An Obvious Fact

by Craig Johnson

  I stood up. “Consider yourself untold, then.”

  “Good.” He nodded down the street. “I am now on my way to the Pondo for lunch if you two would like to join me.”

  “Thanks, but I think we’re going to go listen to a new CD I’ve got.”

  “Who’s on it?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Roger that.” He started to walk off but then paused. “Just so we’re clear: if this turns out to be the case of the century, I’m going to want back in and with full credit for how magnificently I coordinated the whole thing.”

  “Of course.”

  He waved and turned his back on us in more ways than one, disappearing into the crowded street.

  I turned to Vic. “The brotherhood of blue.”

  “No shit.” She glanced behind her. “What the hell is this thing I’m sitting on?”

  “It’s an MRAP, or mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, the centerpiece of the Hulett Police Department’s motor pool.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.” I pulled the DCI envelope from my jacket pocket. “And believe it or not, it has a CD player.”

  • • •

  Fortunately, Chief Nutter hadn’t seen fit to remove the keys from the Pequod, probably because even with the keys most people wouldn’t know how to start the damned thing.

  The CD player was proving to be almost as difficult. “Where do you suppose the volume is?”

  She studied the dash along with me. “Maybe the key needs to be turned to accessory?”

  “I thought it was.”

  She glanced around the cab of the oversized military vehicle. “Why in the world would this thing have a sound system?”

  “Nutter ordered it with all the bells and whistles.”

  She reached overhead to a console and a button that read AUDIO and flipped the switch. “Wonder what this does?” Her voice echoed off the building in front of us as the PA system projected her words over the valley. “Oh shit. . . .” Which also carried through town.

  I reached up and flipped the toggle switch. “I don’t think that’s it.” I looked at the dash again. “How about I just stick the thing in and see what lights up?”

  “Always been my method of operation.”

  I ignored the remark and looked for the slot where the disc might be inserted, finally seeing what could’ve easily been mistaken for a design element. The slot accepted the CD, and it slowly disappeared.

  She lodged her feet up on the dash, her Doc Martins in their usual position. “That it?”

  “That, or I just lost the only copy we’ve got.”

  There was a popping noise and then someone counting. “One, two, three . . . testing one, two, three.”

  I listened to make sure the PA system was off.

  “This is agent Brady Post of the ATF recording a meeting with CI Apelu concerning the activities of the Tre Tre Nomads and specifically Bodaway Torres and Operation Bad God.” There was some scrambling and then the mic switched off.

  “Who the fuck is Apelu?”

  “More important, what’s Operation Bad God?”

  The mic came back on, and this time there were voices in the background along with some music and ambient noises, probably a bar from the sound of it. Brady’s voice was low, as if speaking to someone confidentially. “So, I need a meet.”

  The next man also spoke quietly, but his voice was powerful, with just a touch of an unidentifiable accent. “No way.”

  “Hey, I don’t work for anybody I never met, man.”

  “He don’t meet people.”

  “What, he’s a fucking hermit?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a pause. “Look, B-way wants me in on this, but without knowing where the juice is coming from . . .”

  “Don’t do it, then.”

  Another pause. “Look, I want in, but I just want to know who I’m in with, you know?”

  “I read you, brother, but it ain’t gonna happen.” There were more noises, and I assumed the other man was adjusting himself in his chair or in the booth, or whatever it was. “This is on a need to know basis—and you don’t need to know.”

  Post mumbled something indiscernible.

  “Hey, there’s no need to disrespect me, motherfucker.”

  “Fuck you, asshole!” There was more fumbling around and then the unmistakable sound of the slide mechanism on a semiauto being pulled back. “Hey, man . . .”

  The voice became louder, and I was pretty sure the man was leaning in very close. “Let me explain the situation. B-way works for us, and he says you’re the real deal, but we don’t know that now, do we?”

  “B-way and me go back long before Bird City.”

  “Dude, I don’t care.” There was another pause, and then the noise of the safety being engaged and the gun being put away. “You don’t get to meet the man, and that’s it.”

  There was some more noise, and then the mic cut out.

  “Okay, we need to know what Operation Bad God is and who Apelu is, for starters.”

  “Well, the original name for Devils Tower was Bad God Tower, so it might just be a geographic reference to this area.” There were more noises from the sound system, so I hurried the rest. “Torres is supposedly Apache, so this Apelu might’ve been one of his buddies.”

  The noise on the CD subsided, and there were mumblings but not much else when suddenly we could hear Post’s voice. “Well, I gotta go to the can.” We could hear him walking before closing what I assumed was a bathroom door. “Shit, shit, shit.” There was more fumbling and then a sudden noise that sounded like a window opening. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Vic glanced at me. “What the hell?” More undefinable noise and then nothing. After a moment there was a rhythmical sound. “What is that?”

  It took me a moment to place it, but then I laughed. “Frogs.”

  We sat there listening to the croaking.

  “He ripped off the mic?”

