by Kris Lackey
Several people had told Bond about the red Aveo and the jacked-up Ford, said the pickup had come and gone several times the week before. When she showed them a Photoshopped version of Love’s truck, they all had said the same thing: “That’s it.”
She said again to Coblentz, “Did you see any unfamiliar vehicles on this road?”
“Don’t remember any.”
She showed him the doctored photo.
“Oh, that’n. I thought he was another speed demon from Wapanucka.”
She showed him a red Aveo as well. “Yep, ’member that doodlebug, too.”
Bond took a card from her pocket. “Do you have a phone shanty, Mr. Coblentz?”
“Phone in the barn,” he said.
She handed him the card. “Call me if you remember any other vehicles.”
He gave her a little salute, released the hand brake, and coaxed the gelding down the road. The orange reflective triangle on the buggy disappeared in the white dust.
Bond followed the road, passing Coblentz slowly, twisting up through dusty oaks and sycamores between some spring-fed pools. The road switched back at a crooked, overgrown hall-and-parlor house.
Two days earlier, after an anonymous call about a car door being left open too long, she had stepped past the red Aveo to the house’s open front door and roused a bristling cloud of blowflies that drove her away before she could see what was in the shadowed interior. She batted them away from her face and snorted one out her nose. Folding a Sonic napkin from the cruiser over her face and brandishing a post oak branch, she rushed at the house, just to get it over with.
Before she gained the threshold, something inside fell. Bond dropped the branch, drew her stodgy revolver—Smith and Wesson Model 10—and duckwalked backward to the cruiser. Once behind it, she called for backup.
* * *
“Hannah. It’s Maytubby. Four miles out. I know the house.”
He was returning to Ada from a meeting at the Lighthorse substation in Thackerville. LHP and Johnston County officers were cross-deputized. Maytubby and Bond had trained together at CLEET, the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training.
Maytubby parked a hundred yards from the switchback, took his short-barrel binoculars from the cruiser, and walked into the woods. At the edge of the yard but still in shadow, he trained his glasses on the front doorway and waited for his pupils to adjust. Against the light of the room’s double back window, a peaked silhouette bobbed spasmodically. The shadow looked like a child wearing a legionnaire’s crested helmet.
When he was tucked behind Bond’s cruiser, he showed her the field glasses and shrugged. “I don’t think it’s human,” he whispered.
“Wall of flies. Reeks.”
“Set?”
They split and crossed the yard quickly, guns out. At the edge of his vision, Maytubby saw the silver sneakers and the wild furrow leading to the door. He nodded at Bond to go first. A cloud of green flies billowed out the door, and Maytubby, squinting against the storm, banged his shoulder on the jamb. They halted and stared.
The thing stood on a chair, its outstretched wings filling the room. Gore hung from its beak. It fixed them with one gray-brown eye and hissed like a cat. A young woman’s torso lay on the dining table. Her torn chin was visible at one edge. Her spindly legs, in filthy tight jeans, dangled off the edge.
Bond stared at the child legs for a few seconds, then frowned and raised her pistol.
“Don’t do it, Hannah.”
She sighted, closed her left eye. “You think I’ll disturb this crime scene?”
“It’s not …”
“The nasty raping fucker,” she snarled.
Maytubby looked at her. Her pistol wavered.
Slowly the wings descended and folded, and the bird hopped off the chair. Bond followed it with her pistol, and Maytubby holstered his and backed out of her line of fire. It lurched and rasped, kicking up magazines and cigarette butts with its absurd webbed feet. In the yard, its ascending wingbeats sounded like whiplashes.
Bond holstered her revolver but continued staring into the yard. “I know. Protected species. Discharged-weapon report.”
Maytubby was silent.
“My sister was a protected species.”
“Yes.”
“And you see what walks out the door.”
* * *
Crime-scene tape festooned the crooked house. She parked in the yard and stared into another hall-and-parlor house, in the Winding Stair Mountains, years ago. The Child Protective Services lady saying this was her and her sister’s new foster home. Later, then, beyond the grinning face of her kneeling foster father, her sister’s legs hanging stock-still from a kitchen table.
