Sample Sunday: Excerpt from "Murder Most Fowl" by Bill Crider

I ran the below sample back in March and it seemed like today was a good day to run it again. As I said before, you just can't go wrong with a Bill Crider book. I have inserted the Amazon synopsis before the excerpt below.

"Following Booked for a Hanging, Anthony Award-winner Bill Crider brings back his amiable, computer-phobic sheriff Dan Rhodes to investigate a murder that may or may not be related to a recent wave of emu-rustling. For an officer of the law, Blacklin County, Texas, used to be pretty peaceful, but now, what with the emu-rustling, cockfights, and protests at the new Wal-Mart store — not to mention murder — Sheriff Dan Rhodes has his hands full. Hit hard by the collapse of his little hardware store, Elijah ("Lige") Ward has taken to chaining himself to the Wal-Mart doors and generally making a nuisance of himself. And when Lige's dead body turns up, floating down a river in a portable toilet, Rhodes finds he has quite a case to investigate. What was the connection between Lige and chickens? Lige and the Palm Club? And was he involved in the area's emu thefts? It seems that raising emus ("taste like steak, not chicken") is a booming business, so much so that emu ("calmer than ostriches and more resistant to disease") are being stolen left, right, and center by would-be emu ranchers with little respect for the law. From theft to murder, the local crime spree seems unstoppable. But with a little help from the computer foisted on him by aging deputies Hack and Lawton, plus some good old-fashioned detective work, Rhodes just may be able to straighten out his county."

Murder Most Fowl

by

Bill Crider

Chapter One

            Elijah Ward had chained himself to the exit door at Wal-Mart again.  It was the second time in the last couple of months.

            Ward was about sixty years old.  He was six feet, four inches tall, and despite his first name, he didn't look much like an Old Testament prophet except for the gleam of fanaticism in his dark eyes.  He had a red, leathery face and black hair with just a touch of gray in it.

            Besides about twenty feet of towing chain, he was wearing a pair of faded blue denim pants and a short-sleeved blue shirt that showed the bulging muscles in his upper arms.  His unruly hair was only partially covered by a Houston Astros cap.

            "You can get in, but you can't get out," Ward told the crowd that had gathered in the glassed-in entranceway.

            "That's right," a woman said.  It was Ward's wife, Rayjean, who was no more than five feet tall and as thin as a pick handle.  She had thin lips and a thin, foxy face.  Her thin brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun.  "You can get in, but you can't get out!"

            She was holding a sign tacked onto a piece of wood that might have been a fence picket at one time.  The sign had been printed by hand with a black marker.  Whoever had made it had taken the time to do it right:

WAL-MART

IS

UNFAIR TO

THE SMALLTOWN

MERCHANT!

            "They've ruined your downtown," Ward told the curious crowd.  "Look at all the empty buildings you've got, nothin' in 'em but pigeon nests.  Think of all your neighbors that went broke there, just tryin' to make an honest livin'."

            "You can get in," his wife said waving her sign toward the doors that opened into the store, "but you can't get out!"

            No one was trying to get in, however.  Everyone was too interested in seeing what would happen to the Wards.

            Even the store employees were interested.  Most of them had left their positions behind the cash registers and in the departments where they worked to come see what all the commotion was about.  They were all wearing their blue Wal-Mart vests, and they stood just inside the closed glass doors, looking out at the crowd and at the Wards.

            Elijah Ward rattled his chains.  "You can get in, but --"

            "--you can't get out!" Rayjean said.

            "You can get in, but --"

            "They can get out through the back door in the automotive department," Sheriff Dan Rhodes said, as the crowd made way for him.  "Or the manager will just let them out through the 'in' doors, the way he did the last time you tried this."

            "Maybe so," Ward said, unconcerned about Rhodes' intervention.  "But if they come through the front, they'll have to duck down under that little bar they've got across there to keep people from sneakin' out that way.  Got 'em a guard there, too, that they call a 'greeter.'  Guard is more like it.  They don't trust folks like I did, back when I had a store."

            "Things aren't like the way they were then," Rhodes said.

            "They sure aren't," Ward agreed.  "You might as well leave me alone, Sheriff.  I'm not leavin' this time.  I'm willin' to go to jail for my beliefs."

            "Me, too," Rayjean said, pumping her sign up and down.  "Take me to the pokey, Sheriff.  That's the only way you'll get me out of here."

            She was probably serious, Rhodes thought.  The last time this had happened, he had been able to talk the Wards into going home peacefully.  It looked as if this time might turn out to be different.

Bill Crider ©1994, 2014