  “And dropped it out the window, near the river I’d say.”

  We sat there as the frogs croaked, and I could feel a little ennui overtaking me.

  “How long does this shit go on?”

  I adjusted my seat back and pulled my hat over my face. “Let me know.”

  • • •

  “More than an hour I listened to croaking frogs.”

  I yawned. “Nothing else?”

  “No, just the sounds of the recently departed coming back to fetch his wire.”

  “Well, whoever it was, he must’ve made him plenty nervous.” I flipped off the accessory switch, checking the battery levels first to make sure I hadn’t killed the Hulett Police Department’s apocalyptic auto. “There wasn’t a lot on that recording.”

  “No.” She studied me. “Now that you’re rested, what’s next?”

  “We need to go see if we can find anything about where Post was staying—he mentioned the Pioneer Motel to the north of town.”

  She pulled the handle and began the long climb down. “Did he mention a room number?”

  Hopping out myself, I reached up, shut the door, and met her at the front of the Pequod. “No, but I’m betting DCI has already found a key on his person.”

  Her eyes came back to me as she shook her head. “Pequod—really?”

  “It’s big, it’s white, and it seemed appropriate.”

  After retrieving the motel’s magnetic keycard, we borrowed Chief Nutter’s vehicle and drove south a quarter mile to the Pioneer Motel. “Couldn’t we have walked?”

  I shut the door and headed toward the pleasant-looking strip of rooms only slightly blighted by the bikes and bikers littering the parking lot. “I didn’t think you liked walking.”

  “I don’t, but jeez, this seems a little like ove
rkill.” She stopped by the office and turned to look at me. “How are we playing this? I mean if we just go over and walk in, isn’t anybody involved going to be suspicious?”

  “We’ll just flip the place and look around and maybe there’ll be something else we might find along the way.”

  “There’s this thing called a warrant? And inadmissable evidence?” She sighed and followed me into the office, the doorbell tinkling from the facing.

  “Howdy.”

  A middle-aged woman looked up from reading the Rapid City Journal. “Sorry, we’re full up through the rally.”

  “We’re not looking for a room to stay in; we were just wondering if you might know which room this key goes to?”

  She took it from me and examined it. “No way to tell; we just punch in the room number and then slide it through and encode it magnetically.”

  “Hmm.” I took the key back. “You wouldn’t happen to have a room registered to a gentleman by the name of Brady Post?”

  She opened an honest to goodness file box and pulled a card out. “Room number twelve, on the end out there.”

  “Do you mind if we take a look?”

  She stared at her paper again and then at me. “Well, I don’t know who he is, but it can’t be good if Sheriff Walt Longmire is looking for him.” She turned the Rapid City paper around and held it up for me so that I could read the feature article about the progress of the Save Jen campaign and the High Plains Dinosaur Museum—along with an enormous photo of me.

  12

  “That case was a good two and a half months ago; what the heck are they doing running an article on it now?”

  Vic continued to read the borrowed paper. “It’s more about the addition to the museum than the case. More to the point, where did they get this really hideous photo of you?”

  I ignored her and slipped the card into the electronic mechanism, watched as it blinked from red to green, and pushed the door open. I have, in my time as the father of a teenage daughter, seen scenes of chaos and anarchy that no man should ever witness, and this was another of those. The furniture was turned over with the bed pushed against the wall, clothes and personal effects everywhere. Pictures had been thrown on the floor, and the closet doors had been pulled from the sliders.

  Vic peered in after me. “So, you think they were looking for something?”

  I tipped the mattress from the wall for a look behind it, just making sure there weren’t any bodies lying about, and then leaned it back. “Where do you want to start?”

  She stepped over a pile of clothes and put the newspaper on a windowsill. “Can we rent a backhoe?”

  Carrying the larger pieces of furniture outside onto the sidewalk under the curious eyes of the bikers coming and going from the parking lot, we finally got to where we could move around in the place without tripping.

  Vic started by going through the clothes that were scattered all over the room, making a pile in the corner with the ones that she had examined, as I went through the drawers and the closet. “This was a real toss. If they found what they were looking for, it wasn’t till the end of the search.”

  I felt along the top shelf of the closet under a blanket. “Whatever it was, they were looking hard.”

  There was a noise at the door, and we turned to find a drunk biker in a leather jacket and do-rag standing in the doorway with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Hey, what are you guys doing in Brady’s room?”

  “Straightening up a little.” I glanced around and then studied him. “Somebody trashed the place.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Why did they do that?”

  “Probably looking to see if the tags were still on the mattress.”

  “Do they still check those?”

  I ignored the question. “Were you here when the place got torn up?”

  He threw a thumb. “Two doors down.”

  “What time?”

  “Late—after midnight.”

  “What’d they look like?”

  “I don’t know, a couple of guys in black polo shirts. One of ’em was really big.”

  “Bigger than me?”

  “Yeah. Hey, are you guys cops?”

