Authors: Rex Burns
At the edge of his hearing the radio popped and Deputy Yates voiced a message for the highway patrol: “I got a 10-50, a pickup rolled into the barrow, mile eighteen, state highway 173. No injuries.”
“Ten-four,” said the daughter-in-law. “I’ll tell him.”
Wager waited as she dialed the CHP frequency and relayed the message to a laconic voice somewhere in the dark. Then, the excitement over, she logged the calls and turned back to her National Enquirer with a glance at Wager to see if he had noticed how efficient she was.
“Is your husband with the sheriff’s office too?”
She nodded. “He’s a jailer. We got it fixed so we work the same shifts. No kids yet.” She smiled.
If the county commissioners didn’t mind the nepotism Wager wasn’t going to sweat it. There were few jobs to be had in this corner of the state anyway, and fewer still that brought in any kind of hard cash. Apparently Tice, like everyone else, grabbed for that stray dollar with both hands and with those of all his relatives, and no one thought the worse of him for it. In fact, if he didn’t grab, they’d probably think him a damned fool and not worth voting for in the next election.
“Any other relatives working for the sheriff?”
“Sure—his wife fills in here on weekends, and his other boy’s the animal control officer.” She grew suddenly cautious. “We took a test for it—all the candidates take a test. The highest score gets the job. And all the scores are posted.”
Wager believed her; and he had a good idea who wrote the test. “Are all the radio calls logged in?”
Her voice became businesslike. “We try. Sometimes when it gets real busy we have a hard time keeping up. Daryl—Sheriff Tice—tried to get the commissioners to buy a tape recorder. A lot of times the officers will need to know what they radioed in—a name or license number. But the commissioners said not this year. So we do what we can.” Holding up the clipboard, she showed him the mimeographed form with its columns filled with abbreviations under Time, Sender, Message, and Disposition. Most of the entries were in the Uniform Ten-Code and were routine.
When she had talked herself out of her defensive mood, Wager asked what he really wanted to know. “Do you think there are any avenging angels around the county?”
She giggled nervously. “No!” Then she thought a moment. “I mean I didn’t—not until I heard about those killings in Denver and Pueblo. And then Mueller got shot. But I don’t think I believe in them.”
“Are there a lot of people who do?”
“I don’t know…it’s not something you talk about much. Cynthia was scared after Mueller got killed, I know that.”
“Who’s Cynthia?”
“Cynthia Moreles. She works the day shift.”
Wager remembered. “The pretty one?”
“The young one.”
“Why’s she afraid?”
“I’m not really sure. I just know she heard about Mueller and she just shuddered.”
“But she didn’t say anything?”
“No. Not to me.”
Wager filed the item in his memory; it was a card to be pulled when he got the chance. “Is there a restaurant open this late?”
She glanced at the twenty-four-hour clock, whose hands pointed to 20:00. “The Mesaland restaurant should still be open. They don’t close until nine, unless there’s no business. Ten on weekends.”
Thanking her, Wager headed his Trans-Am toward the steady wink of green-yellow-red in the distance. He found himself driving much more slowly than he did in Denver; there was no place to rush to, and not much to do once he got there. Even the traffic lights seemed to be slower, stopping him for a long time at an empty intersection to look at a gas station closed for the night; at a rambling block of one-story shops with dim lights here and there behind the cluttered windows; at another corner gas station converted into a drive-in curio store, lightless now, and perhaps even out of business judging from the sun-faded signs for real Indian turquoise jewelry.
