Free Of All Sad Words by Bill Crider Page B

and he was pretty sure the book wasn’t going to bring the county the kind of publicity the judge would approve of.
    The truth was that Blacklin County, which covered around a thousand square miles, was a sparsely populated area. Rhodes figured there weren’t more than 25,000 people living there, and that was probably a high estimate. If a serial killer started working in the county, he’d halve the population in a few days. The last bank robbery Rhodes could recall had happened more than twenty years earlier, before he’d been elected sheriff.
    As for gun battles, Rhodes hadn’t taken part in one in awhile, though he’d been in a pretty good firefight in a cemetery a few years ago. That probably didn’t count, since he hadn’t been moving around much. Most of the time, he’d been hiding behind the biggest tree he could find.
    And steamy romance? Rhodes had married Ivy Daniel after his first wife had been dead for a number of years, but their courtship couldn’t have been described as steamy. Rhodes wasn’t the steamy sort.
    When he’d mentioned these things to Jan and Claudia, they’d told him that they didn’t matter.
    “What we wanted to do was tell a good story,” Jan said.
    “One with a little action in it,” Claudia added. “The last time we were here, the major crime news was that a pizza parlor didn’t have a sneeze guard over the salad bar.”
    That wasn’t true. They had been there when Rhodes had solved a murder that had occurred years before. He thought that was a pretty interesting case.
    “It lacked car chases,” Jan said.
    “And gunfights,” Claudia added.
    “Not to mention a serial killer,” Rhodes said. “And romance.”
    The women nodded. Claudia said, “We want to sell some books, so we exaggerated a little.”
    “Poetic license,” Jan said. “You know.”
    Rhodes didn’t know, but he got the idea. Now that the two women had been in the academy, their next book would probably feature a terrorist attack on rural Texas, so the sheriff could have a steamy romance with a beautiful member of Homeland Security.
    Rhodes was glad he had a good excuse not to go to the book signing.
     
     
     
    When Rhodes got home, Ivy gave him a look he’d become familiar with. It seemed to say, What on earth have you been up to?
    So he told her. It had taken her awhile to get used to the fact that now and then he was going to be in dangerous situations, and she still didn’t like the idea.
    “So someone murdered Terry Crawford,” she said when he’d finished.
    She was a slim, pretty woman who wore her graying hair cut short. She worked in an insurance office in town and she still had on the skirt and blouse she’d worn to work that day. She’d kicked off her shoes, however.
    “It looks like murder,” Rhodes said. “I don’t see how it could be anything else.”
    “And someone tried to run you down with a monster truck while you were looking at a moonshine still.”
    “It wasn’t a monster. Just a pickup. It wasn’t as bad as I made it sound.”
    Ivy said, “Ha!”
    “I’m fine,” Rhodes assured her. “Not a scratch on me. A quick bath and I’ll be clean as a whistle.”
    “Did you say clean as a weasel?”
    “That, too.”
    They were in the kitchen, and Sam, the coal black cat, was rubbing against the leg of the chair where Rhodes sat while scratching the top of Sam’s head.
    Rhodes sneezed a couple of times. Ivy had told him that he wasn’t really allergic to Sam, that his sneezing was some kind of psychological reaction. Rhodes couldn’t see that it made any difference. A sneeze was a sneeze.
    Yancey, the Pomeranian, watched from the doorway. He didn’t like Sam in the least. For his part, Sam hardly deigned to notice the dog.
    “I’d better take Yancey outside for a few minutes and let him play with Speedo,” Rhodes said. “He needs a little exercise to work off his hostility toward the cat.”
    “Do it before you bathe,” Ivy said.
    Rhodes called Yancey, who