Junkyard Dogs (5 page)

As we walked toward the hill, there was a cracking sound from the road that led to the dump’s interior. Saizarbitoria looked in the direction of the noise and then back to me. “Are those shots?” There was more than a little concern in his voice.

“Yep. A .22, I’d say.”

He picked up his pace, and I followed along like a one-man posse. I’d gone about three steps when I remembered Dog—he was still watching Butch and Sundance. “Hey.”

He looked at me, back to them, and then followed.

I nudged him with my leg. “What’re you, a tough guy?”

When we got over the hill, it was as I’d expected. Geo Stewart, Durant Memorial Hospital patient-at-large, was dispatching rats with a Savage automatic varmint rifle at an alarming rate. At least, I assumed it was rats. He turned to prop the stock on his knee so that he could remove the tiny magazine, gave us a brief nod of his head to indicate that he was aware of our presence, and then scooped a handful of rounds from his stained and tattered Carhartt. “Hey, Sheriff, long time no see.”

Evidently the shoulder wasn’t bothering him. “Hey, Geo.”

He studied my face as we got closer. “Somethin’ wrong with your eyes?”

I pushed my sunglasses farther up onto my nose, effectively covering the twin saucers of my pupils. “What are you shooting, Geo?”

He went back to thumbing .22 longs into the spring clip of the rifle’s magazine. “Damnable rats, found one of ’em in the cooler trying to run off with the finger I told you about.” His chest-length beard was zipped into his coat. “Adjuster came up here a few months ago and said that if I didn’t do something they’d cancel the insurance. Gaddam insurance.”

Sancho pulled the collar of his jacket up as a makeshift filter since the wind had shifted and we were now getting the full, odiferous impact of the surroundings. “Jesus.” The Euskadi eyes leveled with the junkman’s. “How do you get used to the smell?”

Geo eyed him without irony and then moved off with the words “What smell?”

 

It was a two-gallon Styrofoam cooler—one of the cheap ones that you can pick up at any service station in the summer season and then listen to it squeak to the point of homicidal dementia. It was sitting on the top of a toppled old avocado-colored refrigerator from the seventies. The cooler must’ve been relatively new, however, because it had a bar code sticker on the side.

I didn’t take my hands out of my pockets. “So, is the fickle finger of fate in this?”

Geo nodded, and he, Dog, and I looked at the Basquo. “Okay, fine.” Saizarbitoria stepped up and plucked the top from the cooler, the vacuum pressure causing it to shiver as he lifted. He stood there for a moment, craning his neck for another perspective, and then closed it. “It’s not a finger.”

I could tell the effects of the drops were beginning to fade as I looked at Geo, who was starting to protest.

Santiago raised a hand. “It’s part of a thumb.”

I stepped in, and the Basquo obliged me by lifting the lid again.

The thumb was lodged in a thin skim of ice along with a little dirt and a couple of crushed Olympia beer cans. I made a show of pulling my hands from my pockets, then holding them up like a fighter pilot for review. “Not mine.”

Geo went as far as to present his two thumbs, and we both turned toward Saizarbitoria, who refused to play the game.

It was fresh, and of prodigious size, almost as large as my own. Mottled with a whitish cast, the separated end was crushed and gave no impression of having been surgically removed—it was going to be hard to get a print. “Male.”

Santiago nodded. “Yeah.”

“What do you figure?”

The Basquo took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. “A day, maybe two, but as cold as it’s been it could be longer.”

I nodded. “Maybe it just froze off somebody.”

He pulled an evidence bag from his kit along with a pair of plastic gloves, which he stretched with a bellows of air from his lungs. He stuffed his leather gloves in his jacket pocket and then snapped the latex ones over his hands. He set the cooler top to the side and reached in to gingerly take the digit from the filthy ice; then he placed it in the evidence bag, zipped it shut, replaced the cooler top, and wedged the entirety under his arm.

