“You get paid for taking Coop back to Chicago for the police to have a whack at? We know about your methods down here. This may be a spot on the map to a lady from Chicago but we’re not bone ignorant.”
“My father was a Chicago cop and one of the best, most moral people I’ve ever known,” I said. “Chicago and our police are like any other place or occupation—some are bad, some are good, most are in the middle zone. But, no, I don’t want to take Coop back to Chicago. And I’m not a bounty hunter. No one is paying me to look for Coop.
“I’d like to give Bear back to him—he’s a great dog, but I have two of my own and if I take on Bear I’ll be evicted from my apartment. Anyway, anyway, this story keeps sprouting new tentacles, like an octopus with an infinite number of legs. Since I’ve been down here talking to people about Arthur Morton, I realized—there’s no doubt he killed all those people, but a lot of questions about the trial, about his lawyers, about his suicide, could use some probing.”
She thought over what I’d said. “What makes you think Coop is around here?”
“The women I spoke to at Kansas State’s Conservation department remembered him and thought he might have come from somewhere in the Salina area. Coop is a passionate environmentalist—he showed that in Chicago, although maybe not in the smartest way. I was going to backtrack to Black Wolf this morning to look for a man named Franklin Alsop. He helped run the Meet-Up, he’s a conservationist, according to the K-State women. I’m hoping he might know Coop, or at least know about him.”
“Franklin? If you get Franklin to talk to you, you’re better than anyone around him. Ever since the shooting, he hasn’t spoken to a soul beyond ‘hi’ and ‘thank you’ when he goes to pick up his groceries or his mail.”
“I looked at a map this morning. Black Wolf isn’t a town, is it? Can you tell me how to find him?”
She drummed her fingers on a piecrust table next to her chair, then got abruptly to her feet. She went behind the front desk, where she spoke on her phone—possibly to her husband, interrupting his chicken inspection. The conversation went on for a good ten minutes.
She came back with a map, but she sat with it folded in her lap. “I know Coop, sort of know Coop. He’s a drifter, ranch hand sometimes, road work, whatever needs doing that is short-term. I can’t tell you where he’s from.
“Jack and I used to farm. We had three hundred acres not too far from here, and Coop showed up one day in the middle of a thunderstorm. He’d been walking, you could tell that. He had a different dog, not Bear here—this was maybe twenty-five years ago. I had a baby and another on the way and the work was more than Jack and I could do on our own, but we couldn’t afford full-time help. Out here you trade with the neighbors, but to keep the place going, with planting and so on, keeping the machinery working, it’s not a one-and-a-half-person job.
“Coop said he’d help get the winter wheat in and look after the soybeans if we’d put him up. He might have been twenty-one, twenty-two at the time. We did wonder if he was on the run—he had a temper on him, but he was strong and a hard worker so we didn’t want to look too deep. But then he and Jack had a knock-down fight over the pesticides Jack used on the soybeans. Jack started to worry about him being in the house with little Jack and the baby. And then Coop got into a big fight with a neighbor over how they were cultivating. We had to ask him to leave.
“After that, I heard about him from time to time. He wasn’t a bad person, just unsettled. I guess he’d been thrown out of college before he came to us, if the ladies over there at K-State remember their dates right.”
“Did you learn his full name?”
She shook her head. “He always said if one name was good enough for Prince or Madonna, it was good enough for him.”
“What happened to your farm?” I asked. “Sea-2-Sea?”
Clara produced a sour smile. “They don’t own all of Kansas, not yet, anyway. We lease the land. Got so we didn’t feel like working it, and then we saw a chance to buy this hotel and run it. It’s hard work, but fun bringing it back to life.”
She opened the map. “Old Highway Forty runs through town. You take that down to Eighth Road.”
Her callused finger traced the route. “And in between Avenues I and J, there’s going to be a dirt track, east side of the road. That fancy Mustang you’re driving, it’s going to get caught in the mud there. All the rain we’ve had this year, we might as well be growing rice and sidestepping alligators, we’re that close to being in a swamp. Worst winter wheat crop in twenty years. Anyway, it’s a mile, mile and a half up that track, and you’ll be on Alsop’s land. He calls it the Nicodemus Prairie.”
