by Kris Lackey
Bond turned north and pulled into the park’s south entrance, waving at the attendant. Like other cash-strapped state facilities in the region, the park was now operated by the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations. She parked behind some junipers and walked the perimeter in thick brush until she saw the Cobalt idling in a secluded campsite. The park was otherwise deserted. Within a minute, the white Lexus pulled in behind the Cobalt. The angry man got out of the Lexus and sat in the Cobalt’s passenger seat.
Bond shrugged and walked back toward the cruiser. Just another parson on the down-low, hooking up with some city guy he met. Wouldn’t make trouble in Tushka. Satan is waitin’? Maybe. She returned to the sycamore on the Blue, ticketed a gas-patch roustabout and one of the Wapanucka speed demons who so riled Aaron Coblentz.
The hills behind Bromide rose a little above the prairie. Love had almost certainly fled east, into the rough country of Pushmataha—the Ouachitas. But she squirmed at the thought that he might be hiding under her nose.
Without radioing Tish, she pulled onto 7 and headed west toward some isolated reaches of Tar Branch, above Lake Texoma. The gummy asphalt sizzled under her tires. Dust devils buffeted the little islands of sumac and spun up the topsoil a half mile into the sky.
She knew which houses the state narcs were watching for meth doings, and avoided them, choosing instead houses with a better view of them than the crankers had of their neighbors. The first was a time-stained mobile home that once, maybe in the sixties, had been a beige and brown two-tone but was now the color of black mold. It had vomited out rotted furniture, spavined toys, rusted corn cobbers, animal bones. Two matted mongrels lunged at the cruiser, straightening their log-chain tethers. One of them got his teeth under a fender. Bond could hear metal popping. She backed up out of reach, then got out and stood in the yard.
A curtain snapped open, then shut. Bond waited. The dogs writhed. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Sweat coursed down her neck and back. She stood stolidly, fingering the folded mug shot of Austin Love in her palm. She didn’t show paper. People feared cops, but they feared cops with paper more.
Bond’s shadow had visibly moved before the door flew open and a thin woman in a yellow beavers bend wifebeater stepped down onto the single cinder block that served as the front step. The dogs barked maniacally. She had butterfly and dragon tattoos on her chest and arms. She stood with her hands on her hips. A pencil line of tobacco juice rode the crease of her lips.
“What do you wawnt?” she shouted over the dogs.
“Good afternoon, ma’am. I’d like to show you a picture of a man and ask if you’ve seen him around here.” Bond now unfolded the eight-by-ten enlargement and held it toward the woman. She tried to see what the woman’s eyes would do before she spoke, but she was too far away.
The woman whirled back into the doorway and shouted over her shoulder, “I ain’t seen nobody.” She slammed the door.
Who could blame her.
Backtracking to avoid driving in front of the meth house, Bond drove four miles to get three hundred yards. She looked for a name on the freshly painted mailbox but found only the absurd street number, 148625 North Dove Road, that had replaced a simple rural route number. She followed a long driveway paved with discarded asphalt shingles laid in perfect rows like a roof. It ended before a neat blond brick ranch with green cast-iron porch posts. Three holly shrubs grew on either side of the porch, each trimmed into a strangely perfect sphere.
Bond rang the doorbell, which played the opening notes of “Für Elise.” A middle-aged woman with a silver bob opened the door, smiled uneasily, and said, “Good afternoon, Officer. Please come in.” Bond followed her down a short hallway, wondering at her starched lace collar, wool skirt, and white pumps. An outfit like that, she hadn’t seen since she was young—and even then only on elderly ladies. The house smelled like camphor and tapioca.
In the living room, the woman directed her to a blue satin couch with crocheted doilies on the armrests. “Can I get you some tea?”
She means hot tea. Bond stared at a crystal bowl filled with dinner mints. She had never been offered hot tea in her life. It was 107 degrees outside. “No, thank you, ma’am. I’m fine.”
The woman sat in a blue satin wing chair and folded her hands in her lap. “What can I do for you, Officer?”