“I’ll check the bar code with local merchants, interview the medicos to see if anybody had a thumb removed or was treated for any like injury. I’ll also check the NCIC fingerprint bank, but it’s mangled so you’re going to be lucky if you get even a partial hit.”

I nodded. “You gonna set a grid and check the scene?”

He looked at the darkening sky. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“You never know.”

Sancho turned to Geo with a resigned dip of his head and spread his hands. Geo blinked like a whitetail deer and cupped the rifle in a two-palmed hammock like an Indian would have.

There was an Indian air about Geo, or maybe it was a mountain man quality. Some people live on the high plains because they can’t live anywhere else, their antennae fixed to a frequency that is preset to offense. Once in a long while they venture into town and drink and argue too much. Like fine instruments of delicate temperament rarely played, they become untuned and discordant. I had arrested Geo only once in my career, for drunk and disorderly, when his grandson had gotten married six months ago.

They disappeared over the next hill, and I walked back toward the truck with Dog. I could hear the sound of a diesel motor coming from the front gate and echoing off the hills like a skipping stone as I hiked back toward the main entrance. A top-of-the-line, deep green Chevrolet that proclaimed REDHILLS RANCHO ARROYO on the doors was pulling a gleaming dump trailer pinstriped the same color up to the gate. I looked around for Duane, then walked over.

Ozzie Dobbs Jr. was undersized and overly cheery, smiling with small, square teeth that looked like Italian tile. He was wearing a large cattleman’s style hat, and a green-checkered cowboy scarf was tied at his throat with a square knot and not the usual buckaroo one the cowboys in these parts preferred. The window whirred, and I noticed he let it down enough to be heard but not enough to let the cold or stink in. “Uh-oh. What’s the problem, Officer?”

I patted my leg again for Dog to follow and carefully picked my way to the side of the shiny truck. “Oh, an unidentified individual may have dropped down on the evolutionary scale.” I leaned on the window, tipped my hat back, and smiled at Ozzie’s mother, who was in the passenger seat. “Hello, Mrs. Dobbs.”

Betty Dobbs was approaching eighty but was still a looker with a fine bone structure that had held up to the years and sad eyes, which made you want to tell her anything she wanted to hear. She had been my ninth-grade English/civics teacher, and at the time I’d considered her a harpy. Now retired, she was known to volunteer for every civic organization imaginable, from the county animal shelter to the friends of the library and the hospital auxiliary.

“Hello, Sheriff. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it?”

Evidently, the smell and the cold hadn’t invaded the cab yet. “Yes, ma’am.” I looked around again for the younger Stewart, but only the dogs were in the office. “Got your water bill, Ozzie?”

He grudgingly pulled the yellow slip from the seat but held on to it. “Yeah, I’ve got the damned thing but I gotta tell you, Sheriff, I got about three more loads, and I was hoping you fellas would cut me some slack.”

I glanced back at his covered trailer. “Well, I understand you’ve already dumped one load today. What’ve you got back here?”

He stared at me for a second, probably wondering where I’d gotten my information. “Mostly brush I clear-cut from down by Wallows Creek.”

“All right.” I glanced back toward dump central, where I’d last seen Santiago and the solid waste facility engineer. “I’m not sure where Duane is or where Geo’s going to want you to put it, but you better back up and run it through the scale.”

He sighed. “I will, but then the commissar is gonna want to charge me. I don’t want to say anything against anybody, but you give some people a little power and it goes straight to their head.” He gave an apologetic glance to his mother and then started in again. “I have yet to come up here and not have that old bastard go through every load I bring into this place. You’d think I was trying to drop off nuclear waste.” I held up a hand, but it had little effect. “Now, he knows I’ve lobbied the county to shut this place down and move it a little farther out—and that’s a fight I’m going to win, but as to that private junkyard of his . . .”

“Ozzie.”

