Junkyard Dogs

by Craig Johnson

  “Wouldn’t you say this was like finding a hole in a pincushion?”

  “He was injecting himself three to four times a day to control his glucose levels, but there are two things abnormal about these three injection points. The location where most of his injections took place is in the normal areas of the body, the front and the outside of the thighs, the abdomen, except the area around the navel, the upper and outer areas of the arms, the area just above the waist on the back and the buttocks. You’ll notice where these injections were made.”

  Bill McDermott held the junkman’s leg up for my inspection; I could see that there were three larger holes, which punctured the area behind the knee. “How in the world did you find them?”

  “Blood.”

  “What’s number two?”

  “The size of the needle that went in there three times is a lot larger than the one regularly used for insulin, hence the blood.” I studied the young medical examiner on loan from the state of Montana. It’s something our neighbors from the north did as a courtesy in the depths of the Wyoming winter when the hour-and-forty-five-minute trip from Billings compared favorably with the five and a half hours from Cheyenne. Bill McDermott had changed since the last time I’d seen him. He looked worldlier and more affluent, which is what three months in Europe with Lana Baroja could do for you.

  “When are you going to make an honest woman out of Lana?”

  “She doesn’t want to be an honest woman.” He took a sip of his ginger ale and glanced at Henry, who stood quietly against the wall with his arms folded. Bill turned back and smiled at me, his long, blondish hair hanging in front of his face. “I heard your daughter is getting married.”

  “I heard that, too.” I gestured back toward Geo Stewart’s body. “Was that the leg that had the untied boot?”

  Both Isaac and the Montana ME nodded.

  “Why inject him behind the knee, if indeed someone did?”

  Isaac placed his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “Closest point to the major artery in the leg, and it’s possible that it would go unnoticed.”

  “So you’re saying somebody murdered him.”

  McDermott was cautious. “We’re saying it’s possible that somebody murdered him.”

  “With what?”

  “Air.”

  I walked over and leaned against the wall beside Henry. “I thought that only worked in made-for-TV movies.”

  Isaac decided to take up some of the slack for Bill. “Depends on the condition of the victim, body position, and most important, the amount of air introduced into the system. It’s been reported in some medical journals that as little as twenty milliliters could do the trick, but that’s still quite a bit of air.”

  The Cheyenne Nation’s voice rumbled beside me. “You would need a bicycle pump.”

  “That, or a veternary syringe with something along the size of equine dosage.” Isaac looked down at the dead man. “Despite the uncertainties, air embolism has served as a reasonably dependable method of execution for quite a while. In my home country I was confined first for being a Jew and then for refusing to assist in the gassing of mental patients. Psychiatric institutions were ordered to continue so-called mercy killings by less conspicuous means. I was told there was a program described as ‘wild euthanasia,’ which began at the Meseritz-Obrawalde hospital in 1942. While most of the murders were carried out with overdoses of sedatives, some patients were injected with air, which usually killed them within minutes.”

  “Would you need any medical knowledge to do this?”

  The Doc glanced up at me. “Helpful, but not necessary.”

  8

  When I got back to the office, I saw that Saizarbitoria’s vehicle was backed up to the service entrance; I had put him in charge of collecting and then unloading Duane’s illegal 4-H project.

  “Hey, Duane.” He looked up from behind the bars of his holding cell as I limped in with the last few plants. Vic closed the heavy door, took the plants from my hands, and disappeared.

  “You gotta watch ’em in the cold like that, it’ll kill ’em.”

  “I’m sorry to say, but for our purposes it doesn’t matter if the plants are dead or alive.” I pulled a folding chair over and sat on my good cheek. “Duane, I hate to add to your miseries, but I need to ask you some questions. Depending on whether I’m satisfied with your answers, I can either charge you here in county, hand you over to DCI, or to the Feds, who are not likely to let you off with a stint picking up trash along the side of the roads in an orange jumpsuit.”

