by Kris Lackey
She made short work of the subpoena. She hadn’t told the dispatcher or the sheriff about Carter Love. She was supposed to be taking donations from the speed demons of Wapanucka. Maytubby’s directions were exactly enough, as always. Just after Sykes Road crossed Bee Branch on a little plank bridge, Carter Love’s green cottage appeared on the right. A row of spindly bois d’arc trees broke the south wind. A little elevated coop of rabbit wire and plywood scraps held some Iowa blues, which fretted when Bond walked across the yard.
Carter Love opened the door before she knocked. He was shorter than the deputy, well made, with a dense thatch of silvering hair. The nephew’s strong facial structure was softened in the uncle.
“Chokma?” Bond said in her best night-class Chickasaw. She didn’t make eye contact. Maytubby had told her how hard it was for him to unlearn this habit of respect.
“Hohmi. Ishnako?” Love smiled faintly.
“Hohmi. Anchokma akinnih. Yakoke. Deputy Bond Sa holhchifoat.”
“It’s hot already,” Love said. “Would you like a glass of tea?”
“Yes, thank you,” Bond said.
“Have a seat, Deputy.”
Love set a sweating blue metal tumbler in front of Bond and then sat down in a cowhide chair with horn armrests. The shade on the lamp beside his chair was printed with cattle brands.
“You a cattleman, Mr. Love?” She nodded at the lampshade.
He turned in his chair and craned his neck to see where she was pointing. After studying the shade a few seconds, he turned back to Bond. “I never looked at that lamp before. Huh. That … and this”—he pointed at the chair with his thumb—“came to me when my father passed away. No, I retired last year from the federal government. Forty-two years at the park in Sulphur—Platt National when I started, Chickasaw Recreation Area now. All the creeks in there are dry this summer.”
Bond nodded, listened to the hens clucking. “Mr. Love, I’m working on a case with the Lighthorse.”
“Which man?”
“Sergeant Maytubby.
“William?”
“Yes.”
“I talked to him at the Nation Festival in Tishomingo year before last. A gentle boy. Quick. Both ways. I knew his inki’.” Bond couldn’t read what Love thought about the father.
“Mr. Love, Sergeant Maytubby and I need to talk to …”
Love began to nod.
“… your nephew Austin.”
Love watched her mildly. “Austin has enlarged my circle of friends in law enforcement.”
Bond smiled.
“I already knew the skins.”
She laughed.
“Austin’s ishki passed, or you would be talking to her.” He paused. “This is not about that young woman in Bromide.”
“Yes.”
Love trained his eyes on the wall beside Bond’s head. “He’s not here, Deputy. I haven’t seen him. I don’t know where he is. My friends in law enforcement always know more about his buddies and his doings than I do.”
“His sister Patty?”
Love shook his head. “Last I knew, she was still with that bum Creech.”
Bond finished her tea and stood up. Love kept his seat and looked up at her.
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Love. And the tea.”
“What I said about Austin is true. But so is this: he was here.”
Hannah Bond sat back down.
“The night that girl was killed—if she was killed at night. I saw his dinosaur tracks in my yard. I saw the fuel gauge in my pickup. Saw where he wiped his handprints off the filler cap. And he didn’t leave a siphon hose lying around.”
“He ever done that before?”
“No.”
Has he visited you or anyone in your family since he was released from prison?”
“Not me. Nobody else I know of.”
“Do you mind if I photograph the tread marks?”
“No.”
Bond stood again. This time, Love rose with her. “Yakoke.”
He nodded.
Until she got the Bromide turnoff behind her, Bond couldn’t think about calling Maytubby. Only when she pulled the cruiser under her accustomed sycamore on the Blue could she relax.
Maytubby answered. “Pork sausage and biscuits and pepper gravy.”
“I still ain’t sayin’.”
“You’re a hard woman, Hannah Bond.”
“I interviewed Carter Love.”
“How was your Chickasaw?” “I ain’t sayin’.”
