the state to feel the bite of Old Man Winter when it swung southeast out of Colorado, generally catching most of the population by surprise with a couple inches of snow. At the end of the lane, a white truck with a tank on the back that read Arnold & Sons Propane sped past, the deeply treaded tires whining on the blacktop.

  It would be the fourth winter for Lester as the sheriff of Cimarron County, the most westerly county in the Oklahoma Panhandle. After twenty-four years as a lawman in the southeast part of state doing what he loved the most, locking up bad guys so that decent folks could live in peace, he had called it quits. The country there had changed over the years. The days when the biggest crime of the month was a stolen cow or some kids “borrowing” a car for a joy ride were gone forever. Now it was all about drugs, marijuana fields and meth labs, seeing people destroy their lives with chemicals brewed up in plastic pop bottles. Too many calls for fires in run-down trailer parks where some idiot had let his home go up in smoke, thinking he could handle the newest shake-and-bake, highly flammable recipe for methamphetamine.

  The last call was the worst. Lester still had nightmares about it. A fire, another mobile home engulfed in flame, but this time the fire had jumped to a neighboring doublewide. The fire department was there, doing the best they could, but were unable to save the occupants of the second home, a single mother and two little girls, ages six and four. One at a time, the firefighters brought them out, three bodies, black and charred. The next day, Lester called the County Commissioner’s office to tell them he was resigning the job immediately. “Promote one of the deputies until the next election,” he’d said. “I’ve had enough.”

  For the rest of that summer, Lester spent most of his time on Broken Bow Lake fishing for black bass and crappie. But as the weather turned colder, fishing became more of a chore than a recreation. The boat was in constant need of repair and the motor was getting hard to start. Since Lester preferred to fish alone and with no one to help, getting the boat on and off the ramp was always a hassle. When the first frost came along, the now ex-sheriff threw a tarp over the boat, chained it to the big oak tree in the back yard, and that was the end of the fishing. Except for feeding the birds around the house and trying to figure out their species from a bird book he’d picked up somewhere, Lester had no other hobbies. He was bored, plain and simple.

  Somewhere during the last half of a cold, damp February, Lester ran across a newspaper article alleging a sexual scandal involving possible improprieties within the Cimarron County Sheriff’s Office and a couple of unnamed female prisoners. A few weeks later, it seemed almost certain that the Sheriff and one of his deputies were about to “resign”. Lester figured there was a good chance that the job was about to come open.

  The Panhandle and all its colorful history appealed to the man. Beaver County, just a ways east of Cimarron, was home to No Man’s Land, where outlaws, cowboys, and settlers lived for years without a lick of law enforcement. And there was the Santa Fe Trail, a trade route between Franklin, Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico, often subject to attack by the Kiowa, Comanche, and Arapahoe Indians. The trail passed within only a few miles of Boise City, the county seat. At the local library, Lester learned that Boise City itself had a special place in the history books as being the only city in the continental United States to be bombed during World War II when one of our own B-17’s mistook the town for a practice area. Luckily, the bombs held no explosives.

  The idea of working out of a small town, surrounded by wide-open spaces was tempting. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but he wasn’t getting any younger. The years were adding up. He was a little less spry and not nearly as quick of foot these days. A peaceful land from a bygone era with fewer drugs and less violence sounded good. Lester made a phone call to the Cimarron County Commissioners explaining his qualifications and interest in the job. Desperate for an experienced lawman , the Commissioners extended an invitation to go to work immediately on an interim basis. Lester headed west, the back of his pickup crammed with clothes, boots, books, and his favorite easy chair. What he couldn’t pack, he donated to charity. He found an old but solid house for sale at the edge of town and settled in, thereby establishing a legal residence to qualify for the next election. When the dust from the scandal settled, Lester ran unopposed and was now the official new Sheriff of Cimarron County.

  Like he did every morning, Lester checked the thermometer on the back porch. The numbers were large enough to see from the bedroom which was why he bought it. That and the fact it had a picture of a ten point buck on the face and was on sale over at the hardware store. The red pointer lay exactly between the 60 and the 70. Lester let out a grunt with a measure of contentment to it and said, “Gonna be a nice day, I hope. Harley!” he yelled toward the kitchen. “You up yet?”

  The black Lab lifted his head from the cedar-filled mattress. The remainder of his heavy body lay still with the exception of a thick tail that made a single swish through the air.

  “Dog, get your big black ass out of that bed, we got work to do. We gotta go find some silly little girl that’s done got her folks all worked up and frettin’ about her; not to mention involving the entire Cimarron County Sheriff’s department, all two of us, three countin’ you. Now get up! You hungry?” Hungry was Harley’s favorite word.

  The dog scrambled to his feet, toe nails clicking against the hardwood floor, and trotted to the bedroom.

  “Be with you a minute. I got to hit the bathroom and drain the dragon.”

  Lester watched the steady stream with a degree of satisfaction. “Some of the old parts are still working pretty good by gawd. Bet I could still write my name in the snow if I wanted to. How ‘bout you dog? You gotta go pee?” Lester finished his business, opened the screen door, and held
it against the spring, but Harley held his ground. The dog wasn’t keen about the odds of him being fed if that door slammed shut.

  “Go on now. I’ll wait for you.” The dog stepped off the porch, went to the nearest rose bush, glanced back to make sure the door was still open, and lifted his leg.

  “Aw geez, Harley. Why is it that particular bush every stinkin’ time? I got ten acres of brush and fence posts and trees for you to pee on but no, you gotta spray the roses. I planted those in memory of Mary Alice just so I could look out here and remember how much she loved her flowers. And then you come along and hose it down. You got no respect for anything or anyone do you?” The dog ambled back to the house, passed by Lester without stopping, and plopped down by his oversized food bowl, waiting. Lester shook his head. “Worthless hunk of hair and bone, that’s all you are. When you gonna start earning your keep around here?”

  From under the sink, Lester brought out a can of dog food, cranked around the top with the opener, and dumped the entire contents in the bowl. Three gulps later, the bowl was empty. Harley did a couple extra licks around the edge to make sure he hadn’t missed anything and looked up.

  “No, that’s it for you. You’re overweight as it is.” Lester held the door open once again. “Go on out there and check the perimeter. Protect me while I eat my breakfast.” Still in his boxers, Lester poured oatmeal in a bowl, added milk, stuck it in the microwave, and set it for one minute. Through the window, he watched the dog do his rounds.

  First stop was the little red barn, faded but sound with good lumber and solid doors. The barn was what prompted Lester to buy the property. It was exactly the right size for the horse that he intended to buy…some day, when he got around to it. Lord knows the house wasn’t much, a two bedroom clapboard affair built forty years ago and in bad need of a paint job, but it would do for an old fart living alone.