Hector
a mystery by Jack Smiles
When an officer is killed in a suspicious accident, the sheriff relies on his other young deputy to piece it together. And not to spoil anything, but this Hector fellow may deserve another look, if you aren’t too scared. Read on after the pic!
Hector
by Jack Smiles
Light Bar flashing, Deputy Crane accelerated the Elk County sheriff’s SUV up the winding, hilly two lane blacktop. As he came over a rise, headlights blinded him for an instant, in the next his headlights caught a body jumping in front of him. It was the last thing he ever saw. He cut the steering wheel full left and the SUV swerved off the two lane blacktop, down the embankment, into the woods and smashed into a stand of 100-year-old red maples.
***
“Can’t figure this one out. Usually can, but not this one,” said Sheriff Bernie Winston the next morning, standing on the berm of the road, looking down at the SUV wedged in the trees.
“Yeah,” said Rudy, the tow driver. “Looks like he just decided to run into the woods and kill himself. Musta been doing 80.”
“On a call over to Treverton. A barn roof collapse trapped some horses. He loves horses. Looks like he did hit the brake,” Winston said pointing at a pair of skid marks on the road edge.
“Yeah, a little late though,” Rudy said.
“Animal on the road?” The sheriff said, thinking aloud.
“Probably, but you think he’d a had more time. The straightway is a couple hundred yards here.”
“Yeah, well, a shame it is. He was only 26, two small kids.”
“Damn life,” Rudy said.
***
With Crane dead, Sheriff Winston was down to one full-time deputy, Marguerite Maggie Sonrisas, a 21 year-old Mexican-American. Hers was the only brown family in the Twin Hills, an enclave of old Scotch-Irish farm families. She moved up to the Hills with her husband when he got a job logging for the paper company. She had an associate’s in law enforcement. Winston hired her over three local white kids, causing grumblings at the supervisors meeting, but they voted affirmative figuring it would make them look good. But the sheriff was not going for diversity. He hired her because she was smart. Logical. Good at connecting dots. At the interview, she told him he was a widowed trout fisherman who wished he had grandkids. Regular Sherlock Holmes stuff.
He called her to the scene. “Who called it in?” she asked, standing alongside the sheriff on the berm, as the tow driver crawled under the crushed vehicle with the end of a wire rope cable.
“UPS driver. Out early, around six. He called 911. The firemen and paramedics were here and gone by the time I got here. Firemen cut him out. State turned it over to me when I got here.”
“Well,” Sonrisas said, “Let’s see what we can find.”
“You do that. I have to go make the notification.”
“Oh, midera. Yeah. Vaya con Dios.”
Based on the skid marks, which showed only on the edge of the pavement and across the ground to where the SUV hit the trees, Sonrisas figured the spot where Crane left the road. She walked from there down the double yellow line a hundred yards in either direction, scanning the asphalt step by step. She found a blue button. A big one, like a half dollar, with an anchor on it. She did the same along the shoulder, where she found a small bundle of straw, maybe a foot long and tied with string. Nothing unusual about finding loose straw. The farmers used it for animal bedding and fodder. It stuck to the animals, they carried it into the fields, and it blew all over the place. But why a bundle tied with string?
***
A week later Noah Yates came to the county office. “Bernie, I saw something the night Dave Crane got killed.”
“Go on.” Sheriff Winston rocked back in his chair and folded his arms.
Sonrisas stood next to the desk, lightly drumming her fingers on the desktop.
“Well, there was a body on the road.”
“A body? You mean…”
“Yes a person, a human being.”
“Go on, tell us everything,” the sheriff said.
“Well, I was heading home, back to the farm, oh, around nine o’clock. Had dinner and a couple beers at the Log Cabin. It was well dark and there it was, just laying there in the other lane, the high beams caught it. I kept going, to, you know, get home to a phone, but then I figured, damn, what if it’s alive, you know like hurt real bad, so I went back and it was gone.”
“Why didn’t you come see us sooner?”
“Didn’t think nothing of it. Figured it was a drunk who crawled off. Next morning I went over the Ridgway for a rooster auction. Stayed a couple days with my cousins. Heard about it when I got back.”
Deputy Sonrisas asked, “Did you see any other vehicles either when you saw the body, or when you went back and didn’t see it?”
“Yeah, there was a vehicle ahead of me the first time. Pretty far ahead and it was dark. It might have been a pickup, but I’m not sure.
