A dark shape emerged from the brush at the next hairpin bend—Danny thought for an instant it was a bear. But it was a man, a shambling, filthy man moving with uncertain gait down the steep rocks above the road.
Then he was on the pavement, and Danny’s heel jammed the brake pedal to the floor.
The SUV lost purchase and stuttered over the asphalt in an increasingly sloppy arc, Danny fighting to correct the wheel. She passed within a foot of the red-eyed thing that stumbled across the roadway, and when the Explorer stopped, it was facing the wrong way up the road in an acrid cloud of scorched tires. Another two feet and it would have gone over the edge.
“Jesus
Christ
,” Danny said, and threw the door open. The passing of the big vehicle had only just registered to the ragged creature now standing in the middle of the road. He blinked at Danny as she climbed down, one hand hooked behind her belt to the handcuffs she kept there, the other hand raised in front of her.
“Goddammit, Wolfman, this is it,” Danny said. She grabbed the man—a foot taller and forty years older—and spun him around against the hood of the Explorer. He moved with the underwater grace of the profoundly drunk. Danny could smell the alcohol yeast coming off him in waves, even above the raw-onion stench of his armpits. Wulf Gunnar was what they called a homeless person down in Los Angeles, but a “tramp” up in Forest Peak. He lived in abandoned hunting cabins and moved around some, wintering in the low desert. Made a little money at odd jobs in town. A kind of thorn in the side of the community, Danny thought, but there was something necessary about him, too. Like an old stray dog to remind people they weren’t so bad off. But today Danny was in no mood for strays, and the adrenaline in her system wanted to punish the son of a bitch clean off her mountain. She clapped the handcuffs around his dirt-varnished wrists and he slumped for support on the Explorer, cheek against the metal.
“Gunnar, I warned you last time: You can drink yourself to death, but you can’t do it in public.”
He squinted at her, forming his words with difficulty: “So shoot me then.”
“I about ran you down. That would have done it. What the hell are you doing out here?”
Wulf looked carefully around him, as if “here” was anywhere particular.
“Keepin’ outta town.”
“And I told you to keep out of town, didn’t I.”
Wulf scratched his beard on the shoulder of his grease-blackened fatigue jacket.
“Yes,” he said, at length.
Danny was at an impasse. She could let him go and he might stumble on down the mountain to Ferndale. Or he might loop around until he got to Forest Peak and stink out the tourists and puke in the old horse trough. In either case, Danny was now seriously late.
To hell with it. She hooked Wulf’s elbow and steered him into the backseat of the Explorer, where he lay down on the molded bench and blinked at the armored Plexiglas panel that divided front seats from back. Danny kicked his immense, rotten boots into the compartment and slammed the door. No handles on the inside, so he couldn’t open the door and fall out.
Danny got back up in the driver’s seat, restarted the engine, and stomped the gas pedal. There was a dense
thud
as Wulf bounced up against the back of the seat, then rolled off onto the floor.
Danny took the alley along back of the downhill side of Main Street, and parked behind the Sheriff’s Station, a red-brick block with a glass front entirely out of keeping with the local architecture. It had been the new Post Office in 1954, but there wasn’t enough mail to justify keeping the lights on. The building had been requisitioned for the library after that, but nobody went in for reading much around Forest Peak and the librarian was suspected of being a Red. So in 1971, the Sheriff’s Station was moved out from behind the firehouse on Sawyer Road, and into the refurbished Post Office building. The place hadn’t seen any improvements since then, but the roof was sound and the back room was air-conditioned.
Danny had been a deputy for a couple of years before she went off to Iraq. When she came back and needed a job, she ran for the office of sheriff against Stanley Curtiss Booth, the twenty-year incumbent. He figured she didn’t have a chance, so he didn’t campaign very hard, but referred to his red-haired opponent as “that little carrot-top Adelman girl,” until it became clear Danny’s house-to-house canvassing with her Veterans’ Administration–issue cane was eating away at his advantage. By the time the vote was three days away, he was calling Danny “that gun-crazy bull dyke,” and on
election day he called her “a high-toned cripple bitch” to her face, and that was that. Danny had never painted Booth’s name out of the placard that marked the sheriff’s parking space—every time she pulled up into it was a little like kicking his ass out of the job all over again.