The Mesaland Motel sat at the west end of town, where the state highway swung south toward the Four Corners region and a main county road aimed west at Utah. Here, where traffic was a bit heavier, there was no light and Wager had to yank his wheel hard to miss a swerving pickup truck that screeched rubber across the highway from the county road. The howl of teenage voices hung in the exhaust behind the weaving truck, the spinning clatter of an empty beer can tossed high in the air, a flashing moment of self-contained noise and excitement and speed challenging the dark indifference of the surrounding night and the silent, vast earth beyond. Wager could remember how, just before going into the Marines, he and his buddies had cruised noisily like those kids. It was as if motion and excitement and laughter could hold back the impending world of adulthood and all its plodding sterility. It had not. In fact, Wager had rushed to meet it, not knowing that the avenue he’d chosen for its excitement and challenge was no different from that of his buddy who went into insurance, or the others who became salesmen or contractors or truck drivers. He shouldn’t have joined the Marines at sixteen, but his mother had signed the papers and his sister was glad to see him go. And what the hell, if the old man had been alive he’d have been proud to see his kid in dress blues. Besides, it promised a world where excitement was not only permanent but approved, a world that turned out to be the bleak DMZ in Korea, the orange clay and green jungle of northern Okinawa, the bare crushed coral and barbed wire of Landing Zone Delta in Vietnam. There, not yet twenty-five and already wearing one hashmark, Staff Sergeant Wager saw what he had long suspected: that life was as casual as death, and that the only meaning to be found in either was what he gave to it. Which, he guessed, was what had ultimately landed him in law enforcement when he found himself bored by the kinds of jobs that an infantryman with eight years in the Marine Corps could qualify for. A cop accepted the importance of the rules that tried to order the randomness of life and death, and his job was to go after those who did not accept the rules. Usually they were merely the careless ones; on rare occasions they were the ones who were neither careless nor blind to the rules, but who knew them and chose to stay outside them. That was the real meaning of “outlaw” to Wager, and those were the ones you ruptured yourself to nail, because they were truly dangerous. They reasoned what they did and they struck like feeding sharks at those penned in by the rules; they were the ones who crossed the line between order and chaos, and who brought to their victims not only a fear of death but a terror of the soul.
Nosing the Trans-Am into a vacant slot near the motel’s canopied entrance, Wager sat half listening to an adenoidal singing group on the car radio. Those angel drawings had come from that kind of outlaw. He had killed and then left a message, to terrify and to control. To make people run for their lives or shudder with fright. And he had done it, Wager finally admitted to the stillness around and within him, from motives he considered just. He, too, sought justice beyond the law. But Wager saw a difference between himself and the death angel—Tony-O was scum, proven scum that the law couldn’t reach but Wager could. The death angel perverted all sense of justice; his reason was founded on madness—it had to be. And when Wager could discover the reason, or the madness, he’d have a clearer idea who’d left the messages and the bodies.
The motel’s night clerk was an aggressively friendly and well-scrubbed young man whose smile had not yet become professional. He said, “Sheriff Tice told me you’d be in,” handed Wager a key and a card to fill out, and told him that, yes, the kitchen was still open. The dining room was part of the lounge, where a handful of men sat over beers and joked quietly with the big-chested girl behind the bar. Wager ordered trout and a beer from a tired woman who looked like the girl’s mother, and leaned against the squeaking plastic of the booth’s upright back. It was one of those booths designed to cave in the small of your spine while it pressed against your shoulders, and as Wager squirmed for some kind of comfort a man paused to squint through the dim light.
“You Detective Wager?”
“Yes.”
He was broad-shouldered but slim, balding, and had a plaid shirt closed at the neck by a bolo tie with a turquoise slide. The hand he held out was large, with sore-looking knuckles. “Winston—Orrin Winston. I’m the editor of the
Grant County Beacon
. Can I sit down?”
“That’s the newspaper?”
“The weekly, not the daily. But we have mostly news that’s not fit to print anyway.” He sighed as he slid into the facing plastic seat, and lifted the drooping corners of his mouth in a smile. “Like whose dog got hit by a car, or whose cousin came for a visit last weekend. We don’t get much in the way of murders or city detectives coming out to investigate. That’s real news.”
“I’m not here investigating. That’s the sheriff’s job. I’m just looking for similarities with a homicide we had over in Denver.”
“That’s another destroying angel killing?”
“I mean a homicide with similarities. That’s all.”
“Was that other victim a friend or relative of Mueller?”
“The case is still under investigation, Mr. Winston. There’s not much I can tell the press about it. You’ll have to talk to Sheriff Tice.” Wager half wondered if there was some odor about him that lured newspapermen. Manure, perhaps. They liked to gather like flies on any fresh shit they found.
