Hunter's Moon: Firedamp, #2

By J. Kyle Johnson

Hunter's Moon follows Sam Garrett's debut in Firedamp as a young deputy sheriff taking over for his mentor and boss, Sheriff I.D. Atkins, who has been sidelined by a bootlegger's bullet in Bell County, Kentucky. In this sequel, Sam returns to Pineville after doing battle with gangsters in Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky—the original "Sin City" of its time—only to become entangled with a local moonshiner out for revenge after the deputy removes the man's abused children from a run-down shack in Pickerin Hollow.

Hunter's Moon is also the story of how the greenhorn deputy deals with the odd assortment of characters and kinfolk who make up the patchwork quilt of his daily life. From an irascible federal revenuer to an enigmatic favorite aunt and a one-legged hillbilly cousin, Sam careens into one chaotic scene after another as his well-intentioned but sketchy schemes play out in ways he could not foretell.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J. Kyle Johnson
• Release date: Jan 21, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393050537

Book preview

DEDICATION

For Aunt Pauline and all my Kentucky kin.

May we learn by your example.

And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three;

but the greatest of these is charity.

—1 Corinthians 13:13

FOREWORD

I stood beside the hot road in the summer sun

without a hat,

beaded sweat rolling down my neck

and into my shirt.

If I’d taken refuge in the cooling shadow of a tree,

you might not have seen me,

might have driven by never knowing I was there,

but you did see,

giving me a nod and a solicitous wave

of your gracious hand,

which was enough

and all I needed to carry on.

MARCH 29, 2019 [JKJ]

CHAPTER 1

HELLSEND

The sweltering heat of summer had already built up in the mountains by the time I started out on the county road over the Cumberland River bridge to Wallsend. It’d been so dry of late the trees had give up any hope of rain and started shedding their dead and dying leaves, letting the hot winds blow them to the ground or off into the creeks to be washed down-river. I was driving the sheriff’s new Model A Ford—the one the county had bought him that year to replace the old Tin Lizzie—and carrying a warrant from Judge Newsom’s court to serve on a man seen stealing the spare tire off a working man’s pickup truck parked behind the freight station just outside the Pineville city limits. A L&N brakeman bore witness and I was bound by law to go looking for the man and serve it on him.

He was a man twice my age known to be living with a woman—a girl, really—who by rights ought to still be attending high school. Instead, she was trapped living in a run-down tar-paper shack nursing his babies while he run around the county stealing anything and everything not locked up or nailed down.

As it turned out, at least according to the girl—who come out on the porch to tell me this when I drove up—the man I was looking for had run off when he heard I might be coming for him. She come out of the house carrying one baby side-saddle on her cocked hip and followed by a whole litter of scrawny young’uns with dirt-caked mouths and scraggly hair the color of wet hay. It put me in mind of our ma telling me and my brother we looked like something the dog’s been keeping under the porch when we was boys and come dragging in from playing outside all day.

He ain’t here, the girl vowed, so I told her what I was bound by law to tell her.

If he does come back, I said, you tell him the Sheriff’s Office has got a warrant for his arrest and won’t stop looking for him so long as he’s anywhere in Bell County.

Well, I don’t know where he’s at and don’t much care if he don’t never come back, she answered.

So there weren’t much more I could do right then. If he’d been hiding in the house or out in the privy by the crick, the littl’uns would’ve give him away. I learned that from the sheriff. "Make sure the children hear you, he told me, then watch their faces. They can’t help but look to where somebody’s hiding. It’s in their nature."

I didn’t bother stomping about the place looking under the porch or in the coal bin for that spare tire or whatever else the man had managed to thieve from the freight yard that night. Instead, I got back in the sheriff’s car and headed towards town on the slag road alongside the rail spur. I left without serving the warrant and without telling that poor girl she ought to find her a better man to take care of her and not be living in Hellsend with a passel of young’uns pulling at her.

Hellsend, that’s what some folks call Wallsend, was probably the last place in Bell County, Kentucky, I wanted to be that day anyway on account of it bringing up bad memories about my brother Tick (Billy Wade, that is, Tick was a sort of accidental nickname he got when we was boys.) He’d lived there for a time with Jonetta Isbell, that Melungeon woman of his, before they run off to Newport, Kentucky, on the Ohio River where he got hisself all tangled up with a bootlegger, and, well, it got worse from there, and he ended up getting hisself shot. So, like I say, I weren’t anxious to be back in Hellsend and reliving all that and had kind of a sick feeling in my stomach the whole time I was there.

Coming back, I spotted the tail end of a dead dog laying on the side of the road, its head on the down-slope towards the creek. Most times I wouldn’t have paid it no mind, but something caught my eye, something squirming under the bloated belly. I got out and walked down the bank close enough to see green bottle flies buzzing about the mouth and smell the pall of death, then picked up a dead stick to lift the hind leg. Underneath was four pups crawling over one another, whining, still trying to nuzzle the teats. I wondered if they knowed their ma was dead, but she must’ve still had milk and I guess they was that hungry.

I was about to drop the leg and go—and let the hot sun and maggots do their work—but something changed my mind and I went back to the car for a croker sack we kept in the trunk. I held my breath while I picked them little fellers up by the scruff of their necks and dropped them in the poke, then tied a knot at the top to keep them from crawling out and getting under foot in the car. I figured I already knowed what Ma would say when I showed up at the house with a bag full of pups, but I also knowed she wouldn’t be willing to let ‘em starve any more’n I would. I’d never forgot the time when I was little and Pa had me fill a washtub and drown a litter of kittens once. "Too many mouths to feed ‘round here already," he said about the dogs and cats we had then, and I done it, but it near killed me to set there on top of the tub ‘til they stopped mewing and scratching at the sides. I hid in my room the rest of that day crying, and Ma was the only one who understood why.