She handed me the map, seemed to be about to add something, but changed her mind.
Clara’s comment about walking through a swamp made me stop at a general store on the outskirts of town for some insect repellent for me and a flea and tick treatment for Bear.
I’d filled my water bottles in the hotel but I bought a banana, a couple of apples, and a bag of mixed nuts. Be prepared.
I followed Clara’s directions and pulled off the road when I came to the dirt track. I hoped there was only one—the air was unpleasantly thick and warm, and mosquitoes and flies were blitzing both the dog and me, despite our chemical protection. I’d hate to hike a mile in this weather only to find I was on the wrong road.
The track led past tilled fields. Even to my urban eye, the crops looked small and droopy, not the bright green and upright stalks of healthy plants.
We’d been going for about half an hour, my weather-resistant shoes squelching deep enough in the mud that it spilled into my socks, when the cropscape changed. The neatly squared-off rows—identical horizontally, diagonally, vertically—ended, marked by a barbed-wire fence. On the other side a wilderness appeared: no two plants seemed to be alike. Some were tall, spiky, some short and scrubby. Dotted among them were wildflowers of all colors.
I stopped to watch butterflies and grasshoppers flitting among the flowers. Under the heavy sky, with land stretching to an infinite horizon, it was hard to imagine my city, its buildings and people crammed cheek by jowl. How could both worlds exist simultaneously?
The proposed development on the drawings I’d sent to Murray, about a square mile of luxury shops, homes, golf course, private beach—you could fit all that into this land and not even notice it was there.
Who in Chicago wanted it? Who had that kind of money and why would they spend it there? Uprooting a mile of lakefront, including an eight-lane road, sounded both absurd and obscene, but the city had rerouted Lake Shore Drive around the Field Museum twenty years or so ago—if the money and the will were there, it would happen.
Murray had said it looked as though the mechanical engineers were with a firm called Punter. I’d looked them up before leaving the hotel this morning but hadn’t found a company with that name. Maybe this was a phantom project that Leo had taken seriously—but then, why had he and Simon been murdered? Over some other project? Over something completely unrelated that I didn’t know about?
Bear dropped to the ground, panting heavily. I poured water over his head and into a collapsible bowl for him before drinking myself.
We’d been alone in the fields all morning, and so when a man spoke behind me, I spun around, so startled I dropped my water bottle.
“Who are you and what do you want?”
43
Tales of a Traveler
My unconscious stereotypes had tripped me up: it hadn’t occurred to me that a preserver of prairie and an organizer of the Tallgrass Meet-Up might be African-American. That was the remark Clara had held back from making as I left.
Bear growled softly. I put a hand on his collar and squatted to pick up my water bottle. “My name is V.I. Warshawski. Are you Franklin Alsop?”
“And if I am?”
“If you are, I hope you can direct me to Coop—this is Bear, his dog. Coop left Bear with me, but I’d like to give him back.”
“Wh
oever he is, you don’t belong on my land.” His voice was like gravel, the words almost giving off sparks as they struck the air.
Sweat was running down my neck and soaking my armpits, but Alsop looked not just dry but cool. The pressure of sky on me, the vastness of the space, his coolness, my drenchedness, I wanted to lie down on the track next to Bear and give up.
“You’re my only lead, Mr. Alsop. Coop seems to be a nomad who traveled to Chicago when Lydia Zamir moved there. People tell me Coop was a presence at the Meet-Up. People tell me he likely came from around here, although no one knows his full name or where he grew up. Coop is passionate about land preservation. If he’s in the area, they thought you would know. Anyway, aside from giving him back his dog, I’m not trying to find Coop as much as I’m looking for Lydia Zamir.”
Alsop’s expression shifted, became more alert. “What do you want her for?”
