by Alex Grecian
Kansas—at least this part of Kansas on this particular afternoon—was flat and gray. The people—judging by Jacob Meyer—were solid and white. He straightened his shoulders. Gray and solid were good qualities. They were the qualities of clay, unformed and malleable. Rudy Goodman felt a certain kind of power as he looked out across his newly acquired land at the shadows of trees. He felt free.
From somewhere nearby, he heard a dog bark and an answering whistle, high and sharp. He held himself motionless and watched the treetops as they swayed back and forth in some light breeze that Rudy couldn’t feel. The scraggly bushes that marked the tree line rustled and a head popped up over the top of the grass. A child of perhaps ten or twelve stared at Rudy from several yards away. Dark hair and a round pink face under a sunburnt forehead.
“Hello,” Rudy said. “You look very pretty.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Rudy. What is your name?”
“Nobody lives here,” the child said. Rudy could barely make out her voice. “That house is empty.”
“I live here now. Come closer so I can hear you.”
The child disappeared, her head sinking beneath the shimmering brown surface of the field.
“I think I saw a wolf,” he said. “Not far from here.”
He watched for signs of motion in the grass, but saw nothing.
“Where did you go? Come back. I won’t hurt you.”
“Where are you from?” The faint sound of the child’s voice was carried by the breeze in every direction so that Rudy couldn’t pinpoint her location.
“I am from a place very far away. To the south of here, and the east. Do you know your directions on a map?”
“No.”
“Where are you from?”
“Over there.”
“I can’t see you, little girl. I don’t know where you are talking.”
There was no answer. Rudy stood there, waiting, for another quarter of an hour, but the grass didn’t move and the child made no sound. He considered wading out and looking for her, but she was probably long gone, and he was tired. He wondered if the dog he had heard was a companion to the child, and he wondered whether it would attack him if he managed to find its young mistress out there in the trees. He licked his lips and smiled.
He turned and went back inside, closed the door on the late afternoon sunshine. The child would come again. He knew that. She was curious about him.
And Rudy was a very patient man.
This isolated place would be a suitable home for him. He decided it was time to begin moving his money northward.
Chapter Two
1
Skottie glanced at her daughter in the rearview mirror. “You wanna tell me your version of what happened?”
“What do you mean?” Maddy was ten and still carried a little baby fat, her lips pushed into a bow by her full cheeks. When she wanted to appear innocent, her eyes opened wide and she looked like a toddler again.
“Why did I have to pick you up early?”
“Oh, that.” The innocent expression went away and was replaced by irritation. Maddy looked down at her lap and Skottie could no longer see her eyes. “It was stupid.”
The light changed and Skottie eased up on the brake, turned her attention to the traffic around her. She waited, sure that Maddy would say more when she was ready.
“Chloe wouldn’t tell me a joke, is all.”
“A joke?”
“Olivia told Chloe and Chloe wouldn’t tell me,” Maddy said, “and I thought they were laughing at me.”
“You thought the joke was about you?”
“They weren’t really laughing at me, but I didn’t know.”
“So you—”
“I cupcaked her.”
“You did what?”
“I cupcaked her. It was red velvet. I should’ve used a vanilla one, but I already picked a red velvet one.”
“A cupcake.”
“They had cupcakes for the birthday party. There was juice, too, but I didn’t have any. It had chunks.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean, you cupcaked her?”
“You know, like I mashed a cupcake on her. In her face. Like at weddings and stuff.”
“You were mad at Chloe so you …”
“Cupcaked her, yeah. Only it turned out she wasn’t laughing at me, so it’s okay now. Except the frosting might’ve messed up her shirt. Anyway, the red didn’t come all the way out when we wiped it. There’s a pink blob.”
Skottie slowed down and turned onto their street, the street where Skottie had grown up. She pulled into the driveway, switched off the car, and swiveled so she could see Maddy over the back of the seat. “And that was the whole fight? That’s what happened?”
“I guess.”
“Well, you need to apologize to Chloe.”
“It’s okay. I’m not mad anymore.”
“No, I said you need to apologize to her.”
“But she’s not mad, either. She said so.”
“I want you to apologize to her anyway. Do it first thing tomorrow.”
“Mom, that’s gonna make it worse. It’ll make her, like, remember I did that and she’ll be mad at me again.”
“Do it anyway.” Skottie opened the car door, but turned back and grimaced at Maddy. “And find out if we need to buy her a new shirt.”
Skottie sorted the mail and put a load of laundry in the machine while Maddy started her homework. At six o’clock, Skottie’s mother, Emmaline, came home from a book club meeting at the church, and Skottie took her into the kitchen. In hushed tones, she related the story of Maddy’s fight.
“Cupcaking?” Emmaline shook her head. “That’s new. You never did that.”
“Of course I never did that,” Skottie said. “I’ve never even heard of that.” She craned her neck around the corner to make sure Maddy was still concentrating on her math worksheet. “I’m worried about her.”
Emmaline smiled and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “She’s just testing her boundaries now her dad’s not around. As I recall, you got in more than one fight at that age. Usually over something silly. Kid’s gotta blow off steam just like everybody else.”
