“You’re thinking about the Basque woman again?”
I glanced over. “Just concentrating on the road.”
It was pretty obvious she didn’t believe me. “What was her name again?”
I took a glance at the center console, where I had stowed the autopsy photographs. “Mari Baroja.” She was smiling. “What?”
“It sounds like ambrosia.”
I sighed. “Yep, it does.” I watched the snow for a little while. Lana’s statement still worried me. I guess Lana’s statement didn’t matter if her grandfather was alive but, if he was, why would he have abandoned a perfectly good Kaiser and moved to Vista Verde, New Mexico, without it?
She was still looking at me. “You’re a funny kind of sheriff.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, something I always did when I was forced to really think. “I don’t like mysteries, and I don’t like it when things don’t add up.” I turned and glanced at her. “How about we talk about you?”
“Hey, I’m one of my favorite subjects. Let’s talk about me.” I laughed. “What do you want to know?”
“Oh, everything.” I glanced back at the road but ended up looking at her again. “How does something like you get around without being married?”
She folded down the visor and opened up a small leather purse. “As the queen apparent of Norway, I am only allowed to marry once I’ve reached the age of consent.” She pulled out an even smaller cosmetic bag, glanced at me, and reapplied her lipstick.
I nodded. “That age being thirty-five?”
She closed the vanity mirror and turned back to me with a ravishing smile. “Oh, I do like you.” She replaced the lipstick in the tiny bag and then the bag in the hand-tooled leather purse. “It’s really not all that interesting. I just found myself in an emotional and geographic place where I wasn’t happy.”
“And where was that?”
She cocked her head. “Charlottesville, Virginia. Louis taught at UVA, and after a while we began to regard each other as electives.”
“You chose Cheyenne, Wyoming, instead of Charlottesville, Virginia?”
“It seemed like a clean slate, and the South is full of ghosts. I had a job similar to this one and a degree in economics, so I came out for an interview at the Wyoming state job fair which, by the way, consisted of three balloons tied to the end of an event table in the conference room of the capitol building.”
“We’re a frugal state.”
She kept studying me, but it took a while for her to get up her nerve. “You don’t seem divorced.”
“Seem divorced?”
Her eyes squinted, but the blue sparkles were still evident. “Too much unreined compassion still there, not enough baggage.”
I waited a moment in respect. “Widower.” She nodded but sat there silently with her legs curled beneath her. I didn’t want to talk about Vonnie, but that wouldn’t have been fair. “There was another woman about a month or so ago.” She didn’t say anything. “I don’t think you could call it a relationship in the sense that it was consummated, but we were close, and it didn’t end well.”
Her voice seemed small and far away. “Can I be honest with you?”
“I would hope.”
“I read about it in the newspapers.”
I felt strangely violated, like somebody had burgled my personal life. “Well . . . that’s a price you pay for being a public figure.” She reached an arm out and rested a hand on my sleeve, somewhere alongside my heart. I could feel the welling in my eyes, and I wasn’t sure whether it was for me or for the women whom I had lost. I concentrated on the road and none of the moisture escaped, but I’m pretty sure the blue eyes didn’t miss the emotion. I was pretty sure those eyes didn’t miss much of anything. “We’re talking about me again.”
“Sorry.” Her head tilted forward. “Well, you’re stuck with me for another couple of days at least. I’ve got nine unclaimed security boxes at three different banks so I’m thinking that my predecessor didn’t consider Durant to be high on his list of priorities.”
I was relieved at the change of subject. “So, what do you do when you crack one open?”
“First I ascertain whether the owner is alive and the box has been forgotten or if the box is abandoned due to a death. Next I check on-line credit records or cold-call for possible relatives; if there’s no contact with an owner and the rent hasn’t been paid in five years, it gets turned over to us.”
“How does that go?”
“I get hung up on a lot.” She laughed and shook her head. “It’s really hard to get people to believe that we’re legitimate. They always think it’s some kind of scam, but we turned over eight million dollars to recipients and generated over fifteen million in unclaimed property just last year.”