Bond unfolded the mug shot of Austin Love and held it out. “Have you ever seen this man?”
The woman’s hazel eyes flared, not with recognition but with anger.
“Do you recognize this man?”
“What has he done?”
“Have you seen this man?”
“Oh. I apologize. No, Officer. And if I had, I wouldn’t forget it. Those black teeth! That horrible … leer.”
Bond folded and pocketed the mug shot. “His name is Austin Love. He’s a murder suspect. As far as we know, he’s not in this area.” She handed the woman her card. “If you do see him, please give me a call. And your name, if you don’t mind?”
“Evelyn Hunter.” She opened a drawer on the end table next to her chair and slipped the card inside. “And, Deputy Bond,” she said, reaching farther back into the drawer, “if I do call you …” She pulled out a Smith and Wesson Wonder Nine and laid it on the table. “… it will be to report that I have shot this man on my property.”
Bond stood. “Please call the sheriff’s office. Love is only a suspect.”
Evelyn Hunter stood as well. “This county covers over six hundred square miles. At any given time, how close is the nearest deputy to this house?”
Bond looked at her, said nothing.
“You’re at my house because it’s the closest to that clutch of maggots in the bottom.”
Again Bond didn’t reply.
“So,” Evelyn Hunter said, as she nodded toward the hall.
“So,” Bond said.
Chapter 5
At 5:00 a.m., Maytubby read everything the FBI had learned about Majesty Tate, and then faxed Love’s mug and Tate’s driver’s license photo to all seven Chickasaw convenience stores. He was standing at the entrance to the nation’s Family Life Center at six, waiting for the manager to open up. He set his gym bag down and checked his watch: 6:12. A grasshopper landed on his wrist. The drought was driving them onto irrigated land. In Nuevo Laredo, he had once eaten a whole bag of them. They tasted like chili-fried straw.
By the time the manager opened up, it was too late for Maytubby to lift. He dressed out for a run, all but the shoes. Running barefoot along Broadway or around the Ada airport had got him a couple of ugly cuts and too many goatheads to count, and, of course, it provoked no end of eye rolling and snorts from Jill Milton. So he had located the woman who owned the undeveloped land between the gym and the Canadian River, and got permission to run its cow paths. Now he began and ended each run ducking between strands of barbed wire.
The FBI had not yet located Tate’s next of kin—the parents listed on the California birth certificate she had used to get her New Mexico license. She would have turned twenty-six the day after she was killed. She had spent six months in a foster home when she was eight. At seventeen, she had been arrested for soliciting in Amarillo, Texas. The charge had been dismissed, and her record was otherwise clean.
Her GoPhone listed no contacts and had no record of messages. She had called two other prepaid phones, neither matching an owner and neither still active, and two Oklahoma City motel rooms. One was at the Western Sky, the other at the Old Route 66 Motel. Both 1940s vintage motels were well maintained, red brick with white trim, and both had neon signs featuring a green saguaro cactus, never mind that the closest real saguaro was three states and a thousand miles away. None of the day clerks at either place recognized her photograph. Maytubby Googled the motels.
She had never, under the name Majesty Tate, had a cell phone contract. On one crumpled pink slip of paper, she had written Love’s number, the numbe
r of the pro shop at the Oklahoma City Country Club in Nichols Hills, and the club’s address on Grand Boulevard. None of the clerks or caddies or regulars there when the agent visited recognized her photograph.
An ink pen in her purse was from the Oklahoma History Center, a museum near the state capitol. She had bought the Aveo used from a dealership in Guthrie. The salesman recognized her face and recalled only that she had paid cash, mostly fifties, and that she had exact change, down to the penny. The address on the bill of sale, Maytubby found for himself, was a boarded-up duplex in a decaying precinct of north Oklahoma City. Two weeks before she was murdered, she had moved into the Bromide house, on an old Chickasaw allotment, and paid its owner two months’ rent, again in fifty-dollar bills.