“If you say so.” But Skottie still felt anxious for her daughter. She wished she could be with Maddy everywhere she went, keep her from getting hurt. Keep her from cupcaking other kids.
Maddy wanted a baked potato for dinner, but their ancient gas oven would take an hour and a half to heat up a potato, so Skottie decided to pick something up. She left Maddy with Emmaline, with the understanding that the TV was to stay off until the girl finished her math problems, and drove two miles to the Roundup.
The restaurant was nearly empty, and she saw Travis Roan at the bar as soon as she entered. He was drinking from a rocks glass filled with clear liquid and ice. He had changed his clothes and now wore a white mock turtleneck with wide gray stripes.
He looked up as she approached. “Officer Foster,” he said in his low whisper. He lifted his glass in a salute.
She nodded back at him. She was wearing a leather jacket, an unbuttoned white Henley shirt tucked into faded jeans, and an old pair of scuffed boots. “Dr. Roan,” she said. “I guess you took my advice about this place.”
“I told you, you should call me Travis. And when it comes to food, I always take the advice of locals. May I buy you a drink? I have vodka.”
“I’m not staying. Just getting carryout.”
“As am I. Bear gets steak tonight.”
“Right. The dog. Where is he?”
“Back at the hotel.”
She was curious, despite herself, and pulled out the stool next to him. “You found a place allows pets?”
“We usually stay at a Best Western. It is a good chain. They like pets.”
Skottie nodded. Then there was a silence as she studied the menu the bartender put in front of her. She ordered a potato with everything on it for Maddy and a quarter of a roasted rosemary
chicken for Emmaline. For herself, Skottie chose a Kansas City strip steak and french fries and wondered whether she would be eating the same thing as the dog. After the bartender wrote down her order and walked away, Skottie turned back to Travis.
“Does he sleep on the floor or in the bed with you?”
“Bear gets his own bed whenever there is a double available,” Travis said. “Otherwise, he sleeps on the floor. He would probably smother me in my sleep.”
“He’s big enough,” Skottie said. “What kind is he?”
“Tibetan mastiff.”
“Did you get him in Tibet?”
“Kenya. He was being used by poachers to track rhinos.”
“You’re kidding.” She turned on her bar stool to face him.
“I wish I were,” Travis said. “They cut his vocal cords so he would not bark and scare the rhinos away. When Bear would find a herd for his masters, they would shoot two or three, cut off their horns, then leave the injured animals to die slowly and rot. Bad people.”
“So Bear can’t bark?”
“No. And he has stopped trying to bark. It confused him when he did, and it made me sad. Those men attempted to pass him off as part dingo, but I do not think there is any trace of dingo blood in him.”
“But you got him away from them. From the poachers.”
“I did. I did not know what to do with Bear after I dealt with them, so I took him with me.” He shrugged. “He has been with me ever since.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“Perhaps. Or maybe I identify with him.” Travis pulled down on the collar of his sweater. A three-inch-long scar, jagged and bright pink, ran across his throat under his Adam’s apple.
“What happened?”
He let go of his collar and picked up his glass. “In my business it is sometimes hard to know whom to trust.”
“So you hunt Nazis and poachers,” Skottie said.
“All manner of bad people,” Travis said. He took a sip of his vodka. “I say ‘bad people.’ It is a subjective term, I know, but I have found it useful. Most people I talk to can agree on certain moral standards of behavior, and a simple binary label, good or bad, often suffices.”
“I guess Nazis are as bad as they come.”
“Indeed. But I have had to branch out. In my father’s day, there were still many Nazis to root out, but now? Not so many. Still, there are always bad people.”
“What did you do with the poachers? The ones you took Bear away from?”
Travis stared at the ice in his glass, then set the glass down on the bar without drinking from it. “They will not poach again.”
She sensed that he wasn’t going to expand on his answer, and she wondered how dangerous he really was. “Before, earlier this afternoon, you said you weren’t going to kill anybody here in Kansas. Was that the truth?”
“Would I tell you if I were lying? You are, after all, an officer of the law.”
“I’m off duty right now.”
“If I am able to determine that my witness is correct, that this man she saw is a Nazi, I will alert the local authorities and the Roan Foundation will file a civil suit against him on behalf of the survivors of his camp. All aboveboard, everything perfectly legal. I promise you.”
“Is it ever tempting?”
“To kill?”
“I mean, nobody would miss a Nazi.”
“Sometimes we must sacrifice our ideas regarding expediency and even practicality in order to uphold our core principles,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”
Skottie took a second to think, then nodded.
“My principles are quite important to me,” Travis said. “So, no, I have never chosen to kill anyone when there was another option available to me.”
“You never said what kind of doctor you are. Medical?”
Before he could answer, the bartender arrived with a takeout bag. Travis paid his bill in cash and stood, drained the rest of his drink, and set the empty glass back down on the bar.
“Perhaps I will see you again,” he said.
“You okay to drive?” She tapped a fingernail on the bar.
“I walked. The hotel is right over there.” He pointed to the east. “Or, wait … Over there.” He turned and pointed in the opposite direction. “It is somewhere within this same parking lot.”