  I ignored this question, too. “What about the other one?”

  He leaned against the doorjamb. “He was smaller, but still a big fucker.”

  “What did they look like, other than their size?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I thought you said you saw them?”

  “Well, for a minute. I mean, I wasn’t wearing any clothes, and there was all this noise, so I stuck my head out the door and yelled, but they told me to shut the hell up and disappear or they were gonna stuff me in a trash can.” He thought about it. “And it was dark.”

  “How do you know Brady?”

  He shrugged. “We had a beer out here at the picnic table a couple of nights back.”

  I nodded, figuring I’d gotten as much out of him as I was going to get. “What’s your name?”

  He deposited the cigarette into his beer bottle and stuck out his free hand. “Gogo.”

  “Gogo?”

  “George, George Lance, but everybody just calls me Gogo.”

  I shook the hand and gave him one of my cards. “Nice to meet you, Gogo. Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County.”

  He studied the card. “Cool.”

  “If you think of anything else, you might let us know?”

  “Sure.” He pushed off the door facing and disappeared.

  “You want to know what’s amazing about that exchange?”

  I turned to look at her. “What’s that?”

  “That you actually had cards.” She went back to sorting through Brady’s personal effects. “What phone number have you got on there, anyway?”

  “The office number.” She mumbled something—I wasn’t sure what it was, but I figured that it wasn’t complimentary—and went back to searching. “I’m checking the bathroom.”

  “I’ll alert the press. You want some reading material? There’s a lovely article in the paper on the sill you can wipe with.”

  “Thanks. I don’t plan on being that long.” Thinking it was a heck of a lot easier to search for something when you knew what it was you were searching for, I went into the bathroom. Knowing that the space for contraband on motorcycles was relatively small helped but not much.

  I opened and closed the medicine cabinet and tried not to look into my tired eyes in the mirror. The shower curtain had been torn off the rings, and the towels were on the floor. After checking the back of the toilet, I piled the stuff on the seat and looked in the shower stall, the trash can, and on the windowsill.

  Nothing.

  I was about to turn and walk out when one of those old-fashioned ceiling fixtures with a rectangular glass shade caught my eye. I had had one just like it when I was a kid, with cowboys roping from horses painted on the inside of the surface, but there was a small shaded square in one corner on this one that didn’t match.

  I carefully stepped up on the toilet in the hopes that I wouldn’t rip it from the floor and unthreaded the nut on the bottom of the shade, palming it so that I could pluck out the strange item.

  I put the shade back on, and looked at the small object. It was a plastic cube of some sort, khaki in color, and about two inches square. If it was a box, I had no idea how you would open it since there were no ridges, creases, or cracks. “Hey, Vic?” I came out and offered the thing to her. “Any idea what this is?”

  “A ring box?”

  I handed it to her. “Open it.”

  She turned it in her fingers just as I had and then weighed it in her palm. “It’s plastic but heavy.” She examined it closer. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the light fixture.”

  “No way it’s part
of the thing?”

  “No, and it’s a strange color if it’s for any kind of construction.”

  She handed it back to me. “A Rubik’s Cube for morons?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, this pisses me off. We go through the place with a fine-tooth comb and all we find is something that we have no idea what it is?”

  • • •

  “It’s a plastic cube.” Mike Novo turned the thing in his hand. “Solid, by all accounts.”

  Vic was annoyed. “So, what’s it for?”

  “Hell if I know. I mean it’s not styrene or anything—it’s hard.” He handed it back to me. “Maybe it’s a spacer of some kind.”

  I handed it back to him. “I need to know.”

  “You want me to send it to Cheyenne?”

  “Yep.”

  “And then what?”

  “X-ray it, test it. A federal agent possibly lost his life because of it, Mike. Do whatever it is you people do and find out what the heck it is.”

  “Okay.” He stood and pulled out a FedEx box.

  “T.J. get anything more from the body?”

  He nodded toward the back. “You can ask her—she’s finishing up the autopsy in the pop-up lab.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Henry was by here looking for you. He had your dog with him.”

  “He say where he was going?”

  “The Ponderosa Café. He said Dog was hungry, and they were going for a late lunch/early dinner.”

  I turned to look at Vic. “Hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  “Let’s go talk to T. J., and then we’ll grab something to eat.”

  She followed me as I led the way. “Dead people and dinner, my favorite night out.”

  The Little Lady was pulling off her latex gloves when we shoved the plastic aside and stepped in. “No other traces. The killer placed the muzzle of the .40 against his chest and pulled the trigger.” She threw the gloves in a nearby trash can. “From the angle of the shot, I’d say your friend here was asleep.”

  “Nothing else?”

  She picked up a clipboard and began writing. “As noted, the decedent had sex before being shot; he’d eaten a little before that, and he also ingested a schedule IV controlled substance, probably Lorazepam, a high-potency, intermediate-duration, 3-hydroxy benzodiazepine drug, often used to treat anxiety disorders.”