Chapter 9
Detective Eagleton and Sergeant Rawls had just completed setting up road blocks on every road out of Pinhill. They had already alerted the state police and county sheriff’s office about one Joe Smith, murder suspect, jailbreaker, at-large. An All-Points-Bulletin was making it’s rounds through all the regional law enforcement stations. They had two cruisers watching Joe’s house and neighborhood.
Eagleton picked up the phone to call the sheriff’s office again to get a few details straightened out when Mary Gulder came flying in the station’s front door.
“He’s at my house! He’s there right now! My Gawd, I thought he was gonna kill me!” she screamed directly in Eagleton’s face.
“Calm down, Miss Mary, calm down,” the detective said cooly, “Joe Smith is at yer place?”
“That’s what I said, ain’t it?!”
“And you thought he might kill you?,” he started dialing a phone number and gesturing to Rawls to come over.
“He said he was GONNA kill me. Oh, Gawd, it was somethin’ terrible . . . he was all covered in blood and dirt . . . and had some kind of voodoo warpaint smeared on his face and arms!”
Wide-eyed at this latest development, Rawls asked her, “Golly, ma’am, how did you manage to escape with yer hide intact?”
“He told me to come here and tell ya’ll that he was innocent. If I didn’t, then, he was gonna kill me in a homicidal rage with a guitar!”
Rawls was flabbergasted, “Damn, first the boyfriend and then the girl, to boot. And both with a guitar! What a sicko. I guess you just can’t never tell about some fellows.”
“Ya’ll gotta go out there and shoot him! Kill the sumbitch dead! Don’t just lock him back up or he’ll get out again and kill me! Ya’ll gotta kill him!”
Eagleton was talking to the sheriff’s office, arranging to have everyone available converge on Mary’s River Road house when he heard Mary scream this last bit, “Hold a sec, Dave,” he said into the phone. He looked curiously at Mary, “You want us to just go and shoot him dead on sight?”
“Hell, yeah I do!”
“Yer new boyfriend?”
“Well, he was gonna kill me!”
“But, he didn’t. Instead, he sent you here to tell us that he’s innocent.”
Rawls intervened, “Uh sir, the poor girl is a trifle upset, you know?”
“No doubt about that,” the detective replied, “Put yerself and her in my car and I’ll be out there in a minute. We’ll ride out there and make some sense of this whole mess.”
Eagleton didn’t doubt that Mary Gulder was upset. But, he began to wonder exactly what she was so upset about. It could very well be that Smith had scared the hell out of her, lover or not. However, for the first time he started doubting the guilt of Joe Smith.