Pickles thought so, too, but he didn’t say it. You never knew when a woman was going to go off on a tangent. The night was going to be long enough without having his dispatcher pissed off at him, too. “Hang in there, kid. She’ll come around.”
Relief skittered through him when he heard beeping on the other end of the line.
“I got a 911,” she said, and disconnected.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Pickles racked the mike and hoped the call kept her busy for a while—and didn’t include him. He used to believe that as he got older, women would become less of a mystery. Just went to show you how wrong a man could be. Women were even more of an enigma now than when he was young. Hell, he didn’t even get his wife 90 percent of the time, and he’d been married to Clarice for going on thirty years.
Rain mixed with snow splattered against the windshield, so he turned the wipers up a notch. His right leg was asleep. He wanted a cigarette. His ass hurt from sitting.
“I’m too old for this crap,” he growled.
He’d just turned onto Township Road 3 when Mona’s voice cracked over the mike. “Pickles, I’ve got a possible ten-eleven at the Humerick place on Folkerth.”
He snatched up the mike. “What kind of animal trouble?”
“Old lady Humerick says something killed a bunch of her sheep. Says she’s got guts all over the place.”
“You gotta be shitting me.”
“She thinks it might be some kind of animal.”
“Bigfoot more than likely.” Muttering, Pickles made a U-turn and headed toward Folkerth. “What’s the address out there?”
Mona rattled off a number that told him the Humerick place wasn’t too far from Miller’s Pond and the greenbelt that ran parallel with Painters Creek.
“I’m ten-seventy-six,” he said, indicating he was en route, and he hit the emergency lights.
The Humerick farm was lit up like a football stadium when Pickles arrived a few minutes later. A mix of snow and rain sparked beneath a giant floodlight mounted on the barn facade. A widow for going on twenty years, June Humerick was the size of a linebacker and just as mean. She claimed to Amish, but she neither looked nor acted the part. A decade earlier, she’d thumbed her nose at the bishop and had electricity run to her farm. She drove an old Dodge pickup, dipped tobacco when it suited her, and cursed like a sailor when she was pissed. The Amish church district no longer claimed her as one of its own. The widow Humerick didn’t seem to mind.
She stood next to her old Dodge, wearing a flannel nightgown, knee-high muck boots, and a camo parka. She clutched her late husband’s double-barrel shotgun in one hand and a flashlight in the other. “I’m over here!” she bellowed.
Leaving the cruiser running and the headlights pointing toward the shadowy livestock pens on the backside of the barn, Pickles grabbed his Maglite and heaved his small frame from the car. “Evening, June,” he said as he started toward her.
She didn’t bother with a greeting, instead pointing toward the pens ten yards away. “Evenin’ hell. Somethin’ killed four of my sheep. Cut ’em to bits.”
He followed her point. “Lambs?”
“These was full-grown ewes.”
“You see or hear anything?”
“I heard ’em screamin’. Dogs were barkin’ loud enough to wake the dead. By the time I got out there, those sheep was dead. I got guts ever’where.”
“Could be coyotes,” Pickles conjectured. “I hear they’re making a comeback in this part of Ohio.”
“I ain’t never seen a coyote do anythin’ like this.” The widow looked at him as if he were dense. “I know who done it, and if you had half a brain, so would you.”
“I haven’t even seen the dead sheep yet, so how the hell could I know who done it?” he replied, indignant.
“Because this ain’t the first time somethin’ like this has happened.”
“You talking about them hate crimes against the Amish?”
“That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about.”
“Killing a bunch of sheep is kind of a roundabout way to go about it, don’t you think?”
“The hell it is. Some folks just plain don’t like us, Pickles. Us Amish been prosecuted for damn near a hundred years.”
“Persecuted,” he said, correcting her.
The widow glared at him. “So what are you goin’ to do about it?”
Pickles was all too aware of the recent rash of crimes against the Amish. Most of the infractions were minor: a bashed-in mailbox, a broken window, eggs thrown at a buggy. In the past, the Painters Mill PD as well as the Holmes County Sheriff’s Office had considered such crimes harmless mischief. But in the last couple of months, the crimes had taken an ominous turn. Two weeks ago, someone had forced a buggy off the road, injuring a pregnant Amish woman. The chief and the Holmes County sheriff were working on getting a task force set up. The problem was, the Amish victims had unanimously refused to press charges, citing an all-too-familiar phrase: “God will take care of us.”
“Well, June, we ain’t been able to get anyone to file charges,” he said.