Michael Randolf-Wilson and Ewa Crop looked at each other.
“If I sign your paper— If I give up the money, you won’t go to Delgado?”
“I’m not a policeman. He’s responsible for doing his own job.”
“It wasn’t premeditated, Mister Scape. Stanley caught me with Michael. He yelled and screamed and threatened. We sent Stephanie in but he didn’t want her. Then it happened. And afterwards we realized how hot it was.”
Scape took out his pen and the paper and put them on the hood of the car. “He was going to throw you all out, huh?”
Ewa Crop nodded. She walked forward, read the paper, picked up the pen.
“Two hundred and forty thousand dollars,” she said, sadly. “You swear you won’t tell the police?”
“I’m going right to the airport. Mike, you want to witness this.”
They both signed.
Scape looked at the paper, folded it, carefully put it away.
“Well, it was nice doing business with you,” he said. Then he turned to the wall. “Gentlemen.”
Delgado and two armed Guardia Civil came from behind the wall.
“You are under arrest for the murder of Stanley Crop.”
Both Randolf-Wilson and Ewa Crop looked at Scape. He shrugged, smiled. “I didn’t say a word to Delgado. All I did was call his office. Inspector,” he said, getting into the car.
“I am going to see the three of you prosecuted to the limit of our law. You foreigners are more than welcome here,” Delgado told them. Stephanie had been brought up from the beach by two more Guardia. “But perhaps the severity of your convictions will be a meaningful deterrent. If you want to murder people, do it at home, in your own countries.” He gestured to the Guardia and they came forward to make the arrests.
“Good-by, Mr. Scape,” Delgado said. “You have plenty of time to catch your plane.”
Soundings From the Grave
by Jerry Jacobson
Hate drove Julie’s sister, hate and an unleashed urge to expose Julie’s murderer. The police didn’t know where to start, but she did. And she would follow through to the violent end... her own, if necessary.
It had been a cold, raw night in Zachary, and throughout the entire county the curse of a freeze looked down upon its residents.
Sheriff Quinn Strowe could feel a freeze as well as anyone, because he was too close to these farmers and he was close to the land. Dairy farmers, his neighbors were, and the Holsteins would be inside this night, where there was warmth.
There was also warmth at the Zachary High Gym, where the Zachary Tigers and the Forks Seahawks were battling to break away from each other in a two-way first-place tie.
Strowe listened to the game on a portable radio in his office. Lonnie Davenport, a kid with firepower and talent, was making a serious assault on Strowe’s own musty Zachary High individual game scoring record. Strowe hated to see his record fall because he’d sweated and practiced himself to exhaustion to set it.
To a kid like Lonnie Davenport, everything came as easily as a stroll in a park. Good student, solid social mixer. 12-letter sports star. That ease of acquisition and accomplishment overlapped to include the steady companionship of Zachary High’s most sought-after coed.
Julie Knight was bright, beautiful and tenacious when it came to acquiring her own special feminine honors: head cheerleader, vice-president of the girls’ club, secretary of the student council, and chief organizer for the Tiger Pep and Rally Club. It all made Quinn Strowe feel suddenly older than he’d felt in his lifetime.
The announcer and the crowd were in a frenzy. Forks had knotted the game at 60–60. Lonnie Davenport had 31 of those. And Quinn Strowe had 41 for the record. A record that would be his not much longer than a few minutes of a final quarter of basketball.
The lead see-sawed, as Lonnie Davenport’s total continued to creep in on Strowe’s. It was tied again at 76–76. And Lonnie Davenport was moving in at 39.
Forks held the ball for the last shot to break the tie as seconds vanished. And then the fluke happened. A Forks pass went astray and Lonnie Davenport smelled it like a wolf smelling out the chicken house. A Forks player had Davenport in his sites, but Davenport had him on his hip, all the long race down the floor.
Strowe could sense it coming. The trailing Forks player would purposely foul Davenport long before he reached the basket, giving him two free throws for the flagrant foul and pray for two misses, like lightning miraculously striking twice.
Davenport didn’t have a chance. The Forks player submarined him, cutting the star Zachary guard to the floor. Both players skidded across maple into a heap at the feet of the Zachary band. Both benches emptied. Punches filled the air. Whistles screamed for order. Strowe had four patrolmen at the game for crowd and traffic control. He hoped his men were on the job.
Slowly order was restored and the players untangled. Lonnie Davenport, surprisingly, was awarded three free throws: two for being fouled in the continuance of a shot and a third as a technical for the flagrant foul.
He made all three with automatic ease, blood streaming from his nose, the announcer said.
Sheriff Strowe felt something go out of him. His record was gone. They keep pushing you out, he sighed to himself, though without malice. They keep pushing you out and farther into history. What the hell. Records were made to fall and Lonnie Davenport was a good kid, one who never lost his cool and in this situation he could have lost it very easily. He was an all right kid.
Soon the town was alive with horn honking and cheers. Strowe didn’t think there would be related trouble over the game’s tense ending, but wasn’t going to take the chance. He radioed two of his day-shift deputies and instructed them to head out on a four-hour emergency patrol of town. They had both been listening to the game and didn’t need to be informed why.
The emergency passed without serious altercations. There was a strong rivalry, no one needed to be told that. Forks was beef cattle country, and Zachary dairy oriented. A thing could have developed. But it didn’t.
At twelve-thirty, Sheriff Strowe tumbled into bed. The lost record ached a little inside him, until his wife woke and kissing him on the cheek said, “Records were made to be broken, Quinn.”
And then he was all right with it, felt all right about having it for twenty years, and he dropped off to sleep. He could sleep until eight a.m. now, he was sure.
It wasn’t eight a.m. when he woke, however. And it wasn’t to the bedroom alarm clock. He woke to an incessantly ringing extension telephone on the nightstand. It was Patrolman Storey.
“What is it, Storey?” he asked.
“It’s bad, Quinn, out at Lake Loon. I went down there for a routine check of the picnic grounds. Down Cottage Grove Road from the highway. I found fresh tire tracks leading down to the lake’s edge, but no overlap of a car backing away. Lot of footprints. Ground’s frozen now. They’re perfect frozen casts.”
“Where’s the car?” Strowe asked.
“My opinion? The bottom of Lake Loon,” said Storey, mincing no words.
Lake Loon was the deepest in the state, a crater bed. It had never been sounded to its depth, but fishermen had tried with weighted lines which came up free of sand. Oregon’s Crater Lake at over 1,900 feet deep was the nation’s deepest. Lake Loon was easily a close second.