“What did you learn?”
“Austin paid his uncle’s truck a visit the night we think Tate was killed. Siphoned off most of a tank.”
“Carter’s old heap, Austin’ll be driving with rusty gas. Might make him easier to catch. Uncle see him do it?”
“No. Huge-ass tire prints in the sand. I’ll send you photos. Came from the east, left to the east.”
“Back to State One. No rain in months, so no mud prints to follow.”
“So Austin was either broke or didn’t want to be seen at a gas station—or both.
“Or it was just late at night and he knew where to get free gas. Buffalo omelet with a cornbread muffin?”
“You got to start eatin’, man.”
Chapter 7
The rusted camelback trusses of the Canadian bridge, looming above burr oaks and sycamores, weren’t going to restore his runner’s high. Maytubby had always felt superstitious when he snaked through the shadowy bosk on the narrow approach to the bridge, as if the present and its citizens were being erased behind him. It wasn’t only that the onetime railroad bridge was old, a relic of a time just before statehood, when the federal government had almost completed its demolition of the Chickasaw Nation. More that it was the only visible man-made thing, and it was really long and tall and skinny—a Gothic cage worthy of Tim Burton.
The opposite approach was blind, the bridge one lane, so Maytubby switched on his strobes. Once he was across, in the Citizen Potawatomie Nation, he turned them off and sped over a little rise toward Wanette. A BIA commission freed him to move across Indian national borders.
Sully Wolf and Austin Love, Maytubby knew, had shared a cell more than once before Love waded deep into meth. People said they broke enough cues in southeast Oklahoma to let the owner of Ada Billiards Supply retire early. But they hadn’t made any friends among the small-town docs summoned in the wee hours to stitch up their victims’ scalp wounds.
Maytubby had heard conflicting Wolf sequels. Ol’ Sully went straight, runs a little construction bidness out of his pickup—salt of the earth now. Ol’ Sully took the straight and narrow for a spell, then backslid, then reformed again. He had inherited his mother’s territorial house, built on a Potawatomie allotment between Wanette and Asher. Maytubby saw the dogtrot cabin, a breezeway down its middle, through a grove of pecans planted long ago. It hadn’t seen a paintbrush in living memory. Wolf had replaced a few planks, and the fresh wood gleamed yellow. His woodpile for the coming winter was already eight feet high in the middle. A pickup—an old, gray pickup, Maytubby grimly noted—was parked across the dogtrot’s gap. Shaky block letters on the door spelled out “wolf carp.”
There was a plausible front door on each side of the dogtrot, so Maytubby knocked on both. From the hearth side, he heard some commotion. A deep voice shouted, “Minute!”
Soon, a wooden peg traveled up a groove in the door, and Maytubby gaped at it. When the door opened, Wolf’s frame filled the whole space. His little green bloodshot eyes spun freckles across his cheeks and down into his Teddy Roosevelt mustache. The ’stache softened his aspect and rendered his once-feral eyes almost kindly.
“You have a wooden latch,” Maytubby said.
Wolf looked at the peg in the groove a full three seconds. Then he looked down at Maytubby out of the corner of his ey
e and said drolly, “I didn’t steal it, and if I remember right, I didn’t whack anybody with it. You gonna arrest me for possession?”
Maytubby was about to say he had never seen a wooden latch that wasn’t on a gate or in a museum. “You’ve kept the house intact,” he said.
Wolf continued to stare at the latch for some time before he looked at Maytubby again. “I don’t like to bring my work home,” he said. Maytubby thought he was joking, but waited for a sign before he laughed. Wolf finally smiled.
Maytubby tried a yes-or-no question: “You seen Austin since he got out of Mac?”
It didn’t work. Wolf now stared out over the pecan grove like a ship’s captain surveying the cold North Atlantic from his pilothouse. A mockingbird began to pitch a fit.
“What’s he done?”
“I need to talk to him. There was a murder down by Tishomingo. Young woman.”
