Free Of All Sad Words by Bill Crider Page A

friends..
    “She’ll be fine. It’s just a sprained wrist.”
    “Could be broke,” Lawton said. “Hard to tell sometimes.”
    “She’ll get it taken care of. They’ll take X-rays if there’s any question. She’ll be in tomorrow. You tell her to fingerprint those whiskey jars. We might get lucky.”
    “I’ll tell her,” Hack said. “What about you? You okay?”
    “Nothing wrong with me that a bath and something to eat won’t take care of.”
    “You better get on home, then. You got a big day comin’ up tomorrow.”
    “I don’t think I’ll have time for anything tomorrow,” Rhodes said. “I have a murder investigation going on.”
    “Be good publicity for the book,” Lawton said.
    “I don’t think Terry would look at it that way.”
    “Prob’ly not,” Hack said.
     
     
     
    As Rhodes drove home, he thought about the big day Hack had mentioned. A few years earlier, Jan and Claudia, a couple of women from out of town, had attended a writers’ workshop that had been held on the old college campus out at Obert. They’d intended to write a true-crime book or something of the sort, and they’d come back to the county to do some research while Rhodes was working on another case.
    It turned out that the material they collected was better suited to a novel, or maybe they were better suited to writing fiction than fact. At any rate, they’d written a novel about, as they put it, “a handsome crime-busting sherrif,” and it had been accepted and published. Jan and Claudia would be at the Clearview Wal-Mart the next day for their first book signing, and they’d asked Rhodes to be there, too.
    Claudia and Jan were also the two “outside agitators” that Rhodes had thought of when he was talking to Judge Parry. When they’d heard about the Citizens’ Sheriff’s Academy, they’d applied, even though they didn’t live in the county. Rhodes had lobbied to get them in, even though there were some residents who then had to be left off the list to accommodate them.
    Parry hadn’t been happy about that, but Rhodes had persuaded him it was a good idea. He’d argued that if the book was a success, the two women might write others and get the county some favorable national press.
    All that had been before Rhodes had read the book. Actually, he still hadn’t read it, but he’d read the manuscript. The book was called Blood Fever , and sure enough, there was a handsome crime-busting sheriff.
    But the character was nothing like Rhodes. His name was nothing so ordinary as Dan. It was Sage Barton. Sage was a bachelor who got up at five o’clock in the morning for a breakfast of Cheerios and fruit. He then spent some quality time with his cat, a black neutered tom named Satan, before he went out and jogged four miles through the quiet streets of the small town where he lived.
    After that, and over the course of three hundred or so pages, Sage caught a bank robber after a running gun battle, discovered that a serial killer was at work in the county, had a steamy romance with a beautiful FBI profiler named Jennifer, uncovered the serial killer’s grisly secret, was captured, then rescued by the beautiful profiler, who was then nabbed by the killer, who fled with her to his underground lair, where, after a car chase that had covered several chapters, Sage Barton cornered the killer for a final battle that involved fists, knives, feet, teeth, and, unless Rhodes was misremembering, a pair of nunchucks.
    According to Jan and Claudia, the sheriff was based on Rhodes and the book on their experiences in Blacklin County. Rhodes had a little trouble seeing the similarities. He did, he had to admit, have a cat, but that was about it. And he’d acquired the cat only recently. Jan and Claudia had never seen it and hadn’t even known about it when they were writing the book.
    So while he supposed he was flattered to be the model for a character in a book, he didn’t see that the story had any connection to reality,