His face reddened, but he continued. “The amount of ground seepage, antifreeze, transmission fluid, gasoline, and oil that comes off this hill and down into Rancho Arroyo would be a disgrace to any government agency, and I can tell you that I’m not above making a few phone calls and turning this into a Superfund site.”

I spoke with a little more authority this time.
“Ozzie.”

He stopped and glanced at his mother again, finally resting his eyes on his vehicle’s dash. Mrs. Dobbs moved a little past the profile of her son and looked at me imploringly. “I apologize, Sheriff. Ozzie Junior’s had a trying day, and I’m afraid his nerves are on end.”

I allowed a commensurate amount of silence to pass. “That’s fine, Mrs. Dobbs.” I studied the side of her son’s face, but I think he was embarrassed to look up. I stepped back, calling for Dog to accompany me. “I’ll say something to Geo, Ozzie.”

His mother, unwilling to leave things unsettled and impolite, leaned across and called out to me. “How is your daughter, Sheriff?”

I smiled and raised my voice to be heard over the diesel. “Cady’s fine, ma’am.”

“Still with the law firm in Philadelphia?”

“Yes, Mrs. Dobbs.”

“Betty, please. Are we going to see you at the Redhills Rancho Arroyo Survival Invitational this weekend?”

As a reputable and highly visible member of the community, I received an invitation to the goofy golf tournament every year, but since I wasn’t even a fair-weather golfer, I always ignored it. The Redhills Rancho Arroyo Survival Invitational was one of those midwinter golf tournaments where they played in parkas with optical orange golf balls, white not being a winter color for golf. “I’d love to attend, but I don’t golf, Betty.”

“Yes, but that lovely friend of yours does.” She smiled. “The Native American fellow?”

“Henry Standing Bear, he’s Cheyenne.” Even women in their eighties smiled at the thought of Henry; it was, as always, annoying. “He’s at my jail right now.”

Her forehead furrowed. “Oh, no.”

“Nothing professional; the pipes in both his house and where he works froze, so he needed a place to stay.”

“Doesn’t he golf?”

“Yes ma’am, he’s a scratch player.” I shrugged. “He’s good at everything.”

“He broke your nose, as I recall.”

“Eighth grade, at the water fountain.”

“Didn’t he go on to college?”

“Yes, ma’am—Berkeley.”

She nodded in remembrance. “I don’t suppose you could convince him to play? The benefits from this year’s tournament are going to the American Indian College Fund, and it would be wonderful if we could have a Native American participate.”

I waved, trying to indicate that the conversation was ending. “Well, when I get back to the office I’ll mention it to him.”

She continued to smile, but Ozzie pressed the button for the window. Mrs. Dobbs sat back as he put the truck in reverse, and I saw that Saizarbitoria and Geo were walking side-by-side down the inner road, the Basquo still holding the cooler under his arm, his hat now functioning as a makeshift mask.

About fifty yards away, Geo said something to my deputy, and they parted company—Sancho toward me, and the dump man, still holding the rifle, toward the scales.

I leaned against the grille guard on my truck and watched the young man approach with a slight hitch in his step and a general attitude of dissatisfaction. He reminded me of me.

He pulled up about two steps away and lodged the web of his thumb over the butt of the seventeen-shot Beretta at his hip. “All right, I set a preliminary grid with the twine, but I gotta tell you that in my learned opinion the thumb arrived in the cooler and we have nothing to gain by digging up the surrounding area.”

I crossed my arms and nodded. “You don’t think we’re going to find the rest of him out there, huh?”

“No, and Mr. Stewart says there hasn’t been anything disturbed in that area for a couple of weeks now and given the fragile nature of the container . . .” He squeezed the cooler till it squeaked. “I’d say it’s a new arrival.” He studied me. “Is digging up the entire dump in the freezing cold for the next two weeks going to be my punishment for leaving?”

I ignored him and asked another question. “You gonna check the permits for the weekend?”

“Yeah. The place is closed on Sundays, so it had to arrive either late Friday or Saturday.”