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naturally, that if your cousin in Memphis gave you a call, as many as six people were listening in, and within an hour, half of Elza would know that your cousin’s wisdom tooth fell out the same day his wife ran off with a dentist. On the good side, the night that someone tried to steal George Henry McMillian’s cash box, all it took was a single phone call and Jefferson was there in less than ten minutes. On the other hand, let some fool shoot off a scattergun at a coyote, and within thirty minutes Jefferson would be getting calls saying that no less than John Dillinger was robbing the bank. Never mind the fact that Dillinger had been dead since ’34. And then something happens like Irwin Stoker marching in the Palace, and it didn’t take an hour for most of Cherokee County to know that Jewel Stoker was pregnant with Cliff Tidwell’s baby and Irwin darn-near killed him over it. It took a good ten minutes to convince Susie that Irwin didn’t shoot Cliff because Irwin was sitting in jail sleeping off a fifth of back-forty hooch.
    Then, just as Jefferson was about to sit down to his scrambled eggs and sausage, he got his second call of the morning. Apparently Cliff Tidwell’s noisy Ford coupe was crashed into the loading dock at Nickel Washington’s feed store out on Highway 84.
    Ten minutes later Jefferson was looking at the second worst crime scene of his career. Nickel had said on the phone that there was blood and Jefferson had feared that Cliff might have knocked his head on the steering wheel. He rushed over because the poor kid most likely tried to make it home and was probably knocked-out, drunk, and bleeding someplace. Unfortunately, what had happened was a lot worse.
    Jefferson hadn’t seen so much blood since Peterson Crawford got run over by that train. The passenger seat was almost black. He didn’t think it was really blood until he touched it. Sure enough, the seat was still wet and his fingers came up red as strawberry. The confusing part was that the stuff was only on the passenger seat and not on the driver side. Could there have been a passenger that got hurt? Only the car hadn’t crashed into the loading dock all that hard; the car just had a tiny dent. Even more confusing was that Cliff didn’t leave any footprints. The only tracks around the car were Jefferson’s and Nickel’s. The closest footprints that they could find were up by the highway, nearly a hundred feet away. Cliff must have gotten out of the car and let it roll down the hill into the dock.
    Jefferson had responded to a lot of car crashes in his ten years as chief. He even had a couple with deaths, but he had never seen a crash that was anywhere near that bloody. And he certainly hadn’t seen a bloody crash without a driver around.
    Though he was a one-man police force, Jefferson wasn’t completely alone. Back when Peterson Crawford got killed, it became clear that there were times when he needed some help, so the town council began to set a little money aside so Jefferson could pay temporary deputy police officers. Shorty Newman and Hobe Bethard had agreed to be on call for those times. It seemed like a good idea to get the car out of sight before the Cherokee County Party Line News Service had half of Elza coming out to see the bloody seat. So, before he headed over to the Rose’s, he called Shorty and Hobe on Nickel’s phone and had them move the car over behind the jail and cover it with a tarp.

Chapter 3
    ELZA, TEXAS
    June 26, 1936
    T he summer of ’36 had settled into a regular routine for Jesse and Cliff. Like everywhere else in the country, Elza had been hit hard by what was being called the Great Depression. Jobs were hard to find for everyone and especially hard for a couple of twelve-year-old boys who were only looking for ways to make enough money for a few luxuries like soda pops and Moon Pies.
    Cliff, though, was more enterprising than the normal twelve-year-old and managed to work out a deal with two of the