Maytubby ran the little bluff above Canadian Sandy Creek, dodging cow flops and goathead runners. Scissortails and mourning doves flew between dusty oak groves, and down at the bottom he surprised a whitetail buck. It took the opposite bluff in two bounds and was gone.
Majesty Tate clearly drifted with the running underclass. Whereas most drifted west or in circles, she had drifted east. The medical examiner would tell him if she had been using. If so, her connection to Austin Love would be clearer. She paid cash for everything, she used disposable phones, and she called motel rooms. She might have been dealing. Or hooking. Or both. Maytubby noticed that the path he was running had worn a rut into the Permian red bed. A little allegory, he thought, warning him to stop making glib connections between Tate and Love.
What did the motels have in common? They weren’t chains, they were well enough maintained to get AAA endorsements, they were not on interstate highways, they were survivals not revivals, and they both probably owed their survival to nostalgia tourists following the old path of the mother road. They were both on lots that bordered older, respectable neighborhoods. He imagined a beeline between the state capitol and the Oklahoma City Country Club. It nearly struck both motels. Guthrie was thirty miles from the other places. The only connection Maytubby saw: it was the old territorial capital. Sometimes the junk in his head got in the way.
Bromide was more than a hundred miles south of all the other places, which were above the North Canadian. A long-dead town, almost a century removed from its heyday as a trendy resort. Maytubby recalled that it was founded by the headmaster of Wapanucka Academy, a Chickasaw girls’ school. Bindweed shrouded the derelict walls of Bromide’s four hotels. It was located at the end of a state highway with a letter after its number—a letter a ways down the alphabet. And the town’s back was against the hills. The house Tate had chosen was up in those hills.
If she had been running from someone, which she probably always was, she hadn’t run very far from the previous scenes of her life. This was nothing new. People preferred the devil they knew in the next county to the devil they didn’t in Memphis. It seemed Majesty Tate had overlooked the devil in between.
On a rise, Maytubby jogged to a stop, put his hands on his hips. The creep who threatened Jill. Who is he?
He looked down on the Canadian’s broad floodplain. A river so young it hadn’t even made a dent. The white trunks of cottonwoods blazed against the red river sand. A rafter of wild turkeys foraged among them. Feasting on grasshoppers, Maytubby conjectured.
He turned and retraced his route, making a mental list of Love’s pre-Mac buddies as he loped along. He could remember where some of them lived back then. Most were probably gone or dead. Love’s sister, Patty, used to live outside Sulphur with a vile man named Raleigh Creech. One of Love’s uncles lived in Mill Creek, Johnston County.
A junked refrigerator that seemed to be sledding down a cascade of trash in a wash behind the landowner’s house reminded Maytubby of Love’s Coalgate connection. What was that guy’s name? Fox face, widow’s peak, long ears, red hair, pointy nose. Always slinking, there but not there. Contracted with oil-and-gas companies to cut weeds around the wellheads. Wiley—that was it. Maytubby smiled at the mnemonic. Wiley Bates.
Of course, Austin Love might be holed up way east, in the Jack Fork Mountains. Unless they were his Memphis.
Maytubby showered, dressed, and searched Oklahoman obits on his cruiser’s computer. He found two of Love’s old renegade cohort among the dead—no surprise—but not his sister or uncle. Raleigh Creech and Wiley Bates were still among the quick. The slow quick. That left just two petty recidivists he could scout before he officially went on the clock. He called Hannah Bond on his cell. She was at the Downtown Diner on Capitol Street in Tishomingo, two blocks from the old Chickasaw capitol.
“Hey, Bill.”
“What’s for breakfast?”
“Your girlfriend’s a dietitian, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I ain’t sayin’.”
“We’ve been through too much together.”
“Still ain’t sayin’.”
He told her everything he had learned about Majesty Tate.
“Confusing,” she said.
“If you’re up around Mill Creek this morning, could you talk to Love’s uncle? Lives on Sykes Road, on Bee Branch. Name’s Carter Love. Green cottage with a chicken coop in the side yard. And see if he knows where Patty lives.”
“I have to serve a subpoena in Troy. Extra five miles, easy.”