  He continued to study the concrete floor and then mumbled a response. “Yunh-huh.”

  Vic returned and leaned against the wall. I looked back at Duane. “Whose idea was the marijuana?”

  “Mine.”

  I shot a glance at Vic, who rolled her eyes, and waited a moment. “You’re sure?”

  “Yunh-huh.”

  “Duane, do you know what the sentencing guidelines are for this kind of distribution activity?”

  “I wasn’t distributin’ it.”

  I took my hat off and held it between my knees by the brim. “My deputy, Mr. Saizarbitoria, spoke with the Powder River Co-Op folks earlier this morning after we did a little trash pull out at your place, and they said your electric bill for the last six months has been over seven hundred and fifty dollars a month.” I took a deep breath and tried to explain the hopelessness of his situation. “Duane, possession with intention to distribute is not a specific intent crime—the quantity alone proves intent to deliver. The state of Wyoming doesn’t need to prove specific intent with this amount of marijuana; knowingly possessing this quantity is a prima facie case.”

  He looked at me blankly. “We use a lot of electricity, watching TV and stuff.”

  Vic suppressed a guffaw as I continued. “Duane, I’m afraid there isn’t a court in the land that would believe that even two Olympic-grade hopheads such as you and Gina could possibly smoke that much dope.”

  “Gina don’t smoke it, jus’ me.”

  I dropped my hat for dramatic effect. “Duane, I like you, and I want you to listen very carefully to what I say next—I don’t want you to be guilty of all this stuff alone.”

  Vic stepped from the wall and trailed an arm onto the bars. “Let me tell you, shitbird, I have heard some really lame-ass alibis in my life, but saying that you personally rocked the ganja to the tune of this much gear per annum is the worst alibi I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s true.”

  “It fucking sucks.”

  He started looking like he might cry. “It’s true.”

  “It.” She repeated. “Fucking. Sucks.”

  I retrieved my hat and stood, smiling at the young man to give him a little reassurance. “I’ve got a couple of other things to attend to, Duane, but then I’m going to come back and you and I are going to have another conversation, a conversation where you’re not so completely guilty. Okay?”

  He gathered a little fortitude and smiled back. “Okay.”

  Vic joined me as I walked around the corner, past the two Polaroids of our guests that we used to remind the staff that we actually had somebody in the holding cells. She studied me. “Business is picking up.”

  “Yep.”

  We turned the corner and looked in on Ozzie Dobbs Jr., who was still in his bloody clothes and was standing by the bars with his face pressed between them. “How’s it going, Ozzie?”

  “I want to press charges.”

  I nodded. “You were pretty upset about killing Geo last night.”

  “Yeah, but now that he’s okay, I want to press charges.”

  It appeared that last night’s repentance was limited. “What leads you to believe that he’s okay?”

  Ozzie Dobbs was the perfect picture of someone who had just had the bottom dropped out from beneath him. “He’s not?”

  “He died last night, Ozzie. He tried to make it back home in the snow and had a heart attack. Now we’re not sure if it was the
beating, the exertion, or something else—but Geo Stewart is dead.” I stepped over to our little kitchenette and pulled a mug from the stack and turned it over. “You want a cup of coffee, Ozzie?”

  He blinked and then looked at the two of us. “You guys are kidding, right?”

  I stood there for a moment, wondering if more coffee was really going to help. “Not about the coffee I’m not.”

  He swallowed and nodded his head quickly. “I would love a cup of coffee.”

  I turned over another for myself and looked at Vic, who shook her head. I poured myself a cup and then one for him; I was guessing, but he didn’t stop me from adding cream and sugar. I handed it through the bars, and he took it like a serum. “Geo’s dead?”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh, God.”

  I leaned against the bars and couldn’t help but reassure the man. “If it makes you feel any better, and I’m breaking a number of laws myself by saying this, the beating may have been an aggravating factor, but I don’t think you killed him.”