Maytubby had found the stag-handled knife. FBI Evidence Response wasn’t even at the scene yet. He had just wandered off down the road. Said nada. After the agents had been there a while, they were pissed when he didn’t come back. Then they were really pissed when he did come back. He had already found the knife.
Not until Bond learned that Love had been connected to Majesty Tate did that antler bowie that Maytubby found near the crooked house rattle into place.
Before Love was sent to Mac, she had arrested him in Pecan Bottom for thumping a young woman. He was amped and drunk, screamed at Bond when she kicked in the door, but then stood there swaying, leering at her with eyes the color of concrete. The girl gripped a chair back and held a bloody towel against her nose. “Get that fucking cranker out of this house!” Bond had wished he would go for the knife so she could shoot him. She had last seen it in a personal-effects tray in Tishomingo, when she booked him. The girl left the Johnston Memorial ER and skipped town. Love walked out the jailhouse door and took his bowie with him.
Chapter 3
Renaldo pointed to the OHP cruiser’s little video screen. “That white Cobalt coupe, coming toward the camera. Dream catcher on the mirror. Male driver, no passengers. Elbows out—no AC. We seen that one before?”
Maytubby’s video had been off when he was on the bridge. They were parked on the apron of a long-dead gas station on Old Oklahoma 3 outside Stonewall, a town named for a Confederate general. Maytubby’s ancestors, he knew, had brought their African and Indian slaves with them in Removal. The Chickasaws sided with Jefferson Davis and were roundly punished for it.
“How would we know?” Maytubby said. “Half the cars down here are white Cobalts. I mean, I hope not.”
Renaldo reversed the recording until a white 2004 Cobalt backed up fast toward the camera. Even at a distance, the dream catcher was visible against the front glass. He slowed the recording and paused it when the plate was clear.
On cardboard, in crude bold letters filled in with scribbles of blue ink: lisens lost apply for.
“Pay dirt,” Maytubby said.
Renaldo wheezed a laugh.
“What’s the dealer sticker?”
“Hmm. ‘Bubba’ is the first part. ‘F-U-S-I-L-I-E-R.’ Fusilier. Never heard of him.”
“‘FUSE-lee-ay’—it’s a Cajun name. That dealership’s in Jennings, Louisiana.”
“Okay.” Renaldo stared at him, smiled. “You say so.” He called in the Cobalt to Troop F in Ardmore and Troop E in Durant. “What do you think Bubba’s real first name is?”
“Your great-grandfather mined the Lehigh Seam. What was his first name?”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Guy with an Italian surname from Coalgate? C’mon.”
“Same as mine: Giacamo.”
“So the great-grandsons of the French miners, some of them have the old names?”
“Like Emile Foushee?”
“Calls himself Butch?”
“Tiny.”
“Which mine did Giacamo work?”
“Pinch Along.”
“You think Love’s ride m
ade that lost-license tag to throw us off the scent?”
“‘Lisens lost apply for’? No.”
“Made it to throw someone else off the scent?”
“Somebody would’ve corrected his spelling.”
“Not if that somebody was Love. He never finished fifth grade. The only hard word he can spell is ‘pseudoephedrine.’ Any stolen Cobalts matching?”
Renaldo typed a few words on his cruiser’s laptop, shook his head, typed some more. “No. No recent transfers, either.”
“We’ll see what turns up. Thanks for your help, Jake.” Maytubby got out of the cruiser.
Renaldo whistled the opening bars of “Dueling Banjos.”
“Yeah, I know,” Maytubby said.
He drove back up Oklahoma 48 until he passed Jaydee. Then he turned on his light bar and pulled onto the narrow shoulder. At every driveway and county road intersection, he got out of the cruiser and examined the right-of-way and culverts. The usual Coors cans and Walmart fliers, Chick-O-Stick wrappers, panties, feed sacks. Back in a thicket behind a fence, he saw a rusted half-buried refrigerator, painted with an ad for Hudson’s Big Country Store in Coalgate. The immigrant Giacamo must have bought his dry goods there. A young Adam Richetti, later Pretty Boy Floyd’s partner in crime, stuffed his pockets with some of the five thousand dimes flung one day each year from Hudson’s roof.
