The Last Jeskey - Chapter 30

 

The Last Jeskey

By Karen Singer

 

Chapter 30

 

(Day 6 – Tuesday)

 

Sheriff Cobb

 

Eight vehicles traveled the dirt road leading into the Jeskey farm.  I was hopeful that this time we would find something…something else.  Last time we had found a barn full of drugs and guns, but I knew there was more out there.  Probably a lot more.  At this point, I was mostly interested in money and dead bodies, but I would take anything I could get.  Any win at all.  I knew going in that there was a better than even chance that we would drive out again with nothing at all.  I prayed that wouldn’t be the case.

I was in the lead car with Russ discussing how we wanted to handle this massive search, when we were both suddenly scared to death by a bullet hitting our windshield, at the same time a loud gunshot reached us as well.  I slammed on the brakes and got lucky that the car behind me didn’t crash into us.  A second shot hit the windshield and Russ and I both bailed out of the car and took shelter behind the open car doors.

There was a bend in the road ahead.  Since the bullets had hit the windshield, the gunshots had to have come from there.  With my gun in my hand, I carefully poked my head up enough to see.  Nothing.  Nothing but trees and brush ahead of me.  All of it too thick to see through.

“See anything?” I called over to Russ.

“Nope!  Nada!” Russ yelled back.  “But they had to have come from just ahead.”

He could have at least tried to tell me something I didn’t know.

We waited there like that for a good minute before I slid back in the car.  Russ slid in beside me.  “Let’s see what we can find,” I told him as I put the car in gear.

Slowly we eased forward.  There were two holes in the middle of the windshield.  At this point, I no longer wondered if it was Gary Jeskey or not, we were practically at the Jeskey place.  It had to be him.

We reached the bend, and I could see Russ turning his head almost frantically looking for the perpetrator.  “Where the hell is he?” Russ exclaimed.

I said nothing.  I was busy searching the road not just ahead of me, but on my side of the car.  The road started running through the woods now, going around another bend, making things even more difficult.  Where was he?  Where was Gary Jeskey?  A few minutes later, the trees were left behind and open land surrounded us as the dirt road straightened out.  And ahead of us…the Jeskey farm.

“What the hell!” I yelled angrily as I stopped the car and pounded the steering wheel.  “Where is he?”  I turned to Russ.  “Russ, take the last two cars and search the area back at that bend.  I’m going on ahead with everyone else.  Find that bastard!  And Russ…watch your back.”

“You don’t have to tell me Sheriff,” he replied.  “But you better watch your back too.  As I see it, he didn’t pass us going the other way, so more than likely he’s back at that farm.”

Shit!  He was right.  The farm was the most likely place he would be.  Or maybe somewhere in the woods on that farm, waiting to ambush us again.  Shit!  “You’re right.  Search the bend anyway, and like I said, be careful.  Then join us as soon as you can.”

He got out of the car and ran back the way we had come.  Unless Gary was waiting at the farm for us, it was starting to look like once again the Jeskeys had disappeared and left us with nothing to go on.  Shit!

I moved on ahead to the farm, my eyes already checking the three vehicles that were still parked there.  Nope.  Just the ones that had belonged to the now dead Jeskeys.  Roxie, why the hell didn’t you shoot Gary and Dave as well?  Especially Gary!

We all parked our cars in front of the house.  We all got out cautiously, looking everywhere.  Every man I could see either had his gun drawn, or was carrying a rifle, and they were all ready to use those weapons.  I saw no sign of Gary or his pickup.  Where had he gone?  Not knowing scared me to death.

Since nothing much had happened since we got there, I sent a few men inside to look for any sign that Gary might have been there.  I turned my eyes toward the barn and the other outbuildings.  We had searched them last time, but I intended on searching them again.  This time with a better eye toward finding hidden places.  Those false walls in the barn had been almost impossible to spot.  Behind the barn and the other outbuildings was the tree line.  The trees that comprised the majority of the Jeskey land.  I was convinced though that those trees held a lot more secrets than they should have.  The woods were where I wanted to focus most of my search, but all of it had me more scared than I had ever been.  Gary was out there somewhere gunning for me, and like all the Jeskeys, he seemed a bit too good at hiding.

My cellphone rang and I answered it.  “Yeah?”

“Sheriff,” Russ’s voice came back.  “Did you know there’s an almost invisible road running through these woods?”

“No.  Doesn’t surprise me though.”