There wasn’t any relish in parking the Explorer today, however. Danny leaped out of the driver’s seat and sprinted for the back door of the station, twisting her midlength hair up under her hat.
Way to go
, she thought, and entered her domain. Deputy Dave Thurin was in the back room at the communications desk, ten minutes from the end of his shift. He lurched to his feet as Danny came in, the radio headphone cord stretching to its limit. Danny waved him back into his chair.
“Anything, Dave?”
“Mrs. Davis reported her son Barry left again—”
“He’s eighteen, it’s his privilege,” Danny said. Clear the bullshit off the blotter. Dave scratched his ear, trying to remember what else was happening even though it was written right in front of him. Danny felt a bubble of anger rising inside her.
“There’s an RV illegal parked out by the gym,” Dave continued, as Danny was about to bark at him, “and some kids with firecrackers—”
“Dave? Kelley. Anything about Kelley.”
Dave shook his head. Danny usually wanted the shift incident reports in detail, but now her thoughts were on her sister. Not to mention the midday ceremony. And she was late. Danny would have to make up for lost time and get her shit wired down tight. And even as Dave changed tracks in his slow-working brain, Danny was suddenly, monumentally hung over. All the moisture left her head at once and her brain was high and dry, resting on bony spines inside her skull.
“Sheriff?” Dave said.
Danny flapped a hand at him and headed for the water fountain on the wall. She sucked down icy draughts, and a little life flowed into her along with the chill in her stomach. The prisoner! Danny had forgotten about Wulf.
“I got Wulf Gunnar in the back of the Explorer, Dave. Process him for me, public intoxication or something. I gotta make the rounds before they do the business with the key.”
Without waiting for Dave to think it over, Danny headed into the glass closet that served as her office, dropped the blinds, and did her best to rearrange her uniform so she looked a little less like the Wolfman herself.
The back room of the station contained almost everything police-related. An evidence locker with a padlock on it. The communications desk with its radio, switchboard, and the walkie-talkie charging station. A couple of desks for whoever needed to do paperwork or take a statement. There was also Danny’s tiny glass-walled office, a conference table, a gun cabinet with an impressive arsenal, mostly impounded. And at the back by the outside door, a pair of cells, complete with old-fashioned iron-barred doors.
It was a trim little operation, as long as nothing went too wrong.
Danny emerged from her office as tidied up as she was going to get. Dave was half-carrying Wulf through the door of the nearest cell, grimacing as the old man’s smell was transferred onto himself. Wulf was complaining in a singsong murmur, but offered no resistance.
Danny passed through to the front room of the station, emerging behind the glass partition that spanned the space, a legacy of the Post Office days. A high countertop was let into the middle of the glass for dealing with the public. Danny unlocked the partition door and stepped into the waiting area. Beyond it were a couple of old plastic loveseats, a rest room, and a potted plant that Danny had assumed was artificial for the first four months she worked at the station, until she saw Deputy Ted watering it. On the public side of the partition were taped-up official notices, FBI Most Wanted lists, and government information posters. Some of the posters had become outright bizarre since the federal government began its “Secrecy Is Strength” campaign: The latest one featured an extreme close-up of an American eagle’s eye and the motto “Help Us Watch Over You.”
Outside the plate glass front wall of the station, a growing crowd of out-of-towners was moving down Main Street. Looked like the usual mix of families and retirees, working class mostly, with a few upscale seekers of quaint Americana mixed in. Not many teenagers, Danny was pleased to note. Her head still felt foul although she’d swallowed a couple of Advil tablets from the bottle in her desk drawer. She probably needed to eat something. The Wooden Spoon was right across the way, but the thought of the usual fried egg breakfast sandwich was nauseating.
And Christ, another thing had slipped her mind: the chili contest. In a couple of hours—she checked her watch: three hours, at twelve-thirty—the chili cookoff would begin, and as recipient of the Key to the Mountains, Danny was expected to be the official third judge on the tasting panel. The permanent judges were Gordy Morton, who ran the True Value hardware
store, and Eleanor Dennison of the Junque Shoppe. The thought of watching the three-hundred-pound Gordy Morton eating cup after cup of chili was enough to make Danny’s stomach juke left.
