An Obvious Fact

by Craig Johnson

  “I’m not sure, but I’m thinking it must have something to do with guns or drugs.”

  Engelhardt breathed a sigh. “Usually does.”

  “The problem is, how do you haul enough of something on a motorcycle to make it worth killing somebody for?”

  “How do you know it was something on the bike and not just something personal?”

  “Mike Novo ran the scene, and he says it was weight or possibly somebody else on the bike.”

  “Mike would know. Who found him, anyway?”

  “A young woman by the name of Chloe Nance.”

  “Bob Nance’s daughter?”

  “Yep.”

  “He’s kind of a big dog around these parts. Is that the only connection, the daughter finding the Torres kid?”

  “Maybe not. I came into possession of Bodaway’s phone, and she had called him a number of times before the incident.”

  “Chloe.” He tilted his head. “She had a drug problem herself.”

  Vic sat on the front of the Challenger. “Hell, heroin is a hundred and ten dollars a gram, with crack cocaine at six hundred; methamphetamine is sixteen hundred dollars an ounce, and LSD three thousand a gram. In a single set of saddlebags the kid could’ve been carrying millions.”

  I shook my head. “Funny enough, he doesn’t have any dealings with drugs on his rap sheet.”

  My undersheriff seemed incredulous. “Nothing?”

  “Nope.”

  Irl listened as another siren rose in the distance and then quieted. “What was the other thing you mentioned?”

  “Guns—he’s got a record of gun running.”

  Engelhardt made a face. “I don’t hardly think you could carry enough guns on a motorcycle to make it worth attempting to take somebody’s life. Any history of dealings in antiquarian weapons? I mean, he wasn’t carrying around Jesse James’s pistols or something?”

  “No, just street stuff.”

  “Then I think you’re going to have to stick with drugs. Who knows, maybe he’s broadening his horizons—Lord knows the money’s better.” He tipped his hat back and studied the two of us. “Now, maybe you can tell me why it is you were going a hundred and fifty miles an hour on my highway?”

  Vic smiled, webbing her fingers together and cracking her knuckles. “One seventy.”

  Irl looked at the Challenger with renewed respect. “This big dude’ll do that, huh?”

  Vic ran her hand over the hood as if petting an oversized cat. “Advertised at just under two hundred.”

  I interrupted. “Lola was driving over the speed limit by a somewhat wide margin, and my undersheriff decided to provide a decoy to keep her from going back to slam.”

  “I see.”

  “You’re not going to arrest us, are you?”

  He sighed. “No, I’m just trying to think of how to get you out of here. I could call in the situation, but I’d just as soon not owe them a favor.”

  Vic pushed off the Dodge and stood. “Trade cars with us; then, if they pull you over, you can say you found the ditched car and are impounding it.”

  He shook his head at her. “Boy, if you want to know how to break a law, ask a cop.” He laughed. “How do I get my car back?”

  “We’ll drive it to Rapid tomorrow and pick up the Dodge; by that time the heat will have simmered down.”

  “That’s all fine and well for you, young lady, but what about me? I’m going to get pulled over by every highway patrolman between here and my impound.”

  “And then they’ll owe you a favor for pulling you over and wasting your time.”

  He turned to me. “She’s got an answer for everything, huh?”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  “Well, speaking of favors.” He hitched his thumbs into his duty belt. “Walt . . .”

  “Yep, I know.”

  “Do you? Like I said before, this is the biggest week of my year, and instead of paying notice to the things that require my attention, I am continuing to babysit you and your staff. Now, I appreciate you taking care of the investigation for those fellows up in Hulett with this hit-and-run, but it’s not in my county, not my state, and not my problem.”

  “I’m aware of that, Irl.”

  After a second, he smiled with one corner of his mouth. “You goin’ all cowboy on us?”

  I shook my head. “No. None of this was planned. We’ll try and be a little more circumspect.”