“He’s a speaker. You can try out your Chickasaw pleasantries.”
As Maytubby neared Stratford, orchards of withered peach trees appeared to his left and right. The usual peck baskets lining the stand shelves had shrunk to gallon baskets, and the fruit was small and mottled. Just beyond the town, he turned south on a numbered dirt road and followed it until he found the little red-brick ranch house he remembered from years ago. The automobile carcasses perched on blocks in the yard were exactly the same except for the oak saplings growing out of the trunks and floorboards.
A once-blonde woman of forty or so opened the door and stared through the screen with sleep-addled eyes. She wore a long, tattered Sooners T-shirt as a nightgown. Crossed her arms over her chest and didn’t move to open the screen. Maytubby didn’t recognize her. “Good morning, ma’am. Is Donnie Frederick at home?”
She stared at him. “Which home you mean?” She was awake now. “He always had several, I learned. Drywall job in Sherman, he said. Hayin’ in Marietta, he said.”
She made a moue and raised an eyebrow. He waited for her to continue.
“Followin’ the harvest, he said. Huh! Followin’ his pecker, more like.” She looked to the side and smiled faintly. “He musta took his eye off even that sometime or other, and lost it.” She looked Maytubby in the eye again and started to laugh. “You can’t imagine a man not knowin’ where his pecker’s at … Oh, I forgot. You know Donnie.”
Maytubby smiled.
She opened the screen. “Officer, you want a cup of coffee? Fresh. Cain’s.”
“Sounds good, thanks, but I have to go serve and protect.”
“I th’ew Donnie out more’n a year ago. Out of his own house. I been payin’ the note two years. He was a priceless turd.”
“Do …”
“I got no idea. Believe me, I’d tell you if I knew.”
Maytubby unfolded a photo of Austin Love and held it out. “Have you ever seen this man? He used to run with Donnie.”
She took the photo and brought it close to her face, making a show of being helpful. “Let me think …” She looked into the sky, as if Love might be floating there. She tapped her chin.
Maytubby was impatient to get on to his next rascal. He reached for the photo, and she lifted it out of his reach. “I just might of seen this guy over at Ardmore yersty. I think I did. At a stoplight.” She handed the photo back to him.
Maytubby didn’t believe her. “Do you remember the make, model, or color of the vehicle?”
She gave him the stink-eye. “I thought you were asking my help.” She closed the screen.
“And I am.”
“You thought I was lyin’.”
“If you can recall anything about the vehicle, it would help.”
“Well, I can. It was a old gray pickup.”
Maytubby took an index card with his grocery list on it and pretended to write down what she had said. “That’s good. Thanks.”
The door slammed behind him.
On his way to Wanette, Maytubby reluctantly spread the fib about Love in the old gray pickup way south in Ardmore. There were reasons not to. Officers in the east might pay less attention. Everyone driving such a rig down south would draw the cop stare.
As he waited at an intersection for the cross traffic to pass, a 1966 Ford pickup, gray primer stem to stern, rolled to a stop beside him. “For instance,” Maytubby hissed at himself.
He fought the urge to look into the cab. He looked into the cab. Love was not there. The driver, though. His pale head faced straight forward, a nest of Johnny Rotten copper hair on top, but his left eye was just a click too far over. Maytubby started when he realized the eye was regarding him. He quickly looked up the road in the opposite direction.
Chapter 6
In the rearview mirror of Hannah Bond’s cruiser, the old Chickasaw Nation Capitol, built of local Pennington granite, commanded the hill above the Johnston County Courthouse. It was a stately thing, with its silver cupola and snapping pennant. It buoyed her when she left town, and greeted her when she returned. A public work that was lasting and grand. The new courthouse looked like a tire store.
State 22 threaded some small granite outcrops and crossed the little canyon dug by Pennington Creek. Bond turned north on State 1 and followed the Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks through stands of gnarled red cedars. Rail sidings wandered off toward industrial sand-and-gravel pits hidden by the trees. The shoulder grass was dead.