“Where the hell did you come from?” We stared at each other or him at me and me in his blurry, general direction. “Back.”
He looked forlorn for a moment and then hopped his hundred-and-forty-five-pound frame onto the jump seat in the rear of the cab. I climbed in and turned to sort of look back at him. “Sorry, official business.”
Saizarbitoria climbed in the driver’s side, closed the door, strapped himself in, and turned to look at me. “You got the keys?”
“Yep.” I snagged the set from my jacket pocket and handed them to him. He fired up the three-quarter-ton, and I pointed a finger south. “To the dump, James.”
As he negotiated the parking lot, I fumbled with the mic on the dash and keyed the button in order to raise Ruby. “Base, this is unit one, over?”
Static. “How was your examination?”
“I’m going to get you for that. So, did Dog make his way to my truck or did you send him over with someone?”
Static. “The Ferg dropped him off on his way home. I’ve got a Methodist women’s meeting tonight, and you’re not trustworthy.”
Ruby did a lot of dog-sitting for me, and it was true that I abused the privilege every once in a while.
The airwaves went dead without further comment or levity.
I glanced at the young deputy in my driver’s seat and thought about what Vic had said. He looked good, considering what he’d gone through in the last few months, what with complications stemming from having a serrated kitchen knife filleting one of his kidneys in July and the birth of his first child, Antonio, in November. I’d been easing him back into full-time duty, but it did seem that his energy level was low. “So, you wanna take this show on the road?”
The Basquo smiled weakly as he rolled the steering wheel and pulled out. “Yeah.”
I looked out into the frozen landscape and thought about my daughter; I thought about how she hadn’t called lately, which is what I usually thought when I thought about Cady. I blamed it on the young man she was going to marry this summer, figured they had a lot to talk about. Michael Moretti was occupying Cady’s time, and I was jealous.
The radio broke up my infantile reverie.
Static. “Vic just got here. Are you taking Dog to the dump?”
I keyed the mic and reached around to pat his massive head. “Sure, with twenty-three square inches of olfactory membrane, it’ll be like Disneyland for him.”
Static. “Don’t forget about the Stewarts’ dogs.”
Geo had a pair of mutt wolf-dogs, Butch and Sundance, that were famous countywide as being two of the fiercest creatures this side of Cerberus. They had killed a cougar, a few coyotes, and run at least a couple of black bears off their turf—not to mention more than a few adventurous teenagers. I looked back at the now-expectant canine eyes. Mine were still swimming a slight backstroke as I keyed the mic again. “I’ll keep him close.”
Static. “He gets filthy, you get to wash him.”
“Deal.” Dog looked at me and smiled a fanged smile while I scratched under his wide chin.
I turned back and studied Saizarbitoria as he carefully drove my truck out of town, and I tried desperately to see a little bit of the wayward spark in the musketeer’s eye.
Sancho steered through the foothills outside Durant—the darkening skies were absorbing what little heat there had been and giving none. It was Monday of the second week in February and people talked less because their words were snatched from their mouths and cast to Nebraska. I had an image of all the unfinished statements and conversations from Wyoming piled along the sand hills until the snow muffled them and they sank into the dark earth. Maybe they rose again in the spring like prairie flowers, but I doubted it.
As we made the turn where Geo Stewart had slid into the barrow ditch, an orange ’78 Ford pickup waved us down. A mustached cowboy lowered his window as Santiago switched on the emergency lights and slowed to a gentle, sliding stop on the rinklike ice.
The Basquo pushed the button on his window, and I shouted across him. “Hey, Mike.”
The sculptor shook his head and smiled. “Did you get old man Stewart untied from that Oldsmobile?”
“Yep, we did.”
“I wasn’t sure if somebody had cut him loose or if he’d just worn off.” He draped a hand over his steering wheel and checked to make sure no one was behind him. “I dropped a load of junk off at the dump, but there wasn’t anybody at the scales, so I figured you’d taken the old man to the hospital.” He drew his hand across his face and chuckled. “Ozzie Dobbs was up there unloading a bunch of stuff, and I don’t mind tellin’ you he was just as happy to not see Geo there.”