She swallowed hard and stepped outside into the gathering warmth of Main Street, her eyes stung by the crisp sunlight and her ears set ringing by the bleating of the Skyline High Marching Brass Band. They were belting out the theme from
Rocky
, more or less.
I’d be better off dead, if this keeps up
, Danny thought.
Inside the Wooden Spoon, Weaver Sampson and Patrick Michaels watched through the window as the sheriff of Forest Peak emerged squinting into the sunlight. They had the two-seat window table. It was Weaver’s RV,
The White Whale
, that was illegally parked in the gymnasium lot, not far from the bandstand at the far end of Main Street upon which the Skyline High Marching Brass Band was sacrificing musical goats. Patrick observed Weaver’s eyes as they followed the sheriff on her way down the sidewalk.
“It’s the heat,” Patrick said.
Weaver grunted. He had an eloquent range of grunts, being a man of few words. It was one of the things Weaver did that kept Patrick guessing. Weaver looked like one of those rugged, lean men in the old photographs who built the Hoover Dam and the Chrysler Building; he had that silent sufficiency about him, in direct opposition to Patrick’s incessant babbling and complaining.
Lately Patrick had been waking up alone in the master bedroom with the chocolate-colored walls and cream trim. He no longer went stomping off to the guest room to confront Weaver, whom he invariably found sitting up in bed with his hands laced together behind his head (accentuating his veined rock-climber’s arms), staring thoughtfully out the balcony window at the view of the Sunset Tower Hotel, which had incidentally been renovated by that bitch Paul Fortune. But of course Paul Fortune didn’t have his own show on cable television—
that
honor belonged to Patrick. Was Weaver dreaming of another man when he gazed out the window? Of course not. Weaver was simply looking out the window; he had no interest in décor or fashion or any of the refinements of life.
That was what Patrick loved about him—and also what he loathed. They had nothing tangible in common. The more distant Weaver became, the more frantic Patrick became, and Patrick knew damn well the whole thing
was a vicious cycle, and if he shut up occasionally, the problem would most likely go away.
But he couldn’t, not to save his life. Not even to save the relationship.
Please
shut up. Can’t. Even as the thought went through his head for the millionth time, Patrick spoke.
“She looks like she’s in a very poor mood. Are you
sure
we’re okay to park across all those spaces like that? I mean shouldn’t we just you know park along the street or something?”
Weaver disengaged his eyes from the sheriff and fixed them on Patrick. He considered carefully, and then spoke:
“I think there’s something going on.”
Patrick’s heart bumped in his chest. Did Weaver know about the intern? Only once, and eight long months ago when Weaver was on location in Hawaii for three weeks, but maybe that’s why he was slipping off to sleep alone. Patrick pursed his lips as if to ask, “what?” but no sound came out. Weaver hooked his chin at the television up above the counter.
“Something weird. They keep showing part of these disasters in other countries, and then all of a sudden they cut away to cute stuff like babies watching parades and don’t go back. Something’s not right.”
Patrick simply couldn’t understand the man. At this moment, the eggs and toast arrived.
Danny found Deputy Ted eating a churro in front of Vic’s Barber Shop. He saw her emerge from the crowd a few moments after she saw him, and made the tactical mistake of trying to consume the entire thing before she reached him. Ted was probably too fat for his health and certainly too fat for his uniform, and Danny refused to order him another one because she felt to do so would be to condone a failure of personal discipline, hence a failure of team discipline. Danny was a firm believer in the “slippery slope” theory. She accelerated her pace and reached Ted while he still had so much dough in his mouth he could hardly close his lips.
“Eating on duty, Ted?” Danny said. Ted held a finger up: Hang on a second. Danny crossed her arms and waited. Gluttony was one of the Seven Deadly Sins, as she recalled.
Whereas drowning your sorrows in alcohol and pills is A-OK
, the unhelpful little voice in her head observed. Danny uncrossed her arms and pretended to watch the crowd while Ted struggled manfully to swallow the mouthful.