“Good,” Skottie said. “And good luck.”
Travis smiled and tipped an imaginary hat to her. She watched him walk out and then pass by the big window at the side of the restaurant on his way to the hotel. He didn’t look up at her. She caught the bartender’s eye and motioned him over.
“Do I have time for a quick drink?”
“Kitchen’s moving slow tonight.”
“Bring me a vodka, then,” she said. “No ice.”
“Your friend had a double,” the bartender said.
“Just a single for me.”
“Tito’s?”
“Is that what he had?”
“Yeah, Texas brand. Pretty good for a domestic.”
“Texas, huh? Yeah, I’ll have that.” She turned on her stool to face the big window and waited, wondering if Maddy had made up the term cupcaking and whether cupcaking people might be a halfway decent way to deal with some situations. It was violent, a little, but it didn’t do permanent damage. The thought of Travis Roan, the weird uptight cowboy, cupcaking a Nazi made her chuckle.
“Nazis,” she said.
“What’s that?” The bartender wiped the bar in front of her and set down a glass.
“Nothing,” Skottie said. “It’s just … some days are weirder than others.”
2
They got an early start the next morning. Travis took US-183 north out of Hays and set the cruise control for seventy miles an hour. The highway cut straight through the Smoky Hills, exposing high limestone walls along both sides of the blacktop. Bear alternated between short naps and watching the scenery roll past, but Travis kept the passenger window up. He planned to hit Phillipsburg by nine o’clock, possible if he stopped only once to let Bear relieve himself.
They passed a town named Plainville and another called Stockton, eating up the miles faster than Travis had thought they would. They had the highway to themselves, no traffic moving in either direction at this time of day, and he had begun to consider taking a detour to someplace called Kirwin National Wildlife Refuge, thinking Bear would enjoy running free for a bit, when he saw orange cones in the highway ahead.
A Burden County sheriff’s car was pulled off on the shoulder, and a deputy wearing dark pants and a light blue uniform shirt under a gray jacket was out in the road, putting down cones. Travis steered the car onto the shoulder, Bear watching the deputy out the window. There was a turnoff ahead, and Travis took it. He supposed there had been an accident somewhere between Stockton and Phillipsburg, and he reached for his phone in the cup holder between the seats. He’d have to find an alternate route north.
He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that the deputy was still at work behind him, but hustling now, running back and forth, moving the cones two at a time from the road, blocking the ramp Travis had just taken.
Travis frowned and tapped the brake, slowing the Jeep to ten miles an hour on the dusty side road. He realized he had been herded off the highway and then efficiently isolated. He reached for the glove box and popped it open, pulled out his Kimber Eclipse Custom II. Bear immediately perked up, his black mane bristling as if charged with static electricity.
There was a stop sign ahead of them, and two silver sheriff’s cruisers were pulled sideways, blocking the intersection, their blue and red lights swirling. A big man in a faded blue uniform was leaning against one of the cars, his thumbs stuck in his belt loops. He wore dark glasses, a cowboy hat low on his head, and a heavy jacket with a star pinned to it. He was maybe forty-five years old, by Travis’s estimation, with a heavily lined face that had seen too much sun. The sheriff pushed himself away from the car, turned his head, and spat a brown gob into
the grass. There was a deputy behind him who moved out a bit, keeping Travis in full view, a shotgun held loose at waist level.
Travis put his own gun back in the glove box and closed it. Whatever was happening, the pistol would cause more trouble than it would solve. Travis rolled down his window, put his hands on the steering wheel at ten and two, and sat waiting. The sheriff took his time walking over to the Jeep. Up close, Travis could see that the man was both older and larger than he’d thought, maybe sixty years old, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds, but spread over a six-foot-four frame. The sheriff put one hand on top of Travis’s Jeep and leaned in the window.
“Step out the car, please, sir.” He grinned, a bulge of tobacco in his lower lip, a brown dewdrop caught in the stubble on his chin.
Travis moved his hands off the wheel and pulled on the door handle, at the same time hitting the button that rolled up the window. He removed the key from the ignition and palmed it. He didn’t even glance at Bear. He knew the big dog would not move until there was a clear signal to do so.
The sheriff took a step back as the Jeep’s door swung open. His boots had steel toes. “Take it nice and easy. No surprises. We know you’re armed.”
“Was I speeding, Officer?” As he stood, Travis dropped the key on the asphalt and kicked it under the vehicle with his heel.
“Put your hands on the roof there, Dr. Roan.”
Travis locked his door manually and closed it, then placed his hands in front of him, spread his feet, and braced himself for a pat-down.
The deputy ambled over—probably to make sure Travis saw the shotgun—and peered through the passenger window at Bear. “There’s a dog in here,” he said. “Big sucker, too.” Bear sat still, watching the deputy, and Travis breathed a small sigh of relief that he had remembered to roll the window back up.
The sheriff checked Travis’s chest, waist, and ankles, clumsily, without appearing to care whether he found anything. “The dog can stay there, out of trouble. What’s his name, Dr. Roan? Or is it a bitch?”