  “I’d appreciate it, at least for the next week.” He tossed the Tahoe keys to Vic and then pointed at her. “Not one scratch, young lady.”

  She crossed her heart. “Hope to die.”

  “Where are the keys to this ridiculous conveyance?”

  “In it.”

  He paused. “You had this planned out all along?”

  She smiled again. “You bet your ass.”

  He shook his head and walked around, calling out before climbing the rest of the way into the car, “I’ll be heading south on Crook City Road, so you head north and in Whitewood you can jump on 34 to Belle Fourche; then it turns into 24 in your godforsaken state and takes you straight into Hulett.” He started to duck his head but came back up with one last warning. “Keep ’er under the speed of sound, would you?”

  • • •

  As we drove through the bucolic beauty of western South Dakota, Vic caught me glancing at the clock on the dash of the souped-up Tahoe. “What, you’ve got an appointment?”

  “I was invited to a benefit trap shooting competition up at the Hulett golf course.”

  “By who?”

  “None other than Bob Nance.”

  Vic navigated the sweeping turns of the Bear Lodge National Forest. “Oh, la de da.”

  I pulled my hat off, rested it on my lap, and leaned back in my seat. “I’m thinking it’s something I should do.”

  “I assume you can bring a guest?” She glanced at me. “So, are we doing this because we’re good citizens or because we want to give the daughter a look?”

  “Well, there’s something going on; I’m just not sure what. I mean, what was she doing out on the road at that time of night, and why was she calling him so many times?”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “Surprisingly, I did.”

  “And the answer?”

  “Noncommittal, but her father mentioned that he’d been running interference on a potential relationship for almost a year now.”

  “A year?”

  “Eight months.”

  “So, this isn’t just some met-him-in-a-bar-and-took-him-home-and-clean-his-plugs-and-blow-out-his-lines kind of thing.”

  I turned my hat over and looked at the band with the letters of my name faded gray. “I guess not.”

  “You said this Bodaway character was from Arizona?”

  “Tucson area.”

  “And she’s from here?”

  “Well, I guess lately Los Angeles—aspiring actress.”

  “And Daddy was here?”

  “I suppose.” I was starting to see what she was getting at. “So, how did California and Arizona hook up, and, more important, how did Big Dog break it up from Hulett?” She stepped on the accelerator. “And it’s been going on for eight months? That’s a lot of driving time in that three-way.”

  “Yep.”

  “Well then, let’s go shooting.”

  A few minutes later she made the left heading up the plateau to the Golf Club at Devils Tower clubhouse and the packed parking lot overshadowed by the massive MRAP, now fully decorated with the emblems of the Hulett Police Department and the name PEQUOD on the rear.

  “What is that?”

  “Oh, just a little gift from Bob Nance to the local constabulary.”

  “We need one of those.”

  “No, we don’t.”


  The construction I’d seen the other night was now a series of platforms arranged at the edge of the cliffs looking back toward the snaking Belle Fourche River and the town. We got a few strange looks as Vic parked the Pennington County sheriff’s vehicle in the NO PARKING area—the wrong county and the wrong state.

  She shut the car door and came around to meet me in the front. “So, we’re going to assume that Henry’s all right?”

  “He’s a big boy and can take care of himself.”

  “Uh-huh.” Vic scanned the assembled crowd and checked out the high and low towers on each end of the elaborate decking. “What the hell is all this, anyway?”

  “The original discipline back in the 1900s was called ‘trap’ for the cages they used to hold the pigeons in before releasing them.”

  “And blowing them out of the sky.”

  “Um, yep. With fluctuating sensibilities, the sport switched over to clay pigeons.”

  “The ashtrays?”

  I nodded. “They are even biodegradable these days. Anyway, the sport evolved further, taking the name ‘skeet,’ which, oddly enough, came from Gertrude Hurlbutt in Dayton, Montana, who won a hundred dollar magazine contest with the word that’s derived from the Scandinavian for ‘shoot.’”