“Oh, sure, I understand. And I’m not going to do a story on you if you don’t want it. I’m just trying to do the groundwork for when this thing does break.” The drooping mouth lifted and fell again in what was meant to be a friendly way. “This destroying angel thing’s a real story, Gabe. I want to claim it before the
Denver Post
or the wires or somebody sends some stringer down here to steal it. You see what I mean?”
“I see. How’d you know about me?”
“This here’s a small town. You can’t keep many secrets in a town this small. Did you and Yates learn anything new up to Mueller’s place? Off the record.”
Wager guessed this was the man’s way of proving what he said about small towns. “I just looked at the crime scene. Did you know Mueller well?”
“I knew him. Everybody knew him. But nobody knew him well.”
“Why?”
“He kept to himself. Worked around for wages when he needed money, and stayed by himself up in his cabin when he didn’t.” Without being asked, the tired woman brought Winston a bottle of Coors and he winked “thanks” at her. “See what I mean?” he asked Wager. “Everybody in town knows I drink Coors. Can’t sit in any bar in town without getting a Coors shoved at me.”
“Do you know any reason why somebody would shoot him?”
Winston shook his head. “Don’t know of any man that hated him that much, or any woman that liked him that much.”
“What about those avenging angels?”
The head, balding in a wide strip from brow to crown, shook again. “I’m a Mormon—a jack-Mormon, anyway; used to be a Mormon. But I know there’s no such thing anymore in the orthodox Mormon church.”
“I understand there’s different kinds of Mormons around here.”
“Well, yes, that’s true.” Pouring his beer into a tall glass, Winston dropped his voice with a glance toward the waitress. “Some local folks have been kicked out of the Mormon church. Excommunicated, you understand. If anybody around here believed in the destroying angels, it’d be them.”
“Why?”
“They claim to be fundamentalist Mormons. They claim the church left the basic teachings and they’re the only true Mormons left. They have their own churches and their own prophets.”
“Prophets?”
“Sure. The president of the Mormon church is a prophet. If he says God told him Negroes can be saved, then the church lets them in. If he says the MX missile system is against God’s will, then the brethren vote against the missiles. If he says God told him polygamy’s not to be practiced, then the church won’t approve it anymore.”
“I get the idea, Mr. Winston.”
“Orrin. Just call me Orrin, Gabe.” He took a long sip at his beer. “Actually, the church never denied polygamy as a sacred institution revealed by Joe Smith. What happened was they said it was against the laws of the state and its time just hasn’t come yet. It was a political maneuver, not a religious one, and a lot of members at that time believed the compromise was a betrayal of the faith.”
“At what time? When was this?”
“End of the last century.”
Wager blinked. “And people still get excited about that?”
“Well,” Winston said mildly, “in generations, that’s not too long ago. My own granddaddy was one of them.” He started to say something else, but did not.
“You mean you’ve got local polygamists who still fight the church?”
“And each other. Their fathers were polygamists and their fathers before them. There’s maybe four main schisms scattered from here into California and Mexico. Each one claims its own president and prophet. There’s some smaller groups, too.”
“How do you know so much about them?”
“I was born a Mormon. I’ve lived here for fifty-five years. I know a lot of people and they talk to me. People who wouldn’t give non-Mormons the time of day, they’ll ask me if I heard about so-and-so, or do I know what such-and-such did.” The square shoulders lifted and fell beneath the plaid shirt. “They’re not just being sociable, Gabe. They tell me so they can see something come out in the paper. You get used to it in this business. But if a serious problem does come up and they need the law, they’ll tell me and I’ll be the one to go to the sheriff with it. That way, nobody out there has broken faith with the brethren and communicated with the Gentiles.”
“Gentiles?”
“Non-Mormons. Sometimes they call them strangers or infidels.”
“Do they have an ayatollah, too?”
“Ha! I guess it is a little like that. You are either with them or against them, and if you’re with them, you do what their prophet says. Some of the groups try to convert the Gentiles, but mostly they try to save other Mormons who follow a different prophet. That’s the ones they really go after—false prophets are worse than no prophets at all.”
Wager peeled the spine and ribs out of the smoking white flesh of his trout and squeezed lemon juice onto the flaking meat. “And now somebody wants you to tell me something.”