Just shy of two miles outside Allen, in failing light, Maytubby saw a rectangle of cardboard torn from an Asics shoe box lying at the lip of a culvert, two loops of duct tape stuck on the logo. He parked on the grass to avoid disturbing any tread marks on the dirt drive over the culvert. Snapping on latex disposables, he slid through sunflowers and Johnson grass down into the bar ditch. Sure enough. He flipped the tag, hoping to find impressions of letters or numbers. But Duct-taper had a light touch. He considered slapping the tag over his Chickasaw Nation tag. Then he considered what the nation’s governor would think if Maytubby passed him in Ada. He slipped the plate into a bag and threw it on the passenger seat. Then he took a small tape measure and a thin digital camera from his uniform pocket, laid a foot of metal tape across each tread mark, and photographed the marks. As he made his way back to Kullihoma Road, he radioed concerned parties.
The stomp grounds were lively. Floods from the GMC heavy wrecker backlit Love’s jacked Ford as it was winched up. A single blue light on the FBI sedan strobed old Nub Jump as he unharnessed his pair of mules and coaxed them into a livestock trailer. Maytubby lowered his window for Chief Fox.
Fox leaned on the cruiser and stared at Jump. “We should sell peanuts,” he said.
“How long’s Nub worn that hat?”
Fox squinted. “Since I was a kid, all I know. Same ratty overalls, too. What kind of hat is that?”
“I believe that is a Cordobés. A Zorro hat.”
“Like I said, we should sell peanuts.”
“FBI get anything in the truck?”
“About fifty empty Marlboro packs. Dried blood on a door handle, floor, and seat. Prints, hair. Rock of something under the floor mat … That the plate won the spelling bee?”
Maytubby handed him the bag. “Could you ask the feds to dust this?”
“Why? So we can get the prints of one more dumb-ass twacker friend of Austin Love?”
“Stereotypes are so harmful. And you, a Native American.”
Fox shook his head and took the bag. “Half. Same as Love.”
* * *
Jill Milton watched Maytubby devour his cold shawarma from a take-out carton. At last, she said, “If we all ate as healthy as you, I’d be out of a job.”
“That’s about as likely as everybody suddenly losing the urge to gamble.”
“Game.”
“Game.”
June bugs clattered against the lamplit windows of Jill’s garage apartment.
“You ever see that mural of the little people in the old hospital?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Some members wanted to move it to the new clinic. They had it cut out of the wall. Before they could move it, some other members said that was a bad idea because it would loose the wee folks to do mischief on the tribe. So the mural sits in its old room, in the dark.”
He folded the last bite of pita bread, chewed a couple of times, and swallowed. “I never saw the little people. Now I’m too old—until the minutes before I die. My grandmother told me she did. You?”
“Who do you think taught me nutrition science? They used to teach some children natural medicine, but they keep up with the times.”
“Got to,” he said. “Or they end up in the lore bin.”
“Sol Stoddard was back. In Paoli, for God’s sake.”
“What kind of audience could he get? I mean, who in Paoli would object to a children’s play promoting good nutrition?”
A snare roll of cicadas rose in the hot night.
“He had a claque. People with signs.”
“Like ‘Diabetes is good for our children’?”
“Try ‘Nanny state brainwashing our children.’ Stoddard also claims the animal characters deliver a veiled assault on hunting and meat eating. And the Eagle Play, because it’s connected to the CDC, is part of a liberal conspiracy to destroy the ‘Oklahoma way of life,’ as he calls it.”
“Any cameras?”
“Just KXII in Ardmore. Nobody from the city.” She broke eye contact for an instant. “There was this guy—aviators, ball cap visor pulled down, red hair. Wore a T-shirt that said ‘Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.’ ‘Tolerance’ in big orange caps with flames rising from the letters. He was yelling”—she shook her fist in the air—“‘The Eagle Play promotes spiritual relativism!’”