“Not much help,” the sheriff said, “every driveway up here has a pickup or two.”
“What was he wearing?”
“Huh?”
“The body on the road?
“Oh. Well, it was pretty dark. Looked like a winter coat, maybe one of those Navy things.”
“A peacoat?”
“Yeah, coulda been, but I ain’t sure, like I said it was getting dark.”
***
In the rear view mirror, Andy Sennick saw the cop car swerving into the woods, disappearing down the embankment. Back in the truck bed, his friend James Weld slid the cab window open. Laughing and rubbing his hands and rocking back and forth with glee, he yelled, “Wow, holy shit! That was perfect.”
Sennick wasn’t laughing. “We better go back and get Hector.”
***
There’s a daily suburban paper that comes up from the valley, hardly anyone got it in the hills. But the Tractor and Plow, a weekly published from a barn on Mt. Zion Road, everybody got the Tractor and Plow.
That’s where Weld read about Deputy Crane and his two little kids and wife. It was on the front page with a black and white photo of the SUV being yanked out of the trees.
“Psst, Andy,” Weld said in a harsh whisper. “Did you see the Tractor and Plow?” he said as he climbed in Andy’s truck.
“I don’t read the papers, you know that.”
“Well, you better read this.” He threw the paper on his lap.
“Shit,” he said under his breath. “I heard some talk of a wreck at the Log Cabin.” But didn’t make the connection. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” He punched the steering wheel.
“What are we going to do?” Wells asked.
“Well, first we gotta get rid of Hector.”
***
“How’d the notification go?”
“It was hell, she tried to hold it together for the kids, but man.”
“How about you, what’d you do today?”
“Well, I figured out what happened to Crane, and you and I are going to the Log Cabin to arrest two kids for manslaughter.”
The sheriff stood up. “What the hell?”
“So I figured there were two places to get peacoats,” Sonrisas explained as they headed for the Log Cabin in the department’s other SUV. “Mel’s Army Navy or the Church Thrift store. I went to both and compared the button. Most of the peacoats I looked at had identical blue buttons with anchors. I went and knocked on every farmhouse along the road. There were five within three miles. Nobody saw or heard anything unusual. Nobody saw any drunks stumbling around. But old man Fearghasdan said he wanted to file a missing person report.”
“He’s looney tunes.”
“Tell me about it. The missing person was Hector.”
“Who the hell is Hector?”
“I’ll get to that. Turns out Hector went missing the same night as the accident. Remember it was mischief night and”—she paused for effect—“Hector had a peacoat.”
“Ok, go on.”
“What Crane swerved to avoid was not a person, it was Hector; and what Yates saw was not a person, it was Hector.”
“So who the hell is Hector?”
She held the button between her thumb and forefinger in front of her face. “The button was from Hector’s coat. The straw bundle was part of his arm. Hector was a scarecrow. Fearghasdan confirmed he put a peacoat on Hector.”
“Damn, yeah. And some kids threw it in front of Crane’s car as a mischief night prank and went back and got it. But how did you know which kids?”
“I couldn’t buy it was a drunk who crawled off. Who was he? Where was he? What was a drunk doing a good 10 miles from any source of alcohol, wearing a peacoat on a warm night? So it had to be Hector. Remember Yates said the vehicle he saw in his mirror could have been a pickup.
“And he was right. A pickup owned and driven by Andy Sennick.”
“Andy. You mean Yates’ stepson?”
“Yep.”
“But how…?”
“Like I said, I didn't buy the drunk. So I went up to the Yates' place to talk to him again. We stood by the barn. As we talked I saw black smoke coming up from behind the barn. Black smoke is usually a sign of a manmade object being burned, like a tire or even a heavy wool coat. I ran around the barn and saw two kids standing by a burn barrel. When they saw me they jumped in a pickup and took off down a dirt road. I kicked over the burn barrel and dragged what was left of a peacoat out of it with my baton. And I found another small straw bundle on the ground where the pickup had been parked. Poor Hector’s other arm.”
After they arrested Sennick and Weld and put them in holding, Sheriff Winston said, “Let’s go back to the Log Cabin. I owe you a Cerveza.”
“O dos três.”
Meet the author:
Jack Smiles is a former community newspaper feature writer collecting freelance rejections as a hobby in retirement. He lives in Pennsylvania where he has a part-time jobs delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy. He sees the underside of life delivering to low-income and physically and mentally disabled people.
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