“If I were to bet, Gary was leaving and just happened to spot us coming.  He waited here, took his shots, got back in his truck and left.  We drove right past it earlier and didn’t see the thing.  In fact, if Gary hadn’t just driven through there, we probably wouldn’t have spotted it at all.  We did find two shells from a rifle though.  Sheriff, he’s long gone I’m afraid.”

“That doesn’t surprise me either,” I told him, actually hoping it was true.  I was still worried that Gary was back at the farm a bit too near us, just waiting to get a better shot at me.  “Get the boys out here.  Let’s set up this search.”

Once again Gary Jeskey had taken some shots at me.  Once again he had missed.  I couldn’t count on him continuing to miss.  I would be a dead man if I didn’t find him very soon.

While a few men were searching the house, I and everyone else started searching the few outbuildings.  We considered every place we could see to be somewhere that Gary could be waiting for us.

I took one of the deputies with me, and with my gun in my hand, I chanced opening a small shed, the building that appeared to be further away from the house than any of the others.  I pushed the door open, but stayed well away from the empty passage.  No gunshot had been fired at me when I opened the door.  I quickly ducked my head in, then back out.  I had seen nothing but junk.  I took a closer look, carefully checking all around.  My first impression had been correct.  Nothing but junk.  Rusted junk at that.  Farm implements that hadn’t been touched in years.  I already knew that the Jeskeys weren’t exactly interested in farming.  They just lived on all that land.

“Nothing Sheriff,” the deputy with me said.

I could see that, but still, I took as close a look as I could, remembering those hidden hiding places in the barn.  The shed was too small for false walls, and as far as I could see, nothing in it had been touched in forever.  I went back out and closed the door, starting to move on toward the next building.  But we didn’t get far at all.

“Smells out here,” the deputy noted.

I stopped where I was.  He was right.  “Yeah,” I agreed.  “It does.”

Looking around, we soon found the reason for that smell.  Behind the shed we discovered a hole in the ground that looked to be nearly waist deep.  There was a pile of dirt right next to it.  The ground around that hole though was well packed down from someone walking on it quite a bit.  The awful smell in the air was coming from that hole.  Shit!  I had found Freaky’s pee hole that she had talked about so much.  I never wanted to believe such a thing, but here it was, right in front of me, in all its stinky, smelly glory.  Or gory.

“An outhouse without a building?” the deputy wondered.

“Something like that,” I told him.

“Why the hell didn’t they just turn the shed into an outhouse.  It would be perfect, and probably pretty easy.”

I considered that, and he was right.  “My guess?” I said.  “This is where Bo made Freaky go to the bathroom all the time.  The hole was put here to keep the smell as far from the house as possible.  But I guess Bo didn’t want her to have a proper outhouse like he could have created in that shed.  I’m guessing, he didn’t want to give her that much dignity.  Let’s move on.”

“Yeah,” the deputy replied.  “Gladly!”

We moved on.  There was an old broken water pump not far from the shed.  I ignored it, but the deputy took a closer look.  He needn’t have bothered.  The handle was broken off and it was obvious that it hadn’t been used in years.  I had seen a better one, a working pump out behind the house.  This one was obviously left over from the previous owner, or more likely, several owners ago.  It could have been left over from the civil war for all I knew.  The deputy kicked the thing, and we moved on, closer toward the house.

The next structure was a pump house.  This was where the modern system was that supplied all the water to the farm.  It made sense that it would be near that old broken pump.  That pump practically shouted that hey, there’s water down below.  I took a careful look around that shed.  The pump was modern and well maintained.  Electric powered.  In fact, it didn’t look very old at all.  The Jeskeys had probably installed a new one not too many years ago.  After searching the pump house carefully, we left it behind.

I saw some of my men coming out of the barn.  They had searched it again, but that didn’t stop me from going inside for my own look around.  I pretty much ignored the horse stalls near the front where those hidden doors had been.  This time I took a more careful look at everything else in the barn.

Nope, it didn’t look like the Jeskeys did any farming, although I did see some faint signs of chickens living in part of it as well as some other kind of animals, but there was nothing at all there now.

I was surprised to see all the woodworking tools in the barn.  Was Bo or one of his sons into woodworking?  I remembered something I had seen inside the house that I hadn’t thought about before.  A lot of the furniture inside was wooden.  I had also seen a bunch of wooden Adirondack chairs on the front porch and more around a fire area in the yard.  Had Bo Jeskey made that furniture?  It looked like it was possible.  A psychopathic killer who built furniture.  Who would have thought?  But the truth was, it was entirely likely.  Bo Jeskey was full of surprises.  More than I imagined.