“I thought you were going to say ‘barbarous Chickasaw rites.’”
“Stoddard’s going to need Chickasaw votes someday.”
“He hopes. His former district was a hundred miles north. Not doing himself any favors around here.”
Jill Milton nodded, scowling. “Yeah … Well, Brother Tolerance? When I was coming out of the school, he broke away from the posse and stood between me and the parking lot.”
Maytubby lowered his chin a little.
“I stopped, and he walked into my personal space. Then he turned his head away from me and stage-whispered in this weird accent, ‘Brainwashin’ our children is bad enough. But you don’t hardly look Indian. We don’t need no outsiders.’ He turned his head so I could see my face in his glasses, and then leaned just enough toward me so I didn’t have to tilt my head back. He said, ‘Y’heard me?’ Then he backed away a few steps before he turned and walked away.”
The last of the cicadas outside fell silent.
Maytubby’s lips tightened. “That’s crossing a big line, Jill. You think this was just another mouthy prick, or somebody who could be an actual danger to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“So why don’t I ask Fox to assign a Lighthorse escort for you and the Eagle crew?”
“Not now. It would spook the school administrators, and nobody needs that.”
Maytubby paced the apartment for almost a minute, then washed his fork and put it in the drainer. Jill Milton stood beside him at the sink, and they stared out the garage apartment’s window, at the field of sodium lights spreading away from the King’s Road bluff toward Ahloso. Her tiny window unit labored against the evening heat.
“Tell me you didn’t track Austin Love in your bare feet.”
“Okay.”
She pursed her lips. “He’s a major thug?”
“Went to Mac for second-conviction meth possession with intent. Half-dozen misdemeanor battery convictions on his sheet.”
“No weapons?”
Maytubby shook his head.
“So he’s a middling thug.”
“Depends. H
annah Bond arrested him in Tish once for pounding a woman. Woman skipped.”
“Oh. Considering what happened to her baby sister, I’m surprised Hannah didn’t just haul him out in the Twelvemile Prairie and shoot him.”
“Somebody better find him before she does.”
She touched his forearm. “Can you see that beautiful valley, or do you only see a landscape of violent memories?”
“When I’m with you, all I see is the beautiful valley.”
“Good.”
Chapter 4
Bond liked to park her cruiser where Blue River crosses Oklahoma 7 on a long straightaway near the Deadman Springs Road intersection. Sitting there in the shade of a sycamore, she could clock what vehicles came by, and otherwise just watch the clear river spill over a limestone shelf. In a land of sluggish red-mud rivers, the idyllic Blue stuck with you.
She had stopped the only white Cobalt. It was owned by its driver, a redheaded pastor from Tushka whose eyes were a little too far apart. He handed Bond a tract before he drove away. It had a crude drawing of a glowering red devil on the front, above the caption “satan is waitin’.” She crumpled it up and stuffed it in the ashtray. He hadn’t waited for her.
The next car that passed in the same direction was doing eight over. Not excessive, but the driver was on his cell and didn’t slow when he passed her. She scooted off the grass, lit up her strobes, and followed the white Lexus ES, pretty far back, for half a mile. Normally, she would have turned on her siren, but she was curious to see where he was going. From time to time, he took his free hand off the wheel and hammered the air.
When the Lexus crossed into Atoka County, Bond switched off her strobes and fell back a little more to see where the angry man was going. Then she saw the Cobalt a half mile ahead. The angry man slowed. He also put down his phone and stopped waving. When the Cobalt turned right on Park Road, toward Boggy Depot State Park, the Lexus followed. Bond didn’t. The angry man might be oblivious, but the preacher had been tipped.
The next road south, Wards Chapel, would take her to Boggy Depot Road—quickly, if she broke the law. In four minutes, she struck the ghost town. Saw no cars, only a weed-choked cemetery and a few stone foundations. Maytubby had told her that his ancestors, and his fiancée’s, had survived smallpox in a Removal camp here.