The South Canadian now became the object of Wolf’s contemplation. Maytubby furtively checked his watch. The earth turned on its axis.
“Huh,” Wolf said.
Talking to anyone else, Maytubby would have thought petit mal.
“He started pushin’ that whiz, he got mean.” He saw Maytubby looking at him. “-er.”
“Have you seen him, Sully?”
Wolf folded his arms across his chest. That was a yes. But where? Maytubby watched the little eyes to see where he was looking. South and not east. Most of a minute passed. To the west, an AWACS C5-A descended for its final to Tinker AFB.
“He ain’t been here.”
“You stopped running with him a long time ago.”
“You got that right.”
Maytubby worked that vein. “He went down pretty fast.”
Wolf rubbed the stubble on his chin, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did.”
A hot breeze ruffled native elm volunteers clumped around the yard. “Murdered a girl, you say?”
“Looks that way.”
“Huh.” Wolf shook his head, stubbed his boot on the porch planks. “Bad.”
“Bad.”
Wolf walked to the edge of the porch and exhaled loudly, as if to clear his throat of all moral obstructions. “I finished a job in Stonewall yesterday evenin’. Had a few at Hoyt’s out on old Three toward Tupelo. I was takin’ a piss and saw him out the back window. He was in the passenger seat of a old Dodge pickup—kind with the google eyes. Gray. Talkin’ to the driver and another guy standin’ in the lot. I didn’t reconize any of ’em. None of ’em come inside. They all left. Guy standin’ left in a little white car.”
Wolf didn’t look too pleased with himself. He did not want to pick the vehicles out of a lineup on the LHP cruiser’s computer. It made his snitching too real. But he did. The pickup was a 1966 Dodge D100. The white sedan, Maytubby didn’t need to be told: a 2004 Cobalt.
Wolf got out of the cruiser. It was the first thing he had done quickly. He stalked toward his house. Through the window of the cruiser, Maytubby said, “You think he would hang with Bates or Creech?”
Wolf pointedly shrugged his massive shoulders. He went in the house, slammed the door, and dropped its wooden latch.
* * *
By the time Maytubby pulled into the parking lot of the Johnston Education Building in Ada, he had radioed everyone who needed to know that Love had been seen in the gray Dodge pickup in Stonewall. Chief Fox understood that his investigator would be in the field all day.
As he was now, watching Jill Milton’s car turn onto Ninth Street. Her fierce smile cut the air a block away. He frowned severely, made the Halt! gesture, and motioned her into a parking space.
“Officer, what have I done?”
“You don’t know. Yet another reason you shouldn’t be on the road.”
“Where should I be?” she said, getting out of her car.
“Forging the ideals of our nation?”
“How about canning the chow-chow of our nation?”
A hot wind carried the scent of Johnson grass. American and Chickasaw Nation flags whipped on a metal standard, their snaps pinging.
“Ah, the demonstration kitchen. We eat what we can, and what we can’t, we can.”
“We’re taping for Chickasaw TV today.”
“Woo. You been practicing your flashy canning moves, Doctor?”
“Unceasingly.”
“Just so you keep things in perspective. Canning is not the only thing in life.”
“That’s what you said about low-salt cooking.”
“Funny, the woman I had lunch with at Mazen’s—not noted for its low-sodium menu—looked a lot like you.”
“Will she be there today?”
Maytubby took her forearm in his palm and rubbed it with his thumb. “Sorry, Jill. This morning, one of Austin Love’s old pack told me he saw Love in Stonewall last night.”
“Is that what they call a hot tip?”
“Not for the last forty years.”
“Are you going to tighten the noose?”
“If this is 1965.”
“What do you say?”
“Somebody told us where the suspect was, and now we’re going to see if we can find him somewhere around there.”
“You would have been a lot sexier in 1965.”
“So would you. Panty hose were scarce.”
She smiled and looked away, gnawed her thumbnail. “People got your back somewhere around there?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Hannah Bond?”
“Not unless Love’s gone into Johnston County.”