“Sheriff!”

I turned and saw Russ walking into the barn.  “Anything?” I asked him.

“Just that road.  I sent the other car to see where it goes.  It was there, but it couldn’t have been used much at all.  If we hadn’t gotten lucky, we would have never seen the thing.”

“That’s the impression I’m getting about this whole place,” I told him.  “Look at those false walls we found in the barn here.  If Freaky hadn’t shown them to us, we would have never seen them.”

“The guys are almost done with the house.  Nothing yet,” he told me.  Do you want me to set up to search the woods?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “It’s time.  As we talked earlier, there’s a lot of woods out there.  Take a few men and search the edges carefully and try to mark any possible trails and roads leading through them.  There’s just too much woods to do anything else.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.  “And if they used the woods, they had to leave some kind of trails.”

“Exactly,” I told him.

“On it, Sheriff!”

He took off and I went back to eyeing the stuff in the barn.  I didn’t see any hay, but I did see a partial bag of chicken feed stashed up on a shelf where the chickens wouldn’t be able to get to it.  Down below I saw a bag of pig feed.  As far as I could see, they were the only farm-like things the Jeskeys had on the place.

I gave up and left the barn behind.  So far, we had found a lot of nothing.  Not even Gary Jeskey.  Unfortunately.

I waited and watched as my men fanned out and searched the edges of the woods.  Marker flags began to grace the start of places where they had found trails or roads leading through the trees.  Russ came running back to me before they were finished.

“Three roads leading in Sheriff,” he told me.  A few walking trails, but they barely look used.  We’ll check them anyway.”

“Good,” I replied.  “Any of those roads look like it’s been used more than the others?”

“One,” he told me.

“Let’s go take a walk,” I said.  “Send the guys to check everything else.  And Russ, emphasize again that they need to keep a sharp watch.”

“No need for that,” Rus replied.  “The guys already know there’s a lot of bears in this part of the state.”

I nodded.  That was the primary reason for all the rifles the men were carrying.  We couldn’t shoot the bears unless they actually attacked.  But the noise should frighten the beasts away.  Usually anyway.

Russ called some orders to the deputies as he led me toward one of those markers.  No doubt about it.  The road leading through those trees looked well used.  I was tempted to take one of the cars, but this was a search.  We might miss something if we drove a vehicle.

With two other deputies with us, one of them carrying a rifle, we began walking the road.  The road continued to look well used, but where did it go?  Why was it there?  So far, I could see no reason for it.  But you didn’t build a road that ran through the woods for no reason at all, so there had to be something out there.  We walked nearly half an hour before we found that reason, and the end of the road.  Shit!

There was a pond there.  And from the fishing poles leaning against one of the trees and more of those Adirondak chairs, it was obvious that the Jeskey boys had done more than a bit of fishing there.  But it wasn’t the water or any of the discarded fishing gear that held everyone’s attention.  It was the big black shape on the other side of that pond.  A bear.  A rather large bear.  We all watched it carefully until it gave up watching us and wandered slowly back into the woods.  It had been on the other side of the water, we had guns, but we all breathed a silent sigh of relief.

Following the road had turned out to be useless.  Shit!

By the time we got back to the house, the other deputies were back as well.  “Did anybody find anything at all?” I asked.  I got no answers.  Just a lot of disappointed faces.  “How about those other two roads?” I asked.

“They went too far for us to follow all the way on foot,” one of the deputies told me.  “But it was pretty obvious that they were both used for hunting access.”

Hunting access.  “Yeah.  No doubt.  All that land.  All those trees.  And it was all prime hunting territory and owned by the Jeskeys.  They could, and would hunt their own land, probably a lot.  Hence, the roads to get back there.

Bottom line?  We had come up completely empty.  Shit!

“Okay guys,” I said.  “Let’s go home.”

We piled back into our vehicles and headed back.  We had found nothing.  No guns.  No drugs.  No anything!  Not even one missing ginormous safe.  A safe that was big enough that they had needed a flatbed truck to transport the thing.  Where was it?  Where was all the money I knew the Jeskeys had to have?

And more importantly, where the hell was Gary Jeskey?  That worried me more than anything.  He was still out there, still trying to kill me.  And he was getting closer each time.

Yeah, no doubt about it, this had been one shit day!

Shit!