  He crossed back to the bunk and sat without looking at me. “You’re just saying that to make . . .”

  “No, I’m not. Now, I don’t know how current you are on the situation with the Stewart family and your own, but I’m going to need some answers from you about everything that you might know.”

  He stared at the floor and then slumped with resignation. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but can I get a shower? I’m worried that all this blood might be giving me AIDS.”

  I stared at him. “You weren’t all that concerned last night, when you took the time to finish off a fifth of tequila.”

  “I wasn’t in my right mind then.”

  Vic’s eyes narrowed, and the iridescence was like a solar flare. “No shit, little beaver.”

  “Put your mind at rest, Ozzie. If Geo was HIV-positive, Doc Bloomfield would’ve told us by now.” He didn’t say anything more, and I figured after all he’d been through that it was the least I could do for him. “But, I’ll get you downstairs for a shower.”

  Vic pushed off the counter and started toward the hallway. “If you can get through there without a machete; the basement looks like the Jamaican Botanical Gardens.”

  “Sancho says it’s British Columbia Bud.”

  “Whatever.”

  Ozzie’s voice carried after us. “Hey, Walt, can you ask my mother to bring me some clean clothes?”

  When I got to the hallway outside my office, Vic was waiting for me on the other side of my open doorway. “Mrs. Dobbs already came by with his things, but she doesn’t want to see him.”

  “Great, we’ll just round up all the idiots and send the whole damn bunch off to Rawlins.” I sounded a little fed up, even to me, and then noticed the odd expression on Vic’s face. “What?”

  She nodded to the open doorway between us. “Um . . . She’s here. In your office. Right now.”

  I tried to exude an aura of blustering professionalism as I entered, tossed my hat onto my desk, and pulled out my chair.

  “Hello, Mrs. Dobbs.”

  She’d made herself at home and taken off her coat, the shopping bag with her son’s clothes sitting on the corner of my desk. “I suppose I’m one of the idiots you’re wanting to send off to Rawlins.”

  I sat and looked at her. “Not specifically. I hear you don’t want to see Ozzie, but I think he needs your support right now.”

  “Walter, this was a completely unprovoked attack, and a man I cared a great deal for is dead.”

  “This is your son we’re talking about.”

  She sighed audibly through her nose. “All the more reason.”

  I thought about the emotional linchpin that the entire episode hung upon and figured that if I could get her to focus maybe we could avoid all of this. “Mrs. Dobbs, is this the first time that your son has found out about . . . I mean, known for sure that you . . . ?” I waited for her to provide the rest so that I wouldn’t have to come across with a more palatable version of shtupping the junkman.

  “That I what, Sheriff?”

  I was going to have to come across with a more palatable version of shtupping the junkman. “Umm . . . Is this the first indication that your son might’ve had . . . umm . . . concerning the intimacy between the deceased and yourself?”

  She stared at me. “I don’t see what that has to do with the matter at hand.”

  If I’d still been holding my hat, I most certainly would’ve dropped it. “Well, I think it has everything to do with it.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, the way I always did when I was afraid I was going to say something I might regret later. “Betty, can’t you see how this might raise something of an emotional response in your son?”

  “Not to the point of beating someone to death.”

  “Well, we’re still not sure that that’s what killed Geo.”

  Her voice elevated, just a touch. “I’m surprised at you, Walter.”

  I leaned back in my chair and wedged my good foot under my desk, this time trying to take the weight not only off the not quite healed broken bone in my foot but the still sore bite in my right butt cheek. Her arms remained folded, and I felt like I was, once again, in the ninth grade. “If your son is charged, it’ll be for murder.”

  “Yes.”

  I leaned forward, trying to convey the seriousness of the subject even though I doubted Ozzie would have to do more than pay some heavy court and lawyer fees, and do community service. It was also possible that he and Duane would be picking up trash on the sides of the county roads in matching orange jumpsuits. “Which means he’ll go to Rawlins.”

  “Yes.”