I looked through the windshield and thought about the new housing development that had planted itself on the rise that led to the foothills just west of the dump and Geo’s junkyard. They didn’t call it a housing development, but that’s what it was, if you could call five-acre ranchettes with four-million-dollar mansions alongside a golf course a housing development.
Redhills Rancho Arroyo had been the brainchild of Ozzie Dobbs Sr., a developer from the southern part of the state, who had taken the opportunity to buy the cheap land adjacent to the dump that happened to have views of the eastern slope of the Bighorns. Ozzie Sr. had quietly passed about two and a half years ago, and the reins had gone to his son, Ozzie Jr., who had been making a public case for having the junkyard/ dump moved again. Geo Stewart was having none of it.
Mike Thomas’s tidy, picturesque ranch was over a couple of ridges from my cabin, and whenever Martha and I had driven by Mike’s place, my late wife had looked at it wistfully. He’d sculpted it as meticulously as he did his statuary, with hand-hewn logs, crafted doors, and an artist’s eye. It made me want to hate his guts, but he was too nice a guy. Geographic proximity made him an interested party in what was, southeast of town, the makings of a modern range war.
All this history clattered through my mental projector and slapped the tail end with the sculptor’s voice. “Walt, those people are a hazard.”
I tried to rethread the film. “Yep, but thank goodness it’s mostly to themselves.” I smiled back at him to let him know that my preoccupation wasn’t personal. “Hey, Mike, can you show me your hands?”
He looked puzzled but held up a full complement of digits.
We continued on our way, and I remarked to Sancho with my most determined investigative face. “We call that detecting.”
He didn’t laugh like he used to.
We drove into the driveway of the Stewart family’s big house, careful to avoid the mailbox lying in the roadway, and took the cutoff leading to the junkyard’s double gates, which were across from the dump’s drive-on scales.
The combination junkyard/dump was in an old gravel quarry, and the cliffs at the back of the place rose to almost a hundred feet. Even though you could see row after row of antiquated vehicles to the left and mound after mound of trash to the right, it wasn’t a bad spot.
Geo’s incongruous-looking office, an art-deco structure that had been salvaged from the city pool and still a startling, if peeling, turquoise with white circular windows and rounded trim, was straight ahead. If you looked hard enough, you could still see the darker paint where the letters that spelled SNACK BAR had fallen off.
The Classic was parked by the scales along with a phalanx of tow trucks, all from different decades, but no one seemed to be around.
“Pull over here and park it.”
He did as I requested without comment. It was possible he was dreading the rest of the long winter even more than I was and that his words were also gone to Nebraska with the wind.
I took a sounding. “How’s Marie?”
It took a moment, but the words slowly surfaced. “More tired than she was when she was pregnant.”
“I bet.” I had thought about telling him a few months ago how tiring it would be when the little rascal was out and about but had decided to keep that nugget of wisdom to myself. “How’s Antonio?”
He continued to look at the zigzag patterns of snow, his face away from me. “He sleeps . . . sometimes.”
“It can get a little wearing.”
I watched his breath on the window. “What?”
“Babies, they can get a little wearing.”
He still didn’t move. “Yeah.”
“Have you figured out whose he is?”
He sat there until he turned his head far enough forward so that one eye drifted my way. “What?”
I leaned against my door, readjusted my old .45 so that it wasn’t poking me, and looked at the Basquo. “All right, what’s on your mind, Sancho.”
He contemplated the Remington twelve-gauge locked onto the transmission hump, and we sat there listening to the dry rhythm of the wind gusts as they pushed against the outside of the truck. His voice sounded like it was coming out of a barrel. “I’m thinking about going back to corrections.”
Santiago had started his law enforcement career in Rawlins at the state prison’s maximum security wing. I’d had him for less than a year but liked him and wanted to keep him. “Why?”
It took him a moment to respond. “I think I’m better suited working in an environment where I know everybody’s guilty.”
I smiled. “At least judged to be guilty by a jury of their peers.”
“Well then, in an environment where I can treat everybody as if they’re guilty.” I didn’t say anything. “Look, I know you’re going to try and talk me out of doing this . . .”