“Jake Renaldo?”
“If OHP has put him somewhere around there. I’ve got Lighthorse and Pontotoc County cops and state police.”
“Like what’s-his-name, the Goober.”
“Katz.”
“Reassuring.”
“Katz is okay. Self-awareness is not essential in law enforcement. In fact …” He bent over and looked in the cruiser’s side-view mirror, ran his hand through his thick black hair.
She bit her lip and kicked him, side of the foot, seat of his britches.
They laughed and grabbed each other’s hands. She gave him a look that told him to be careful.
“I will,” he said.
They turned away from each other. As Maytubby opened his cruiser’s door, she said, “Hey!” and pointed down Ninth Street. “I’ve seen that car somewhere.”
He followed her hand and saw a new white Lexus ES accelerating west. Waxed and new, it stood out in Ada. They watched it disappear.
“Call me if you remember where.”
“I will.”
Chapter 8
The twists and narrow bridges of Old Oklahoma 3 spoiled Maytubby’s time to Coalgate, but it had to be—Austin Love had already shown that he preferred the old road’s scrubby camouflage and easy escape routes to the high, sunny, well-mown new version. As leaning bollard stumps snapped past his window, Maytubby fought the impulse to take this or that road trailing up a shaggy hillside. It was the difference between a hunch and an informed hunch.
Hoyt was picking up empties and chip bags in his empty parking lot. Maytubby didn’t have to show him a picture of Love, and Hoyt already had phone numbers for law enforcement agencies from the Stonewall Police to Interpol. In the forty-some years he had owned the bar, he claimed to have called all of them at least once. “I ain’t seen him, Bill. I eighty-sixed him a week ago. Again. Give you a ring if he turns up, which I hope he doesn’t.”
“’Preciate it, Hoyt.”
Old 3 didn’t have a sign marking the boundary between the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, but the Coal County sign stood in for one. The Choctaw tribal police knew that Maytubby would be nosing around their bailiwick. And if it meant someone besides them would be dealing with Love, he was welcome to it.
After th
e old road disappeared into US 75, Maytubby looked for Jake Renaldo’s cruiser in its usual concealments. He spied it in a stand of elms near Haworth Road, just outside the Coalgate city limits.
“I was hoping to find Katz here,” Maytubby said.
“Even though you’re in Coal County?”
“Yeah.”
“Phoo-oo!”
“Close. But I know Katz. He’s a friend of mine. And believe me, Jake, you’re no Katz.”
“Tidings of great joy.”
“Wiley Bates still live across from the South liquor store?”
Renaldo looked south, frowned, and looked back at Maytubby.
“Bates?”
“Used to hang with Love. Roustabout.”
“Can you believe Love didn’t head off into the Jackfork?”
“Still might have. Only an hour away. Wiley Bates. Redhead, widow’s peak, pointy nose, looks like a fox only dumber.”
“Ferret, more like. I know the guy. Looks like a ferret, only meaner.”
“Ferrets aren’t red.”
“Well, Wiley Bates doesn’t have a long bushy tail, either.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No, I don’t.”
Cicadas droned in the elms above the dusty cruisers.
“Does he still live across from the South Broadway liquor store?”
“I don’t know that, either. Why don’t you look him up on your Lighthorsemobile computer?”
“I was giving you the chance to look good.”
“Thanks.”
“Katz would’ve known where Bates lives. And he would’ve known he looks like a fox.”
“Katz doesn’t know where the president of the United States lives. And he would have said this dude looks like a boar hog.”
“Well, then, do you know where the well sites are clustered in Coal County?”
“The whole county is one big cluster. It’s got a big red sweet-spot circle around it on the Woodford Shale map. ’Nother five years, that”—he looked at the ground around them—“will look like a prairie dog town. Quite a few out southwest of Lehigh, though. And talk to Lorenza Mercante. She just bought that South liquor store. Or …” Renaldo shrugged. “You can sit here till Viezer comes on at five.”