  She stopped and, shaking her head, studied me. “I am consistently stunned by the shit in your head.”

  I looked for a place to check in. “They used to do it in a circle, but that proved awkward for spectators.”

  “I bet.”

  “The typical course spans one hundred and eighty degrees and has ten to fifteen different shooting stations.” I spotted an event table to the right and began angling that way like a pulling guard, with Vic following closely. “And now we have sporting clays, which started in England and spread here in the ’70s. They are laid out to simulate the unpredictability of live-quarry shooting with different trajectories, angles, elevations, speeds, and distances, usually on a trail.”

  We got to the table, and Vic studied the elaborate setup, which looked almost like a cliff dwelling. “So, golf with shotguns.”

  “I guess.” I stood at the table and waited until the man I’d met the previous night finished up with the shooter in front of me. He shifted a piece of paper to his cohort, Frack, as I glanced around for Nance. “Mr. Frick.”

  “Sheriff.”

  “I was invited by Mr. Nance to participate in the tournament.”

  He sighed and ducked his suntanned face into the popped collar of his black polo shirt. “What’s your name again?”

  “Longmire, Walt Longmire.”

  He studied the sheet, flipped a few pages, and then looked back up at me again, this time with a smirk. “You’re not on the list.”

  “Is Mr. Nance around?”

  He looked over his shoulder. “He’s probably at the shooter’s table getting ready to compete.”

  “Well, is there any way to ask him?”

  “Not me; he gets real serious when he’s shooting.” He glanced past me at my undersheriff as she watched the participants approaching the different stations. “All the shooters have registered, including the alternates—so there isn’t any room anyway.”

  I nodded, just as happy not to compete. “Okay, but if you could let him know I’m here and that I tried, I’d appreciate it.”

  He nodded and glanced at his friend. “Frick and Frack, huh? I’ve heard that my whole life; do you know where it comes from?”

  “They were a pair of Swiss skaters who came to the U.S. back in 1937; they were in the Ice Follies shows and became a household phrase.”

  He stared at me. “Before my time, pops.” I nodded and we started to surge our way back through the crowd as he called after us, “Hey, I said there weren’t any spots in the men’s bracket, but we had somebody drop out in the women’s, so do you think your friend would like to shoot?”

  Vic looked at him and then tilted her head back—showing off the elongated canine tooth. “Fuck yeah.”

  8

  Not for the first time in our collective lives, we needed a shotgun.

  Lucky for us Chief Nutter was shooting in the second round, and even more fortunately, he was a small man and had extra equipment, including a lovely 332 Remington that had been cut down an inch, making it a perfect fit for the Terror. While the first-round shooters peppered the air with pellets and the hillside with broken pottery, Vic tried on Nutter Butter’s old shooting vest, which, with a little adjustment, fit like a dream.

  “I need my shooting gloves.”

  “Where are they?”

  She looked at me as if I were the raw recruit who’d just been brought up from stupid. “They’re on the seat of the Tahoe with my Flyers hat. Could you get that for me, too?”

  “Anything else?”

  She examined the beautiful over-and-under. “Lessons?”

  When I got there, Dougherty was studying the SUV as if it had dropped out of the sky. “What are you doing with Irl Engelhardt’s car?”

  “It’s a long story.” I tossed the gloves in the orange and black hat. “You stuck doing crowd control or can you watch the competition?”

  “I can’t. I’ve got to move around and keep people from getting into trouble. Hey, I saw your dog down at the Ponderosa Café with Henry and Lola.” He cocked his head. “The conversation seemed pretty intense.”

  “I bet.” I started back. “Well, you might want to try to see some of the tournament—Vic’s shooting.” When I got back to the competition, there was a group around my undersheriff, all of them giving her advice.

  Vic nodded and smiled the way she did when she wasn’t listening. I arrived with her equipment, and she pulled her Broad Street Bullies hat down low, just above her space-age Oakley Radarlock sunglasses.