  “Prison.” I paused. “Probably for the rest of his life.”

  She didn’t pause. “Yes.” Her head nodded slightly, and it appeared as if she was agreeing with herself. “I understand, Walter, but I just don’t see anything else for it.”

  My mouth closed for a moment in hopes that some sanity might creep into the conversation, and I could just feel the beginnings of another of my headaches coming on. I was saved by the red light that began blinking on my phone and snatched up the receiver. “Yes?”

  “Scott Montgomery on line one.”

  I made a face, even though I was glad for the interruption. “Who?”

  “The sheriff of Travis County, Texas?”

  “Oh, right.” I placed the receiver against my chest and looked at Betty Dobbs. “Will you please consider what I’ve said, Mrs. Dobbs?”

  She stood and shrugged on her coat. She tapped the bag on my desk. “These are Ozzie’s things.”

  “I’ll see that he gets them.”

  She nodded once with her chin, turned, and started to leave. “Walter?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  She stood with her back to me. “Are you aware that your door does not have a doorknob?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She stood there for a moment more and then continued out.

  Hoping for a sane person, I raised the receiver to my ear and punched line one. “Hello?”

  “Sheriff Longmire, Sheriff Montgomery here. I bet you don’t remember me.”

  He was right. “Have we met?”

  “Why yes, at the Doolittle Raiders Reunion in San Antonio a few years ago. You escorted Lucian Connally down here, and we were both on that flight where the crew of the B-25, The Yellow Rose, let him take the stick?”

  I vaguely remembered a heavyset man who was wearing a very large palm leaf hat, who said that he was also a sheriff. I also remembered thinking we were all going to die that day. “Do you have a mustache?”

  “I do! Hey, if you and Mr. Connally ever make it back down this way, we’ll be sure to show you Yankees a good time.” He paused to take a breath. “They were looking to do one of the reunions down here at Austin-Bergstrom International, but we got beat out by Dallas. Hey, do you have any say in the committee that selects the locations for the reunions?”

  “No, I’m afraid that I—”

  “That�
��s too bad, ’cause we sure would like for somebody to put in the good word for us. Have you ever been to Austin?”

  “Well, no.”

  “It’s a great town, you’d love it. We’d put on a heck of a show for ’em down here; everything’s bigger in Texas.”

  The man’s enthusiasm was contagious, and I found myself nodding at the receiver. “Sheriff Montgomery, I was wondering if—”

  “Scott, just call me Scott.”

  I nodded some more. “Scott, I was wondering if you’d had a chance to take a look at that bench warrant that you have out on Felix Polk?”

  Vic came in and sat in the chair that Betty Dobbs had vacated. She leaned forward and poked through Ozzie Junior’s clothes.

  He rustled some paper. “I’m looking at this fax your dispatcher sent down. We had a flood in the basement about ten years ago, and this warrant is so old. . . . What is it you’d like to do about this, Sheriff?”

  I cleared my throat, and Vic looked up at me. “Drop it.”

  The response was immediate. “Consider it done.”

  “Simple as that?”

  He laughed. “Walt, I’ll be honest with you, this is a Band-E that’s over forty years old.” He breathed into the phone, and I wondered what the temperature was in Austin, Texas. He spoke again, and this time his tone was a little more serious. “This fella a good guy?”

  “Seems like.”

  “How’d he come up on your radar?”

  “We found his thumb out at the dump—seems he pinched it off in a log splitter. We ran the partial fingerprint through and got nothing, but his connection to you guys came up with his name.”

  “He get it put back on?”

  “The thumb? No. But I think he wants to make a key chain out of it.”

  There was a pause. “Sounds like he’s suffered enough.” His voice sprang back to conversational like a leaf spring. “Hey, you say you’ll pull for us down here in Austin to get one of those Doolittle Reunions?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Well, that’s all we can ask, isn’t it?”

  I thanked him and hung up the phone. “World War Two fan.”