When I got back into Pineville with the pups, I drove up behind our house through the back alley and carried the sack up on the porch. Ma must’ve heard the whimpering, because she come to the screen door and stood there behind it with her hands on her hips watching me pull them critters out one by one and put them in a empty kindling box under the washing machine.

Are you planning to stay here and help me with them critters, she asked through the screen, or are you expecting me to take care of ‘em?

I would, Ma, I begged off, but there ain’t nobody in the Sheriff’s Office, so I got to go back. Can you keep a eye on ‘em ‘til I can get back here for supper? I’ll figure something out after that. I found ‘em by the side of the road where their ma got hit by a coal truck or something.

Ma narrowed her eyes and give me a hard look, but I knowed she’d likely be wet-nursing them pups with a milksop by the time I got back.

***

I’d been working in the Bell County Sheriff’s Office on my own as acting sheriff ever since the elected sheriff, I.D. Atkins, got laid up with a gunshot wound. He got shot the night him and me was supposed to be out at the freight yard scouting for bootlegged whisky. It was a serious enough head wound, and word was he weren’t in no hurry to get back to the job on account of it, but I thought that was just courthouse talk. I suspect most of it come from Chief Helton, the Pineville city police chief, but I didn’t think he meant nothing by it even if it was him. He just wanted to be the first to predict Sheriff Atkins might be thinking of retiring off the job.

If’n he was to retire, though, he told me one day at the courthouse, he’d find hisself at home with Mossie every day and that might change his mind some. That woman could drive the devil back to his lawful wife!

I laughed right along with him then, but I had a gnawing fear he might be right and I.D. might actual be thinking of staying home. I’d only been a deputy two year and weren’t looking forward to working for no other sheriff.  I.D.’s the one brung me into the job and trained me up.

"He ain’t said he ain’t coming back, has he?" I asked the chief that day in his office.

"No, but he ain’t said he is coming back neither, Virgil answered as he raised his coffee cup and looked over the brim at me. All I know is, he said, lowering it again, I been by the house to see him near ever day since the shooting, and he ain’t said one way or t’other yet."

The truth of it was, I avoided going by his house and felt bad about it. The sheriff hadn’t confided in me and I didn’t have the nerve to ask. What was I gonna say? "You thinking ‘bout coming back to work anytime soon?" I mean, it ain’t up to me to go telling the sheriff when he ought to come back after taking a bullet to the head, ‘specially when it was partly my fault for not being there to stop it from happening that night behind the courthouse.

But the other truth was, I was starting to let the idea of him not coming back take root in my own mind and lead me in a direction I weren’t convinced I wanted to go—not yet, anyhow.

***

It was along about this same time I got a telephone call concerning my brother, Tick. It come from Special Agent Colvin Schilder of the BOI office—the fed’ral Bureau of Investigation, that is—up in Cincinnati. Schilder’s the one ill-used me to get my brother to help trap a fella by the name of George Rhodes, who they call the King of the Bootleggers up north and around Newport.

I weren’t all that happy to hear from him since he was the one throwed me in the briar patch there at the end, so to speak.

Morning, Sam, he started off after Verda, the chief’s daughter and courthouse switchboard operator, patched him through to me. Glad I caught you in the office.

What can I do for ya, Col? I asked, trying not to sound too leery.

Maybe I can do something for you, he answered.

I took the bait, knowing his record of doing anything that would help me or my brother weren’t all that promising.

Well, then, what can you do for me? I asked.

It’s about your brother Billy.

Is he alive or dead? I asked flat out, figuring I might as well get to the point. I could only think of two reasons Agent Schilder of the BOI might be calling me. Either they’d found my brother and brung him in or they’d found my brother and he was dead.

Neither, Schilder said in answer to my question. What I mean to say is, the Bureau’s office in Cleveland has reported seeing George Rhodes’ Packard being driven around town by a man who might be your brother.

Good godamighty, I thought, first the bootlegging, gun-running ‘bull’ at the mining company, then that gangster Rhodes in Cincinnati—who’s Tick got hisself hooked up with now? Billy got shot in the neck in the back seat of that same Packard car with me and his woman Jonetta setting right there beside him. We’d got ourselves kidnapped and I warned him not to go for the gun Rhodes was holding on us, but he weren’t listening to me. He never listens to nobody once his blood gets up. If it hadn’t been for Jonetta coming up with that ice pick or whatever it was out of her corset and stabbing Rhodes in his gun hand, well, we’d all three likely be dead now. As it turned out, Tick survived the shooting, escaped the law, and run off in that gangster’s own car before I had a chance to coax him into coming back home with me to Bell County. To my way of thinking, it was the gov’ment got my brother shot and near killed in the first place, but pressed for the truth, I’d have to admit he brung it on hisself.

The car’s got counterfeit registration plates on it, Agent Schilder was saying while I was thinking, but the Bureau has been able to confirm it’s the same Packard. The Black Hand mob in Cleveland has been  using it to ferry out-of-town gangsters and politicians from the train station to the brothels and speakeasies in ‘Little Hollywood’ out there, and—

Hold up right there, Col, will ya? What’s this got to do with Tick . . ., I mean, Billy?

Sorry, Sam, the agent said, "I just wanted to let you know I sent a photograph of your brother out to the Cleveland office to have them check it out for you. I haven’t forgotten what you did for us in Newport, and I wanted you to know we intend to keep looking for