“I found her living in a hole in the ground ten days ago. She wouldn’t let me get her help. A few hours later, I ran into Coop. Since he seemed to be the one person she responded to, I told him where she was and begged him to get her proper medical help. When I went back to her hideout, she’d vanished. Coop also disappeared, leaving Bear tied up outside my building. If Coop doesn’t have Lydia, then she’s either dead or in the hands of some ugly people in Chicago and I should redouble my efforts to find her there.”
“Ugly people.” Alsop gave a soft laugh, but it, too, had an ugly sound. “Yes, I know ugly people. If Coop is hiding from them, then I’m not going to help anyone find him.”
“Not even to save Lydia Zamir’s life?”
“To save Lydia’s life? Now we’re in a melodrama. Who do you work for, that you’re investing this kind of effort, traveling here from Chicago to hunt for two people whom I know only as names from a four-year-old catastrophe?”
For the second time that day, I told the story of my involvement with Lydia and Coop. I kept the details to a minimum, but it still took ten minutes. As I spoke, the wind rose, clearing some of the sultriness out of the air, but lightning began to play along the horizon, making me aware of how exposed I was.
When I finished, Alsop stared at me steadily. “You could write a book of fables. You said you should return to Chicago, and that is an excellent idea.”
He turned and walked through the field to my right, following a scarcely visible footpath. He knew where Coop was, I was sure. Perhaps Lydia as well. I could yell at him to stop, to listen, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that would get past his decision to shut me down.
I’m not usually indecisive, but I didn’t know what to do next. You can’t tail someone in the open air, especially when that person knows hidden paths and crevices that allow the earth to swallow him up—one moment I was watching Alsop head northeast through his land, a second later, he’d vanished.
I started the trek back to the county road, Bear plodding next to me. The storm broke when we were still about ten minutes from the car. I broke into a jog, a shuffle, really, given the mud weighing down my shoes. I had my head hunched into my shirt and wasn’t looking around, but as I pushed the unlock button on the remote, Bear grabbed my jeans leg and pulled me into the mud.
A second later, the back window of the car shattered. Thunder in the sky, thunder on the ground, the two rolled together. I slid into the ditch. The driver’s window shattered in another thunderclap.
If I stayed here any longer, the car would be undrivable and the dog and I would be easy targets for the shooter.
“We’re going,” I said to Bear. “Now.”
I jumped from the ditch, opened the passenger door, and started the car while sliding into the driver’s seat. Bear hung back for a second but as another bullet slammed into the driver’s door he jumped into the passenger seat. I tore down the road, the passenger door swinging wildly. I skidded around a curve, one hand dug into Bear’s fur, one on the wheel. When the car straightened out, I slowed enough to slam Bear’s door shut.
The gravel road was slick and the Mustang skittered between the ditches. Five miles from Ellsworth, the nearest town, a pickup hauling a powerboat slowed us to forty. They were taking up most of the road, making it impossible to see oncoming traffic, making it impossible to pass. A line of cars built behind us. Maybe we were safer in a convoy if the shooter was following us.
Now that I was driving more slowly I felt the rain pelting in through the broken driver’s window. The wipers had been knocked askew by the force of the shots and the steering was getting stiffer. I’d hoped to get east of Salina before I stopped for help, but that meant going another hundred miles or so, and the car wasn’t going to make it that far.
Our convoy trundled into Ellsworth. another wicked cowtown a sign on the outskirts announced, population 3,120. Ellsworth wasn’t that far from Salina, which made me worry that the Salina LEOs would have passed on an alert about me and my searches to their Ellsworth colleagues.
I asked my phone to find me a place to stay. There was a motel nearby, named with surprising whimsy, Tales of a Traveler. A body shop was only a few blocks beyond that, and restaurants and a grocery store were in walking distance. As long as no one shot at me, it was a perfect place to regroup.
I left the engine running while I checked in at the motel, just in case whatever was ailing the car meant it wouldn’t start again. The desk clerk pointed out that I had blood on my hands.
