Exit Wounds - J. A. Jance [87]
That afternoon, Eva Lou’s down-home cooking hit the spot—meat loaf, mashed potatoes, fried okra, and freshly made biscuits, followed by fresh peach pie. As soon as dinner was over, Jenny retreated to the spare bedroom which was her special domain at the Brady household. As Butch, Eva Lou, and Jim Bob sipped their coffee, conversation turned to work.
Before Andy’s death, Jim Bob Brady had always expressed more than a passing interest in whatever cases his son, the deputy sheriff, had been involved in. Now that same curiosity was focused on Joanna’s cases, and she was happy to oblige. She had found that sometimes, in the process of explaining a case to a law enforcement outsider, she was able to gain a new perspective on it herself.
With regard to the Mossman/Ortega/Davis murders, Jim Bob homed in on the ammunition. “The casings all come with the same stamp?” he asked.
Joanna nodded. “Initial S for Springfield, Massachusetts, and ‘seventeen’ for 1917. So we know where it came from, and obviously it still works. The question is, where has it been all this time?”
Jim Bob frowned. A faraway look came into his eyes. “I wonder,” he said.
“Wonder what?”
“You know what was going on around here in 1917, don’t you?”
“World War One?” Joanna offered tentatively.
Jim Bob shook his head. “No, that was over in Europe. Around here, the big news that year was the Bisbee Deportation.”
“I remember now,” Joanna said. “Something about union activists being run out of town on a rail.”
“In boxcars, actually,” Jim Bob corrected. “A bunch of company-organized vigilantes rousted over a thousand men out of bed at gunpoint, marched them down to the Warren Ballpark, and then loaded them into boxcars that left the men standing for hours ankle-deep in manure. After some back-and-forthing, they finally dropped them off in the desert near Columbus, New Mexico, before the U.S. Cavalry finally showed up to take charge of them. Some came back eventually, but others never did.”
“You seem to know a lot about this,” Butch observed.
“Sure thing,” Jim Bob said, nodding sagely. “When I went to work in the mines after the Korean War, the Deportation was still big news around here. Back then, considering whatever company you were keeping, if you came down on the wrong side of the Deportation, you were likely to get your ass kicked.”
“Jim Bob,” Eva Lou admonished, “watch your language. Jenny might hear.”
Joanna could picture Jenny lying on the floor, with her eyes closed and the earphones to her Walkman clapped to her ears.
There’s a good chance the language on the CD is a lot worse than that, Joanna thought.
Joanna had heard pieces of the story all her life. Butch, hearing about the Bisbee Deportation for the first time, listened with avid interest. “So if the vigilantes were company men…”
“Deputized by Sheriff Wheeler,” Jim Bob interjected.
“…who were the deportees?”
“Where’s that book of mine?” Jim Bob asked. “Bisbee Seventeen, it’s called. That tells the whole thing.”
“It’s out in the garage,” Eva Lou replied. “Along with all the other books you boxed up because you were going to build a new bookshelf, remember?”
Jim Bob grimaced. “Wobblies,” he said, in answer to Butch’s question. “The IWW. International Workers of the World. They called a strike in July of 1917. According to the company honchos, they were undermining the war effort. The real problem was, the IWW recruited minority members. Back then, Mexicans weren’t allowed to work underground, and they received less pay. Same goes for the European immigrants. They were allowed to work underground, but they were limited to lower-paying jobs. Now it sounds like the IWW had the right idea, but back then what they were proposing must have been pretty outrageous.”
He stopped then and slammed his open palm on the table with enough force to make the cups and saucers rattle. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “I’m sure it is.”
“What