Free Blanco County 03 - Flat Crazy by Ben Rehder Page B

good stories about Marlin’s dad. “You need to keep an eye on Duke,” Rogers said.
    “You ever write him up?” Marlin asked.
    “Dadgummit, no, but I sure as hell tried. Man’s smart, I give him credit for that.”
    “And his brother?”
    “What, is he smart?”
    “No, was he trouble, like Duke?”
    “Well, he was always hanging around, but Duke was the ringleader, that’s for sure.”
    “But you never nailed them for anything?”
    “The closest I came … one time some lowlife broke into a shed behind my house. Stole a bunch of my supplies, a few power tools, even an old carbine I kept out there. I heard it was Waldrip who done it, so I started asking around. One of the locals told me they’d seen him with a rifle just like mine. So I got a warrant and checked his place out. No luck.” Marlin could hear the regret in the older man’s voice.
    “You ever see him get violent? Get into a fight maybe, stuff like that?”
    “Not me, no. You should check with the sheriff.”
    Rogers’s cell phone crackled. Even old Howell had joined the mobile crowd. Marlin was aware that he himself was in danger of becoming the last game warden in Texas without one of those gadgets.
    “Now he’s back in your part of the country?” Rogers asked.
    “’Fraid so.”
    “Do me a favor. Send that son of a bitch to jail, will ya?”

9
     
    DRIVING THROUGH JOHNSON City early Thursday morning, John Marlin noticed a sign in the window of Big Joe’s Restaurant: ASK FOR THE CHUPACABRA SPECIAL! ONLY $3.99!
    Great. Sure, some people would get a laugh out of it, but others would take this chupacabra business seriously and the calls would start to come in. “I just saw the chupacabra running through my backyard!” Or “I think the chupacabra is hiding in the crawl space under my house!”
    Marlin remembered when a mountain lion was allegedly on the loose in the area four years ago. The whole county was nervous, keeping their children and pets in sight at all times. Late one night, Marlin was awakened by a call from an elderly man living up near Round Mountain. “I got the cougar trapped in my henhouse!” he said. Of course, when Marlin arrived on the scene, he had to be cautious—even though he was sure it would be another false alarm. He swung the door of the henhouse open slowly, a spotlight in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
    That’s when the house cat—granted, a damn big house cat—streaked right between Marlin’s legs.
    The cougar was never seen. But it showed how easily things can be blown out of proportion.
    Marlin put those thoughts aside and concentrated on what Bobby Garza had told him last night. The sheriff had done some digging, and it turned out Gus Waldrip’s brother, Richard—aka Duke—had done some time for armed robbery. Gus’s record was clean. Now Garza wanted Marlin to drop by Kyle Dawson’s place, like it was just a casual hunting check, and see what he could find out about the Waldrip brothers, especially Gus. Marlin had only run into Gus on a couple of occasions and didn’t know him well. His general impression, though, was that the guy was sort of odd. Kind of spacey.
    Dawson’s place, the Macho Bueno Ranch, didn’t have a gate at the entrance—just two ornate stone columns on either side of a cattle guard, a holdover from the days when Dawson’s father, Floyd, raised a large herd of Angus on the place. Marlin remembered the elder Dawson: a quiet, hardworking man who had managed to assemble a sizable fortune in the oil and gas industries. His son, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have any sort of occupation at all, other than squandering the assets his daddy had left behind. Nothing more than white trash with money.
    Marlin’s tires thrummed over the cattle guard, and then he was on the quarter-mile driveway up to the large house, pavement all the way, a luxury in these parts. He parked in the circular drive, walked to the door, and rang the doorbell.
    In the living room, Cheri was