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re not?”
“Nope.” I tipped my hat back and looked at him. “You decide to go, I’ll give you a recommendation that’ll turn the state attorney general’s head, but the only thing I ask is that you give it a few weeks and not make your move too quickly. It seems to me you’ve got an awful lot on your plate right now and—”
“I’m giving you my two-weeks’ notice as of today.” He turned back to the glass.
So much for the wise ol’ sheriff routine.
I closed my mouth, took a breath, and continued to inspect him for remnants of the man I’d hired fourteen months ago. It was a tough business coming to terms with your own mortality, and some people, once they are confronted with its face, never forget its features. “Okay.”
We returned to the silence, and then he spoke again. “I’ve talked it over with Marie.”
I thought about Martha and how she’d never adjusted to the life. “Okay.” The word was like a bad taste.
“You still want me for the two weeks?”
I thought about all those years, all those times I’d thought about quitting. “You bet.”
I cracked open my door, and even in the cold, the smell was like a wall.
I had noticed that Duane had approached the driver’s side of the truck, but Sancho hadn’t. When Duane tapped on the driver’s side window, Santiago started, which made Duane jump back in turn, whereupon he lost his balance and fell onto the frozen ground, which was pooled with a slick of motor oil and frozen rusty water.
Sancho turned and looked at me. “Jesus.”
I opened the door the rest of the way, and Dog jumped out. I gave Duane a hand up. There were tattoos on his knuckles and under his thermal hood was a T-shirt with the inscription, MESS WITH ME, AND YOU MESS WITH THE WHOLE TRAILER PARK. The humor didn’t seem to match the young man’s sensibilities, so someone must’ve bought it for him or maybe I was underestimating Duane.
“You guys here about the hand?”
I nodded. “We heard it was just a finger.”
He looked nervous, but then he always looked nervous when we were around. He still smelled vaguely like marijuana. “Yunh-huh, yeah, a finger.”
I heard a low growl and looked at Dog, who was sitting on my foot. He was transfixed and looking directly at the junkyard’s quasi-office where, in one of the claw-scarred, Plexiglas windows, Butch and Sundance were seated at attention with only their heads showing. They were as big as Dog but not as bulky. He growled again, low enough to quake my own lungs, and I swatted at him.
“Stop it.” He easily evaded my hand and looked at me, hurt at my admonishment. I threw a chin toward the two Heinz fifty-seven variety wolves. “They’re behaving, so you better be good or I’ll put you back in the truck.”
I glanced at the two sets of eyes that studied us, aware that even if they were behaving, it didn’t mean they weren’t planning. There was something about the way they sat there quietly that reminded me of what my friend Henry Standing Bear says about the quiet ones being like the Cheyenne, waiting until you were in a compromised position, then moving to action. For now, they were behind closed doors, and I was just as glad.
“Are you watching the office for your grandfather?”
“Yunh-huh.”
“Where’s he?”
He gestured with a thick hand. “That way.”
I nodded and started off. “Make sure to keep Butch and Sundance in the office, okay?”
“Okay.”
Piles of garbage were heaped to the surrounding hillsides on our right and as Double Tough, another of my deputies, would have said, the unfettered smells were bad enough to gag a maggot off a gut wagon. All in all, it looked pretty much how I was beginning to feel.
The Basquo caught up but kept a hand over his mouth and nose. “How about I stay in the truck?”
I shook my head. “Nunh-unh.” I waited for a response, but there wasn’t any. “If this is your last two weeks, then you’re going to be the primary on this one.”
He sighed, and his shoulders shrugged a little as he stuffed the small evidence kit under his arm. “It’s freezing. How come we don’t just drive the rest of the way in?”
“Because I’ve already lost two tires to scrap metal and wayward drywall screws in this place, and I’m not about to lose another.”
I flipped the collar up on my coat and stuffed my gloved hands even deeper into my pockets. The high plains was a place of extremes with a people of extremes—most of my work involved the sentient and venal aspects of human nature—but even with the wet and the real, we generally didn’t get body parts.