  She thanked everybody for the pointers, hooked her arm in mine, and looked at the late afternoon sun. “Okay, what the hell am I supposed to do—hit the little ashtrays?”

  “Yep, and make a visual connection with the target—keep a good line with it, don’t start low when you’re shooting high. The better you get set up, the more efficient you become.”

  “Got it.”

  “Attack the target line but don’t rush.”

  “Got it.”

  “Stay loose and lead fast. Those ashtrays are moving pretty quick.”

  “Got it.”

  “Have fun.”

  She nodded, pulling the gloves on and wrapping the Velcro around her wrists. “I always have fun with a gun in my hands.”

  I followed her back to where Chief Nutter was polishing the proffered weapon. “Where’d you get that antique, Bill?”

  “Oh, my wife bought it for me before we got divorced—she got the house and I kept my guns. No harm no foul.” He looked at the sheen sparkling off the stock. “It ain’t nothin’ too fancy, just a working man’s gun, but she’s true and shoots straight with no idiosyncrasies, which is more than I can say about my ex-wife.” He handed the shotgun to Vic.

  Vic held it like a baby, smiled at the old chief, and then turned toward the assembled competitors with a predator’s eye. “Who am I up against?”

  “Some of the best shooters in all of the upper Midwest.” He pointed at a blonde woman with a straw cowboy hat. “Connie Evans, two-time national champion from Sioux Falls.” He gestured to a dark-haired woman. “Patricia Frontain out of Chicago, teaches at the National Sporting Clay Association. And that cool drink of water on the end is Annemarie Potter, who can out-shoot most of the men here.” He tiptoed to see the others. “Raye Lankford, all-Midwest, and Kelly McBride on the end down there won it all last year.”

  I nudged her shoulder. “Scared?”

  She barked a laugh. “Hell with that; I’m used to targets that shoot back.”

  Carefully watching how and what the other women were doing, she joined them with th
e Remington’s butt cupped in her hands, which were laced at her crotch.

  There seemed to be an unstated pecking order, with Evans going first. She was good, very good, catching the targets on a perfect line, graceful and balanced. The Frontain woman was faster but clipped one of the clays in a double and you could feel the others sensing a weakness. The tall woman, Potter, was a natural but didn’t keep a good line with the target, and I could see that she could be beaten—so did Vic. Lankford was a short blonde whose shooting was flawless, but she didn’t seem as bloodthirsty as the rest, and that lack of competitiveness might be her downfall later in the shoot. McBride shot like Evans and was a problem.

  Like a nervous groom, I watched as Vic stepped up to the station and carefully raised the over-and-under.

  The puller lifted the remote that would signal the high and low houses and spoke in a loud voice: “Ready?”

  All the other shooters had barked their command, almost as if the added impetus might help them in destroying their nemeses, but Vic was loose and draped around her weapon like a gunfighter. Although the place was almost silent, I had to listen carefully to hear the word drifting out like a sigh of foregone conclusion. “Pull.”

  Firing points at one and six launched the two targets like miniature flying saucers, and they’d no sooner gotten to their separate trajectories than they both disappeared in two sequential blasts that almost sounded as one.

  The chief leaned over to me. “That was her taking her time?”

  “I guess.”

  He whistled quietly. “Shee-it.”

  Evans, McBride, and Vic graduated to the next level. The other shooters were talking, but Vic, with the Remington on her shoulders, stood looking into the distance like a major league pitcher throwing a shutout.

  • • •

  Bob Nance was in the finals of the men’s competition but had made time to come over to where Chief Nutter and I were standing. Now leaning on the steel divider that separated the contestants from the hoi polloi, he squinted at me. “You bring a ringer to my tournament?”

  “It’s her first time.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope, but she’s got experience with shooting things. Four brothers who . . .” I paused and then started over. “Three brothers who are active-duty police officers, and a father who’s the chief of detectives north back in Philadelphia.”