I whistled. “Fifteen million. I’d say the state is getting its money’s worth. Maybe they’ll buy more balloons.” The visibility was dropping, so I slowed the truck down even more. At this rate, we might as well have gotten out and walked from the Rez. “You’re the department?”
She saluted. “Unclaimed property manager. I’m my own branch of the Wyoming State Treasury Department.”
“I have to ask. What kind of stuff do you find?”
She looked back out the windshield. “All kinds of things. We found an 1863 ambassadorial appointment signed by Abraham Lincoln, and just last week I found an old collection of Nazi campaign ribbons from World War II. Pocket watches, stocks, bonds . . . There was this one in Gillette that had a complete change of clothes, a ski mask, and a pistol.” I turned and looked at her. “Then there are the Polaroids. We’ve got a stack of nude snapshots that is over a foot tall.”
“Must be great decoration for the bulletin board.”
“Not really.” She rolled her eyes. “Most of the time they’re of people you wish hadn’t taken their clothes off.”
That image was broken by an ice slick where melted snow must have collected on a short overpass and frozen. Past that, there was another, and the truck kicked sideways; I steered into the skid and touched the brakes but, as the snow curtain blew away, the dark bulk of a vehicle loomed in front of me. I stomped the ABS brakes and felt the surge of the master cylinder as it attempted to keep me from locking the wheels and sliding into the ton of steel that lay on its side ahead of us. Even with the system-assisted brakes, I wasn’t going to get it stopped. In that split second, I saw the opening between the bridge guardrail and the undercarriage of the disabled car. The adrenalin-induced slow motion allowed me to categorize the median beyond as sloping but not bad enough to tip the Bullet; I just had to make sure I kept the tonnage pointed straight so that we didn’t end up like the other vehicle. As we went off the road, I could feel the sudden deceleration as the big tires snagged on the fresh snow. We slid down into the shallow frontage, up the other side, and slowly mired to a stop past the last post and out of harm’s way. I took a deep breath and looked down my outstretched arm, which was holding Dog from catapulting through the windshield and was pinning Maggie against her seat. Dog scrambled as I studied Maggie. “Are you all right?” She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.
I flipped on the light bar and hit the automatic program two on my radio, landing me at 155.445, the HP’s frequency. I needed a lot of help, and I needed it pretty fast. I handed her the mic. “Tell the highway patrol that you’ve got a 10-50 at mile marker 12 on route 87, that you need emergency response with an ambulance and a wrecker.” I smiled. “Got it?”
Her eyes were very large. “How did you know what mile marker?”
“Habit. Stay here, but look for me? 10-50, mile marker 12 on route 87, emergency ambulance and wrecker.”
I crunched through and sank past the powder to the slick surface below. The hard ring of ice at my knees was the only traction I could get, so I used it to bull my way up the slope. The air was burning in my lungs as I got to the shoulder. I looked back in the direction from which we had come; there hadn’t been anybody on the road since we had passed Sheridan, so I had a chance.
I looked at the car again and froze. Lying on its side was Isaac Bloomfield’s ’71 Mercedes.
The doors hadn’t sprung and the windows were intact, the motor was running, and the wheels turned like a gut-shot horse. The lights of the metallic-colored sedan pointed off toward the hills of Lodge Grass as the motor sputtered and started to fail. The steam was still rising from the surface of the road so it must have just happened. I slid into the trunk lid. The glazed surface of the road made it difficult to navigate, but I traversed my way around to the back glass; the condensation had fogged the surface from the inside so that I couldn’t see. As I scrambled, I heard a groan, and I suddenly had a little trouble breathing. I threw myself around the rear bumper and was relieved as the motor finally died, taking with it the hazard of internal combustion and two wheels driving.
Somewhere along the way I must have put my gloves on, which was good because the bottom of the car was still hot. I climbed up, and the sizzle of the wet leather on the exhaust smelled like a burning steak. I reached and grabbed the bump strip at the middle of the passenger-side door. I pulled at the handle and the damn thing actually gave with a quick bump but then settled back and fastened. I yanked it hard enough to get my fingers under the lip of the door and leveraged it open again. It wasn’t going to stay, so I lodged my feet against the opening and hit it with all the weight that had inconvenienced me up to now. The door bent completely back on its hinges and ripped loose, flipping past the hood, and sliding away on the frozen sheen of ice. Piss on Ralph Nader, they never made ’em like they used to.
