Lillelara

"We gone get in trouble, Sheriff?" the farmer asked. "You know," he said piteously, "I didn´t mean to run the woman down."

"Well," Garrett replied, "wasn´t your fault, like you said. She wasn´t wearing white, and she ought not to be running up on bridges when the sun´s gone down. And she ought not be killing her husband with pine branches either."

"Ought not do that in any case," added the deputy. "No, sir," he added a moment later, for emphasis, when no one thought to second his opinion.

"It´s real peculiar," mused the sheriff.

"What is?" said Jack.

"Everybody dying like they are..." said the sheriff.

"You mean these two, and then the policemen and his wife?" asked Jack. "Not much family left, is there?"

"Wasn´t just them," said Deputy Barnes, "cause last Wednesday night seven people burned up on the other side of town."

"Well," said the farmer, "burning up´s a lot different from stabbing and shooting and getting run down on bridges and being hit on the head with pine branches in the middle of the creek."

"Maybe," saif the sheriff, "but I tell you, sir. I just can´t say I was suprised when you folks pulled up and said you had two bodies in the back of your truck, what with all these people dying. And if I had thought about it for twenty second I think I could have guessed that it would be Malcolm and Dorothy Sims."

"And you know what´s funny too?" said the deputy.

"What?" asked the sheriff, pulling the canvas back over the corpses; there wasn´t any point in examining them further now. 

"For the last nine dying," said the deputy, "we ain´t had one open coffin, and from the looks of these two, we´re not gone get it now."

"We not gone get them anyway. They was from Montgomery," said the deputy.

"You´d think she´d have waited till they got back to Montgomerey," said the deputy.

"I sure do wish she had," said Jack Weaver, shaking his head slowly.

The dialogue is pure gold and darkly comedic. These police men remind me an awful lot of the police people in the movie / tv-show Fargo.