Free Of All Sad Words by Bill Crider

sandpile? Where’s Ruth? Is she all right?”
    Rhodes would have answered him, but just then Lawton came in from the cell block.
    “What we need,” Lawton said, “is a new jail, one of them modern ones where you can watch all the inmates on TV and don’t have to go check on ’em all the time.” He looked at Rhodes. “You been in a fight?”
    “He won’t tell me,” Hack said. “He’s keepin’ it all to himself.”
    “I’ll tell you all about it,” Rhodes said. “Just as soon as I get all that whiskey out of the county car.”
    “Whiskey?” Hack said.
    “What whiskey?” Lawton asked.
    Rhodes just smiled.

Chapter 9
    LAWTON HELPED RHODES PUT THE ’SHINE IN THE EVIDENCE room. Hack had to stay at his desk and answer the calls. Rhodes could tell that it was killing them not to ask any more questions, but they managed to keep quiet, because Rhodes had threatened not to tell them a thing if they didn’t.
    When the evidence was secured and labeled, Rhodes sat down at his desk and went through the whole thing for them.
    “So the Crawford boys were runnin’ ’shine,” Hack said. “I bet they had plenty of customers who’ll be gettin’ mighty nervous about now.”
    “We won’t be arresting anybody on the Crawfords’ say-so,” Rhodes told him. “So nobody has anything to be nervous about—yet. Buying the booze isn’t the problem unless you’re caught in the act. Making it’s the problem. But not ours.”
    “You gonna call in the TABC?”
    The TABC was the Texas Alcoholic Beverages Commission, the agency assigned to deal with bootlegging, among other things, which included prostitution, gambling, weapons, and narcotics. They’d have been involved in the meth lab if the Crawfords had been running one.
    “I’ll call them tomorrow,” Rhodes said.
    “You didn’t mention any whiskey to Lawless.”
    “Son of a gun. I must have forgotten.”
    “Yeah,” Hack said. “I noticed your memory’s gettin’ bad lately. Won’t the TABC be ticked that you brought in the ’shine?”
    “Can’t help it if they are,” Rhodes said. “It’s evidence, and somebody might have taken it off.”
    “Somebody’s nervous all right,” Lawton said. “Prob‘ly lookin’ for that booze. Else they wouldn’t be tryin’ to run you and Ruth down.”
    “We need to find out who owns that truck,” Rhodes said to Hack. “When Buddy comes in tomorrow, you tell him to talk to the Dodge dealers in all the counties around here and see if any of them remember that brush guard. Anyway, if that truck’s as old as it looked to me, that’s not a dealer-installed item.”
    “Most likely somebody installed that himself,” Hack said. “On an old truck like that, it’s prob’ly a custom job.”
    “Maybe got a welder to do it,” Lawton added.
    “Have Buddy check around with welders, too, then.”
    Rhodes didn’t think a pickup that distinctive could be hidden easily, not with a bullet hole through the windshield, but all the driver would have to do would be to remove the brush guard and go to a city like Houston and get the windshield replaced. So the best bet would be to find someone who remembered it and might know who owned it. Which reminded Rhodes to tell Hack to send a deputy to the courthouse first thing in the morning and find out what kind of vehicles were registered in Jamey Hamilton’s name.
    The truck might not have been registered at all, but there was a chance the license plate had been removed. Rhodes wanted to be sure.
    “I’ll send Buddy,” Hack said.
    “You’d better have him check on stolen vehicles, too,” Rhodes said.
    “You got any ideas who killed Terry?” Hack said after he wrote himself a note or two.
    “Not yet.”
    “What about Ruth? She gonna be all right?”
    Hack hadn’t been fond of Ruth when she’d first come to work in the department. He hadn’t liked the idea of a woman deputy around the jail. Ruth had won him over quickly, however, and now they were