Isaac wasn’t moving. His eyes were closed, and there was blood on the side of his head. An arm was lying across the trunk of his body. It’s always the same, if there’s even the remotest possibility of neck or back injury, you might do more bad than good. If I went in, I was going to crash down on top of him, so I put a leg over the side to give me a little advantage. He was warm, and there was a familiar rhythm at the inside of his wrist. It was then that one of those little miracles happened. He stirred once, adjusting his weight as if trying to find a more comfortable position. It wasn’t much, but it told me that his spine and nervous system were intact. He could be moved. I strained to reach the seatbelt that had saved his life and thanked God that seat-belts were designed to fasten on the inside. As I pulled him from a sitting position, his legs caught below the steering wheel, and I had to hoist him a little to the right to get him free. As I negotiated the controls of the vehicle, I got my other hand on the front of the doctor’s coat and lifted him up.
That was when I felt the lights. Nothing I had called would have flashing yellow lights, and nothing I called would be that big. The state of Wyoming uses large five-ton plows equipped with shale spreaders that could disseminate five yards of granulated scoriae; this meant ten tons of bad news arriving in a little more than a minute.
Suddenly rediscovering my strength and glad that Isaac hadn’t gained that much weight since prison camp, I pulled him free from the steering wheel and almost had him when his foot caught on the seatbelt. Forcing myself to be calm, I turned him to the side, but the seatbelt clung there. I took a breath and twisted him in the other direction as the belt slipped free and slithered back into the darkness. I raised him up the rest of the way and turned.
It was way too late. The driver must have seen my emergency lights and he had started braking, but it didn’t look like he was going to make it. I looked down at the icy reflection of the black road. There was nowhere we could go. Anywhere we went from here would be just as bad as where we were and probably worse, so I did nothing. I watched as ten tons of WYDOT equipment hit the first ice slick and started its sickening slide sideways.
As we sat there on the side of the car like some bizarre modern pieta, I couldn’t help but think that this is what I got for thinking I could have a night off to take a beautiful woman to a magical place to meet wonderful people. Retribution was at hand in the form of cold rolling steel and red shale.
The guardrail of the underpass looked like a galvanized funnel, and I glanced at the ice plastered on the northwest surface of the metal. Arching showers of melted snow flew from the tires of the truck. The plow seemed as big as the ones I had seen on the front of Burlington Northern locomotives.
I looked down at Isaac and smiled; this shit didn’t happen to Tom Mix when he was saving some nubile young thing who had been tied to the tracks. What happened to me didn’t seem to matter, but Isaac was different; how could a life so full of meaning end so meaninglessly? I smoothed the old man’s hair on one side; there was blood, but I didn’t think he was hurt badly. As the light of the oncoming truck lit the red liquid streaks, I heard a noise in the distance. It might have been the rhythm of the big studded and chained Bandag tires clawing the aggregate surface of the highway or the thump of the Bullet’s diesel, but it sounded like drums.
When I looked up again, the back of the truck was sliding toward us, and the taillights were two angry eyes. The spin continued, but the showers of slush didn’t seem to be arching quite so high. I watched as the headlights turned back toward us again along with the vaulted metal of the plow. The truck slid to a stop about nine feet from where we sat. It looked like an irate buffalo, blowing steam from its stacked nostrils and dripping sweat from its forehead. The drums had stopped.
* * *
Static. “Unit Six, 10-55, over.”
I knew Wes Rogers because he was old like me. He was the first highway patrolman on the scene, and I was helping him with his report. The other HPs oozed in under throbbing blue light in their mercury black cruisers, and the EMTs loaded Isaac Bloomfield into the back of the ambulance.
“So you just sat there?” He was smiling as he wrote on the metal clipboard, his Smoky the Bear hat pushed back in a pretty good likeness of Will Rogers, no relation. It was strange being on the passenger side of the cruiser. He shook his head and chuckled. “You got an extra pair of shorts?”