I hadn’t noticed it, but now, in the motel lobby, I saw that glass shards were embedded in my wet clothes. I had cuts on my hands and one on my neck.
“Someone ran me off the road out by Black Wolf,” I said. “I want to get my car into the body shop and stay here while they work on it.”
The woman behind the desk clucked sympathetically. “Those kids, thinking they can take their bikes up to a hundred on the gravel roads, they’ve caused more accidents! I’ll call Eddie—he has a body shop, he can come tow your car. No, it’s no trouble, and if you have all that glass and so on, better not drive it anymore. But, hon, if you could get some of that glass off you out in the lot—there’s a bin there—I don’t want it indoors.”
While she talked to Eddie, I let Bear out of the car and took him and my big carryall to a secluded spot behind the building, where I solved my glass problem by throwing out my damaged clothes and putting on clean ones. I inspected my fingers and palms. I had one shard embedded in a finger—I’d have to buy some tweezers. I kept the finger elevated while I felt Bear for damage. He had a couple of pieces in his paws, from when he’d leapt in, and several in his haunches, but I was able to work those free without an instrument.
When I returned to the car to get the rest of my belongings, the shattered windows made me think of the bullets. They were likely still in the car; I’d just as soon gossip not start spreading around the town about a shot-up Mustang. Whoever fired at me might well be looking for me; I didn’t want to make the hunt too easy.
I put socks over my hands and sorted through the glass, trying to protect the finger with the shard stuck in it. The cartridges were large and easy to find, one under the driver’s seat, one where Bear had been sitting. I stuck them into my jeans pocket and went back to the trunk.
I hadn’t secured the dog food bag well and it had spilled out in the trunk. Eddie arrived with a tow truck as I was trying to scoop it back into the bag. I lifted out my carryall and my boots, took them with Bear’s blanket and bowls into the hotel lobby.
“Jenna told me you’d been run off the road,” Eddie said. “Looks like you could use a look-see by a doctor. There’s a clinic not half a mile from here. I’ll drive you, it’s hardly out of the way.”
I assured him it would be better for me to walk—the dog needed exercise—the rain had stopped and air would calm me down. Eddie assured me if I changed my mind, he’d be glad to send one of the boys out with the truck to drive me. Meanwhile, he looked the Mustang over, sadly clicking his tongue over the damage.
“Might take a few days to get the windows in. N
ot much call for Mustangs out here—it’s more SUV and ATV country.”
I gave him a credit card and my phone number and finally was free to go inside. The motel had one of those alcoves where you could buy junk food, phone chargers, and basic toiletries. I paid ten dollars for a kit with tweezers and another for Band-Aids and disinfectant. When we were settled into the room, I pulled the glass out of my finger with more haste than skill—it tore the hole wider and blood gushed onto the bathroom floor. I wrapped my hand in an ice-filled plastic bag and lay down. Just before losing consciousness, I promised Bear the biggest steak I could find in Ellsworth: “You saved my life,” I told him.
44
Honesty Is the Best Policy
I woke in the muzzy way one does from sleeping in the middle of the day, but after a shower and some stretches, I set out with Bear to buy groceries, including the promised steak.
On our way back to the motel, we detoured past Eddie’s Body Shop. It was late afternoon by now, but the work bay doors were still open.
The Mustang was parked outside the shop, along with a Honda SUV and a Chevy pickup that hadn’t fared well in collisions. Inside, Eddie and another guy were working on a Ford Super Duty. If the Mustang was third on the runway, it would be awhile before I got it back.
When I looked into the car, I saw Eddie had at least cleaned out all the broken glass. The front left tire was flat. I squatted to look at the rim, which had come loose. There was a dent in the driver’s door as well.
Bear let out a short bark: Eddie had emerged from the shop and was standing near us.
“Those windows didn’t get broke from you ending in a ditch, did they? Someone shot at you.”
I stood up. “True enough.”
“Why’d you lie to me? I don’t like that. Makes me think I shouldn’t work on this car, if you’ve got some Chicago mobster chasing you.”
Dead Land Page 28