Free Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) by Randall Silvis

and destruction of private property.
    The third incident, the most serious of the three, involved the alleged attempt to steal an air compressor from a construction site just off Exit 201 of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The night watchman, sixty-seven-year-old William Ladebu of Porters Side-ling, just north of Hanover, had been awakened at three A.M. by the sounds of “scraping and banging” just outside the foreman’s little trailer. Ladebu emerged with a baseball bat to see Rankin with the coil of rubber hose already looped over a shoulder and the four-hundred-pound compressor already pushed up against the padlocked cyclone fence where Rankin’s pickup truck waited on the other side. Ladebu had the good sense to step back inside the construction trailer, lock the door, hit the switch to the floodlights, and call the police with a description of Rankin’s truck. Ladebu later told the magistrate, “As far as I can figure, he must’ve thought he was going to hoist that compressor up over that fence all by hisself. But then when the lights hit him, he had a change of plans.” Rankin’s plea of not guilty was refuted by the fact that the twenty-five-foot length of compressor hose was located in the weeds only fifteen yards from where the state police came upon Rankin’s pickup truck saddlebagged in a drainage ditch alongside Pennsylvania Route 419. During Rankin’s twenty days of incarceration at the county jail in Carlisle, Sheriff Gatesman had made a point of visiting Rankin on four separate occasions, each time to remind him of his duties as a father and husband and to impress upon him the ephemeral nature of youth and the lasting effects of bad choices. In each case, Rankin had accepted the advice with a meek and sober contrition.
    Through this experience Gatesman had come to know Rankin as a contradiction. He was, by all accounts, a very hard worker, whenever he worked. He claimed to love Livvie and little Jesse more than life itself, but Gatesman doubted that the man had ever displayed this tenderness or voiced the same sentiments to his wife and son. He was, according to those who knew him best, domineering with his family, but generous and forgiving toward his friends. When sober, he tended to respond to life’s tribulations with a crooked smile. At all other times, he could be counted on to behave with belligerence, furtiveness, guile, malice, sabotage, explosive violence, or any combination thereof.
    All this, and not much more, Gatesman knew about Denny Rankin. From this knowledge he had deduced that if Denny was not currently employed or with his family, he was in all probability in or near a beer-dispensing establishment. Gatesman gave some thought to the eight bars within a ten-mile radius of Belinda. He could not picture Denny Rankin paying five dollars for a microbrewed glass of beer, nor could he picture him bellied up to either the old Colonial Hotel’s polished mahogany bar flecked with light from golden wall sconces or in the sanitized, too-bright, mojito-dispensing lounge at the Ramada. Any of the others, however, all shot-and-beer facilities where a man could quench his thirst without having to change out of his work clothes first, were likely candidates.
    The bartenders in the first three, two females and a male, all knew Denny Rankin but claimed to have seen nothing of him in the past seventy-two hours. The fourth place, the one Gatesman had been hoping he wouldn’t have to visit, was a squat cement-block building called the Mustang Bar, but known locally as the Harley Hilton because the wide dirt lot behind the building filled with hundreds of motorcycles every Wednesday night from late spring through September. A cardboard sign in the window read “Open 11:30 Daily,” but now, at not quite nine in the morning, there was a silver Nissan Altima parked close against the side of the building, and when Gatesman tried the front door, it swung open